Montana Law Collections, Bing, Twitter, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 31, 2022

Montana Law Collections, Bing, Twitter, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 31, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

State of Montana Newsroom: Montana State Library Digital Collection Of Current and Historic Montana Law Means More Access and Research Possibilities. “The Montana State Library recently partnered with the State Law Library and Legislative Branch to digitize hundreds of historic print volumes of Montana law… This new online collection delivers all the qualities traditional print readers love: the look and ease of print navigation minus the negatives: torn pages, missing copies, coffee stains, pencil marks from previous users, and having to physically travel to a library. Not a minor inconvenience in our geographically big state since only a handful of Montana libraries have law books.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Catching Up On Bing Search User Interface & Search Experiments. “Over the past several weeks, I’ve been collecting a number of Microsoft Bing search experiments and user interface tests. It has slowed down a bit this week, so I’ll share most of them below.”

Techdirt: It Took Just Four Days From Elon Gleefully Admitting He’d Unplugged A Server Rack For Twitter To Have A Major Outage. “I know, I know. Some of the more angry commenters around here keep insisting that I should stop talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, and I want to do exactly that. I planned to do exactly that and not write another post about it all until next week. And then… Twitter crashed hard last night.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 9 Free Cloud Computing Online Courses for Beginners . “Cloud computing is a game-changing technology that has changed the way we work. IT services are now delivered over the cloud or the internet, making work processes more efficient. With many companies migrating to the cloud, the demand for cloud computing professionals continues to grow. If you’re a beginner, choose from these free online courses to start your career in cloud computing.”

Digital Trends: Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good. “New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.” I love Tweetbot! Had no idea Tapbots was making a Mastodon client.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: The Reign of the Part-Time Twitch Streamer. “Reporting from WIRED’s Will Bedingfield lays out how streamers with small audiences struggle to grow. Even those with a decent following struggle to make ends meet on the platform.”

Wall Street Journal: Google Maps Chief Sees New Directions for Digital Navigation. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google Maps is the fourth most popular mobile app in the U.S. by unique visitors age 18 and up, according to Comscore, making it more popular than the mobile apps of Instagram and Tiktok as well as its closest direct competitor, Apple Maps. The Google Geo group, which runs the Maps app, now also oversees the company’s Waze mapping service. Christopher Phillips, the head of Google Geo, recently talked with The Wall Street Journal about what he sees as the longer-term future of navigation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Vice: One of the World’s Poorest Countries Put Its Faith in Crypto – Why?. “The Central African Republic heralded its status as the only country in Africa to adopt Bitcoin as legal currency, but 8 months later, many questions remain about what’s really going on.”

The Verge: New York breaks the right to repair bill as it’s signed into law. “The bill establishes that consumers and independent repair providers have a right to obtain manuals, diagrams, diagnostics and parts from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in order to repair their own devices. However, the bill was meaningfully compromised at the last minute by amendments that give OEMs some convenient exceptions and loopholes to get out of obligations that many right to repair advocates had been hoping for.”

Engadget: North Korean hackers targeted nearly 1,000 South Korean foreign policy experts. “South Korean authorities believe North Korean hackers, working for the government, have targeted at least 892 foreign policy experts in the country. The efforts focused on members of think tanks and academics, dating back to April.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PC World: Meet Stable Horde, the crowd-powered Folding@Home of AI art. “Does your PC really need to search for aliens? How about pitching in your resources to help make AI art, instead? A new community effort, Stable Horde, allows you to donate your PC’s extra GPU cycles to create AI art and use your donated time to create AI art in just a fraction of the time instead.”

Mashable: The internet used to be fun. Remember?. “Today, Corn Kid’s glee over the buttery goodness of an ear of corn feels so precious because the internet now feels so sour and divisive. Politics embitters so much of our online experience, and the rest of it is suffocated by negativity or bullying. Meanwhile, cultural content has become so derivative, closer to regurgitation than reinvention.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 31, 2022 at 06:29PM
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Minangkabau-Indonesian Dictionary, Google, Smartphone Chargers, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 30, 2022

Minangkabau-Indonesian Dictionary, Google, Smartphone Chargers, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 30, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Antara Indonesia News Agency: Minangkabau-Indonesian dictionary digitized. “West Sumatra Language Development and Fostering Agency has digitized the Minangkabau-Indonesian dictionary to allow more residents to access the dictionary…. Apart from the Minangkabau-Indonesian dictionary with its 29 thousand entries, the regional office also published the Mentawai-Indonesia dictionary with 4,760 entries, which is expected to be digitized next year.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: 22 products and features we launched in 2022. “We’re just about to auld lang syne-off for the year, but before we do we wanted to take a quick look back on some highlights from the past 12 months! Here are 22 Google products and features launched in 2022.”

Business Standard: India makes USB Type-C charging must for device makers from March 2025. “Mobile device companies in India will have to give USB Type-C as the standard charging port in their products by March 2025, said a civil servant on Tuesday.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BuzzFeed News: We Spoke To Twitter Troll Juniper About Manufacturing Moral Panics, Creating “Goblin Mode,” And Dealing With Elon Musk. “June, who uses both she and they pronouns, is a 27-year-old from Wisconsin. By day, they work in quality control in the food industry. By night, they are one of our nation’s leading shitposters. She started her account in 2020 to support Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, but quickly found it more cathartic to just make fun of her political enemies.”

WIRED: An App Wants to Subtitle Life for Deaf and Hearing-Impaired Users. “FOLLOWING A CONVERSATION can be a challenge for the deaf and hard of hearing. But what if you could pop on a pair of glasses and have subtitles appear in real time? That’s the promise of a newly released app called XRAI Glass. It works with augmented reality glasses called Nreal Air (sold separately by a different company) to subtitle conversations.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CoinDesk: Anonymous Twitter User Leaks 3Commas API Database. “An anonymous Twitter user has obtained around 100,000 API keys belonging to users of the crypto trading service 3Commas. The leaker published over 10,000 of the keys on Wednesday and says the rest ‘will be published full [sic] randomly in the upcoming days.'”

CBS News: Professor sues TikToker who accused her in University of Idaho murders. “A professor at the University of Idaho has filed a defamation lawsuit last week against the internet personality Ashley Guillard, who alleged to have solved the prominent murder cases and whose TikTok videos have repeatedly alleged that the school’s history department chair was involved in the fatal stabbings of four students last month.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Next Web: What to expect from AI in 2023 . “From the AI developer who tried to convince the world that one of Google’s chatbots had become sentient to the recent launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it’s been 12 months of non-stop drama and action. And we have every reason to believe that next year will be both bigger and weirder.”

New York Times: The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2023. “Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in technology to predict the tech that may affect your life in a big way — and the tech that will most likely be a fad. Before we get into that, though, let’s take a quick look back at 2022.”

Tech Xplore: A greener internet of things with no wires attached. “Emerging forms of thin-film device technologies that rely on alternative semiconductor materials, such as printable organics, nanocarbon allotropes and metal oxides, could contribute to a more economically and environmentally sustainable internet of things (IoT), a KAUST-led international team suggests.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 31, 2022 at 01:24AM
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Tom Lehrer, Twitter, NFTs, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 30, 2022

Tom Lehrer, Twitter, NFTs, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 30, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Techdirt: Tom Lehrer Puts Whatever He Hadn’t Already Donated To The Public Domain Into The Public Domain. “Back in 2014, we wrote about how a fan had basically put all of his works on YouTube, and then contacted Lehrer to apologize. Lehrer told him there was nothing to apologize for: he was glad the works were out there. The fan then asked if he needed to do something to make sure that no one would ever copyright strike the videos, and Lehrer again says not to worry, as far as he’s concerned it’s all in the public domain, and he has no heirs to cause problems after he dies.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: Twitter experiences a widespread global outage. “Twitter experienced a global outage late Wednesday, according to numerous reports from Twitter users and the online tracker Downdetector. It wasn’t immediately clear how many Twitter accounts were impacted by the outage. As of just before 8 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Downdetector had tracked more than 10,000 user reports of outages. Virtually all 10,000 reports had emerged over the course of the previous hour.”

Yahoo Finance: 2022, the year NFTs fell to earth. “OpenSea’s best trading day of this year, 1 May, saw a record $2.7bn (£2.2bn) in NFT transactions, but on the worst performing day a few months later on 28 August, it recorded just $9.34m in trade volume.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Defector Media: When Adults Banned Their Books, These Teens Fought Back By Organizing. “Meghana Nakkanti really loved the book Homegoing. The 18-year-old high school student in Nixa, Mo., loved how author Yaa Gyasi’s work of historical fiction, following the descendants of one Ghanaian woman across multiple families and two centuries in both Ghana and the United States, delved into intergenerational trauma. But Homegoing was also one of more than a dozen books that parents at Nakkanti’s school wanted to ban. She found this not just odd, but also extremely disconcerting. So, she and her fellow students mobilized.”

Loudoun Now (Virginia): Morven Park’s 246 Years Project Expands Access to Enslaved Family History. “The 246 Years Project is an initiative of Morven Park and Loudoun County Circuit Court Clerk Gary Clemens and his Historic Records Division team. Morven Park is building an online database organizing fragmentary information about Loudoun’s enslaved communities, allowing descendants to delve deeper into their family histories.”

Cleveland .com: In objection to Musk’s leadership, University Heights suspends its Twitter account. “During his report during City Council’s Dec. 19 meeting, Mayor Michael Dylan Brennan said that, ‘Hate has no home in University Heights,’ and then told council that the city has suspended its Twitter account.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: Ex-Google boss helps fund dozens of jobs in Biden’s administration. “Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google who has long sought influence over White House science policy , is helping to fund the salaries of more than two dozen officials in the Biden administration under the auspices of an outside group, the Federation of American Scientists.”

Engadget: Google is making its internal video-blurring privacy tool open source. “Google has announced that two of its latest privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including one that blurs objects in a video, will be provided to anyone for free via open source. The new tools are part of Google’s Protected Computing initiative designed to transform ‘how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety,’ the company said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Bloomberg: Musk’s Frequent Twitter Polls Are at Risk of Bot Manipulation. “New Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk has outsourced several controversial decisions — like whether to reinstate former US President Donald Trump’s account, and if he should leave the Twitter CEO job — to public polling on the network, saying he intends to follow the will of the people. But the results of such surveys can be easily gamed by bots, according to new research.”

The Verge: How Kindle novelists are using ChatGPT. “Earlier this year, I wrote about genre-fiction authors using AI in their novels. Most wrote for Amazon’s Kindle platform, where an extremely rapid pace of publishing, as fast as a book a month, is the norm. AI helped them write quickly, but it also raised complex aesthetic and ethical questions.”

Utah State University: USU Folklore Announces Digital Trend of the Year. “Utah State University’s Digital Folklore Project has named the hashtag #MahsaAmini, which launched a significant grassroots protest of the Iranian government’s treatment of women, the #DigitalLoreoftheYear for 2022.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Star of Mysore: Over 6,500 Kodavas Gather At One Venue To Break Guinness Record. “Kodava Clan portal, which had entered the India Book of Records for the largest family tree, attempted to break the earlier Guinness Book of World Records after hosting ‘Okkoota’ the largest-ever family reunion on Dec. 24. The event was attended by over 6,500 people/family members at ‘Coorg Ethnic’ in Bittangala, Kodagu district.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 30, 2022 at 06:32PM
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Virginia Evictions, Google, Twitter, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 29, 2022

Virginia Evictions, Google, Twitter, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 29, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Richmond Times-Dispatch: New database tracks Virginia eviction numbers. “The RVA Eviction Lab and the University of Virginia Equity Center have created the Virginia Evictor Catalog, which collects eviction data from courts. The databank is part of a partnership between the two organizations called the Virginia Housing Justice Atlas project.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts. “Google workers in Switzerland sent a letter this month to the company’s vice president of human resources, outlining their worries that a new employee evaluation system could be used to cull the work force.”

Economic Times: Google receives CCI notices after failing to pay penalties. “Technology behemoth Google has received demand notices from the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for failing to pay – within the stipulated time – penalties imposed on it for anti-competitive practices, sources told ET on Wednesday.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch: This tool helps you trim your follow list on Twitter. “Twitter is a mess, but it’s still addictive. While some folks might have headed to Mastadon, those who stick around might still want to get the best out of the bird site. If you feel that your timeline is very cluttered, a new tool named Prune your follows can really help with that. The app shows you the people you follow in largely four categories: Overpopular (most followed), Underpopular (least followed), Overactive (accounts that tweet a lot) and Unactive [sic] (accounts that tweet only a few times a year).”

InfoWorld: How to create your own RSS reader with R. “Choose your feeds wisely, and your RSS reader will let you easily scan headlines from multiple sources and stay up to date on fast-moving topics. And while there are several capable commercial and open-source RSS readers available, it’s a lot more satisfying to code your own. It’s surprisingly easy to create your own RSS feed reader in R. Just follow these eight steps.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to preserve nonprofit status. “Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.”

7Life: West Gate Bridge works: Three-hour delays on Melbourne freeway from Boxing Day until January. “Victoria’s transport department has blamed Google Maps for making traffic delays worse on the West Gate Bridge, as motorists are told they are facing delays of more than three hours.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google, YouTube content providers must face U.S. children’s privacy lawsuit. “A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday revived a lawsuit accusing Alphabet Inc’s Google and several other companies of violating the privacy of children under age 13 by tracking their YouTube activity without parental consent, in order to send them targeted advertising.”

CNET: DOJ Investigating $372 Million in Missing FTX Funds, Report Says. “The probe, which is reportedly independent of the fraud case against FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, centers on more than $370 million that went missing mere hours after the cryptocurrency exchange declared bankruptcy.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Trove’s funding runs out in July 2023 – and the National Library is threatening to pull the plug. It’s time for a radical overhaul. “The repeated threats to the public’s access to nationally significant collections are part of a broader malaise. Australia’s national collecting institutions have been hobbled by funding cuts and debilitating efficiency dividends for decades, with the some of the deepest cuts occurring in the years since Trove was launched. Reduced access to these publicly funded resources is more than an inconvenience: it is an attack on democratic accountability.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 30, 2022 at 01:03AM
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Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library, Pediatric RSV Care, Twitter, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 29, 2022

Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library, Pediatric RSV Care, Twitter, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 29, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Goshen College: Shetler’s lifelong research enters new stage: Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library website goes live. “Jan Bender Shetler, director of global engagement and professor of history at Goshen College, has spent the past 40 years of her life conducting and analyzing oral history research on cultural memory in Tanzania. This summer, her research entered a new phase with the official public launch of the Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library (MCHDL).”

Newswise: Free Online Course Focuses on Pediatric RSV Care. “A new online course from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) is available at no charge to help nurses and other clinicians care for the influx of pediatric patients with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza and other respiratory-related illnesses.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Elon Musk Took Twitter from Troubled to Tanking. “With massive layoffs, users flocking to alternatives and advertisers pulling back spending on Twitter, Musk acquired an embattled platform and turned it into a collapsing circus for all of its 238 million users – and the rest of the world – to watch. ‘Twitter’s future is especially uncertain – and it doesn’t look good,’ said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester.”

Ars Technica: Musk contradicts Twitter safety chief, disavows statement as “fake news” . “…increasingly, Twitter trust and safety chief Ella Irwin seems more willing to confirm or deny rumors to media outlets, a move that’s possibly irking Musk. Over the holiday weekend, Musk tweeted to directly contradict a statement Irwin provided to Reuters, causing even more confusion over what’s going on at Twitter—and whether there’s tension brewing between Musk and Irwin.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Use Your Smartphone to Cope With Vision Loss. “Whether you struggle to read distant signs or find yourself squinting to decipher small print, you probably have a gadget that can help. Too many of us ignore accessibility features, assuming they are only for the blind or severely vision-impaired, but they can also help folks with a wide range of vision loss issues.”

How-To Geek: How to Write an Awesome Stable Diffusion Prompt. “Stable Diffusion, a popular AI art generator, requires text prompts to make an image. Sometimes it does an amazing job and generates exactly what you want with a vague prompt. Other times, you get suboptimal outputs. Here are some tips and tricks to get ideal results.”

MakeUseOf: The Best Sites to Watch Movies for Free (Legally!). “Whether you’re looking for movies or TV shows, finding free videos to stream is totally feasible; it just requires that you know where to look. With that in mind, here are the best free online movie streaming sites to check out.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: Google algorithm updates 2022 in review: Core updates, product reviews, helpful content updates, spam updates and beyond. “This year had different stresses accompanying the Google algorithm updates, fewer pandemic stresses, and more recession-related stress. We had ten confirmed Google algorithm updates this year, the same number of confirmed algorithm updates we had in 2021. This year, we had a brand new ranking system named the helpful content update, and we had two of them.”

Jerusalem Post: Google fixes error after labeling ‘Jew’ as an offensive slur. “The word ‘Jew’ was listed on Google as a verb marked offensive, defined as ‘to bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way’ for most of the day on Tuesday”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Center for the Study of the Public Domain: January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all!. “On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream. Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.”

Ars Technica: No more TikTok on House of Representatives’ smartphones. “TikTok will no longer be allowed on any device managed by the US House of Representatives. On Tuesday, the House’s Chief Administrative Office announced the ban of the popular video-sharing app, a move that comes just a week after legislation that would bar TikTok from all federal devices was introduced.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Shadowbanning is real: Here’s how you end up muted by social media. “Two decades into the social media revolution, it’s now clear that moderating content is important to keep people safe and conversation civil. But we the users want our digital public squares to use moderation techniques that are transparent and give us a fair shot at being heard. Musk’s exposé may have cherry-picked examples to cast conservatives as victims, but he is right about this much: Companies need to tell us exactly when and why they’re suppressing our megaphones, and give us tools to appeal the decision.” This URL links to a gift version of this article; you should be able to read it without a paywall. Good morning, Internet…

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December 29, 2022 at 06:29PM
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India Medicinal Plants, France Rent Costs, Reporting Fake Accounts, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 28, 2022

India Medicinal Plants, France Rent Costs, Reporting Fake Accounts, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 28, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Hindu Business Line: Database on medicinal plants. “A group of scientists from the North East Institute of Science and Technology, Jorhat, Assam, have created a database of 6,959 medicinal plants found across India. The database sources information under four sections — traditional knowledge, geographical indications, phytochemicals, and chemoinformatics.”

From Le Monde, and Google-Translated from French: Real estate: a new interactive map of rents in France. “A ratio of 1 to 6 between the rents charged in the most upscale neighborhoods of the Ile-de-France region and those of small towns in rural areas. This is revealed by the new rent map just put online on the website of the Ministry of Housing and Ecological Transition. This interactive tool provides the price per square meter, charges included, everywhere in France, for unfurnished houses and apartments in the private rental stock.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Report Fake Accounts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok. “Are people pretending to be you or your business on popular social platforms? Wondering how to report profiles that steal your content? In this article, you’ll discover how to find and report fake accounts.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Finding Community, and Freedom, on the Virtual Dance Floor. “During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, regular partygoers flocked to virtual clubs hosted on platforms like Zoom, but since physical venues have reopened, the popularity of these digital spaces has waned. Not so with VRChat. When much of the world was locked down, the platform’s daily user numbers steadily increased. That trend has mostly stuck, with numbers continuing to surpass prepandemic levels, according to data cited by the platform.”

TechCrunch: Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko talks funding and how to build the anti-Twitter. “Mastodon’s success has somewhat taken its creator by surprise. Rochko didn’t jump into this project as a power user of social media, nor is he prone to sharing much about himself. When we spoke, he dialed into our video chat from an undisclosed location. He’s never even used Instagram. If growth hackers look at building audience or revenue as an end in itself, Rochko seems to be the opposite when it comes to development. This week we spoke with Rochko about the early days of Mastodon, its recent surge in users and how advertising may or may not factor in its future.”

Ars Technica: Twitter sells blue checks, Tumblr allows nudes: 2022’s biggest Big-Tech U-turns. “During a year that seemingly shook Twitter up for good—adding an edit button and demoting legacy verified users by selling off blue checks—it’s easy to overlook how many other tech companies also threw users for a loop with some unexpected policy changes in 2022.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Comcast agents mistakenly reject some poor people who qualify for free Internet. “People with low incomes can get free Internet service through Comcast and a government program, but signing up is sometimes harder than it should be because of confusion within Comcast’s customer service department.”

CNET: TikTok Under Pressure as Biden Administration Scrutinizes Chinese Ownership. “The Chinese owners of TikTok may be facing pressure to divest. The security concerns of the popular social media platform have led some Biden administration officials to ‘push for a sale of the Chinese-owned company’s U.S. operations to ensure Beijing can’t harness the app for espionage and political influence,’ according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal citing unnamed sources.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Engadget: OpenAI releases Point-E, which is like DALL-E but for 3D modeling. “OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence startup behind popular DALL-E text-to-image generator, announced on Tuesday the release of its newest picture-making machine POINT-E, which can produce 3D point clouds directly from text prompts.” I’m putting this under Research & Opinion instead of New Resources because it’s early days for this software. This is maybe an alpha version.

Georgia Tech: Cheerful Chatbots Don’t Necessarily Improve Customer Service. “GT researchers conducted experimental studies to determine if positive emotional displays improved customer service and found that emotive AI is only appreciated if the customer expects it, and it may not be the best avenue for companies to invest in.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 29, 2022 at 01:57AM
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Mastodon Web Space Search

Mastodon Web Space Search
By ResearchBuzz

As Twitter continues to do whatever it’s doing, I’ve been spending more time on Mastodon. I quite like it but I’m still pondering how to search Mastodon space.

With Twitter, of course, it’s easy — everything’s in one place. All you have to know is Twitter’s search syntax. With Mastodon, however, you have to find the instances you want to search first. Then you have to search them.

This search puzzle is something that’s been itching the back of my mind so I broke down and put it together this morning. Mastodon Web Space Search uses the Instances.social API to find Mastodon instances either by language or keyword. It then gives you a list of the instances it found (it only finds those with more than 200 active users), lets you choose up to ten of them, and makes you a Google search. There are three steps.

Step One – Search Term

Enter the query you want to use to search the Mastodon instances you find. This will be done via Google so you can use any Google syntax you like. Just don’t make it very long — Google has a query limit of 32 words and a great deal of that will be taken up by the Mastodon instances you’re searching.

Step Two – Find Mastodon Instances by language OR keyword

For step two you’ve got two options, but the first of the two is very simple.

If you want to find Mastodon instances by language, just enter the two-letter language code. You can get a list of language codes here. Please note that just because a language exists doesn’t mean that there are any Mastodon instances out there using it.

If you have a more specific interest and you want to search by keyword, use the second option, Active Instances by Keyword. I encourage you to treat this as a one-word query, as multiple word queries might narrow your search too much. There doesn’t appear to be a standard vocabulary for describing instances, so you might have to experiment a little. (If you find things aren’t updating when you specify new keywords to search, just reload the page.)

Step Three – Make Your Google Search

Once you’ve specified how you want to find Mastodon instances, filled out the search form, and clicked the button, you’ll get a list of instances that match your search. Here’s a list from a search for the keyword science:

Each listing shows the name of the instance, the number of active users, and a brief description. Tick the boxes of the ones that look interesting (up to 10, though in this case you could tick all of them) and click the Search the Web space of these Mastodon instances. button. It’ll bundle the instances you chose into a Google search that’ll open in a new tab. Here’s a few of those instances with a search for geology:

Geology is a relatively general search term, but I found when I looked up instances by keyword I could do more specific terms like volcanology or tectonics and also get decent results (though there were fewer of them, of course.)

I tried doing a Google search of GLAM library with Mastodon instances in English and I was happy with the results:

I’m only just barely getting started exploring and searching Mastodon instances, and I suspect I’ll be tweaking this as I learn more. In the meantime, I’ve found some interesting people to follow, and even a couple of searches I might turn into Google Alerts.

 

December 29, 2022 at 12:37AM
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