NEW RESOURCES

Family Safety & Health: New online tool shows the way to healthier food choices. “Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system that looks at more than 8,000 foods’ nutrients, ingredients, processing characteristics and additives, among other characteristics, and grades their healthfulness on a scale of 1 to 100. Experts encourage regular consumption of foods that have a score of 70-100. Foods with scores of 31-69 should be eaten moderately, and those in the 1-30 score range should be minimized.”

Devex: Tracking food waste and loss is hard. A new database makes it easier. “A new database is collecting research on post-harvest food loss and waste to help inform policymakers and academic researchers as they seek to reduce the estimated one-third of food that is grown but not consumed…. The database, which launched in November, currently contains more than 200 papers with information from more than 80 countries and 22 crops.”

Straits Times: New online database details rare bird species in Singapore. “As bird-watching takes flight in Singapore, a group of 17 enthusiasts wants to tap the growing network of birdwatchers here by creating an online platform that allows people to submit their sightings of these rarities. The Singapore Birds Project last month published the first edition of its rare species database, featuring over 150 species. A rare bird is one that has been seen three times or fewer in a year, or belongs to a species that has been recorded more often but can be challenging to identify in the field.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google is making its first in-house smartwatch that could launch in 2022. “Google is finally making its own in-house smartwatch that’s set to launch in 2022, according to a person familiar with the matter and a new report from Insider. While Google has made its own smartphones for years under the Pixel line (which has since extended to other accessories, like wireless headphones), the company has never designed its own smartwatch, despite the fact that Google has had a companion wearable platform for Android since 2014.”

CNET: YouTube names the top 10 most-viewed videos uploaded in 2021. “YouTube has dropped its list of top trending videos and creators of the year. MrBeast, the YouTuber who made headlines recently for his re-creation of Netflix’s survival drama Squid Game, came No. 1 in the US for the video I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive. It’s notched up over 147 million views since it was released in March.”

Mashable: Google’s pizza-themed Doodle is actually a fiendish mini-game . “Who would’ve thought slicing pizza could be this much of a head-scratcher? Google unveiled its latest Doodle on Monday, a fiendish mini-game which tasks you with cutting up a pizza into a certain number of slices using only so many strokes.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: How TikTok Reads Your Mind. “There are four main goals for TikTok’s algorithm: 用户价值, 用户价值 (长期), 作者价值, and 平台价值, which the company translates as ‘user value,’ ‘long-term user value,’ ‘creator value,’ and ‘platform value.’ That set of goals is drawn from a frank and revealing document for company employees that offers new details of how the most successful video app in the world has built such an entertaining — some would say addictive — product.”

Northumbria University: Research on US Civil War sailors to create a treasure-chest for genealogists and social historians. “Project Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy, 1861-1865 is being led by Professor David Gleeson from Northumbria, in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Information Scientists Dr Morgan Harvey and Dr Frank Hopfgartner. The research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), will include the creation of newly digitised muster rolls – registers of the officers and men on Union Naval vessels – from the conflict, providing a valuable online resource both for social historians and people looking to discover their family histories.”

AFP: Google to halt election ads ahead of 2022 Philippines vote. “Google will stop carrying election ads in the Philippines ahead of the May 2022 presidential vote, the internet giant said Wednesday, similar to action it has taken in the United States. Alarm has been raised in recent years by governments and election watchdogs over the use of targeted political advertising, especially disinformation campaigns to sway voters.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them. “Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime-prediction software called PredPol. The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server. Gizmodo and The Markup analyzed them and found persistent patterns.”

CNN: Suspected Chinese hackers breach more US defense and tech firms. “A suspected Chinese hacking campaign has breached four more US defense and technology companies in the last month, and hundreds more US organizations are running the type of vulnerable software that the attackers have exploited, according to research shared with CNN.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stony Brook University: Study Suggests New Strategy to Detect Social Bots. “The study looked at more than 3 million tweets authored by 3,000 bot accounts and an equal number of genuine accounts. Based only on the language from these tweets, the researchers estimated 17 features for each account: age, gender, five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), eight emotions (such as joy, anger and fear), and positive/negative sentiment.” Good morning, Internet…

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