Monday, May 11, 2020


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
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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