New researches

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Hawaii Substance Abuse, Colorado Natural Disasters, Twitter, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 5, 2022

Hawaii Substance Abuse, Colorado Natural Disasters, Twitter, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 5, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Hawaii News: Substance abuse in Hawaiʻi tracked by new dashboard. “From overdose deaths to crisis calls in Hawaiʻi, data related to drug trends is now available to the public through a new online dashboard. The Statewide Substance Use, Mental Health and Hawaiʻi CARES Summary is a web site of the Hawaiʻi State Department of Health’s (DOH) Behavioral Health Administration.”

9News: New website helps backcountry explorers find avalanche conditions. “Snow has returned to the high country, which also means an increased risk of avalanche. And the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) has launched a new website helping users looking for avalanche conditions in Colorado.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Confusion and Frustration Reign as Elon Musk Cuts Half of Twitter’s Staff. “By early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Find Your Twitter Friends on Mastodon. “We told you how to get started on Mastodon a few years ago, so I won’t rehash that. Once you set up an account, though, you might be wondering whether you can find any of your Twitter friends. Here are a few ways to do that.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ITV: Southampton General Hospital clarifies it is ‘very much open’ after Google said it was closed. “A major hospital has been forced to clarify that it is ‘very much open’ after it was flagged as temporarily closed by Google Maps. Southampton General Hospital, which is one of the busiest in the South, deals with emergency and critical care as well as acute medicine and operates a dedicated eye casualty.”

Mashable: V Live, the largest archive of K-pop live streams, is shutting down. What will happen to those videos?. “On Monday, Oct. 31, South Korean live streaming app V Live notified users that it’d be shutting down on Dec. 31, 2022. The closure isn’t a surprise — in March, HYBE, owner of the competing app Weverse, announced it had acquired V Live and intended to close the app — but it is a bummer for artists and fans. V Live is the largest-ever archive of live-streamed K-pop content. Where will that content live on when the app goes dark?”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Z-Library eBook site domains seized by U.S. Dept of Justice. “Internet domains for the popular Z-Library online eBook repository were seized early this morning by the U.S. Department of Justice, preventing easy access to the service. Z-Library is ranked in the top 10k most visited websites on the Internet, offering over 11 million books and 84 million articles for free via its website.”

Washington Post: Investigators search for pricey gifts to Trump from foreign leaders. “Congressional investigators are looking for dozens of pricey mementos gifted to former president Donald Trump and his family members by foreign governments, according to three people familiar with the matter. The House Oversight Committee has asked for help in locating the items from the National Archives, which is among the agencies charged with keeping presidential gifts, two of the people said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Copenhagen: Disappearing coastlines: A smartphone and selfie stick can let us know by how much. “New mobile phone technology makes it possible to better monitor Danish coastlines, which recede up to four meters a year in some places. The method, which has been tested by the University of Copenhagen, also lets citizen scientists help researchers and government agencies monitor coastal erosion and may provide us with a better understanding of erosion in the future.”

Penn State: New coding tool could aid computer programmers who are blind or have low vision . “Prior work has focused on making different parts of the coding process more accessible for blind and low-vision users, such as reading or navigating code. Grid Editor is the first to place emphasis on code editing — an important step in making continuous updates to software, in which programmers edit and update existing code that was previously written by other programmers.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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November 6, 2022 at 12:56AM
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A Big List of Mastodon Resources

A Big List of Mastodon Resources
By ResearchBuzz

I took a pop at Mastodon several years ago, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t figure out how to make it social, and I didn’t have a good grasp of how the “federated” part works.

The ascension of EM on Twitter gave me impetus to look again, so yesterday afternoon I started exploring. At the end of the evening I had a better understanding of the fediverse (though I suspect my understanding is only 1% complete), a much busier Mastodon instance, and a big pile of resources which I’m going to share with you here.

I’m seeing some wild statements about Mastodon on Twitter, like how there’s nobody on Mastodon, it’s too hard to use, etc. I haven’t found that to be true. Is there a learning curve? Yes. Are there LOTS of people who are willing to help you flatten that learning curve? Yes. Are there as many people on Mastodon as Twitter? No. Are there literally thousands of communities talking about everything under the sun and moving information all over the place? Yes.

Feels like early Web, to be honest, which is a difficult feeling to explain and one which can evoke a lot of scorn, so I don’t think I’m going to go around arguing about it. Instead, I’ll just say I’ve already found a lot of interesting people to follow, the global use of hashtags is exquisite, and there are so many Mastodon tools already available that I’m planning a set of ResearchBuzz bots.

If this sounds like something you want to explore too, read on for a big list of resources.

One warning before we start: if you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time you know that the scammers come out whenever anything big/viral happens. It’s the same with Mastodon – there are indications that there are jerks setting up malware disguised as useful products. I’m trying to stick to the older/established tools in this writeup to avoid that danger, but in all cases please be careful when something asks you for Twitter or Mastodon permissions.

Primers

Everything I know about Mastodon – This article by Danielle Navarro is subtitled “A hastily written guide for data science folks trying to navigate the fediverse,” but if this is hastily written I can’t tell it. Thorough, lots of resources, even has a table of contents on the side.

How to Join Mastodon, the Ad-Free Social Network Billionaires Can’t Buy – Mostly, an overview of the culture and nature of Mastodon. Answer some high-level questions like “Which server should I join?” Executive summary type article.

Exploring Mastodon – A multi-part (and I think ongoing) article from Martin Fowler on his experiences using Mastodon. The part I’m linking to talking about the importance of finding your first Mastodon instance. (Spoiler – it’s not particularly important and Mastodon makes it very easy to move to another instance.)

Mastodon Basics – An overview article that’s geared more toward software developers, with discussions about the tech and pointers to ongoing projects.

Mastodon for Writers/Readers – A discussion of Mastodon and its resources with a particular focus on writers, readers, and accessibility. Lots of resources here.

Adding alt text (and more) to images in Monsoon – Sharpen your accessibility chops with this article from Clint Lalonde on adding alt text and setting the focus area for an image.

Fedi.Tips – Once you’ve found an instance and you’re looking around Mastodon, you’ll probably want some guidance on finding popular hashtags, verifying your account, etc. Fedi.Tips has a big list. (It’s also a good account to follow if you’re a newbie.)

Finding Mastodon Instances

Instances.social – Asks you a few preference questions about instance size, moderation preferences, and languages, and generates a big list of instances for you to check out.

To the Fediverse – Would you rather browse instances than get a list of recommendations? This site lists 7700 instances, which includes a number of lists on the front page (newest instances, largest instances, instances in various languages, instances by topic, etc.

In the rapidly expanding Mastodon fediverse, there’s an instance for everyone – A brief Mashable article about some of the more niche-y parts of Mastodon.

Finding People to Follow

Academics on Mastodon – Are you a proud member of #AcademicTwitter? You’ll love this list of academic accounts on Mastodon, sorted by discipline. There are groups available here as well as a list of science/academic/GLAM instances.

Social Search – Search engine indexing over 2.4 million fediverse accounts. Search by keyword, or browse some of the lists on the front page (largest number of followers, active tech accounts, popular RSS feeds, etc.)

Resource Lists

Fediverse Party – A big, nicely-organized list of Mastodon resources. Includes tools for both end-users and programmers, forks, tutorials, utilities, etc.

Project Awesome – A list of Mastodon tools in a number of programmer and end-user categories, with what appears to be a focus on French-language content.

Twitter Tools

3 tools to help you find people you follow on Twitter on Mastodon – Clint Lalonde looks at three ways to find your Twitter fam on Mastodon. Again, be careful about granting Twitter permissions. (Fortunately the way these tools are structured you can give permission, run the tool, and then revoke permission.)

Moa.party – Acts as a bridge between your Twitter and your Mastodon account. This is a utility that requires a lot of trust. I checked the GitLab repo for this tool, and it’s two years old, and the original GitHub account is over three years old.

Stork (pleroma bot) – A bot that lets you mirror Twitter accounts into Mastodon. The GitHub project for this started in 2020.

How to Find Your Twitter Friends on Mastodon – An article from Wired that covers both methods and tools for finding your friends after they migrate.

News

Bots in Space / UA News – Mirrors a bunch of (mostly) Ukraine news accounts on Twitter.

Hosts and Hosting

People use Mastodon by logging on to Web sites called “instances”. These instances are all linked together and people can communicate across them. (If you’re in tech and of a certain age, I might explain by saying “It’s a BBS network, only on the Internet instead of phone lines.”)

Just like with a Web site, you can host your own Mastodon instance. That’s what I’m doing via Masto.host. With my own instance I can mess around and make bots and not bother people. Masto.host’s entry-level tier cost for an instance is $6 a month, but unfortunately it’s a bit overwhelmed at the moment and is temporarily closed to new users. I’m putting it here because I’ve always had a good experience working with this host and he answers support requests like lightning.

The Best Fediverse Servers to Create Your Own Online Community — An article from MakeUseOf that covers a number of available spaces in the fediverse; not just Mastodon but also Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc.

On running a Mastodon Instance – Tobias from Rixx lays it out, warts and all.

Programming

How to Make a Mastodon Bot: The Definitive Guide – Just what it says on the tin. Also includes a list of fediverse bots if you want to see what other people are working on.

Create a Mastodon bot to forward Twitter and RSS feeds to your timeline – A walkthrough from the Platypush blog.

November 5, 2022 at 10:13PM
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Are You Pressworthy, NASA Artemis Missions, Cyber Law Toolkit, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, November 5, 2022

Are You Pressworthy, NASA Artemis Missions, Cyber Law Toolkit, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, November 5, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Associated Press: How much press is someone ‘worth’? A new tool tackles inequality in missing persons stories.. “If you went missing, how much press would you be ‘worth’? The Columbia Journalism Review unveiled a tool on Thursday that calculates the number of stories your disappearance would net, based on demographics.”

University of Illinois UC: New online video resource: learn from experts about NASA Artemis space technology. “If you’re interested in space technologies that will put the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, you can now learn from experts for free and at your own pace. A collection of videos, each less than 30 minutes long, are creatively packaged as an accessible online course. In all, the videos provide an in-depth look at NASA’s Artemis missions to explore the lunar surface, then apply that new knowledge it to Mars’ missions and beyond.”

University of Exeter: Latest edition of influential Cyber Law Toolkit tracks online warfare around the globe. “The Cyber Law Toolkit, an established go-to resource for professionals and scholars working on international law and cyber operations, has been updated again for 2022. The Toolkit contains a customizable overview of all available national positions on international law and cyber operations. Users can search for specific countries or compare different states’ views on a diverse range of topics such as sovereignty, non-intervention, or due diligence.”

Sarajevo Times: Database of active Cases of Persons Missing during War in the former Yugoslavia launched. “The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Group on Missing Persons (GNO), which consists of domestic institutions responsible for issues of missing persons from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia, as part of the Berlin process, today in The Hague, will publicly launch the Database of active cases of persons missing as a result of armed conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

MIT Technology Review: Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over. “The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number.”

Daily Beast: Twitter Employees Slam Elon Musk as ‘Tremendously Shitty’ During Mass Layoffs. “Scores of Twitter employees unceremoniously lost access to their work emails late Thursday as Elon Musk commenced a brutal round of layoffs. The workers have reacted with mixed emotions; some are devastated, having spent years at the social media giant. Others are happy to finally exit the chaos.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Worries Grow That TikTok Is New Home for Manipulated Video and Photos. “Edited or synthesized material also appears on other online platforms, such as Facebook, which has nearly three billion monthly active users. But experts said it was especially difficult to catch on TikTok, which encourages its estimated 1.6 billion active users to put their own stamp on someone else’s content, and where reality, satire and outright deceit sometimes blend together in the fast-moving and occasionally livestreamed video feed.”

Axios: Tech workers brace for massive wintertime layoff surge. “Layoff and hiring freezes are cascading across America, after a record boom lulled many employers and employees into a false sense of security.”

Iceland Review: National Library Rejects Esperanto Archive. “With dwindling membership, the Icelandic Esperanto Association has sold its former Skólavörðustígur property and is now searching for a home for its collection of 6,000 Esperanto works. The National Library of Iceland is not interested, leaving the future of the unique archive in question.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Bloomberg: Candidates Keep Pushing Election Denial Online — Because It Works. “Candidates who have pushed the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen routinely saw their posts collecting more engagement overall compared to the performance of each candidate’s average post, Bloomberg found. The review covered the Facebook and Twitter posts of every Republican running for Senate, Congress, governor, attorney general or secretary of state this year.”

Cornell Chronicle: SkinKit offers versatile, wearable on-skin computing. “On-skin interfaces – sometimes known as ‘smart tattoos’ – have the potential to outperform the sensing capabilities of current wearable technologies, but combining comfort and durability has proven challenging. Now, members of Cornell’s Hybrid Body Lab have come up with a reliable, skin-tight interface that’s easy to attach and detach, and can be used for a variety of purposes – from health monitoring to fashion.”

Harvard Gazette: How to spot a gerrymandered district? Compare it to fair ones.. “Called ‘redist,’ the tool creates a vast pool of alternate nonpartisan plans (upwards of 5,000 to 10,000) that can be compared to a map that’s being proposed or has already been enacted by local legislators or redistricting committees. This pool of nonpartisan baseline maps makes it possible to see whether the new map fairly represents the new shifts shown in the Census, or is an outlier.” Good morning, Internet…

November 5, 2022 at 05:28PM
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Friday, November 4, 2022

Wentworth Woodhouse, CultureBrew Artist Database, Black History North Carolina, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 4, 2022

Wentworth Woodhouse, CultureBrew Artist Database, Black History North Carolina, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 4, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Yorkshire Post: Wentworth Woodhouse’s ‘lost’ archives that were thought to have been destroyed in a fire reveal fascinating facts about Yorkshire estate. “The story goes that a huge bonfire at Wentworth Woodhouse in the 1970s destroyed a vast collection of private letters and documents belonging to the aristocratic Fitzwilliam family. Yet this urban legend that sprang up in the estate villages as the family’s fortunes crumbled and the Grade I-listed house near Rotherham’s sale approached was never accurate – and a new research project has digitised the Fitzwilliams’ ‘lost’ archives and revealed previously unknown facts about their lives.”

STIR Vancouver: CultureBrew.Art launches national database of Indigenous and racialized artists. “CultureBrew.Art seeks to counteract systemic racism in the arts by linking up BIPOC artists in performing, literary, and media arts with decision-makers via a national searchable database. The resource, seven years in the making, is aimed at producers, directors, casting agents, and curators, as well as community and social service agencies, schools and educational institutions, government, and media outlets. It aims to spark collaboration, networking, and employment in the arts.” There are fees for both people who want to be part of and people who want to search the database, but in neither case are they onerous.

New Bern Sun Journal: African American voices from New Bern’s past come alive in new Oral History Library. “Examples include Ben Watford, founding President of the James City Historical Society, discussing the James City Crockett-Miller Slave Quarters; a look at the history of St. Peter’s AME Zion Church; an episode about former slave George Henry White, an attorney and politician who served in the U.S. Congress from 1897 to 1901; a look at the history of New Bern’s Pleasant Hill community with Alderman Barbara Best and retired educators Mark Best and Nancy Allen; and a 2012 interview with Luke Martin, an accomplished brick mason who was the son of a former slave who served in the United States Colored Troops.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: General Mills latest to halt Twitter ads as Musk takeover sparks brand exodus. “The growing exodus of advertisers comes amid concerns [Elon] Musk will scale back misinformation and security protections on the platform. As civil rights groups call potential moderation issues into question, companies are considering whether staying on Twitter might tarnish their brands.”

Engadget: Twitter cancels Chirp developer conference two weeks before it was scheduled to begin. “In another sign of the upheaval happening internally at Twitter, the company has called off its Chirp developer conference just two weeks before it was scheduled to take place on November 16th. The company alerted developers and other attendees in a brief note that didn’t provide a reason for the cancellation.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Stack Overflow wants to make it easier to code in the Arctic or prison. “Stack Overflow is trying to make sure that its repository of programming knowledge, stored in the form of millions and millions of questions and answers, is available even to people without internet access. It’s announcing an initiative called Overflow Offline, where it’ll work with developers and a wide range of organizations that deal with things like the justice and prison systems, education, and scientific endeavors.”

Mashable: Google makes millions from greenwashing ads, report says. “The CCDH, focusing exclusively on U.S.-based users, found that major oil and gas companies including BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil have bought ads on Google searches in response to questions like ‘eco-friendly companies’, ‘net zero’ and ‘how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?’ These ads redirect to companies and their greenwashing content.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Vietnam to Require 24-Hour Take-Down for ‘False’ Social Media Content. “Vietnam’s information minister said on Friday authorities had tightened regulations to deal with ‘false’ content on social media platforms so that it must be taken down within 24 hours instead of 48 hours previously.”

Bloomberg: Twitter sued over Musk’s short-notice mass layoff plan. “Twitter Inc was sued over Elon Musk’s plan to eliminate about 3,700 jobs at the social media platform – half of its workforce – which workers say the company is doing without enough notice in violation of federal and California law. A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court.”

BBC: TikTok says staff in China can access UK and EU user data. “Chinese-owned video-sharing platform TikTok has told users that some of its workers in China have access to data of accounts in the UK and European Union. The social media giant said the ‘privacy policy’ was ‘based on a demonstrated need to do their job’.” Good afternoon, Internet…

November 5, 2022 at 12:21AM
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Rhode Island Seafood, Image Generator Bias, King Tutankhamun, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, November 4, 2022

Rhode Island Seafood, Image Generator Bias, King Tutankhamun, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, November 4, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Governor of Rhode Island: RI Seafood Launches New Website Tools and “Fishline” App to Help Local Consumers Find Fresh, Local Seafood. “Developed in partnership with the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island, the new app, FishLine, lets consumers search for fresh seafood to buy from seafood markets, farmers’ markets, and restaurants, as well as directly off the boat from fishermen.”

Motherboard: This Tool Lets Anyone See the Bias in AI Image Generators. “Called the Stable Diffusion Bias Explorer, the project is one of the first interactive demonstrations of its kind, letting users combine different descriptive terms and see firsthand how the AI model maps them to racial and gender stereotypes.”

Gale: University of Washington Students Unlock New Historical Connections on King Tut’s Tomb Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab (PRESS RELEASE). “For the first time in nearly 100 years, scholars and the curious public can see one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century in a new light. The Tutankhamun Centenary: 1922–2022 is a website showcasing University of Washington students’ groundbreaking digital humanities (DH) research to mark a century since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s (King Tut’s) tomb.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: Elon Musk begins mass layoffs at Twitter. “An email went out to the company’s employees late Thursday notifying employees of plans to cut jobs, informing them that by 9 a.m. Pacific time Friday, workers would receive an email with the subject line: ‘Your Role at Twitter.’ Those keeping their jobs would be notified on their company email. Those losing them would be told via their personal email.” I have a comment about this but I like this keyboard and I’m afraid the comment would melt it.

Ars Technica: OpenAI debuts DALL-E API so devs can integrate its AI artwork into their apps. “On Thursday, OpenAI announced the introduction of an API for its DALL-E image synthesis model that will allow developers to easily integrate its AI image generation technology into their apps. DALL-E, currently available as a standalone commercial service, allows people to generate novel 1024×1024 images from text descriptions called ‘prompts.'”

CNET: Patreon Launches Its Own Video Player, and It’s Ad-Free. “Patreon, the service that lets artists and creators provide exclusive content to subscribers, launched its own video player, the company said in a blog post Thursday. The new tool allows creators to share video without sending their fans to another site.”

USEFUL STUFF

Gizmodo: How to Join Mastodon, the Ad-Free Social Network Billionaires Can’t Buy. “In the few days since (mostly) ditching Twitter, I’ve gained a new respect for the platform, which is decidedly less toxic and is far more conversational and troll-free. I’m hoping this very brief guide will serve new users as well as those hearing about it for the first time. Let’s dig in.” I’m not on Mastodon but you can find me on CounterSocial as @ResearchBuzz.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: Their children went viral. Now they wish they could wipe them from the internet.. “For decades, celebrities have obscured their children’s faces on social media and from paparazzi pictures. Now, a growing collective of creators like Kodye Eylse are pushing other parents to take similar precautions when making content about kids.”

Insauga: Canadian photo archive based in Mississauga at risk of closing without help from the public. “The Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation (CHPF) has more than 150,000 historic images in its archives but the organization is a risk of closing. Founded in 2001 in Mississauga by Canadian photographer George Hunter, the foundation has a large collection of his historic images with subjects ranging from early highway photos to anglers trying their luck along the Credit River.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBC: Antisemitic conspiracies are rampant online. Students, experts share how to combat them. “As events marking Holocaust Education Week get underway, CBC News talked to students and experts about antisemitism facing young people in online spaces today, and the need for better education to help navigate harmful and pervasive misinformation in these social spheres.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Verge: Google’s text-to-image AI model Imagen is getting its first (very limited) public outing. “Although the company’s Imagen model produces output equal in quality to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, Google hasn’t made the system available to the public. Today, though, the search giant announced it will be adding Imagen — in a very limited form — to its AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

New York Times: When Technology Makes Music More Accessible. “In Britain and Ireland, a series of recent projects show the rich possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are considered in the creative process.” Good morning, Internet…

November 4, 2022 at 05:29PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/rKTf1Ud

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Explore Wikipedia Pages by Popularity With Category Cheat Sheet

Explore Wikipedia Pages by Popularity With Category Cheat Sheet
By ResearchBuzz

I spend a lot of time thinking about how search engines can narrow down information pools and provide richer search results without relying overmuch on the searcher themselves.

Look at it this way: you’re searching for something because you want to know more about it. You want to know more about it because you have a gap in your knowledge (or you want to confirm that you don’t.) Relying on the searcher’s query past a certain point runs the risk of introducing errors in knowledge that damage the quality of the search results.

Google and other big search engines know that, of course; they’ve developed extensive search technology to ideally get you where you need to go on the Web with only the most amorphous requests. The problem is that it’s non-transparent. You don’t know how Google is using your search to get you from point A to point B. You just know that your search worked. Will it work the next time Google changes that non-transparency algorithm? Who knows.

That’s why I focus on ways to inform your search without taking it over or rendering it non-transparent. I might use authoritative information about Web space, as with Super Edu Search. I might try to focus on a particular area, as with Backyard Scholarship. I might use time-bounded searches, as with Contemporary Biography Builder.

Or I might use indicators of interest and past attention. Page view counts are a wonderful record of how popular Wikipedia topics were and are. Why not take advantage of that?

I love exploring Wikipedia, but it can be daunting. Say I want to learn more about bass guitarists who play jazz, so I head over to Wikipedia. When I open the American jazz bass guitarists page, this is what I see:

Wikipedia presents category pages in alphabetical order, which is to its credit – they’re striving to present data in a neutral way. Great! But that doesn’t tell me which of these players are popular. It doesn’t tell me which ones are active or part of online discussions or controversies. It gives me no place to start.

You might not need a place to search when the category is small or when you’ve got a lot of time. But when you want to get to the heart of the matter and find the popular pages in the category, try Category Cheat Sheet, at https://searchgizmos.com/ccs/ .

Category Cheat Sheet takes the first 500 pages of a Wikipedia category and evaluates the most recent months’ page views for each. It then re-sorts the category by page view count and provides brief summaries for the top 20 most popular pages. It also provides links back to Wikipedia pages if you need more than an overview.

Here’s what that jazz bass player category looks like when it’s run through the CCS:

With every entry you get the name of the article, a recent monthly page count, and a summary. The links to full Wikipedia articles open in a new tab so you can skim through the list, click on anything that looks interesting, and then review the tabs separately. I found in making this that it’s a much friendlier way (for me at least) to explore a category, and definitely exposes the popularity bias errors I would have made (I thought Larry Graham would rank a lot higher.)

I’m releasing it as a standalone tool because it’s useful and fun to play with, but Category Cheat Sheet is actually one half of something else I’m building. I’m still wrestling with the problem of doing a successful general topic Web search with as little knowledge as possible. By gathering up the most popular names in a category and applying some (very basic) language analysis, I’m hoping I can turn a Wikipedia category name into a specific, useful Google search for that topic. Stay tuned.

November 3, 2022 at 10:35PM
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Science and Community Action Network, Global Jukebox, Public Health Jobs, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, November 3, 2022

Science and Community Action Network, Global Jukebox, Public Health Jobs, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, November 3, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Union of Concerned Scientists: SciCAN Platform Launches, Offering Resources to Promote Environmental Justice. “Members of the environmental justice movement have launched a new website, called the Science and Community Action Network (SciCAN), to bring together grassroots movements, scientists, and subject matter experts from across the country to address the many health and safety threats that frontline communities are facing.”

Phys.org: ‘Global Jukebox’ performing arts database now publicly available. “The Global Jukebox relies on a dataset that includes traditional songs representing 1,026 societies. Many of the recordings were captured by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who categorized them according to different features of musical style, such as number of singers, vocal embellishments, and various rhythmic and melodic qualities; 37 such features are now included for each of the 5,776 songs in the Global Jukebox dataset. A preliminary version of the Global Jukebox tool launched in 2017, and the underlying database is now available for anyone to download.”

PR Newswire: New Website Helps Public Health Job Seekers Nationwide. (PRESS RELEASE). “The site offers a simple way to search for jobs both nationally and by state and includes job preview videos of several different public health careers as well as information on working in governmental public health. In the future, add-ons to the site will include additional career spotlights as well as fellowship, internship and training programs in governmental health departments, a job-skills quiz to help identify potential career fits, and career resources for those seeking their first job in government.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Twitter’s C-suite clears out as Musk cements power over the company . “In less than a week since Musk acquired Twitter, the company’s C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations. Musk has also dissolved Twitter’s former board of directors. In their place, Musk is now the CEO and sole director of the social platform… At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Politifact: No, blogs weren’t created day of Pelosi attack to smear conservatives. “Both blogs — called Frenly Frens and The Loving God — are no longer online, but parts of the sites were archived after the Pelosi attack and some media outlets reviewed them before they went dark. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that saves billions of web pages over time, has files showing the blogs were not created the day of the attack. And there’s no evidence to support the claim that they were created to smear conservatives.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: T-Mobile’s $350 Million Cyberhacking Settlement: How to Claim Your Share. “After millions of T-Mobile customers’ personal information was exposed in a massive 2021 cyberattack, the telecom giant agreed this summer to a $350 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit. Now a website has launched to let current and past T-Mobile customers file a claim for their share of the payout.”

Mainichi: Japan police give out pointers on how to foil Google Street View criminals . “Google Maps’ Street View is tremendously convenient, but sometimes for the wrong people, like stalkers, or thieves who use the service to case their targets before stealing cars or burgling homes. The problem has left experts calling for measures to cut back on the information available on Street View that can be used by criminals.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Personal Tech Has Changed. So Must Our Coverage of It.. “Our tech problems have become more complex, so we are rebooting the Tech Fix column to focus on the societal implications of the tech we use.”

Argonne National Laboratory: Science beyond Siri: A team of educators and computer scientists take on AI. “Soon enough, AI competency will be an essential workforce skill. A group of computer scientists and learning science experts are considering what a foundational introduction to AI might look like for middle school and high school students.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: This guy cobbled together off-the-shelf AI tools to make an impressive digital assistant . “Consumer-grade AI has gotten a lot better and a lot cheaper. Here, a guy used UnrealEngine’s Metahuman, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s Whisper and GPT3 to make a digital assistant that understands what he says and creates art on command.” Good morning, Internet…

November 3, 2022 at 05:29PM
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