NEW RESOURCES

PR Newswire: The New Zagat: Supporting Local Restaurants Since 1979, the World’s Most Iconic Name in Restaurant Discovery Officially Relaunches (PRESS RELEASE). “Zagat, the most trusted name in restaurant discovery, has officially relaunched. The all-new digital-only platform is designed to improve upon the current state of user-generated content by emphasizing trust, curation, and utility — timed perfectly to meet the moment after a historic year for the restaurant industry. As of today, Zagat’s new digital service is available exclusively for Miami, FL restaurants and diners. As the new product is in its first stages of launch the company plans to roll out additional features as Zagat expands to more cities across the country in the months to follow.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Instagram Takes On Clubhouse With Audio-Only Livestreams. “This Instagram Live feature basically allows users to turn their video off. This means that the livestream will be audio-only, similar to that of Clubhouse which allows users to broadcast their audio and speak to each other and other participants in real-time.”

CNET: TikTok names new CEO and COO after 8 months of interim leadership. “In a move that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, categorized as a strategic reorganization, current ByteDance Chief Financial Officer Shouzi Chew will continue in that position while also assuming the role of TikTok chief, and interim TikTok CEO Vanessa Pappas will move into the position of chief operating officer.”

BetaNews: Surprisingly unproblematic KB5001391 update brings speed boost to Windows 10. “File under ‘color us surprised’: the KB5001391 update that Microsoft released for Windows 10 recently has been well-received by users. Feedback about the update shows that people who have installed KB5001391 are happy not only with the fact that it adds News and Interests to the taskbar, but also that it seems to be stable and problem free. Some users are even finding that their system is performing better after installing this particular update.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Arab News: Pakistan restores social media access after suspension on ‘security grounds’. “Pakistan has restored access to multiple social media apps which it temporarily blocked on security grounds on Friday, the country’s telecommunications authority said. The suspension of social media services was part of a crackdown against a religious political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), that held violent nationwide protests this week.”

The Verge: Facebook and Instagram notices in iOS apps tell users tracking helps keep them ‘free of charge’. “Facebook is continuing its campaign against Apple’s iOS 14 privacy updates, adding a notice within its iOS app telling users the information it collects from other apps and websites can “help keep Facebook free of charge.” A similar message was seen on Instagram’s iOS app (Facebook is Instagram’s parent company).”

Idaho Press: Connecting manufacturers: U of I student helps build app for Idaho companies statewide. “Idaho has more than 3,000 manufacturers. What it doesn’t have is a way for them to find and connect with one another. Nicole Handlen, an economics and international studies student at the University of Idaho, is changing that with an app. The foundation of any app is data. Handlen’s research started by identifying as many ways to collect data on manufacturers in Idaho as possible. The senior’s research — and resulting database — created the most extensive picture of the Gem State’s manufacturing sector.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: In nod to Trump, Florida is set to ban ‘deplatforming’ by tech companies. “Florida is on track to be the first state in the nation to punish social media companies that ban politicians like former President Donald Trump under a bill approved Thursday by the state’s Republican-led Legislature.”

Miami Herald: Hackers post online thousands of Broward schools files, including student, teacher info . “Hackers who broke into Broward County Public Schools’ computer system last month made good on their threat this week to release thousands of files that they stole from the district. The group, known as Conti, published almost 26,000 files on its website, which threatens other businesses and organizations they target that unless they pay ransoms, their files, which may contain personal information, will be released as well.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

AP: Scientists put GPS in trash to find out how far it travels . “Scientists are placing GPS devices inside plastic bottles to study how trash enters the watershed and travels downstream, with the ultimate goal being to reduce pollution in rivers and oceans.”

The Aggie: The inevitable death of Snapchat has arrived. “We can speculate forever about the features of Snapchat, but one of the main reasons why Snapchat doesn’t do as well as other platforms is that you can’t truly cultivate your online persona on the app, which is sort of the reason why we go on social media. The permanence of posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all contribute to our personal brands. If everything you post on Snapchat eventually disappears, could there ever really be a sense of a persona?”

Analytics India: What Happened When Google Threw All Voice Data To The Blender. Answer: SpeechStew. “Training large models is a massive challenge as it requires collecting and annotating vast amounts of data. It is particularly challenging in the case of speech recognition models. To overcome this challenge, a team from Google Research and Google Brain have introduced an AI model, SpeechStew. The model is trained on a combination of datasets to achieve state-of-the-art results on various speech recognition benchmarks.” Good evening, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!