Southeast Asia Newspapers, Snapchat, Raspberry Pi, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 16, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Center for Research Libraries: Global Press Archive CRL Alliance adds Southeast Asian Newspapers as digital open access collection . “Southeast Asian Newspapers adds to the growing body of open access material available in the Global Press Archive, by virtue of support from Center for Research Libraries members and other participating institutions. The Southeast Asian Newspapers collection encompasses over 265,000 digitized pages from 65 publications, including: Gia định báo (the first Vietnamese newspaper, published in Saigon from 1865–1910), Nagara vatta (the first Cambodian-language newspaper), and Bramartani (a weekly newspaper from Surakarka, Indonesia), among others.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Engadget: Snapchat is adding TikTok-like AR music lenses. “Snap has signed a music licensing deal with Sony Music Entertainment. The partnership means Snapchat users will have access to songs from Sony artists. With today’s announcement, the company has licensing deals with all the major music labels. And Snap plans to take advantage of the milestone by launching new AR music filters.”
MakeUseOf: Raspberry Pi OS 11 Is Now Available: Here’s What’s New. “Debian Linux 11–codenamed ‘Bullseye’—offers a range of features that make the latest Raspberry Pi OS slicker and more functional than before. Let’s take a look at the latest iteration of Raspberry Pi OS and its noteworthy features.”
USEFUL STUFF
Wired: How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick. “For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to take a look at Tails. It was developed as a way to avoid surveillance, censorship, advertising, and viruses, and it comes with a stack of useful, privacy-focused software applications. It’s also free to use, and all you need to provide is the USB stick. We’ll show you how to set up Tails in its default configuration, which gives you maximum anonymity and protection; every time you start it up, it’s like you’re starting up a new computer for the first time. If you’d prefer to have Tails remember your activity and hold onto files saved to the USB stick, that’s possible too—the instructions are here.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
New York Times: Google executives tell employees it can compete for Pentagon contracts without violating its principles.. “Google executives told employees last week in a companywide meeting that it is interested in a Pentagon contract for cloud computing and that working for the military would not necessarily conflict with principles created by the company for how its artificial intelligence technology would be used.”
Wall Street Journal: Roblox, Building Out the Metaverse, Looks to Bring Educational Videogames to Schools. “Roblox Corp. plans to help bring educational videogames to classrooms world-wide, part of its strategy to expand its mostly teen and preteen user base and play a role in the next evolution of the internet known as the metaverse. San Mateo, Calif.-based Roblox announced Monday that it has invested $10 million to help develop three games for middle-school, high-school and college students. ”
BBC: Google: US technology giant to invest $740m in Australia. “Google has announced that it will invest A$1bn ($740m, £550m) in Australia over the next five years. It is the US technology giant’s largest investment in the country to date. Google says the money will be used to build a research hub, increase its cloud computing capacity and fund partnerships with local organisations.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
CNET: A timeline of the biggest ransomware attacks. “Cryptocurrency ransomware payments totaled roughly $350 million in 2020, according to Chainanalysis — an annual increase of over 300% from 2019. And because US companies are legally required to report cyberattacks only if customers’ personal information is compromised, that estimate may be far too conservative.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
University of Washington: Serious mental illness? There’s an app for that. “People with a serious mental illness often have dysfunctional beliefs that spiral them downward. They feel stigmatized. They may believe people are out to get them. They might think they will never get better. Wanting to address these dysfunctional beliefs, researchers created a smartphone app with daily game-like exercises to help people with a serious mental illness reassess their beliefs. The app was tested among 315 people in 45 states recruited through online ads on Google and Facebook in 2020.”
The Next Web: IBM achieves true ‘quantum supremacy’ with most powerful computer ever built. “Healthy skepticism: We’re not sure exactly what Eagle does. Modern quantum computers usually solve bespoke problems that have little-to-no impact on society. This is because the technology is in its infancy. The point of building a quantum computer, today, is to see how far we can push this rudimentary technology on our way towards a simple goal: quantum supremacy.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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November 17, 2021 at 02:07AM
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Whistleblowers, Public Opinion, Government Oversight, More: ResearchBuzz, Special Facebook Edition, November 16, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TechCrunch: Facebook’s new academic research API opens in early access. “This week, a handful of academic researcher teams will gain access to a new tool from Facebook designed to aggregate near-universal real-time data on the world’s biggest social network. When it comes to who gets access to Facebook data and how, the company now known as Meta is still feeling reverberations from 2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested the personal data of millions of unaware Facebook users to build detailed profiles on potential voters.”
Business Insider: After years of struggling to get people to leave Facebook, tech recruiters say there’s an exodus building at the company. “Kali [Hays]’ story, and another this week from Insider’s Rob Price describing burnout and frustration at the tech giant, hint at a shift in how staffers at what’s now known as Meta look at the company. Yes, they’re still well paid, and yes, lots of people still want to work there. The company is still hiring, planning to bring on 10,000 people to build its metaverse. But there’s a feeling among some employees that there’s more interesting work to be done elsewhere. That poses a risk for any company that depends on having the best talent.”
USEFUL STUFF
Snopes: Does ‘New Facebook/Meta Rule’ Permit Company To Use Your Photos?. “In November 2021, a copypasta post claiming that a new ‘Facebook/Meta rule’ allows Facebook (lately renamed ‘Meta’) to use members’ photographs without their permission circulated widely on that platform.” This rumor has been circulating for years and is STILL not true.
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
CNET: Facebook says it can’t keep up with oversight board’s recommendations. “Facebook says it can’t keep up with the recommendations its oversight board is producing and wants changes to the process. In a report released Tuesday, the giant social network says it wants to work with the quasi-independent body to ‘improve the recommendation process.’ The company, which recently rebranded as Meta, didn’t detail what changes it might be seeking but said it had spoken with the board.”
Scroll India: Sophie Zhang interview: Facebook prioritises Indian power players, not Indian people. “Sophie Zhang knows all too well the influence Facebook can wield over a society. As a data scientist working at the tech giant, she saw up close the social media platform being exploited to undermine political systems around the world, including India. So, in 2020, she wrote a 7,800-word memo, laying out damning details of ‘Facebook’s failures’.”
New York Times: When a Logo Doesn’t Risk It All: Meta’s Brand Is Designed for Unknown Worlds. “To design experts, the change by a scandal-plagued company was the latest example of efforts by corporate America to create brands that are less unique and ultimately less offensive. It was also a reflection of the growing challenge for corporate identities to exist in many different sizes and digital settings at once, from V.R. headsets to smartwatches — a challenge that is magnified for Meta as it tries to establish an identity for something that largely doesn’t exist yet.”
The Verge: Meta CTO thinks bad metaverse moderation could pose an ‘existential threat’. “Meta (formerly Facebook) CTO Andrew Bosworth warned employees that creating safe virtual reality experiences was a vital part of its business plan — but also potentially impossible at a large scale. In an internal memo seen by Financial Times, Bosworth apparently said he wanted Meta virtual worlds to have ‘almost Disney levels of safety,’ although spaces from third-party developers could have looser standards than directly Meta-built content. Harassment or other toxic behavior could pose an ‘existential threat’ to the company’s plans for an embodied future internet if it turned mainstream consumers off VR.”
Independent: Facebook mysteriously banned people from saying ‘#SaltBae’. “Facebook had blocked any mention of #SaltBae around the world after a controversy over one of his gold-encrusted steaks. Anyone who had searched for the phrase during that time showed a message saying that it had violated community standards. The company has now reversed the decision – but said it was not clear why the hashtag had been banned in the first place.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Radio Free Asia: Facebook Papers: Chinese state-linked hackers targeting Cambodian opposition. “A hacker collective with suspected ties to Chinese intelligence has engaged in ‘consistent and long-term targeting’ of officials from the Cambodia National Rescue Party, an internal investigation by Facebook found.”
CNN: Ohio Attorney General sues Meta over revelations from the ‘Facebook Papers’. “Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on Monday announced that he is suing Meta, the social media giant formerly known as Facebook, based on revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen and the trove of internal company documents she leaked.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
KnowTechie: Surprise! Three out of four adults think Facebook is bad for society. “If you’ve seen or heard any kind of news lately, you’re probably aware of just how much scrutiny Facebook has come under over the last couple of months. Well, a new survey from CNN shows just how bad Facebook’s reputation has gotten. Three out of four adults say that the company makes society worse.”
Los Angeles Times: Op-Ed: Think Facebook is invincible? Here’s how the social media giant can be held accountable. “Facebook should further be held liable for misleading public statements about the nature of its products. For example, the company’s statements about the mental health benefits of social apps for young people glaringly omit its own internal research showing that Instagram use makes body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teenage girls. Facebook’s products and what the company says about them should be fair game for product liability lawsuits.”
FiveThirtyEight: Facebook’s Algorithm Is Broken. We Collected Some Spicy Suggestions On How To Fix It. . “If the algorithm is to blame, can Facebook change the algorithm to make it better? What would that look like? To find out, I interviewed 12 leading experts on data and computer science, as well as former Facebook employees, and asked them to propose changes that could help the algorithm suck less. What I got was a range of ideas about how Facebook could start to solve this problem, or whether a solution is even possible. Some are more radical than others, so I’ve categorized these ideas from mild to spicy (though we know Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prefers it sweet).”
EFF: After Facebook Leaks, Here Is What Should Come Next. “When Mark Zuckerberg went in front of Congress to address his company’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal over three years ago, America’s lawmakers seemed to have trouble agreeing on basic things like how the company’s business model worked, not to mention the underlying causes of its issues or how to fix them. But since then, policymakers and politicians have had time to educate themselves…. Now, the Facebook Papers have once again thrust the company into the center of public discourse, and the scale of the company’s problems have captured the attention of both news outlets and Congress. That’s good—it’s high time to turn public outrage into meaningful action that will rein in the company.” Good morning, Internet…
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November 16, 2021 at 09:10PM
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James Weldon Johnson, Tribal Treaties Database, Women in Distilling, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, November 16, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Maine Government News: Maine State Archives Shares Railroad Accident Report of the Death of Civil Rights Leader James Weldon Johnson. “The original report of the 1938 railroad accident that killed famed Civil Rights leader James Weldon Johnson in Wiscasset, which is held by the Maine State Archives, is now available for viewing on DigitalMaine.com…. James Weldon Johnson was a famous author and Civil Rights activist during the early twentieth century. He is most famous for writing the lyrics to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ commonly referred to as the Black National Anthem.”
Oklahoma State University: OSU Library project unveiled at White House Tribal Nations Summit. “The new “Tribal Treaties Database” is a free public resource available at treaties.okstate.edu. The first phase of the project focuses on U.S. government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883. The treaties are indexed and can be browsed by tribe, treaty or location.”
Mental Floss: How Many Danny DeVitos High Is Mount Everest? The Omni Calculator Can Tell You That, and Other Weird Measurements. “Mount Everest is officially 29,032 feet tall, but that figure only goes so far to capture the peak’s magnitude. It’s much easier to picture 26 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another, or 5696 Danny DeVitos. That’s why the scientists and researchers at the Omni Calculator Project developed the Weird Units Converter. Plug a measurement in a standard unit into the tool and it will tell you what it is in Empire State Buildings, spaghetti strands, blue whales, and more.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TheNextWeb: Give YouTube the finger by restoring dislike counts with this plugin. “YouTube’s decision to hide dislike counts on videos has sparked anger and derision. The company said the move will protect creators from harassment and coordinated attacks, but critics fear it will become harder to find useful and trustworthy content. Some of them have proposed using YouTube comments as an alternative dislike counter, while others are devising technical fixes.”
The Verge: Twitter Makes Big Changes For Devs As It Eyes Decentralized Future. “Twitter has announced that the second version of its application programming interface, or API, is ready to come out of early access and become the default for developers. When Twitter announced API v2 in August 2020, it seemed like a chance to rebuild not only the infrastructure on which developers build their apps and bots, but Twitter’s relationship with the people using its platform as well.”
Engadget: Twitter buys Threader to help develop Twitter Blue features. “Twitter has acquired Threader. It’s one of a few apps that allow you to make threads easier to digest. By tagging Threader’s profile and typing ‘compile,’ the bot will condense a series of tweets into an article-like form.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Furturism: Scammers Are Creating Fake Students on Harvard.edu and Using Them to Shill Brands. “The practice of scammers cooking up fake Harvard students to shill brands on the university’s site appears to be widespread. In response to questions from Futurism, Harvard removed the Mikao John profile as well as about two dozen similar accounts being used for the same purpose. According to emails advertising the scheme obtained by Futurism, a Harvard blog post from a fake student like John can be bought for as little as $300 via PayPal.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Irish Examiner: Irish far-right groups flocking to encrypted and unmoderated social media sites, research finds. “Irish far-right groups have been exploiting online loopholes and using encrypted and largely unmoderated social media sites and messaging apps to mobilise and spread messages of hate throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s according to research carried out by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an independent global organisation dedicated to powering solutions to extremism, hate, and disinformation.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
NewsWise: Clinician peer networks remove race and gender bias. “Using an experimental design, researchers showed that clinicians who initially exhibited significant race and gender bias in their treatment of a clinical case, could be influenced to change their clinical recommendations to exhibit no bias. ‘We found that by changing the structure of information-sharing networks among clinicians, we could change doctors’ biased perceptions of their patients’ clinical information,’ says [Professor Damon] Centola, who also directs the Network Dynamics Group at the Annenberg School and is a Senior Fellow of Health Economics at the Leonard Davis Institute. ‘Put simply, doctors tend to think differently in networks than they do when they are alone.'”
CBC News: Researcher developing online tool to help find missing Indigenous tuberculosis patients . “A University of Winnipeg researcher is developing an online research tool to help Indigenous communities and families find missing tuberculosis patients who were sent to Manitoba hospitals and sanatoriums but never came home. Anne Lindsay is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Winnipeg and will be working with the university’s Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project on the initiative.”
Open Gov: AI Records Data on Species to Monitor Biodiversity. “The U.S. research team from the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin–Madison is deploying autonomous recording equipment in natural areas to eavesdrop on the animals. This project aims to help answer important scientific questions, such as which species are present and how their abundance changes over time. Their long-term goal is to characterise natural soundscapes using artificial intelligence and to use that data as a baseline to measure how ecosystems are responding to climate change and other human-induced changes.” Good morning, Internet…
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November 16, 2021 at 06:38PM
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Black History Williamsburg, The Schoolbooks Archive, Child Development, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 15, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
13 News Now (Virginia): ‘Local Black Histories:’ New virtual project tells untold stories of Greater Williamsburg area. “A new, interactive platform uncovers the rich history of the Black community in the Greater Williamsburg area. The Local Black Histories Project launched Sunday. The project is spearheaded by the Village Initiative for Education Equity, a non-profit focusing on equity in education. The College of William & Mary and Williamsburg-James City County are also partners.”
The Hindu: Digital archive of school books launched. “Azim Premji University on Monday launched an open access digital archive of over 5,600 school books and related material from India and other countries in South Asia. The Schoolbooks Archive, as the platform is called, has material in multiple languages including Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Arabic, and other languages apart from English that span a period of more than 200 years.” Fourteen languages are represented here, but English has the most materials.
University of Maryland Baltimore: Free Video Series Can Help Kids be ‘Unstuck and On Target’ . “The series of free, educational videos are designed to support parents and caregivers tackling common emotional and behavioral topics to help children to stay organized, plan and reach their goals, be flexible thinkers and help regulate their feelings. Behavioral specialists call these skills executive functioning. By following the tips and skills in the videos, parents can help their children be successful, avoid meltdowns and negativity, and develop a shared language and ways of interacting to achieve calmer, more productive days.” There are 17 videos here. Five of them are in Spanish. You can turn on captioning (the videos are on YouTube) and the ones I spot-checked looked accurate.
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
The Register: There’s something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs . “An update to the Insiders version of Windows 11 includes a massive list of bug fixes, many of them serious, showing the wisdom of holding back on an early upgrade from Windows 10. Windows 11 was released on 5 October but has proved a problematic upgrade due to onerous system requirements and certain user interface decisions, with some features chopped in the Start menu and a confusing new right-click menu in File Explorer.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: 25 of the Best True Crime Podcasts, Rated From ‘Cozy’ to ‘Disturbing’. “The genre is often seen as exploitative—is true crime cathartic, helping us to examine and thus exorcise our own fears and demons? Or is it just a way to wallow in the suffering of others from a discreet distance? That’s a question to ask of any entertainment, really, but it’s also not entirely fair: the true crime genre is broader than it gets credit for, with one of the earliest popular shows (Serial) focusing on the potential failings of the judicial system. Or they can be an education in the worlds of crime, forensics, and society. Across these popular pods, you’ll find examples of all of that and more.” Slideshow.
MakeUseOf: The 6 Best Free Sites for DIY Arts and Crafts. “Sometimes, it’s nice to take a little time away from our devices and do something different. But it’s not always easy to find an activity interesting enough to keep us occupied for long enough. Why not give your creative side a chance? Here, we look at six free websites that offer fun and affordable DIY arts and crafts ideas to keep your mind as well as your hands busy.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: New online database to aid in learning Chinese. “On 25 November, researchers from the UAB Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asian Studies will be presenting e·Chinese, an online quadrilingual database created to help users learn Chinese. The presentation will take place at the Confucius Institute Foundation in Barcelona. The main objective of this project, funded by the Confucius Institute Foundation in Barcelona and the UAB Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asian Studies, is to offer open access to a list of online resources aimed at teaching and learning Chinese.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
The Conversation: Technology-enabled abuse: how ‘safety by design’ can reduce stalking and domestic violence . “Traditional ideas of cybersecurity are focused on ‘stranger threats’. However, to reduce and combat digital domestic and family violence we need an ‘intimate threat’ model. Partners and family can compel others to provide access to devices. They may be linked to online accounts or able to guess passwords, based on their intimate knowledge of the owner. In this context, technologies that enable surveillance and recording can be used to constrain and threaten victims and survivors in alarming ways, in everyday life.”
NiemanLab: The end of “click to subscribe, call to cancel”? One of the news industry’s favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says. “A study of 526 news organizations in the United States found that only 41% make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, and more than half trained customer service reps in tactics to dissuade customers who call to unsubscribe. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, recently made it clear that it sees the practice as 1) one of several ‘dark patterns that trick or trap consumers into subscriptions’ and 2) straight-up illegal. ”
RESEARCH & OPINION
WION: Social media may lead to demise of apostrophe, suggest researchers. “In recent years, social media has found numerous takers. The situation is such that almost everybody is on social media. Sharing thoughts or commenting on any issue is part of an everyday affair for several people. In these messages, the character limit on the posts at online platforms, such as Twitter, seems to have been playing a dampener as it is leading to the habit of dropping punctuation from the text.” Good afternoon, Internet…
Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!
November 16, 2021 at 01:57AM
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Monday CoronaBuzz, November 15, 2021: 42 pointers to updates, health information, research news, and more.
By ResearchBuzz
Please get vaccinated. Please wear a mask when you’re inside with a bunch of people. Much love.
NEW RESOURCES – MEDICAL/HEALTH
WSU Insider: New podcast pushes for healthcare professionals’ mental health. “A new podcast created by faculty at the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine explores how physicians and other healthcare professionals can maintain their physical and mental health. ‘Finding Joy: The Health Care Professional’s Journey to Wellness and Resiliency’ features doctors, nurses, medical students from the WSU College of Medicine, and other health care professionals as they dive into the challenges they face and how they manage practicing wellness in their careers.”
UPDATES
BBC: UK bucks Europe Covid trend but concern over winter. “While many European countries are seeing steep rises in coronavirus cases and preparing to step up Covid restrictions, the UK has been going in the other direction. Experts say differences in levels of immunity and people’s behaviour are the likely explanations.”
New York Times: On Podcasts and Radio, Misleading Covid-19 Talk Goes Unchecked. “Scientific studies have shown that vaccines will protect people against the coronavirus for long periods and have significantly reduced the spread of Covid-19. As the global death toll related to Covid-19 exceeds five million — and at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans are not fully vaccinated — iHeart, Spotify, Apple and many smaller audio companies have done little to rein in what radio hosts and podcasters say about the virus and vaccination efforts.”
Meduza: The two faces of RT’s coronavirus propaganda. “When it comes to pandemic coverage at the network’s English-language division and especially its German-language branch, Russia Today actively amplifies unscientific information about COVID-19 and features many guests who are openly hostile to the very idea of vaccination. As a result, RT’s content for audiences abroad becomes material that Russia’s own vaccine opponents cite as ‘proof’ against the need for inoculation.”
SOCIETAL IMPACT
BBC: Online hate speech rose 20% during pandemic: ‘We’ve normalised it’. “Online hate speech in the UK and US has risen by 20% since the start of the pandemic, according to a new report. Youth charity Ditch the Label commissioned the study, which analysed 263 million conversations in the UK and US, between 2019 and mid-2021. It found 50.1 million discussions about, or examples of, racist hate speech in that time.”
Associated Press: Thousands of military families struggle with food insecurity. “It’s a hidden crisis that has existed for years inside one of the most well-funded institutions on the planet and has only worsened during the coronavirus pandemic. As many as 160,000 active-duty military members are having trouble feeding their families. That estimate by Feeding America, which coordinates the work of more than 200 food banks around the country, underscores how long-term food insecurity has extended into every aspect of American life, including the military.”
BBC: No regrets! Pandemic purchases that made us happy . “Lockdown was an isolating experience for many people, but for John Emery it was an amazing opportunity to make new friends nearby and overseas. The maintenance engineer has always had an interest in amateur radio, but pandemic restrictions actually gave him the chance to fully embrace his hobby. He was able to save enough money to afford the equipment needed. With radio exams forced to move online, he also had the time to get fully qualified.”
ACTIVISM / PROTESTS
BBC: Maori tribe tells anti-vaccine protestors to stop using popular haka. “A Maori tribe has told anti-vaccine protesters in New Zealand to stop the use of a famous haka ‘immediately’. The Ka Mate haka is hugely popular as it is performed by national rugby team the All Blacks before every match. The Ngati Toa tribe, which has legal guardianship of the haka, issued a strong notice after protestors performed the war dance during demonstrations last week.”
Foreign Policy: Italy’s Anti-Vaccination Movement Is Militant and Dangerous. “The intensity of Italy’s anti-vaccine movement is confusing at first glance. The country has done a good job of vaccinating its citizens during the pandemic. Right now, around 83 percent of people over 12 years old have had both doses. To put that in perspective, the United States is around 59 percent vaccinated, and as of last month, around 74 percent of adults in the European Union were vaccinated. But that hasn’t made Italian anti-vaccine hysteria any less powerful.”
HEALTH CARE / HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS
Charlotte Weekly: Report: Nursing homes down 221,000 jobs since start of pandemic. “The American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living released a report Nov. 10 showing long term facilities are suffering from the worst labor crisis and job loss than any other health care sector. Nursing homes alone have seen its industry’s employment level drop by 14% or 221,000 jobs since the beginning of the pandemic.”
HEALTH CARE – CAPACITY
Portland Press-Herald: Maine sets all-time high for COVID-19 hospitalizations. “According to data from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of individuals hospitalized rose to 248, which eclipses the previous high of 235 set on Sept. 25. Among those currently hospitalized, 72 are in critical care and 31 are on ventilators. Prior to September, hospitalizations had not been above 200 since January. Now, the number has been above 200 for 21 of the last 22 days.”
EU Politics: New Retail Trends Explode In Spite Of Ongoing Covid Pandemic. “The continuing international health crisis has fundamentally changed daily life in France, as well as the average citizen’s consumer habits. Key players in retail are keen to answer new questions arising among the consumer base. According to Antoine Daviet, product marketing director of Trace One, new dynamics have emerged, particularly in the areas of eco-packaging, digitalization and local economies.”
Charlotte Observer: Motel owner announced vaccine mandate. Then most of his staff quit. “‘Now this is great. Just discovered this,’ says Joseph Franklyn McElroy, chuckling, as he tries to get the hardwood floors inside this cozy little motel room to sparkle. ‘This is a Swiffer that steams at the same time it cleans. It’s my favorite thing.’ The steam mop with the purple handle is actually a Shark-branded product, not a Swiffer. It’s tough, though, to fault McElroy for misidentifying this tool of the housekeeping trade. While he has become as proficient at turning over rooms at the Meadowlark Motel over the past couple months as any current cleaning staffer, changing linens and sanitizing toilets was never meant to be the New York City chief executive’s bailiwick.”
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
Boing Boing: Jen Psaki is back from Covid and as feisty as ever. “Twelve days after testing positive for a breakthrough case of Covid-19, Press Secretary Jen Psaki is back, along with a fresh stockpile of TNT. When asked by a reporter about the Build Back Better Act, and how it might add to inflationary pressure, Psaki shot straight to the point.”
BBC: Covid: Austria orders nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated. “Austria is placing millions of unvaccinated people into lockdown from Monday amid record infection levels and growing pressure on hospitals.’We are not taking this step lightly but it is necessary,’ Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said. Unvaccinated people will only be able to leave home for a limited number of reasons, like working or buying food.”
Associated Press: As COVID-19 Surges In Eastern Europe, Leaders Slow To Act. “At the main hospital in Romania’s capital, the morgue ran out of space for the dead in recent days, and doctors in Bulgaria have suspended routine surgeries so they can tend to a surge in COVID-19 patients. In the Serbian capital, the graveyard now operates an extra day during the week in order to bury all the bodies arriving. For two months now, a stubborn wave of virus infections has ripped mercilessly through several countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where vaccination rates are much lower than elsewhere on the continent. While medical workers pleaded for tough restrictions or even lockdowns, leaders let the virus rage unimpeded for weeks.”
Euronews: Latvia bans unvaccinated MPs from voting and suspends pay. “Latvian MPs who have not been vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19 will have their pay suspended and no longer be able to take part in parliamentary votes. MPs approved the measure in a vote on Friday with 62 votes in favour in the 100-seat parliament.”
BBC: Why China is still trying to achieve zero Covid. “A person walks into a five-star hotel to ask briefly for directions and ends up in two weeks quarantine because a guest had some coronavirus contact. One crew member on a high-speed train has close contact with an infected person, and a trainload of passengers is sent to quarantine for mass testing. In Shanghai Disneyland, 33,863 visitors suddenly have to undergo mass testing because a visitor the day before got infected. Welcome to life in the country which now feels like a perpetual, back-to-zero-Covid world.”
STATE GOVERNMENT
Tennessean: Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signs sweeping COVID-19 legislation into law. “With a stroke of a pen Friday afternoon, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law an expansive legislative package strictly limiting the authority schools, health agencies and businesses have over COVID-19 restrictions. The law now takes immediate effect in Tennessee and will almost certainly face swift legal challenges. ”
CBS Denver: COVID In Colorado: Gov. Jared Polis Cites New Mexico As Example Of Why He’s Not Planning To Bring Back Mask Mandate. “The Governor of Colorado says he does not plan on bringing back a mask mandate throughout the state even as COVID-19 cases surge. Gov. Jared Polis said he would leave masking orders to the counties, citing that neighboring New Mexico has a mask mandate and cases were comparable to those seen in Colorado. However, Polis did push for more people to get vaccinated.”
Ars Technica: States expand boosters, activate crisis care as delta rolls on. “While cases and hospitalizations have subsided in previous southeastern hotspots such as Florida and Alabama, the wave has headed north and west. Nationally, new cases of COVID-19 have plateaued at a high level of more than 70,000 per day, down from September peaks of upwards of 160,000. North Dakota, Colorado, Minnesota, Alaska, and Vermont currently have the top-five highest case rates per 100,000 people, according to tracking by The New York Times. New Mexico, which ranks seventh for the highest daily case rates, is seeing a surge in hospitalizations, and more facilities are moving to crisis standards of care.”
ArmyTimes: Oklahoma Guard goes rogue, rejects COVID vaccine mandate after sudden change of command. “The new commander of the Oklahoma National Guard has declared the organization will not enforce the Defense Department’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on its troops, according to local media outlets. Army Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino was announced as the state’s new adjutant general Wednesday, though he has not yet been confirmed by the state Senate, according to a press release from Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office.”
CBS News: COVID booster shots allowed for all adults in California, Colorado and New Mexico. “Three states — California, Colorado and New Mexico — are allowing COVID-19 booster shots for all adults, even though federal health officials recommend limiting shots to patients considered most at risk. The three states have some of the nation’s highest rates of new COVID infections.”
INDIVIDUALS / BANDS / GROUPS
WDSU: Newborn finally discharged after being hospitalized for 6 months with COVID-19. “A newborn baby will spend his first night at home Wednesday after contracting COVID-19 over the summer. Monchell Cruppi told WDSU that her son Byron was born prematurely in April. ‘He actually came from Touro when he was two months, and right before he was getting ready to get discharged, he got COVID,’ Cruppi said. ‘That extended his stay four extra months.’ Doctors said Byron was infected by a visitor who did not realize they were sick.”
StarTribune: Ironman COVID-19 survivor rewards Minnesota caregivers. “Not many patients return voluntarily to intensive care units where they endured pain and nightmares, but Ben O’Donnell stopped by the University of Minnesota Medical Center on Friday to thank those who saved him from one of the state’s first and most shocking COVID-19 cases. The 40-year-old presented his finisher medal from the Ironman Tulsa triathlon on May 22 to caregivers who treated his COVID-19 in March 2020 — a pick-me-up for a critical care team that didn’t expect to be battling the pandemic 20 months later.”
BBC: The Nigerian artist who turned pain into fame during lockdown. “The beauty of paintings by Ijeoma Ogwuegbu disguises the pain she is living through. Stacked up against a wall in the Nigerian artist’s home studio in Lagos are canvasses adorned with swirls and circles of bright colour. Some are abstract and some have more recognisable forms but are clearly impressionistic. These are the works of an artist who took up painting 18 months ago as a way to deal with the searing discomfort caused by a condition known as fibromyalgia.”
INDIVIDUALS / BANDS / GROUPS – CELEBRITIES/FAMOUS
Boing Boing: Gene Simmons rants about anti-vaxxers: enemies with an “evil idea”. “Kiss frontman Gene Simmons is a tangled man when it comes to politics. He has described himself as both ‘an avowed democratic capitalist’ and a ‘social liberal/equal rights & fiscal/foreign policy conservative’ (see Tweet below). He voted for Obama, according to Rolling Stone, but was then dissatisfied with his vote ‘in a lot of ways.’ He also once said about Trump: ‘He’s good for the political system.’ But one thing he is clear about: Anti-vaxxers are the enemy.”
SPORTS
University of Washington: Post-COVID-19 symptoms appear rare in college athletes. “The observational study looked at 3,597 male and female athletes from 44 colleges and universities. All of the athletes had been infected by COVID-19, but just 1.2% were found to have persistent symptoms – defined as those lasting more than three weeks from initial illness or symptom onset. During return to exercise, the prevalence of exertional symptoms – including chest pain, shortness of breath, fatigue and heart palpitations – was also low, in just 4% of the study cohort.”
K-12 EDUCATION
Newswise: New Research Shows Virtual School Can Harm Children’s Vision. “When COVID-19 first shut down classrooms and virtual schooling became the new norm, ophthalmologists predicted an increase in digital eye strain in children. New research from ophthalmologists at Wills Eye Hospital confirms that the increased screen time did lead to more eye strain in children, as well as a more troubling eye condition called convergence insufficiency, which can cause difficulty reading. The study is being presented at AAO 2021, the 125th annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.”
San Diego Union-Tribune: Judge dismisses lawsuit challenging Newsom’s school mask rules – The San Diego Union-Tribune. “A San Diego County judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit that challenged the state’s school mask mandate, saying that Gov. Gavin Newsom has the legal authority to enforce universal masking. Judge Cynthia Freeland dismissed the lawsuit filed by Let Them Breathe, a local group that has led opposition efforts against mandatory COVID precautions in schools across the state.”
HEALTH
Newswise: Flu Season Underway Amid Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic. “For the second straight year, flu season is emerging against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the number of flu cases was relatively low last year, experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine say that this year, it could be much higher.”
CNN: The Covid-19 numbers seem stuck. That doesn’t bode well for winter, experts say. “The coronavirus numbers don’t look so good this week. New Covid-19 diagnoses are up in about half of US states over the past week. Hospitalizations are up in 11 states, and deaths have risen in 17 states. US coronavirus cases have plateaued in recent weeks, holding on to about half of the growth from this summer’s latest surge. While new cases have fallen in some states, they’re rising in others, particularly some region’s cold-weather states.”
CIDRAP: WHO, CDC warn COVID disruptions could stall measles battle. “Missed measles vaccine doses for babies and deteriorating surveillance for measles during the pandemic are setting up a perfect storm for the disease to come roaring back, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned today.”
CNN: Flu shots uptake is now partisan. It didn’t use to be. “Uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine has, unfortunately, become partisan like so much else in our society. Almost every Democratic adult (90% to 95%) has gotten a shot, while a little less than two-thirds of Republican adults have. That partisanship appears to have transferred to at least one other important vaccination. An examination of flu shot data suggests that which party people belong to is highly correlated with whether they have or will get a flu shot this season — something that was not predictive of flu shot uptake the last few years.”
BBC: Covid vaccine ‘waning immunity’: How worried should I be?. “There have been warnings from doctors and the UK’s Health Security Agency that waning immunity is leading to deaths even of people who have had two doses of a Covid vaccine. So how much protection are we left with?”
NBC News: People got sicker during the pandemic, even without Covid-19. “A new study found that the number of Americans able to keep their blood pressure at healthy levels dropped significantly in 2020 —either because people avoided the doctor’s office or were unable to get care because their physicians closed their offices temporarily during the pandemic. The research, presented Saturday at an annual meeting of the American Heart Association, showed that on average, only 53.3 percent of adults in the U.S. had their blood pressure under control last year, compared to 60.5 percent in 2019.”
RESEARCH
Newswise: Can Ancient Botanical Therapies Help Treat COVID-19?. “A novel study is assessing whether medicinal mushrooms and Chinese herbs provide therapeutic benefit in treating acute COVID-19 infection. MACH-19 (Mushrooms and Chinese Herbs for COVID-19) — a multi-center study led by University of California San Diego School of Medicine and UCLA, in collaboration with the La Jolla Institute for Immunology — is among the first to evaluate these specific integrative medicine approaches using the gold standard of Western medicine: the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.”
OUTBREAKS
Los Angeles Times: As infections rise, the San Joaquin Valley becomes the land of the eternal COVID surge. “This is what the COVID-19 pandemic looks like in the part of California where the Delta variant surge refuses to let up. In Fresno County, understaffed hospitals have been so clogged that ambulance crews have stopped transporting people unless they have a life-threatening emergency. In Tulare County, a Visalia hospital — which has been treating more COVID-19 patients in recent days than any other medical facility in the state — declared an internal disaster last week on a day 51 patients in the emergency room waited for a bed to open up. And this week, sparsely populated Kings County, which has one of California’s lowest vaccination rates, had one of the state’s highest per capita COVID-19 hospitalization rates.”
OPINION
New Zealand Stuff: Covid vaccine not a freedom threat, unvaccinated host population is. “There will be very few people now who have not had an opportunity to be vaccinated. No one in mainland New Zealand is so isolated from society that they have not been to town in the past year. Most will have driven past a medical clinic, GP clinic or vaccination venue several times in that time. We must stop making excuses for them. There are none.”
CoronaBuzz is brought to you by ResearchBuzz. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.
November 15, 2021 at 11:10PM
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IFTTT / Reddit Alerts Filling Up With Porn Spam? Here’s What To Do
By ResearchBuzz
A little over five years ago I wrote an article called Keeping Up With Reddit: Use IFTTT, Not Google Alerts. While I don’t use Reddit as a social network, it has been invaluable for keeping me informed about new resources, especially from smaller creators who might not have the resources to do a big rollout with press releases and so forth.
That article includes this comment: “What about spam? – Personally, I haven’t seen much spam on the Reddit resources I get. I think my keywords are keeping most of it at bay.”
That quote did not age well.
In the last few weeks my Reddit/IFTTT notifications have been overrun with pornography spam. Not just text but pictures of people doing things I don’t want to look at with body parts I don’t want to look at. Having to slog through that makes it difficult to get to my meaningful email.
Initially I thought I would be unable to completely solve this problem and would have to live with unsolicited tonkers, but I fixed it entirely. Tonkers 100% gone. How’d I do it? Read on!
(ALSO PLEASE NOTE: I hope this goes without saying but if you’re a grown adult and want to look at pornography it’s fine with me. I don’t and I don’t like it showing up in my email.)
My Reddit Spam Problem
While I was putting this article together, I got an example of this Reddit spam clean enough that I can post a screenshot without censoring 90% of it (some words were censored along with a naked rear end and the guy’s face.) I also highlighted an important part of the subject line.
If these porn emails were all the same, then it would be easy to filter them out. But each of them is much like this one – a range of keywords, some not in English, and sometimes an image. There is no single keyword that I can use to filter all of this spam out. (And Gmail is not helping; issues of ResearchBuzz regularly end up in my spam bin while the Reddit porn spam has no trouble making it to my inbox.)
One thing I noticed with this and the other Reddit spam is the subreddit: /r/u_guicepdeo1993 . The u_ is not a regular part of most subreddits I see. Taking a quick look at the other spams, I noticed that the subreddit style seems to be consistent. Here are three examples:
/r/u_muscperssing1980
/r/u_ticdime1991
/r/u_unarhot1990
As I understand it, that u_ as part of a subreddit’s name means it’s a subreddit that’s attached to a user account. I think they’re made automatically; here’s mine for ResearchBuzz: reddit.com/r/u_researchbuzz .
When it comes to Reddit monitoring, the personal subreddits do not provide useful resources, as I discovered when I reviewed a group of useful, non-spam Reddit alerts. Therefore, if I could filter out this subreddit pattern — the /r/u_ that appeared in every spammy email — I could eliminate most/all of my pornography spam without missing much if any meaningful content.
The logical next step was looking for a place to put that spam-catching filter.
Looking for a Place to Put a Filter
Gmail filters by entire words and only entire words as far as I know. If I wanted to create a Gmail filter that sent every email containing the subreddit name /r/u_muscperssing1980 to my Trash folder, I could do that. But I can’t filter by words that contain the string /r/u_, because Gmail does not support stemming, a search feature that allows you to find keywords based on a common string at the beginning (the “stem”.) Unless I want to gather up all the spam-sending subreddit names and manually add them to my Gmail filters (and who has time to do that?), Gmail is not going to help me in filtering out this spam.
I then checked at Reddit to see if there was some way I could change my search to limit my exposure to spam. The keyword that seems to attract the most junk is archive, but it’s such a useful keyword! It finds me so many good things and I am not willing to make it more specific. So adding more keywords to my search query was out, but I was hoping that Reddit might have a way to let me exclude personal subreddits from search results. I couldn’t find that feature, which left me with one more possible place to put a filter: in the IFTTT applet directly.
And there I struck gold!
Filtering with IFTTT
IFTTT has been around forever in Internet terms. I remember starting to use it around 2012. At that time it was limited to a few online services and a very basic “If this happens, then do that” workflow. Over the years it added a lot more services, but the functionality remained basic.
Eventually IFTTT started expanding how its tools work, and in September 2020 added a Pro plan for users who want to make more extensive, multi-step applets for Internet workflows. There was some controversy about that and a lot of people were angry about it.
But I’m not. IFTTT Pro is $3.33 a month, which is a bargain considering everything I do with it. I use IFTTT to organize materials I’ve saved to Pocket into a useful Google Sheet. I use it as a quick way to curate Twitter content. It lets me use Newsblur to save items to Pocket. I have even used it to monitor tweets coming from a certain area. Once you’ve got a Pro account, you can make unlimited applets; IFTTT doesn’t try to nickel and dime you if you want to create lots of workflows. I’ve been a paying customer (full freight) since Pro started and I think it’s absolutely worth it.
You will need to have a Pro account to use the solution I’m going to explain in this article. IFTTT offers a 7-day free trial, though, so you can try the steps in the article without giving up any $$$. Who knows, it might give you some useful ideas for more IFTTT tools!
If the black and blue slider reads “Connect” instead of “Connected,” you will have to activate the applet. This applet requires that you have IFTTT’s Reddit channel and the email channel activated.
This applet doesn’t yet have a filter. To add one, click on the Settings link in the upper corner. The editing page will look like this:
Click on the + in the middle, where the tool tip reads “Add queries and filter code.” You’ll get the option to either add a filter or add a query.
We’re going to add a filter. Here’s what will happen: every time the applet triggers, the information it gathers will be sent to the filter. The filter will look for /r/u_ , the string common to all the porn spam I’m getting. If it’s found, the subject and content of the mail will get a boilerplate replacement, making it easy to filter such email straight into the trash. Begone, unsolicited tonkers!
But before we get rid of them we have to put the filter in place.
Looking at the Filtering Options
When you choose to Add filter, you’ll get a page with an expected place to put your code, but what’s that stuff underneath? That’s information you get when the IFTTT applet runs, and generally you’ll need to use at least some of it in your filter code. Here’s a quick rundown.
Trigger Data: The Trigger data is what IFTTT gathers from a service when your applet’s “trigger” — the match or event that sets off the IFTTT recipe — is activated. For this applet, IFTTT gathers several different types of data from Reddit:
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.Title
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.ImageURL
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.Content
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.ContentHTML
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.PostURL
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.Subreddit
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.Author
Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.PostedAt
What these data are is pretty easy to figure out if you just look at the word after the last period in each item. This IFTTT applet triggers when it finds Reddit posts with a certain keyword and the data are the different elements from a Reddit post: the title, the author, when it was posted, the subreddit, and so on.
What we want is a data element that we can check for a /r/u_ string . You’d think that we could use Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.Subreddit for that, wouldn’t you? Well, I tried that and it didn’t work; I think the URL is formatted differently when presented as a subreddit name. The element that I used successfully to find the /r/u_ string is Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.PostURL .
User Actions: The user actions are what you can choose to do when your IFTTT applet is triggered. These are a little more obscure but easily understood:
Email.sendMeEmail.skip() – Instead of sending an email with data found using the IFTTT applet like you normally would, you skip it.
Email.sendMeEmail.setSubject() – Send the email as normal only the subject is changed to something you specify.
Email.sendMeEmail.setBody() – Send the email as normal only the body is changed to something you specify.
The easiest thing for me to do would be to create a filter that just skipped sending me Reddit porno spam, using the Email.sendMeEmail.skip() action. But I don’t want to do that for two reasons: 1) It’s not nearly as satisfying as seeing the defused porn spam hit my in-box, and 2) I wanted to see exactly how many spams I was blocking. Instead of just skipping sending an email, therefore, I’m changing both the body and the subject of the message. More about that in a minute.
Other: There are two more elements here called Other that have nothing to do with the applet per se. Instead they’re used if you want to activate applets based on time. We won’t be using them for this article.
Putting in the Filter
IFTTT’s filters are in JavaScript. I’m going to put the whole filter here and then walk you through what it’s doing so you can make your own changes.
(I used to use JavaScript a fair amount but it was fifteen years ago or so and as you might imagine I’m a bit rusty. If my filter’s JavaScript makes you laugh, feel free to give me a couple of hints on how to do it better.)
Paste this entire script into the filter code box:
Make sure to click the big Update Filter button at the bottom of the box! When you do, you’ll be taken to the main page for the applet. Click on Update to integrate the new filter code into the entire applet.
Now that you’ve made your IFTTT applet, let’s take a look at the filter code line by line:
let str = Reddit.newPostFromSearchReddit.PostURL;
Take the Reddit post URL from the IFTTT applet data and save it to a variable called str.
let PornStrings = str.match(/\/r\/u_/);
In the variable str, we are looking for a match of the string /r/u_ . If we find that match, we’re going to create another variable called PornStrings. If we don’t find that match, the PornStrings variable doesn’t exist.
(Did you notice that the string in the parentheses doesn’t look much like /r/u_ ? It’s because I’m using something called regular expressions to find that string, and in regular expressions / is considered a special character and requires special treatment. Regular expressions is far too huge a subject to tackle here, even briefly, so if you want to learn more let me point you to Syd Johnson’s funny, friendly introduction.)
if (PornStrings) {
Remember, if there’s no match for /r/u_ in the Reddit Post URL, then there’s no variable named PornStrings. All this IF statement is asking is “Does the variable PornStrings exist?” If it does, then the curly bracket starts a list of actions that must be taken. We’re specifying two actions on the next two lines:
These two lines change the subject of the PornString email to Reddit Crap Nobody Asked For and the body to NOPE, thus removing all those things I didn’t want to look at, yay! Having done that, the list is completed with a closing curly bracket:
}
Ends the actions that must be taken if the IF statement is true.
Underneath the IF statement is the ELSE statement, basically saying “If you didn’t do what was in the IF statement, do this instead.” I’m pretty sure that strictly speaking I don’t need the IF statement; IFTTT will just do what it normally does with the applet and send me an email. But since I’m rusty I’m writing my scripts with training wheels. Here’s the entire ELSE statement, directing the applet to proceed normally and send me an email with the Reddit post title as the subject:
A summary in English: you’re telling IFTTT to look at the URL of the Reddit post it just found and see if anything in it matches /r/u_. If it does, IFTTT will change the subject of the email it sends you to “Reddit Crap Nobody Asked For” and the body of the email to “NOPE”. If it doesn’t, IFTTT will send you an email with the contents of the Reddit post and the title of the post as the email’s subject.
Now, do you have to wait around for some spammer to queue up their next load of fecula to test this? Not if you have a Reddit account!
Testing the filter
At the beginning of this article I noted that the string we’re searching for – /r/u_ – matches the formatting for personal subreddits. If you have a Reddit account, check for a personal subreddit at reddit.com/r/u_YOURREDDITNAME . Here’s what mine at
reddit.com/r/u_ResearchBuzz looks like:
All the goofy posts are from me testing the things in this article! I’m going to make yet another one to test the filter we just made.
To post in your personal subreddit, click on the + sign on the top menu bar:
And you’ll get a screen that looks like this:
Make sure it’s set to your personal subreddit before you post!
Put anything you want in the Title spot as long as it includes the word database. That’s what IFTTT needs to find the match with the applet. Put an URL of some sort in the Post part of the form, then move over to the right to the Link tab and enter another URL (It doesn’t matter if they’re the same or different.) Your Reddit applet will not detect your post unless it has a link. Hopefully you do not end up with something this silly:
Now wait for ten minutes or so. Your IFTTT applet will need a few minutes to run. Go get a sandwich or something. Okay, back?
Viewing Your Applet’s Activity Log
Your applets live at https://ifttt.com/home . Look for the one called “Monitoring Reddit for new posts containing the keyword database” and click on it. You’ll get a page that looks like this:
Click on View Activity to see if your post was successfully found. I clicked on the one for my applet and here’s what I found:
If the applet runs and doesn’t find anything, you won’t get a notification. But if does run and it does find something, you’ll get a notification that looks like the above. IFTTT first shows me when the applet ran and the Reddit post that triggered it. You can then expand the Reddit sections to see what data IFTTT gathered when the applet was triggered:
(Hmm, looking at that now I know why searching the Subreddit string for /r/u_ didn’t work.)
Finally, IFTTT shows what actions were taken by the applet:
Please be careful when you expand the Email section. IFTTT will change the body and subject of the email that’s sent to you, but the original body and title are preserved here in the activity log, and if your applet is working correctly it’s pretty pornish stuff.
(Sometimes you might get a big APPLET FAILED message in your activity log. In my experience that’s when IFTTT fails to run a search or execute an action. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with your script unless you’re getting actual script errors. If it is IFTTT’s issue, give it ten minutes or so; IFTTT will rerun the applet. It’s usually successful the second time.)
The Results After a About a Week
Where are we now? We have an IFTTT search of Reddit that filters out pornography spam, giving it a standard title and body. That means the posts thread in my GMail instead of being scattered around my in-box. I successfully activated this applet for another search (my Reddit search for archive) on November 7th. Under a week later here’s the count of filtered Reddit porn spams:
In about six days my IFTTT stopped five hundred and seven porn spams from cluttering up my in-box. It’s a lot! (Do you see why I found them so annoying?)
And did it catch all of the Reddit porn spam? Yes. Apparently the personal subreddits are the only way this content is spread (for the moment.) There is a minuscule chance I will miss a posted resource that someone posts about only in their own subreddit, but I’m not concerned. This strong filter is far more important to me.
I’m so pleased with how well adding a filter to an IFTTT applet worked that I want to try it with other things. If you’ve got any ideas, chuck ’em in the comments. Or if you’re feeling inspired yourself, check out these resources from IFTTT:
An overview of using IFTTT filter code, with examples. Might be a little too much for beginners; if you found my JavaScript explanations tedious you’ll like this much better.
This will help you generate JavaScript to put in your filters. You’ll notice that the last generator, which generates JavaScript looking for keywords, looks a lot different from mine.
A small group of articles providing filter codes for specific situations (like “Can I make my Applet only run on weekdays (or weekends)?” and “How can I run an Applet only after sunset?”)
November 15, 2021 at 07:23PM
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Illinois WWI Monuments, Atomic Data Portal, Twitter, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, November 15, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
PR Newswire: Landmarks Illinois publishes WWI Monuments of Illinois Database containing more than 300 memorials of the Great War (PRESS RELEASE). “In honor of Veterans Day, Landmarks Illinois has published its new online database of historic World War I monuments and memorials in Illinois. The Landmarks Illinois WWI Monuments of Illinois Database currently contains information on 311 monuments and memorials such as doughboy statues, plaques, sculptures and public spaces dedicated to honoring those who served in the Great War. Monuments included in the database are located in 158 different Illinois communities.”
University of Delaware: New Atomic Data Portal. “Even if you’re one of the most precise physicists on the planet — as University of Delaware Professor Marianna Safronova is — you still will need collaborators whose skills complement your own and make new opportunities possible. You will need someone such as UD Professor Rudolf Eigenmann, who can take that precision, add generous amounts of computer science expertise and help to make that high-value information available to any other physicist who wants it. A project led by Safronova and Eigenmann and supported by the National Science Foundation has done just that, producing a Portal for High-Precision Atomic Data and Computation that provides extraordinary information about atomic properties in user-friendly ways. It’s the periodic table on steroids and it is already drawing keen interest from researchers who need to know the nitty-gritty details of the materials they work with.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
The Verge: Twitter will now show full-sized images on web. “Twitter is dropping the crop on web. This is the same update that banished Twitter’s awkward auto-cropping algorithm on its Android and iOS apps, which means that you’ll see images in their entirety on your timeline as you scroll through Twitter on your web browser.”
ReviewGeek: Chrome Is About to Get a Screenshot Editing Tool, Here’s How to Unlock It Early. “The Chrome mobile app recently gained a handy screenshot tool, and now, Google is bringing a more robust version of this tool to the desktop. That’s right; you’ll soon gain the ability to capture, edit, and share screenshots within the Google Chrome browser.”
USEFUL STUFF
Family Tree Magazine: Genealogy Blogs from Around the World (and Why They’re Valuable). “Starting family history research in another country is like traveling there for the first time. You don’t know the nuances of record-keeping, the ins and outs of repositories, or even how to read the country’s records. It can help to have a friendly local as your guide. Where can you find such a guide? Try the international geneablogging scene. Amateurs and experts from Argentina to Australia, British Columbia to the British Isles note their successes, tips and techniques in genealogy weblogs, or ‘geneablogs.’ In this whirlwind world tour, we’ll introduce you to 40 fantastic international blogs, and help you find, read and use them in your research.”
MakeUseOf: The 10 Best Google Sheet Quick Hacks You Probably Didn’t Know . “You might have been using Google Sheets for storing and visualizing numerical data for both personal and collaborative work. However, it’s not only a spreadsheet tool with many rows, columns, and formulas. You can also use it to do various cool stuff to wow your audience. In this article, we’ll introduce you to some of the best Google Sheet hacks you need to know to become a master of the platform.” Nice roundup.
James Tanner released the last part of this series on Friday, so I’m linking to it now so you can bingeread. Genealogy’s Star: Digging into the entire FamilySearch.org website: Part One. “One of the challenges of the website is that it is constantly changing. FamilySearch continues to add and subtract features on a regular basis. I decided to take a close look at every part of the website that I could discover over the next blog posts. Of course, I will give my comments about the functionality, need, usefulness, ease-of-use, and ultimate value to genealogists about each section/feature/web page/whatever of the website. So here it goes.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
WTXL: Seminole Tribe fighting to bring home ancestral remains from Smithsonian Museum. “‘We know where they came from. We know who these ancestors are, it should be enough,’ said Domonique DeBeaubien, the collections manager for the Seminole Tribe of Florida Tribal Historic Preservation Office. DeBeaubien has worked for the tribe since 2011. She’s led the effort to bring the ancestors sitting inside the Smithsonian home, but it’s a complicated job.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Bloomberg: FBI Says No Network Data Compromised After Fake Email Incident. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation said no data or personal identifiable information was accessed or compromised on the agency’s network after hackers sent fake emails yesterday using its Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal. The illegitimate email originated from an FBI-operated server, which was ‘dedicated to pushing notifications for LEEP and was not part of the FBI’s corporate email service,’ said the agency in a statement on Sunday on the update of the incident.”
Kyodo News: U.S. court orders Google to disclose manga piracy site operator. “A court in the United States has ordered internet firms including Google LLC to disclose the identity of the operator of a large-scale manga piracy site in line with a request from Japanese publishers, court documents showed Monday.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
The Conversation: We studied suicide notes to learn about the language of despair – and we’re training AI chatbots to do the same. “We believe the safest approach to understanding the language patterns of people with suicidal thoughts is to study their messages. The choice and arrangement of their words, the sentiment and the rationale all offer insight into the author’s thoughts. For our recent work we examined more than 100 suicide notes from various texts and identified four relevant language patterns: negative sentiment, constrictive thinking, idioms and logical fallacies.”
Lifehacker: What Parents Need to Know About Eating Disorder Content on Social Media. “With eating disorders already on the rise among teens during the pandemic, many experts have found that TikTok exacerbates the risk of falling into eating disordered behaviors. Even though TikTok attempts to censor pro-ana videos, a February 2021 study found that even the ‘anti-pro-anorexia’ videos on TikTok paradoxically lead the users to emulate these ‘guilty’ behaviors. To further understand this phenomenon, and to find out what concerned parents should know about it, I spoke with Dr. Alix Timko, a psychologist in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who focuses on eating disorders, as well as Dr. Melissa Coffin, the senior director of clinical programming at Monte Nido & Affiliates.” Good morning, Internet…
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November 15, 2021 at 06:28PM
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