NEW RESOURCES

Route Fifty: New Data Resource Focuses on Racial Wealth Gap. “A tool launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative Thursday aims to provide better access to data about racial wealth inequities in the United States. With interactive maps and graphs, the Black Wealth Data Center, or BWDC, allows users to compare data across race, sex, education and location and explore topics including employment, homeownership, assets and debt.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Cheers! A Computational Exploration of Alcoholic Beverages with the Wolfram Language . “The science of fermentation—known as zymology (or zymurgy)—is a fascinating blend of chemistry, biology, history and geography. The Wolfram Language now brings a new dimension to the study of alcoholic beverages through an extensive dataset ready to be explored and analyzed.”

Engadget: Snapchat for Web is now available for everyone. “Snapchat’s messaging and video chat features first made their way to browsers back in July, but only in select markets and for Snapchat+ subscribers. Now, Snapchat for Web is finally available for all the messaging app’s users worldwide. It could be the better choice for users who have a lot of typing to do and messages to send, since they’ll be looking at a bigger screen and have access to a real keyboard.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How LinkedIn Became a Place to Overshare. “Since the start of the pandemic, as office workers missed in-person interactions with colleagues, many people turned to LinkedIn to help make up for what they had lost. They started talking about more than just work. The boundaries between office and home lives became blurrier than ever. As personal circumstances bled into workdays, people felt emboldened to share with their professional peers — and found interested audiences both in and beyond their networks.”

New Yorker: The Search for Dirt on the Twitter Whistle-Blower. “The dozens of e-mails and LinkedIn messages received by people in Zatko’s professional orbit appeared to be mostly from research-and-advisory companies, part of a burgeoning industry whose clients include investment firms and individuals jockeying for financial advantage through information.”

CNN: Extreme California heat knocks key Twitter data center offline. “Extreme heat in California has left Twitter without one of its key data centers, and a company executive warned in an internal memo obtained by CNN that another outage elsewhere could result in the service going dark for some of its users.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers. “While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights. Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice.”

Tubefilter: YouTube’s Chief Product Officer testified before Congress. Then he announced a new approach to extremist content.. “Neal Mohan has had a busy week. On Wednesday, YouTube‘s Chief Product Officer was one of the tech execs who was called to testify before Congress. A day later, after attending a White House summit, he took to Twitter to announce an updated content moderation policy that aims to curb violent extremist content — even when that content is not affiliated with a known terrorist organization.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mike Shouts: Metaphysic Pulled Off Deepfake Elvis Performance At America’s Got Talent. “I am sure most of us are familiar with what deepfake is by now but what some of us may not know is that deepfaking has gone real-time. At the season finale of the seventeenth season of America’s Got Talent, Metaphysic, a tech company that uses AI to create hyperreal content, pulled an incredible ‘real-time deepfake’ onstage.”

York University: Study: Even smartest AI models don’t match human visual processing. “Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) don’t see objects the way humans do – using configural shape perception – and that could be dangerous in real-world AI applications, says Professor James Elder, co-author of a York University study published today.” Good afternoon, 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!