afternoonbuzz

Tokyo International Schools, Influencer Fashion, Women Techmakers, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 25, 2025

NEW RESOURCES

Japan Times: Tokyo launches English-language international school database. “With the aim of supporting parents living in Tokyo who want information about international schools, the portal offers a comprehensive database of international schools in the city, with details on location, average class sizes and capacity, curriculum and tuition fees.”

EVENTS

Mashable: Influencer runway show Creators in Fashion displays the future of the creator economy. “At this year’s VidSummit, a YouTube and video marketing conference in Dallas, Texas, attendees expected to see panels on marketing, AI, and the all-knowing algorithm. But YouTubers in attendance also encountered a fashion show, complete with the usual: a runway, fingernail knives, and a four-legged Furby robot.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: ‘Their history is just erased’: Google drops a key program for boosting women in tech. “The email that said the career resource program for women would no longer be part of Google was terse and followed months of eroding support. But the deletion of years of Women Techmakers’ work came as a significant shock to its members.”

The Register: A single DNS race condition brought Amazon’s cloud empire to its knees. “Amazon has published a detailed postmortem explaining how a critical fault in DynamoDB’s DNS management system cascaded into a day-long outage that disrupted major websites and services across multiple brands – with damage estimates potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NOLA: ‘This has been wonderful:’ With new grant, the Louisiana Digital Library continues preservation work. “That library, the Louisiana Digital Library, is an extensive online archive of more than 350,000 items from libraries, museums and other repositories across the state. Accessible for free to anyone, it includes manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, oral histories and other items. It’s now undergoing an upgrade.”

National Comedy Center: Ben Stiller Donates Stiller & Meara Archive to National Comedy Center as Documentary of His Parents’ Legacy Debuts . “Donated by Ben Stiller and the Stiller family, the archive spans more than five decades of creative collaboration, documenting the evolution and impact of one of America’s most enduring comedic partnerships.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

France24: EU accuses Meta, TikTok of breaching rules under landmark digital content law. “On Friday the European Commission said Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms and TikTok breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s content moderation law attacked by US President Donald Trump’s administration. It is the first time the commission has accused Meta of breaching the DSA, which the US giant rejected.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: We let OpenAI’s “Agent Mode” surf the web for us—here’s what happened. “I wanted to put Atlas’ Agent Mode through its paces to see if it could really save me time in doing the kinds of tedious online tasks I plod through every day. In each case, I’ll outline a web-based problem, lay out the Agent Mode prompt I devised to try to solve it, and describe the results. My final evaluation will rank each task on a 10-point scale, with 10 being ‘did exactly what I wanted with no problems’ and one being ‘complete failure.’”

Los Angeles Times: Contributor: The web is awash in AI slop. Real content is for subscribers only, and democracy suffers. “Business incentives align with a culture of compliance, resulting in algorithms that favor divisive or low-value content because it drives engagement. The slop economy exists because churning out low-quality content is cheap and profitable. Solutions to the slop problem must realign business incentives.”

Press Gazette: AI companies steal publisher traffic then undermine trust by getting answers wrong. “The research points to a generally corrosive impact of AI answer engines on the news ecosystem. It found that the likes of Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are stealing publisher traffic but also contributing to declining trust in the news industry by giving distorted answers.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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