New researches: March 2023

Friday, March 31, 2023

Digital Library of Georgia, Twitter, Google Drive, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023

Digital Library of Georgia, Twitter, Google Drive, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Digital Library of Georgia: Forthcoming Newspapers – Spring 2023. “This year, the Digital Library of Georgia will be adding a variety of new newspaper titles to the Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN) website (https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/). Below is the list of titles currently slated to be added to GHN in the Spring and Summer of 2023.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Twitter’s Blue Check Apocalypse Is Upon Us. Here’s What to Know.. “For those of you who primarily use Twitter to follow celebrities and news sites, this policy change will affect what you see and read on the service. You may see fewer tweets from accounts you care about in your timeline, for instance, because individuals who choose not to pay for Twitter Blue will become less visible on the site.”

The Verge: Twitter takes its algorithm ‘open-source,’ as Elon Musk promised. “Twitter has released the code that chooses which tweets show up on your timeline to GitHub and has put out a blog post explaining the decision. It breaks down what the algorithm looks at when determining which tweets to feature in the For You timeline and how it ranks and filters them.” As you might imagine, Jane Manchun Wong is already on the case…

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users. “Google apparently decided to put a hard limit on the number of files you’re allowed to have on one Google Drive account. Google rolled out this file limit without warning anyone it would happen. Users over the limit found themselves suddenly locked out of new file uploads, and it was up to them to figure out what was going wrong.”

University of Texas at Austin: Harry Ransom Center Acquires Archive of Poet James Fenton. “The archive of the English poet, journalist and literary critic James Fenton is coming to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Fenton’s body of work traces the political upheavals of our time, including the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the suppression of political protest in China’s Tiananmen Square, and Northern Ireland’s fratricidal bloodletting.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: U.S. published Social Security numbers of 1,900 White House visitors in error. “The United States government erroneously shared the Social Security numbers of more than 1,900 people online earlier this year, part of a data breach that occurred during the publication of the Jan. 6 select committee report, according to a letter reviewed by The Washington Post.”

BBC: ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns. “Italy has become the first Western country to block advanced chatbot ChatGPT. The Italian data-protection authority said there were privacy concerns relating to the model, which was created by US start-up OpenAI and is backed by Microsoft.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington University in St. Louis: Making Internet of Things more secure. “Shantanu Chakrabartty’s lab demonstrates a quantum device for authentication in adversarial wireless environments.”

CoinTelegraph: AI has a role to play in detecting fake NFTs. “Beyond all the good a permissionless internet promises, it also makes it convenient for anyone to freely mint pirated nonfungible tokens (NFTs). There are in fact over 90 million fake copies of NFTs. Because in a permissionless system, what’s to stop bad actors from creating copymints to scam unsuspecting users or damage a brand’s reputation?” Good afternoon, Internet…

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April 1, 2023 at 01:34AM
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National Library of Estonia, Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection, Volcanoes on Venus, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023

National Library of Estonia, Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection, Volcanoes on Venus, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Super Edu Search.
Super Edu Search takes higher education institution information from the Department of Education and applies it to a Google search. Did you ever want to search the Web space of all the public universities in Indiana? Or all the HBCUs in the country? Or maybe all the Baptist institutions in Texas? Now you can. Requires Free Data.gov API key.

NEW RESOURCES

From the National Library of Estonia, and machine-translated from Estonian: The National Library’s DigiLabor helps to monetize cultural data. (Based on the rest of the article I don’t think that’s a great translation.) “On March 30, the Estonian National Library’s research portal DigiLabor started operating. Those interested can create new knowledge and values from the datasets themselves or use the help of a library representative. The goal of the National Library’s DigiLab ( digilab.rara.ee ) is to help make the data held by libraries more digitally accessible and usable, to promote data valorization, research and innovation. The DigiLabor collection contains metadata of over 12 million newspaper articles and 70,000 books and 785,000 objects, but the datasets are constantly being supplemented. ”

Forward: The digitized ‘Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection’ is now live. “The Workers Circle has unveiled a long anticipated website: the digitization of 400 Yiddish songs, based on the popular out-of-print songbook series, Pearls of Yiddish Song, compiled and written by the late Yiddishist couple, Yosl and Chana Mlotek.”

Washington University in St. Louis: Scientists share ‘comprehensive’ map of volcanoes on Venus — all 85,000 of them. “Intrigued by reports of recent volcanic eruptions on Venus? WashU planetary scientists Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn want you to use their new map of 85,000 volcanoes on Venus to help locate the next active lava flow.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PetaPixel: Midjourney Ends Free Trials After Fake AI Images go Viral. “Midjourney has ended free trials of its AI image generator citing ‘extraordinary demand’ and ‘abuse.’ Founder David Holz took to the company’s discord channel to announce the news. ‘Due to a combination of extraordinary demand and trial abuse we are temporarily disabling free trials until we have our next improvements to the system deployed,’ Holz wrote on March 28.”

Associated Press: TikTok propaganda labels fall flat in ‘huge win’ for Russia . “A year ago, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, TikTok started labeling accounts operated by Russian state propaganda agencies as a way to tell users they were being exposed to Kremlin disinformation. An analysis a year later shows the policy has been applied inconsistently. It ignores dozens of accounts with millions of followers. Even when used, labels have little impact on Russia’s ability to exploit TikTok’s powerful algorithms as part of its effort to shape public opinion about the war.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Google denies Bard was trained with ChatGPT data. “The Information published a report Wednesday including allegations from a former Google AI researcher that the company used a rival’s responses to train its own chatbot. Google denies that Bard uses that data.”

Engadget: A new Twitter alternative is trying to lure users about to lose their old checkmark. “With Elon Musk set to pull verification from thousands of users who were verified under the company’s previous leadership, one Twitter alternative is hoping to lure some of those ‘legacy’ checkmarks to its platform. T2, an invite-only service led by two former Twitter employees, says it will allow users to carry over their ‘legacy’ Twitter verification to its site.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: The campaign to save TikTok has been years in the making. “The campaign to save TikTok has been years in the making. A POLITICO investigation revealed an effort by TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, dating back to at least 2018, long before concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership reached their current pitch.”

The Guardian: Cyberwarfare leaks show Russian army is adopting mindset of secret police. “A consortium of media outlets have published a bombshell investigation about Russia’s cyber-capabilities, based on a rare leak of documents. The files come from NTC Vulkan, a cybersecurity firm in Moscow that doubles as a contractor to Russian military and intelligence agencies.”

BBC: Google: India tribunal upholds $160m fine on company. “An Indian appeals court has upheld a $160m fine imposed on Google by the country’s antitrust regulator in a case related to Android’s market dominance. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) said the Competition Commission of India (CCI) findings were correct and Google was liable to pay the fine. But it set aside four of 10 antitrust directives imposed on the firm.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Voice of America: China to Limit Access to Largest Academic Database. “The China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), the largest academic database in China, has notified several universities and research institutes in the U.S., Taiwan and Hong Kong that their access will be limited starting April 1.”

York University: Video platforms like Zoom can disrupt normal visual communication cues. “Visual cues people normally pick up when communicating in-person can become misleading and false over video platforms like Zoom and Skype, making communication not only more difficult, but also exhausting, says new research out of York University.” Good morning, Internet…

March 31, 2023 at 05:40PM
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Thursday, March 30, 2023

Wearing Gay History, Blue Ridge Lambda Press, Google Advertising Transparency, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

Wearing Gay History, Blue Ridge Lambda Press, Google Advertising Transparency, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Carl’s Name Net
Genealogists, this one’s for you. Carl’s Name Net takes a name and optional keywords, generates a set of name variants, and builds search URLs for Google, Google Books, Google Scholar, and Internet Archive.

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, via The Guardian: Wearing Gay History. From the About page: “Whether to protest, satirize, or show pride, the LGBT community’s often ignored history can be seen vividly in the clothing we often throw out. We invite you to browse through the t-shirts and explore the short exhibits to more thoroughly understand the history of LGBT communities around the country with select t-shirts from the past forty years.”

Roanoke College: Roanoke researchers lead digital preservation project for LGBTQ+ history archive. “For the first time ever, Virginians now have digital access to the full run of the historic newsletter. The Blue Ridge Lambda Press was published for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, comprising 26 volumes, hundreds of issues, and thousands of pages of Virginia LGBTQ+ history.”

Android Police: Google’s new Ads Transparency Center makes it easier to investigate ads. “Sometimes you want to know a little more about that ad you keep seeing over and over and over again online. Today, Google is launching a new searchable hub of every ad that shows up from verified Google advertisers in Search, YouTube, and Display over the past 30 days.”

Utah State University: Beaver Mountain’s History Celebrated in New Digital Collection at USU. “Located 27 miles up the canyon from Logan, the Beaver Mountain Ski Resort has been a central part of Cache Valley’s winter sports community since 1939. The resort is also popular with Utah State University students, who can take skiing and snowboarding classes there. Despite the resort’s important place in Utah’s ski history and culture, it has typically received less attention from historians and other researchers than larger resorts in the state.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Woolly introduces a Twitter and TweetDeck-inspired Mastodon app. “The slow but steady Twitter exodus has brought a new abundance of third-party Mastodon apps like Ivory, Mammoth and Ice Cubes that connect users to the increasingly popular open source and decentralized social network. Today, we can add one more app to that list with the launch of Woolly, another solidly built iOS Mastodon client focused on offering a more customizable home screen, threaded views for reading longer conversations and a TweetDeck-inspired layout for the iPad.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

National Library of Finland: National Library of Finland to terminate microfilming in early 2024. “Microfilming will be discontinued for several reasons. One is that as the required technology is no longer developed except to a very limited extent, we would be unable to replace our ageing equipment. Access to equipment maintenance services is also uncertain, making microfilming risky.”

Harvard Gazette: Putting Black culture on the map — of historic places. “Only 3 percent of the sites listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places currently focus on the experiences of Black American history and culture. Jocelyn Imani, Black history and culture director at the Trust for Public Land, wants to remedy that, and is part of the effort to preserve such sites.”

CNBC: Google reshuffles virtual assistant unit with focus on Bard A.I. technology. “Google is reshuffling the reporting structure of its virtual assistant unit — called Assistant — to focus more on Bard, the company’s new artificial intelligence chat technology.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried tried to bribe Chinese officials, prosecutors say. “Federal prosecutors tacked on a 13th criminal charge against Sam Bankman-Fried, accusing the FTX co-founder of bribing ‘one or more’ Chinese government officials with $40 million worth of cryptocurrency.”

Gizmodo: Court Orders GitHub to Reveal Who Leaked Twitter’s Source Code. “After Twitter caught wind of its source code being leaked on GitHub, the only thing on the company’s mind was revenge. Now, Twitter has an ace up its sleeve as the US District Court for the Northern District of California signed off on a subpoena yesterday.”

Reuters: Twitter Blocks Pakistan Government’s Official Account In India. “Twitter has blocked the Pakistan government’s account from being viewed in India in response to a legal demand, according to a notice on the social media platform on Thursday.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

BuzzFeed News: Here’s What The World’s Most Heavily Guarded Photo Archive Looks Like. “If you travel about 51 miles north of Pittsburgh and go 220 feet underground, past armed guards, you’ll find the Bettmann Archive. If you’re somewhat familiar with the world of photojournalism, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this renowned archive that’s managed by Getty Images. Preserving around 11 million images, the archive is a visual record of many of the world’s most important historical events since the invention of the camera in the early 1800s.” Good morning, Internet…

March 30, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Semi-Aquatic Insects, Google Advertising, Zoom, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

Semi-Aquatic Insects, Google Advertising, Zoom, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Phys .org: Some bugs live in water as larvae: Now there is a database to track these semi-aquatic insects. “… so-called semi-aquatic insects are an important food source for animals in the water and on land and are used as bioindicators to assess water quality and the state of freshwater ecosystems. Thanks to the commitment of nearly 100 researchers, the EPTO-database is the first global data source regarding geo-referenced and freely available data sets on aquatic insect occurrences worldwide. The project was coordinated by IGB.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Ads Tests Blue Badges For Verified Advertisers In Search. “Google is testing showing blue badge icons and labels on some search ads for advertisers who are verified by Google Ads. The blue label is a blue circle with ridges and checkmark within it. This is from the ongoing Google advertiser verification program and now we are seeing Google test little blue checkmarks for advertisers who are verified.”

SlashGear: Zoom Just Added New AI-Powered Features, Here’s What They Do . “Starting with chats, users will soon be able to use a generative AI-assisted feature to compose their messages. The composing system will let users specify the tone — from formal to playful — and also pick between three presets for the length of messages they want the AI to generate.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Another art museum chief quits as Russia pressures cultural institutions. “The director, Marina Loshak, insisted Tuesday that her resignation after a decade in the post was voluntary. But her departure is the latest example of turnover in the leadership of Russian cultural institutions amid wartime demands from the government that art exhibitions reflect patriotic, national values.”

Engadget: Twitter’s secret VIP list is the reason you see Elon Musk’s tweets so often. “We now know why Twitter’s algorithm seems to recommend some users’ tweets so often. Newsletter Platformer reports that the company has a secret VIP list of a few dozen accounts ‘it monitors and offers increased visibility’ in its recommendation algorithm. The accounts include Elon Musk, as well as a handful of other prominent Twitter users.”

The Independent: The Global Music Vault wants to preserve the world’s music in case of disaster – but how will they do it?. “When Luke Jenkinson, an Australian entrepreneur now living in Norway, saw what was being done with the Arctic World Archive and the Global Seed Vault, his mind went to something less tangible than food or even history.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google violated order to save evidence, antitrust judge says. “Alphabet Inc’s Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation over its Google Play app store policies, a federal judge concluded.”

The Hill: Twitter restricts Greene’s congressional account over ‘vengeance’ post. “Twitter on Tuesday restricted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) congressional account for seven days after she repeatedly posted an image of a poster about a rally called ‘Trans Day of Vengeance.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Twitter is dying . “The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has — for months now — felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision — whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists — Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.”

Brigham Young University: Can AI predict how you’ll vote in the next election?. “In one experiment, the researchers created artificial personas by assigning the AI certain characteristics like race, age, ideology, and religiosity; and then tested to see if the artificial personas would vote the same as humans did in 2012, 2016, and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES) for their comparative human database, they found a high correspondence between how the AI and humans voted.” Good morning, Internet…

March 30, 2023 at 12:39AM
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Turn a Wikipedia Page Into a Contact Directory With RoloWiki

Turn a Wikipedia Page Into a Contact Directory With RoloWiki
By ResearchBuzz

When you want the official Facebook account or the LinkedIn for a famous person, what do you do? A quick Web search? It’s either that, ask a friend, or try to guess.

But there are other places that have that kind of information too, like Wikipedia. And if you’re looking to get such data on many people in the same category — lists of CEOs or active politicians, for example — Wikipedia might be a faster option. But how do you extract the data without doing a lot of poking and clicking and spending much more time than you would with a Web search?

I like this question. I answered it with RoloWiki ( https://searchgizmos.com/rolowiki/ ). RoloWiki lets you specify a Wikipedia article and then shows you the content of that page. The difference is that the internal links to other Wikipedia pages are replaced with a function call that extracts a predetermined list of available Wikidata properties about that Wikidata entity. Here’s how to use it.

Using RoloWiki

Start using RoloWiki by entering the name of a Wikipedia article and clicking the button. The default value is “List of chief executive officers” so let’s stay with that.

When you click the button RoloWiki will show you what looks like a regular Wikipedia article, though the formatting is different and the edit links don’t work.

See someone interesting? Click on their name. A box will open in the upper right corner providing additional information on them. RoloWiki looks for a number for Wikidata properties – first and last name, date of birth, occupation, official website, Library of Congress reference ID, Wikimedia Commons category, LinkedIn ID, Facebook account, and Twitter account. (Bear in mind that not all accounts have all Wikidata properties available.)

The Wikidata Properties box stays in the upper corner of the page to minimize interfering with your browsing

Isn’t that nice? You can turn Wikipedia pages into mini contact directories.

Because of the Wikidata properties being people-oriented, RoloWiki is best for people search, but you can search for companies and institutions as well. Apple doesn’t work because it’s too ambiguous, but other companies work fine:

March 29, 2023 at 08:30PM
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LGBTQ Rights Worldwide, Zagreb Film Cartoons, UK NFT, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

LGBTQ Rights Worldwide, Zagreb Film Cartoons, UK NFT, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Time-Sliced News Search.
This tool takes a year and query you input and generates date-restricted searches for several news search engines, including Google News, Google Books (Books, Newspapers, and Magazines are searched separately), Newspapers.com, and Chronicling America.

NEW RESOURCES

Out in Perth: New database tracks global progress and decline on LGBTI+ rights. “The ILGA World Database, a platform launched by ILGA World compiling laws, news, and references to human rights bodies and advocacy opportunities with the United Nations related to LGBTI+ people worldwide. The free, interactive, and collaborative platform gives details insights on the state of laws and proposed legislation concerning sexuality, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics issues in 193 UN member States and 47 non-independent territories.”

Cartoon Brew: Some Of The Weirdest And Most Stylish Cartoons Ever Made Are Now Free To View On Youtube. “Zagreb Film produced some of the wildest, most eclectic animated shorts of the 20th century, but their work has been exceptionally difficult to view — until now.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: NFT: Plans for Royal Mint produced token dropped by government. “Plans for a government backed non-fungible token (NFT) produced by the Royal Mint have been dropped, the Treasury has announced. Rishi Sunak ordered the creation of a ‘NFT for Britain’ that could be traded online, while chancellor in April 2022.”

ProPublica: A Rare Statue of Buddha Fails to Sell at Auction as Questions Swirl Around a Renowned Art Collection. “What happened may be a sign that objects from the collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf will have trouble finding buyers following questions about how they were acquired. The piece from Nepal was once displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Engadget: Fitbit challenges, adventures and open groups join the Google graveyard today. “If you’re a longtime Fitbit user, the demise of open groups, adventures and challenges is likely to come as a shame, particularly since two of them made the platform more social and were widely copied by the company’s competitors.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: The Ultimate Todoist Keyboard Shortcuts Cheatsheet. “Productivity is a hot topic of conversation. As such, choosing the right tool for the job is crucial. Todoist is a popular and robust app that lets you create simple shopping lists or more complex projects – including professional ones.” Extensive. No annotation, but extensive.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: How we might stop the flood of data-driven misinformation. “People are often tempted to trust statistics and algorithms as neutral arbiters. But algorithms are incapable of independently understanding the worth of what they’re generating. They’re also very good at producing the appearance of meaning, which makes it that much easier to trawl through data sets in search of the conclusions you want to see in them.”

University of Iowa Libraries: Preserving Hawkeye sports history, one digitized film at a time. “The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives and Conservation and Collections Care have an initiative to digitize about 530 films of football, men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling, and track films that date back to the 1930s and go through at least 1989. The films’ state of degradation is dramatic, especially for the older material, and many of these films don’t have much life left in them.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CoinDesk: Binance, CEO Zhao Sued by CFTC Over ‘Willful Evasion’ of U.S. Laws, Unregistered Crypto Derivatives Products. “The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued crypto exchange Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao Monday on allegations the company knowingly offered unregistered crypto derivatives products in the U.S. against federal law.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

La Trobe University: New project to track alcohol in Influencer posts. “A new research project led by La Trobe University will use artificial intelligence software to monitor social media influencers’ Instagram posts for alcohol marketing, to inform future regulation and reduce alcohol harms.”

Flinders University: Plus side of app use before bed. “Overuse of mobile devices gets a bad rap but an upside may be their ability to create a distraction and positively affect teenagers’ ability to get to sleep, new Flinders University research shows. Feedback from more than 600 teenagers from age 12 to 18 at South Australian schools between June and September 2019 has led the international research group to point to a more nuanced view on using the wide range of mobile content – led by Youtube, music apps, Instagram and Snapchat – before young people’s bedtime.”

Eos: Deluges of Data Are Changing Astronomical Science. “For scientists who study the cosmos, hard-to-grasp numbers are par for the course. But the sheer quantity of data flowing from modern research telescopes, to say nothing of the promised deluges of upcoming astronomical surveys, is astounding even astronomers. That embarrassment of riches has necessitated some serious data wrangling by myself and my colleagues, and it’s changing astronomical science forever.” Good morning, Internet…

March 29, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Twitter, iPhone, Commercial Spyware, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023

Twitter, iPhone, Commercial Spyware, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ABC News: Twitter celebs balk at paying Elon Musk for blue check mark. “William Shatner, Monica Lewinsky and other prolific Twitter commentators — some household names, others little-known journalists — could soon be losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity on the social media platform.”

Axios: Musk says Twitter will only show verified accounts in “For You” timeline. “Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced Monday evening that only tweets by verified users will show up in the platform’s default main feed of ‘For You’ recommendations starting April 15.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Finally, There’s an Easy Way to Reduce Background Noise on Your iPhone. “As reported by 9to5Mac, Apple is adding Voice Isolation mode to phone calls as part of iOS 16.4. According to Apple, Voice Isolation mode ‘prioritizes your voice and blocks out ambient noise around you,’ a simple solution to clearer audio during phone calls.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rest of World: Twitter blocked 122 accounts in India at the government’s request. “Twitter blocked 122 accounts belonging to journalists, authors, and politicians in India this week in response to legal requests from the Indian government.”

Daily Beast: Elon Musk’s Twitter Makes Millions Off Anti-LGBT “Groomer” Tweets: Report. “Under Elon Musk’s leadership of Twitter, tweets linking LGBT people to ‘grooming’ have sky-rocketed, jumping 119 percent since Musk’s takeover in October 2022, according to a new report released by the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The study also found that Twitter is making millions from big-name advertisers, whose brands are appearing alongside hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: Biden administration bans federal agencies from using commercial spyware. “In an executive order signed Monday, President Biden barred federal agencies from using commercial spyware that threatens US national security or carries a risk of improper use by foreign governments and individuals.”

WIRED: A US Agency Rejected Face Recognition—and Landed in Big Trouble. “Officials working on Login.gov, used to access dozens of government sites, worried about algorithmic bias. Their decision breached federal security rules.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NHK: Japan donates washi paper to restore ancient Ukrainian texts. “The western Japanese prefecture of Tokushima has donated locally-produced washi paper to an archive in Ukraine, so that old documents can be restored.”

Washington Post: The biggest decider of who backs a TikTok ban? If they use TikTok.. “More Americans back a TikTok ban than oppose one, with a majority expressing concerns over the company’s links to China, underscoring that distrust of the foreign-owned app has spread beyond Washington, even as its domestic user base soars.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ars Technica: Hobbyist builds ChatGPT client for MS-DOS . “On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique way to converse with the popular OpenAI language model.” You don’t know how much I miss those super-solid IBM keyboards. Good afternoon, Internet…

March 29, 2023 at 12:28AM
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“The Chills”, Royal Neighbors of America, Criminal use of ChatGPT, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023

“The Chills”, Royal Neighbors of America, Criminal use of ChatGPT, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Sinker Search
Change your Google results by emphasizing one word in the query.

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Motherboard: Here’s a Database of Media Scientifically Verified to Give You the Chills. “Chills are an innate response for most people. Whether you’re watching a scary movie, or get some harrowing news, it’s a common emotional response to stimuli. And now, scientists have created a database of certain media that has the potential to give you the chills.”

Our Quad Cities: For anniversary, Royal Neighbors unveils digital museum. “Tuesday, March 21, 2023 is the 128th anniversary of Royal Neighbors of America, the Rock Island-based fraternal benefit society and one of the largest women-led life insurers in the U.S. To celebrate its anniversary (during Women’s History Month), Royal Neighbors launched a new Historical Digital Museum that features information on its camps, chapters, leaders, timeline of current events, and archived historical documents, articles, and photos.”

Europol: The criminal use of ChatGPT – a cautionary tale about large language models. “In response to the growing public attention given to ChatGPT, the Europol Innovation Lab organised a number of workshops with subject matter experts from across Europol to explore how criminals can abuse large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, as well as how it may assist investigators in their daily work. Their insights are compiled in Europol’s first Tech Watch Flash report published today. Entitled ‘ChatGPT – the impact of Large Language Models on Law Enforcement’, this document provides an overview on the potential misuse of ChatGPT, and offers an outlook on what may still be to come.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Boing Boing: Having devalued Twitter’s blue checkmark, Elon sells Gold Badges. “No longer serving the purpose of identifying a publication or other notable source as passing whatever Twitter’s idea of verified or notable was, Elon Musk now offers a Gold Badge your company can buy for $1000/mo to prove they are a company that paid $1000.”

Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! . “Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as ‘computational superpowers’.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Indicted Chinese exile controls Gettr social media site, ex-employees say. “An exiled Chinese tycoon indicted in New York earlier this month in a billion-dollar fraud case controls the conservative social media platform Gettr and used it to promote cryptocurrencies and propaganda, former employees have told The Washington Post.”

India Today: Man clears job interview at Google but fails tenant interview in Bengaluru, here’s the full story. “A Google India employee posted on LinkedIn that a landlord didn’t accept him as a tenant because he worked for Google and thus would probably buy his own home one day.”

WFTS: Florida Sentinel Bulletin history in the process of being digitized at the C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Library. “The Florida Sentinel Bulletin Collection dates back to the 1940s. The collection highlights African American history that you wouldn’t see in other media outlets. Right now, the library is in the process of digitizing all of the items to make them more accessible to the community.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Twitter takes legal action after source code leaked online. “Twitter has revealed some of its source code has been released online and the social media platform owned by Elon Musk is taking legal action to identify the leaker.”

Reuters: Japan ruling party group eyes ban on TikTok, other apps – lawmaker. “A group of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers is planning to compile a proposal next month urging the government to ban social networking services such as TikTok if they are used for disinformation campaigns, an LDP lawmaker said Monday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: A design tool to democratize the art of color-changing mosaics. “Computational tool from MIT CSAIL enables color-changing cellulose-based designs for data visualization, education, fashion, and more.”

WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “The particular kind of data that foils AI more than anything is human language. Unfortunately, human language is also a primary form of data on the meganet. As language confounds deep-learning applications, AI—and meganets—will learn to avoid it in favor of numbers and images, a move that stands to imperil how humans use language with each other.” Good morning, Internet…

March 28, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Monday, March 27, 2023

American House Museums Web Archive, Scribd Alternatives, Emoji, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023

American House Museums Web Archive, Scribd Alternatives, Emoji, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Launches the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive. “The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive, curated by librarians, library workers, and professors at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. House museums have been a key component of historic preservation in America since the mid 19th century.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 6 Scribd Alternatives to Host Your PDF Files. “Scribd is a popular document-hosting website, and if someone wanted to share a PDF file online, chances are they would upload it to Scribd. However, its interface and restrictive features are less popular, and the company modified its initial business model. Luckily, there are more than enough Scribd alternatives to choose from.”

MakeUseOf: 5 Online Tools and Websites to Make Your Own Emojis . “Have you ever wished a specific emoji existed but couldn’t find it? Well, now you can explore making your own. Fortunately, you don’t need any advanced software, or technical and artistic skills to make emojis, as there are online tools that allow you to do that. Here are five websites to use to make your own emojis.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: How Twitch lost its way. “Delivering live video content to millions of people, 24 hours per day, is expensive, and as Twitch grows, it incurs greater costs. But Twitch’s moves in pursuit of profitability have confused and upset creators, fans and staff. Creators have decried new monetization schemes that put the onus on them to run more ads.”

Reuters: Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools. “Several rival search engines have launched their own AI-powered chatbots, which aim to combine the the conversational skills of Microsoft’s ChatGPT with search engine results.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping. “Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, [Ellen] Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.”

The Verge: The Linus Tech Tips YouTube hack is the latest in a line of crypto scam breaches. “Popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has been hacked this morning, with the channel’s 15.3 million subscribers seeing videos for crypto scams instead of tech hardware reviews. It’s the latest breach in a series of high-profile YouTube accounts being hacked, with scammers regularly gaining access to prominent accounts to rename them and livestream crypto scam videos.”

New York Times: Online Troll Named Microchip Tells of Sowing ‘Chaos’ in 2016 Election. “The defendant in the unusual trial, Douglass Mackey, and the pseudonymous witness collaborated to beat Hillary Clinton. They met for the first time in a Brooklyn courtroom.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Motherboard: Microsoft Now Claims GPT-4 Shows ‘Sparks’ of General Intelligence. “Microsoft is betting heavily on integrating OpenAI’s GPT language models into its products to compete with Google, and, the company now claims, its AI is an early form of artificial general intelligence (AGI).”

The Conversation: How TikTok became a breeding ground for hate speech in the latest Malaysia general election. “Hate speech on social media is a major issue across many regions of the world, including Southeast Asia. Hate speech includes expressions to discriminate, insult, demean, or provoke violence against individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or others.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 28, 2023 at 12:44AM
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Build Focused Google Searches Around Associated Topics With Wiki-Guided Google Search

Build Focused Google Searches Around Associated Topics With Wiki-Guided Google Search
By ResearchBuzz

How do we ask for what we don’t know?

It’s my favorite question. I chew on it all the time like it’s a mental cinnamon toothpick because it’s such an essential question of search.

All we can bring to a search engine topic query is ourselves and what we know. And unless we’re some kind of expert on the topic, we probably know woefully little and what we know probably contains misinformation of various sorts. Our lack of understanding makes us more susceptible to junk searches or shallow, SEO-serving search results that exist only to bump up a Web site’s ranking, and not to provide knowledge.

Knowing everything is an impossible strategy. Fact-checking every single Web page you get in a search result, also impossible. So currently we tend to trust Google (or Bing or DuckDuckGo or You or whichever search engine you use) to guide us to the most useful search results available.

The problem with that is twofold: search engine algorithms are usually opaque and there is a constant conflict between the search engine trying to serve the most useful results possible and SEO black hats trying to game the system and serve results for the money/propaganda benefits/etc.

I can’t start a search engine because ResearchBuzz is just one (1) person. But I can and do try to figure out ways to make searches focused enough to break through the SEO / general knowledge fog and into richer results with more context.

In December I made Clumpy Bounce Topic Search, which was an attempt to use Wikipedia categories to build Google queries for broad topics. And it works pretty good and it’s fun, but it’s no good for specific topics, people, etc.

I’ve been trying a bunch of different approaches to address this, to build a set of related query topics that works and provides meaningful search results without excessive weirdness and junk results. Finally I figured out a good way was to count Wikidata entry mentions across Wikipedia pages, so now there’s Wiki-Guided Google Search ( https://searchgizmos.com/wggs/ ).

Using Wiki-Guided Google Search

To use WGGS, you provide two things: a Wikipedia topic (it’s case-sensitive, so keep that in mind) and the number of times the topic should be mentioned in another Wikipedia article before that topic is included in the search results. Fewer mentions will lead to less-associated topics (and occasional nonsense.) If you’re not sure how many mentions you should screen for, start at 2 and go higher if you’re getting too many results.

Let’s stick with the default search here. Solar energy is definitely a popular topic, so it’s going to have lots of mentions. A mention filter of 5 will still find plenty of results. Click the search button.

Results include the name of the associated topic (with a link back to its Wikipedia article), a bit of excerpt, and links to Google and Google News searches for both your original topic and the associated topic.

The first time I ran this search I said out loud “Morocco?!” Morocco as a topic associated with solar energy would have taken me a while to come up with on my own, though it makes sense if you think about it. And man, does it bring great results.

Adding Morocco as additional context to our query about solar energy gets past those shallow sites about solar power and takes us straight to rich results (and, of course, a Wikipedia article.) Here’s another result, this time for “solar energy” and “Passive solar building design”:

I don’t have any proof to back this up, but I suspect that the formality and structure of Wikipedia’s language use helps make the results more information-oriented.

WGGS also works great for people search, especially for people who have been influential in our culture but are possibly lesser-known. My favorite pianist is Henry Byrd, who used the name Professor Longhair. He influenced any number of better-known musicians but is not well-known himself. However, if you put his name into WGGS with a filter of 4 you’ll see that his name appears in a variety of contexts:

And these too yield tasty search results.

March 27, 2023 at 10:52PM
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Group Wikipedia Category Pages By Age, Education, or Gender With Wiki Bunch

Group Wikipedia Category Pages By Age, Education, or Gender With Wiki Bunch
By ResearchBuzz

I think a lot about searching, but I think about search results, too, and the way information is organized.

Often search results are presented by relevance, by date, or alphabetically. But does it always have to be that way? If you’re grouping specific kinds of content there might be a host of other parameters available.

When you have the ability to sort information in different ways, you’re able to look at it from different perspectives. That leads you to different ideas or new avenues of exploration.

I wanted to make a sorter that used something besides date or alphabet. So I turned to the Wikipedia API (which is basically my personal fun park) and decided to see if I could make a people-sorter. And that’s why there’s Wiki Bunch ( https://searchgizmos.com/wikibunch/ ). Wiki Bunch takes a Wikipedia category (ideally one containing people so you get results) and sorts them by age, gender, or place of education. (Wiki Bunch also offers the option to sort by place of birth, but the parameters on that are so wide – everything from a hospital to a state – that it doesn’t work well.)

Using Wiki Bunch is really simple. Enter a Wikipedia category (you can paste the URL of the category page to make it easy) and choose what you want to group the pages by. The default is grouping American astronauts by age. When you’ve made your selection hit the blue button.

Wiki Bunch will think for a few seconds (sometimes for MANY seconds if it’s a big category) and then present you with a list of Wikipedia pages grouped by your property of preference.

All properties Wiki Bunch sorts by except age are available as discrete Wikidata properties. Age, however, isn’t: Wiki Bunch has to calculate it based on birth date and the current date, as well as filter out pages with death dates. This means sometimes there will be oddities; occasionally a death date property isn’t available and you’ll find a 150-year-old person on your list. Some people have incomplete birth dates (just the year, for example) and those aren’t included as they can’t be properly calculated.

March 27, 2023 at 07:09PM
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Medieval and Renaissance Women, Undeniable Street View, Introduction to Probability, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023

Medieval and Renaissance Women, Undeniable Street View, Introduction to Probability, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: The Anti-Bullseye Name Search
Most names in English are expressed in news articles and other places like this: Firstname Lastname, or possibly Firstname Middlename Lastname. TABNS takes a name and generates a Google search that searches for the name in reverse order (Lastname Firstname) and *specifically excludes* the most common expression of firstname lastname.

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Medieval and Renaissance Women: full list of the manuscripts. “Rejoice! Over the past year, we’ve been hard at work digitising and cataloguing manuscripts connected with Medieval and Renaissance Women. We can now announce that all the manuscript volumes are online, no fewer than 93 (NINETY-THREE) of them.”

Creative Review: The Undeniable Street View exposes the destruction in Ukraine. “Created by a group of Ukrainian organisations – including United24, Voices of Children, Nova Ukraine and Vostok-SOS – The Undeniable Street View offers viewers an unprecedented insight into the destruction of residential buildings and other non-military targets since the conflict began a year ago.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Stack the Odds in Your Favor and Master Probability with Wolfram Language. “I am glad to announce the launch of Introduction to Probability, a free interactive course aiming to help you learn probability intuitively, from simple to advanced concepts. Anyone who wants to learn probability for the first time, needs a refresher or is looking to apply probability professionally will find great value in this course. It will help students understand and use randomness and random variables.”

WordPress Blog: Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog. “With much activity happening in the WordPress development space every day, keeping up-to-date with the latest updates can be challenging. The new WordPress Developer Blog is a developer-focused resource to help you stay on top of the latest software features, tutorials, and learning materials relevant to the open source project.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Hollywood, music industry brace for a TikTok ban. “Since the last time the U.S. government considered banning TikTok in 2020, the app has evolved from a social platform supporting a robust ecosystem of content creators and small businesses to an entertainment powerhouse, upending Hollywood power structures and rewriting the rules of the entertainment landscape. A ban now would threaten not the livelihoods of TikTok’s biggest stars and thousands of small businesses, it could deal a massive blow to the entertainment industry, forcing movie studios, record labels, casting directors, Hollywood agents, and actors to radically shift the way they do business.”

WIRED: Your Favorite Podcast Is Probably an ‘Experience’ Now. “Podcasts have always been a deeply personal experience, thanks in part to how most people listen to them: With headphones in, on commutes or while cleaning, and without a whole lot of subsequent discussion among peers. Now, though, the most financially and creatively successful podcasts are the ones that are also cultivating their own communities, with hosts taking care to connect on a more personal level with the fans whose ears they’ve whispered into for all these years.”

Engadget: Levi’s will ‘supplement’ human models with AI-generated fakes. “Levi’s is partnering with an AI company on computer-generated fashion models to ‘supplement human models.’ The company frames the move as part of a ‘digital transformation journey’ of diversity, equity, inclusion and sustainability. Although that sounds noble on the surface, Levi’s is essentially hiring a robot to generate the appearance of diversity while ridding itself of the burden of paying human beings who represent the qualities it wants to be associated with its brand.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: At least 17 members of Congress had sensitive information exposed in data breach. “The hacking of the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority data system has triggered at least three investigations and a federal civil lawsuit against the District of Columbia government, CBS News has learned. It has also sent a significant shock through Congress and its staffers.”

Techdirt: Utah’s Governor Live Streams Signing Of Unconstitutional Social Media Bill On All The Social Media Platforms He Hates. “On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to ‘protect the children’ on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WVXU: The Cincinnati Zoo is creating a massive behavioral database to better understand its animals. “Out of uniform and hidden from the animals, Cincinnati Zoo scientists are collecting massive amounts of information on its 400 species — like Huto the Komoto dragon, hippos Fiona and Fritz, and Nutmeg the fox — so they can live their best lives in Cincinnati.”

Internet Archive Blog: The Fight Continues. “We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”

International Atomic Energy Agency: IAEA and FAO Kickstart the Development of Pioneering Protein Quality Database. “Nutrition experts from the IAEA, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization as well as national, research and academic institutions came together recently to outline the framework for a first-of-a-kind protein quality database, to help governments assess the protein adequacy of foods sold to consumers and develop optimal dietary protein requirements.” Good morning, Internet…

March 27, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Sunday, March 26, 2023

Windows Snipping Tools, Social Media Muting, AI Chatbots, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023

Windows Snipping Tools, Social Media Muting, AI Chatbots, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft pushes OOB security updates for Windows Snipping tool flaw. “Now tracked as CVE-2023-28303, the Acropalypse vulnerability is caused by image editors not properly removing cropped image data when overwriting the original file. For example, if you take a screenshot and crop out sensitive information, such as account numbers, you should have reasonable expectations that this cropped data will be removed when saving the image. However, with this bug, both the Google Pixel’s Markup Tool and the Windows Snipping Tool were found to be leaving the cropped data within the original file.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Mute Everyone. “Free yourself from manufactured outrage and the fear of missing out. Life is too short to subject yourself to the ravings of every misguided relative, drunk friend, or semi-acquaintance. It’s time you learned how to mute.”

The Verge: AI chatbots compared: Bard vs. Bing vs. ChatGPT. “The web is full of chattering bots, but which is the most useful and for what? We compare Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Pigeon Wager. “Jason Morningstar seems to have a knack for Deep Cut games: last year he handily snagged the prize with The Obstruction Method, and this year’s entry has once again demonstrated why the category is one of our favorites. The Pigeon Wager takes its inspiration from ‘The Military Use Of The Homing Pigeon’, an article published in a 1927 issue of an ornithology quarterly. On this humble foundation, the game builds a live-action roleplaying exercise full of drama and creativity.”

Motherboard: The Amateurs Jailbreaking GPT Say They’re Preventing a Closed-Source AI Dystopia. “OpenAI’s latest version of its popular large language model, GPT-4, is the company’s ‘most capable and aligned model yet,’ according to CEO Sam Altman. Yet, within two days of its release, developers were already able to override its moderation filters, providing users with harmful content that ranged from telling users how to hack into someone’s computer to explaining why Mexicans should be deported. This jailbreak is only the latest in a series that users have been able to run on GPT models.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: U.S. State-Government Websites Use TikTok Trackers, Review Finds. “More than two dozen state governments have placed web-tracking code made by TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. on official websites, according to a new report from a cybersecurity company, illustrating the difficulties U.S. regulators face in curtailing data-collection efforts by the popular Chinese-owned app.”

Ars Technica: “Click-to-cancel” rule would penalize companies that make you cancel by phone. “Canceling a subscription should be just as easy as signing up for the service, the Federal Trade Commission said in a proposed ‘click-to-cancel’ rule announced today. If approved, the plan ‘would put an end to companies requiring you to call customer service to cancel an account that you opened on their website,’ FTC commissioners said.”

The Record: BreachForums says it is closing after suspected law enforcement access to backend. “In an abrupt about-face, the new administrator of popular cybercriminal platform BreachForums said they plan to shut down the site after its previous administrator was allegedly arrested last week.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Arizona: Confused by quantum computing? Students are developing a puzzle game to help. “University of Arizona students have developed a computer game to make complex quantum computation concepts easier to grasp. The game challenges users to arrange puzzle pieces into a shape that models a quantum computing circuit. The game was designed to teach students, and even quantum researchers, an unconventional model of quantum computation.”

SiliconAngle: Databricks open-sources an AI it says is as good as ChatGPT, but much easier to train. “Big-data analytics firm Databricks Inc. has emerged as an unlikely player in the generative artificial intelligence space, open-sourcing a new AI model that it claims is ‘as magical as ChatGPT,’ despite being trained on far less data in less than three hours using a single machine.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 27, 2023 at 12:26AM
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Tulsa Historical Photography, DPReview Conservation, Mozilla.ai, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023

Tulsa Historical Photography, DPReview Conservation, Mozilla.ai, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

News on 6: Tulsa Historical Society And Museum Adds 50,000 Photos To Online Archive. “The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum has now added 50,000 of its photos online. This means anyone can view pieces of Tulsa’s history, any time they want and all for free.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PetaPixel: To Save its Content, Archive Team is Attempting to Back Up All of DPReview. “Following yesterday’s news that DPReview is shutting down, photographers around the web began wondering what would happen to its huge library of articles, reviews, and camera test images, including the website’s excellent studio shot comparison tool. Archive Team aims to scrape more than 4 million articles and posts within the next three weeks.”

Mozilla: Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI. “The vision for Mozilla.ai is to make it easy to develop trustworthy AI products. We will build things and hire / collaborate with people that share our vision: AI that has agency, accountability, transparency and openness at its core. Mozilla.ai will be a space outside big tech and academia for like-minded founders, developers, scientists, product managers and builders to gather.”

Search Engine Journal: OpenAI Introduces Plugin Support For ChatGPT. “OpenAI announced the introduction of plugin support for ChatGPT. This development aims to enhance the language model’s capabilities, allowing it to access up-to-date information, perform computations, and use third-party services. OpenAI plans to gradually roll out plugins and study their real-world use, impact, and potential challenges.”

USEFUL STUFF

Noupe: A Quick Guide to Color Blind Design: How to Present Data to Everyone. “Reduced color perception or the capacity to distinguish between colors are symptoms of color blindness. Color blindness affects 1 in 200 women and 1 in every 12 men. Do digital resources like websites and educational materials affect color blindness? Absolutely! Consider accessibility best practices when creating online documents to ensure that your website or online products are accessible to all visitors.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: How The Verge gamed Google with its ‘best printer 2023’ article. “Technology news publisher The Verge has published a 600-word article half-filled with ChatGPT content and a heavy dose of sarcasm that has been outranking more in-depth, well-researched and arguably more helpful content written by humans at publications like the New York Times for the competitive query [best printer 2023].”

Wall Street Journal: Elon Musk Offers Employees Stock Grants Valuing Twitter at About $20 Billion. “Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. employees will receive stock awards based on a roughly $20 billion valuation, less than half of the $44 billion price he acquired the company for last year, according to an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”

AFP: Kenya police misleadingly use old protest photos in online hunt for March 2023 rally participants. “After violent anti-government protests in Nairobi, Kenyan police took to social media to announce they were looking for suspects who partook in the rallies organised by the opposition on March 20, 2023. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) posted a series of images on Twitter purporting to show individuals suspected of causing mayhem during the demonstrations. But AFP Fact Check found that some of the photos were old and unrelated.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Next Web: Big Tech gives EU access to thousands of user accounts each year. “Most of us share huge amounts of personal information online, and Big Tech companies are in many ways the gatekeepers of this data. But how much do they share with the authorities? And how often do governments request user data? According to new research by VPN provider SurfShark, the answer is a lot, and a lot again.”

University of Texas at San Antonio: Uncovering the unheard: Researchers reveal inaudible remote cyber-attacks on voice assistant devices. “Guenevere Chen, an associate professor in the UTSA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently published a paper on USENIX Security 2023 that demonstrates a novel inaudible voice trojan attack to exploit vulnerabilities of smart device microphones and voice assistants — like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa or Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft Cortana — and provide defense mechanisms for users.”

TechCrunch: Google removes hundreds of Kenya-focused loan apps from Play Store. “Google has taken down hundreds of loan apps from the Play Store in Kenya since its new policy, which requires digital lenders in the East African country to submit proof of license, went into effect in January. The policy came in the wake of Kenya’s Digital Credit Providers (DCP) regulations last year, which required entities that provide loans digitally to acquire a license to operate from the Central Bank of Kenya.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WUSF: USF researchers create 3D models and virtual tours honoring the legacy of President Jimmy Carter. “The researchers were tasked by the NPS to digitally scan and preserve furniture items that the 39th president built himself. They also created virtual tours of his boyhood home, farm, and depot that served as his campaign headquarters in 1975. The house in Plains where Carter and his wife Rosalynn currently live will eventually be included in the tour as well.” Good morning, Internet…

March 26, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Saturday, March 25, 2023

British Library Endangered Archives, Internet Archive, Canva, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, March 25, 2023

British Library Endangered Archives, Internet Archive, Canva, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, March 25, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Endangered Archives blog: New online – March 2023. “This month we would like to highlight five new collections that have recently been made available online. They have come from South Africa, India, Nepal and from Georgia.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Internet Archive’s digital book lending violates copyrights, US judge rules. “A U.S. judge has ruled that an online library operated by the nonprofit organization Internet Archive infringed the copyrights of four major U.S. publishers by lending out digitally scanned copies of their books.”

TechCrunch: Canva unveils a series of new features, including several AI-powered tools. “The company is launching Assistant, which lets users search for design elements and provides quick access to features. The tool can also give you recommendations on graphics and styles that match your existing design. Assistant provides quick access to AI-powered design tools like Magic Write, which is the platform’s AI-powered copywriting assistant that it launched in December.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: The Best AI Image Generators You Can Use Right Now. “AI image generators like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney have suddenly burst into mainstream consciousness. More of these tools seem to be popping up all the time, but they aren’t always available to the public. Here are the ones you can use right now—today.”

Hongkiat: How to Make QR Codes in Google Sheets. “In this post, I’ll show you two simple ways to create a QR code using Google Sheets. One method involves using a Google Sheet formula and the other can be done through a Google Sheet add-on.”

Larry Ferlazzo: This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom. “At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: The internet rediscovered Blockbuster’s website. Press play on nostalgia.. “The movie rental franchise, which first opened in 1985 and at its peak had more than 9,000 stores worldwide, has all but disappeared after it filed for bankruptcy in 2010. (A lone Blockbuster-branded store remains in Bend, Ore.) But nostalgia for it was triggered this week when some internet users realized its website, Blockbuster.com, had been revived with the words: ‘We are working on rewinding your movie.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: UK creates fake DDoS-for-hire sites to identify cybercriminals. “The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed today that they created multiple fake DDoS-for-hire service websites to identify cybercriminals who utilize these platforms to attack organizations.”

Engadget: OpenAI says a bug leaked sensitive ChatGPT user data. “In Tuesday’s incident, users posted screenshots on Reddit that their ChatGPT sidebars featured previous chat histories from other users. Only the title of the conversation, not the text itself, were visible. OpenAI, in response, took the bot offline for nearly 10 hours to investigate. The results of that investigation revealed a deeper security issue: the chat history bug may have also potentially revealed personal data from 1.2 percent of ChatGPT Plus subscribers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of East Anglia: More Support Needed For Children With Disabilities Using The Internet. “For children with disabilities, being online and part of a well-connected community can have huge benefits. However, children with disabilities will encounter more online risks, and these can escalate more quickly than for their peers. The research shows that extra support from professionals such as teachers, youth workers and speech and language therapists does not always happen when they are learning, playing, and socialising on the Internet.”

NewsWise: Hard-Right Social Media Activities Lead to Civil Unrest: Study. “Does activity on hard-right social media lead to civil unrest? With the emergence and persistent popularity of hard-right social media platforms such as Gab, Parler, and Truth Social, it is important to understand the impact they are having on society and politics.”

NextGov: AI and Twitter Could Help Predict Opioid Deaths. “A unique approach using artificial intelligence and social media posts could predict opioid mortality rates, researchers report. The findings revealed that a sophisticated AI algorithm was able to predict opioid death rates—going back from previous years 2011 to 2017—much more accurately than using traditional information researchers and clinicians often use, such as prior rates in communities and socio-economic measures.” Unfortunately accessing Twitter for research purposes is about to get really expensive. Good morning, Internet…

March 25, 2023 at 08:19PM
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Friday, March 24, 2023

Judy Chicago, Global Occupant Behavior, Twitter, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 24, 2023

Judy Chicago, Global Occupant Behavior, Twitter, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 24, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Penn State: Expanded Judy Chicago Research Portal relaunches with five unified collections. “Penn State University Libraries has announced the relaunch of an expanded Judy Chicago Research Portal, a searchable gateway to the archives of this prominent feminist artist. The portal is intended to facilitate and support research and curriculum development around Chicago’s work and feminist art in general.”

Syracuse University: Syracuse Researchers Create a Global Occupant Behavior Database for ASHRAE. “SyracuseCoE Associate Director and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Bing Dong and several students have compiled research from 15 countries on how building occupants behave – more specifically, how they interact with building systems like windows, doors, light switches, thermostats and fans.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Vox: Why advertisers aren’t coming back to Twitter. “Vox spoke with several advertising executives, former Twitter employees, and other industry insiders who explained why Twitter’s relationship with advertisers continues to suffer. Sources described a lack of confidence in Musk’s ability to keep his promises about stopping Twitter from turning into a ‘free-for-all hellscape,’ high turnover in Twitter’s sales department, and confusion about the company’s policies regarding content moderation.”

Daily Beast: TikTokers Came to D.C. to Lobby Congress. It Got Kinda Weird.. “There’s already a ban on the app for government devices. But some lawmakers are pushing to ban it in the U.S. altogether unless ByteDance, which is partially owned by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, sells its stake in the platform. President Joe Biden already signed off on a bipartisan bill that would give the president authority to ban the app nationwide. In a building usually defined by drab suits and perfectly staged appearances, the TikTokers made sure things got a bit weird.”

Mashable: WhatsApp will soon let you chat with WhatsApp on WhatsApp . “WhatsApp is now on WhatsApp. The chat app has launched its own official WhatsApp account (via WABetaInfo(Opens in a new tab)), which you can chat with to receive updates about the platform and usage tips.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make a Public Archive of Your Tweets. “IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE IF you’re less enthusiastic about Twitter now than you were five years ago—the vibes are, as they say, off. You might even be contemplating deleting your tweets or setting your account to private. Either way, you have to ask: Do you really want all of your tweets to disappear from the web? Forever? There’s a happy medium, it turns out. You can make your own archive of tweets and even share it on your personal website. Here’s how.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Economic Times: India to pitch for open access to research among G20 countries: Principal Scientific Advisor Prof Sood. “India will make a pitch for interlinking of national archives of G-20 countries .to make available scientific papers published by researchers free-of-cost when chief scientific advisors of the multilateral platform meet at Ramnagar in Uttarakhand next week.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: TikTok CEO fails to convince Congress that the app is not a “weapon” for China. “For nearly five hours, Congress members of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew over concerns about the platform’s risks to minor safety, data privacy, and national security for American users.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University College London: Detecting anaemia earlier in children using a smartphone. “Researchers at UCL and University of Ghana have successfully predicted whether children have anaemia using only a set of smartphone images.”

Modern War Institute at West Point: Find It, Vet It, Share It: The US Government’s Open-Source Intelligence Problem And How To Fix It. “Throughout this process we routinely faced challenges in maximizing the value of open-source information. More specifically, we encountered problems in three areas: collection, vetting and analysis, and sharing content. We attempted several methods to address these deficiencies, with varying degrees of success, but our experiences laid bare a fundamental truth: better solutions are required to ensure US and ally information warfare capabilities are prepared for future crises.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 25, 2023 at 12:36AM
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Kindergarten Readiness, Natural History Museums, Book Bans, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 24, 2023

Kindergarten Readiness, Natural History Museums, Book Bans, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 24, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Back That Ask Up
Remove recent Google News from your search results by day, month, or year.

NEW RESOURCES

University of Illinois Chicago: New UIC early learning website focuses on kindergarten readiness. “The focus of The Ready Child is on pre-K families and teachers and is broken down into three sections, including The Ready Child, where people can learn about the five areas of kindergarten readiness; The Ready Family, where family members can find resources needed to help their child succeed; and the Ready School, where teachers and child care providers can build on the strengths children bring to the classroom.”

Smithsonian: Global Natural History Initiative Builds Groundbreaking Database To Address 21st-Century Challenges. “A group of natural history museums, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the American Museum of Natural History Museum in New York City and the Natural History Museum in London, has mapped the total collections from 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums in 28 countries.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: Book ban attempts hit record high in 2022, library org says. “Attempted book bans and restrictions at school and public libraries continue to surge, setting a record in 2022, according to a new report from the American Library Association released Thursday.”

TechCrunch: Twitter will kill ‘legacy’ blue checks on April 1. “Twitter has picked April Fool’s Day, otherwise known as April 1, to start removing legacy blue checkmarks from the platform.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post Engineering: Here’s how The Washington Post verified its journalists on Mastodon. “A small cross-disciplinary team of engineers worked together to add a feature so journalists at The Washington Post could link their Mastodon profiles from The Post’s website and verify themselves on the social network.”

Classical Music: The Lark Ascending: brand new skylark recordings project . “[The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society] has joined forces with the Wildlife Sound Recording Society (WSRS) and the British Library’s Wildlife and Environmental Sounds collection to gather examples of the song of the skylark – the bird whose exuberant, melodious singing inspired the composer’s much-loved piece The Lark Ascending.”

The Jefferson Monticello: Monticello Awarded $3.5 Million Mellon Foundation Grant for Getting Word African American Oral History Project Expansion, Digital Archive. “The Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities, recently awarded $3.5 million to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to expand the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s pioneering Getting Word African American Oral History Project. Established in 1993, Getting Word is a decades-long initiative to collect and share the stories of Monticello’s enslaved community and their descendants.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: The Younger Brother Caught in the Middle of the FTX Investigation. “The money flowed freely at a pandemic-prevention organization run by the younger brother of Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul. Just over $375,000 financed a failed campaign in Colorado to increase taxes on cannabis sales in order to support pandemic research. Another $1 million was spent on consulting and advertising expenses in a single year. And $3.3 million went toward the purchase of a luxurious townhouse a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.”

Governor of Hawaii: Attorney General Warns Of Fake Fbi Bitcoin Phone Scam Involving “Spoofed” Department Of The Attorney General Phone Number. “Scammers are calling Hawaiʻi residents pretending to be Federal Bureau of Investigations (‘FBI’) agents. The callers are lying and telling potential victims that they owe unpaid fines and are going to be arrested unless they immediately make a payment in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, or using other methods.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cornell Chronicle: Lawmakers struggle to differentiate AI and human emails. “A field experiment investigating how the natural language model GPT-3, the predecessor to the most recently released model, might be used to generate constituent email messages showed that legislators were only slightly less likely to respond to AI-generated messages (15.4%) than human-generated (17.3%).”

Georgetown University: Georgetown and UNHCR Collaborate on Big Data and Forced Displacement Project. “Georgetown and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have formed a new partnership to blend traditional and new forms of data to better understand and predict mass movements of forcibly displaced populations.”

North Carolina State University: Leafing Through History: Mining DNA Clues From Centuries-Old Manuscripts. “Since early 2021, an intercollege, interdisciplinary team of NC State researchers has been using modern scientific techniques to mine genetic clues from old manuscripts. In doing so, they are uncovering traces of the past hidden in the books and shaping future scholarship.” Good morning, Internet…

March 24, 2023 at 05:27PM
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