NEW RESOURCES

Queens Chronicle: Oh, the places named for people!. “The Queens Public Library has launched an online archive of information on over 1,300 people whom schools, streets, buildings, parks, monuments and other public spaces across the borough have been named after.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Snapchat lets subscribers choose when their stories expire. “Snap has introduced a number of features for its Snapchat+ subscription app, including a new ‘Story Expiration’ feature, along with custom notification sounds, camera borders and more.”

Google Blog: Add these new Google widgets to your iPhone. “Our Lock Screen widgets for iOS 16 are officially available, so you can access features from your favorite Google apps with a quick tap or even just a glance at your iPhone Lock Screen. Between these and our Home Screen widgets, we’ve got you covered across all your favorite Google apps. Let’s take a closer look at ways you can use all these new widgets.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

How-To Geek: Yes, Emoji Have Multiple Meanings Too. “In case you haven’t heard, Gen Z has apparently ‘canceled’ a handful of emoji, including the thumbs-up. That’s absolutely not true, but it’s brought something interesting to light. Do people not realize emojis have multiple meanings, just like words do?”

Jewish Press: Google Calls New NYC Migrant Center ‘Adams Tent City’. “Google Maps appears to have created a new name for a pet project of New York City Mayor Eric Adams – his much-debated migrant processing center on Randalls Island – at least temporarily. The site, officially called the ‘Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center,’ had a different name on the location software, until Tuesday night.”

SECURITY & LEGAL
Euronews: Interpol is setting up its own metaverse to learn how to police the virtual world. “Will Interpol become the new sheriff of the metaverse? One thing is certain: it does not want to fall behind. The global police organisation has just unveiled what it calls ‘the first-ever metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide’.”

Motherboard: Researchers Defeated Advanced Facial Recognition Tech Using Makeup. “A new study from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that software-generated makeup patterns can be used to consistently bypass state-of-the-art facial recognition software, with digitally and physically-applied makeup fooling some systems with a success rate as high as 98 percent.” I did not plan to have this article and the next one appear in the same newsletter. Just shook out of the queue that way.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Hackaday: Render Yourself Invisible To AI With This Adversarial Sweater Of Doom. “Ugly sweater season is rapidly approaching, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve always been a bit baffled by the tradition of paying top dollar for a loud, obnoxious sweater that gets worn to exactly one social event a year. We don’t judge, of course, but that’s not to say we wouldn’t look a little more favorably on someone’s fashion choice if it were more like this AI-defeating adversarial ugly sweater.”

University of Glasgow: Researchers Propose A Roadmap To Understand Whether AI Models And The Human Brain Process Things The Same Way. “Researchers use Deep Neural Networks, or DNNs, to model the processing of information, and to investigate how this information processing matches that of humans…. New research, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences and led by the University of Glasgow’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience, presents a new approach to understand whether the human brain and its DNN models recognise things in the same way, using similar steps of computations.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Lifehacker: Someone Built a 4D Minecraft Clone. “Video games usually come in one of two dimensions: You have your 2D side scrollers, or, more commonly, your typical 3D adventures. Rarely do you see a game that pushes beyond these dimensions, since, you know, we live in the third dimension. Why, then, does a Minecraft clone exist in 4D?” There is a video in the article that really helps it make sense. Good afternoon, Internet…

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