NEW RESOURCES

I thought I must have indexed this but I can’t find it anywhere so, new-to-me: New voices added to Yale Library’s collection of music oral histories. “The recordings will add the voices of two more gospel artists to [Oral History of American Music]’s growing collection, Major Figures in American Music. The collection now contains more than 1,400 recorded interviews, dating from 1970 to the present day, with noted composers and musicians.”

Scientific Data: The African Development Corridors Database: a new tool to assess the impacts of infrastructure investments . “We developed a database of 79 development corridors across Africa, synthesizing data from multiple sources covering 184 projects on railways, wet and dry ports, pipelines, airports, techno-cities, and industrial parks. The georeferenced interlinked tabular and spatial database includes 22 attributes.”

EOS: Geospatial Database for the Prince Edward Islands Think South Africa, not Anne of Green Gables. “As rare landmasses dotting the vast Southern Ocean, South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands provide valuable insights for climatologists, geographers, biologists, botanists, and even astronomers…. But despite their value to science, spatial data and associated metadata for the two islands (Marion and Prince Edward) were difficult to assess and validate.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: “Too easy“—Midjourney tests dramatic new version of its AI image generator. “On Saturday, AI image service Midjourney began alpha testing version 4 (‘v4’) of its text-to-image synthesis model, which is available for subscribers on its Discord server. The new model provides more detail than previously available on the service, inspiring some AI artists to remark that v4 almost makes it ‘too easy’ to get high-quality results from simple prompts.”

USEFUL STUFF

CoinDesk: Why Is Crypto Tanking: The FTX-Binance Drama Explained. “The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance reversed course on a plan to bail out competitor FTX in an event that has shocked the crypto industry and is catching the attention of regulators.” This article assumes some knowledge of the cryptocurrency world, but it’s a good general explainer if you’re wondering why two entities called “FTX” and “Binance” are all over the news.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Roundtable: Mastodon Is Using Rel Noreferrer On Outbound Links Causing Visits To Appear As Direct Traffic In Google Analytics. “As I’ve been sharing on Mastodon more, and as activity on the social network surges overall, I’ve been trying to track visits to content from Mastodon…. I ended up testing the tracking situation by sharing some links on Mastodon and seeing how that was tracked in Google Analytics. If you’re a user of Mastodon, and want to analyze traffic from the growing social network, I don’t think you’re going to like what I found.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Olive Press: Police officer becomes first person in Spain with criminal conviction for spreading ‘fake news’ on social media. “A Guardia Civil officer has become the first person criminally convicted in Spain of spreading ‘fake news’. He used a social media account to falsely allege that a group of Moroccan child migrants attacked a Barcelona area woman.”

AFP: Biden says Musk’s foreign ties ‘worthy’ of scrutiny. “US President Joe Biden Wednesday said that Elon Musk’s ties with foreign countries were ‘worthy’ of scrutiny, amid questions over the Saudi acquisition of a stake in Twitter as part of the tycoon’s blockbuster takeover.”

Gizmodo: DOJ and SEC Investigating FTX Collapse as Entire Crypto Market Plunges. “The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating FTX, a crypto platform that halted withdrawals on Tuesday, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. And while the SEC’s investigation has reportedly been going ‘for months,’ the agency’s scrutiny has only expanded this week following the liquidity crisis at FTX, which has caused the entire cryptocurrency market to tank.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Brandeis NOW: The age of invention: patents show differences between younger and older inventors. “The study… examined more than 3 million U.S. patents filed from 1976 to 2000 to identify certain attributes, and then analyzed them based on the age of the filers. The research found older inventors are more likely to rely on their knowledge and experience, and build on novel applications of past inventions – what psychologists call crystallized intelligence – to develop a patent. Younger inventors are more likely to submit patents that are forward-looking and rely on abstract reasoning and novel problem-solving – all traits of fluid intelligence.”

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