NEW RESOURCES

USGS: New USGS diagram re-envisions how Earth’s most precious commodity cycles the planet. “Starting today, educators around the nation will have a more accurate and more comprehensive tool to explain the Earth’s water cycle with the unveiling of the new U.S. Geological Survey water cycle diagram.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

EPA: EPA Launches Updates to Environmental Justice Mapping Tool EJScreen. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has updated and added new capabilities to EJScreen, the Agency’s public environmental justice (EJ) screening and mapping tool. EJScreen combines environmental and socioeconomic information to identify areas overburdened by pollution.”

Engadget: Twitter is testing a way for users to limit their mentions. “According to privacy researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong, the company is testing out the ability to block @ mentions entirely, or limit them to people who already follow you. (Literally, don’t @ me, bro.)”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

STV News: Controversial fracking site ‘renamed’ as ‘Liz Truss Career Memorial’. “A Blackpool fracking site was briefly renamed to take a jab at the Prime Minister earlier this week as it appeared as the ‘Liz Truss Career Memorial’ on Google Maps.”

Washington Post: How TikTok ate the internet. “More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll. You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: Elliptic: Over $4 Billion in Illicit Crypto Laundered via Cross-Chain Technologies. “Criminals have laundered at least US$4 billion-worth of illicit crypto proceeds using cross-chain technologies since 2020, new research by blockchain analysis firm Elliptic reveals.”

CNET: Mormon Church Data Breach Exposed Members’ Personal Information. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the target of a cyberattack earlier this year that exposed the personal information of some members and associates, the church said Thursday.”

Krebs on Security: Microsoft Patch Tuesday, October 2022 Edition. “Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Penn State: AI language models show bias against people with disabilities, study finds . “The researchers found that all the algorithms and models they tested contained significant implicit bias against people with disabilities. Previous research on pretrained language models — which are trained on large amounts of data that may contain implicit biases — has found sociodemographic biases against genders and races, but until now similar biases against people with disabilities have not been widely explored.”

Yale School of Nursing: Ramos Explores How A Virtual Environment Can Produce Cardiovascular Health Gains IRL. “Using mixed methods, Dr. Ramos will conduct qualitative interviews and then test if the virtual environment is acceptable as prevention education. Using the American Heart Association’s Life Simple 7 Framework, Dr. [S. Raquel] Ramos is embedding information into the virtual environment to address issues, such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and nicotine exposure.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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