NEW RESOURCES

The Hindu: New digital archive promotes South Indian visual artists and their works. “An artist and her efforts to create a space for her peers forms the foundation of A Moxie Tale, a digital archive that promotes visual artists from South India. Now, in its nascent stages, the platform attempts to train the spotlight on South Indian practices, more specifically from Tamil Nadu, and doubles up as a digital space for display, which connoisseurs can browse and opt to support.”

New-to-me, from the Iowa High School Athletic Association: Archives: State Championship Programs Now Available. “The Iowa High School Athletic Association’s online archive at ArcaSearch has added its complete collection of state championship programs through the 2019-20 school year. ArcaSearch provides digitized and searchable archives of printed publications to preserve invaluable history for research and review. These programs, which feature all 11 sanctioned IHSAA sports and date back as early as the 1906 State Track & Field Meet, join the annual Summary Books (1967-2005) in the current archive.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PCMag Australia: Google Maps Rolls Out Wildfire Tracking Globally. “Building on the firm’s wildlife boundary map, launched last year to provide satellite data about California’s infernos, the new wildfire layer is now available globally. Tap on a virtual fire—indicated by a red-and-white flame icon—to see links to resources from local governments (think emergency websites, phone numbers, evacuation details). And when available, Maps will provide details about the fire, such as its containment status and how many acres have burned.”

NBC News: Twitch releases new safety feature amid scrutiny over ‘hate raids’. “Phone-verified chats will allow targeted creators to have more control over who can participate in their communities, Twitch said in a blogpost Wednesday. The move will require all or some users to verify phone their numbers before they can participate in streamers’ chats, which could help reduce targeted attacks by bots. Once users verify the phone numbers to their accounts, they will not need to verify them again for other channels.”

CNET: Facebook brings Reels to its iOS, Android apps in the US. “It’s official: Reels are now available on Facebook. The short-form videos, which originally launched on Instagram last year, can be created and viewed on Facebook by folks in the US with an iOS or Android device.”

USEFUL STUFF

Museum of Modern Art: How to Make Comics: Ideas, Activities, and Resources for Learning and Making. “Over the course of three articles, writer and comics scholar Chris Gavaler helped us understand what comics are, the potential of the art form, and some of the many approaches to making comics. Still, for many of us, starting with a blank sheet of paper can be daunting—even when we know the basic ideas for filling in the page. To conclude the How to Make Comics series, we wanted to offer a step-by-step approach you can follow in order to transform that blank sheet into a visual story that’s all your own.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: A Hospital Hit by Hackers, a Baby in Distress: The Case of the First Alleged Ransomware Death. “When Teiranni Kidd walked into Springhill Medical Center on July 16, 2019, to have her baby, she had no idea the Alabama hospital was deep in the midst of a ransomware attack. For nearly eight days, computers had been disabled on every floor. A real-time wireless tracker that could locate medical staff around the hospital was down. Years of patient health records were inaccessible. And at the nurses’ desk in the labor and delivery unit, medical staff were cut off from the equipment that monitors fetal heartbeats in the 12 delivery rooms.”

The Next Web: Researcher banned from Facebook beseeches Congress to regulate social media. “An NYU researcher who was shut out of Facebook has taken her fight for transparency to the US Congress. During Congressional testimony on Tuesday, Laura Edelson, who investigates online ads and misinformation, called for new data requirements and legal protections for researchers.”

GovTech: Texas Social Media Censorship Law May Increase Spam Emails. “House Bill 20, which passed on Sept. 9, prohibits email service providers from ‘impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.’ Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University of Law whose research and teaching focuses on Internet, IP and advertising law topics, says this restricts efforts to control email spam.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: One Man’s Endless Hunt for a Dopamine Rush in Virtual Reality. “Since the arrival of the seminal Oculus headset in 2013, [Wolf Heffelfinger] has played games in virtual reality, watched movies, visited distant lands and assumed new identities. He sees his virtual adventures as a relentless search for the dopamine rush that comes when the technology takes him somewhere new. When he reaches the edge of what the technology can do, the rush wanes. He has put his many headsets on the shelf, where they have sat for months. But when advances arrive, he leaps back in.”

Bloomberg: Google Hands SoftBank Patents From Failed Balloon Moonshot. “Alphabet has transfered about 200 patents from its Loon project to the telecoms unit of SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese company said in a statement on Thursday. SoftBank is developing its own wireless technology that uses fixed-wing autonomous aircraft as a flying base station.”

Phys .org: New tool reveals ultimate owners of companies. “With responsible investing gaining popularity, even as major nations seek ways to counter tax evasion in offshore financial centers and put unwanted individuals and companies on designated persons lists to deter business with them, the problem of revealing the ultimate beneficiary that owns a company through a long chain of intermediaries is as complex and relevant as ever. To address it, a team of Russian researchers has created a network science-based algorithm called α-ICON, short for Indirect Control in Onion-like Networks. The tool ingests ownership data from state registers and detects and ranks the ultimate owners of each organization, providing indirect insights into its practices for compliance officers, potential investors, and due diligence analysts to draw upon.” Good morning, 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!