New researches

Thursday, July 7, 2022

Web Site Safety, Map-Making Tools, Jewish Vienna, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, July 7, 2022

Web Site Safety, Map-Making Tools, Jewish Vienna, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, July 7, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Independent: New website checker launched to combat online fraud. “A new website-checking tool has been launched to help users confirm whether a site is legitimate before they visit. Internet safety group Get Safe Online has worked with fraud prevention service Cifas to create the tool, which enables users to enter the address of any website to check if it a real site or a scam.”

The Next Web / Shift: Goddamn, this map-making tool has turned me into a digital cartographer. “Making maps is usually something you either associate with old dudes in dusty paper-laden shops or serious people who wear colorful glasses and work at huge digital desks. But now, mapping startup Felt makes it easy to create personalized maps using drawing tools such as markers, pins, notes, and images.”

Jerusalem Post: New digital archives show Vienna Jews efforts to escape before WWII. “Israeli genealogy platform MyHeritage on Sunday unveiled its database of digitized records of Vienna’s Jews between the years 1938-1939 – when the robust Jewish community of Vienna, Austria attempted to flee Nazi rule and persecution.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Europe’s Sweeping New Internet Rules Adopted by EU Parliament. “The package consists of two pieces of legislation: the Digital Services Act, which protects the rights of internet users, and the Digital Markets Act, which is designed to create fair and open competition in the digital realm. Together the pair of laws propose a set of new rules for all digital services, including social media and online market places.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 4 Free Sites and Extensions for Online Text-to-Speech Tools. “There are a whole host of different benefits that you can achieve with text-to-speech, no matter who you are or what you’re doing. But downloading various programs onto your computer just to give text-to-speech a try can be a bit of a daunting task. Fortunately, there are plenty of online services that allow you to achieve the same functionality as many text-to-speech services without having to worry about any downloads.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How Wall Street Escaped the Crypto Meltdown. “It’s not that financial giants didn’t want to be part of the fun. But Wall Street banks have been forced to sit it out — or, like [BNP Paribas], approach crypto with ingenuity — partly because of regulatory guardrails put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. At the same time, big money managers applied sophisticated strategies to limit their direct exposure to cryptocurrencies because they recognized the risks. So when the market crashed, they contained their losses.”

University of Rochester: Slaughter family papers help complete the story of a life in politics. “The letters exchanged between late United States Representative Louise Slaughter and her husband, Bob, are a small portion of the Robert and Louise Slaughter family papers that now reside at the University of Rochester. A gift from the Slaughters’ family, the papers will be held by the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP), complementing the Louise M. Slaughter congressional papers given to Rochester in 2019.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Idaho News: Idaho debt collectors can now contact through email, text, social media. “Debt collectors are now allowed to contact people through email, text and social media, the Department of Finance says. This new rule falls under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which went into effect Nov. 30, 2021. Officials say it might be hard to tell the difference between a legitimate debt collector and a scam artist.”

TechCrunch: Twitter, challenging block orders, sues India’s government. “Twitter has sued the Indian government to challenge some of the block orders on tweets and accounts, further escalating the tension in the key overseas market. In its lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the Karnataka High Court in Bengaluru, Twitter alleges that New Delhi had abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform.”

Reuters: Hacker Claims to Have Stolen 1 Billion Records of Chinese Citizens From Police. “A hacker has claimed to have procured a trove of personal information from the Shanghai police on one billion Chinese citizens, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: The cryptopocalypse is nigh! NIST rolls out new encryption standards to prepare. “In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse.”

Tech Xplore: New AI-powered app could boost smartphone batteries by 30 per cent. “A cutting-edge AI development that could boost smartphone battery life by 30 percent and shave countless kilowatts from energy bills will be unveiled to technology giants. The ground-breaking University of Essex-developed work has been rolled into an app called EOptomizer—which will be demonstrated to expert researchers and designers as well as major manufacturing companies like Nokia and Huawei.” Good morning, Internet…

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July 7, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Wednesday, July 6, 2022

The Pirate Library Mirror, Ford Heritage Vault, Encrypted Communications, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 6, 2022

The Pirate Library Mirror, Ford Heritage Vault, Encrypted Communications, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 6, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Next Web: The Pirate Library Mirror wants to preserve all human knowledge… illegally. “A new project has just launched with the goal of preserving all human knowledge. The problem? It’s illegal. The Pirate Library Mirror is what it says on the tin: a mirror of existing libraries of pirated content. The project focuses specifically on books — although this may be expanded in the future.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ford Authority: Ford Heritage Vault Proves Incredibly Popular As Traffic Overloads Site. “…the response to this new site was so overwhelming that many had difficult accessing it as the Ford Heritage Vault has garnered a large amount of traffic, to the point where it’s been down quite a bit over that same time span, as Ford archivist Ted Ryan explained to the Detroit Free Press.”

The Art Newspaper: ‘Tate capitulated to my legal demand’: donor of disputed Francis Bacon archive responds to museum’s return of collection. “Barry Joule, who donated his Francis Bacon archive to the Tate, tells The Art Newspaper that its decision in June to return a thousand items was at his insistence. ‘Tate capitulated to my legal demand,’ he says.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: The Best Free Ways to Send Encrypted Email and Secure Messages. “The Internet makes it easier than ever to communicate with others. Within seconds, you can be chatting with someone on the other side of the planet. But what if you want to communicate or send files privately? You need to make sure that you’re using encryption.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: TikTok Is Flooded With Health Myths. These Creators Are Pushing Back.. “Mr. Dhahir is part of a growing cohort of scientists, physicians, health care professionals and academics who debunk health misinformation on TikTok by ‘stitching’ videos, which involves clipping existing videos into new ones and then offering one’s own input. While social media platforms including TikTok have developed systems to flag vaccine misinformation, an ocean of other dubious health claims often go unscrutinized — except when individual users like him, who have actual medical knowledge, push back.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: British army Twitter and YouTube accounts compromised to promote crypto scams. “The British army is investigating an apparent hack after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised on Sunday. News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great. According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.”

Bleeping Computer: Macmillan shuts down systems after likely ransomware attack. “Publishing giant Macmillan was forced to shut down their network and offices while recovering from a security incident that appears to be a ransomware attack. The attack reportedly occurred over the weekend, on Saturday, June 25th, with the company shutting down all of their IT systems to prevent the spread of the attack.”

Route Fifty: The Changing Face of Ransomware. “Attackers are increasingly targeting organizations they think will deliver the greatest rewards. They vary their ransom demands based on the victim’s estimated financial position, the quality of data exfiltrated, whether the victim has cyber insurance and the reputation of the ransomware group, the study said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Techdirt: Congress And The SEC Are Getting Basically Everything Wrong In Trying To Respond To ‘Meme Stocks’ . “There’s an underlying myth that the entirety of meme stock investing was about ignorant investors doing silly things, but doing so en masse to effectively counter for their own ignorance. And, surely, there were some retail investors who just went along for the ride, for the lolz, or whatever. But especially with the original meme stock, GameStop, the core of that deal was a retail investor who had done a ton of research, had a real game plan, and a real argument for why the stock was undervalued.”

The Register: We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world. “There’s a good reason why thoughtful technologists find emulation exciting. One of the real intellectual thrills is that it preserves the exact experience of using vintage software, going back to the very first days of commercial computing. It’s like going to a museum to see a Model T Ford, only to find there’s an infinite supply of them, fueled up and ready to go, waiting for you in a period-perfect replica of a 1920s Detroit suburb. There is not a single museum director who wouldn’t put their grandmother in a glass case to offer that sort of experience for their visitors, and we techies can just whistle it up.” Good afternoon, Internet…

July 7, 2022 at 12:16AM
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Rohingya Refugee Photography, SNES Video Game Manuals, Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, July 6, 2022

Rohingya Refugee Photography, SNES Video Game Manuals, Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, July 6, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NBC News: Young Rohingya photographers capture life in world’s largest refugee camp. “A new virtual exhibition explores the identity of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar living in the world’s largest refugee camp, through the lens of Rohingya photographers.”

Video Games Chronicle: An archivist has made every English-language SNES manual available online . “The user, who goes by the name Peebs online, has spent the last eight years playing through every SNES game on Twitch. However, while playing they noted that there wasn’t a resource online that provided a full archive of SNES game manuals. After a number of years, Peebs has now completed their own archive and made it available online for anyone to access.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Virtual private view of Gold on the British Library Player. “Many thanks to all of our readers who have visited the Gold exhibition of illuminated manuscripts at the Library; we’ve had some great feedback from you. … you can now watch two videos about the exhibition: (1) a highlights video outlining the exhibition and featuring curators discussing seven manuscripts in detail as a virtual private view; and (2) a film of a live question and answer session with the curators, chaired by Professor Alixe Bovey, Dean and Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: Worker-Owned Apps Are Redefining the Sharing Economy . “The growth rate of platform cooperatives is hard to pinpoint, because they don’t have to be registered with any government to exist. According to the UK’s Employee Ownership Association, the employee-owned sector (which includes platform cooperatives) has doubled in the UK since 2020 to over 1,030 companies.”

Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I became desperate’: the singer trying to recover her legacy from the ABC. “Marilyn Richardson, one of Australia’s finest ever opera singers, fears a chaotic approach to archiving at the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]– capped by a recent announcement of archivist staff cuts – could mean some of her historic performances have been lost forever. On one occasion, a family connection helped her track down a forgotten pile of recordings that had been left on a shelf in a locked room in a former ABC building in Adelaide.”

Axios: Influencers more integral than ever to marketers. “Influencers on social media have become so integral to the process of selling merchandise that they’ve become appendages to the largest marketing organizations in the world. Why it matters: Online creators, whether on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, have not only been filling a role to pitch products, but also to plug gaps in creativity as advertising agencies have shrunk.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Institute for Local Self-Reliance: Rolling Back Corporate Concentration: How New Federal Antimerger Guidelines Can Restore Competition and Build Local Power. “When the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice announced plans to revise their merger guidelines earlier this year, it marked a dramatic shift from business as usual. Their announcements set the stage for a new era in antitrust regulation where mergers are not seen as inherent benefits to the market to be encouraged but rather as inherent threats of which to be skeptical.” A lot of tech industry competition in the last several years has been “If you can’t beat them, buy them and eat them”: if the commitment to antitrust regulation holds it’ll mean a lot.

MakeUseOf: What Is Double Barrel Phishing and Is It Dangerous?. “In a typical phishing scam, you’ll likely receive one malicious email, text, or instant message from an attacker. But in a barrel phishing scam, two or more messages will be sent. Let’s consider a barrel phishing email attack to understand why this is the case.”

BuzzFeed News: TikTok Shop Customers Are Worried That They’re Buying Fake Products. “TikTok launched its marketplace in September 2021, and since then vendors have sold items often at highly reduced prices, including a sunset lamp that has gone viral as well as the famous ‘TikTok water bottle’ that both sold for 99p…. Several videos have been posted on TikTok with users questioning the authenticity of the products sold.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Smart Cities Dive: High-speed reality capture tool holds sustainability, preservation potential for cities . “A Los Angeles pilot plans to make the city’s buildings more sustainable and reduce carbon emissions using a digital twin. Chattanooga, Tennessee also uses a digital twin to anticipate and alleviate vehicle congestion in an effort to increase the energy efficiency of the city’s traffic. And it seems the trend will continue to grow. A recent report predicted that digital twin implementation will increase an average of 36% over the next five years in major industries.”

FedTech: Where Is Quantum Technology Going in the Federal Government?. “According to federal data, the U.S. budget for QIS [Quantum Information Science] research and development was roughly $900 million in fiscal 2022. That’s approximately double what the U.S. spent in this area in fiscal 2019, according to a report by the National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science.”

New York Times: 3-D Printing Grows Beyond Its Novelty Roots. “The 3-D-printing foundry in Devens, Mass., about 40 miles northwest of Boston, is owned by VulcanForms, a start-up that came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has raised $355 million in venture funding. And its work force has jumped sixfold in the past year to 360, with recruits from major manufacturers like General Electric and Pratt & Whitney and tech companies including Google and Autodesk.” Good morning, Internet…

July 6, 2022 at 05:29PM
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Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Ireland Historical Records, UK Public Art, EXIF Metadata, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 5, 2022

Ireland Historical Records, UK Public Art, EXIF Metadata, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 5, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Europeana Pro: Digitally recovering Ireland’s history: Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland connects millions of lost records. “This week sees the launch of the innovative new digital archive, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, which makes a rich array of historical documents available for research, education and enjoyment.”

BBC: ArtUK: Six strange statues from new photographic database. “The charity ArtUK has created a photographic database of 13,500 works of public art. Queen Victoria is the most honoured person with 175 works dedicated to her. The data also shows 77% of people depicted are male, 17% female and the rest a mixture of the sexes.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to See EXIF Metadata in Photos on iPhone. “Every photo you take on your iPhone includes EXIF metadata, which records information about how, when, and where you took the photo. Previously, you needed a special utility to see EXIF metadata on iPhone, but with iOS 15 and up, you can see it directly in the Photos app. Here’s how.”

The Verge: Your internet life needs a Feeds Reboot — here’s how to do it. “Odds are, some of what’s in your feeds — the creators on YouTube, the out-there old friends on Facebook, the inescapable dance crazes on your TikTok For You page — is the result of something you commented on, liked, or just happened to watch many months or years ago. The reboot gives you a chance to start fresh, to declare to the internet that you are no longer the person you once were, and to take more control over the algorithms that run so much of your life.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Slate: False Flag. “[Bob] Heft’s story—which many reputable sources cite as a historical fact—is false. While he did make a 50-star flag for his history class, and [Stanley] Pratt may even have agreed to change the grade if it were accepted by the government, everything else in the usual account is a lie that Heft embellished for nearly half a century. If the origin story of the nation’s most recognizable symbol is untrue, it illustrates how misinformation about the American past can be deliberately invented and uncritically perpetuated. The real question is how and why Heft did it—and why so many people wanted to believe that it was the truth.”

New York Times: Family Recipes Etched in Stone. Gravestone, That Is.. “At his home in Washington, D.C., Charlie McBride often bakes his mother’s recipe for peach cobbler. As he pours the topping over the fruit, he remembers how his mother, aunts and grandmother sat under a tree in Louisiana, cackling at one another’s stories as they peeled peaches to can for the winter. Mr. McBride loved this family recipe so much that when his mother, O’Neal Bogan Watson, died in 2005, he had it etched on her gravestone in New Ebenezer Cemetery in Castor, La., a town of about 230 people.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

US Department of Justice: Justice Department Announces Enforcement Action Charging Six Individuals with Cryptocurrency Fraud Offenses in Cases Involving Over $100 Million in Intended Losses. “The Department of Justice, together with federal law enforcement partners, today announced criminal charges against six defendants in four separate cases for their alleged involvement in cryptocurrency-related fraud, including the largest known Non-Fungible Token (NFT) scheme charged to date, a fraudulent investment fund that purportedly traded on cryptocurrency exchanges, a global Ponzi scheme involving the sale of unregistered crypto securities, and a fraudulent initial coin offering.”

PetaPixel: Photographer Sues Google, Says YouTube Ignores Copyright Theft. “A photographer has sued Google for copyright infringement alleging that YouTube failed to remove his unauthorized images from the website. The lawsuit was filed against Google, LLC by Doniger Burroughs on behalf of photographer Alexander Stross in the U.S. District Court for the Central Court California on June 28.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ProPublica: How We Fight Back When Officials Resist Releasing Information You Have a Right to Know. “All told, as of June 15, we and our partners at the Texas Tribune had filed about 70 records requests related to the shooting and hadn’t gotten any records back; we’ve gotten a few things since then. We weren’t just denied by the city, but also by Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Marshals Service.”

NewsWise: The Art of Getting DNA Out of Decades-Old Pickled Snakes. “Many of these specimens are decades or even centuries old, near-perfectly preserved by a combination of formalin and alcohol. But the process that preserves tissues often destroys or at least makes acquiring DNA for modern studies very difficult, which is bad news for scientists who study genetic relationships between organisms. A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, however, reveals new approaches for getting and maximizing usable DNA from decades-old pickled specimens, and uses these techniques to solve a long-standing mystery about a small snake from the island of Borneo.” Good afternoon, Internet…

July 6, 2022 at 12:46AM
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Keep Your RSS Fresh With Keyword-Based Feeds

Keep Your RSS Fresh With Keyword-Based Feeds
By ResearchBuzz

Over the weekend I found an interesting article at The Verge. In Your internet life needs a Feeds Reboot — here’s how to do it, David Pierce explores the ways you can give your algorithmic timelines a bit of a reset to make your social media better.

He even, to my vast appreciation, mentioned RSS feeds! But that’s all it was: a mention. RSS appears precisely once in the article, in the phrase “look at all the sources you follow on RSS.” That’s excellent advice and I recommend it to anyone, but a little later in the paragraph he adds the sentence “Don’t worry about adding better stuff since that tends to happen naturally over time.” I agree with him that it’s true for social media. I disagree when it comes to RSS feeds.

On social media platforms, the name of the game is keeping you engaged with the content. You don’t like that news source? Here, try this one. We think you’ll like this. Hey, you liked that thing, here’s something similar. As long as you show the faintest flicker of interest, social media platforms will try to understand you (at least enough to pigeonhole you for advertising) and constantly feed you content in an attempt to profile your interests.

When it comes to RSS feeds there isn’t really anything similar. RSS feed readers like NewsBlur will recommend feeds or list interesting feeds, but there’s no algorithm pushing you to try PC World because you like ZDNet. (The closest I’ve found is Feedly, which has an “Explore” feature. It’s fine, but I find it’s too general to bring me a steady stream of useful content.) You’re responsible for curating your own experience. Instead of up- or down-voting content, though, you should be constantly evaluating your feeds.

For maximum efficiency, you should have some kind of threshold of how much non-useful content an RSS feed generates before you abandon it, and you should use it. You should be regularly deleting RSS feeds; if you hang on to a lot of feeds that contribute nothing to your curation you’ll end up spinning your wheels and wasting time going through them. (As someone who reads literally thousands of RSS feeds AND who has as her special interest “everything,” I wrestle with this. But ResearchBuzz is better when I am ruthless while pruning my RSS feeds.)

Here’s the snag, though; you might struggle with finding new sources. If you’ve been around the Internet a while you’ll know how to winkle out an RSS feed from a Web site. Even if you’re new to RSS, you might stumble across a site that promotes its feed (that seems to happen less and less these days.) But either way, you will not be offered a plate of algorithmically-generated feed suggestions to browse through. Some feeds, like mine, link to lots of other sites, but most feeds focus on their own content. How do you find new RSS to replace the ones that don’t provide relevant content?

Here’s the secret: keyword-based RSS feeds.

Usually when we talk about RSS feeds, we’re usually talking about a feed associated with one Web site. There’s the “CNN RSS feed,” for example. But you can also get keyword-based feeds – search results for a given query that are delivered in RSS format.

I use keyword-based feeds constantly. I can’t possibly monitor every RSS feed that might mention “archive,” but I can use Google News alerts (which you can get as an RSS feed.) I can’t monitor all international news for the word “database,” but I can get Bing News RSS feeds for that keyword with a focus on specific countries.

When I use keyword-based RSS feeds, I’m discovering new resources that are least peripherally-related to my interests. (This is more true with very specific keywords, but even for a general query like “database” the news resources are somewhat relevant.) Of course, just because an article appears in a keyword-based RSS feed doesn’t mean that the article source itself has an RSS feed, but I find that they generally do.

I also find that keyword-based feeds can act as “auditions” for sources. Sometimes you’ll find that a source ends up in your keyword-based feeds over and over and over with excellent content until you have to give in and subscribe directly to the source’s RSS feed. (Looking at you, Arizona State University.)

If regular RSS feeds are difficult to find, then keyword-based feeds must be impossible right? Not so – like regular RSS feeds, they’re mostly right there in the open. You just have to know where to look. Here are three places to find keyword-based RSS feeds.

Google Alerts – https://www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts are mostly associated with email alerts, but any Google Alert can be an RSS feed as well. Just change the last option from deliver to email to RSS feed. I also recommend you leave the “How Many” option at “only the best results” because keyword-based feeds can easily get gummed up with spam.

Once you’ve generated the RSS feed, you’ll see an RSS icon next to the feed name in your Google Alerts list. Click on that and you’ll get your feed.

I’ve written a few articles about Google Alerts that might help you when setting them up:

The Importance of Excluding Words When Setting Up Google Alerts

Tips for Angelina Jolie: How to Set Up a Google News Alert on a Famous Person

Anatomy of an Information Trap, Part II: Setting Up and Sharing Google Alerts

Bing / Bing News – https://www.bing.com/news

You might have noticed that a Google Alert as an RSS feed looks like this:

https://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/00000000000000000000/00000000000000000000

Only instead of all zeroes it’s a string of numbers. Google generates those feeds when you create an alert, but they’re not created in a pattern (at least not one that I can find) that lets you create the feeds outside of Google Alerts. Update from the future: This is wrong. Stay tuned.

Bing and Bing News’ formats for RSS feeds are much easier to understand and recreate. In fact, you can use the Bing URL patterns to create RSS feeds in bulk. Here’s what a Bing search looks like:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=cow

If you want to turn that into an RSS feed, just add &format=rss to the end:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=cow&format=rss

A Bing News search works the same way:

https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=cow&format=rss

I find Bing News’ RSS feeds find me news stories that I don’t get from Google Alerts, especially international news. There’s some overlap but not as much as you’d think! I’ve done a lot of writing about using Bing and its feeds:

How To Make Non-English Bing News RSS Feeds (And Review Them Before You Commit)

Backstop Your Google Alerts With Bing News RSS Feeds

Cooking Up Lots of RSS To Feed Your News-Monitoring Needs

WordPress.com – https://www.wordpress.com

WordPress.com generates huge amounts of content. According to its stats page, “Users produce about 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month.”

That’s a lot, and happily it’s as easy to create feeds for as Bing News. The most basic RSS feed format for WordPress is a feed for a tag. A tag search on WordPress looks like this:

https://wordpress.com/tag/database

To turn that into an RSS feed, just add /feed/ to the end:

https://wordpress.com/tag/database/feed/

This is the most basic way to create a WordPress RSS feed, but there are a number of tricks you can use to make really focused RSS feeds using other aspects of a blog’s content, like category or keyword. Even better, you can apply these searches to WordPress.com in toto or to individual blogs. I wrote an article about how to keep your ResearchBuzz RSS feeds super-focused using WordPress; check it out here.

RSS feeds are a critical part of monitoring the Internet for information, but it’s hard to get good feed recommendations. Whip up some keyword-based feeds, though, and you’ll have a constant source of new sites to keep your RSS feeds fresh and relevant.

July 5, 2022 at 06:47PM
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McKinsey Opioid Consulting, Forensic Research Library, Smartphone AI, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, July 5, 2022

McKinsey Opioid Consulting, Forensic Research Library, Smartphone AI, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, July 5, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Johns Hopkins University: New documents show McKinsey’s role in fueling opioid epidemic. “The Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a project of Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Francisco, today released more than 114,000 documents related to McKinsey & Company’s work as a management consulting firm for the opioid industry over a 15-year period. The documents show how McKinsey advised opioid makers Purdue Pharma, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, and Mallinckrodt to help them increase sales, despite the growing public outcry over the opioid epidemic.”

Big thanks to Jeffrey T for bringing this to my attention. Florida International University: FIU launches open-access Forensic Research Library. “Florida International University (FIU) has launched a first-of-its-kind resource for forensic science practitioners, students, researchers, and the general public. The Research Forensic Library provides access to thousands of articles and reports in the scientific literature, a critical step in the forward momentum required of forensic science and its varied applications.”

USEFUL STUFF

New York Times: Use That Everyday A.I. in Your Pocket. “Virtual assistants usually hog the spotlight when it comes to talk of artificial intelligence software on smartphones and tablets. But Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Samsung’s Bixby and company aren’t the only tools using machine learning to make life easier — other common programs use the technology, too. Here’s a quick tour through some common A.I.-driven apps and how you can manage them.”

MakeUseOf: 6 Truly Free Online Image Editors for Photoshop Effects (No Limitations). “Plenty of free image editors online do wondrous things like remove backgrounds from photos or upscale picture sizes. But usually, these have some restrictions. You’ll find limitations like only editing five images in the free account or exporting images at a really low resolution. So we set out to find free online image editors with no restrictions or limitations that don’t affect a normal user.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: One woman dominated a local fair’s food contest. The internet went looking for her. “The competition at the Virginia-Kentucky District Fair began innocently enough when a woman named Linda Skeens entered her many baked treats, canned goods and other items for the judged contest. Then she won — and she won huge. The fair posted a list of winners on Facebook showing that Skeens dominated the June 13 competition, winning more than 25 of 80 contest categories. That’s when things took on a life of their own. Her online fans wanted to find her.”

Houston Chronicle: Chinese posed as Texans on social media to attack rival companies. “An English-language social media propaganda effort that previously criticized Hong Kong protesters and other foes of the Chinese government and has been linked to China has taken the rare step of going after private companies in a strategic industry, researchers said Tuesday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google targeted in fresh EU consumer groups’ privacy complaints. “Alphabet unit Google has been targeted by a French consumer group and its peers in complaints to privacy watchdogs over its vast trove of users’ personal data harvested via their Google accounts, European consumer organisation BEUC said on Thursday. In addition to the French consumer group, others in Greece, the Czech Republic, Norway and Slovenia have taken their gripes to their data protection authorities, BEUC said.”

Springfield News-Leader: Missouri court documents will be available online to anyone starting next summer. “Rule changes announced by the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday will allow anyone to access public court records through the state judiciary’s online database, Case.net, starting on July 1, 2023. Currently, only summaries of cases are available online; to access documents and other filings, you need to find a public access terminal at your nearest courthouse.”

KPVI: Open records bill would mean major changes for Pennsylvania ‘state related’ universities. “Senate Bill 488 would require state-related universities (University of Pittsburgh and Temple, Penn State, and Lincoln universities) to disclose salary, budget, and contract information in a user-friendly online database. Donor privacy would be unaffected and remain confidential. The bill passed first consideration in the Senate State Government Committee on Tuesday. If it’s signed into law, it would align Pennsylvania’s transparency rules with the majority of other states.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Twitter Could Take These Steps to Slow Viral Misinformation, Researchers Say. “Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are rife with misinformation that can easily go viral. One study looked at millions of tweets and found that a handful of steps could be taken to slow the spread of false information on Twitter.”

NASA: NASA Selects 5 Proposals to Provide New Insights from Openly Available Data in the Physical Sciences Informatics System. “Researchers will investigate important problems with existing data from NASA’s Physical Sciences Informatics (PSI) system. The online database contains data from completed physical science reduced-gravity flight experiments conducted on the International Space Station, Space Shuttle flights, free flying spacecraft, commercial cargo flights to and from the space station, or from related ground-based studies.”

TechXplore: Study finds toxicity in the open-source community varies from other internet forums. “A team of researchers from the Institute for Software Research (ISR) in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science recently collaborated with colleagues at Wesleyan University to take a first pass at understanding toxicity on open-source platforms like GitHub.” Good morning, Internet…

July 5, 2022 at 05:33PM
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Monday, July 4, 2022

Oregon Mental Health, Working Lands for Wildlife, Seabed 2030, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 4, 2022

Oregon Mental Health, Working Lands for Wildlife, Seabed 2030, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 4, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

KGW8: Oregon Department of Education launches website addressing mental health. “School may be out but students’ mental health needs are still front and center for a lot of educators and parents after such a tough couple years. Now there’s a new resource to help identify ways to help young people who are struggling. The Oregon Department of Education launched a new website called Oregon Classroom WISE this week to help people better address mental health issues in kids, teens and school staff.”

USDA: Working Lands for Wildlife Launches Literature Gateway. “USDA just launched a new research and visualization tool that summarizes published scientific research on bird species-vegetation relationships in the Eastern and Boreal Forests of North America. The tool, Literature Gateway: A Systematic Map of Bird-Vegetation Relationships in Eastern and Boreal Forests, can be used to identify science-need gaps and guide habitat restoration and forest management practices on the ground.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Almost a quarter of the ocean floor is now mapped. “Roughly 25 percent (23.4 percent to be exact) of the Earth’s sea floor has been mapped, thanks to an international initiative known as Seabed 2030. Relying largely on voluntary contributions of bathymetric data (or ocean topography) by governments, companies and research institutions, the project is part of a larger UN-led initiative called The Ocean Decade.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times Magazine: The Accidental Media Critics of YouTube. “Even in a world with no gatekeepers and limited moderation, a certain savvy will assert itself. YouTube even has its equivalents of tabloids and trade publications, covering salacious online drama or niche interests. But it’s the commentary YouTubers in particular who have become, in some cases, as popular as the stars they react to, leading to strange conflicts between fame and critical integrity — plus literal run-ins in the influencer-infested studios of Los Angeles.”

New Indian Express: ASI faces uphill task of cataloguing and preserving piles of its archival treasure . “The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has started an uphill task to catalogue and preserve piles of archival records lying in disarray in its offices across states. Historical documents are being searched through and evaluated to fast-track the setting up of the Archive Division at ASI headquarters in Delhi.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Free smartphone stalkerware detection tool gets dedicated hub. “Kaspersky has launched a new information hub to help with their open-source stalkerware detection tool named TinyCheck, created in 2019 to help people detect if their devices are being monitored. Stalkerware is software explicitly created to spy on people via their smartphones by monitoring their whereabouts, communications, photos, browsing history, and more.”

Washington Post: You scheduled an abortion. Planned Parenthood’s website could tell Facebook.. “The Supreme Court’s decision last week overturning the nationwide right to an abortion in the United States may have sent worried people flooding to Planned Parenthood’s website to learn about nearby clinics or schedule services. But if they used the organization’s online scheduling tool, it appears Planned Parenthood could share people’s location — and, in some cases, even the method of abortion they selected — with big tech companies.”

The Verge: New York denies air permit to Bitcoin mining power plant. “Bitcoin miners in New York state faced a regulatory blow today as the state denied air permits for a gas-fired power plant used to mine Bitcoin. It’s the latest step that New York has taken to crack down on crypto mining as it tries to meet its goals on climate change.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): The Metaverse in 2040 . “Hype? Hope? Hell? Maybe all three. Experts are split about the likely evolution of a truly immersive ‘metaverse.’ They expect that augmented- and mixed-reality enhancements will become more useful in people’s daily lives. Many worry that current online problems may be magnified if Web3 development is led by those who built today’s dominant web platforms.”

Ars Technica: Smart contact lens prototype puts a Micro LED display on top of the eye. “Since 2015, a California-based company called Mojo Vision has been developing smart contact lenses. Like smart glasses, the idea is to put helpful AR graphics in front of your eyes to help accomplish daily tasks. Now, a functioning prototype brings us closer to seeing a final product.” Good afternoon, Internet…

July 5, 2022 at 12:18AM
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