NEW RESOURCES

Big shout to Twitter user @osint_unleashed who found this: the Limerick castles database. From the project about page: “Joseph Lennon is an historian and a graduate of Limerick Institute of Technology and the University of Limerick, and currently based in the National University of Ireland Galway. For over a decade, Joseph has been compiling a comprehensive archive of images documenting the castles and tower houses of Limerick. This fieldwork has taken him to the four corners of the county and beyond; including to Castle Lishen and Kilbolane, once part of Limerick but now in County Cork.”

Leiden University: Online platform Historical Maps of Southeast Asia launched. “On August 30, the online platform Historical Maps of Southeast Asia was launched. The platform provides access to over 1,400 digitised maps of Southeast Asia from the collections of the National Library Board Singapore (307 maps), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – Yale University (150 maps), Bodleian Libraries – University of Oxford (387 maps ) and Leiden University Libraries (UBL) (593 maps).”

The Mainichi: Pollen image database at Japanese univ. offers unique microcosm of natural wonders . “An image database is now open for anyone wanting to marvel at electron microscopic images of a vast and visually eclectic range of pollens, that all appear as just tiny grains to the unassisted human eye. Dubbed ‘Kafun search’ (pollen search), the database was developed at Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University to showcase the pollens of 118 plant families, 391 genera and 634 species as of Aug. 21, and the number is rising.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: Google Docs Features to Help You Ace Your College Papers. “Google Docs can be great for writing school essays and other projects. From citations to research to collaborating with classmates, take advantage of these helpful features for your college papers.”

MakeUseOf: 4 Ways to Have Alexa Translate Languages. “Through the power of AI, Amazon Alexa has evolved to become the voice assistant that seems like it can do everything. And it’s not just limited to telling you the latest weather updates and turning your lights off. Alexa can also be used as an effective translation tool. We’ll show you a number of ways that Alexa can translate words, phrases, and even whole conversations.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Artnet: Watch John OIiver Marry a Cabbage Live on TV to Capture the Absurdity of A.I.-Generated Art . “While Open AI is researching responsible public deployment for the platform, Oliver and his show’s team took to Midjourney, one of many public-access A.I.s that have popped up recently, to demonstrate the power of the text-to-image phenomenon. And in the show’s consummately absurd fashion, they did this by envisioning a new Marvel protagonist named Roast Beef Superhero.”

University of Oxford: Oxford University project aims to preserve Second World War memories. “A project led by the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford is looking for contributions to a free online archive of family stories, anecdotes, memories, and digitized objects relating to people’s experiences of the Second World War.”

NBC News: Search for missing Native artifacts led to the discovery of bodies stored in ‘the most inhumane way possible’. “Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, federal law has required institutions that receive federal funding to catalog their collections with the National Parks Service and work toward returning them to the tribal nations they were taken from. But the University of North Dakota has no entries in the federal inventory, even though its administrators acknowledge it has possessed Indigenous artifacts since its inception in 1883.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft Defender falsely detects Win32/Hive.ZY in Google Chrome, Electron apps. “A bad Microsoft Defender signature update mistakenly detects Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Discord, and other Electron apps as ‘Win32/Hive.ZY’ each time the apps are opened in Windows. The issue started Sunday morning when Microsoft pushed out Defender signature update 1.373.1508.0 to include two new threat detections, including Behavior:Win32/Hive.ZY.”

TechCrunch: A huge Chinese database of faces and vehicle license plates spilled online. “While its contents might seem unremarkable for China, where facial recognition is routine and state surveillance is ubiquitous, the sheer size of the exposed database is staggering. At its peak the database held over 800 million records, representing one of the biggest known data security lapses of the year by scale, second to a massive data leak of 1 billion records from a Shanghai police database in June. In both cases, the data was likely exposed inadvertently and as a result of human error.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Texas at Austin: Sharing on Social Media Makes Us Overconfident in Our Knowledge. “Social media sharers believe that they are knowledgeable about the content they share, even if they have not read it or have only glanced at a headline. Sharing can create this rise in confidence because by putting information online, sharers publicly commit to an expert identity. Doing so shapes their sense of self, helping them to feel just as knowledgeable as their post makes them seem.” I publicly commit only to reading really fast.

Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): More so than adults, U.S. teens value people feeling safe online over being able to speak freely. “Teens and adults in the United States differ on a key issue tied to online speech and its consequences. A majority of teens ages 13 to 17 say a welcoming, safe online environment is more important than people being able to speak their minds freely online, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. A separate survey of Americans 18 and older shows that adults’ views on the same question are more evenly divided.” Good morning, Internet…

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