NEW RESOURCES

New York City: DOT and Fordham University to Open Exhibition Celebrating NYC’s Street Design Manual. “… the SDM has helped reimagine New York City’s street network from one designed primarily for automobiles into one that supports a greater diversity of safe and convenient travel modes and activities – including with an increased focus on pedestrians and cyclists. First published in 2009, the third edition of the SDM is for the first time available entirely online.”

UC San Diego: Nanoengineers Develop a Predictive Database for Materials. “Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering have developed an AI algorithm that predicts the structure and dynamic properties of any material—whether existing or new—almost instantaneously. Known as M3GNet, the algorithm was used to develop… a database of more than 31 million yet-to-be-synthesized materials with properties predicted by machine learning algorithms.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Is as Grim as You’d Expect. “Lookups for gaslighting increased by 1,740% for 2022, with ‘high interest’ throughout the year, according to Merriam-Webster. In this age of conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls and deepfakes, it isn’t surprising gaslighting topped the list.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Distant Librarian: Clipchamp – a VERY cool screencasting option!. “The other day, Lifehacker posted that Windows Has a New Tool for Simultaneously Recording Your Screen and Webcam. That tool is Clipchamp, and I am impressed! Oh, and it’s free.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The New Stack: Lighting a Bonfire Under Social Media: Devs and ActivityPub. “As developers begin to shift away from post-Musk Twitter and contemplate building apps on federated social media protocols, many are asking themselves: what can I do with ActivityPub, the key open protocol of the fediverse?” This raised my understanding of ActivityPub from “nonexistent” to “abysmal” which is a great step up, because with abysmal I know enough vocabulary for research.

Screen Rant: Tumblr Users Made Up Fake Scorsese Movie Goncharov & It’s Almost Convincing. “Tumblr users have concocted a fake movie by Martin Scorsese, called Goncharov, and it’s remarkably, eerily convincing. Scorsese is the maestro of crime thrillers like Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Irishman. His next project is the eagerly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon, which stars frequent Scorsese collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: New ransomware encrypts files, then steals your Discord account. “The new ‘AXLocker’ ransomware family is not only encrypting victims’ files and demanding a ransom payment but also stealing the Discord accounts of infected users.”

Global Voices: In Turkey, social media platforms become complicit in censoring media and freedom of speech . “Twitter unveiled a tool that allows it to censor content on a country basis in 2010. At the time, the platform may not have completely envisaged how its tool could be abused by a number of increasingly authoritarian countries where social media platforms have been targeted by the authorities in the face of growing crackdowns and censorship. In fact, one of the Turkish government’s tactics to silence users on the internet and deny them their right to access information, is submitting requests to Twitter and other platforms to withhold content deemed in violation of its local laws.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Social media can be a lifesaver for new international ventures. “The use of social media can be beneficial to international new ventures and help them to survive. A new study from the University of Vaasa, Finland, shows that newly established international firms and start-ups with limited resources can effectively use social media to learn about their new foreign markets and customers in a fast and inexpensive way.”

Techdirt: ‘Publication Laundering’: How Publishers Happily Accept Fake And Nonsense Conference Papers In The Pursuit Of Profits. “Profit margins are extremely high for top publishers — typically 30-40%. And yet academics are routinely forbidden from sharing their own papers, because they are pressured to assign copyright in them to the publisher, which uses the control that affords to block wider access to knowledge. An eye-opening post by James Heathers on Medium reveals that the greed and rot in the world of academic publishing goes even deeper.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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