California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation: DFPI Launches Scam Tracker to Help the Public Spot Crypto Scams. “The Crypto Scam Tracker is a database that is searchable by company name, scam type, or keywords to learn more about the crypto specific complaints the DFPI has received. An accompanying glossary aims to help consumers better understand common scams.”
BusinessWire: New Healthier Workplaces Website Offers Free Resources to Protect Employers, Consumers from Hazards at Work and Home (PRESS RELEASE). “The website provides free resources for employers and employees to safeguard worker health and well-being, including keeping workplaces safe from infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics. Consumers can also learn how to address health risks in their homes arising from natural disasters such as wildfires and floods, as well as mold.” This site is brought to you by the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA).
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Vox: Musk’s Twitter is getting worse. “If you were accustomed to a time when Twitter — while far from perfect — was a place where you could dependably digest a wide range of breaking news, politics, celebrity gossip, or personal musings, it’s time to accept a new reality. Twitter is becoming a degraded product.”
Bloomberg: Twitter Shuts Delhi, Mumbai Offices, Asks Staff To Work From Home: Report. “Twitter Inc. has shut two of its three India offices and told its staff to work from home, underscoring Elon Musk’s mission to slash costs and get the struggling social media service in the black. Twitter, which fired more than 90% of its roughly 200-plus staff in India late last year, closed its offices in the political center New Delhi and financial hub of Mumbai, people aware of the matter said.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
American Medical Association Update: Challenging racial bias and medical myth-busting on Tiktok, Twitter and Instagram with Joel Bervell. “In today’s AMA Update, Joel Bervell, a social media educator and fourth-year medical student in Baltimore, shares how he is using his social media platform to address health disparities, racial bias and misinformation in health care. Joel is the former AMA medical student digital fellow. AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger hosts.”
KERA: Fans of Turkish dramas refocus social media obsessions on helping victims of earthquakes . “On any given day, fans of Turkish dramas are busy tweeting about the latest plot twist in their favorite show or casting news of their favorite actor. But the devastation in Turkey and Syria caused by two strong earthquakes has prompted fans to use social media to raise awareness of the needs in both countries.”
CNBC: Google asks employees to rewrite Bard’s bad responses, says the A.I. ‘learns best by example’. “Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s vice president for search, asked staffers in an email on Wednesday to help the company make sure its new ChatGPT competitor gets answers right. The email, which CNBC viewed, included a link to a do’s and don’ts page with instructions on how employees should fix responses as they test Bard internally.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Reuters: Google, Twitter, Meta, Apple face tougher EU online content rules. “The new rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) label companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms and subject to obligations such as risk management and external and independent auditing. They are also required to share data with authorities and researchers and adopt a code of conduct.”
CNBC: Promoting FTX was their side hustle. Now these student ambassadors are left to pick up the pieces. “He had been identified as someone who could represent and promote the crypto exchange at his college. [Gabriel] Trompiz promptly applied through the link he was sent and became an FTX campus ambassador shortly afterward. No contracts were signed, and Trompiz says he wasn’t paid. But he was given a task: promoting the company to fellow students to help build its userbase in Europe.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
University of Southern California: NSF Grant to Make Coding More Accessible for Persons with Physical Disabilities. “The team, which includes experts in computer science, education, kinesiology and occupational therapy, aims to develop personalized prototype interfaces, enhanced by artificial intelligence, to help persons with disabilities learn and practice programming skills.” 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 18, 2023 at 06:30PM
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DE&I In Digitized Clinical Trials, Google, GitHub CoPilot, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Medical Marketing and Media: Digital Medicine Society unveils resources to boost DE&I in digitized clinical trials. “The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) launched a suite of free resources designed to boost diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in digitized clinical trials Wednesday morning…. These include definitions to ensure industry-wide alignment on DE&I as well as a guide to conduct a digitized clinical trial with these considerations in mind.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Search Engine Land: Google publishes new link best practices. “Google has published a new link best practices in their SEO and search developer documentation. Originally it was a document about how to create crawlable links, but the document has been [expanded]…”
Bleeping Computer: GitHub Copilot update stops AI model from revealing secrets. “GitHub has updated the AI model of Copilot, a programming assistant that generates real-time source code and function recommendations in Visual Studio, and says it’s now safer and more powerful.”
TechCrunch: Otter.ai launches OtterPilot, its new AI meeting assistant. “AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai is launching a new AI meeting assistant called OtterPilot, the company announced on Tuesday. OtterPilot automates meetings and is designed to help professionals save time and increase meeting productivity. The new features will roll out to users on all plans over the coming days, the company says.”
USEFUL STUFF
Hongkiat: 10 Free Tools For Digital Storytelling. “Digital storytelling is accomplished by combining narration with digital content such as animation, stills, audio, etc. It is very popular these days in schools and educational institutions around the globe. In this post, we discuss ten free tools for creating digital stories for your own purpose in the classroom.”
Search Engine Journal: 13 Best Video Editing Software Tools For Beginners (2023). “In evaluating beginner tools, I focused on two core areas: user-friendliness and price. Some of the tools on the list are a bit more expensive, but they could be worth the price for their features and support. Others are entirely free but more difficult to use. The higher learning curve could be worth it if you’re willing to invest time in the tool.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Dutch News: Names of Nazi collaborators online from 2025. “The names of people who were suspected of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II will become freely available to the public as the digitalisation of the 300,000 names in the special archive begins. The Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (CABR) contains the names of those suspected of having collaborated with the Germans in some form, betrayed fellow citizens, were a member of the Nazi affiliated NSB or fought in the German army.”
CNN: Disconnected: My year without the Internet. “We are using the Internet wrong. Smartphones turn people into horrible listeners. And cat videos aren’t as riveting as we think they are. These are just some of the revelations writer Paul Miller had during a year of self-imposed exile from the Internet.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Engadget: City of Oakland declares state of emergency in wake of ransomware attack. “While Oakland previously assured residents that 911 dispatch and fire emergency services weren’t affected by the breach, its police department warned people that the attack has delayed response times. It’s now encouraging people to file reports online for non-emergency complaints. Oakland also had to close some of its buildings and is now asking people to email government offices’ service counters before coming to visit.”
Slashgear: Hyundai And Kia’s Fix For The Viral TikTok Car Theft Hack Is Software And Stickers. “The #kiaboyz hashtag that exploded in popularity on TikTok in 2022, receiving over 33 million views, started as a group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, breaking into Kia and Hyundai vehicles and using the male end of a USB Type-A cable or flash drive to start and steal the car. It has since spread, and owners are reporting thefts happening in Chicago and New York City.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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February 18, 2023 at 01:13AM
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Atwater Kent Collection. Montana Population Growth, Michigan Clean Energy, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, February 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Drexel University: Drexel Launches Digital Database, Making Atwater Kent Collection Available to the Public. “The Atwater Kent Collection includes an extraordinary assemblage of some 130,000 historic artifacts and archival materials relating to Philadelphia and American history…. With the help of grant funding, the new online database debuts with over 1,000 objects on virtual display.”
NBC Montana: New tool helps track Montana’s population growth. “The Population Forecasting Data Model is a collaboration between the Montana Department of Commerce and Carroll College. The data model will help plan community development and land use. The model also predicts population at the county level for the next five years.”
MI Tech News: LTU, UM Develop Online Roadmap To Track Michigan’s Clean Energy Assets. “A grant of nearly $300,000 to Lawrence Technological University’s Centrepolis Accelerator and another grant of nearly $112,000 to the University of Michigan’s Economic Growth Institute has produced a new online database of Michigan’s key renewable energy resources for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Syracuse University: New Podcast Explores How Technology Has Dramatically Changed Storytelling. “From news to fiction to film to photography to podcasts to social media and even the human voice, technological innovation has inspired and enabled new paradigms in storytelling. Last month, in partnership with Antica Productions and Trint and in association with WAER, the Newhouse School launched ‘StoryTech with Jeff Kofman,’ a podcast that explores this new era of storytelling.”
AFP: A year of disinformation around the war in Ukraine. “The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a ferocious battle of disinformation, waged in particular by pro-Russian agitators seeking to distort and shift the blame for many atrocities on the ground. These agitators have sought to depict the Ukrainian side as Nazis or suggest that Western support for Kyiv is evaporating. Here are some of the main narratives, false or misleading, that have been fact-checked over the past year.”
Engadget: TikTok creators might soon put some videos behind a paywall. “TikTok might use a simple strategy to keep growing: help creators make extra money. The Information sources claim TikTok is developing a paywall feature that would let producers charge $1 (or a price of their choice) to access a given video. While it’s not clear exactly how the system would work, this would help influencers profit directly from their hottest clips.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Financial Times: Handel the composer-philanthropist celebrated in concert and online archive. “Having committed the biggest dates in its diary to Handel for some years, the English Concert is launching Handel for All, a website that will offer video recordings of every work the composer wrote. Given how prolific the composer was, this promises to be no small challenge, comprising 42 operas, almost 30 oratorios, more than 120 cantatas and much more.”
Bloomberg: Hundreds of Google Staff in Zurich Stage Walkout Over Job Cuts. “About 250 employees from Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google in Zurich walked out Wednesday to protest the company’s decision last month to cut about 6% of its global workforce.”
Michigan Daily: Inside reality shifting: the TikTok trend that took the online fandom by storm. “No matter how inconceivable projecting your consciousness into a fictional reality seems, it hasn’t stopped thousands upon thousands of people from trying it. There are dozens of TikTok creators whose content centers around shifting — creators with hundreds of thousands of followers returning day after day to hear shifting stories, get advice on how to successfully shift and connect with other shifters.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Ars Technica: Health info for 1 million patients stolen using critical GoAnywhere vulnerability. “One of the biggest hospital chains in the US said hackers obtained protected health information for 1 million patients after exploiting a vulnerability in an enterprise software product called GoAnywhere. Community Health Systems of Franklin, Tennessee, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday that the attack targeted GoAnywhere MFT, a managed file transfer product Fortra licenses to large organizations.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Stanford Medicine: Moms’ and babies’ medical data predicts prematurity complications, Stanford Medicine-led study shows. “By sifting through electronic health records of moms and babies using a machine-learning algorithm, scientists can predict how at-risk newborns will fare in their first two months of life. The new method allows physicians to classify, at or before birth, which infants are likely to develop complications of prematurity.”
The Guardian (Nigeria): How presidential candidates pay influencers to peddle fake news on social media, by CDD report. “The 10-page report, titled ‘Online operations: Nigeria’s 2023 social media election campaigns’ chronicles the challenge of misinformation, mal-information and disinformation, which it said have dominated social media platforms as the country counts down to the polls.” 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 17, 2023 at 06:26PM
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Brazilian Cultural Objects at Risk, Vietnam Archive Photography, Internet Explorer, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
International Council of Museums: ICOM New Red List of Brazilian Cultural Objects at Risk. “The purpose of this Red List for Brazilian Cultural Objects at Risk is to contribute to the protection of cultural heritage by identifying the type of objects that are most in danger of theft, looting and trafficking. The objects featured in this Red List have not been stolen, but are examples of the typologies of objects at risk.”
Vietnam+: Vietnam – France joint website of archive photos launched. “A joint website featuring archive photos from the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) and the Institute of Social Sciences Information at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences was officially launched on February 15.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
ReviewGeek: Microsoft Rips Internet Explorer Away From Users Still Holding On. “Internet Explorer had a great run, but the writing has been on the wall for years. Microsoft officially said goodbye to the long-running browser back in June. Today, it confirmed that a new Microsoft Edge update would permanently disable Internet Explorer on Windows 10 and send it into retirement.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: How to Cancel a Subscription Online Even When the Company Doesn’t Want You To. “As it turns out, this isn’t a universal problem: Some states have enforceable laws on the books requiring companies to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up. California is the shining example: Since 2018, the state requires companies to offer California-based customers a way to cancel online. Paradise. If you’re one of the 290 million U.S. citizens who don’t live in California, that’s OK.” Brilliant. Tell your friends.
ARY News: Turkey Arrests 78 Over Earthquake Social Media Posts . “Turkish police said they have arrested 78 people accused of creating fear and panic by ‘sharing provocative posts’ about last week’s earthquake on social media, adding 20 of them were being held in pre-trial detention.”
Krebs on Security: Microsoft Patch Tuesday, February 2023 Edition. “Microsoft is sending the world a whole bunch of love today, in the form of patches to plug dozens of security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. This year’s special Valentine’s Day Patch Tuesday includes fixes for a whopping three different ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities that are already being used in active attacks.”
Oxford University: Oxford philosopher launches project to explore the ethics of AI. “Professor John Tasioulas, Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, has been awarded an AI2050 Senior Fellowship by Schmidt Futures.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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February 17, 2023 at 01:23AM
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Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part II: Authority)
By ResearchBuzz
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching.
In Part II, I want to look at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do Web search. Instead of using data about the subject, we’ll be using authority to guide our search to (hopefully) more useful Web spaces and search results. Authority can be both search guide and search feature and we’ll look at both. But first, the fundamental question:
What is Authority?
I struggled with vocabulary when I first started considering this word. When I thought of authority I thought of this:
… but that’s not what I mean. Instead in the context of Web search and authority I mean two things:
Expertise Authority
Expertise authorities are institutions and groups who are generally acknowledged to offer useful, factual information. The information may be topical or general. Expertise authorities would include the Library of Congress, WorldCat, the archives of an accredited research group, etc.
Access Authority
Access Authority is either access to something normally unavailable to the general public or the authority to offer an option or action which is usually restricted. Certain top-level domains (like .edu, .mil, and .gov) are examples of access authority because only certain groups are allowed to register and use them. (These TLDs are sometimes called “Restricted TLDs.”) Licensing bodies like the FCC have access authority because they license the ability to run a television station in the United States. Your local municipal government exercises access authority when they issue construction permits.
Authority Everywhere, But Rarely Applied
While Google will include and use authoritative data in its own search results, it’s rare that you get the opportunity to use and direct it yourself in an easy way. One of the big exceptions is the site: search syntax with the top-level domains edu, mil, or gov.
One of the most well-known of Google’s search syntax, site: lets you restrict your search to a top-level domain (like edu) or a domain name (ncsu.edu). You can even restrict your search results to a subdomain (wolfpack.ncsu.edu).
When you add site:edu to your query, you’re using authoritative data because only accredited educational institutions are allowed to register and use .edu domains. When you use site:edu, you’re ensuring that every page in your search results comes from the Web space of an accredited institution of higher learning.
That’s really powerful if you think about it! There are only a few top-level domain searches you can do, including site:edu, site:mil, and site:gov, that will bring you results from only one type of Web site. That doesn’t mean everything on those sites will be useful or relevant to your search, but it does mean that with just one addition to your query you can narrow down your search results in a very meaningful way using the authority of the Internet’s infrastructure!
… to a point. As powerful as it is to be able to focus your search results with one application of the site:edu syntax, it only does so much. You’re finding content from higher education institutions in the United States, but you can’t get any more specific than that. You’re not limiting your search to the location of an educational institution, for example. You’re not limiting your results to only those institutions which are private.
But wouldn’t it be cool if you could? Wouldn’t it be great if you could do something like search the Web space of only Catholic universities in New York? Or all the public universities in North Carolina?
Personally, I thought it would be, so I made a Search Gizmo to put some muscle into a site:edu Google search. Not only is it fun to search with, it also shows you how authoritative systems can focus your results even when you don’t have a very specific query. Let’s talk about Super Edu Search. But first, a brief side note about API keys.
A brief side note about API keys: Super Edu Search and another Search Gizmo I’m highlighting in this article, Congressional Social Media Explorer, require API keys to work. API keys are little strings of text that API services use to verify their users. Super Edu Search requires a Data.gov API key and Congressional Social Media Explorer requires a ProPublica API key. Both keys are free and require only registration, and once you have the key all you’ll have to do with it is copy and paste it into a text box. Think of them as an example of access authority!
Using authority to focus your searches: Super Edu Search
I’ve already mentioned the edu top-level domain as an example of access authority, as only accredited institutions of higher learning can use .edu domain names. But who decides whether an institution of higher education is accredited or not?
You might think it’s the US Department of Education, but it isn’t, at least not directly. Instead of accrediting institutions itself, the Department of Education oversees the organizations which do the acreditting. (Perhaps you could argue that the DoE does acreditting once removed.) Furthermore, the Department of Education aggregates information about the colleges and universities around the United States and makes it available via an API at https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/ .
Super Edu Search, available at https://searchgizmos.com/super-edu-search/ , is an authority search on top of an authority search. You’re searching the US Department of Education’s data to find higher education institutions which meet certain criteria, and then you’re using the authority of .edu web space to do a focused Google search. Compared to a regular site:edu search, you can get ridiculously specific!
Super Edu Search allows you to choose the ownership type, religious affiliation, minority/gender emphasis, and location (by state) of the higher education institutions you’re searching. You’re limited to 200 search results but limiting by state will get you under that limit for most states.
Usually when you do a Web search you want to make your query as specific as possible so you get a limited number of results. With Super Edu Search, that strategy is reversed because authority is doing such a good job of narrowing the Web space you’re searching. Let’s talk about a general search like “climate change” and how it looks across four different site:edu searches.
Climate Change and Site:Edu
If I do a Google search for “climate change” site:edu, it looks like this:
The results are as general as you’d expect and rather varied, though I’m surprised to see a single university take the top two spots in the search results.
But what if we used Super Edu Search to change the Web space we were searching without changing the general nature of a search? Let’s find out.
One of the easiest ways to use Super Edu Search is by searching the Web space of all universities in a particular state. What does a search for the term “climate change” look like when your search results are restricted to universities in Hawaii?
Unsurprisingly, results focus on research from and about Hawaii, from rainbows to reefs. Super Edu Search lets you move your focus from creating a specific, detailed query to creating a specific, detailed space to search, allowing you to play with general searches.
Let’s do another one. The Hawaii search focused on location, but what if we did a search for “climate change” across Jewish universities?
In this case, the top results varied, with topics ranging from faith to art to activism. What jumped out to me here is the reference to both activism and activist groups.
You’ll notice that these two results have featured one university’s domain (and sometimes multiple sub-domains) in the search results. That’s because Super Edu Search works by grouping university Web sites into Google search modifiers that look like this:
Sometimes one domain name overwhelms the other ones at the top of the search results, but you’ll find more as you explore further down from the top.
Sometimes a Super Edu Search result shows more domains up top, like this result for a search of “climate change” across Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
In the case of these search results, sustainability is addressed but so is environmental justice and disproportionate impact.
Every group has its own perspective about a topic. If you’re a farmer in the midwestern United States you’re thinking about climate change differently than a property landlord in coastal North Carolina, who’s thinking about it differently than a local grocery store manager.
Groups form perspectives in response to problems, changes, and even innovations. The distinctive names, keywords, and vocabulary created by groups around topics is a priceless compilation of experience and understanding that you don’t have unless you’re part of that group.
If you aren’t part of a group, you don’t have access to its perspective. If you don’t have access to its perspective, you can’t use its experience and understanding to build a Web query. (This takes me back around to my eternal first search question: how do I ask for what I don’t know?, but more about that in a minute.)
So if you can’t access the expertise of a group to build a search query then you don’t. Instead, you can try to define the group, discover Web spaces that match that group, and see if there’s a way to aggregate those spaces to one searchable area. Super Edu Search does that by using both the Department of Education’s overriding authority data and the authority data of the .edu top-level domain itself.
But as I said a couple of paragraphs ago, my first, essential search question boils down to “how do you ask for what you don’t know?” With Super Edu Search I showed you how you can use educational authority to define groups and then search them with general topics.
Sometimes defining a group isn’t that easy, though. Sometimes the group whose perspective you’re interested in is made of specific people and, unlucky you, you have no idea who they are. Expertise authority to the rescue! Let’s talk about Congressional Social Media Explorer.
Congressional Social Media Explorer
At this writing there are 435 voting members of the US House of Representatives. You’re probably aware of your own representative and some of the noisier national ones, and you might know some of the other reps in your state. And generally that’s all you need to know!
But if you’re doing research that is adjacent to politics or state and federal government, you need more political knowledge than that, and sometimes it can be tedious to find. If you want to know what representatives of Texas circa 2014 have said about cannabis on social media, for example, you might go look them up from a reference resource, create social media sources, and go through them one by one.
OR you can use an expertise authority to find the politicians and then automatically build the searches yourself. That’s what Congressional Social Media Explorer, available at https://searchgizmos.com/congressional-social-media-explorer/ , does.
In this case the authority is ProPublica, which maintains an API of Congressional member data at https://www.propublica.org/datastore/api/propublica-congress-api . Its data extends to everyone who has ever served in Congress, but the CSME goes back to only the 112th congress (2011-2012), since social media was less-developed before that (as was political response to it.)
Since ProPublica has a reference API with all the names I need if I want to research Texas politicians talking about cannabis, I can search for what I do know – I want social media statements about cannabis from politicians who were Texas representatives circa 2014.
(Note that CSME identifies politicians who were representatives at a particular time, but does not put date-boundaries on searches. In other words, if a Congressperson was in office in 2014 and is still maintaining the social media account they were using in 2014, your search will get a list of all statements they’ve made on that account about cannabis until the present day.)
CSME has a template for doing social media searches and uses the authoritative data from ProPublica to fill it in. Since it maintains information on the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, here are the two Texas senators in 2014:
Several one-click searches use Google to find content (or comments) related to each senator across several platforms. (Also note that replies are indexed in addition to politician statements, so don’t look at Google’s page summary and make assumptions about who said what!)
In this case I’m relying on ProPublica’s authoritative data to build somewhat an admittedly usual interface for exploring the comments of politicians on social media. While I’m here I should probably also admit that I found the ProPublica API ripe for extended goofery. Did you ever want to search for US Senators by generation, or percentage of votes missed, or – um – zodiac sign? Feel free to noodle around with Senator Social Slices: https://searchgizmos.com/senator-social-slices/ .
So far in this article I’ve shown you an example of using access authority to build group spaces for Web search, and expertise authority to build searches for politicians across social media. But authority doesn’t have to be the main aspect of a search – sometimes it can just act as guidance. Let’s talk about Pam’s Pin and MegaGladys.
Authority as search feature
Pam’s Pin, at https://searchgizmos.com/pams-pin/ , is one of the first Gizmos I made. It “translates” a street address to a Twitter location search (Twitter uses latitude and longitude for precise location search, which is not user-friendly.)
If you went to Pam’s Pin and just clicked on the button, you’d get the default search, which is to find all tweets which look like they were made in a 1km radius of the exterior shot used for the Brady Bunch house. Buf if you add a little y in the last option before you click on the button, your search results will be limited to only those tweets from verified Twitter accounts – you’ll be using access authority to narrow down your search results.
I am aware that this example of access authority worked much better before Elon Musk came along, and that identity verification on Twitter may mean anything or nothing. So I humbly ask you to imagine Twitter with a consistent identity verification program, and how being able to quickly separate out verified from non-verified user content in conjunction with a location search could be useful. Imagine all the people, living life in peeaaaceeeee… sorry. Happily I don’t have to ask you to imagine anything with my last example, MegaGladys.
MegaGladys, at https://searchgizmos.com/megagladys/ , uses Wikipedia to help surface authoritative information about persons, places, or things. I actually don’t consider Wikipedia itself an example of expert authority. As much as I admire Wikipedia, I don’t give it the automatic trust I would give to the Department of Education or ProPublica. There are way too many pranks and propaganda wars and general shenanigans going on in its pages.
But Wikipedia links to excellent examples of expert authority and that’s what I’m taking advantage of with MegaGladys. If I used MegaGladys to search for Huey “Piano” Smith, a pioneering New Orleans musician who recently passed away, I would actually get a pretty restrained set of results (Mr. Smith has a extensive article at Wikipedia, but MegaGladys is for summarizing and pointing to other resources.)
While I don’t consider Wikipedia itself that authoritative, it does link to resources like WorldCat and the Library of Congress. If I’m getting minimal information from Wikipedia, or information I’m not sure of, I can explore his listings in WorldCat and the Library of Congress, and if I wish I can pursue finding offline resources like popular books.
In the first part of this series I talked about using item metadata to create contextual boundaries for your searches, and in this part we looked at using authoritative data to create Web spaces and provide useful search context.
The next part is going to be a little different – it’s going to be about popularity and how you can use it to make your search better. But I’m not talking about current popularity, I’m talking about recent popularity and popularity over time. I’m talking about …fossilized attention.
February 16, 2023 at 11:23PM
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UK Cultural Heritage, US Food Equity, DetectGPT, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, February 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Google Blog: Plan the perfect family day out in the UK with Google Arts & Culture . “Right on time for half-term (or any school holiday), Google Arts & Culture invites families in the UK and visitors to embark on a cultural adventure across the country with a new collection of stories and activities curated with more than 100 partner institutions.”
Partnership for a Healthier America: What Food Equity Looks Like in Your Neighborhood. “Partnership for a Healthier America has launched its Food Equity Opportunity Map in partnership with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, highlighting where improving access to good food would make the greatest impact and allowing everyone to see what Food Equity looks like in their community for the first time.”
Stanford University: Human Writer or AI? Scholars Build a Detection Tool. “[Eric Anthony] Mitchell and his colleagues have developed DetectGPT, released as a demo and a paper last week, which distinguishes between human- and LLM-generated text. In initial experiments, the tool accurately identifies authorship 95% of the time across five popular open-source LLMs.” I tested it with some of my own writing and some AI text generated from You Chat. DetectGPT correctly identified my writing as being non-AI, but for the AI text it guessed that it COULD be AI text but that it probably wasn’t. It’s not perfect, take with salt.
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Ars Technica: ChromeOS will finally, mercifully, let you change its keyboard shortcuts. “As spotted in Kevin Tofel’s About Chromebooks blog, an updated version of the shortcut viewer in the Settings app—first seen in October 2022—has the early makings of a shortcut changing and adding mechanism.”
TechCrunch: Google starts beta testing its rebrand of interest-based ad-targeting on Android. “Google has begun letting Android developers kick the tyres of its claimed reboot of ad-targeting — announcing the launch of the first Beta for its ‘Privacy Sandbox’, an adtech stack proposal which aims to iterate how ad tracking, targeting and reporting is done so it appears less creepy for individual users while maintaining an interest-based, behavioral targeting capability on web users’ eyeballs.”
Engadget: Google Fiber launches 5Gbps service for $125 per month. “Google Fiber is launching the 5Gbps internet plan it began testing in October. The service will initially cover four cities, but Google says the $125-per-month service will expand to other areas later this year.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
WIRED: What Web3 Can Learn From Archive of Our Own . “[Fannish Next-of-Kin] arrangements allow users of the popular fan-fiction website Archive of Our Own to designate another fan to take control of their works—things like fan fiction, fan art, essays, and videos—after they die. Carpenter had heard of the policy before, but it was XT’s death—and the suggestion from a fellow server member that they all consider naming a FNOK—that spurred her into action.”
Golf Digest: Artist CR Obetz salvages the iconic drawings of illustrator Anthony Ravielli with 21st-century methods . ” As an artist, Obetz’s general instinct is to search for the lost and forgotten, so he ignored the paintings on the main walls and ventured into the back room where he found boxes containing thousands of sketches, notes and scratchboards littering a billiards table. Among them, he recognized the sharp black pen of Anthony Ravielli and knew he had to rescue them.” There’s some NFT stuff in here and it’s partially promotional with Golf Digest, so I almost didn’t include it. But the art is so good.
New York Times: Why Are You Seeing So Many Bad Digital Ads Now?. “…advertising experts agree that crummy ads — some just irritating, others malicious — appear to be proliferating. They point to a variety of potential causes: internal turmoil at tech companies, weak content moderation and higher-tier advertisers exploring alternatives.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
The Conversation: Historic Iwo Jima footage shows individual Marines amid the larger battle. “I came across this film clip in my work as a curator of a collection of motion picture films shot by Marine Corps photographers from World War II through the 1970s. In a partnership between the History Division of the Marine Corps and the University of South Carolina, where I work, we are digitizing these films, seeking to provide direct public access to the video and expand historical understanding of the Marine Corps’ role in society. Over two years of scanning, I have come to realize that our work also enables a more powerful relationship with the past by fostering individual connections with videos, something that the digitizing of the large quantity of footage makes possible.”
Clark University: ‘The fantasy of it runs wild’. “Nestled between Rome and Florence, the Italian hillside town of Bomarzo appears calm and unassuming. But with a look down the hill, monsters appear. Just below a Renaissance palace is a 29-acre park, where mystery and wonder emerge from boulders and outcroppings of Tufo stone. More than 400 years ago, artists carved beasts and mythological figures into Pier Francesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini’s land. ‘When you’re there, the fantasy of it runs wild,’ says art history Professor John Garton, who is working on an international project to preserve the site crafted in the late Renaissance period, between 1550 and 1585.”
Asahi Shimbun: Japan has more than 14,000 islands, digital mapping reveals. “Thanks to digital mapping technology, Japanese geographers have identified more than 7,000 islands previously unrecognized in the country’s waters. The first such survey in 35 years revealed that the nation is made up of 14,125 islands rather than 6,852, as previously thought, according to a source familiar with the matter.” Good morning, Internet…
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February 16, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Dementia Caregiver Support, ConvoWizard, Minecraft, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
University of Waterloo: DREAM resources support the health and wellness of persons living with dementia. “The [Dementia Resources for Eating, Activity, and Meaningful inclusion] project has developed a new series of learning modules and resources with an aim to improve how community service providers support and include persons living with dementia in their wellness programs and services, especially those related to physical activity and healthy eating.”
Cornell Chronicle: Regret being hostile online? AI tool guides users away from vitriol. “The tool, named ConvoWizard, is a browser extension powered by a deep neural network…. the tool can inform [users] when their conversation is starting to get tense. It can also inform users, in real-time as they are writing their replies, whether their comment is likely to escalate tension.” If you do a Web search for ConvoWizard you’ll find a FAQ for installing it.
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
How-To Geek: Archeology Is Coming to Minecraft. “Mojang, one of the many game studios under the Microsoft umbrella, confirmed in a blog post that a new feature in Minecraft 1.20 will be archeology. Areas with sand, like beaches and deserts, will have a new block called ‘suspicious sand.’ Brushing the block with a new item, the brush, will extract items hidden within.”
New York Times: Combating Disinformation Wanes at Social Media Giants. “YouTube, like other social media platforms, spent years expanding its efforts to tackle misinformation after the 2016 election…. Last month, the company, owned by Google, quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts… left only one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, one of the people said.” This sounds like the problem is solved so fewer resources are necessary. From everything I can see that is not the case.
MJ Biz Daily: Twitter to allow ads for cannabis, THC products in United States. “In a major policy shift, Twitter Inc. is allowing ‘approved’ and state-legal cannabis companies and other advertisers to post ads in the United States for regulated THC and CBD products, accessories and services, the social media platform has disclosed.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Emory University: Mellon Foundation awards Emory $2.4 million to advance Indigenous studies and knowledge with the Muscogee Nation. “The Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory University and the College of the Muscogee Nation (CMN) in Oklahoma a $2.4 million grant that will help develop collaborative and independent programs advancing Native and Indigenous Studies and the preservation of the Mvskoke language in a unique partnership between the two schools.”
Platformer: Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first. “Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
The Guardian: Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections. “A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Foreign Policy: Turkey Tests Elon Musk’s Grasp of Twitter. “Ankara has never shied away from muzzling critics and the media, and analysts are concerned that the recent blocking of Twitter is a sign of government steps to silence political discourse ahead of highly anticipated elections scheduled for May—and that Twitter may be holding the leash.”
Brookings Institution: Politics and school libraries: What shapes students’ access to controversial content. “My school library sample consists of 5,240 elementary/middle and 1,391 high schools in 48 states. This sample includes schools in rural and urban areas, schools in counties with conservative and liberal political leanings, and schools that serve students of very different backgrounds. I use these data to identify patterns in library resources and content, especially as they relate to political preferences, state laws, and book bans.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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February 16, 2023 at 01:19AM
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