afternoonbuzz

1990s Belgium Nightlife, Iceland Secondary Schools, iPhone Photos, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2022

NEW RESOURCES

Mixmag: Charlotte De Witte’s Label KNTXT Launches New Archive Dedicated To ‘90s Belgian Nightlife. “Charlotte de Witte’s label KNTXT has curated a brand new archive charting the history of Belgian nightlife through the late ‘80s and ‘90s. Époque promises to ‘bootleg, document and pay tribute to Belgian discotheque culture’ through photographs, flyers, stories, and other memoirs from Belgium’s clubbing heyday.”

Reykjavik Grapevine: New Website Shows Accessibility Performance At Secondary Schools. “The Union of Icelandic Secondary School Students has launched the Support Bank, which ranks school performance on accessibility and services for those with learning needs, RÚV reports. The website was developed with input from students with learning needs. Questionnaires were sent to schools to collect the data for the website.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: 7 Ways You Didn’t Know You Could Search for Photos on Your iPhone. “If you’ve been using your iPhone for years, you’ve probably experienced the struggle of finding an old photo. Thankfully, the Photos app has a pretty powerful search feature that, if used right, can help you find the pictures you’re looking for.” It’s a slideshow, but a good slideshow.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What?. “‘DYOR’ is shorthand for “do your own research,” a phrase that, on its face, amounts to excellent if obvious advice — a reminder to stay informed and vigilant against groupthink. But in the context of a broad collapse of trust in institutions and the experts who speak for them, it has come to mean something more specific. A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: FTC fines Twitter $150 million for ‘deceptive’ ad targeting. “Twitter has paid a $150 million fine to the FTC over its ‘deceptive’ use of user data for targeted advertising. The fine stems from the company’s admission in 2019 that it had for years used Twitter users’ phone numbers and email addresses provided for two-factor authentication to also serve targeted ads.”

World Trademark Review: USPTO inadvertently makes applicant emails public, responds to community concern. “Trademark practitioners reacted with concern to the discovery that, on 24 May, the USPTO made the private email addresses of up to 21,000 applicants publicly available in its Trademark Status & Document Retrieval (TSDR) system. The USPTO has subsequently confirmed that it is taking measures to address the issue and prevent it from happening again.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brookings Institution: How can digital public technologies accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals?. “This paper focuses on ‘digital public technology’ (DPT), meaning digital assets that create a level playing field for broad access or use—by virtue of being publicly owned, publicly regulated, or open source. We consider how they could support greater progress toward the SDGs’ overarching 2030 deadline, with an emphasis on issues of extreme deprivation and basic needs.”

Ars Technica: Lidar reveals networks of pre-Columbian cities and towns in Bolivia. “An airborne lidar survey recently revealed the long-hidden ruins of 11 pre-Columbian Indigenous towns in what is now northern Bolivia. The survey also revealed previously unseen details of defensive walls and complex ceremonial buildings at 17 other settlements in the area, built by a culture about which archaeologists still know very little: the Casarabe.”

Environmental Investigation Agency UK: Groundbreaking stripe-pattern database to boost enforcement in fight against illegal tiger trade. “Our Tiger Campaign’s project aims to develop a tiger stripe detection AI tool to help identify individual tiger stripe pattern profiles. Tiger stripe patterns are as unique as human fingerprints and we plan to create a database comprising thousands of images of individual tiger stripe patterns, sourced by EIA staff and other organisations, which will allow the identification of tigers and skins seized in illegal trade.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

ScienceDaily: Just being exposed to new things makes people ‘ready to learn’. “A new study is one of the first to provide experimental evidence that people learn from incidental exposure to things that they know nothing about and aren’t even trying to understand.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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