TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ReviewGeek: Google Assistant Now Lets You Delay Actions Within Your Routines. “Google has spent the last year trying to improve its smart assistant Routines, the single-command shortcuts that trigger multiple changes across your home. Earlier this year, the company announced one-tap My Actions buttons that let you start Routines from the Google Home app. And now, Google is quietly rolling out a Delay Start feature that lets you adjust when specific actions within your Routines start.”

ZDNet: Microsoft Teams: Now teachers can monitor students’ reading fluency with AI. “Microsoft has rolled out Reading Progress, a free education tool for Teams that gives teachers artificial intelligence (AI) estimations of student performance and errors when reading text.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: The Best Google Docs Templates to Organize Your Life. “Google Docs offers an astonishing variety of templates to handle every need of users. Instead of working hard to create a new document, you can use one of these customized, ready-to-use templates. All of them are free to edit and accessible from your Google Docs web interface. Let’s take a look at how you can use Google Docs templates to organize your life better as well as a selection of the best.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Mashable: Adventure app Randonautica is fueling wildly unfounded conspiracy theories on TikTok. “The urban exploring app created a genre of YouTube and TikTok videos that marry the supernatural with the internet’s obsession with mystery and true crime. Randonautica, which coincidentally led a group of Seattle teenagers to an actual suitcase full of human remains last year, describes itself as ‘somewhere in the middle between a game, science, art, and spirituality.’ Thrilling content keeps audiences engaged, but conspiracy theorists are using viral Randonautica videos to justify harassing real people.”

Washington Post: ‘YouTube magic dust’: How America’s second-largest social platform ducks controversies . “In an era when tech giants control the largest global information networks, their decisions about who can speak and what they can say have massive geopolitical implications…. But for a constellation of reasons, YouTube’s content policies have tended to attract less media attention and scrutiny than those of Facebook or Twitter, experts say — even though nearly a quarter of U.S. adults say they get news from YouTube, according to the Pew Research Center. (Facebook serves as a news source for 36 percent of Americans, the highest share of any social platform, while Twitter is third at 15 percent.)”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: T-Mobile CEO apologizes after hacker stole millions of users’ personal information. “T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert published an open apology to customers Friday after hackers stole more than 50 million users’ personal data, including their Social Security numbers and driver’s license information.” As the article points out, T-Mobile has an extensive history of security issues.

Engadget: Amazon disables ISIS propaganda website using AWS to host content. “The Islamic State’s propaganda arm used Amazon Web Services to host content promoting extremism, according to The Washington Post. Nida-e-Haqq, the group’s media arm, posted messages on the website in the Urdu language, including ones celebrating the recent suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 170 people. Since Amazon’s policy bars clients from using its services to incite violence and terror, the company pulled the website after The Post alerted it to its existence.”

Techdirt: Fake ‘U.S. Copyright Office’ Imposter Gets Google To Delist URLs On Section 1201 Grounds. ” The notices claiming to be from the Copyright Office indicated they were sent on behalf of the Video Industry Association of America, which doesn’t appear to exist based on a Google search I performed. Even if it does, the Copyright Office is not a party to these sorts of takedown requests on behalf of any organization. The URLs targeted appear to be mostly related to stream-ripping sites, but not just sites that offer that service. Instead, some of the URLs targeted merely mention sites that offer stream-ripping services, which is how several TorrentFreak posts got targeted.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

UCSF: AI Algorithm Matches Cardiologists’ Expertise, While Explaining Its Decisions. “Clinicians rely daily on electrocardiograms (ECG) to detect common cardiovascular conditions, but accurate diagnoses require high levels of expertise. In a new study that reviewed nearly 1 million ECGs from 365,000 adults, an artificial intelligence algorithm exceeded the performance of a widely available commercial system in nearly all examined diagnoses, while also matching the performance of expert cardiologists and, importantly, providing an explanation for its results.”

Commonplace: The Invisible Citation Commons. “Scholarly knowledge relies on citations. Discovering and acknowledging prior work is fundamental to knowing what has been done before, synthesizing the state of the field, and identifying spaces for new research. Despite being so crucial, citations — the pieces of metadata that serve as references to works — are often ignored in discussions of types of open knowledge.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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