#Data Discoverability

[jaimedavid27]

Toward an Integrated Resource Hub: The Case for a Curated Master List of Publicly Available Research Databases

Abstract Despite the exponential growth of publicly available scientific and scholarly databases, the lack of centralized, user-friendly access to these resources remains a persistent barrier for students, researchers, educators, and independent learners. This paper outlines the rationale for curating a comprehensive, categorized list of publicly accessible databases across scientific and…

[automatticdata]

Organizing data.blog content via NLP and LLM

When redesigning data.blog, our primary goal was to make it easier for readers to find great content. One of the ways readers do this, is using the site taxonomy – the categories and tags that are used to organize the blog posts on the site. As data.blog grew over the past 8 years, we accumulated an excessive number of categories and tags. To address this issue and enhance content…

[infoanalysishub]

Why Your Best Content Is Invisible to AI Search Engines

Discover why your top-quality content may be hidden from AI search engines and learn practical fixes to boost visibility and traffic. Why Your Best Content Is Invisible to AI Search Engines—And How to Fix It In the age of AI-powered search engines like Google’s SGE, Bing AI, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT plugins, creating exceptional content is only half the battle. The other half? Making sure it’s…

[emacrow]

Bats don't know what to do as The Mockingbird and Time Mock them

That Edward Nygma wasn't a real person in the database or that the riddler actually got won one battle over Batman. Batman had tried to snoop through the apartment, but there was mostly always a person there alongside children.

Then there was a trigger of other rogues break out when there actually nobody in the apartment.

Not mentioning the real person behind riddler

Eddie Mockingbird Walker was born out of a 6 year affair between Edwin Walker, strict borderline insane Prisoner Warden, and beautiful red haired Judy Mockingbird, a former cleaning lady who was fired by the wife of Walker after finding out the affair.

Three years later, Judy Mockingbird was later a victim of a break-in and homicide, the only witness being a 3 year old traumatized Eddie hiding in a toy chest doodle with hand drawn puzzle murals, unfortunately that case was later put in the cold case files with not enough suspects.

Eddie was thrown through the wringer of several orphanages for 4 years, only to be refound by his grandmother Grethen Mockingbird, a former retired pianist who was unable to play anymore due a severe case of tendonitis.

A bright Prodigy to music and puzzles boxes made by his grandmother, a rare talent in school to the point the music teacher begged his grandmother Grethen to signed him in a tournament which later led to Eddie into the spotlight with the youngest pianist to make he audience weep with joy that catapult him all the way through several tournaments, winning each one, talkshows, interviews from age 9 to 22 year old.

He was known as Rose Thief of Hearts in the music community, the next living Beethoven they cried out, especially on how many ladies and guys fallen for his sweet, obvious charms and bright red hair that flow down his waist.

Becoming best friends with his half-sister, Madeline Walker, that he rarely met.

Tragedy struck when on The Chopin Competition, Gretchen Mockingbird died from cardiac arrest in the middle of her grandson's performance.

Eddie disappeared, being dragged off by Edwin Walker during the private funeral, which led many people to the theory of the whereabouts of the music Prodigy.

Then, the rest of the data file went missing until a year ago when Eddie Mockingbird appeared once more during a shocking news of adopting his niece and nephews who will stay anonymous after explaining a rather shocking tale with enough explanation on why he was away from media was extremely popular in the music culture.

Batman could only stare at the photo capture by Red Robin on the Batcomputer, tired bag eyed soft smiling Eddie Mockingbird at family diner. His black hair and eyebrow were gone, revealing a natural red hair that had grown down to his neck, wearing casual clothes with his niece, Jasmine Fenton, a teenage red-haired girl speaking with a soft look

A large massive man, named Jack Fenton that looks too alike to Bruce clumsily and failing feeding a little 2 year old baby girl in a toddler chocolates banana fudge ice cream with green bitd, while trying to stopping her twin brother flinging soft sweet peas at a giggling 5 year old toddler trying to air bite the peas.

A disgusted looking young entrepreneur who discoverered a much better energy source for phones that went world-wide, Tucker Foley, who was gagging at a Sam Manson, had a beyond burger and a salad, her middle finger pointing at him saying something to him.

Batman couldn't get near someone like him, or get a hint of his music albums that were also sold out even from 10 year ago to now with new albums that not even Jim Gordon would help him that Riddler is the famous pianist that he had a collection of his music, and he wouldn't let him 'borrow' them.

Jason had just started dating Jasmine, but he wouldn't tell them about what the riddler's plans were to the point of disconnecting and disabling all the trackers on his phones, even the backup ones with Cass and Babs!

He tried booking for Mockingbird concerts only to find out they were all booked to 20XX for the past 6 months after The Chopin Competition, not even attempting bribes, would shorten a 15 mile long waiting list.

This was driving Bruce a little mad as if time itself was mocking him!!

Part 3 here <-

[transfaguette]

HI SO THIS

IS SPECIFIC TYPE OF GAME CARD - NOT HOW ALL PHYSICAL SWITCH 2 GAMES WORK.

Most switch 2 games, especially first party games, will have regular cartridges that work how you expect. in fact they explicitly boast about how the new cards have upgraded data transfer speeds- theyre not going away.

The game-key card is just an extension of something the games industry has already been doing- selling “physical” versions where all you’re really buying is a game code. its a way for games to have a physical presence in stores where they may benefit from that type of discoverability without actually producing cartridges. I don’t particularly like it, but it is what it is, and its NOT the default way to purchase switch 2 games.

all that being said the switch 2 is $450 fucking usd and mario kart is EIGHTY DOLLARS so!! thats all the reason you need to not buy the console, and not misinformation.

[dead-west-podcast]

Getting rating bombed on your Audio Fiction podcast for being a guest on another show by a single person over many different accounts is WILD. And so very immature. I just started my show a few months ago and already see in the sparse data I have how much it has impacted growth and discoverability. Kill em with kindness and move on I guess?

[typhlonectes]

Dwarf planet Eris is ‘squishier’ than expected

University of California, Santa Cruz Professor of Planetary Sciences Francis Nimmo recently co-authored a Science Advances paper about the internal structure of the dwarf planet Eris. Eris is about the size of Pluto but around 50% farther from the sun. The discovery of Eris in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune in 2005 prompted the debate that ultimately reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. It was an interest in Pluto that drew UC Santa Cruz researcher Francis Nimmo to study Eris. Nimmo was visiting Michael Brown—one of the discoverers of Eris—at the California Institute of Technology about six months ago and realized some of Brown’s new, unpublished data could help reveal information about the properties of Eris. The two worked on models for the next several months and published their results in a Science Advances paper. Two main pieces of information led to their results. The first important clue is that Eris and its moon, Dysnomia, always face the same way toward each other. The main, unexpected result of Nimmo and Brown’s model is that Eris is surprisingly dissipative, or “squishy”...

Read more: https://charmingscience.com/dwarf-planet-eris-is-squishier-than-expected/

[transmutationisms]

can u talk a bit more about working as a bibliographer? like what does that actually entail?

so the bibliography i worked at was affiliated with the major academic professional society of my subfield, and the society sponsors the bibliography as a kind of sister publication to their journal. this means 1) we were almost exclusively grant-funded, and 2) the staff positions at the bibliography go to grad students. there are jobs in bibliography and related information sciences that are not exclusive to academics/grad students, but i can't really tell you anything about them personally; i had this job as a graduate research assistant (ie this was what i did to get my paycheck for two years instead of TAing).

anyway the purpose of a bibliography like this that's affiliated with a journal or subfield is usually to aggregate data on what's published in that journal or subfield. ours was aimed at capturing the whole subfield. so, the bulk of the staff job is to comb through recent academic publications (journal articles & books) and pull anything that's topically relevant. we add the abstract and metadata to the bibliography (meaning basically a searchable database) and then we do subject tagging. this is the most fun part because you have to think about how knowledge is categorised and what's most useful to a user and whatnot.

so like let's say i'm entering an article from the journal of the history of psychiatry. i already pulled the metadata from the online journal listing and put it through zotero, which then talks to the bibliography's back end. i do the authority control (link it with the author's other publications in our bibliography, and with some external identity profile like viaf or orcid). i link it to the journal in our database and make sure it has the right date, page numbers, etc. this article is about philippe pinel, so its main category tag is probably 'psychiatry - 19th century'. then i aim for 5–10 additional subject tags, maybe 'france, metropolitan', 'psychiatric hospitals and institutions', 'therapy and therapeutic methods', 'philosophy of medicine', 'nosology and diagnosis', 'pitié-salpetrière hospice', etc.

once this is all entered, the article is searchable by any of its metadata, by going to the author's profile in our database, or by those subject and category tags. institutions (universities, libraries, hospitals, etc) all have their own authority controls too. you can browse the database by data, by subject tag, by searching keywords, etc; it also has a few visualisation tools that show strongly associated subject tags, histograms of a person's or publisher's history of publication, etc. this all means that things are more easily discoverable than they might be, and once you've found them you can also browse related things easily, or look at some provisional info on the state of publications in the field.

because this bibliography was affiliated with a journal, we also used to publish a yearly print edition with the entries published in the last year (this was satisfying to hold but honestly way less functional than the online database version lol) and we also published a special edition of bibliographic / historiographic essays on pandemics that i worked as managing editor for. idk how common this would be at other kinds of bibliographic job positions; we used the same publisher as the sister journal, so mostly all i had to do was correspond with people and deal with typesetting. anyway once that was published we also added those articles to the bibliography itself too.

anyway super fun job tbh, like a lot of it is data entry but haggling over subject tags was honestly enjoyable if you like that kind of thing. i lost the battle to add "total institutions" as a subject tag but won when i said we needed to revamp our system for entries dealing with weight management; as a result those subject tags are now clearer and more useful, and capture scientific discourses about both 'underweight' and 'overweight'. our best tag imo was "controversies and disputes", which was like a catch-all for any time there was some kind of haterism in the literature. it kind of changed how i view knowledge categorisation (like, the process; philosophy-of) and because we spent so much time reading abstracts to tag them, we would basically have walking encyclopedic knowledge of recent publishing in the field.

some of this functionality can ofc be replicated in library catalogues or google scholar or whatever, but the real value-add is the subject tagging and the relationships between those terms; this is where the bibliography is useful both for finding things and for showing an additional layer of information about the field and publishing in it. lots of academic fields have some equivalent of this, although i will say that our database was generally better (in the sense of more data and useful detail) than others i've used; it was a well-funded project run by a very dedicated prof who's been doing this for over 20 years now, and that continuity and institutional memory is really paying off for it.

but yeah if this is generally something that interests you, like i said, this is really just one specific form of bibliographic work. definitely look into what else is out there (i dunno how much of this would require a degree like an mlis even) and see what you think :)

[leasthaunted]

Episode 123: Lights! Phoenix! Action!

Garth has returned from his special assignments, and Cody has returned from Phoenix with a tale to tell. Get out your telescopes and potato cameras, look upwards and through the past to the mid 90's as we explore one of the largest mass UFO sightings in history! And along the way we'll take a ride on a warthog too. 

As always, please come join the episode discussion on the Least Haunted Discord!

Enjoy the images and videos below!

Newspaper article with artists interpretation of eye witness accounts of UFO that flew over Arizona March 13th, 1997.

Flight path of UFO. Starting in Henderson, Nevada and finishing near Tucson, Arizona. A route of approximately 370 miles or 546 Kilometers. This was traveled in 1.25 hours.

At 10:00 pm Mike Crispin looks southward across Phoenix towards "South Mountain" and captures this footage.

Approximate line of sight of Mike Crispin, with his position being the North (top) end of the line.

Arizona Governor Fife Symington III holds a press conference about The Phoenix Lights with an aide dressed as an alien.

The A-10 Thunderbolt II aka "The Warthog" Close Air Support (CAS) jet aircraft. Development began in 1972, and it entered into service in 1977. Headquartered at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.

The General Electric GAU-8 Avenger 30mm Gatling Gun.

The Gau-8 Avenger can fire 3,900 30 millimeter depleted uranium rounds a minute. The round on the left is the 30 millimeter round, with the left being the round of a 30.06 rifle for comparison.

The Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range and Training Area.

The LUU2 Illumination Parachute Flare.

Sales Brochure for the flare with selected specs. Note that it is a A-10 Warthog that is shown deploying the flare in official promotional material for the hardware.

A video Analyisis of the Crispin footage that shows what is really going on with the second set of lights seen on March 13th, 1997.

Enhanced image from the video that shows the night time lights superimposed on top of daylight footage from the same exact spot and angle. This proves that the lights were beyond South Mountain, and confirms the official explanation of a LUU2 flare training exercise over the Barry M. Goldwater Gunnery Range.

GARTH'S CORNER!

Comet Hale-Bopp

Alan Hale, Astronomer and one of two discoverers of the comet.

Thomas Bopp (1949-2018), the other discoverer of the comet.

Model of the path of Comet Hale-Bopp, credit for the animations goes to Phoenix7777 posted on Wikipedia - working from Data source: HORIZONS System, JPL, NASA.

3D model of the same

Heaven’s Gate website, which is still active.

How to report a comet: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/how-to-report-a-comet-discovery/

[chestersbraincell]

Opinion on Sebastian from pressure

Had a fangirly phase(/not negative/gender neutral) for a while, but over time it has gradually faded along with my interest in the game tbh. I still casually enjoy some fanarts/comics tho!

On a more personal level, I think he’s a pretty cool character, both design and story-wise. I definitely like some of the more detailed re-designs/hcs that people draw him as but I understand that this level of detail is not very theasible in a Roblox game model ahaha. I like all the little characterisations of him behind the scenes on wiki’s and the such, too; I wish more of those neat little personal facts about him were somehow discoverable in-game. You mean to tell me you’ll flesh out a character THIS much and leave it all in outside sources? Shame :(

But yeah I like the way he’s so intricately woven into the narrative of the game, but in like a background type of way? To a first time player, he’s a mysterious snarky voice greeting them after death(already a hilarious and fun dynamic mind you) and then an equally snarky shopkeeper. But for a more experienced, curious player, there are various hints everywhere to show that he is truly at the core of the story and the game's events. and I like that aspect of him alot, especially when coupled with the game banner-it's super symbolic! Not only is he hovering greedily over the expendable, likely for their data, but also if you look closely, the crystal. The placement of him above the expendable with his hands almost hovering over/around/touching them also gives off puppeteer vibes, which, well, is fun considering he's the one in kahoots with most of the entities that attempt to stop you from getting said crystal!

(keep in mind this is all based on my knowledge of the game pre-halloween update. that's around when I stopped taking as much of an interest so I might not be aware of newer lore additions)

[automatticdata]

New data.blog is here: Designed for Discovery

I’m excited to announce that the new data.blog is now live! This is the first visual/UX/logo/color refresh since the original site was built 10 years ago. Why the Redesign? Our original data.blog was like a brilliant but cluttered data scientist’s desk. Valuable insights were everywhere, but it was not always easy to find what you needed. After analyzing our metrics and discussing usage…

[likeadevils]

okay it seems like we’re picking up new cult members tonight and i need to tell yall about a man named sir richard owen

so i first stumbled upon him when i was trying to find out what platypus milk tastes like. you would think this would be easily googlable. surely, swiftie tumblr is not the first person to wonder about this, and surely some youtuber, or at least a zookeeper, has tried it and told the tale

to this motherfucking day the only first hand account i could fine was from one sir richard owen in 1832. EIGHTEEN THIRTY TWO. “okay,” i think. “it’s not like platypus milk has dramatically changed taste sense the 1800s. this strange, but still relevant data.”

but no. no. this motherfucker did not sample milk from a wild platypus. he did not sample milk from a captured platypus. dear reader, he did not even sample milk from a living platypus. this motherfucker sampled milk from a taxidermied platypus shipped from australia to england in the 1830s, which means it had at best been dead for months. (for the record, he described it as “drops of a yellowish oil, which afforded neither perceptible taste nor smell, except such as was derived from the preserving liquor”)

after months of platypus milk cult nights, i finally crack and look at this guys wikipedia page. what follows are my favorite qoutes, fun facts, and other miscellaneous bullshit

richard owen coined the term dinosauria, now dinosaur.

he helped create the natural history museum in london, the first of its kind

he once hosted a dinner party inside a giant concrete dinosaur

“Owen was granted right of first refusal on any freshly dead animal at the London Zoo. His wife once arrived home to find the carcass of a newly deceased rhinoceros in her front hallway.”

there is a very large section of his wikipedia page dedicated to his personal beef with charles darwin. not included in that section, his statue in the natural history museum of london, a museum that he opened, was replaced by a statue of charles darwin

“Owen has been described by some as a malicious, dishonest and hateful individual. He has been described in one biography as being a "social experimenter with a penchant for sadism. Addicted to controversy and driven by arrogance and jealousy".”

“An Oxford University professor once described Owen as "a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice".”

“Richard Broke Freeman described him as "the most distinguished vertebrate zoologist and palaeontologist ... but a most deceitful and odious man"”

Charles Darwin called him "Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever; the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about"

He claimed that he was the discoverer of the iguanodaun, when really it was this other guy, gideon mandell. richard published an anonymous paper talking shit about gideon and used his sway in the field to ensure that none of gideon mandalls papers were published in the royal society.

“Owen also resorted to the same subterfuge he used against Mantell [against Charles Darwin], writing another anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. In the article, Owen was critical of Darwin for not offering many new observations, and heaped praise (in the third person) upon himself […] Owen did praise, however, the Origin's description of Darwin's work on insect behavior and pigeon breeding as "real gems".

this is what he looked like

[klimkovsky]

Horsehead Nebula

The whimsical image of a chess knight in profile among the stars is perhaps the most recognizable among deep space objects. It can be said that the Horsehead Nebula tops the recognition rankings among nebulae and galaxies. Perhaps the Andromeda and Orion Nebulae resonate more with the general public, but only specialists and advanced amateurs know what they look like. Even among them, there are often cases when the famous Andromeda Galaxy is confused with another galaxy, even by experienced popularizers of astronomy. The Orion Nebula, too, can look different in pictures taken with various filters. Yet, the profile of the chess knight allows every inhabitant of Earth to recognize that in front of them is the one-of-a-kind and completely unique Horsehead Nebula.

Let's begin by noting that when we talk about the Horsehead Nebula, we refer to two fundamentally different formations in this region of our Galaxy. Only together do they create this memorable visual image. Moreover, what we see—the glowing diffuse background—is not the Horsehead Nebula. It is a dark silhouette against a light background—a bizarrely shaped dust cloud opaque to the visible radiation of stars and nebulae. If there were no relatively bright emission nebula behind it, we might not even know about any dark gas-dust cosmic horse.

The background for the recognizable horse profile is created by the hydrogen nebula IC 434, discovered by William Herschel in the late 18th century. However, Herschel did not notice any amusing details in the outline of this nebula, although he was an excellent observer—much more keen-sighted and attentive than most of his followers. There are also objective reasons for this—telescopes in Herschel's era were imperfect, and their dark metal mirrors lost from 50% to 80% of the light that entered them.

A hundred years later, the dark silhouette of the Horsehead was discovered on a photographic plate made at the Harvard College Observatory by Williamina Fleming—a woman of unique destiny and one of the brightest personalities in astronomy. Without having a special education, she did a lot in astronomy that immortalized her name. The discovery of the Horsehead is perhaps a curious episode in her scientific biography, rather than something serious. After all, Williamina created the very first system of classifying stellar spectra and personally examined more than 10,000 stars within the framework of this system, creating a method of data processing and manual calculations in astronomy so effective that it worked faster than the first computers (however, she did not live to see them and died quite early—unable to cope with pneumonia).

Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming — pioneering Scottish astronomer

Williamina discovered dozens of new nebulae, but the publication of these discoveries was done by her scientific adviser, William Henry Pickering, who did not even mention his colleague's name. The irony of the situation developed in such a way that John Ludwig Dreyer described the new nebula in his catalog without indicating the initials of the formal discoverer—he indicated only the surname—Pickering, which gave rise to confusion, and the discovery began to be attributed to William Henry's brother—Edward Charles Pickering—also a famous astronomer of the 19th-20th centuries.

Against the backdrop of the Horsehead Nebula, Edward Emerson Barnard managed to shine, including it in his catalog under number 33. But the name of the discoverer, Williamina Fleming, was not listed there either.

If it were not for the enormous resonance that photographs of the nebula began to cause in the press, and the growing interest in the details around this universal (but first of all, cultural) phenomenon, the name of Williamina Fleming would have remained in the shadows. But journalists raced to find new secrets around the nebula, were interested in who exactly discovered this outlandish horse's head in space, and got to the bottom of the truth—the name of the discoverer became known to the World.

It must be said that for astronomers, the resemblance to a horse did not make the nebula more attractive. But for the public far from science, this turned out to be the main trigger for activating attention—just like the illusory face of the Sphinx on Mars or other artifacts that do not need a scientific explanation, the essence of which lies only in a fleeting external resemblance.

Nevertheless, the Horsehead Nebula still looks at us from every book on astronomy, from every scientific or pseudo-scientific website more than a century later. And the culprit for all this is simply a cloud of light-absorbing dark cosmic dust, covering part of the light nebula located slightly behind.

All together—both the light and dark parts of the Horsehead image—constitute a fragment of a massive nebula complex in the constellation Orion, which includes many other nebulae: the Great and Small Orion Nebulae, and the Flame Nebula (which is literally adjacent to the Horsehead). It is believed that the distance to all these nebulae is approximately the same—about 1,200 to 1,500 light years. While distance estimates vary, it is difficult to accurately determine the distance to objects that lack clear boundaries. Nebulae are visible only to the extent that they are illuminated by other stars (as in reflection nebulae, such as the Flame Nebula), or to the extent that the ultraviolet radiation from nearby stars is strong enough to ionize the hydrogen within these nebulae. Only for dark dust nebulae, which have clear outlines (visible against the background of light nebulae), is there some specificity in terms of size and boundaries. However, even these estimates are conditional, as they are based on data from a more distant light nebula, and this data can be quite approximate.

Given all of the above, it remains unclear how much closer the dark silhouette of the Horsehead Nebula is compared to the emission nebula IC 434. The distance difference could range from 30 to 300 light years.

According to various rough estimates, the size of the dark cloud is about 4 light years. However, this refers to the size of the “head” of the nebula, not the entire dust cloud, which extends in various directions beneath the emission nebula IC 434, at distances tens of times greater. (Astronomers still do not know for sure whether this is one large dust cloud, or several that simply overlap each other when observed from Earth.)

In any case, we are dealing with a vast reservoir of material that could form planets and third-generation stars. Several thousand stars could form from the hydrogen clouds in the Orion complex. However, a wide range of chemical elements is necessary to form planets. All of these elements are found in dust nebulae. In the Horsehead Nebula, many heavy chemical elements have been discovered, as well as a significant variety of chemical compounds, including organic ones. In fact, the Universe is synthesizing substances in interstellar space that will later participate in the emergence of life. Ultraviolet radiation, which is destructive to all living things, acts as an effective catalyst for many important chemical reactions that are crucial for the origin of life. The only remaining step is to form planets where the substances already produced by the cosmic environment can give rise to life.

Interestingly, it was in the "neck" area of this cosmic horse that astronomers discovered the active formation of small-mass stars, comparable to our Sun. These stars are now considered the most likely candidates for hosting planetary systems that could support life.

The Horsehead Nebula is extremely popular among astronomy enthusiasts. Taking a photo of this nebula with modern amateur equipment is not difficult—almost every novice astrophotographer tries this as their first target. However, only a few are able to detect the nebula visually—extreme observers who have developed their night vision adaptation to far beyond the average human capacity. The difficulties in such observations are compounded by two closely located bright stars in Orion’s belt: Zeta Orionis (Alnitak) and Sigma Orionis (an extremely interesting multiple star, known since ancient times but curiously not given its own name). These stars can “blind” the observer, preventing them from seeing the faint glow of the emission nebula IC 434 and the dark silhouette of the Horsehead against its background.

Interestingly, in the infrared spectrum—studied by the James Webb Space Telescope—the silhouette of the Horsehead appears bright. This is because interstellar dust, heated to only a few degrees Kelvin, begins to re-radiate the energy received from stars in the form of thermal radiation.

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new infrared light

Stellar winds sweeping through the vast Orion nebula over time modify the shape of the dust nebulae, eventually leading to their complete dissipation (except for the material that will form dense protoplanetary disks). However, it is these stellar winds that create density waves that push dust particles together, ultimately forming rocky planets. Our distant descendants will most likely no longer see the whimsical image of a horse’s head in the sky, but they will undoubtedly find something just as captivating.

The video illustration for this article was created based on astrophotography by American astrophotographer Chuck Ayoub.

A music track from my album «Oort Cloud» was used in the video.

Article Author: Andrey Klimkovsky

[noticiasarquelogicasjaponesas]

Chapter 2: Pre-Jomon Japan Welcome, Japanese archaeologists, to a new archaeological installment. Having said that, make yourself comfortable and let's begin. - In the previous publication we made a short description, commenting on where the Kasuke neighborhood of the city of Midori is located, Gunma prefecture in the northern region of Kantō, we also commented on when the Upper Paleolithic dates back to 35,000 / 25,000 BC. Currently the Iwajuku III culture is 40,000 and possibly even older, only future research will shed more light on this culture and the Japanese passage, its discoverer was Tadahiro Aizawa, during the 1946 showa era of post-war Japan, excavation has continued until our present that corresponds to the Heisei era. - I hope you liked it and see you in future posts, have a good week. 第2章: 縄文以前の日本 日本の考古学者の皆さん、新しい考古学へようこそ。そうは言っても、気を楽にして始めましょう。 - 前回の出版物では、関東北部の群馬県みどり市の嘉助地区がどこにあるかについて簡単な説明を行い、上部旧石器時代がいつ紀元前 35,000 年 / 25,000 年に遡るかについてもコメントしました。現在、岩宿Ⅲ文化は 40,000 個あり、おそらくさらに古いものである可能性があります。この文化と日本語の歴史にさらに光を当てるのは将来の研究だけです。その発見者は相沢忠宏で、戦後日本の 1946 年の昭和時代に、発掘は現在まで続けられています。それは平成に相当します。 - 気に入っていただければ幸いです。今後の投稿でお会いしましょう。良い一週間をお過ごしください。 - Capítulo 2: El japón pre-Jomon  Sean bienvenidos, japonistasarqueologos, a una nueva entrega, arqueológica, una vez dicho esto pónganse cómodos que empezamos.  - En la publicación anterior hicimos una pequeña descripción, comentando donde se localiza el barrio de Kasuke de la ciudad de Midori, prefectura de Gunma en la región norte de Kantō, también comentamos de cuando data paleolítico superior 35.000 / 25000 a.c. Actualmente la cultura Iwajuku III y es de 40.000 e incluso más antigua posiblemente, únicamente futuras investigaciones arrojará más luz sobre esta cultura y el pasadizo japonés, su descubridor fue Tadahiro Aizawa, durante la era showa 1946 del Japón de la posguerra, se ha seguido excavando hasta nuestro presente que corresponde a la era Heisei.  -  Espero que os haya gustado y nos vemos en próximas publicaciones que pasen una buena semana.

[thesims4blogger]

The Sims 4 New Game Patch (January 14th, 2025)

EA has shared the patch notes for an upcoming game update, scheduled to drop today (January 14th) at 10am PST.

If you have auto updates enabled in Origin’s “Application Settings”, the game will auto-update once you open Origin. If you have auto-updates disabled, you will need to manually update by clicking the game in your library.Advertisement

To ensure your game is up to date, check the game version found in Documents > EA > The Sims 4 > GameVersion.txt. Your game should now read: PC: 1.112.481.1030 / Mac: 1.112.481.1230; Console: 2.05.

Hoople Borpna Simmers! Ok, it’s not February yet, but The Sims 25th Birthday is just around the corner and it’s exciting to think about twenty-five years of The Sims!

At 10 AM PST, the first update of the new year will begin to roll out bringing a range of improvements from a brand-new Main Menu to memory and performance optimizations, a refresh of the base game homes, and a few bug fixes.

Thank you for your support and continued reporting efforts via Answers HQ, it really helps us identify the issues you care the most about. If you’re ready to start the birthday party early, come join us in The Sims Discord!

Dag dag!

-The Sims Team

What’s New in The Sims 4 ?

Base Game Updates

Main Menu Visual Refresh

To start off with, we have a brand-new Main Menu visual refresh! We’ve pushed aside the clutter to make space for your Sims! New Game / Resume Game has moved from right to left, as have a few of the other navigation options. Home, Events and Store can be found at the top, along with the Options panel in the far right. It may take a moment to get used to the New Game / Resume Game new location, I know it took a moment for some of us. A few other changes to mention:

The visual update includes a bit of fresh paint, a little less clutter, with the desire to keep information clear and discoverable for you!

The Sims in the center are your last played household Sims, all of them!

And important updates and information from The Sims are focused on the right side.

Speaking of the Main Menu, you’ll receive a message about the upcoming Blast from The Past Event.

Starting on February 4th, this birthday event will feature rewards inspired by iconic items from the 2000s, such as a milk carton, telephone, alarm clock, triple-tiered birthday cake, and inflatable chair and loveseat.Advertisement

Performance and Memory Improvements

Smoother Gameplay

We’ve optimized mouse movements, preventing slowdowns and making gameplay more responsive on PC, Console, and Mac.

Improved Graphics and Performance – On Mac and PS4, we’ve optimized how graphic data is handled, resulting in smoother and more efficient rendering and overall performance.

Memory Efficiency

Various enhancements have been made to save memory across all platforms, helping the game run more smoothly and reducing crashes.

Base Game Townie Home Refresh

New year, new homes! All Townie Homes in Willow Creek and Oasis Springs have been updated and renovated to breathe some fresh life into classic lots.

Willow Creek Homes: Cypress Terrace, Ophelia Villa, Pique Hearth, Garden Essence

Oasis Springs Homes: Sultry Springside, Affluista Mansion, Cacti Casa, Slipshod Mesquite

Both the Legacy and Updated Lots are automatically available in the “My Library” tab.

New Saves

Players who start a New Game will automatically see the updated lots in the world!

Existing Saves

Players who would like to see the update in their existing saves must manually update the homes by placing the new lots from the “My Library” tab.

Bug Fixes

Console

Potion Color Issue on Consoles – Fixed a bug where potion colors in cauldrons would change to gray after loading a saved game.

Texture Reloading Optimization – Improved the texture reloading process on Xbox One to reduce “out-of-memory” crashes, and providing more efficient loading of game lots.

Base Game:

[AHQ] Fullscreen Minimization Fix

We resolved an issue where you couldn’t minimize the game in Fullscreen mode using DirectX 11. Now, key combinations like Alt + Tab and the Windows key will work as expected.

“Work in Off hours” interaction does not clear the Tense buff for workaholic Sim.

[AHQ] Fixed cases of really high Bills. Lot Taxes will now only count the property value and household_net_worth not add value from anything in inventories.

[AHQ] “Try for baby” in shower will now fill the Hygiene motive.

[AHQ] Inspired Sim will no longer mix drinks excessively.

Discomfort Relief Value is no longer missing for Bath tubs.

“Purchase Garlic Seeds“ has its own interaction and should be categorized/available under the “Purchase Seeds“ interaction.

[AHQ] Outgoing and Socially Awkward traits cannot be selected together. If one is selected, the other will appear greyed out and cannot be chosen.

[AHQ] Female frame facial hair on Male Sims will no longer disappear.

[AHQ] Shoes are now replaced with barefoot when a Styled Look with barefoot is applied.

[AHQ] Neon signs no longer break due to rain.

[AHQ] Water puddle VFX animation will no longer appear on the ground floor when Sim is swimming on the second floor.

“Revive” is now available on a dead Cowplant.

Ponds properly display water textures in Map View.

Comfort Value attribute is no longer missing for Toilet objects.

Affecting Multiple Packs

[AHQ] Sims’ weight and muscle levels are now properly affected by Bike Riding, Horse Riding, Jog here and Rock Climbing.

[AHQ] Thumbnails of Guidry and Temperance Sim are visible in relationship panel, Sims profile, Manage HH.

Sim no longer has the option to give the toddler fertilizer as food from inventory.

[AHQ] Sim can now set the waffle/pizza oven/stand mixer for sale in a retail store.

“Invite to Hangout at Current Lot“ interaction is no longer available for Infants in the Sim profile.

Get Together

Clubs are now under the default section under the social groups interface.

City Living

[AHQ] “Play with emotion“ interaction is now greyed out when the piano keyboard breaks.

Cats & Dogs

[AHQ] Dog and Cats with the fire obsession perk are far less obsessed with the fireplace.

[AHQ] Sims no longer gain Fitness skill when cleaning the litter box.

Discover University

[AHQ] Sim with the Gym Rat trait will no longer lose hygiene while juggling a soccer ball.

[AHQ] Frequency of getting electrocuted from Robotic Workstation has been considerably reduced.

Eco Lifestyle

[AHQ] Roaches are removed from the dumpster after Sim successfully performs the “Try to clear roaches” interaction.

Snowy Escape

[AHQ] Seaweed Ramen recipe is now available from the fridge cooking menu.

Sim’s Hygiene motive will now increase when using a Hot Spring.

Cottage Living

[AHQ] Sims can now use Hot Pot with the Simple Living Lot Challenge.

High School Years

[AHQ] When Sims switch from an outfit created in Thriftea to a regular outfit, they no longer revert back to the Thriftea outfit when showering/bathing.

[AHQ] Notification badges no longer displayed when phone is in silent mode and when Social Bunny has notifications turned off.

[AHQ] Bronze prom reward now unlocks correctly in B/B catalogue.

“Hide from Paparazzi“ interaction is available for Sims with Fame level 3 and below.

Growing Together

[AHQ] Fixed an issue where some Life Milestones wouldn’t be achieved when the Sim is off lot,, including milestones for toddlers’ movement skill.

Horse Ranch

[AHQ] ‘Drink an Aged Nectar’ Want fulfils when Sim drinks the aged nectar bottle

For Rent

[AHQ] A serving of Vegetable Chili from the Pressure Cooker will no longer turn into 8 servings.

Spa Day

[AHQ] Applied Pedicure will no longer vanish when a Manicure is requested.

Dine Out

Sparkling Water is now available under the “Fizzy” category.

My First Pet

[AHQ] In new saves Sim will no longer receive “Baby whisked away” buff and TNS suggesting that Rattigan passed away when Rattigan is still alive.

Nifty Knitting

[AHQ] Knitting now counts towards Arts & Crafts for Scouting.

Crystal Creations

[AHQ] Last Exception error will no longer trigger when Ring is placed on the Mystical Moonlight Crystal Grid and the household is reloaded.

[AHQ] Option to order Crystals is now available on the computer.

[mariacallous]

As the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policy ramps up, people have started to seriously consider their privacy and security when crossing into the United States. That’s especially true when it comes to searches of travelers’ phones and other devices, which US Customs and Border Protection agents have broad authority to search. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take, such as deleting certain apps from your personal phone or using an alternative phone that’s set up just for traveling internationally.

Operatives with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have spent the first months of the Trump administration clawing their way into US government systems. It’s now starting to become clear exactly what those systems are and what kind of data on US residents they hold. WIRED this week detailed the 19 systems DOGE operatives have access to just at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Pope Francis died on Monday at age 88. The passing of the supreme pontiff sets in motion a conclave, the secretive process used to select the new pope. To protect the conclave’s integrity and try to prevent leaks, a wide range of security measures will be put in place, from privacy film on windows at the Vatican to signal jammers and sweeps for hidden microphones.

Google recently announced the initial rollout of end-to-end encrypted email for Google Workspace accounts, which is good news for the privacy of enterprise-level users. When a Workspace user emails a non-Workspace account, the recipient gets an invitation to create a guest account so they can read the email. Unfortunately, security experts say, this will likely create new opportunities for phishing attacks, as scammers try to bait people with fake invitations.

But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

SignalGate is the scandal that just won’t die—at least not if you’re US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had installed Signal on a “second computer in his office” so that he could “use Signal in a classified space, where his cellphone and other personal electronics are not permitted, and communicate with ease with anyone.”

The Associated Press on Thursday added to the picture of Hegseth’s reported Signal use, revealing that Hegseth got a second internet line installed that connected directly to the public internet rather than through the Pentagon’s secured connection, according to sources who spoke with the AP. Hegseth allegedly did this so he could use that second computer with Signal installed. Then on Friday, The New York Times found that the phone number associated with Hegseth’s Signal account—the one he used in that infamous group chat—is easily discoverable online, potentially opening him up to targeted cyberattacks by hostile nations.

Cybercriminals Stole a Record-Breaking $16.6 Billion From US Entities in 2024

Despite a steady flow of arrests and takedowns of online scammers, cybercriminals are operating at unprecedented levels and making more money than ever. Two reports released this week reveal the stark scale of online criminality. Last year in the United States, businesses and individuals lost $16.6 billion to online crimes, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center—that’s the highest figure ever reported and a leap of 33 percent compared to 2023. In 2024, there were 859,532 complaints about potential online crimes, with the FBI saying phishing and spoofing complaints account for 193,000 of them, followed by extortion with 86,000 complaints. Investment scams, which often involve cryptocurrency, made up more than $6 billion of the total losses, with business email compromise scams leading to losses of $2.7 billion.

Around the same time, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime highlighted that giant scam compounds in Southeast Asia—where human trafficking victims are forced to work scamming people—are generating $40 billion in profits per year and keep on growing. These industrial-scale scam organizations, which are often linked to Chinese criminals, heavily use investment scams (sometimes called pig-butchering) to con people out of their life savings and are expanding outside of the region. “It spreads like a cancer,” Benedikt Hofmann of the UNODC said in a statement.

Google Chrome Won’t Ditch Creepy Tracking Cookies After All

Back in 2020, Google announced its Chrome browser would stop using third-party cookies, which track people around the web, and would move to a less creepy way of powering its advertising businesses. Web browsers such as Safari, Firefox, and Brave ditched cookies years before Google made the announcement. But this week, after countless U-turns, failed efforts to develop alternatives, and criticism that proposals to replace cookies would favor Google, the company announced it will, in fact, keep the trackers in Chrome.

“We’ve made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome,” wrote Anthony Chavez, the Google VP in charge of its Privacy Sandbox efforts, in a blog post. “As we’ve engaged with the ecosystem, including publishers, developers, regulators, and the ads industry, it remains clear that there are divergent perspectives on making changes that could impact the availability of third-party cookies,” Chavez wrote. While the US government is proposing that Google sell off Chrome as part of its antitrust case against the company, it’s still possible to turn off third-party cookies or use a privacy-friendly