New researches

Friday, August 26, 2022

Japanese Anime, Medieval Drawings, EarthSnap, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, August 26, 2022

Japanese Anime, Medieval Drawings, EarthSnap, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, August 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Crunchyroll: The World’s Largest Japanese Anime Database “Anime Taizen” Opens to The Public Today. “As of the end of July 2022, Anime Taizen has approximately 15,000 registered titles, mainly Japanese commercial anime works released from 1917 to the present. In addition to title name searches, the database has search functions for chronology, Japanese syllabary, keywords, etc. As a result of the research to date, the number of episodes amounts to approximately 180,000.” Apparently the site is somewhat slow at this writing due to demand.

Medievalists: Thousands of medieval images available for free, thanks to Albertina Museum. “The Albertina Museum, located in Vienna, is considered to have one of the best collections of drawings and prints in the world. Recently, they put into the public domain most of the online image collection, which will allow people to use the images freely. Nearly 4,000 of these images date between the 12th and 15th centuries, with another 23,000 dating to the 16th century.”

PR Newswire: EarthSnap Launches Revolutionary App to Identify All Types of Earth’s Plants and Animal Species (PRESS RELEASE). “EarthSnap is citizen science in action: When users upload photos of plants or animals to EarthSnap, the app utilizes a custom-built, patent-pending AI machine learning solution to identify the subject and share details like habitat, global population distribution and known history on Earth. These uploaded photos also contribute to EarthSnap’s ever-growing database – applications of which include recording animal migration habits, shifting habitats and animal behavior.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: DuckDuckGo Opens Email Protection Service Beta to Everyone . “Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo opened its Email Protection service beta to everyone Thursday. The service gives you a free Duck address (name@duck.com) and will detect and strip trackers within emails sent to it. Then the email is forwarded to your personal email address, and DuckDuckGo will let you know how many trackers it got rid of.”

Wall Street Journal: DHS Folds Disinformation Board After Criticism Over Threat to Free Speech. “The Department of Homeland Security has terminated a government board formed earlier this year to combat online disinformation, after a range of critics said it could stifle free expression on the internet and had an unclear mission. It encountered widespread criticism from conservatives, civil liberties advocates and some current and former officials.”

How-To Geek: CrossOver 22 Can Run More Windows Apps on Mac and Linux. “CrossOver is one of the best ways to run Windows software on Mac and Linux, as it’s based on the popular Wine project. CodeWeavers has now released CrossOver 22, with significant changes to the interface and software compatibility.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

TechCrunch: Shuffles, Pinterest’s invite-only collage-making app, is blowing up on TikTok — here’s how to get in . “Collage-style video ‘mood boards’ are going viral on TikTok — and so is the app making them possible. Pinterest’s recently soft-launched collage-maker Shuffles has been climbing up the App Store’s Top Charts thanks to demand from Gen Z users who are leveraging the new creative expression tool to make, publish and share visual content. These ‘aesthetic’ collages are then set to music and posted to TikTok or shared privately with friends or with the broader Shuffles community.”

Reuters: Walmart explores matchmaker marketplace for social media influencers. “Walmart may launch a platform that will use social media influencers to help the retailer and its 100,000 third-party sellers promote their goods and services online, according to trademark filings.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: Twitter whistleblower to testify about company’s ‘widespread security failures’ at Senate hearing. “Twitter’s former security chief will testify at a Senate hearing about the company’s security practices. Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, who recently went public with a lengthy whistleblower complaint based on his experiences at the company, will appear at a Judiciary Committee hearing on September 13th.”

Wall Street Journal: NFTs Are Increasingly Targeted by Criminals, Report Says. “Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are increasingly sought by criminals looking to either steal them or use them to launder illicit gains, a new report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said on Wednesday. More than $100 million worth of these blockchain-based assets were reported stolen in scams over the past year, according to the study. Over 4,600 NFTs were stolen in July, the most in any month since Elliptic began tracking the data in 2017, the report said.”

Oxford Mail: Lawyer struggles to communicate with client over Google Translate. “AN ADVOCATE said he had battled to communicate with his cannabis farmer-accused client using Google Translate – as no interpreter was available. Pham Hoang, 18, was before Oxford Crown Court accused of producing the class B drug at a commercial scale factory in a flat in Underhill Circus, Barton. The Vietnamese teenager was allegedly found at the 270-plant cannabis farm by police officers during a raid on July 19.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ProPublica: Visualizing Toxic Air . “Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S.” Good morning, Internet…

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August 26, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Thursday, August 25, 2022

Illinois State University Performing Arts, Martha’s Vineyard Biodiversity, Google, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 25, 2022

Illinois State University Performing Arts, Martha’s Vineyard Biodiversity, Google, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Illinois State University: School of Theatre and Dance programs now online. “Did you know that the actor who plays Officer Kevin Atwater in the hit NBC series Chicago P.D. also played Private Driscol in the 2008 Wonsook Kim School of Theatre and Dance production of Bury the Dead? And that actors from The Office and Will & Grace once played harpsichord together on the Westhoff Theatre stage in a 1991 production of Love for Love: A Comedy? You can find all this and more in Illinois State’s institutional repository, ISUReD! Through a partnership between Milner Library and the School of Theatre and Dance, around 190 programs have been added to the School’s collection on ISUReD. Patrons can now browse production programs that date back to 1957 and feature hundreds of the school’s theatre and dance students, faculty, and staff.”

Martha’s Vineyard Times: Recording the Island’s biodiversity . “BiodiversityWorks launched a new website called the Martha’s Vineyard Atlas of Life, where Islanders can record the biodiversity that exists on the Island. This project was launched with support from the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation. Claire Callagy, the foundation’s philanthropic program manager, said the foundation made a three-year commitment to help launch this project.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: Google “airbrushes” out emissions from flying, BBC reveals. “Flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before. That’s because the world’s biggest search engine has taken a key driver of global warming out of its online carbon flight calculator…. The company said it made the change following consultations with its ‘industry partners’.”

USEFUL STUFF

VERIFY: Yes, there is a way to check if you received a Pell Grant. “Pell Grants are need-based federal grants awarded to college students. Unlike loans, they do not need to be repaid, but many Pell Grant recipients also used student loans to help pay for school. The additional forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients was unexpected for many, and top search questions after Biden’s announcement were about Pell Grants and how to check if someone received one.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: New York museums are now required to disclose artwork looted by Nazis. “Museums in New York will now be required to disclose which artworks were stolen in Europe during the Nazi era, thanks to new legislation signed last week by Governor Kathy Hochul.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: She Had an AirTag in Her Lost Luggage. It Led Police to a Baggage Handler’s Home.. “A traveler who put a tracking device in her bag helped sheriff’s deputies in Florida identify an airport worker who was accused of stealing more than $16,000 in goods from passengers’ luggage, the authorities said.”

Salt Lake Tribune: Utah cold case investigators unveil nationwide resource aimed at solving railroad killings. “The database currently has more than 1,000 entries, spanning crimes ranging from the 1960s to 2012, and still more are being added. At least 12 of the cases originated in Utah. Volunteers have pieced together information from newspapers, police and court records and even railroad documents, and they soon hope to visit train archives in other states that may contain more information.” The database is not publicly-available because the information has not been scrubbed of personal information, but the Cold Case Coalition is happy to search it for law enforcement or family of missing persons.

RESEARCH & OPINION

NBC News: Google is trying out ‘pre-bunking’ in an effort to counter misinformation. “In a study published Wednesday, social scientists from Cambridge University and Google reported on experiments where they showed 90-second cartoons to people in a lab setting and as advertisements on YouTube, explaining in simple, nonpartisan language some of the most common manipulation techniques. The cartoons succeeded in raising people’s awareness about common misinformation tactics such as scapegoating and creating a false choice, at least for a short time, they found.”

ReviewGeek: Why I Hate Google’s New Search Interface. “Over the last week or so, you may have noticed a drastic change to the ‘All, Shopping, News, Images, Videos, More’ shortcut buttons under the search bar after you Google something. Or, maybe you noticed they’re missing entirely. Instead of the options we’ve all enjoyed for years, it looks like Google is A/B testing a big visual overhaul, and it’s a convoluted mess.”

University of Florida: Smartphones push consumers to prefer unique, tailored products. “Personalized wine lists. Tailored clothing options. Unique experiences just for you. The world is awash in products and services that promise to provide custom experiences to every consumer. And it turns out our smartphones are pushing us to unconsciously prefer just these kinds of customized options.” Good afternoon, Internet…

August 26, 2022 at 01:02AM
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OED Correspondence, Twitter, Iran Social Media, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 25, 2022

OED Correspondence, Twitter, Iran Social Media, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Thanks to Tish W for always keeping an eye out and sending me cool stuff. From Fine Books & Collections: Oxford English Dictionary Correspondence Heads Online. “The Murray Scriptorium has been established by Professor of English at the University of Oxford Charlotte Brewer and research fellow Dr. Stephen Turton from the University of Cambridge, both specialists in the history of dictionaries. It aims to document the letters and papers of Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915) who was the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and sent and received so many letters compiling it that a pillar box was set up outside his house in Oxford.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Twitter merges misinformation and spam teams following whistleblower claims. “According to Reuters, Twitter is merging its health experience team, which is in charge of clamping down on misinformation and harmful content on the website, with its service team. The latter reviews profiles when they’re reported and takes down spam accounts. Together, the combined group will be called Health Products and Services (HPS).”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Iran International: Iran Further Limiting Access To Western Social Media. “Internet and digital security experts say the Iran’s government is quietly implementing ‘intelligent’ filtering of social networks, particularly Instagram. In the past ten days, subscribers to Instagram and WhatsApp who use two-step authentication for signing into their accounts have reported that they are not receiving the required authentication codes via text message. Text message codes are also required for creating new accounts.”

South China Morning Post: TikTok owner ByteDance quietly launches search app Wukong in China, where Google is banned. “ByteDance, owner of the hit short video app TikTok, has quietly launched a new search engine that promises no advertisements in a cyberspace where Google has not been available for more than a decade.”

Chicago Reader: Mapping sex work in Chicago. “Rebelle C[], a writer, activist, and self-proclaimed Chicago ‘heaux-storian,’ is the founder and director of Heaux History, a multimedia archive that explores the history of Black, Brown, and Indigenous sex workers and erotic labor.” I have censored the last name as it is also a popular vulgarity for a woman’s intimate parts. I’m worried this newsletter will get filtered with extreme prejudice if I don’t.

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: A monumental case looks to crack open the world of auto-warranty robocalls. “…according to state and federal officials, just two men may be responsible for an overwhelming share of the billions of auto-warranty spam calls that have hit US phones. Now, a new lawsuit in Ohio is trying to cut them off at their source, following a years-long effort across the public and private sectors to turn the tide on the scourge of robocalls once and for all.”

Bleeping Computer: WordPress sites hacked with fake Cloudflare DDoS alerts pushing malware. “WordPress sites are being hacked to display fake Cloudflare DDoS protection pages to distribute malware that installs the NetSupport RAT and the RaccoonStealer password-stealing Trojan.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: A Teen’s Journey Into the Internet’s Darkness and Back Again. “What science increasingly shows is that virtual interactions can have a powerful impact, positive or negative, depending on a person’s underlying emotional state.”

Vox: Why you (probably) won’t finish reading this story. “A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention. Hari argues that we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and more like a parade of diversions. And it seems to be getting worse and worse every year.”

The Collegian: Social media’s mental health advice is failing us, destroying community . “Social media is designed to make us feel good. It’s been compared to a drug, because in a way, it is. It’s meant to be addictive — these platforms feed us more and more of what we want to keep us coming back. Nuance and complexity get weeded out by algorithms, while simple and declarative statements are pushed to the top. It’s led to quick-hitting self-help accounts becoming the staples of social media, but the more I see this stuff, I begin to wonder what the real value of it is.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Utah State University: USU Anthropology Student, Vet Med Faculty Identify Object in Centuries-Old Indigenous Pouch. “Anthropologists sometimes work with animal remains in the course of understanding how human societies lived, but they rarely cross paths with veterinarians, who focus on treating living animals. However, when anthropology graduate student Alexandra Wolberg needed to analyze an unusual Indigenous pouch without damaging it, the College of Veterinary Medicine had a unique opportunity to support one of Utah State University’s anthropologists.” Good morning, Internet…

August 25, 2022 at 05:32PM
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Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Monkeypox in Europe, Meat Sentiment, Marine Energy Atlas, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2022

Monkeypox in Europe, Meat Sentiment, Marine Energy Atlas, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

World Health Organization: New mobile friendly web tool with interactive dashboard gives individuals the information they need on monkeypox in advance of attending gatherings. “WHO/Europe has launched a new tool that will offer convenient access to monkeypox information for people planning to attend large gatherings, events or parties. The tool provides an up-to-date assessment of the in-country situation, links to the websites of local health authorities, advice on available preventive measures, as well as links to WHO guidance. It is part of a comprehensive monkeypox resource toolkit with ready-to-use and customizable tools to support national authorities and event organizers in their planning and coordination of mass and large gathering events.”

Purdue University: Purdue Agriculture launches interactive dashboard to track meat sentiment in news and social media. “Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability has added a meat sentiment dashboard to its roster of free-access food system dashboards. The new dashboard, updated weekly, shows the sentiment and volume of meat and meat alternative mentions in social media and online news.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

National Renewable Energy Laboratory: An Updated Marine Energy Atlas Could Give Communities Greater Energy Autonomy . “With free, publicly available tools, like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Renewable Energy Atlas and Marine Energy Atlas, anyone anywhere in the world can access the data they need to start planning their clean energy future. Now, new features in the Marine Energy Atlas make it even easier for communities to decide how and where to incorporate marine energy into their power mix and for marine energy developers to learn how much electricity their device could produce at various U.S. sites.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Guardian: Tinder for booklovers: the new app matching like-minded readers. “Reading taste can make or break a relationship for the bookish-minded, and literary preferences are highly subjective. But a new app in development is aiming to remove the uncertainty about literary tastes when meeting new people. Klerb has already been dubbed Tinder for bookworms because it matches you with people in your area according to your shared interests in books.”

West Virginia University: WVU Libraries receives sixth NEH grant to digitize historical newspapers. “The National Endowment for the Humanities is awarding the West Virginia University Libraries’ West Virginia and Regional History Center a grant — its sixth from the NEH, this one totaling $162,155 — allowing it to continue its important work of digitizing newspapers published in West Virginia from 1791 to 1927.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Radio New Zealand: RNZ among media to secure news content deal with Google. “Google is launching its News Showcase in New Zealand today. RNZ, NZME and its various divisions, Scoop and Newsroom, are debut partners and contributors. The Showcase has been rolled out around the world as Google’s response to long-running complaints that it had profited from running media content without payment.”

Washington Post: Lawmakers demand data about online threats against law enforcement. “House Oversight Committee leaders are demanding social media companies take ‘immediate action’ to address a flood of violent online threats against law enforcement, following the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.”

SC Magazine: Nonprofit sues DHS agencies for records on social media monitoring. “The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit legal think tank and advocacy organization at New York University, is suing the federal government and Department of Homeland Security to obtain records on how it uses a trio of social media surveillance contractors.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Duke Today: Economists Have A Method For Reducing Fake News On Social Media. “In new research published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [Duke University economist] McAdams and collaborators explore ways to improve the quality of information being shared on networks without making any entity responsible for policing content and deciding what is true and false. The model suggests that to cut down on the spread of false information, the network can set limits on how widely certain messages are shared, and do so in a way that is not overly restrictive to users.”

Route Fifty: $26M Awarded for Hyperlocal Smart Cities Research. “The National Science Foundation is investing $26 million to establish an engineering center that will leverage a variety of technologies to improve the quality of urban environments and advance smart city technology.” Good afternoon, Internet…

August 25, 2022 at 01:08AM
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Facebook Roundup, August 24, 2022

Facebook Roundup, August 24, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: A Facebook bug spammed celebrity comments to everyone for hours. “Facebook experienced a bizarre bug on Wednesday morning that filled user feeds with endless posts from celebrity accounts. Multiple Verge staffers who attempted to use the social media network experienced the same issue, where their main News Feed was flooded with minor posts sent to pages for artists like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles. As of 5:15AM ET the issue appears to have been resolved after creating three hours of chaos.”

Engadget: Meta’s anti-misinformation strategy for the 2022 midterms is mostly a repeat of 2020. “Meta has outlined its strategy for combatting misinformation during the 2022 US midterm elections, and they’ll mostly sound familiar if you remember the company’s 2020 approach.”

Ars Technica: Amid backlash from privacy advocates, Meta expands end-to-end encryption trial. “Meta is ever so slowly expanding its trial of end-to-end encryption in a bid to protect users from snoops and law enforcement.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: They built their businesses on Instagram. Then the platform changed. “As Instagram increasingly prioritizes videos and recommended posts in users’ feeds in an effort to keep pace with rival TikTok, some small businesses that were built on the platform are having a harder time reaching their followers and facing declining engagement, and say they’re worried about the future of their businesses.”

Reuters: Asset managers on alert after ‘WhatsApp’ crackdown on banks. “Asset managers are tightening controls on personal communication tools such as WhatsApp as they join banks in trying to ensure employees play by the rules when they do business with clients remotely.”

Engadget: Dozens of Facebook contractors lost their jobs after an algorithm reportedly chose them ‘at random’. “A firm contracted by Meta recently told dozens of its workers that their work for Facebook ‘was soon being taken away,’ according to a new report from Insider. The cuts affect about 60 employees of Accenture, a firm that oversees teams of Facebook moderators and other contractors.”

Washington Post: Facebook bans hate speech but still makes money from white supremacists. “Last year, a Facebook page administrator put out a clarion call for new followers: They were looking for ‘the good ole boys and girls from the south who believe in white [supremacy].’ The page — named Southern Brotherhood — was live on Tuesday afternoon and riddled with photos of swastikas and expressions of white power. Facebook has long banned content referencing white nationalism. But a plethora of hate groups still populate the site, and the company boosts its revenue by running ads on searches for these pages.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Misconfigured Meta Pixel exposed healthcare data of 1.3M patients. “U.S. healthcare provider Novant Health has disclosed a data breach impacting 1,362,296 individuals who have had their sensitive information mistakenly collected by the Meta Pixel ad tracking script. Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel) is a JavaScript tracking script that Facebook advertisers can add to their site to track advertising performance.”

CNET: Meta Reaches $37.5M Settlement in Facebook Location Tracking Lawsuit. “Court documents show that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has reached a $37.5 million settlement in a lawsuit accusing the company of violating the privacy of some users by tracking their movements through their smartphones without permission. This is not the first time Facebook has been accused of tracking users.”

CNET: FTC Drops Mark Zuckerberg as Defendant in Antitrust Lawsuit. “The Federal Trade Commission has removed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant in an antitrust lawsuit that aims to block the company’s acquisition of virtual reality startup Within Unlimited. The agency said in a filing in a Northern California federal court that it had agreed to remove Zuckerberg as a defendant after the Facebook parent company’s CEO agreed to not try to personally purchase Within Unlimited.”

NPR: Nebraska cops used Facebook messages to investigate an alleged illegal abortion. “A 41-year-old woman is facing felony charges in Nebraska for allegedly helping her teenage daughter illegally abort a pregnancy, and the case highlights how law enforcement can make use of online communications in the post-Roe v. Wade era.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mashable: It took just one weekend for Meta’s new AI Chatbot to become racist. “The company’s new BlenderBot 3 AI chatbot — which was released in the U.S. just days ago on Friday, August 5 — is already making a host of false statements based on interactions it had with real humans online. Some of the more egregious among those include claims Donald Trump won the 2020 U.S. presidential election and is currently president, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, as well as comments calling out Facebook for all of its ‘fake news.'”

August 24, 2022 at 07:46PM
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Smushy Search: A Tool for Topical Searching on Google

Smushy Search: A Tool for Topical Searching on Google
By researchbuzz2

Every now and again I have to pause and marvel at the fact that Web directories as a category are pretty much defunct. There are specialized directories for specific categories, of course (while older directories like Jasmine and Starting Point have pivoted to business listings), but the idea of an Internet-wide searchable subject index dimmed considerably with the death of DMOZ. (Props to Curlie for soldiering on.)

This remains inexplicable to me and over the years I’ve come up with various schemes to remedy what’s a serious lack (I won’t bore you with them here.) At the same time I’ve mused a lot on the problem caused by a lack of Web directories – topic browsing is a pain!

Yes, you can go to Google and type cooking or beer or whatever and get search results that are useful. But you’re limited to whatever you find when you enter the topic through Google’s “front door.” And those results are just one aspect of your topic (and depending on how popular that topic is, the results might be warped by SEO.)

How to get different results? Add more keywords, of course. And that takes us to the essential question of searching online: how do you ask about/think about/talk about what you don’t know?

Any keywords you can add to a search are predicated on your own knowledge/awareness. That makes topical browsing a challenge when your knowledge is limited (or worse, corrupted by mis/disinformation.) If you don’t have a subject index through which you are guided through a series of subtopics, how can you explore a topic that takes you beyond Google’s “front door” of results without relying on your knowledge of keywords (which may be nonexistent or incorrect?)

I tried to answer that question with Smushy Search. It’s available at https://researchbuzz.github.io/SmushySearch/ and does not require an API key or anything like that.

Making It Go

Here’s how Smushy Search works:

You enter the topic term for which you want to search (in the screenshot above it’s cooking.) Optionally you can add additional keywords to tilt your search in a certain direction (in the screenshot above it’s beginner.)
Choose if you want to filter out some common ecommerce results (removes some big ecommerce sites and tries to filter out other pages via search exclusions. Doesn’t work completely but it helps.)
Choose if you want to restrict your Google results to pages from edu and gov domains. Helps when you’re searching for something scholarly but will seriously narrow down your search results.
Finally, set the maximum frequency for the words that are going to augment the Google search. Word frequency is the number of times a word appears per million words of English text. The higher the frequency, the more common the word; light has a word frequency of a little over 173, while powdered clocks in at 2.35.

But where are the words coming from? That’s where the Datamuse API comes in.

Feeding Smushy Keywords With the Datamuse API

Once you’ve selected your words and options, Smushy Search sends your word to the Datamuse API. The API finds a set of adjectives related to your topic word and returns that to Smushy. Here’s where the frequency option comes in. Adjectives that relate to your topic might relate to lots of other topics as well! By specifying a lower frequency, you can zero in on words that are both related to your topic and unlikely to bring you irrelevant results.

Smushy Search takes the array of words returned by the Datamuse API and filters it to eliminate any words that are more common than your frequency option. It then selects four of those words and groups them into two OR sets ( (wordone | wordtwo) (wordthree | wordfour) ) and adds them to your original keywords to make a Google query URL, which then opens in a new window. The query ends up looking like this:

(wordone | wordtwo) (wordthree | wordfour) topicword optionalword1 optionalword2

Smushy in Action

Let’s see how it works with the topic cooking and the tilt word beginner. When I hit the Smush button I get this page of Google results in a new tab:

Hmm, lots of cooking classes and easy recipes. (Do you see the query that Smushy used the Datamuse API to make?) Let’s do another search:

Now Smushy has taken us to a page of results about Asian cooking, with some healthy recipes thrown in. Let’s take one more spin:

Mmmmm… Creole food. Okra. Now I’m hungry. (Why do I always use food examples?)

Do you see how Smushy Search takes you past Google’s “front door” of searches, or even any keywords you might think of yourself? It’s like a Web randomizer, only it keeps you within a certain topic. It’s a fun toy for exploring and a bit of a timesink!

I shared Smushy Search with my Patreon supporters yesterday (without them I could not do this) and I had some feedback about expanding this to search other collections, like maybe Internet Archive or Google Books. What do you think?

Thanks for reading.

August 24, 2022 at 07:04PM
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Open Diffusion, Google, Alt Text, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2022

Open Diffusion, Google, Alt Text, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Mixed: Open Source DALL-E “Open Diffusion” is now available via website. “Open Diffusion is now available via a web interface. After logging in, you can generate images via text prompts, similar to DALL-E 2, and have several additional options for fine-tuning. As with DALL-E 2, there are restrictions on prompts, such as sexual or violent images.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google search updates will prioritize real reviews over clickbait. “Google is making a series of updates to Search that aim to tackle clickbait and improve the relevancy of search results, prioritizing original and authentic reviews over recycled information that passes around aggregator sites. The changes in the form of two updates are being rolled out in the weeks ahead, according to a blog post announcing the ranking updates.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: What Is Alt Text? Why You Should Use It, and How to Write It. “Have you noticed prompts to write image ‘alt’ text (sometimes stylized as ALT text) when creating blog posts or sharing photos on social media? Here’s why this part of the HTML standard is important and how you can write it well.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Know Your Meme: Woman Pictured In The Viral ‘Girl Explaining’ Meme Explains The Origins And Her Reaction To Sudden Internet Fame. “Also going by the name of ‘Bro Girl’ and ‘Girlsplaining,’ we dove into researching the format this week in order to get to the bottom of what exactly was being said in the original. Through our search, we managed to find the woman depicted in the photo, whose real name is Denise ‘Denu’ Sanchez, and learned just what was going on that night in 2019.”

CNET: Funny Business: TikTok Is Putting a New Spin on Standup Comedy. “The short-form video app’s fingerprints are all over the Fringe this year, shaking up the 75-year-old arts festival with an injection of new talent and energy. Freshly TikTok-famous comedians have come to the Fringe for the first time, buoyed by their online success, while old hands are using the platform to find new audiences and experiment with material.”

Deadline: Google’s Covid Outbreak Is Currently The Largest Of Any Employer In Los Angeles. “The number of Covid infections among Los Angeles-area Google employees nearly doubled over the weekend, according to the count on the county’s official Covid workplace outbreak site.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies. “Twitter has major security problems that pose a threat to its own users’ personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy, according to an explosive whistleblower disclosure obtained exclusively by CNN and The Washington Post. The disclosure, sent last month to Congress and federal agencies, paints a picture of a chaotic and reckless environment at a mismanaged company that allows too many of its staff access to the platform’s central controls and most sensitive information without adequate oversight.”

Reuters: U.S. lawmakers unveil bill to help news media negotiate with Google, Facebook . “A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Monday released a revised version of a bill aimed at making it easier for news organizations to negotiate collectively with platforms like Google and Facebook.”

Ars Technica: Old laptop hard drives will allegedly crash when exposed to Janet Jackson music. “It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit ‘Rhythm Nation.’ But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility.”

The Hacker News: Google Uncovers Tool Used by Iranian Hackers to Steal Data from Email Accounts. “The Iranian government-backed actor known as Charming Kitten has added a new tool to its malware arsenal that allows it to retrieve user data from Gmail, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Outlook accounts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: That Painted Greek Maiden at the Met: Just Whose Vision Is She? . “Two German archaeologists use science to recreate the lost colors of antiquity. Historians debate just how authentic their version of the past really is.”

PsyPost: Science opponents believe their knowledge ranks among the highest, but it is actually among the lowest. “People with the greatest opposition to the scientific consensus tend to have the lowest levels of objective science knowledge but the highest levels of self-rated knowledge, according to new research published in Science Advances. The findings are in line with the Dunning-Kruger effect, a well-documented phenomenon in which people who are lacking in skills or knowledge tend to overestimate their abilities.” Good morning, Internet…

August 24, 2022 at 05:31PM
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