NEW RESOURCES

CMS: HHS Releases New Data and Report on Hospital and Nursing Home Ownership. “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is releasing data publicly — for the first time — on mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, and changes of ownership from 2016-2022 for hospitals and nursing homes enrolled in Medicare…. HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) is also releasing a related report — an analysis of the new CMS data examining trends in changes of ownership over the past six years.”

Harvard Medical School: Data Deep Dive . “Minerva, available online to anyone, is named after the Roman goddess of wisdom. It allows users to access in-depth maps of tissue samples gathered during research, ranging from cancerous tumors to heart muscle in distress. On each map, users can zoom and pan, overlay features such as immune cells, and explore noteworthy areas. The maps also incorporate the expertise of scientists and medical doctors who can create narratives to guide users through the samples.”

TmoNews: New website keeps track of all lawsuits T-Mobile is facing. “Today, a new website has emerged to keep an eye out on all the complaints and lawsuits that T-Mobile is facing against former Sprint dealers and distributors. As of this writing, Wireless Franchisees for Justice has recorded a total of 15 complaints from Plaintiffs from over 20 states. The website also details that the merger has caused 382 stores to close down with a corresponding job loss of over 2,500. ”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Natural History Museum of Utah: Museum launches Triceratops Traits for middle schoolers. “Today, the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) is launching a new educational investigation as part of Research Quest, its award-winning and free online education program. In Triceratops Traits, the new investigation, students work alongside paleontologists to solve an evolutionary mystery by analyzing and interpreting data from the fossil record. This data, documenting the diversity, evolution and extinction of life forms, are interpreted under the premise that natural laws have operated the same throughout the history of life on Earth to fit 7th grade learning standards in Utah and 6th-8th grades around the U.S.”

TechCrunch: Google Search now displays city-level air quality information in the US. “Google is rolling out detailed information about air quality in Search, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The company notes that the launch currently only supports city-level queries. Google first rolled out the feature in India last November. The company says it’s now bringing the feature to Search in the United States to help people find timely and actionable information about air quality in their area.”

PTI: Social media app Koo makes algorithms public; pledges commitment to transparency, neutrality. “Twitter-rival Koo on Wednesday said it has become the first significant social media platform to publish the philosophy and workings behind its core algorithms, thereby empowering users to understand why they are seeing the content that they do. These algorithms were made public on Koo’s website, according to a statement.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: BeReal Basics: How to Use the ‘Unfiltered’ Social Media App. “A FRENCH SOCIAL media platform launched by Alexis Barreyat in 2020, BeReal is attracting dedicated users on US college campuses after gaining popularity overseas. Essentially, BeReal sends users a prompt at a random time each day, urging them to snap a picture and send it to their friends. You only have two minutes to respond, and a two-image collage is captured from your front and back cameras.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

South China Morning Post: Supporters of Hong Kong chief executive candidate John Lee accuse Google of interfering in poll after YouTube pulls his channel. “Online video platform YouTube cancelled Hong Kong’s sole chief executive candidate John Lee Ka-chiu’s campaign channel on Wednesday as it emerged that Facebook had restricted his user status, both citing compliance with United States sanction laws but earning a rebuke from the leadership contender who accused the US of bullying.”

Tubefilter: The video app Josh is making deep inroads in India. Its parent company just raised $805 million.. “The Indian government’s decision to ban TikTok has turned the country’s short-form video landscape into a gold rush. American tech companies like Instagram and YouTube have made inroads in the world’s second-most populous nation, but the biggest winners of the post-TikTok era have been local platforms.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Vox: Companies lose your data and then nothing happens. “There’s a simple reason companies collect so much of our data — money — but why they get to collect so much, keep it, and monetize it is more complicated. There are some laws around data privacy and security, but they’re scattershot and generally handled state by state, and they could be better. Companies keep screwing up with our data, and there are no good answers on what to do about it.”

CNET: Google Experts Found a Record Number of Zero-Day Security Bugs Last Year. “Project Zero, an in-house team of Google experts and analysts tasked with finding advanced cybersecurity threats known as zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits, detected a record-breaking 58 in-the-wild exploits in 2021, according to a report from the team published Tuesday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Analytics India: Google unveils Phorhum; state-of-the-art in photorealistic 3D human reconstruction. “Google unveiled Phorhum, a photorealistic 3D human reconstruction that can greatly help online apparel shopping. Phorhum is a method to photo-realistically reconstruct a dressed person’s 3D geometry and appearance as photographed in a single RGB image. The produced 3D scan of the subject accurately resembles the visible body parts and includes plausible geometry and appearance of the non-visible parts.” Good morning, Internet…

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