NEW RESOURCES

Recently launched, apparently, and discovered on Twitter: Nightingale Open Science. From the docs page: “Today, health data are mostly locked up in small sandboxes, controlled by a handful of private companies or well-resourced researchers. Nightingale Open Science aims to unlock those data, securely and ethically, and make them available for the public good…. Our datasets are curated around medical mysteries—heart attack, cancer metastasis, cardiac arrest, bone aging, Covid-19—where machine learning can be transformative.”

PR Newswire: WhiteSource Launches Free Tool to Detect and Remediate Log4j Vulnerabilities (PRESS RELEASE). “This free developer tool, which is hosted on GitHub and is now available for use, quickly scans projects to find vulnerable Log4j versions and provides the exact path — both to direct or indirect dependencies — along with the fixed version for speedy remediation. As a standalone tool, developers can download the utility that matches their platform, run it within the terminal, and run the scan command on the root folder of the project.” WhiteSource will be having a Webinar about Log4j on December 20.

University of Massachusetts Amherst: Latest Toxic 100 And Greenhouse 100 Lists Name Top Air And Water Polluters, Climate Gas Emitters In The U.S.. “Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) today published the newest editions of its lists of the top corporate air and water polluters and top greenhouse gas emitters in the United States, based on the most recent data available from the Environmental Protection Agency.”

National Archives: National Archives Releases New Group of JFK Assassination Documents. “In accordance with President Biden’s directive of October 22, 2021, the National Archives today posted 1,491 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act). Released documents are available for download.”

Cornell Chronicle: Rural humanities projects explore NYS past and present. “‘In 1850, the federal census recorded 19 black residents in the Town of Caroline in Tompkins County.’ That’s the first line of Ethan Dickerman’s essay about the Tompkins County Rural Black Residents Project, a website he created that details where Black residents in the county lived from 1820 to 1870.” This is one of several projects exploring Black history in rural New York.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google’s Area 120 launches Qaya, a service offering web storefronts for digital creators. “A team at Google is today launching a new service called Qaya, which will allow creators to easily set up new web storefronts where they can sell their products and services directly to their audiences. The project is the latest to emerge from Google’s in-house project incubator, Area 120, which was recently a part of a broader reorganization at the company that elevated its status after many of its earlier projects exited to different parts of Google, including its Cloud, Search, Shopping and Commerce divisions.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 3 Easy TikTok Transitions: A Beginner’s Guide. “Sometimes, TikTok can look like pure magic. For instance, when a video that starts with someone in their bedhead and natural complexion, changes instantly into a fabulously made-up face with a flawless blow-dry. Or, when a TikTok creator changes their whole outfit with a little jump and the snap of their fingers. From the outside, these TikTokers look like master cinematographers who have years of film-editing experience. However, once you get to know how the app works, you can see that these transitions are not that hard to achieve, even for someone who’s just starting out.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Strange, horny game ads are flooding social media. I accidentally became obsessed. “Mildly tamer versions of this ad have been bombarding me on social media for months now. You might have seen them yourself. They’re for an array of different mobile games – Choices, Whispers, Chapters, Episode – which each offer a range of visual interactive stories, usually romantic, in which you control a protagonist and periodically make narrative choices that affect the story’s outcome.”

Columbia Journalism Review: Online censorship is growing in Modi’s India. “Using a combination of web scraping, APIs, and text extraction from hundreds of legal notices given to Twitter (sourced from the Lumen database, a Harvard University initiative monitoring global content removals), I created a series of datasets to better understand the nature and magnitude of the content that the Indian government wiped from Twitter.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: CFPB Calls Tech Workers to Action. “Clear, actionable information is critical for workers when they’re deciding how to raise concerns and consider becoming whistleblowers. I am pleased to announce the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has used human-centered design, including usability testing, to streamline how tech workers can alert us to potential violations of federal consumer financial laws.”

The Verge: Algorithms that detect cancer can be fooled by hacked images. “Artificial intelligence programs that check medical images for evidence of cancer can be duped by hacks and cyberattacks, according to a new study. Researchers demonstrated that a computer program could add or remove evidence of cancer from mammograms, and those changes fooled both an AI tool and human radiologists.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

North Carolina State University: Wildlife Scientists Are Solving Big Data Problems to Track Animals Around the Globe. “In a new study, [Roland] Kays and researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and other sites around the world published a paper in the journal Methods of Ecology and Evolution on technology they’ve developed to analyze, visualize and store data in the new ‘golden age’ of wildlife tracking. The study describes Movebank, a free set of tools to help researchers address the big data problems of wildlife tracking. Scientists are already using it to manage more than 3 million new data records generated each day.” Good morning, Internet…

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