NEW RESOURCES

University of Central Florida: Mitsubishi Power and UCF Develop NOx Tracking Tool. “Mitsubishi Power Americas and the University of Central Florida have formed an industry-education partnership to establish a reliable and accessible source of information that tracks nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions as the U.S. power generation industry undergoes an energy transformation to decarbonize. The online Power Generation NOx Tracker uses data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database as analyzed by UCF’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research (CATER) to show trends over time.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: There Are Now 2 Million Creators In YouTube’s Partner Program. “YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently said that the number of channels joining the YPP doubled in 2020 compared to 2019. Creators who are part of the Partner Program can make money off ads run on their videos, and also through YouTube’s stable of what it calls ‘alternative monetization’ features–Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks, and Channel Memberships.”

CNET: Taylor Swift joins TikTok ahead of Red re-release. “Some of us have been living on Taylor Swift TikTok for a while now, but it’s just been missing one thing — Taylor herself. All that changed on Monday when the global megastar joined the video-first social network by posting her very first TikTok.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Upworthy: Meme artist raises more than $2 million in 5 hours to rescue Afghans on Taliban kill list. “We’ve all spent several days watching the news from Afghanistan with a mixture of horror, sadness, and frustration. Images of crowds of people clamoring to get onto planes at the Kabul airport, human beings clinging to a flying jet before falling to their deaths from the sky, hordes of men, women, and children desperate to escape a violent, extremist regime crammed like sardines into U.S. cargo planes—it’s all too much. We know there are so many people we can’t help. That’s the tragic reality. But there are people we can help. And that’s happening, right now, on the internet and on the ground in Afghanistan.”

Mashable: Meet the designer who makes high-tech nail art and fights facial recognition with flowers. “Based in North Carolina, [Joselyn] McDonald is the co-founder of Blink Blink Creative Circuit Kits, which makes gender inclusive STEM education products, and previously served as creative technologist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab.”

Washington Post: Only Facebook knows the extent of its misinformation problem. And it’s not sharing, even with the White House.. “The Biden team, according to the three officials, asked how many people had been exposed to misinformation about covid-19 on Facebook and its sister platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp. How many users were still sitting on the fence about whether to take the vaccine? And when Facebook blocks its algorithm from spreading unwanted content, how many people are still exposed to it? For almost as long as Facebook has had its singular cache of data about the behavior and attitudes of billions of people, outsiders have sought to obtain it. But, increasingly, the social network is taking steps to restrict access to the very data needed by the public to understand the scope of the problems and to potentially combat them, some experts and insiders say.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Krebs on Security: Wanted: Disgruntled Employees to Deploy Ransomware. “Criminal hackers will try almost anything to get inside a profitable enterprise and secure a million-dollar payday from a ransomware infection. Apparently now that includes emailing employees directly and asking them to unleash the malware inside their employer’s network in exchange for a percentage of any ransom amount paid by the victim company.”

BetaNews: Security: plug in a Razer mouse or keyboard and gain admin privileges in Windows 10. “A worrying security flaw has been discovered in Razer Synapse software which can be exploited to gain administrator privileges in Windows 10. What is particularly concerning about this vulnerability — aside from the fact that there is no patch available yet — is that exploitation is possible by simply plugging in a Razer mouse, keyboard or dongle.” Of course this also means that an attacker also has to have physical access, but GEEZ.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Quanta Magazine: How Big Data Carried Graph Theory Into New Dimensions. “Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which usually depends on networks — vertices (dots) and edges (lines connecting them) — has been an invaluable way to model real-world phenomena since at least the 18th century. But a few decades ago, the emergence of giant data sets forced researchers to expand their toolboxes and, at the same time, gave them sprawling sandboxes in which to apply new mathematical insights. Since then, said Josh Grochow, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, there’s been an exciting period of rapid growth as researchers have developed new kinds of network models that can find complex structures and signals in the noise of big data.”

The Register: We spoke to a Stanford prof on the tech and social impact of AI’s powerful, emerging ‘foundation models’. “Typically, these models are giant neural networks made up of millions and billions of parameters, trained on massive amounts of data and later fine-tuned for specific tasks. For example, OpenAI’s enormous GPT-3 model is known for generating prose from prompts, though it can be adapted to translate between languages and output source code for developers. These models – drawing from vast datasets – can therefore sit at the heart of powerful tools that may disrupt business and industries, life and work. Yet right now they’re difficult to understand and control; they are imperfect; and they exhibit all sorts of biases that could harm us. And it has already been demonstrated that all of these problems can grow with model size.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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