NEW RESOURCES

Clean Cooking Alliance: Clean Cooking Alliance Launches Redesigned Website CleanCooking.org. “The website showcases new engagement areas, such as ‘What is Clean Cooking?’, and also hosts several resource hubs, including: Reports & Tools, which contains annual reports, industry snapshots, policy briefs, progress reports, and more; and the Sector Directory, an online database housing a comprehensive list of thousands of clean cooking enterprises, finance companies, research organizations, and public sector actors from around the world. CCA welcomes new organizations to register online to be included in the directory.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: WordPress 5.8.1 Released to Fix Multiple Vulnerabilities. “WordPress Update 5.8.1 addresses three security issues in REST API, Gutenberg editor and Lodash JavaScript library. Recommends updating now.”

ZDNet: Google is making it easier to find files and downloads on your Chromebook. “Google has released Chrome OS 93 with improvements to a feature that lets Chromebook owners pin frequently accessed files to an area in the shelf. The new file-pinning capability has been added to Tote, a digital bag to stuff things collected from a Chromebook, such as screenshots and other files that need to be accessed frequently.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Penn State News: Penn State offers new online certificate in financial engineering. “As more companies continue to rely on mass data sets to solve critical financial issues and guide important business decisions, professionals who can analyze complex data to support business ventures will be more in demand. Those interested in increasing their knowledge of quantitative data analysis and management to gain an edge in this competitive field can now do so through a new online credential from Penn State.”

Intermountain Jewish News: IJN to further digitize archives with help of Rose Community Foundation grant. “The Intermountain Jewish News is the recipient of a Rose Community Foundation Jewish Life grant, announced IJN Assistant Publisher Shana R. Goldberg. The grant will be used to digitize the IJN archives, 1927-1967.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Indian Express: PIL against Google for showing Kannada as ‘ugliest language’ withdrawn after its apology. “The Karnataka High Court Wednesday disposed of a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking to initiate legal action against Google India, after a query on the search engine for the ‘ugliest language in India’ returned Kannada as the answer.”

The Guardian: Study finds growing government use of sensitive data to ‘nudge’ behaviour. “A new form of ‘influence government’, which uses sensitive personal data to craft campaigns aimed at altering behaviour has been ‘supercharged’ by the rise of big tech firms, researchers have warned. National and local governments have turned to targeted advertisements on search engines and social media platforms to try to ‘nudge’ the behaviour of the country at large, the academics found.”

Reuters: Google’s voice assistant under new EU antitrust investigation -MLex. “Alphabet Inc’s Google is being investigated by EU antitrust regulators on whether it may be forcing device makers to use Google Assistant as the default voice assistant on Android devices, news agency MLex reported on Thursday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Google and Microsoft are creating a monopoly on coding in plain language. “Currently, numerous coding platforms exist. Some of these platforms offer varied features that different programmers favour, however none offer a competitive advantage. A new programmer could easily use a free, ‘bare bones’ coding terminal and be at little disadvantage. However, AI at the level required for NLC [Natural Language Coding] is not cheap to develop or deploy, and is likely to be monopolized by major platform corporations such as Microsoft, Google or IBM. The service may be offered for a fee or, like most social media services, for free but with unfavourable or exploitative conditions for its use.” NLC is a first for me; I’m used to seeing it called no-code programming or low-code programming.

The Register: Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?. “Doctors could soon use emoji, those love-them-or-hate-them colourful successors to the humble emoticon, to communicate with patients and ease their diagnosis and recovery – or, if you prefer, 👨‍⚕️🗣️🖼️🤒🚑🏥🩺🤕.” I use a text editor to write ResearchBuzz. Apologies if anything got mangled in the excerpt. Good evening, Internet…

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