NEW RESOURCES

NREL: News Release: New Database Shines Spotlight on Decades of Solar Mirror Research. “The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is preparing to unveil a database containing the results of exposure experiments on solar reflectors conducted over more than four decades. The publicly available Solar Mirror Materials Database (SMMD) will contain information from thousands of solar mirror samples from more than a hundred suppliers that have been subjected to outdoor tests and laboratory environments.”

Getty: A Rare 500-Year-Old Manuscript Gets a Second Life Online. “The Florentine Codex… is a 16th-century manuscript that details, in both the Spanish and Nahuatl languages, the culture and history of the Mexica (Aztec) people, including the invasion of Mexico City by the Spaniards and their Indigenous allies. The Digital Florentine Codex reveals the manuscript’s contents by providing access to new and previously published Nahuatl and Spanish language transcriptions, English and Spanish translations, as well as easily searchable texts and images.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: Twitter takeover: 1 year later, X struggles with misinformation, usage decline. “X looks and feels something like Twitter, but the more time you spend on it the clearer it becomes that it’s merely an approximation. Musk has dismantled core features of what made Twitter, Twitter — its name and blue bird logo, its verification system, its Trust and Safety advisory group. Not to mention content moderation and hate speech enforcement. He also fired, laid off or lost the majority of its workforce — engineers who keep the site running, moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate, executives in charge of making rules and enforcing them.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Introduces AR Beauty Ads, Promote Products With Virtual Try-On. “Google has launched a new advertising product called AR Beauty Ads, which allows beauty brands to promote their products using augmented reality (AR) technology. The interactive ads feature virtual try-on capabilities that aim to showcase items in a more engaging way.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

KUSA: Descendants rethink ethnic identity after historians uncover indigenous slave names. “[Native Bound Unbound] brings a new team of historians together who search old documents, like baptismal and census records, to identify and catalog thousands of names of forgotten indigenous slaves in the Western Hemisphere. … The goal is to eventually publish an open-source website where people can read stories and find names of their enslaved indigenous ancestors.”

Rowan University: Global impact: Alumna’s gift to preserve history, legacy of Operation Uganda. “[Betty Bowe Castor’s] gift will support the establishment of the Operation Uganda Digital Collection & Exhibit, an online archive containing historic records that will showcase the educational legacy of Operation Uganda and its important role in teaching the South Jersey region about Africa.”

Reuters: Google to run internet cables to Pacific islands in Australia-US deal. “Alphabet’s Google will run undersea cables powering internet access to at least eight far-flung Pacific Ocean nations under a joint U.S.-Australian deal set to be announced on Wednesday, according to a U.S. official.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Governing: States Act, but Can Legislation Slow AI-Generated Election Disinformation?. “Artificial intelligence (AI) is hardly the first breakthrough technology released into society before its impact was understood. We still have a lot to learn about human-made chemicals that have made their way into air, soil, water, food and our bodies since the 1950s. But a contentious election season is just ahead, and policymakers have to do their best to contain a force that could make things even more volatile.”

Ars Technica: Pro-Russia hackers target inboxes with 0-day in webmail app used by millions. “A relentless team of pro-Russia hackers has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in widely used webmail software in attacks targeting governmental entities and a think tank, all in Europe, researchers from security firm ESET said on Wednesday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ohio State News: ‘Dim-witted’ pigeons use the same principles as AI to solve tasks. “A new study provides evidence that pigeons tackle some problems just as artificial intelligence would – allowing them to solve difficult tasks that would vex humans. Previous research had shown pigeons learned how to solve complex categorization tasks that human ways of thinking – like selective attention and explicit rule use – would not be useful in solving.”

Texas A&M: Developing deep learning technologies for medical image classification. “Dr. Tianbao Yang, associate professor for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, recently received more than $1 million from the National Science Foundation to develop deep learning technologies for medical image classification by leveraging both the images and associated free-text reports of patients for self-supervised learning.”

Cornell Chronicle: Robot stand-in mimics your movements in VR. “Researchers from Cornell and Brown University have developed a souped-up telepresence robot that responds automatically and in real-time to a remote user’s movements and gestures made in virtual reality.” Good morning, Internet…

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