NEW RESOURCES

Nature: AnimalTraits – a curated animal trait database for body mass, metabolic rate and brain size. “Trait databases have become important resources for large-scale comparative studies in ecology and evolution. Here we introduce the AnimalTraits database, a curated database of body mass, metabolic rate and brain size, in standardised units, for terrestrial animals. The database has broad taxonomic breadth, including tetrapods, arthropods, molluscs and annelids from almost 2000 species and 1000 genera.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Deadline: Roku Channel Launches Free Hispanic Streaming Hub Espacio Latino. “Roku is launching Espacio Latino, a free streaming hub for Hispanic programming, on the Roku Channel. With more than 61 million active accounts as of March 31, Roku is a leading gateway for streaming, and one of its most popular offerings is the Roku Channel, a mix of free and paid on-demand and linear services with reach to some 80 million households.”

TechCrunch: Here’s everything Apple just announced at the WWDC 2022 keynote. “It’s WWDC keynote time! Each year Apple kicks off its Worldwide Developer Conference with a few hours of back-to-back-to-back announcements, generally covering things from iOS to watchOS to — sometimes! — new hardware. Didn’t have time to tune in? We get it! We’ve wrapped up all of the biggest news in an easy-to-skim digest.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Brown University: Grant to support Brown-led global oral history project on slavery’s legacy . “With support from the grant, researchers at Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice will collaborate with an international network of scholars in Senegal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium, Brazil and beyond to host public conversations, capture video narratives and record oral histories that seek to answer two important questions: How did slavery and colonialism shape these places, and how did they shape the world as a whole?”

The Verge: Google Contractors Say A Recruiting Company Has Been Systematically Skimming Their Pay . “A group of Google contractors says they’ve been underpaid by the agency that recruited them, resulting in thousands of dollars in unpaid wages per affected worker. The earliest reports occurred as long ago as 2019, and workers say the payroll errors are happening so regularly that they believe it to be a kind of systematic wage theft.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Italian city of Palermo shuts down all systems to fend off cyberattack. “The municipality of Palermo in Southern Italy suffered a cyberattack on Friday, which appears to have had a massive impact on a broad range of operations and services to both citizens and visiting tourists. Palermo is home to about 1.3 million people, the fifth most populous city in Italy. The area is visited by another 2.3 million tourists every year. Although local IT experts have been trying to restore the systems for the past three days, all services, public websites, and online portals remain offline.”

South China Morning Post: Tech war: Chinese database software vendor shrugs off sanctions risk on using open-source code from Oracle’s MySQL system. “A Chinese software vendor has brushed aside speculation that its enterprise product, which uses code from Oracle Corp’s MySQL open-source relational database management system, faces the risk of sanctions amid simmering tensions between Washington and Beijing.”

CBS DFW: Texas AG Ken Paxton launches investigation against Twitter. “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation against Twitter, saying the social media platform may have falsely reported its fake bot accounts, which is a violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Johns Hopkins University: Black Beyond Data. “This is one of [Jessica Marie] Johnson’s passions as a historian. To tell the stories of Black people—particularly Black women—in the Atlantic African diaspora during the centuries of slavery. She highlights the relationships, warmth, and intimacy they created despite the harshest of circumstances, as well as the ways in which they wielded intelligence, creativity, and interpersonal skills to strive for freedom. But Johnson is equally committed to opening access to the myriad amounts of data that contain information about Black life and Black people, both historical and contemporary.”

Purdue University: An edible QR code takes a shot at fake whiskey. “The days of fake whiskey could be numbered, thanks to a team of biomedical engineers from Purdue University and South Korea. The team, led by Young Kim, associate head for research and an associate professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, has developed an QR code on an edible silk tag that manufacturers can place in bottles of whiskey. Consumers can use a smartphone app to confirm the whiskey’s authenticity.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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