Is
China afraid we won’t share information on a cure? Perhaps they
want to file their patent first?
U.S.
to Accuse China of Trying to Hack Vaccine Data, as Virus Redirects
Cyberattacks
The
F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are preparing to issue
a warning that China’s most skilled hackers and spies are working
to steal American research in the crash effort to develop vaccines
and treatments for the coronavirus. The efforts are part of a surge
in cybertheft and attacks by nations seeking advantage in the
pandemic.
Because
people with lots of time on their hands might find something they
don’t like?
States
Are Suspending Public Records Access Due to COVID-19
The
Markup – There is little precedent for such action, even in an
emergency:
“…Hawaii is among several jurisdictions around the country that
have amended or suspended access to public records as the coronavirus
spreads. Governors are taking emergency action in some states,
ordering changes to public records compliance during the crisis.
Other states and municipalities have made legislative changes to
their laws. But government-transparency advocates argue
that
in a time of crisis, access to public records is even more important.
Officials say they need to take drastic actions to battle the
pandemic. In New Jersey, where the state legislature amended its
open records law, an analyst with an association of state
municipalities told
NJ.com that
officials “need the flexibility during emergencies to be able to
run government and respond to the emergency at hand.” A San Diego
county spokesperson told
the Voice of San Diego recently
that “the public interest in receiving records at this time is
outweighed by public interest in having county personnel free to
handle this ongoing emergency. State and local jurisdictions aren’t
the only ones making changes. At the federal level, government
agencies are making their own decisions about how to process
requests. But it’s clear those requests are facing heavy delays.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) recently
found that
several agencies were telling requesters to expect delays through the
course of the crisis…”
Perspective.
All is not profits at Amazon? Are they loosing market share or is
this a new market?
Amazon's
Empire Is Vulnerable to 'Rebel' Incursions
Amazon
is widely considered one of the biggest beneficiaries of the
e-commerce boom, as self-isolating consumers shift their shopping
behavior to purchase more online. The numbers are bearing out the
trend: While most companies are suffering from dramatic business
slowdowns, Amazon last week posted
first-quarter revenue
of $75.5
billion,
up 26% from a year earlier, and projected continued momentum by
giving a sales growth forecast range of 18% to 28% for the June
quarter. Amazon’s growth hasn’t come without issues, though.
The company has faced severe logistical challenges to meet demand –
including the rapid hiring of 175,000 additional workers. And the
stress put on its supply chain and delivery networks, along with the
prioritization of certain essential items, has led to shipping delays
and many shortages for its customers. Questions revolving around
workplace safety have also dogged Amazon.
With
Amazon so much in the spotlight, it may be surprising to know that
consumers are increasingly going elsewhere for their online shopping
needs. In fact, several e-commerce sellers are showing dramatically
faster growth rates than the tech giant. On Wednesday, Shopify
revealed the aggregated online sales of its merchant customer base
grew 46% in the first quarter and accelerated further in April. That
news came after online furniture retailer Wayfair Inc. said it had
revenue growth of roughly 90% so far in its second quarter, a
significant increase versus the 20% growth it generated for the three
months ended in March.
Traditional
retailers are flourishing as well. On April 23, Target Corp. said
its online business had
risen more than 275% month-to-date to that point, while electronics
retailer Best Buy Co. also pointed last month to recent
triple-digit growth trends for
its website. Costco Wholesale Corp., meanwhile, reported
April
e-commerce sales growth of 86%.
History,
as written at the time…
The
Newspaper Navigator Dataset
The
Newspaper Navigator Dataset: Extracting
And Analyzing Visual Content from 16 Million Historic Newspaper Pages
in Chronicling America –
Benjamin
Charles Germain Lee,
Jaime
Mears,
Eileen
Jakeway,
Meghan
Ferriter,
Chris
Adams,
Nathan
Yarasavage,
Deborah
Thomas,
Kate
Zwaard,
Daniel
S. Weld,
May 4, 2020 – eprint, arXiv:2005.01583 [cs.IR]
Chronicling
America is
a product of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership
between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the
Humanities to digitize historic newspapers. Over 16 million pages of
historic American newspapers have been digitized for Chronicling
America to date, complete with high-resolution images and
machine-readable METS/ALTO OCR. Of considerable interest to
Chronicling America users is a semantified corpus, complete with
extracted visual content and headlines. To accomplish this, we
introduce a visual content recognition model trained on bounding box
annotations of photographs, illustrations, maps, comics, and
editorial cartoons collected as part of the Library of Congress’s
Beyond Words crowdsourcing initiative and augmented with additional
annotations including those of headlines and advertisements. We
describe our pipeline that utilizes this deep learning model to
extract 7 classes of visual content: headlines, photographs,
illustrations, maps, comics, editorial cartoons, and advertisements,
complete with textual content such as captions derived from the
METS/ALTO OCR, as well as image embeddings for fast image similarity
querying. We report the results of running the pipeline on 16.3
million pages from the Chronicling America corpus and describe the
resulting Newspaper Navigator dataset, the largest dataset of
extracted visual content from historic newspapers ever produced. The
Newspaper Navigator dataset, fine tuned visual content recognition
model, and all source code are placed in the public domain for
unrestricted re-use.
A market for
“free?” I often point my students to open textbooks just to give
them a second perspective.
In
the COVID-19 world, open source textbooks are the way of the future
Kyle
Hiebert – National Post:
“Universities have the chance to save students huge sums of money
by ramping up the creation and use of open educational resources,
particularly open textbooks… Long story short, any current or
aspiring post-secondary student looking to go to college or
university anytime soon will likely end up doing so largely online
and will be further financially stressed because of it. The prime
benefit of adopting OER — which is defined as digital learning
materials offered for free through Creative
Commons licenses —
is
that it greatly reduces the cost of receiving a post-secondary
education. The average student in Canada taking a full course load
will spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a year on
textbooks. That is on top of tuition, which is also on the rise.
The most significant cost is for textbooks for year-long introductory
courses in major subjects — think chemistry, psychology,
accounting, biology, sociology, engineering, physics and others.
However, the core concepts students need in order to gain a grounding
in these disciplines remains relatively static year-to-year, and
high-quality, peer-reviewed open textbooks for these courses already
exist
for free in
digital form as downloadable PDFs. And
online classes necessitate that any learning material be provided
digitally, anyway…”
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