New researches

Saturday, January 7, 2023

Great Kanto Earthquake, Twitter, Zoom, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 7, 2023

Great Kanto Earthquake, Twitter, Zoom, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NHK World Japan: JMA launches website on 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. “The website presents photos and data related to the 7.9-magnitude Great Kanto Earthquake, which struck on September 1, 1923. The temblor destroyed buildings, triggered landslides and tsunami, and caused massive fires that engulfed wide swathes of Tokyo and Yokohama. It left more than 100,000 people dead.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg: Laid-Off Twitter Workers Remain in Limbo Over Severance Pay. “Twitter Inc. employees who were laid off shortly after Elon Musk took over are still awaiting details of their severance packages months after being let go, leading to further legal trouble for the new owner.”

Engadget: Zoom’s avatars now let you appear as a cartoon version of yourself. “Zoom announced human avatars today for its video meeting app. Like Apple’s Memoji or the humanoid cartoons Mark Zuckerberg wants us to use in the metaverse, the customizable virtual characters mirror your movements and facial expressions. The idea is to inject zaniness into less formal meetings, letting you be present without appearing on camera as your (flesh and blood) self.”

The Verge: Snap’s shutting down the app that put cool filters on your Zoom calls. “On January 25th, Snap will be shutting down its camera app for Mac and PCs. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, you may remember it as the program that let you apply silly filters to your face while you were on Zoom or other video conference calls.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: The 7 Best Weather Apps to Replace Dark Sky on iPhone and Android. “Dark Sky, one of the best weather apps on Android and iOS, officially discontinued service at the end of 2022. Apple bought Dark Sky in 2020 and slowly ported some (but not all) of its features to the Apple Weather app, but its closure means users have to find a replacement. Luckily, there are several great apps on Android and iOS with hyper-localized weather tracking, accurate forecasts, and user-friendly interfaces that can fill the Dark Sky-shaped hole in your app launcher.” Slideshow.

Smashing Magazine: A Guide To Getting Data Visualization Right. “In this article, Sara Dholakia presents a guide on how to choose just the right type of data visualization, with guidelines and things to keep in mind.” A good deep dive.

Search Engine Journal: Best SEO Courses Online – Free & Paid Options. “If you’re just getting started in SEO, you’re a mid-level professional looking to add tools to your toolbox, or even a seasoned veteran seeking the latest tricks, we’ve got just the thing. Below, we’ve compiled a list of the best online SEO courses available, so you can find exactly what you’re looking for.” I dislike SEO intensely, but it’s a fact of life. If you’re in charge of a Web site and its promotion, it behooves you to at least have an understanding of SEO, even if you have no intention of becoming a professional about it.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNET: QAnon Conspiracy Theory Channel Appears on Roku Lineup. “Roku has a new channel in its lineup that’s full of misinformation, such as content regarding QAnon, debunked vaccine conspiracies and false information about COVID-19. Roku says it’s looking into the conspiracy theory channel, which was reported on earlier by Media Matters.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: Celsius Co-Founder Sued by New York Attorney General. “New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit Thursday against Alex Mashinsky, alleging the co-founder of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network LLC defrauded investors out of billions of dollars of digital currency.”

Kotaku: Logan Paul Says Some Of His NFT Game Devs Were ‘Con Men,’ But He Didn’t Scam. “After keeping his mouth shut for roughly two weeks, Logan Paul has finally opened up about his blockchain NFT ‘game,’ CryptoZoo, in a response video to investigative YouTuber Stephen ‘Coffeezilla’ Findeisen. However, if you were hoping for some sort of explanation of what went wrong with the project, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

How-To Geek: Why I’m Switching Back to Cable TV. “The early days of streaming live TV was great. The channel packages were small and very affordable. Most services let you choose from add-on bundles to expand your channel list. It was pretty easy to get the channels you wanted without much extra ‘fluff’ jammed in. However, in the years since, I’ve watched as these services have ballooned in channel lineup size and price. The dream of ‘al la carte TV’ never really materialized. This brings us to today, where streaming live TV is not much different than cable TV.”

Texas Tech Today: Texas Tech’s Ardon-Dryer Receives National Science Foundation Grant. “Karin Ardon-Dryer, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences, has received a $480,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that will augment research into helping society better understand the causes and impacts of dust storms. Ardon-Dryer, an atmospheric scientist who has been part of the faculty in Texas Tech’s College of Arts and Sciences for six years, received the grant to investigate dust events across the nation during the past 20 years and build out an accessible, centralized database for researchers and communities alike.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 7, 2023 at 06:28PM
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Friday, January 6, 2023

Vietnam War Memorial, Plastic Pollution Sources, Freedom On the Move, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 6, 2023

Vietnam War Memorial, Plastic Pollution Sources, Freedom On the Move, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Christian Science Monitor: It took decades: Now there’s a photo for each name on Vietnam wall. “Volunteers have now tracked down at least one photo for every one of the more than 58,000 U.S. military service members who died in the Vietnam War – for an online Wall of Faces project that took more than two decades to complete.”

Monterey Bay Aquarium: Monterey Bay Aquarium study creates new open-access database to better identify plastic pollution sources. “Published in Scientific Data, the study offers a more extensive free resource for scientists to tap than previously available. It adds 42 polymer types not included in other open-access libraries and is the first to include polymers from non-plastic particles, such as seagrass, shells, and animal tissues, to prevent misidentification and improve accuracy of results. The study constructs a library of polymer types to match current and newly discovered plastic pollutants.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Cornell Chronicle: Mellon grants $1M to deepen and improve Freedom on the Move. “A grant of more than $1 million from the Mellon Foundation will support improvements to the content and functionality of Freedom on the Move (FOTM), a collective digital history project based at Cornell, as well as fostering a research community around the collection. Through FOTM, Cornell is partnering with multiple institutions, including Howard University’s Department of History, to build a free and open archive of all existing ‘runaway slave’ advertisements published in North American newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries, estimated between 100,000 and 200,000 total. The collection currently contains about 32,500.”

Motherboard: Researcher Deepfakes His Voice, Uses AI to Demand Refund From Wells Fargo. “Do Not Pay is an organization that has previously automated all manner of things from fighting parking tickets to easily cancel unwanted subscriptions. In a video uploaded to Twitter on Wednesday, Do Not Pay founder Joshua Browder showed the tool calling Wells Fargo customer support, and using an AI-generated version of his own voice to overturn wire fees.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Engadget: At CES 2023, Google showed up as an automotive company. “At CES 2023, the company shared that it’s working with Spotify to integrate the Connect streaming tool into the Android UI. It also teased a preview of an audio handoff feature that would suggest different devices to move your music onto depending on your habits and where you are. But CES is a big car show, and Google also has products for automobiles.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google set to challenge India Android antitrust ruling at Supreme Court-source. “Google is preparing to approach India’s Supreme Court within days to try to block a ruling by the country’s antitrust watchdog that will force the U.S. company to change how it markets its Android platform, two people familiar with its strategy told Reuters.”

Ars Technica: Unpaid taxes could destroy porn studio accused of copyright trolling. “Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called ‘copyright troll,’ suing thousands of ‘John Does’ for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio’s website, ‘X-Art.’ Whether defendants were guilty or not didn’t seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio’s litigiousness.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Financial Times: Whatever happened to Google Search?. “The company says that its goal is always to provide ‘ads that are useful’. It points out that not every search result has ads, either. But advert crowding would be more palatable if the basic service was noticeably improving at the same pace. Google’s example of one enhancement is the fact that search results come with more images now. Of course, this just so happens to be good for advertisers too. Other improvements have been slower to appear. Content behind paywalls is still not marked as such, for example. Nor is it possible to search for words spoken in a video without a transcript — though a trial is under way in India.”

Stanford Graduate School of Education: Stanford faculty weigh in on ChatGPT’s shake-up in education. “The recent release of ChatGPT — a new natural language processor that can write essays, spit out a Haiku, and even produce computer code — has prompted more questions about what this means for the future of society than even it can answer, despite efforts to make it try. Faculty from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning are already thinking about the ways in which ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence will change and contribute to education in particular.”

Western University News: AI tech exaggerates biases in facial age perception more than humans. “Researchers from Western University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) tested a large sample of the prominent major AI technologies available today and found not only did they reproduce human biases in the recognition of facial age, but they exaggerated those biases.”

January 7, 2023 at 01:26AM
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19th Century Snowflake Photography, PFAS Analytics, Jot for Journal Selection, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 6, 2023

19th Century Snowflake Photography, PFAS Analytics, Jot for Journal Selection, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Guardian: Snowflake Bentley’s 19th-century images of snow crystals put online. “For most farming families in 19th-century rural Vermont, winter snowstorms were dreaded and endured. But for Wilson Bentley, snow was a source of intense fascination that led him, at the age of 19, to produce the world’s first photomicrographs of snow crystals, which he described as ‘tiny miracles of beauty’. A stunning album of 355 of the original prints by the man who came to be known as Snowflake Bentley was bought by London’s Natural History Museum in 1899, and the collection has now been digitised and made available to view online.”

EPA: EPA Releases New PFAS Analytic Tool. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a new interactive webpage, called the ‘PFAS Analytic Tools,’ which provides information about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) across the country. … The PFAS Analytic Tools bring together multiple sources of information in one spot with mapping, charting, and filtering functions, allowing the public to see where testing has been done and what level of detections were measured.”

Yale School of Medicine: Introducing Jot — a new open-source tool that help researchers with journal selection. “Say hello to Jot: a free, open-source web application that matches manuscripts in the fields of biomedicine and life sciences with suitable journals, based on a manuscript’s title, abstract, and (optionally) citations. Developed by the Townsend Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, Jot gathers a wealth of data on journal quality, impact, fit, and open access options that can be explored through a dashboard of linked, interactive visualizations.”

Denver Post: CDOT snowplow driver offers a glimpse behind the wheel. “The online COtrip map, which already gave users highway information from around the state, including camera images, construction information, electronic signs, road conditions and road closures, is now tracking CDOT snowplows in real-time. It’s the first season that the public is able to track snowplow locations and work areas on the map, and it includes the plows’ names, such as Darth Blader, Snowtorious B.I.G., and Eisenplower, which were submitted and voted on by Colorado kids from across the state in 2021.”

Business Insider: A new website compiles salaries for jobs at 700 top tech firms, from Amazon to Google — see what your job is worth. “The site aggregates salary ranges for jobs at 700 top tech firms and startups. Its software visits the careers sites of these employers everyday to update numbers daily as new job posts are added. The database is possible thanks to pay transparency laws that recently took effect in places like New York City, California, and Washington state, which are home to major tech hubs.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Elon Cuts Costs by Laying Off the People Who Make Twitter Money. “From a people-power perspective, Twitter is inarguably a husk of what it once was. Since Elon Musk took over the social media platform at the end of October 2022, the company has lost more than an estimated three-quarters of its staff to layoffs and voluntary departures. On Wednesday, the cuts continued.”

Foreign Policy: Après Twitter, the Deluge?. “On the day in mid-November when Elon Musk told Twitter’s remaining employees to commit to being ‘hardcore’ or leave, Mayank Bidawatka landed in San Francisco on a one-way ticket and checked into an Airbnb downtown. Bidawatka, the co-founder of Indian social media app Koo, was there to cash in on the disarray inside Musk’s Twitter. ”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Influencers outshine traditional media on coverage of FTX implosion. “All this coverage of the FTX implosion is the most prominent example of how so-called ‘citizen journalism’ is battling legacy publishers for online attention, catapulting a fresh class of independent journalists into the mainstream while also giving rise to a group of social media influencers who optimize for attention rather than accuracy.”

GrepBeat: New Raleigh-Based Social Media Platform Aims To Captures Your Legacy. “Three years ago Matt Phillips experienced an incident where he faced his own mortality. Being a single father to his 9-year-old son Cooper and 5-year-old daughter Piper, he felt there needed to be a way for him to remain present in their lives, even if he passed away. For Phillips and many others, losing someone means losing their stories, wisdom, and pure essence. That sentiment inspired his Raleigh-based startup, Project Transcend.”

GP Today: FIA Creates E-Library To Preserve Its History. “In order to preserve its rich heritage for future generations, the FIA will digitise its archives, creating an e-library that will be accessible to all in 2024, when the FIA celebrates its 120th anniversary…. The e-library will combine the 120-year-old Motor Sport and Mobility databases, making these facts and figures searchable and comparable. It will be an important tool for the FIA University’s work and by making it public, it will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history of Motor Sport and Mobility.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: How Tesla, Google and Others Are Making Robots More Like Us. “Tesla is making AI-powered humanoid robots. Google wants to give its AI brain a bot body. Robotics are moving fast, and every day, droids are becoming more like us.”

Genealogy’s Star: Where is genealogy going in 2023 and beyond?. “I am not worried about being replaced by this or any other program but I appreciate the advances that make doing research possible. You are going to see a lot more AI involved in genealogy in 2023 and beyond and how we do genealogical research will continue to change just as rapidly.”

Scripps News: Organization says misinformation spread on Twitter following Hamlin’s cardiac arrest. “Damar Hamlin’s sudden cardiac arrest led to a rise in misinformation on Twitter, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The organization notes that the anti-vax trope ‘Died Suddenly’ spiked by 328% a day after the on-field incident.” Good morning, Internet…

January 6, 2023 at 06:27PM
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Thursday, January 5, 2023

Vietnam Biodiversity, Niyazi, Slack, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 5, 2023

Vietnam Biodiversity, Niyazi, Slack, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Vietnam+: Rich biodiversity database debuts. “A web portal collecting data of natural resources and wildlife conservation in Da Nang City has been introduced. It will provide information, documents, photographs and statistics from nature reserves in Son Tra and Ba Na-Nui Chua, as well as a special-use forest of South Hai Van in the central city.” I took a quick look and it seems that the site officially launches tomorrow. I didn’t see an English option but Google Translate did okay.

Azernews: National Archive Department highlights Niyazi’s musical legacy. “National Archive Department has launched a virtual exhibition devoted to maestro Niyazi, Azernews reports. The exhibition includes documents from the private funds of the State Archive of Literature and Art. Maestro Niyazi’s musical talent was truly impressive. The maestro conducted the Azerbaijan State Symphony orchestra for 46 years.” At this writing the link in the story will give you a 404 error; remove the period at the end of the URL and you’re good. The site is in Azerbaijani and, unusually, Google Translate has a difficult time with it. You can use Google Lens to translate the photography captions without any problem.

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: How To Use Slack Effectively: 10 Tips To Increase Productivity. “For many, Slack has overtaken email as the dominant means of communication. And just like some wrestle with unmanageable email inboxes, many others are trying to tame their Slack. So here are 12 handy tips for making the best of Slack and leveraging it to enhance what you do across the rest of your suite of programs.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: Jan. 6 Committee Experiment Found TikTok Went From Zero To Nazi in 75 Minutes. “WHEN THE JAN. 6 committee wanted to test how easy it was for TikTok users to wander down a far-right rabbit hole, they tried an experiment. They created Alice, a fictional 41-year-old from Acton, Massachusetts, gave her a TikTok account, and tracked what the social media app showed her. To their surprise, it only took 75 minutes of scrolling — with no interaction or cues about her interests — for the platform to serve Alice videos featuring Nazi content, following a detour through clips on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation suit, Donald Trump, and other right-wing culture war flashpoints.”

Washington Post: Twitter said it fixed ‘verification.’ So I impersonated a senator (again).. “After Blue 2.0 (my term for it) launched on Dec. 12, I made another faux Markey and applied for verification. Some of Twitter’s new requirements slowed down the process — and might dissuade some impatient impersonators — but the company never asked to see a form of identification. Last week, up popped a blue check mark on my @SenatorEdMarkey account. Oops! I did it again. Twitter didn’t reply to a request for comment. After I published this story, Twitter suspended the @SenatorEdMarkey account.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: 200 million Twitter users’ email addresses allegedly leaked online. “A data leak described as containing email addresses for over 200 million Twitter users has been published on a popular hacker forum for about $2. BleepingComputer has confirmed the validity of many of the email addresses listed in the leak.”

Ars Technica: Hundreds of WordPress sites infected by recently discovered backdoor. “Malware that exploits unpatched vulnerabilities in 30 different WordPress plugins has infected hundreds if not thousands of sites and may have been in active use for years, according to a writeup published last week.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Stop Using Social Media Apps. The Web Version Is Often Better. “I CAN SCROLL through my timeline of choice whenever I want, which is a miracle of technology. The downside: I do so, a lot, even when I wish I were doing something else. With this in mind, I’ve been thinking lately about how I’d like social media to be just a little bit worse—to add the slightest amount of friction so I don’t spend quite so much time doomscrolling. I found the perfect solution: using the web version of social networks on my phone instead of installing the app.”

Front Matter: Building an archive for scholarly blog posts. “Building an archive of scholarly blog posts faces the same fundamental challenges as repositories for other types of scholarly content, whether data, software, preprints, or journal articles. You have to collect metadata and content, and that approach only scales with standardization and open licenses. Luckily we already know a lot about required and optional but desired scholarly metadata, and they are fundamentally not different for scholarly blog post.”

Daily Sabah: Turkish researchers use AI to read cuneatic Hittite tablets. “For the first time, 1,954 ancient Hittite tablets are being read with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to a project implemented in Türkiye. When the translation part is completed, the cuneatic clay tablets will be put on display for the public in the Hittite Digital Library scheduled to open soon.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 5, 2023 at 11:35PM
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1940s Coventry Photography, Alzforum, CES, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, January 5, 2023

1940s Coventry Photography, Alzforum, CES, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, January 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BBC: Coventry photographer’s archive saved from a skip catalogued by volunteers. “Thousands of photographs taken by Coventry photographer Arthur Cooper from the 1940s up to the 1960s have been digitized and released online by Coventry University. The archive, in the form of thousands of glass negatives, was found dumped on a Coventry street and returned to publishing company Mirrorpix.”

Alzforum: Goodbye Antibodies, Hello AlzAntibodies: New Database is Growing on Alzforum. “After two decades and more than 30,000 entries, Alzforum’s original Antibodies database has been retired. A listing of antibodies relevant to neurodegenerative disease research, the database had in recent years been rendered increasingly redundant by the proliferation of online antibody compendia and manufacturers’ catalogs. In its place, Alzforum has created a new database, AlzAntibodies. It aims to provide detailed descriptions of antibodies selected by Alzforum curators based on community interest or novelty.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: CES 2023 Day 0 recap: All the early news you missed. “CES is back! For real. Sort of. While the show has never actually gone away in spirit, this year is the first time since the pandemic that Engadget has a team on the ground. The show proper kicks off on Thursday Jan 5th, but the news has already been coming hot and heavy. If we count Jan 4th as Day 1, since it’s usually the media preview day, that would make today… Day 0. Some companies couldn’t even wait and broke their news on New Year’s day, those eager beavers. From Samsung’s eye-catching display prototypes and home appliances, to a slew of chips and laptops, here’s what you missed from Day 0 of CES 2023.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: 5 DuckDuckGo Features You Should Be Using. “DuckDuckGo is primarily known for its focus on privacy. But the search engine (and now browser) offers several helpful features, many of which aren’t even available on Google or Bing. So if you are new to DuckDuckGo, here are five features to improve your search experience.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: A Eulogy for V Live, K-Pop’s Library of Alexandria. “V Live, the hugely influential live-streaming platform that ushered Korean pop music to global prominence, has gone dark. The mobile app and desktop site hosted a public library of tens of thousands of live streams that documented a period of growth in which the Korean music industry evolved from a regional phenomenon to a global market superpower. The result of a merger with fellow fan-artist engagement app Weverse, the closure of V Live and its video database is tantamount to burning K-Pop’s Library of Alexandria.”

Los Angeles Times: TikTok’s addictive anti-aesthetic has already conquered culture. “IIf Franz Kafka were to reconceive “The Metamorphosis” for our era, he might decide to ditch the novella in favor of a series of surreal TikToks — Gregor Samsa as eyes and mouth green-screened onto a picture of a roach jacked from the web. Kafka is long gone. But thankfully, we have Kendria Bland, a Mississippi comedian who does a semiregular bit on TikTok about the travails of a pack of domestic roaches who like to party behind the refrigerator and sneak Popeyes when the humans aren’t around. ”

SECURITY & LEGAL

AFP: Arma 3 video game footage fuels misinformation about Russia-Ukraine war. “Footage from the war-themed Arma 3 video game, often marked ‘live’ or ‘breaking news’ to make it appear genuine, has been used repeatedly in recent months in fake videos about the Russian offensive in Ukraine. The frequency and ease with which gaming footage is mistaken as real, even by some media broadcasters, and shared as authentic news on social media highlight what researchers call its serious potential to spread misinformation.”

The National Interest: Virtual Reality, Real Dangers: The Metaverse Poses Counterterrorism Challenges. “Even though the arrival of a fully functional metaverse is still a few years away, the potential threats posed by the metaverse require immediate attention from a wide range of individuals and organizations.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Search Engine Journal: Is This Google’s Helpful Content Algorithm?. “Google published a groundbreaking research paper about identifying page quality with AI. The details of the algorithm seem remarkably similar to what the helpful content algorithm is known to do.”

National Institute of Mental Health: NIMH Creates Publicly Accessible Resource With Data From Healthy Volunteers. “Studying healthy people can help researchers understand how the brain works in states of health and illness. Although many mental health studies include healthy participants as a comparison group, these studies typically focus on selected measures relevant to a certain functional domain or specific mental illness. The Healthy Research Volunteer Study at the National Institute of Mental Health aims to build a comprehensive, publicly accessible resource with a range of brain and behavioral data from healthy volunteers.”

Chalkbeat New York: NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks. “New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.” Based on what I’ve been reading about chatbot-based AI startups, they’re going to be playing Whac-A-Mole for a while.

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

BBC: Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery. “A London furniture conservator has been credited with a crucial discovery that has helped understand why Ice Age hunter-gatherers drew cave paintings. Ben Bacon analysed 20,000-year-old markings on the drawings, concluding they could refer to a lunar calendar. It led to a specialist team proving early Europeans made notes about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.” Good morning, Internet…

January 5, 2023 at 06:32PM
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Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Women’s Music Oakland, Bing, Google, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 4, 2023

Women’s Music Oakland, Bing, Google, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Bay Area Reporter: Because of a song: Holly Near celebrates Oakland’s women’s music scene with new online archive. “Music is one of the connecting forces for women in the Women’s Movement, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Women’s music legend Holly Near called the music made by women musicians at the time a lifeline…. Recently, the Bay Area Reporter spoke with Near about why she created the archive devoted to the Oakland women of the Women’s Music Movement and its importance.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Evening Standard: Microsoft’s Bing steps up battle with Google with plans to incorporate AI technology behind ChatGPT. “The Washington-based business plans to use the tools built by artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI, which created the ChatGPT service, to offer human-like answers to queries typed into its search engines rather than provide a list of websites as it does currently, and could have the functionality up and running as soon as March, according to IT news site The Information.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search “Popular Next Steps” Option. “Google is testing or has launched a new search refinement or expansion feature named ‘popular next steps.’ If Google thinks your original query will lead to a new query in your research cycle, Google may show you this “popular next steps” option.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 8 Apps You Need When Visiting National and State Parks. “A trip to a national or state park can be pretty exciting, but you’ll want to make sure you’re well-equipped for the adventure. Navigating trails, finding campsites, and exploring dining options can get hectic, so you’ll need to prepare appropriately beforehand. Fortunately, there are a good number of apps that can help you plan a successful and enjoyable visit to a national or state park.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Bring back personal blogging. “If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?… The answer is we don’t know because we don’t control Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BNN Bloomberg: India Court Refuses Immediate Relief to Google on $162 Million Penalty. “An Indian appeals court refused to grant immediate relief to Alphabet Inc.’s Google over a $162 million antitrust fine for abusing the dominant position of its Android smartphone operating system in the country.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wall Street Journal: Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring. “Ukraine has achieved a cut-price version of what the Pentagon has spent decades and billions of dollars striving to accomplish: digitally networked fighters, intelligence and weapons. Kyiv’s improvised web of drones, fighters and weapons, linked through satellite communications and custom software, is giving its soldiers a level of intelligence, coordination and accuracy that has allowed the initially outnumbered and outgunned forces to run circles around Russia’s massive but lumbering armies.”

New York Times: Your Memories. Their Cloud.. “As a child of the 1980s, I used to have physical constraints on how many photos, journals, VHS tapes and notes passed in seventh grade that I could reasonably keep. But the immense expanse and relatively cheap rent of the so-called cloud has made me a data hoarder. Heading into 2023, I set out to excavate everything I was storing on every service, and find somewhere to save it that I had control over. As I grappled with all the gigabytes, my concern morphed from losing it all to figuring out what was actually worth saving.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Cracked: 5 Ways Libraries Used to Be Hardcore. I hate the intro to this one so let’s just say it’s about really tough cool librarians. Skip the intro. Good afternoon, Internet…

January 5, 2023 at 03:24AM
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Search Gizmos December 2022: 5 New Options for TV Station Search, Wikipedia-Guided Google Search, Mastodon Web Search, and More

Search Gizmos December 2022: 5 New Options for TV Station Search, Wikipedia-Guided Google Search, Mastodon Web Search, and More
By ResearchBuzz

I didn’t think I’d get much done with Search Gizmos in December, but the opposite was true: I got some quality thinking time and came up with some really good puzzles, which translated into five Gizmos.

I also installed a new WordPress theme so the Gizmos should be easier to use. I’m a terrible, terrible Web designer and I’m sorry to make you suffer through my lack of visual acuity.

And now, what’s new.

MegaGladys: https://searchgizmos.com/megagladys/

I do a lot of fact-checking, and that often means pulling up the “official” sites for people and organizations. I got tired of having to constantly Google that stuff so I made MegaGladys.

MegaGladys works for anything that has a Wikipedia article. It pulls up to 22 data points from Wikidata and presents them in a nice list so you have instant access to official social media sites as well as authoritative compilations like WorldCat and LOC data. As a bonus you also get recent Google News about the topic.

I can’t show everything MegaGladys provides in a reasonably-sized screenshot but the one here shows a partial list of the information provided on a search for Dolly Parton.

Clumpy Bounce Topic Search: https://searchgizmos.com/clumpy/

This Gizmo is the result of my continuing pondering over how to search for what you don’t know about, and how you could guide a topical search without relying on an opaque algorithm. Clumpy Bounce lets you search for a category on Wikipedia and extract the most popular pages in that category. You can then “clump” up to three of those pages together and “bounce” them into a Google search.

If you’ve read my books Information Trapping or Web Search Garage, you know that I’m a big believer in searching for groups of the same type of thing to create “weight” in your search and tilt it toward a certain type of result. That’s what Clumpy Bounce is for, and I find it works rather well. The screenshot in this case shows a search for space solar, which led to an exploration of the pages in the Photovoltaics category.

Marion’s Monocle: https://searchgizmos.com/monocle/

Oh, how I despair at the state of local news search on the Internet. Marion’s Monocle is my attempt at a solution and I’m sure it won’t be my last one.

This Gizmo uses the FCC license database to show you a list of TV stations in the state you specify, then lets you select up to ten of them to add to a Google search. Some states (Florida and California spring to mind) have an amazing number of stations available.

The screenshot shows a search for TV stations in Rhode Island with a few of them ticked for the Google search.

PD Prompt Machine: https://searchgizmos.com/prompt/

– I love messing around with those AI-powered image generators, but I don’t love using someone else’s creativity without their permission. So I went looking for a way to avoid that and came up with PD Prompt Machine.

This Gizmo takes a random book title from the Internet Archive’s Open Library, and pairs it with a random artist in the public domain from the Art Institute of Chicago to create a prompt which you can copy and paste to your favorite image generator.

Sometimes the prompts are banal, some of them are sweet, and some of them may make you shriek with horror and scare the cat. A screenshot for this one isn’t particularly useful so may I present Insects in the style of Claude Monet?

Mastodon Web Space Search: https://searchgizmos.com/mwss/

Everybody’s been talking about Mastodon in the last month. Some of the talk has been about how much more difficult it’s going to be to search a decentralized social platform than a central one like Google.

That sounded like a fun search challenge so I made Mastodon Web Space Search. It uses the Instances.social API to find Mastodon instances with at least 200 active users and lets you search them in Google via the site: syntax. You can find instances either by language or keyword. The screenshot shows an instance search for the keyword humanities.

Bonus: Improving No Shop Sherlock: https://searchgizmos.com/no-shop-sherlock/ – I’ve been going back and looking at some of the old Gizmos I posted early, and decided on a quick upgrade for No Shop Sherlock. You can now filter by four different kinds of search clutter: general search cruft, bookstore sites, social media sites, and video sites.

January 4, 2023 at 07:45PM
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