NEW RESOURCES

BBC: Coventry photographer’s archive saved from a skip catalogued by volunteers. “Thousands of photographs taken by Coventry photographer Arthur Cooper from the 1940s up to the 1960s have been digitized and released online by Coventry University. The archive, in the form of thousands of glass negatives, was found dumped on a Coventry street and returned to publishing company Mirrorpix.”

Alzforum: Goodbye Antibodies, Hello AlzAntibodies: New Database is Growing on Alzforum. “After two decades and more than 30,000 entries, Alzforum’s original Antibodies database has been retired. A listing of antibodies relevant to neurodegenerative disease research, the database had in recent years been rendered increasingly redundant by the proliferation of online antibody compendia and manufacturers’ catalogs. In its place, Alzforum has created a new database, AlzAntibodies. It aims to provide detailed descriptions of antibodies selected by Alzforum curators based on community interest or novelty.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: CES 2023 Day 0 recap: All the early news you missed. “CES is back! For real. Sort of. While the show has never actually gone away in spirit, this year is the first time since the pandemic that Engadget has a team on the ground. The show proper kicks off on Thursday Jan 5th, but the news has already been coming hot and heavy. If we count Jan 4th as Day 1, since it’s usually the media preview day, that would make today… Day 0. Some companies couldn’t even wait and broke their news on New Year’s day, those eager beavers. From Samsung’s eye-catching display prototypes and home appliances, to a slew of chips and laptops, here’s what you missed from Day 0 of CES 2023.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: 5 DuckDuckGo Features You Should Be Using. “DuckDuckGo is primarily known for its focus on privacy. But the search engine (and now browser) offers several helpful features, many of which aren’t even available on Google or Bing. So if you are new to DuckDuckGo, here are five features to improve your search experience.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: A Eulogy for V Live, K-Pop’s Library of Alexandria. “V Live, the hugely influential live-streaming platform that ushered Korean pop music to global prominence, has gone dark. The mobile app and desktop site hosted a public library of tens of thousands of live streams that documented a period of growth in which the Korean music industry evolved from a regional phenomenon to a global market superpower. The result of a merger with fellow fan-artist engagement app Weverse, the closure of V Live and its video database is tantamount to burning K-Pop’s Library of Alexandria.”

Los Angeles Times: TikTok’s addictive anti-aesthetic has already conquered culture. “IIf Franz Kafka were to reconceive “The Metamorphosis” for our era, he might decide to ditch the novella in favor of a series of surreal TikToks — Gregor Samsa as eyes and mouth green-screened onto a picture of a roach jacked from the web. Kafka is long gone. But thankfully, we have Kendria Bland, a Mississippi comedian who does a semiregular bit on TikTok about the travails of a pack of domestic roaches who like to party behind the refrigerator and sneak Popeyes when the humans aren’t around. ”

SECURITY & LEGAL

AFP: Arma 3 video game footage fuels misinformation about Russia-Ukraine war. “Footage from the war-themed Arma 3 video game, often marked ‘live’ or ‘breaking news’ to make it appear genuine, has been used repeatedly in recent months in fake videos about the Russian offensive in Ukraine. The frequency and ease with which gaming footage is mistaken as real, even by some media broadcasters, and shared as authentic news on social media highlight what researchers call its serious potential to spread misinformation.”

The National Interest: Virtual Reality, Real Dangers: The Metaverse Poses Counterterrorism Challenges. “Even though the arrival of a fully functional metaverse is still a few years away, the potential threats posed by the metaverse require immediate attention from a wide range of individuals and organizations.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Search Engine Journal: Is This Google’s Helpful Content Algorithm?. “Google published a groundbreaking research paper about identifying page quality with AI. The details of the algorithm seem remarkably similar to what the helpful content algorithm is known to do.”

National Institute of Mental Health: NIMH Creates Publicly Accessible Resource With Data From Healthy Volunteers. “Studying healthy people can help researchers understand how the brain works in states of health and illness. Although many mental health studies include healthy participants as a comparison group, these studies typically focus on selected measures relevant to a certain functional domain or specific mental illness. The Healthy Research Volunteer Study at the National Institute of Mental Health aims to build a comprehensive, publicly accessible resource with a range of brain and behavioral data from healthy volunteers.”

Chalkbeat New York: NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks. “New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.” Based on what I’ve been reading about chatbot-based AI startups, they’re going to be playing Whac-A-Mole for a while.

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

BBC: Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery. “A London furniture conservator has been credited with a crucial discovery that has helped understand why Ice Age hunter-gatherers drew cave paintings. Ben Bacon analysed 20,000-year-old markings on the drawings, concluding they could refer to a lunar calendar. It led to a specialist team proving early Europeans made notes about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.” Good morning, Internet…

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