Tech Xplore: Simulating discrimination in virtual reality. “To assist with perspective-taking, MIT researchers have developed ‘On the Plane’—a virtual reality role-playing game (VR RPG) that simulates discrimination. In this case, the game portrays xenophobia directed against a Malaysian America woman, but the approach can be generalized.”
Bloomberg: Hong Kong to ‘Use All Means’ Against Google Over National Anthem. “Hong Kong has strongly criticized Alphabet Inc.’s Google for failing to ensure the city’s correct national anthem features prominently on its search page. Typing in Hong Kong national anthem into the search box brings up articles and videos about Glory to Hong Kong, the unofficial anthem of the mass protests that rocked the financial hub in 2019, instead of China’s March of the Volunteers.”
USC Information Sciences Institute: The Potentially Adverse Impact of Twitter 2.0 on Scientific and Research Communication. “In just over a month after the change in Twitter leadership, there have been significant changes to the social media platform, in its new ‘Twitter 2.0.’ version. For researchers who use Twitter as a primary source of data, including many of the computer scientists at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the effects could be debilitating.”
Ars Technica: New Winamp update adds features, fixes, and (sigh) support for ‘music NFTs’. “If you’d asked me in January to make some predictions about what 2022 would bring, I don’t think “multiple significant updates to the Winamp player” would have been on the list. But the release candidate for version 5.9.1 of the software builds on the groundwork laid by August’s 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new features to the reanimated music player.”
The Hill: Twitter’s head of France resigns amid Musk’s shakeup. “Twitter’s head of France, Damien Viel, announced his resignation from the social media platform in a tweet saying it was ‘over.’”
CNET: World’s Oldest Known Map of Stars Found Hiding in Medieval Manuscript. “More than 2,100 years ago, Greek astronomer Hipparchus mapped out the stars — and for a long time, this had been considered humanity’s earliest attempt to assign numerical coordinates to stellar bodies. But despite its fame, the treatise was only known to exist through writings of another well-known astronomer named Claudius Ptolemy, who compiled his own celestial inventory some 400 years later. Until now, that is.”
Homeland Security Today: IARPA and U.S. Army Launch Research to Engineer Next Generation of Computers. “The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory announced the launch of a program to engineer innovative, new computer architecture designs that will help the Intelligence Community (IC) execute its increasingly critical data analysis missions.”
Reuters: Google Appoints Top Washington Post Exec as General Manager of News. “Alphabet Inc’s Google has picked the Washington Post’s longtime chief information officer to help run its news division as general manager, the tech giant said on Wednesday. Shailesh Prakash, who also led the news publisher’s design, product and tech teams for over a decade, will join Google in November.”
Tech Xplore: New algorithm based on the behavior of gulls improves edge computing. “The seagull algorithm encodes the migratory and attack behavior of gulls in such a way that it can be used to solve problems such as the assigning and routing of computational resources. The use of the simulated annealing algorithm in conjunction with the seagull algorithm will help the system avoid the local maximum and premature convergence problems, which are often the bane of other approaches to similar problems.” Not clear on edge computing? IBM has an overview.
Army Times: Army schoolhouses dive into new social media trainings. “New training tools, classes and exercise scenarios are coming into play at all levels of the professional military education system, from basic training to special courses tailored for general officers. To get a sense of where the Army might go next with social media in its schoolhouses, Army Times interviewed TRADOC Command Sgt. Maj. Daniel Hendrex and other officials developing social media training programs across the command.”
USGS: New one-stop shop webpage for all things Great Salt Lake. “On the website, users can see how changing lake levels, which recently reached a new historic low, affect local wetlands, biology, economics, safety, recreation and land use. Both current and historical USGS data from the Saltair and Saline gaging stations automatically populate the site’s diagrams with up-to-date lake level information.”
The Conversation: Rivers can suddenly change course – scientists used 50 years of satellite images to learn where and how it happens. “Throughout history, important cities around the world have flourished along river banks. But rivers can also be destructive forces. They routinely flood, and on rare occasions, they can abruptly shift pathways. These ‘channel-jumping’ events, which are called avulsions, have caused some of the deadliest floods in human history…. In a newly published study, I worked with colleagues to map the global distribution of avulsions on river fans and deltas. We used satellite images of over 100 rivers from 1973 to the present, providing a half-century of bird’s-eye views of global river evolution.”
BuzzFeed News: Male Fashion Influencers Are Saving Basic Men Everywhere. “There’s a growing niche of TikTok guys who show their peers how to elevate their style. Take Ethan Glenn. Glenn posts his outfits, hauls, and sponcon for an audience of over 300,000. This isn’t groundbreaking content. But considering that a whopping 84% of influencers doing sponcon on Instagram are women, it’s noteworthy that more guys are finally getting in the game. After years of women running the fashion show online, it turns out that men want to be influenced too.”
Washington Post: From Russia with money: Silicon Valley distances itself from oligarchs. “A Putin youth leader-turned-investor once touted connections to wealthy Russians. Now she denies knowing ‘anyone.’”
The Register: Facebook fined peanuts after Giphy staff quit and firm didn’t tell UK competition regulators. “The latest £1.5m ($2.03m) fine was imposed after three key staffers left Giphy. The CMA had imposed a legal order on Facebook owner Meta (2021 profit: $39bn) forcing the US giant to reveal if any ‘staff in positions of executive or managerial responsibility and/or whose performance affects the viability of the business’ resigned.”
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