NEW RESOURCES

University of California Fruit & Vegetable Preservation Resources: New interactive web tools help growers cope with climate change. “Growers and crop consultants can use CalAgroClimate’s crop and location-specific tools and resources to help make on-farm decisions, such as preparing for frost or untimely rain and taking advantage of expected favorable conditions. CalAgroClimate currently includes heat advisory, frost advisory, cropphenology and pest advisory tools.” That’s “crop phenology” the science and not CropPhenology the R package.

State of Massachusetts: MassWildlife and The Nature Conservancy Announce Launch of BioMap. “The web portal delivers the latest scientific data and resources to help state and local governments, land trusts, non-government organizations, and other conservation partners strategically plan projects to conserve wildlife and their habitats.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NPR: Sensing an imminent breakdown, communities mourn a bygone Twitter. “Users on the site have been steadily eulogizing the social network in the chaotic days since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. But the death knell sounded louder by Thursday, which saw yet another exodus from what’s left of Twitter’s workforce. That night, the top five Twitter trends in the U.S. all related to what people see as the imminent end of the site as they know it. Among the flood of tributes, a consensus has emerged about what makes the platform worth mourning: Twitter has been a uniquely accessible space where otherwise marginalized groups have felt heard and built community.”

Mozilla Accessibility Blog: Significant Improvements for Screen Readers Now in Nightly Firefox. “A couple of months ago, we shared an update on our Cache the World project, covering the ongoing re-write of the Firefox accessibility engine. The project aims to improve Firefox’s overall performance for users of assistive technologies (ATs) like screen readers and to reduce crashes and hangs. It will also make the accessibility engine easier to maintain and simplify adding new features going forward.”

TechCrunch: Google rolls out new features across Maps, Search and Shopping. “Google announced today that it’s introducing a slew of new Maps, Search and Shopping features. The company revealed a majority of the new features during its Search On event in September and is now starting to roll them out to users.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: The Arc browser is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for . “Arc wants to be the web’s operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen.”

Engadget: Elon Musk is reportedly considering cutting more of Twitter’s workforce. “According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk is considering new layoffs that would target the company’s sales and partnerships teams. The scale of the potential cuts is unclear but come after a large number of employees rejected Musk’s Twitter 2.0 ultimatum. On Friday, Musk reportedly asked Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s head of ad sales, and Maggie Suniewick, the firm’s partnerships chief, to fire more employees. Both were terminated after pushing back.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Not patched Log4j yet? Assume attackers are in your network, say CISA and FBI. “Almost a year on from Log4j’s disclosure, a joint alert by CISA and the FBI warns organizations that if they haven’t protected their systems against it yet, they really need to now.”

CNN: Singapore writes down $275 million in FTX, calls belief in Sam Bankman-Fried ‘misplaced’. “In a statement on Thursday, state-owned investment company Temasek said it had decided to write down the value of its full investment in the exchange to zero, ‘irrespective of the outcome of FTX’s bankruptcy protection filing.’ Temasek said it had invested $275 million in the crypto exchange, which was once considered one of the biggest and most reputable players in the market for digital assets.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Google Blog: Using AI to study 12 years of representation in TV. “See It, Be It: What Families are Seeing on TV is a new study that analyzes trends in the screen and speaking time of the visually presenting attributes of the characters — gender, skin tone and age — in scripted television over the last 12 years.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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