NEW RESOURCES

The Cooper Union: New Online Archive Offers A Glimpse Into More Than A Century Of American History. “Voices from the Great Hall is a digital archive, free and accessible to anyone, and generously supported by The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. This growing collection presents all known sound and video recordings made in Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall dating back to 1941 and continuing to the present, as well as 8,900 objects, such as photographs, tickets, and fliers, related to more than 3,000 Great Hall programs dating to 1859.”

Johns Hopkins University: Tool Visualizes The Public Health Impact Of Redlining. “‘Environmental Racism: A Tool for Exploring the Enduring Legacy of Redlining on Urban Environments’ enables users to visualize the correlation between 14 contemporary environmental metrics and the practice of ‘redlining’ that took place in the 1930s.” Never heard the term redlining? Encyclopedia Britannica has an overview.

PR Newswire: A new open-access portal for human immunology data and tools (PRESS RELEASE). “Launched today, the Human Immune System Explorer is the Allen Institute for Immunology’s data-sharing portal to the broader community. Built using de-identified and anonymized data, the site allows scientists to delve into the methods and resources the immunology team is using to analyze and manage their studies on human immunology. As the team’s long-term studies of immune health and diseases are completed, those data will be deposited on the public portal as well.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Clubhouse lays off some employees amid strategic shift. “Clubhouse has laid off some of its employees, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. It’s unclear exactly how many staff the company let go, but at least some now-former workers left voluntarily to pursue opportunities outside of Clubhouse. Among one of the more high-profile departures was Nina Gregory, a former National Public Radio editor who joined the company to head up its news partnerships initiative. Clubhouse also lost its community and international leads.”

CNET: Welcome to Plugged In, Your New Home for Everything EVs and More. “Vehicles with plugs made up 12.5% of all registrations in California last year. Other states won’t be far behind. And so, for those readers we’d like to introduce CNET Cars Plugged In, a new, curated selection of content specifically for those with an eye towards electrified transportation. The focus will be on EVs, but we’ll also mix in some of the more interesting developments on plug-in hybrids and fuel-cells, plus the latest on the micromobility front, like scooters and e-bikes.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Set Up Search Alerts in Google Scholar. “Email alerts are a useful tool to use to stay updated with new content. Even though annoying promotional emails might make alerts seem like something to avoid, there are times when you might want to be alerted on the latest information. If you love to consume academic content, and you don’t want to miss out on newly published articles, you can create Google Scholar alerts for your email.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Glasses or no glasses, this year’s WWDC is all about AR. “It’s now fairly clear that AR and VR are Apple’s next big thing, the next supposedly earth-shakingly huge industry after the smartphone. Apple’s not likely to show off a headset at WWDC, but as augmented and virtual reality come to more of our lives, everything about how we experience and interact with technology is going to have to change.”

State of Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission Awards 47 Keystone Historic Preservation Grants. “The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC) has awarded $2.6 million in Keystone Historic Preservation Grants to assist historical and heritage organizations, museums and local governments in 20 counties. PHMC awarded 47 grants selected from 93 eligible applications. Grant amounts ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 for project grants and $5,000 to $100,000 for construction projects. All grants require a 50/50 cash match and were awarded through a competitive selection process.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Racist and Violent Ideas Jump From Web’s Fringes to Mainstream Sites. “As the number of mass shootings escalates, experts say many of the disturbing ideas that fuel the atrocities are no longer relegated to a handful of tricky-to-find dark corners of the web. More and more outlets, both fringe and mainstream, host bigoted content, often in the name of free speech. And the inability — or unwillingness — of online services to contain violent content threatens to draw more people toward hateful postings.”

Bleeping Computer: Conti ransomware targeted Intel firmware for stealthy attacks. “Researchers analyzing the leaked chats of the notorious Conti ransomware operation have discovered that teams inside the Russian cybercrime group were actively developing firmware hacks. According to messages exchanged between members of the cybercrime syndicate, Conti developers had created proof-of-concept (PoC) code that leveraged Intel’s Management Engine (ME) to overwrite flash and gain SMM (System Management Mode) execution.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: It’s Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message . “I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box full of possibilities, a mini-MySpace profile or a Facebook status update years before either existed. It was also a boundary: An Away Message not only popped up as a response after someone IM’d you, it was wholly visible to that person before they IM’d you. Nothing like this exists in our modern messaging apps.”

Newswise: Data Ethicist Cautions Against Overreliance on Algorithms. “Pigeons can quickly be trained to detect cancerous masses on x-ray scans. So can computer algorithms. But despite the potential efficiencies of outsourcing the task to birds or computers, it’s no excuse for getting rid of human radiologists, argues University of Oregon philosopher and data ethicist Ramón Alvarado.” 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!