New researches

Sunday, September 18, 2022

A.I.R. Gallery, Idaho Folklife, Arizona Memory Project, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2022

A.I.R. Gallery, Idaho Folklife, Arizona Memory Project, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Artnet: A.I.R. Gallery Broke Barriers by Showing Women and Nonbinary Artists. Now the Collective’s Story Is Finally Being Told. “Today marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Artists in Residence, Inc. (A.I.R. Gallery), the first nonprofit artist-run cooperative gallery for women artists in the United States. In recognition of that milestone, the organization is launching a new digital archive and exhibition that covers the first half of its history.”

Boise State University: New partnership preserves Idaho folklife. “Special Collections and Archives at Boise State University’s Albertsons Library has partnered with the Folk and Traditional Arts program at the Idaho Commission on the Arts to create The Idaho Folklife Collection…. The first collection to be digitized, organized and made publicly-accessible contains fieldwork associated with Rosalie Sorrels. This collection includes work for the book Way Out in Idaho (Idaho Commission on the Arts, 1990). Materials include sound recordings, photographs, notes, and other ephemera related to her time spent roaming Idaho, documenting folklife practitioners and songs related to the state.”

Arizona Secretary of State: New platform for the Arizona Memory Project launches September 29, 2022. “The new website provides users with a modern look at the Arizona Memory Project and comes with many enhancements. Users will find the new website easier to search, with thousands of additional documents, newspapers, and other items fully text searchable. Additional enhancements include linked information across collections and items, improved search capabilities, and improved storytelling that highlight Arizona’s people, places, and events.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Flickr Blog: Discover Virtual Photography on Flickr. “Flickr is home to EVERY kind of photography, and that covers a vast range of subjects, styles, and categories. Today we’re excited to introduce a new kind of content category for the bulk uploading, group adminning, and search filtering needs of one of Flickr’s most active communities: Meet virtual photography!… Virtual photography is an emerging art form specializing in photos taken inside a video game or virtual environment.”

Engadget: Patreon lays off 17 percent of its employees . “Patreon, a platform that helps creators to generate more income from their work, has laid off 80 employees, or around 17 percent of its total headcount, amid the global economic slowdown and fears of a recession.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mexico News Daily: Doña Ángela: a Michoacán abuelita with over 4 million YouTube subscribers. “Doña Ángela lives in the town of Pablo Cuin in the Ario de Rosales municipality of Michoacán and she has become a viral hit by presenting homestyle Mexican recipes from her state’s regional cuisine and beyond. Her first video of how to make enchiladas verdes has had over 11 million views since it was published in 2019. Without a big production team, a fancy demonstration kitchen, and bevy of assistants behind the scenes, Doña Ángela’s kids film her on their cellphones as she cooks in front of her a large flat comal stove in a rural, wood-paneled kitchen.”

Review Geek: Adobe to Acquire Figma, Its Greatest Rival in Web and App Design. “In a shocking announcement, Adobe says it will acquire Figma. The $20 billion deal is controversial, but it’s also quite interesting. Figma is the first design tool that’s truly adapted to remote work, an area that Adobe struggles to understand.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Death of Queen Elizabeth II exploited to steal Microsoft credentials. “Threat actors are exploiting the death of Queen Elizabeth II in phishing attacks to lure their targets to sites that steal their Microsoft account credentials. Besides Microsoft account details, the attackers also attempt to steal their victims’ multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes to take over their accounts.”

Reuters: US appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech. “A US appeals court on Friday upheld a Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on “viewpoint,” a setback for technology industry groups that say the measure would turn platforms into bastions of dangerous content.”

Ars Technica: Musk filing claims “conspiracy among Twitter executives” to deceive public. “Elon Musk filed an amended countersuit against Twitter, claiming the allegations by Twitter’s former security chief, Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, give Musk new legal grounds to kill the merger deal.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: From analog to digital. “There was once a time, not so long ago, when scientists like Casey Holliday needed scalpels, scissors and even their own hands to conduct anatomical research. But now, with recent advances in technology, Holliday and his colleagues at the University of Missouri are using artificial intelligence (AI) to see inside an animal or a person — down to a single muscle fiber — without ever making a cut.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

NOLA: Nobody knows as much about New Orleans’ street tiles as this guy. And he’s worried.. “For more than a century, street corners in the older sections of the Crescent City have been marked with names made from embedded alphabet tiles. The Wordle of street names lends a certain genteel, old-fashioned charm to any stroll. Like beignets and Mardi Gras beads, they are among New Orleans’ iconic images, a signature of the City That Care Forgot. But these days, the tiles may be in trouble. With widespread street repairs unfolding around them, tile-lovers are concerned that when the dust settles and the cement trucks finally retreat, many of the tiles will permanently disappear with them.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 18, 2022 at 05:27PM
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Saturday, September 17, 2022

Portuguese WWI Military Veterans, TikTok, Regular Expressions, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022

Portuguese WWI Military Veterans, TikTok, Regular Expressions, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Institute of Contemporary History (Portugal): Digital Archive On The History Of The Portuguese Maimed By War. “This week saw the launch of the digital archive ‘Os Mutilados da Guerra (1914-1918): reavivar uma memória’ [The War Maimed (1914-1918): Reviving a Memory], which aims to ‘work as a starting point for the study and dissemination of the history of the Portuguese maimed in the First World War’.” The site is in Portuguese but Google Translate worked fine. As you might expect some of these images are very disturbing; I didn’t go past the thumbnails.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Business Insider: Business Insider
TikTok copies Instagram’s move to copy buzzy app BeReal. “TikTok is launching a new tool that people quickly noticed is incredibly similar to another popular app: BeReal. The social media platform announced on Thursday TikTok Now, a tool where users receive a daily prompt to film a 10-second video or take a photo to share what they’re doing in the moment from the front and back cameras on their phone.”

USEFUL STUFF

Red Hat Developer: Regex how-to: Quantifiers, pattern collections, and word boundaries. “Filtering and searching text with regular expressions is an important skill for every developer. Regular expressions can be tricky to master. To work with them effectively, you need a detailed understanding of their symbols and syntax. Fortunately, learning to work with regular expressions can be incremental. You don’t need to learn everything all at once to do useful work. Rather, you can start with the basics and then move into more complex topics while developing your understanding and using what you know as you go along.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Independent: ‘GrieveWatch’ Twitter account goes viral for showcasing how brands are mourning the Queen. “One such image it shared was from an unnamed laser hair removal company. In a screenshot of what looks like an email, the company writes: ‘To celebrate and remember our Queen, we are offering the most amazing deals until the 19 September 2022.’ Another shows a shopfront with ‘RIP Queen Elizabeth’ carved into the side of a watermelon, which the account dubbed ‘Mourn Melon’.”

New York Times: For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine. “Need to find a restaurant or figure out how to do something? Young people are turning to TikTok to search for answers. Google has noticed.”

Front Office Sports: ESPN’s Newest Attempt To Target Younger Audiences. “ESPN is making a play for Gen Z by putting its social media might behind a new network of content creators, the network told Front Office Sports. The Worldwide Leader is launching ESPN Creator Network, a program that will provide up-close access to ESPN’s sports properties — as well as the company’s considerable resources — to up-and-coming content creators.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Uber Investigating Computer System Breach. “Uber’s computer network was breached on Thursday, leading the ride-hailing giant to take several internal communications and engineering systems offline as it investigated the hack, The New York Times reported.”

ProPublica: Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims Into Cyberscamming. “Tens of thousands of people from across Asia have been coerced into defrauding people in America and around the world out of millions of dollars. Those who resist face beatings, food deprivation or worse.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BusinessWire: American Library Association Releases Preliminary Data on 2022 Book Bans (PRESS RELEASE). “Between January 1 and August 31, 2022, ALA documented 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources, and 1,651 unique titles were targeted. In 2021, ALA reported 729 attempts to censor library resources, targeting 1,597 books, which represented the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling these lists more than 20 years ago.”

IANS: NASA, Google to help track air pollution at local level. “NASA and Google will develop advanced machine learning-based algorithms that link space data with Google Earth Engine data streams to generate high-resolution air quality maps in near real-time.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 18, 2022 at 12:05AM
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Video Game Maps, Houston Air Quality, Banned Books Week, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022

Video Game Maps, Houston Air Quality, Banned Books Week, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Lifehacker: Use This Site to Get a Deeper Look at Your Favorite Video Game Maps. “Part of what makes video games so darn fun is the pure exploration. Us 90s gamers remember how huge Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field felt for the first time, or how realistic Grand Theft Auto III’s Liberty City seemed. While these games are still just as fun to explore today, modern tech makes it possible to take that exploration a major step forward, by allowing you to fly through the entire map on your own time.”

KSAT: Website aims to make pollution permit information more accessible in Houston. “The new website, called AirMail and launched Tuesday, automatically assembles data from across [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality]’s labyrinthine website so that ordinary people and community groups can easily see where polluting projects are planned, file official comments and request public hearings.”

EVENTS

BusinessWire: American Library Association Highlights Increasing Censorship Attempts During Banned Books Week Programming (PRESS RELEASE). “Libraries nationwide will join the American Library Association to highlight increased censorship of books during this year’s Banned Books Week, taking place September 18-24, 2022. The American Library Association (ALA), Unite Against Banned Books (UABB) and the Banned Books Week Coalition are planning extensive programming during the week, bringing together authors, librarians and scholars to share perspectives on censorship.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Discord’s new feature looks a bit like Internet forums—with a dash of Reddit. “Discord announced a new feature on Wednesday called ‘Forum Channels’ to allow for more organized and asynchronous discussions within servers. The intent with Forum Channels seems to be to make it easier for specific conversations to continue for extended periods without the worry that a topic change or another simultaneous conversation will bury a subject in the annals of chat log history.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to See Deleted Reddit Posts. “When you’re browsing Reddit, finding a deleted post with tons of upvotes is annoying. A brief look at the thread title and your curiosity takes control, leading you into wondering how great it would be if you could just time travel to the past and see what the deleted thread was all about. Well, that’s not possible—only the time travel part. We’ll show you five different ways to view old, deleted Reddit posts and comments so you can satisfy your curious mind.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software. “Emulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computing experience is always getting better. I’m writing this in Google Docs so my editor’s little round avatar head can peek in and make sure I don’t miss my deadline for once, but I’d prefer to write it in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which was the greatest word processor ever—a blank screen illuminated with only letters and numbers, offering just enough bold and italics to keep things interesting. I remember WP51 the way a non-nerd might remember a vintage Mustang. You could just take that thing out and go, man.”

UCLA: UCLA Library to expand global preservation work thanks to largest grant in its history. “UCLA Library has received the largest grant in its 139-year history: $13 million over eight years to digitize and make at-risk cultural heritage materials from the 20th and 21st centuries available online to the public.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Tech Companies Ramp Up Efforts to Combat Online Extremism. “Several major tech companies on Thursday announced new policies and tools to combat online extremism on their sites as part of a White House effort focused on fighting hate-fueled violence.”

Florida State University: FSU Department of Computer Science receives $4.2M to boost nation’s cybersecurity workforce. “To help meet the growing demand for cybersecurity experts, the National Science Foundation’s CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program has awarded Florida State University a $4.2 million grant to support students pursuing careers in cybersecurity. This is the second round of funding the Department of Computer Science has received to operate this program.”

University of Maryland: UMD Researchers Create Unremovable Watermark to Secure Intellectual Property in Age of AI. “Watermarks of the future will be a way for organizations to claim authorship of digital models and systems they create, akin to a painter signing their name in the corner of a painting. Current methods, however, are vulnerable to savvy adversaries who know how to tweak the network parameters in a way that would go unnoticed, allowing them to claim a model as their own. That’s changing with the new watermark developed by the UMD team, which presented it at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: It takes a laboratory to avoid data loss. “Academia heaps most of the burden of documentation and data storage onto individuals, instead of the lab as a whole. At the same time, little, if any, instruction is provided to teach individuals how to properly document and store their data. But labs can mitigate data loss by implementing three simple suggestions.”

University of Chicago: Is a book hidden inside a decades-old piece of concrete? Scientists seek answers to art mystery. “The piece in question is called Betonbuch, or Concrete Book, and is the work of German-born artist Wolf Vostell. He was part of Fluxus, an international community of experimental creators that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and was a pioneer of using concrete as a material for art, not just construction. In 1971, Vostell wrote a short book called Betonierungen, or Concretifications, and as evidence of his commitment to the material, he purportedly encased 100 copies of that book in numbered slabs of concrete.” Good morning, Internet…

September 17, 2022 at 05:25PM
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Friday, September 16, 2022

PromptHero, Have I Been Trained?, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 16, 2022

PromptHero, Have I Been Trained?, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Discovered on Twitter, I think: PromptHero. It’s a search engine for AI-generated images. You can do a regular keyword search or get a set of random images. I did a search for Hollywood and discovered someone out there really likes capybaras in knitted caps.

Ars Technica: Have AI image generators assimilated your art? New tool lets you check. “When visiting the Have I Been Trained? website, which is run by a group of artists called Spawning, users can search the data set by text (such as an artist’s name) or by an image they upload. They will see image results alongside caption data linked to each image.”

Anchorage Daily News: OPINION: A new tool to help understand Alaska’s historic Native land claims act. “To provide future generations insights into this groundbreaking law, the Alaska Historical Society (AHS) has just completed the first-ever comprehensive guide to historical sources about ANCSA. The three-volume, nearly 1,200-page Guide to Sources for the Study of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act identifies the vast majority of documents, located in archives, libraries, personal collections and online.” The guide is freely available and searchable online.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Conversation: One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a spectacular failure. “When [Nayib] Bukele announced his plans in July 2021, Bitcoin’s value was about US$35,000. By the time the legislation came into effect, on September 7 2021, it was about US$45,000. Two months later, it peaked at US$64,400. Now it is trading at around US$20,000.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: New Report Claims YouTube Is Cashing in on Misogyny, Racism, and Targeted Harassment . “In an exclusive interview, Bot Sentinel founder Christopher Bouzy tells Rolling Stone that the report uncovered a pattern of unchecked hate speech, misogyny, racism, and targeted harassment singularly focused on famous and identifiable women. The most mentioned women in the channels were Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and actress Amber Heard, both of whom have remained extremely vocal about the long-term mental and emotional effects of targeted harassment.”

USC: First-of-its-kind media studies lab launches at USC to amplify Black social change makers on the West Coast. “As the University of Southern California’s first media studies center dedicated to saving, studying and sharing the work of prominent and hidden figures who have been central to Black social justice movements in America, the Bass Lab will create a web archive that serves as a repository for Black media and activist journalism. The archive will include digitized newspapers, magazines, photojournalism and scanned 3D objects that tell the story of Black life and culture on the West Coast. Original content in the form of recorded interviews and oral histories will also be featured. ”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Tech Xplore: Indonesia investigating Google over app store payment system. “Indonesia has launched an anti-trust investigation into Google over the etch firm’s insistence that its payment system be used for purchases from its app store, authorities said Thursday, accusing it of unfair business practices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford News: The real strength of weak ties. “A team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and LinkedIn recently conducted the largest experimental study to date on the impact of digital job sites on the labor market and found that weaker social connections have a greater beneficial effect on job mobility than stronger ties.”

Globe and Mail: Justin Trudeau, Google and Canada’s loophole-filled lobbying rules. “The PM’s lobbying-that-wasn’t-lobbying chat doesn’t mean Google’s win was preordained. Waterfront Toronto has always said the process was fair. But what’s certain is Ottawa spent years withholding salient details about its role in a major public project. And the system to hold Ottawa accountable was once more exposed as filled with loopholes.”

Music Connection: New Survey: Trends & Concerns In Audio Archiving. “Based on key topics raised during an Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) and Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing (P&E Wing) co-hosted 2021 summit ‘Protecting Legacies: The Art, Science and Value of Music Archives,’ IMES, the P&E Wing and the Audio Engineering Society (AES) developed a survey to assess current practices and challenges in audio archiving. The survey was sent to approximately 4,000 members of the P&E Wing and 11,000 members of the AES.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 17, 2022 at 12:38AM
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Race in America, Lobbying Data, Canva, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 16, 2022

Race in America, Lobbying Data, Canva, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brown University: Brown Library publishes five new volumes in the “Race & … in America” digital book series . “Open access publication expands series delving into comparative perspectives on the roots and effects of racism in the U.S…. As an open access publication, the digital series provides enduring, barrier-free access to knowledge, and has been developed with universal design principles for equitable use by all persons, including those with disabilities.”

EIN: LobbyingData.com Announces the Launch of the First-Ever Publicly Available Real-Time View of American Lobbying (PRESS RELEASE). “LobbyingData sources all of the thousands of lobbying exchanges everyday and distills the information into an easy to understand, tabular dashboard – providing transparency to the public into the notoriously opaque and powerful industry of lobbying. The dashboard is accessible on web and mobile.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Canva moves beyond graphic design to launch a visual worksuite. “Canva is further establishing itself as more than just a user-friendly graphic design tool. The Australian company announced at its Canva Create event that it will unveil a suite of new products to round out its product offerings: Canva Docs, Canva Websites, Canva Whiteboards and Data Visualization, which comes from its acquisition of Flourish.”

Engadget: Period tracker app Flo launches ‘Anonymous Mode’ for iOS devices. “Flo’s anonymous mode has arrived. The period tracker promised to launch the new mode shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, in an effort to assuage privacy-related fears.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Astana Times: Women of Kazakhstan Virtual Museum Celebrates Overlooked Kazakh Women in Arts and Culture. “The Women of Kazakhstan project is the first virtual museum exploring the history and accomplishments of Kazakh women undertaken as part of an effort to broaden the picture of women’s important, yet historically overlooked roles in driving the cultural and historical changes in Kazakhstan.”

Waxy: Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images. “As AI-generated art platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion explode in popularity, online communities devoted to sharing human-generated art are forced to make a decision: should AI art be allowed?”

TV News Check: WRAL Moves To Digitally Save Its Identity. “This Thursday, WRAL will announce a partnership with Eon Media, a Toronto-based tech company focused on artificial-intelligence video streaming solutions, that will generate boundless access to the station’s archives. The vast cache of now metadata-encoded video — amounting to half a million hours’ worth of content, according to Accarrino — will soon be made easily available to not only the WRAL newsroom, but also the general public.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: House Oversight Committee asks Archives if Trump still possesses presidential records. “The House Oversight Committee is asking the National Archives for an assessment of whether there are presidential records still unaccounted for and in Donald Trump’s possession, according to a new letter obtained by CNN.”

CNN: Albania blames Iran for second cyberattack since July. “Albania blamed the Iranian government Saturday for a cyberattack against computer systems used by Albanian state police — just days after the White House condemned Tehran for a hack that disrupted Albanian government services in July.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul. “Based on data collected since the company began using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein published a report yesterday showing that the company’s SSDs are failing at a much lower rate than its HDDs as the drives age.”

CNET: The Cowboy Is Deeply Misunderstood, Says Adobe Emoji Report. “His warm smile beams out from beneath the rim of his 10-gallon Stetson, bringing farm-to-text delight into every conversation he joins. Summoned by only the most brazen texters, his rambunctious presence offers a sudden jolt of rodeo-howling glee when he rides into a thread. The message he sends? A mysterious riddle. His delivery? Wild and untamable. No one, it seems, truly knows the secrets of the chaotically alluring cowboy emoji.”

Futurism: Google And Oxford Scientists Publish Paper Claiming AI Will “Likely” Annihilate Humankind. “In a recent paper published in the journal AI Magazine, the team — comprised of DeepMind senior scientist Marcus Hutter and Oxford researchers Michael Cohen and Michael Osborne — argues that machines will eventually become incentivized to break the rules their creators set to compete for limited resources or energy.” Good morning, Internet…

September 16, 2022 at 05:30PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/SmN8bqB

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Spanish-Language Radio, Google Photos, Patreon, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 15, 2022

Spanish-Language Radio, Google Photos, Patreon, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 15, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

RadioWorld: AAPB Releases Resources to Honor Hispanic Heritage. “To honor Hispanic Heritage Month, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is releasing a selection of documentaries, interviews and other archival material for stations to air. The resources highlight the AAPB’s archive of Latinx, Hispanic and Spanish-language programs created by public radio broadcasters for radio and television. The material includes more than 8,000 newly added broadcasts from Linea Abierta, the only nationally-aired, Spanish-language, public radio call-in show.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PC Magazine: Google Photos Rolls Out Its Biggest Ever Feature Update for Memories. “Google Photos is harnessing our collective need to share nostalgia with its biggest-ever update to Memories, which surfaces snapshots from recent years. The redesign, according to product manager Yael Marzan, will feature more videos—including ‘the best snippets’ from longer videos automatically trimmed ‘so you can relive the most meaningful moments.'”

TechCrunch: Patreon lays off 17% of staff, affecting 80 employees. “CEO Jack Conte wrote in a letter to staff — cross-posted to Patreon’s blog — that 17% of the staff will be laid off. This affects the Go-to-Market, Operations, Finance and People teams. Patreon will also close its Berlin office, which worked on sales and marketing.”

USEFUL STUFF

Smashing Magazine: Making Sense Of WAI-ARIA: A Comprehensive Guide. “The Web Accessibility Initiative — Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) is a technical specification that provides direction on how to improve the accessibility of web applications. Where the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) focus more on static web content, WAI-ARIA focuses on making interactions more accessible.” This article is sponsored. Normally I hate sponsored articles and I will not link to them. This one is so information-rich that I’m breaking my own rule.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Snapper (Millersville University): Content creator inspires discussion through nostalgic memes. “Humorous phenomena taking the form of pictures, videos, and sounds, known as ‘memes,’ have been taking the world by storm for as long as most of us can remember. They spark joy, help us to cope or distract us from life’s troubles, and even inspire discussion about the world around us…. Living a Hannah Montana-esque double life, Lydia navigates work and life as any young woman in her 20s would, but when she wants to escape or express herself, she takes to the internet as her own online persona – Klit Klittredge.”

Globe and Mail: Sidewalk Labs project gained support from Trudeau in 2017 call ahead of bid process. “Google parent Alphabet Inc. gained support from Justin Trudeau for its plan to build a technology-driven community in Toronto after a private, undisclosed call between the Prime Minister and the company’s chairman before the project was ever made public.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft September 2022 Patch Tuesday fixes zero-day used in attacks, 63 flaws. “Today is Microsoft’s September 2022 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for an actively exploited Windows vulnerability and a total of 63 flaws. Five of the 63 vulnerabilities fixed in today’s update are classified as ‘Critical’ as they allow remote code execution, one of the most severe types of vulnerabilities.”

Associated Press: South Korea fines Google, Meta over privacy violations. ” South Korea’s privacy watchdog has fined Google and Meta a combined 100 billion won ($72 million) for tracking consumers’ online behavior without their consent and using their data for targeted advertisements.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

USA Today: Livestreamed violence compounds America’s horror and inspires copycats, experts say. When will it stop?. “The violence across Tennessee’s second-largest city that left four dead and three injured is the latest example of why advocates have been pushing tech companies since the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, to draft policies against livestreamed attacks and quickly scrub the videos from their platforms.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Washington Post: They’re locked up in D.C. — and learning how to code from MIT. “The last time Rochell Crowder held an office job, he said, it was 1983 and computers were not yet central to everyday life. But on Thursday, after almost four decades of odd jobs and crimes that landed him in and out of jail, the 57-year-old completed a computer science course taught by PhD candidates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 16, 2022 at 01:01AM
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RB Search Gizmos: Exploring Nearby Goings-On With Local Community Finder

RB Search Gizmos: Exploring Nearby Goings-On With Local Community Finder
By ResearchBuzz

I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch a lot of regular network TV (or cable TV for that matter), but I do spend a couple of hours a night watching YouTube. One of the channels I watch is called Beau of the Fifth Column. Beau, the host, talks about politics, current events, and community organizing, among other things.

A few months ago while I was watching, Beau was talking about a message he had gotten asking about how to find like-minded people in one’s community. In response, Beau said something about going online and searching Twitter, and then my husband laughed because I involuntarily blurted out “Oh, honey, no.”

Beau’s not entirely wrong. Twitter is a good place to find community and like-minded people. However, if you’re looking for people in your local area it’s unreliable. You can use location names to narrow down search results a little, but if you want to find people in your area you need to do a location search.

Twitter’s location searching is neither intuitive nor easy to use, and I’ve been picking at the problem for a couple of months after making a Twitter-only solution that I wasn’t satisfied with. Then yesterday I found an API that offered geocoding without requiring an API key, and that’s all I needed to finish up the Local Community Finder, available at https://researchbuzz.github.io/Local-Community-Finder/ .

When I have tried to do local event search before I always ran into the problem of getting lots of outdated pages in the search results. This time I started by generating the date and making sure the month and year appear in the search results. It looks weird and I kept second-guessing myself when I was testing search patterns, but it works.

The LCF also uses an API to get a city, state, and lat/long pair for the zip code you specify. It uses the city and state name in the generated Google queries and the lat/long to generate Twitter searches for your vicinity.

Let’s try using this tool like a Beau of the Fifth Column viewer. The zip code is for St. Louis, Missouri, and I’ll leave that alone. But instead of the word Fair I’m going to use the word voters. I’m going to leave the local option at local, which searches the entire city, instead of VERY local, which tries to restrict a search to a zip code area.

After you click the Find Your Local Community button, you’ll get a list of URLs for a Google search and a few Twitter searches.

The first link will open a page of Google results in a new tab. Different queries bring different results, of course, but I was impressed with how information-rich the results could get:

Underneath the Google link are two sets of Twitter links. In the first set you can search the Twitter space in your area with and without your search query. In the second, you’re searching the same space only your results are restricted to those users who have been verified by Twitter. Let’s take a look at the are verified user search without your topic query:

Without your query you’ll generally get things like reporters, news institutions, sports teams, and other prominent local people. When your query is added in you may find your results change a lot (especially if you’re searching for something like a sports team) or only a little. In this case we find two news institutions and a cotton expert in our search:

The Twitter query searches a very generous 10 km around the zip code’s lat/long. If you’re in a big city and find that radius brings you too many results, look in Twitter’s search box for the part of the query that reads 10km and change the 10 to whatever you like (when searching in the zip code area only, it defaults to 2km.)

I could make that radius adjustable. I could add more sources of information. I could do lots of things! What do you think? When you try the LCF does it find you anything cool?

September 15, 2022 at 07:51PM
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