Cosmetic Ingredients Europe, New Hampshire Municipal Government, McLaren Racing, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 22, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Premium Beauty News: Cosmetics Europe launches database of cosmetic ingredients. “… the database provides information on almost 30,000 ingredients used in cosmetics. It includes information on ingredient properties, their function, whether they are man-made and/or of natural origin and in which types of products they can be found.”
University of New Hampshire: UNH Library Digitizes Town Reports for Entire Granite State. “The UNH Library recently wrapped up a massive multi-year project that digitized and organized all known annual reports for every town in New Hampshire, an undertaking that essentially reached every municipality, past and present, throughout the state. The New Hampshire City and Town Annual Reports Collection now boasts 35,491 volumes, including more than 20,000 added during the most recent blitz that began in 2021 thanks in part to a grant from the New Hampshire State Library.”
Google Blog: Check out Street View’s new collection with McLaren Racing. “Since Google became an official partner of the Formula 1 team last year, we’ve worked to create an exclusive Street View experience that takes fans behind the scenes at the McLaren Technology Center (MTC), the headquarters of McLaren Racing and home of the McLaren Formula 1 Team in Surrey, England.”
USEFUL STUFF
Online Journalism Blog: VIDEO PLAYLIST: An introduction to Python for data journalism and scraping. “Python is an extremely powerful language for journalists who want to scrape information from online sources. This series of videos, made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University, explains some core concepts to get started in Python, how to use Colab notebooks within Google Drive, and introduces some code to get started with scraping.”
MakeUseOf: How to Create a Direct Link for Your Google Drive Files. “Are you looking for ways to share files from Google Drive conveniently? Look no further. When you’re working with files, nobody wants to be redirected to a page where they still have to click the download option. Luckily, you can create a direct download link to share your files. That way, your recipients can download files from you by simply clicking a link. Here, you’ll learn how to create a direct download link for your Google Drive files.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Press Trust of India: Company Employees With Fake Profiles Created False Praise About Gautam Adani, Says Wikipedia. “For more than a decade, sockpuppets – some of them being company employees – created ‘puffery’ around tycoon Gautam Adani, his family and the apples-to-airport group he helmed by adding non-neutral material and removing warnings from information on Wikipedia, the free internet-based encyclopedia has alleged.”
Ars Technica: Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated. “With over 26,000 followers, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.”
Bleeping Computer: Activision confirms data breach exposing employee and game info. “Activision has confirmed that it suffered a data breach in early December 2022 after hackers gained access to the company’s internal systems by tricking an employee with an SMS phishing text. The video game maker says that the incident has not compromised game source code or player details.”
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 23, 2023 at 01:24AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/IHsbZ0S
Global News (Canada): New wrongful convictions database spurs hope of reforms, change in Canada. “Students and staff at the University of Toronto law school are launching a new database this week documenting dozens of cases of wrongful convictions in Canada hoping to draw more attention to the problem.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Search Engine Journal: TikTok’s Latest Monetization Tool: Creativity Program Beta. “TikTok has introduced a new program called the Creativity Program Beta, designed to help creators earn more money with longer content. The program is the latest addition to TikTok’s range of monetization tools that support creators of all levels.”
USEFUL STUFF
WIRED: How to Protect Yourself from Twitter’s 2FA Crackdown. “On February 17, Twitter announced plans to stop people using SMS-based two-factor authentication to secure their accounts—unless they start paying for a Twitter Blue subscription. However, there are more secure, free, and easier ways to continue protecting your Twitter account with two-factor authentication.”
MakeUseOf: Make Old Low-Resolution Images Look Great on Linux With Upscayl. “Fortunately, the same kind of machine learning and image enhancement carried out by high-end phones, can be carried out on your Linux PC. Upscayl takes any JPG, PNG, or WEBP image as input, and allows you to select from a variety of upscaling options. The resulting images are suitable for use as glorious desktop backgrounds, and you can even batch-process multiple image files, bringing entire photo albums up to date, and looking good.” This is a bit more technical than most of the articles I include, but I know a lot of genealogists read ResearchBuzz and this looks like a powerful tool.
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Washington Post: AI is starting to pick who gets laid off. “Google says there was ‘no algorithm involved’ in their job cut decisions. But former employees are not wrong to wonder, as a fleet of artificial intelligence tools become ingrained in office life. Human resources managers use machine learning software to analyze millions of employment related data points, churning out recommendations of who to interview, hire, promote or help retain.”
Deadline: BBC Takes Down Story About Will Ferrell After Being Fooled By Fake Twitter Account. “The BBC has taken down from its website a story about Will Ferrell after being fooled by a Twitter account that did not belong to the Anchorman actor. Ferrell has been in the UK this month on something of a soccer tour, attending a variety of games and mingling with fans.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Independent (Ireland): ‘Inaccessible’ RTÉ Archives to be made more open to the public under proposed legislation. “RTÉ Archives could be made more open to the public under proposed new laws. The current archive is ‘inaccessible and prohibitive’ according to Green TD Patrick Costello…. However, the operation of the archives may be revamped if the Government decide to support Mr Costello’s bill and open it up to the public.”
AFP: France says tax on tech giants ‘blocked’ in global talks. “International talks aimed at taxing global tech giants that only declare profits in a few jurisdictions have hit a standstill due to opposition from countries including the US and India, France’s finance minister said Monday.”
Mother Jones: Bing Is a Liar—and It’s Ready to Call the Cops. “When I started playing with Bing, I was drawn by its promise of relevant, accurate, and natural-sounding web results. I was confronted instead by the possibility of industrial-scale fabrication.”
PsyPost: Psychologists uncover “frightening” results after examining susceptibility to fake news in Hungary. “People with greater cognitive reflectiveness tend to be better at distinguishing disinformation from real information, according to new research. However, in Hungary, voters who oppose the government used their thinking skills to question false information that was both concordant and discordant with their political views, while voters who support the government were far less likely to question fake news.” 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 22, 2023 at 06:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/Ii23S09
Private Jet Carbon Emissions, 19th Century Black Poets, Microsoft Outlook, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Business Insider: A 17-year-old Seattle high schooler is tracking more than 150 private jets’ emissions. “Using [Jack] Sweeney’s Ground Control Registration Database — which was developed to famously track Elon Musk’s private jet — [Akash] Shendure identifies and compiles carbon emissions from the private jets of more than 150 wealthy Americans and their families.”
Cornell Chronicle: Website sheds light on 19th century Black literary culture. “The site includes 700 poems [Charline] Jao discovered and transcribed from periodicals managed by Black editors in New York City. The site is searchable by publication, title, description, author and other parameters. The website also includes collections of poems focused on themes — from deaths and elegies to hymns and songs to British poets and women poets. Another section showcases a large collection of online and textual resources.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Bleeping Computer: Microsoft Outlook flooded with spam due to broken email filters. “According to reports from an increasing number of Microsoft customers, Outlook inboxes have been flooded with spam emails over the last nine hours because email spam filters are currently broken. This ongoing issue was confirmed by countless Outlook users who have reported (on social media platforms and the Microsoft Community’s website) that all messages were landing in their inboxes, even those that would have been previously tagged as spam and sent to the junk folder.”
Euroradio: Russian propaganda creates network of mirror sites to bypass blockades in Europe. “After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was decided to block the projects in the EU. The authorities restricted access to sites with disinformation, and later made it impossible for legal entities associated with the projects to operate. But the propaganda resources are still working and getting their audience in Europe. Here’s how they do it.”
Yle: Finnish grammar foils pro-Russia trolls. “Attempts by trolls to write the sentence ‘Nato cannot save Finland’ in Finnish failed because the language has two different words for ‘save’, with two completely different meanings.”
University of Delaware: Mellon Foundation grant supports UD Library project focused on 20th-century poet-activists of color. “The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press was recently awarded a $250,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the curation and stewardship of poetry archives related to 20th-century poet-activists of color along with a digital publishing and poet-in-residence project that draws on these collections.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Motherboard: Librarians Are Finding Thousands Of Books No Longer Protected By Copyright Law. “The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.”
University of Michigan: U-M researchers aim to bring humans back into the loop, as AI use and misuse rises. “A trans-Atlantic team of researchers, including two from the University of Michigan, has reviewed information systems research on what’s known as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and found an overwhelming focus on technology-enabled business benefits. The focus means far less attention is being paid to societal implications—what the researchers refer to as “the increasing risk and damage to humans.” Good afternoon, 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 22, 2023 at 01:33AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/Cns4WTi
1930s British Cinema-Going, Tile Trackers, AI-Powered Seinfeld, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, February 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Lancaster University: Focus on silver screen stars and cinema-going now open to all. “The Lancaster team worked with experts from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Glasgow to produce the ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ (CMDA)… The starting point for the project focused on materials gathered during the course of ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’ (CCINTB), a large-scale pioneering nationwide inquiry, conducted in the 1990s, into cinema audiences and film going in the 1930s.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TechCrunch: Tile takes extreme steps to limit stalkers and thieves from using its Bluetooth trackers. “Apple took a big PR hit as news spread that its item tracker the AirTag was being used for stalking and car thefts, which led the company to retool its software with a closer eye on user safety. AirTag’s competitor Tile is now introducing its own plan to make its device safer, with the launch of a new feature called ‘anti-theft mode,’ which prevents the tracker from being detected by anyone but its owner. But it’s taking things a bit further…”
Irish Examiner: Limerick historian ‘blown away’ by discovery of documents. “‘Utterly breathtaking’ historical documents dating as far back as 1695 may have been lost forever if not for a man who rescued the collection 30 years ago from a skip.”
Washington Post: TikTok loves Gen Z’s true confessions. Colleges and employers, not so much.. “While corporate social media campaigns ‘raised awareness’ around subjects like mental health and body positivity, young people shared their experiences in droves. But as they hit college or the working world, they’re met with a harsh reality: The standard of professionalism among older generations hasn’t changed, and it doesn’t make room for the type of authenticity social media companies tend to encourage.”
InsideHook: Google Maps Incorrectly Directed Drivers to a Residential Driveway. “The next time I’m passing through [Warren, New Jersey], however, I’m going to be a little more aware of where my navigation of choice — in this case, Google Maps — is taking me. Why? Well, because a few Warren residents recently learned that Google Maps believes that their driveways are through streets, and is directing drivers accordingly.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Search Engine Journal: WordPress Vulnerability: ShortPixel Enable Media Replace Plugin. “National Vulnerability Database published a vulnerability advisory about the ShortPixel Enable Media Replace WordPress plugin used by over 600,000 websites. A high severity vulnerability was discovered that could allow an attacker to upload arbitrary files. The United States Vulnerability Database (NVD) assigned the vulnerability a score of 8.8 out of 10, with 10 being the highest severity.”
BBC: Why TikTok sleuths descended on Nicola Bulley’s village. “I am walking the same route that Nicola Bulley, 45, followed before she disappeared, along the river in the small Lancashire village of Saint Michael’s on Wyre. It’s also the same route that amateur social media sleuths take when they come to look into the case themselves. They have been turning up in their numbers, prompted by rumours, speculation and conspiracy on social media viewed and shared by millions of people who have never been anywhere near this village.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
The Conversation: How Records of Life’s Milestones Help Solve Cold Cases, Pinpoint Health Risks and Allocate Public Resources. “As a family demographer, I use information from these vital records to understand how childbirth, marriage and divorce are changing in the United States over time. The scope and quality of these records reflect remarkable administrative coordination from the local to the national level, but examples from other countries illustrate how much more the records could yet tell us.”
Penn State: Beyond memorization: Text generators may plagiarize beyond ‘copy and paste’. “Students may want to think twice before using a chatbot to complete their next assignment. Language models that generate text in response to user prompts plagiarize content in more ways than one, according to a Penn State-led research team that conducted the first study to directly examine the phenomenon.”
Stanford Daily: Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege. “[Marc] Tessier-Lavigne, who became Stanford’s president in 2016, has been under investigation by the Stanford Board of Trustees since late November, after The Daily revealed concerns that several other papers he had co-authored contained altered imagery. But these latest allegations, about a different paper, are more serious because they involve what was once considered a promising treatment target for Alzheimer’s disease — and because people involved in the review allege that Tessier-Lavigne tried to keep its findings hidden.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
Chron: How a vast collection of Mardi Gras history was lost, then found. “… they couldn’t believe their eyes: hand-painted scenes—some 40 feet high—of mountain ranges, ancient cities, exotic castles and whimsical fantasy landscapes, in still-vivid color, with mica accents glittering across waves and windowpanes. They noticed words scribbled on the back of some: Athenians 1929, Osiris 1940, Hermes, and many more. To an outsider these might be cryptic, mystical words, but a New Orleanian instantly recognizes them as the names of Mardi Gras krewes.” 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 21, 2023 at 06:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/fsIwgOj
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part III: Popularity/Interest)
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 looked at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do Web search. That approach uses authoritative spaces (like restricted top-level domains) and authoritative expertise (like the US Department of Education) to create Web spaces that are useful and as low on misinformation/disinformation as possible.
In Part III, we’re going to look at a less formal method for focusing and enhancing your searches: popularity and interest. And please, before you run away screaming at the word popularity, give me a few paragraphs. Popularity can be useful in Web search!
What Popularity Isn’t
If you think about popularity you might think about the cool kids in high school, or the movies and TV shows you hear about in the media even though you have no interest in them personally.
When I first started thinking about popularity, cultural popularity was the kind I thought of – the national-level advertising and marketing and media Brownian motion that fills up style sections and YouTube channels. Could be great for searching current events and cultural topics, but for regular Web search? Not so much.
But when I stopped taking such a wide view and started looking at popularity on a more topical basis, I realized I wasn’t seeing it as holistically as I should. National-level popularity is an amalgam of media attention and marketing budgets. Topic-level popularity has some elements of national popularity, but it’s got additional elements as well.
What Popularity Is
Imagine you’re an American who doesn’t know much about music. If I asked you “who’s a good rock guitarist?,” you might say Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen because they are very popular and well-known in our culture. If I asked you “Who’s a good country guitarist?” you might come up blank, or, depending on where you live, you might mention Buck Owens or Chet Atkins. And if I asked you “Who’s a good flamenco guitarist?” you might wonder what my problem is.
Popularity at a national/cultural level feels pervasive enough that you might think it encompasses all things and that all popularity is noise. But of course it isn’t; as soon as you pull back to a more localized- or topic- based perspective, you realize the richness of the things around us.
Popularity is the Sustained Interest of a Knowledgeable Group
A thing is popular because at least one group of people took a sustained interest in it and gave it their attention. Sometimes that group is a marketing group, sometimes that group is an expert group, and sometimes that group is a fandom. Sometimes it’s all of the above!
(And please note that a thing’s popularity has nothing to do with its inherent goodness or value. It’s just popularity. Something isn’t better because it’s popular or worse because it’s unknown.)
A marketing group’s motive for popularity is not something useful to Web search, so let’s skip that kind. Instead, let’s look at expert groups and fandom groups. When they make something popular by giving it attention, what do they have concerning that topic that you do not? Expertise and experience.
Expertise
If an expert group recommends something within its realm of expertise, it’s because they have knowledge of it and in their assessment it’s something worth paying attention to. (If instead they’re recommending something because they’re paid to, we’re back to the attention of a marketing group.)
Consumer Reports is a good example of this. CR has an excellent reputation for testing products and providing recommendations without editorial bias. That’s valuable because you know their recommendations are based on knowledge, not hearsay, and provided without bias.
Hobbyists can be a useful mix of expert and fan, and there are hobbyist groups for everything. There are people who bond over extreme ironing. I bet they know a lot about ironing boards and outdoor sports that I don’t. Some people collect airsickness bags. I bet they’ve forgotten the names of more airlines than I ever knew. And, of course, if you ask a guitarist who their favorite guitarists are, you’ll probably hear names you never heard before.
Experience
You can learn a lot about something just by paying attention for a long time. If you do it for long enough, you can start developing an understanding of the thing and how it works in relation to other topics.
Sports fans, you already know about this. If you’ve ever expressed the opinion online that the Sippergulch So-and-Sos had a great lineup in 2012, you know you run the risk of someone pushing back with an essay about how the Sippergulch So-and-Sos of 1986 were clearly the superior team, with extensive comments about front office politics and tons of supporting evidence. It’s not a formal aggregation of knowledge but it does inform expertise! And again, it’s knowledge you don’t have if you’re not part of a group interested in the topic.
Well, all this sounds great, doesn’t it? Find out what enthusiasts are interested in and use that to make a better Web search. But how do you know what those people are looking at and looking up? You’d have to have some kind of large reference resource that covered every conceivable topic, divided them into categories, and encouraged people worldwide to contribute their own knowledge. And on top of that, this resource would have to make its pageview counts public so you could assess the popularity of each page.
Oh wait, we do have that: it’s called Wikipedia!
Wikipedia’s Secret Weapon: Pageviews
Wikimedia has a Pageviews API which allows you to get page view information for Wikipedia and other projects. It’s not extensive – the archives go back only to late 2015. But it can still be really useful.
There are some cool tools that let you graph and compare page count views across Wikipedia pages using the Pageviews API, but I’m using that page popularity information a little differently. Instead of comparing pages to each other one at a time, I made a Search Gizmo to find the most popular pages within categories, and another one to use popular pages in Wikipedia categories to make better Google searches.
Let’s look at how using popularity can make your searches easier.
Using Popularity for Topical Search: Category Cheat Sheet
Let’s go back to pretending that you’re an American with little music knowledge. But after you listened to my weird questions about guitarists and flamenco guitar, you find yourself interested in flamenco and you want to listen to music and learn about flamenco guitarists.. After some Web surfing you find yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_flamenco_guitarists . It looks like this:
There are over 50 guitarists on this page. They’re listed in alphabetical order. How do you decide where to start? Do you click at random? Do you grimly start reviewing the pages in order? Or do you wish you knew someone who was into flamenco music so you could ask about Spanish guitar players?
You might not know any Spanish flamenco enthusiasts, but Wikipedia does, in a roundabout way; you can use the pageviews API to find out which of the people in this category get the most interest. Sorting the pages in a category by that interest gives you a more meaningful list and a place to start.
Category Cheat Sheet, at https://searchgizmos.com/ccs/ , will reorganize the pages in a Wikipedia category by popularity and give you brief summaries of the top 20 pages. Here’s how the Spanish flamenco guitarists category looks with it:
In addition to getting a brief description of the page topic/person and a link to the full article, you also get a count of the most recent month’s page views. That lets you tell at a glance if most of the musicians are equally popular or if the category has any superstars.
In this case Paco de Lucía is clearly the leader in the category in terms of popularity, with a pageview count almost ten times that of Pepe Romero. You might decide to start a search with his name and the terms Spanish flamenco guitar, or maybe you’ll review his full Wikipedia article and look for search terms that you can add to a Google search.
In either case you are now more informed. You know who the larger names are in this space. You know who’s probably going to have more news and multimedia resources. You even, thanks to the summaries, have an idea of which figures in a category are contemporary or historical.
Category Cheat Sheet works well for topics in addition to people. Say you’re interested in renewable energy. You know about solar and wind power, and maybe you’ve heard about hydropower. But you don’t know much beyond that. Plugging in Category:Renewable_energy shows you a list of technologies, companies, and even places relevant to renewable energy.
I call this kind of exploration surface-scratching; by sorting Wikipedia pages by popularity I can get beyond popular culture and its misconceptions and get a broader idea of what’s happening in a topic. Once I do that, and I know a little more, I can build better searches.
You can also use the popularity of Wikipedia pages to build topical searches on Google. That’s what Clumpy Bounce is all about.
Using Popularity to Inform General Web Search: Clumpy Bounce Topic Search
Clumpy Bounce, at https://searchgizmos.com/clumpy/ , lets you clump up to three Wikipedia pages into a query and then bounce them into a Google search. First you start by finding categories covering your topic of interest:
Then you choose up to three of the most popular pages in that category:
And finally, you click the button and get a Google search for those three topics (along with a little query-tinkering to eliminate as much Wikipedia-based content as possible.)
The thing I really love about Clumpy Bounce is you can quickly try lots of different searches around a single topic. Changing just one element in your Google search leads to very different results.
Clumpy Bounce is basically just a big surface-scratcher. It lets you expand your topical searches with keywords you may not immediately know but can understand in terms of popularity. And having all those keywords available allows you to attack your search in several different ways, as you can see from the results above. You get a lot of directions to choose from.
Earlier in the article I defined popularity as “the sustained interest of a knowledgeable group.” But what about when people are popular because they’re on the news, or they had a hit record, or they went viral on TikTok? That’s unsustained interest which sometimes turns into sustained interest but often doesn’t.
But even that kind of interest is useful too, because it helps you find times when something might be particularly newsworthy, even when it’s normally ubiquitous. Let’s talk about Gossip Machine.
Using Temporary Popularity to Gauge Historical Interest: Gossip Machine
You’re chatting with someone at work. They mention a news topic you haven’t heard about. Later you Google it and find that the first result is a Wikipedia page, so you click on that and enlighten yourself. Or you hear on the news that someone has died. Did you see them in that one sitcom, or was it a game show? You Google it, get Wikipedia as the first result, and click on it to refresh your memory.
Now multiply that same behavior by millions of people a day and you can immediately see how Wikipedia’s Pageviews API is a huge goldmine for what I like calling fossilized attention – discrete points in the life of a Wikipedia topic when it is particularly searchable for whatever reason. And since the reason for sudden popularity is often some kind of news consumption, why not reverse-engineer this fossilized attention and turn it into a date-focused Google News search?
That’s what Gossip Machine ( https://searchgizmos.com/gossip-machine/ ) does! It tallies Wikipedia article views over the course of a year and creates date-based Google News searches for those days which have an unusually high number of views. It works spectacularly well for people who are/were in the news constantly, helping filter out meaningful news from mentions.
Take for example Tucker Carlson. He has a news show that’s on every night so has a lot of media mentions and attention to start with. But you can filter that with Gossip Machine. You can do a keyword search for his name, select the year (Gossip Machine goes back to 2016), and choose how high the spike in page views should be before it’s noted.
Gossip Machine will present you with a list of Google News and Google Web searches, one for each date that Gossip Machine finds.
Click on a search link and it’ll open in a new tab. It’s not a perfect search and gets wonky when average page views are low, but for pages with at least 7000 views a month it can bring some very targeted news results.
And just like the Category Cheat Sheet, it works for topical searches too. A good example search is psilocybin, which has gotten a surge of news coverage in the last year.
There are only a few results but they’re great searches:
Temporary and Ongoing Popularity Are Both Powerful Search Tools
You’re not making a value judgment when you search for the most popular elements in a Wikipedia category, you’re using the interest and expertise of others to guide your Web search to what are hopefully information-rich resources. No doubt as your expertise and understanding of a topic deepens, you will find your own favorites off the beaten path!
I’ve covered a lot of philosophical ground in these first three parts of this series, but I want to do one more article looking at how you can use the ideas covered in the first three parts in conjunction with each other. Stay tuned.
February 21, 2023 at 03:55AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/8E03OJD
Viz Media Anime, Cheyenne Frontier Days, Bing Search API, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Engadget: Viz Media makes ‘Sailor Moon’ and other anime classics available for free on YouTube. “Viz Media has uploaded some of the most well-known anime series out there to YouTube and made them available to stream for free. You can now find shows such as Sailor Moon — the old series that aired in the 90s, not the remake, Sailor Moon Crystal — Naruto, Death Note, Inuyasha and Hunter X Hunter on the publisher’s account.”
Wyoming Tribune-Eagle: The CFD experience is now at your fingertips. “In partnership with West Edge Collective, the local marketing and content creation firm, the history of [Cheyenne Frontier Days] — from behind-the-scenes footage to historical events — has been made available to the masses both in person and in a digital archive.”
WIRED: Roblox Is Bringing Generative AI to Its Gaming Universe. “ROBLOX IS TESTING a tool that could accelerate the process of building and altering in-game objects by getting artificial intelligence to write the code. The tool lets anyone playing Roblox create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars; change the appearance and behavior of those things; and give them new interactive properties by typing what they want to achieve in natural language rather than complex code.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Binghamton University: Modern scribes: How medieval books go from parchment to the cloud. “In her new book, Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor, [Professor Bridget Whearty] introduces readers to the digitization process and the highly trained professionals who perform this work.”
MIT Technology Review: The ChatGPT-fueled battle for search is bigger than Microsoft or Google. “…a new wave of startups have been playing with many of the same chatbot-enhanced search tools for months. You.com launched a search chatbot back in December and has been rolling out updates since. A raft of other companies, such as Perplexity, Andi, and Metaphor, are also combining chatbot apps with upgrades like image search, social features that let you save or continue search threads started by others, and the ability to search for information just seconds old.” Of the blizzard of new search engines we’ve seen in the last few months, I like You.com the best.
SECURITY & LEGAL
Mashable: Yes, the Equifax breach settlement emails are real. “Just like no one ever asked to be born, no one asked to have a credit score, and yet we all do. And now, unlike in your actual life, you may be entitled to financial compensation for simply having a credit score, thanks to Equifax. Why you may ask? Payments in the 2017 Equifax data breach are finally being disbursed and users across social media are asking if they’re real, if so, are they getting a payment too? And why is the payment so small?”
Washington Post: FTC launches technology office to keep up with Silicon Valley giants. “The Federal Trade Commission on Friday is launching an Office of Technology to aid efforts to rein in the fast-moving tech sector, which has emerged as a major focus under Democratic Chair Lina Khan, in an announcement shared exclusively with The Technology 202.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Financial Times: Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI. “Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support.”
PsyPost: Smartphone checking predicts more daily cognitive failures, study finds. “More frequent smartphone checking behavior is associated with greater incidences of daily cognitive failures, according to new research published in the British Journal of Psychology. However, the new findings also indicate that some forms of screen time are actually associated with reduced cognitive failures.” Good afternoon, 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 21, 2023 at 01:28AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/bLVWjUA
General Aviation Accident Dashboard, Bing, Google Meet, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, February 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
National Transportation Safety Board: NTSB Releases Data Visualization Tool for General Aviation Accidents. “The General Aviation Accident Dashboard provides summary statistics, investigative findings and safety recommendations for general aviation accidents from 2012 through 2021. The Dashboard allows users to more intuitively display accident information, reports and statistics by selecting one or more filters for year, location, phase of flight and defining event.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Engadget: Microsoft limits Bing conversations to prevent disturbing chatbot responses . “Microsoft has limited the number of ‘chat turns’ you can carry out with Bing’s AI chatbot to five per session and 50 per day overall. Each chat turn is a conversation exchange comprised of your question and Bing’s response, and you’ll be told that the chatbot has hit its limit and will be prompted to start a new topic after five rounds.”
The Verge: Google Meet rolls out 360-degree virtual backgrounds for video calls. “Google Meet’s launching new 360-degree virtual backgrounds for video calls on mobile. While Google first announced the new feature last month, now it’s rolling out on both iOS and Android and uses your device’s gyroscope to move with you.”
UNC Libraries: Black and Carolina Blue Tour site highlights Black History at UNC-Chapel Hill. “For more than 20 years, the Black and Blue Tour has introduced students and visitors to local histories of slavery, racism, memorialization and activism at UNC-Chapel Hill. Now, the University Libraries has released a revised Black and Carolina Blue Tour website, with updated and expanded entries for each tour stop.”
USEFUL STUFF
MakeUseOf: How to Turn Your PDF Into an Audiobook Online . “Many people choose to listen to audiobooks, especially on the go. You may want to hear your PDF read aloud or create an audiobook from the contents of your PDF file to share with others. This guide will show you how to create an audiobook from a PDF file online.”
PC World: 10 cheap or free ways to make your old PC run faster. “…there are a slew of ways to breathe new life into an older PC that’s starting to feel a little pokey. Even better: Most are outright free, a couple of (still relatively low-cost) hardware upgrades aside. Sure, these tweaks and tips aren’t as thrilling as booting up a brand new PC for the first time—but they’ll let you continue to get the job done with the gear you already have.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Washington Post: Leaked files reveal reputation-management firm’s deceptive tactics. “They look at first glance like ordinary news outlets serving up headlines from around the world. The hundreds of websites, seemingly unconnected to one another, come in six languages and purport to cover far-flung cities such as Paris, London and Chicago. But beneath the surface, the sites have something in common: They host frothy stories about clients of a little-known reputation-management company that promises to remake the online images of its customers.”
Mashable: Creators are blowing their ancestors’ minds thanks to archeology TikTok. “What started as an engaging way for Stephanie Black, a PhD candidate in Archeology at Durham University, to share how similar we are to our ancestors quickly escaped the confines of academia TikTok and became the preeminent trend on the platform this week — so popular that even Drew Barrymore participated. Informally known as the ancestor trend, in these videos creators don makeshift costumes and conduct imaginary conversations with their ancestors through their captions about how their lives have and haven’t changed with the passage of time.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
The Register: What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue. “Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS, according to a source familiar with the matter. This is one of the aspects of the relationship between the two tech goliaths that currently concerns the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).”
Motherboard: The Company Helping the IRS Go Undercover Online. “Internal IRS documents obtained by Motherboard show the IRS paid Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tool that helps it monitor the web while undercover.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Michigan Daily: A love letter to Pinterest. “I still remember the day that you and I first met. I couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. My aunt had told me all about you — ‘It’s like an online bulletin board,’ she described — and showed me around her own profile. I had never seen so many pictures, appropriately dubbed ‘pins,’ in one place before. I could save these pins to a board, or multiple boards, and organize them in whatever way I liked. I knew that I had just discovered something magical.”
New York Times: Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT. “The state’s hardening censorship and heavier hand have held back its tech industry; so has entrepreneurs’ reluctance to invest for the long term. It wasn’t always that way.” 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 20, 2023 at 06:28PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/lO293Pk
