New researches

Monday, February 6, 2023

Protests Against Racism Web Archive, Data Liberation Project, Hip-Hop and the Metaverse, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, February 6, 2023

Protests Against Racism Web Archive, Data Liberation Project, Hip-Hop and the Metaverse, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, February 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: Library Opens New Web Archive Collection, Features Programs for Black History Month. “A new web archive collection from the Library of Congress documents the civil unrest sparked by the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The Protests Against Racism Web Archive contains a selection of websites documenting protests against racism and police brutality against Black people, as well as grass roots movements and activism calling for police reform.”

The Distant Librarian: Jeremy Singer-Vine’s Data Liberation Project. “Not to be confused with Canada’s Data Liberation Initiative, Jeremy Singer-Vine is spending his time on the Data Liberation Project, ‘an initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest.’ There’s not yet a lot to look at there, but there’s plenty in the pipeline.”

University of Southern California: Taj Frazier explores how hip-hop artists are shaping emerging technologies. “Young artists are changing the game by creating unique experiences for audiences in 3D spaces and developing art with innovative decentralized technologies. Associate Professor of Communication Taj Frazier examines this intersection of music, art and technology as host of a new series, Hip-Hop and the Metaverse.”

USEFUL STUFF

Beyond Search: Definitive AI Market Snapshot. “Matt Shumer, the co-founder of Otherside AI, posted on Twitter ‘the definitive market map Twitter thread.’… The format of the information in Twitter is helpful, but I prefer information in tabular form. Here is Mr. Shumer’s ‘map’ presented with the company name and its url.” I think you’re going to be surprised at how long this list is already.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Platformer: Instagram’s co-founders are mounting a comeback. “Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back. The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps. Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends.”

Daily Beast: Russia’s Google, Yandex, Fixes Results So ‘Bald F*cker’ and ‘Bunker Grandad’ Reportedly Won’t Show Putin. “Russia’s biggest search engine secretly put blocks in its code to stop images of Vladimir Putin showing up in the results of potentially embarrassing searches, according to a report, with Nazi iconography also allegedly scrubbed out of the results of queries for the ‘Z’ symbol signifying support for the war in Ukraine.” Headline censored by me so this has half a chance to get to you.

Engadget: YouTube Music workers strike at Google’s Austin offices. “YouTube Music workers in the Austin, TX area who voted to unionize are striking. The Alphabet Works Union-CWA (AWU-CWA), which represents the contractors, says this is the first time a group of Google-affiliated workers has gone on strike.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software. “Searching Google for downloads of popular software has always come with risks, but over the past few months, it has been downright dangerous, according to researchers and a pseudorandom collection of queries.”

Washington Post: Harvard is shutting down project that studied social media misinformation. “Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government said Thursday that it will shut down a prominent research center that studied online misinformation next year, marking the latest turning point for the study of social media’s impact on American society and politics.”

ABC News (Australia): Adelaide woman wins second defamation case against Google over search results. “An Adelaide woman has won a second defamation case against Google, after a court found the search engine knowingly put derogatory comments about her online despite her winning $100,000 from the company in a similar case in 2015.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PR Newswire: NASA Awards Millions to Historically Black Colleges, Universities (PRESS RELEASE). “NASA is awarding $11.7 million to eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) through the new Data Science Equity, Access, and Priority in Research and Education (DEAP) opportunity. These awards will enable HBCU students and faculty to conduct innovative data science research that contributes to NASA’s missions.”

EurekAlert: Online forums help those with dementia find missing support and companionship. “Online forums for people with dementia provide a much-needed sense of community and hope and fill an important gap in the support they receive after diagnosis, a new study has found. The researchers suggest that clinicians, support workers and organisations could recommend online support forums to people with dementia, in addition to providing their regular in-person care.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

North Carolina Coastal Federation: To move a manatee: Museum catalogs skeletal specimen. “It took a lot of collaboration to get an 800-pound manatee carcass that washed up on a beach in Kill Devil Hills in early December 2021 to Lisa Gatens, the mammalogy collection manager at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The carcass was delivered in mid-December 2021 and buried in manure to decompose, leaving just the bones. After about a year, the bones were dug up, cleaned, put in a freezer to get rid of any critters, cleaned again and, as of last week, each bone was being entered into the mammalogy collections catalog.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.

February 6, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Sunday, February 5, 2023

Bauhaus Design, Google, Machine Translation, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 5, 2023

Bauhaus Design, Google, Machine Translation, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

PRNewswire: Letterform Archive expands its Online Archive to include full, original publications from the Bauhaus School (PRESS RELEASE). “Letterform Archive announces a significant update to its Online Archive with the digitization of fourteen Bauhaus books and three years of Bauhaus magazines. The publications are now available online as free resources to anyone in the world. This is the first time these publications will be available in full, using digitization techniques that result in high-fidelity imagery and text that can be read on screen.”

EVENTS

The Verge: Google is holding an event about search and AI on February 8th. “Next week, Google will be holding an event about how it’s ‘using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need,’ according to an invite sent to The Verge. The 40-minute event will be streamed on YouTube on February 8th at 8:30AM ET.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

MakeUseOf: ChatGPT vs. Google Translate: Which Is Better At Translation?. “From content writing and programming to product design and data analysis, ChatGPT is making an immediate impact in almost every digital field imaginable. However, one area ChatGPT could be particularly impactful—although currently getting little attention—is machine translation. Currently, Google Translate is the top dog, and almost everyone else is playing catch-up.”

BBC: Russia in Africa: How disinformation operations target the continent. “Russosphère describes itself as ‘a network in defence of Russia’. Made up of several social media groups on different platforms, it was created in 2021 but fully launched in February 2022 – just days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The network swiftly gained over 80,000 followers.”

British Vogue: FarmTok: The Wholesome Social Media Trend I Can’t Get Enough Of. “While social media can often feel oppressive, a place laden with perfect-looking people trying to sell us things, wholesome nature accounts are a joyful antidote to all of that. I’ve also found that it’s a great reminder that there is something beyond all of the noise, and it’s there for all of us at all times.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: The Untold Story of a Crippling Ransomware Attack. “Today, more than two years later, Hackney Council is still dealing with the colossal aftermath of the ransomware attack. For around a year, many council services weren’t available. Crucial council systems—including housing benefit payments and social care services—weren’t functioning properly. While its services are now back up and running, parts of the council are still not operating as they were prior to the attack.”

New York Times: Advisory Firm Sues Elon Musk’s Twitter, Saying It Hasn’t Been Paid. “The blockbuster technology deal that every adviser on Wall Street clamored to be a part of has proved not to have been so lucrative for at least one advisory firm that worked on it. That firm, Innisfree M&A Incorporated, sued Twitter on Friday in New York State Supreme Court, seeking about $1.9 million in what it says are unpaid bills after it advised the company on its sale to Elon Musk last year.”

NBC News: ‘Doppelganger murder’: Woman accused of killing Instagram lookalike in plot to fake her own death. “A family dispute, a missing woman, and a body that had been stabbed to death found in the woman’s car by her parents: These things, authorities in Germany now say, are not as they once seemed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Stirling: Heritage experts to study responses to protecting Ukraine’s cultural heritage and monuments. “The main goal of the project is to identify national and international responses that aim to safeguard heritage and heritage practitioners during the war, helping to create more effective and targeted support for the work of professionals and communities in the future. Researchers… will track support initiatives and networks of cooperation across Europe, investigate their impact, and identify the challenges of providing helpful aid and assistance in conflict and post-conflict environments.”

Clark University: Can A.I. learn empathy? . “Seeing the growing popularity of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November, Rabbi Joshua Franklin ’06, M.A. ’07, engaged his congregation in a quirky, but poignant, experiment. Franklin asked ChatGPT to write a sermon based on a Torah portion dealing with the idea of vulnerability and read it to his congregation. No one could guess who authored the text.” This is a summary article for a podcast. Unfortunately, I can’t find transcripts for the podcast, it appears to be audio only. If you notice a transcript please drop a comment. Good afternoon, Internet…

February 6, 2023 at 01:05AM
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Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part I: Contextual Boundaries)

Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part I: Contextual Boundaries)
By ResearchBuzz

I have been asked to speak to the folks of Apra Wisconsin at a virtual event sometime in the near future about Web search. I’ll be talking about people search because the audience is prospect researchers, but I also want to discuss a little of my philosophy about searching and why I’m creating my Search Gizmos.

I’ve spent the last couple of days wandering around and thinking about it, and this morning I got up and thought about it a little more. Eventually I realized I’d have to write things down to get them all thought out.

I want to talk about four principles: metadata as contextual boundary, authority as search guide, interest as a directing force in exploratory searching, and overlapping strategies. Each of those is an extensive discussion, so I’ll present it in four parts, starting with…

Metadata as Contextual Boundary

The most common definition I’ve seen for metadata is “data about data.” Everything has metadata attached to it. Metadata for people might include things like birth date, birth location, name, parents, and so on.

Consider Louisa May Alcott and some of her metadata. She was born on November 29, 1832 and died on March 6, 1888. Usually we think of those facts as standalone and singular. You might look up LMA’s birth date for a report, or you might check her death date on a reference site to see if it provides reliable information. You might even use those facts in a Web search to limit your results to reference-type searches.

You might think of a singular bit of metadata as a dot. In this case it’s metadata that’s handy for reference searching and finding reliable information, but it’s still just…. a dot.

But what if you connected two dots of related metadata – like, say, a birth date and a death date – and then used them to define the context of a Web search? Then you have a line. In fact, you have a contextual boundary!

A contextual boundary lets you carve out a particular part of the Web to search. In applying Louisa May Alcott’s birth and death dates to a search, you’re saying “I want to find everything within the boundaries of November 29, 1832, and March 6, 1888.” In other words, everything contemporary to LMA’s life.

Contemporary Biography Builder

Google News and other news search tools have ways to search within date spans but they generally don’t offer those tools in relation to people, so I made one, the Contemporary Biography Builder. It uses Wikipedia data to build lifespan-bounded searches in Google Books, Chronicling America, and other online news sources.

Here’s what a Google Books/Newspaper search for Louisa May Alcott looks like for all dates:

The first result is dated over 60 years after LMA died, and the second one 18 years after that. They’re going to be very different from the articles that were published during her life. I’m not saying these searches aren’t useful, I’m saying the cultural and media assessment of a person changes after their death. It has to. First the person dies, then their cultural context – their generation – dies out. After that any assessment of the person and their work is a matter of research and reassembly, not memory and experience. Of course it’s going to be different!

To contrast, here’s what a Contemporary Biography Builder search of LMA looks like in Google Books/Newspapers:

Instead of “Famous books your children should read,” it’s society gossip and a death in the family. It’s a completely different tone of news because it’s contemporary.

If you’re a Lousia May Alcott fan you might know that in addition to children’s books, she wrote what we would consider thrillers today – suspenseful stories with decidedly adult themes. Her fiction dealt with, among other things, violence, revenge, and drug use. These stories, often referred to as “blood and thunder” tales, were written under pseudonyms and generally unknown until they were rediscovered and popularized by the late researcher Madeline Stern. Stern’s work was covered with a wave of articles in the 1970s, with some additional articles written about them in the late 1990s.

I wasn’t sure if LMA’s suspense writing was known in her lifetime, so I decided to use Contemporary Biography Builder to see if I could find out. I set up a Google Books/Newspapers search for her name and then added the keywords blood and thunder.

And I got a tasty result right off the bat!

I wasn’t sure this search would work since the keyword search is for an entire page at a time and I couldn’t be guaranteed a meaningful proximity of the keywords. This looked promising, though. So I clicked on it, and…

It turns out that almost exactly six months before LMA died, the Boston Evening Transcript published a rumor that she’d written a thriller and also noted a story called “Monica” (which I didn’t see any further mention of, alas.) I can’t find any further news related to this article, but apparently there were some rumors floating around Concord!

I was able to find this search so easily because I used Contemporary Biography Builder and made the years of LMA’s life a boundary to my search. If instead you do an open, undated search for Louisa May Alcott blood thunder, you’ll find out the results are more about Madeline Stern’s scholarship than LMA directly. Here’s an example of what that search looks like:

Birth/death metadata is not obscure; it’s easy for the user to understand and implement into a query. You don’t need to have a clear search goal in mind (though lifespan-bounded searches can be useful for that too.) It’s a simple way to radically change the Web space you’re searching.

But does creating contextual boundaries always have to involve more than one piece of metadata? Not necessarily. You can create useful contextual search boundaries even with one item of metadata; let’s talk about Obit Magnet.

Contextual Boundaries and Obituaries

Searching for obituaries online seems like a simple task: enter a name and maybe a death date in a search engine. Often you can get useful results that way, especially if you’re researching an uncommon name. But if you’re searching for a Smith or a Williams or a Jones you might find yourself quickly overwhelmed and frustrated.

My Search Gizmo Obit Magnet uses one piece of metadata – a death date – and creates two time-bounded queries: one for seven days after the death date, and one for fifteen days after the death date. Those queries are turned into search URLs which search Google News, Chronicling America, and other news archives. This is a useful and simple way to restrict search results when you’re searching common names and doing genealogy research.

Here’s an Obit Magnet search result for Louisa May Alcott:

As she has both a famous and an unusual name, LMA is not a difficult obituary search. But I made Obit Magnet with 7- and 15-day search spans because I wanted to see if there were ever followups to obituaries – personal reactions, responses, or even corrections.

And in this case I found a sweet story, again from the Boston Daily Transcript, about a boy whose father is about to read him a chapter from LITTLE MEN before the evening paper comes and they find out that LMA has died. And because this is still only a 15-day search, this story popped up right to the top of the search results.

Other Metadata Options

It’s not just dates that you can use to create contextual boundaries for your search, either. Backyard Scholarship uses higher education institutions in a radius of a location to find information proximate to a famous person’s birthplace, workplace, place of most productivity, etc. As you might imagine, Boston University has a lot of scholarship about Louisa May Alcott.

In this case we’re using location and higher education institutions’ specific top-level domain of .edu to, once again, carve out a section of Web space to explore that should, thanks to the use of metadata, yield richer results.

Further Exploration

I’ve been doing some additional experimenting with contextual boundaries, but at the moment I’m limited to the APIs I can access and my beginner JavaScript skills. I continue to learn, though, so stay tuned.

As I polish my skills and look for new ways to tunnel into Web collections, I have found that using authority has helped a lot. Not mine, but the authority of other groups and institutions who specify, gather, and publish information. In the next part we’ll talk about Marion’s Monocle, Super .Edu Search, and Congressional Social Media Explorer.

February 5, 2023 at 10:18PM
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Roblox, Online Sports Database, Twitter, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, February 5, 2023

Roblox, Online Sports Database, Twitter, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, February 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

EVENTS

TechCrunch: Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie. “Hip-hop artist Saweetie is performing exclusively in Roblox for the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII pregame on February 10, the National Football League announced today.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PRNewswire: OSDB Expands With Addition Of NHL To Its Sports Platform (PRESS RELEASE). “Since its inception in 2021, complete rosters of NFL, MLB and NBA athletes have been available on the OSDB website. Now, NHL enthusiasts will finally have a place to view in-depth athlete profiles featuring personal interests, business ventures, charities, and career statistics, along with agent and management contact information.”

The Verge: Elon Musk will share Twitter ad revenue — but only with creators who pay for Twitter Blue. “Elon Musk says that Twitter will start sharing revenue from reply-thread ads with creators who are subscribed to Twitter Blue Verified.”

The Register: ChatGPT (sigh) the fastest-growing web app in history (sigh) claim analysts . ”
Last November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a free web interface and took the internet by storm. Data compiled in a study by UBS reported the chatbot had managed to reach 100 million monthly active users by January, which would make it the fastest-growing consumer app in internet history.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Curbed NY: I’ll Miss You, Design Bots. “Twitter bots like @slam_decorative crawl public records and public collections, tweeting historic, anarchic, and beautiful images and text into your everyday feed. They provide an escape from the influencers, an escape from the algorithm, an escape from 2023 — or they will until February 9.”

WIRED: Startup T2 Wants to Terminate Twitter. “IN MID-2021, GABOR Cselle bought a $15 Moleskine notebook to sketch out ideas for new startups. On the first page, he wrote ‘T2’ and began taking notes for a better version of Twitter. Cselle had sold startups to Google and Twitter and worked at both companies. (He was at the time at Google for a second stint, as a director at Area 120, its startup incubator.) But he couldn’t figure out how to draw people away from ‘T1’—the original Twitter—and set the idea aside.”

Bloomberg: Google Workers Stage Rallies Against Job Cuts, Low Wages. “Google employees staged protests on both US coasts this week to call attention to labor conditions for subcontracted workers and support thousands of co-workers who were recently laid off.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Florida hospital takes IT systems offline after cyberattack. “Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH) has taken its IT systems offline and suspended non-emergency procedures following a late Thursday cyberattack. While all its network systems were taken online, TMH says this attack only impacted some of them.”

Associated Press: Microsoft: Iran unit behind Charlie Hebdo hack-and-leak op. “After the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo launched a cartoon contest to mock Iran’s ruling cleric, a state-backed Iranian cyber unit struck back with a hack-and-leak campaign that was designed to provoke fear with the claimed pilfering of a big subscriber database, Microsoft security researchers say. The FBI blames the same Iranian cyber operators, Emennet Pasargad, for an influence operation that sought to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the tech giant said in a blog published Friday.”

Asahi Shimbun: Japan setting up rapid-response unit to counter disinformation. “The central government is setting up an organization within the Cabinet Secretariat to take on disinformation campaigns, such as fake news and impersonator accounts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Carnegie Mellon University: Making Meaningful Impact: Using Data Science for Social Good. “… the Baltimore City Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) is tasked with assessing 15,000 vacant homes to identify and remediate roof damage. The problem is complex, systemic and formidable. Enter the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Summer Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University.”

Harvard Business School: Why We Still Need Twitter: How Social Media Holds Companies Accountable. “Remember the viral video of the United passenger being removed from a plane? An analysis of Twitter activity and corporate misconduct by Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli reveals the power of social media to uncover questionable situations at companies.” Good morning, Internet…

February 5, 2023 at 06:32PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/OFNj93R

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Oakland Community Posters, Google Earnings, LibreOffice, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 4, 2023

Oakland Community Posters, Google Earnings, LibreOffice, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

San Francisco Chronicle: 50 years of powerful Bay Area posters collected by Oakland library go online. “Before the internet age, artists, community leaders and organizations in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood would drop off posters at the library that highlighted educational classes for the community, protests and cultural events in the Bay Area. Over the past 50 years, the librarians at the then-called Latin American branch – the first branch in the U.S. dedicated to the Spanish-speaking community – archived and have since collected more than 250 posters, a majority of them stored in boxes. This year the library unveiled a digital version of the collection on its website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Alphabet’s revenues are still growing, but just barely. “It’s no secret that the huge tech companies are still making money hand over fist, but there’s also a noticeable slowdown going on. Google’s parent company Alphabet is not immune — the company just reported its earnings results for Q4 of 2022, and just barely grew revenue year over year. The $76 billion the company pulled in during the quarter is up only one percent from Q4 of 2021.”

How-To Geek: LibreOffice, the Free Office Suite, Has a Fresh New Look. “LibreOffice is a popular open-source office suite, with applications that can serve as replacements for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now there’s a new update with design changes and a few new features.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The National: New archive treasure trove to map the history of the UAE. “The documents are part of the second phase of the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive ― a landmark digitisation project between the UAE and the UK ― that aims to shed light on the rich history of the Gulf. A vast collection of hundreds of thousands of files are expected to go live on the AGDA’s website later this year once they are catalogued, transcribed and translated into Arabic.”

New York Times: Will the Metaverse Be Entertaining? Ask South Korea.. “In a vast studio outside Seoul, technicians huddled in front of monitors, watching cartoon K-pop singers — at least one of whom had a tail — dance in front of a psychedelic backdrop. A woman with fairy wings fluttered by. Everyone onscreen was real, sort of.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: Breakup of Google’s Ad Business Would Reshape $500 Billion Sector. “Google spent the better part of two decades building the world’s most powerful digital advertising machine. Breaking it up would send shock waves through the $500 billion online-ad market.”

Euractiv: Poland warns of disinformation campaigners smearing Ukrainian refugees. “The government Plenipotentiary for the Security of the Information Space of the Republic of Poland, Stanisław Żaryn, warned at a press conference about a disinformation campaign taking place in the country concerning refugees from Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees often fall victim to online and media disinformation. Rarely, however, on a scale against which the governments must warn citizens.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Empathy’s new tool uses AI to generate obituaries, and it’s not half bad. “Writing an obituary isn’t an easy task. That’s an understatement — it’s incredibly painful, usually expensive too. But someone has to do it. Or perhaps not. Consider leaving it to AI. That’s the pitch Empathy, a platform that provides support for families who’ve recently suffered a loss, is making with the launch of its new tool that uses AI to create obituary drafts. Called Finding Words, the tool generates obits from basic info provided by family members.”

Brown University: Study offers neurological explanation for how brains bias partisans against new information. “People who share a political ideology have more similar ‘neural fingerprints’ of political words and process new information in similar ways, according to a new analysis led by Brown University researchers.”

Ohio State News: True stories can win out on social media, study finds. “Some past research has suggested that falsehoods travel more quickly online than the truth and are more popular with the public, but a new study gives a more hopeful view. Researchers found that posts on the social media site Reddit that included news articles fact-checked as true received more engagement and positive reaction than posts with news labeled as false.” Good afternoon, Internet…

February 5, 2023 at 01:19AM
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Seattle Gay News, Philadelphia Mayor Race, HemisFair ’68, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, February 4, 2023

Seattle Gay News, Philadelphia Mayor Race, HemisFair ’68, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, February 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Washington Secretary of State: 41 Years of SGN now online at Washington Digital Newspapers; historic content available free to the public. “Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, recently digitized 1,745 issues of the Seattle Gay News (now known as SGN), as part of the Washington Digital Newspapers (WDN) program.”

Metro: New dashboard shows who’s spending big in mayor’s race. “A new data dashboard is letting Philadelphians follow the money just as this year’s mayoral race heats up. The city’s Board of Ethics, along with Mayor Jim Kenney’s Office of Information and Technology, launched the program this week with the aim of making campaign finance data more accessible to the public.”

Odessa American: Texas Film Commission announces new interactive exhibit. “The Texas Film Commission and the Texas Archive of the Moving Image announced Thursday the launch of a new interactive exhibit ‘Meet Me in San Antonio: HemisFair ’68 on Film.’… HemisFair ’68 was a sixth-month event celebrating the ethnic groups of the western hemisphere as well as San Antonio’s 250th birthday.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: ChatGPT firm trials $20 monthly subscription fee. “The firm behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT is trialling a subscription service in the US. For $20 (£16) per month, subscribers will get access to the platform even at peak times when it can be hard to log onto, and also ‘priority access’ to new features, chatbot creator OpenAI said.”

WordPress Blog: What’s New on WordPress.com: Tools to Make Designing Your Site Easier Than Ever. “At WordPress.com, we’re always adding features and pushing our blocks and Site Editor to do more so that you can create, design, and publish amazing things with ease. Our newest features are largely design-focused, giving you the confidence to explore a variety of styles and then easily apply them across your entire site.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Futurism: Leaked Messages Show How CNET’s Parent Company Really Sees AI-Generated Content. “Kevin Hughes, the head of AI content for Red’s EDU division, is a true believer in the company’s vision of sites populated largely by AI-generated content. On LinkedIn, for instance, he recently boasted that the company’s ‘dirt cheap’ AI can crank out articles so efficiently that it costs ‘less than a penny for 750 words’ — a practice that he wrote was ‘generating millions of dollars in revenue.'”

Engadget: China’s biggest search engine is to set launch a ChatGPT rival in March. “Chinese search giant Baidu aims to introduce a ChatGPT-like AI service that gives users conversational results, Bloomberg has reported. It’ll be based on the company’s Ernie system, a large-scale machine-learning model trained over several years that ‘excels at natural language understanding and generation,’ Baidu said in 2021.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Shady reward apps on Google Play amass 20 million downloads. “The applications promote themselves as health, pedometer, and good habit-building apps, promising to give users random rewards for staying active in their daily lives, reaching distance goals, etc. According to a report by the Dr. Web antivirus, though, the rewards may be impossible to cash out or are only made available partially after forcing users to watch a large number of advertisements.”

UK Government: UK sets out plans to regulate crypto and protect consumers. “The government will set out ambitious plans to robustly regulate cryptoasset activities – providing confidence and clarity to consumers and businesses alike.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Cambridge: Memes-field Park? ‘Digital natives’ are flirting with Jane Austen’s vision of the ideal man all over again. “In a newly-published analysis, literature specialists examined the phenomenon of internet memes about Jane Austen and her fictional creations, in particular those from Pride and Prejudice and, above all, Mr Darcy. Austen’s work is ‘memed’ – turned into bite-sized, ironic snippets of online content – more than almost any other author of classic fiction.”

CNN: AI reveals unknown play by one of Spain’s greatest writers in library archive. “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology used to transcribe anonymous historic works at Spain’s National Library archives has uncovered a hidden gem — a previously unknown play by one of the nation’s greatest authors, Felix Lope de Vega.”

BuzzFeed News: Why Are AI-Generated Hands So Messed Up?. “why do these programs mess up hands (not to mention bare feet) so badly? It’s a question that many people have asked. To find out, I emailed Midjourney; Stability AI, which makes Stable Diffusion; and OpenAI, which created DALL-E 2. Only Stability AI responded to my questions.” Good morning, Internet…

February 4, 2023 at 06:29PM
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Friday, February 3, 2023

Emanuel Jackson, Eudora Welty, Wyoming in WWII, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 3, 2023

Emanuel Jackson, Eudora Welty, Wyoming in WWII, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 3, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Northern Virginia Daily: Belle Grove online exhibit. “Belle Grove has published its latest online exhibit …, The Jackson Family: A Story of Resilience & The Enduring Love of Family. It tells the story of Emanuel Jackson, a free Black man from Frederick County and how he purchased the freedom of his children and grandchild who were enslaved by the Hite family. Jackson resided in Pittsburgh and his children joined him there.”

State of Mississippi: Eudora Welty Digital Archives Launches Online. “Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) is pleased to announce that The Eudora Welty Digital Archives is now available to the public on the MDAH website…. The Eudora Welty Digital Archives represents only a sample of Welty-related material housed at MDAH and features selections of correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and other media related to Eudora Welty (1909-2001), master of the short story and one of America’s greatest authors.”

Wyoming State Library: Explore State’s History With Wyoming Places Online Exhibits. “The Wyoming Places website now hosts three in-depth digital exhibits on the topics of Heart Mountain WWII Internment Camp, Wyoming’s Statehood Celebration, and WWII Prisoner of War (POW) Camps in Wyoming. The latter is new to the collection, while the other exhibits have been revamped for visitors.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Twitter to end free access to its API in Elon Musk’s latest monetization push. “Twitter will discontinue offering free access to the Twitter API starting February 9 and will launch a paid version, the Elon Musk-owned microblogging website said as it looks for more avenues to monetize the platform.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Simcoe: Georgian Bay Métis Council working to record and preserve local Métis history. “The Georgian Bay Métis Council is working to ensure the region’s Métis history is not forgotten. The Midland-based organization has received funding from Heritage Canada to digitize historical documents, photograph historical artifacts and collect stories from local elders to create an online museum.”

BBC: New archive to show life in Derby’s south Asian communities. “Pictures illustrating life in a city’s south Asian communities over 30 years are to be collected in a new archive. Derby Museum’s Alternative Archive project is collecting images from the 1950s to the 1980s. Museum managers said the aim of the project was to fill a gap in its existing displays. The archive, which is being funded through a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant, will be displayed in an exhibition in 2024 and also online.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mashable: KinkTok is rife with misinformation. Here’s why that’s dangerous.. “False information is a widespread problem on the internet generally, but on KinkTok — the TikTok kink community — it holds a particularly dangerous weight.”

CNN: Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media. “US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says he believes 13 is too young for children to be on social media platforms, because although sites allow children of that age to join, kids are still ‘developing their identity.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Clemson News: Virtual reality is ‘mind-blowing’ but even better when shared with other people, researchers find . “The early adopters of mass-market virtual reality headsets are working together to display their art, organize work meetings, record their favorite DJ sets, and play a host of games ranging from paintball and dodgeball to escape rooms and obstacle courses, according to researchers in Clemson University’s School of Computing.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Two Row Times: New grant for Indigenous filmmakers launched in honour of Jeff Barnaby. “Netflix and imagineNATIVE on Thursday announced the Jeff Barnaby Grant in honour of his contributions to Indigenous narrative sovereignty, genre film, and Canadian cinema. Five Indigenous film and television creatives across Canada with productions at any stage in the horror, thriller and futurism genre will each receive $25,000 to support their projects.” Good afternoon, Internet…

February 4, 2023 at 01:01AM
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