I Hate People Lacking What They Need So I Made Cecily’s Book Tea

I Hate People Lacking What They Need So I Made Cecily’s Book Tea
By ResearchBuzz

I spent last week and the weekend doing a lot of messing around with JavaScript and ended up, today, with three Gizmos I needed to write about. I titled the first article “I Hate Searching Google For News So I Created A Gizmo To Make It Better,” and as a joke at myself I decided to give the other two articles similar titles. So we’ll end the hate title trilogy today with a look at Cecily’s Book Tea,at https://searchgizmos.com/cecilys-book-tea/ .

A lady on Mastodon named Cecily was looking for a way to get book descriptions for a list of books programmatically. That seemed like a good excuse to play with the Internet Archive’s Open Library API to see if it could do something like that. And it could.

It’s very simple. Put a list of books, one per line:

Click the search button. After a few seconds you will get a carat (^) delimited CSV file spat out to your computer. It’ll have the title in one side and the description on the other:

That’s it, that’s all it does. But if you’re trying to get book summaries together I guess it’ll save you a lot of time.  It doesn’t have descriptions for every book I searched for, but it had a lot. It seems to do better with fiction than non-fiction.

I have made things based on suggestions before but this is the first time I went from someone asking to a working Gizmo in less than two hours. Because of that I haven’t done much tinkering with it, just put it up. I’ve done a little more work with the Open Library API and I have a nice little  thing that pulls a little data and translates Dewey Decimal numbers at the hundred level, but I need a Gizmo for that. Until then I’ve tucked it away in a pile of script sketches.

March 7, 2023 at 01:16AM
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I Hate Searching Google News For Famous People So I Made Double Stuff Gossip Machine

I Hate Searching Google News For Famous People So I Made Double Stuff Gossip Machine
By ResearchBuzz

Searching Google News for popular people and topics can be annoying. You’re likely to get a lot of noise in your search results, and even when you don’t, results tend to deal with recent events. That’s great if you want to just get an idea of what’s happening right now, but it can confound attempts to do deeper background news searches on a famous person. Of course if you have information about specific topics and events you can add those to your query and eliminate some of the junk in your results, but what if you don’t?

Last year I made a Search Gizmo called Gossip Machine.  It uses a Wikipedia article’s page view activity to single out dates which might be especially newsworthy for that article’s topic and then creates a Google News search for that topic on that date. For example, you might want to refresh yourself on what Mark Zuckerberg was up to in 2018. You run that query in Gossip Machine, which will resolve to a list of newsy day candidates:

Pick a date and a new tab will open with a date-specific Google News search.

Making the searches this date-specific seems to dodge a lot of the crud that devils Google News searches, though some of it creeps in from time to time. And as you see Gossip Machine can provide some seriously focused news searches.

But what if you’re not interested in just one topic, but in how two topics intersect? Maybe you don’t want to find news about Mark Zuckerberg, but rather Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. I found myself wanting the feature of two topics more and more as I used Gossip Machine, so I tore it apart and put it together again into Double Stuff Gossip Machine ( https://searchgizmos.com/double-stuff-gossip-machine/ ).

Using Double Stuff Gossip Machine

Double Stuff Gossip Machine analyzes the page views of two Wikipedia articles and finds the unusually busy days they have in common. Like Gossip Machine, it then organizes those dates into Google News searches. If you run a search for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in 2018 you’ll get a grand total of ONE result:

But that result is packed with meaningful results:

When you’re using Double Stuff Gossip Machine, you don’t have to limit yourself to just searching people. You can search people/place or people/topic as well. For example, you could try searching for Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine in 2019. You’ll get a good number of results.

The search result pages are right on target.

You may have noticed that there’s an option to change the “Newsworthiness” of your match. That lets you change how much busier than usual the Wikipedia pageviews are before they’re picked up by Gossip Machine. It will give you more results but in my experience generally not LOTS more; Setting the Zuckerberg / Sandberg search to the “I’m a Gossip Fiend” setting (which provides the most matches) provides three dates instead of one, though results from those dates are still focused.

I love tinkering with Wikipedia  – this centralized, constantly-growing repository has a free API and page view data available? I feel like I’ve barely gotten started digging around in this gold mine. Stay tuned.

March 7, 2023 at 12:07AM
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I Hate Searching Google For News So I Created A Gizmo To Make It Better

I Hate Searching Google For News So I Created A Gizmo To Make It Better
By ResearchBuzz

I have been unhappy with Google News search for a long time. Over the years it’s become less information-rich, with a number of useless sources slipping through (I wrote about this in 2019.) On top of that, the Internet is filling up with fake local news sites. I can’t imagine the introduction of ChatGPT and AI-generation tools is going to do anything but make it worse.

I use the Internet to discover and learn and hopefully to help OTHER people discover and learn. Trying to navigate through all the junk and garbage populating Google News search is unsatisfying and annoying and too often unfruitful.

I’ve been thinking about possible ways around this for a while. If the main problem with my Google search for news is that there’s too much fake junk, why not create a way to direct my search through a list of media news outlets and search THEIR sites exclusively?  Unfortunately my attempts at a solution didn’t work well. I couldn’t find a news outlet list that was open, free, and accessible, and when I did find a good group (like a membership page for a statewide newspaper association, for example) it was too limited in scope.

A few days ago I crumpled everything up and started over with the idea of using Wikipedia to find media sources. And that worked, so I’m pleased to share with you the Non-Sketchy News Search ( https://searchgizmos.com/nsns/ ).

Let me show you its features!

Using the Non-Sketchy News Search

The NSNS lets you search Wikipedia categories by news source. Choose a category and you’ll get a list of the media outlets with Web sites in that category. Choose as many on the list as you like (with the caveat that Google has a search limit of 32 words) and they’ll be bundled into a Google search via Google’s site: syntax along with your original query and opened in a new tab. Easy peasy.

For example, say you want to learn more about banned books in Florida. I’m going to start with the Google query and search for Wikipedia categories which contain the Miami Herald, a Florida newspaper. (I’m looking for categories which contain media in Florida, so the Miami Herald or any actual Florida newspaper works fine.) Then I click the Search for Wikipedia Categories Containing this Outlet button.

I’ll get a drop-down menu of all relevant categories containing the outlet for which you searched (the results are filtered, more about that later.) I’ll choose a category (in this case Mass media in Miami) and click the List Media Outlets With Web Sites From This Category button.

Now you have to wait a few seconds. Depending on whether you chose a category with a lot of media outlets, you may have to wait several seconds. In the case of this search, I waited about five seconds before I got a list of 17 media based in Miami with Web sites. I’ve cropped the list a bit but you get the idea. I’ve checked the news outlets I want to search and when I’m done I’ll click the Site: Search Google for the Outlets You Checked button.

When I check the button, a new browser tab opens with a Google search containing your original query and a site: search for the sources you chose.

Obviously using this you are not going to get the bajillion results you would from an open Google search. On the other hand, I think you’ll find the results a lot more focused and useful. You also know you can check the Wikipedia article on the outlet if you want to.

I’ve also discovered that I can get some search focus options that aren’t available with Google. If I search for the Daily Tar Heel I can search media focused on the University of North Carolina:

You can also find outlets nationwide that report on a particular theme. I did a search for Bay Area Reporter and got a big list of LGBTQ media outlets:

A surprising but wonderful discovery was that I could use NSNS to find English-language news outlets in other countries. Here’s what I found after I did a search for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun:

I got the Non-Sketchy News Search working on Saturday and spent Sunday playing with it on-and-off. It works really well but does have problems. Here’s where I’m dissatisfied:

1. Limited sources mean limited results: Considering Google’s 32-word query limit I’m afraid this is baked-in. On the other hand, when I need to do focused news search, whether it’s topical or location-based, I suspect this is going to be a feature instead of a bug.
2. Not all possible resources are included: True. On the other hand junk is not included. Further, I suspect it’s easier to set up your news outlet with a Wikipedia page than it is to figure out Google’s inclusion requirements.
3. The categories are limited: This is on me. Right now the only categories you’ll get in your search results are ones that include the strings “news” or “media”. I didn’t want you to get ridiculous categories. I could relax it some and include strings for radio or television stations. On the other hand I could go in the other direction and figure out several categories to make searchable, like NGOs or area-based searches.

Sound fun? Let me know. Thanks for reading.

March 6, 2023 at 09:13PM
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Ukraine Cultural Heritage, Minnesota Prescription Prices, Blender, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 6, 2023

Ukraine Cultural Heritage, Minnesota Prescription Prices, Blender, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Winnipeg Free Press: A treasure of Ukrainian culture open to the world. “The curator of Oseredok Ukrainian Culture and Exhibition Centre has spent the last 14 months digitizing items in aid of its newly launched online catalogue. The catalogue currently lists 1,252 museum artifacts, 1,235 library holdings, 424 fine art pieces, 4,583 photographs and 600 glass slides. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Minnesota Department of Health: New prescription drug price transparency dashboard, report show high and varied prices. “The first-of-its-kind data release for Minnesota was issued today by MDH as part of the implementation of the Minnesota Prescription Drug Price Transparency (RxPT) initiative. It gives Minnesotans new insight into how much drug prices increased in 2022 and at what prices new drugs came to the market. These detailed data are available in several interactive dashboards, giving Minnesota policymakers and payers additional information to begin addressing high drug prices.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Blender can now use AI to create images and effects from text descriptions. “Stability AI has introduced a Stability for Blender tool that, as the name implies, brings Stable Diffusion’s image creation tech to the open-source 3D tool. You can create AI-based textures, effects and animations, whether using source material from your renders or nothing more than a text description.”

The Verge: Hey, where’s the Twitter Blue revenue sharing Elon Musk promised a month ago?. “As far as I can tell, the sum total of publicly available info on Twitter Blue’s ad revenue sharing is contained within Musk’s tweet about its launch.”

USEFUL STUFF

EL PAÍS: How to get the most out of cellphone photo editing: Tips from professional photographers. “Most people (91%) take photos with their cellphones, rather than with digital cameras (7%) or tablets (3%). Keeping the lens clean and avoiding flash use as much as possible are key to taking a good picture. But, once the shot is taken, there is another phase that is almost equally important: photo editing. Here are some tips from professional photographers who are active on social media.” This article is far better than the headline might indicate.

Hongkiat: 50+ Sites to Download Creative Commons Music for Commercial Use. “One of the best things about the internet is that you can find a lot of free creative resources on it. Like all other useful stuff, there is a ton of music on an array of websites that you can download and use for free. This post is meant to give you a comprehensive list of websites through which you can access and download Creative Commons music for free.” Decent annotation considering the size of the list.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

UPI: 50 U.S. medical, science organizations launch group to fight health misinformation. “Called the Coalition for Trust in Health & Science, the group brings together reputable associations representing American academics, researchers, scientists, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, drug and insurance companies, consumer advocates, public health professionals and even medical ethicists.”

Hyperallergic: Museum Under Fire for Showing AI Version of Vermeer Masterpiece. “On view online and in person through June 4, My Girl with a Pearl displays fans’ recreations of the 17th-century masterpiece, including versions featuring self-portraits, miniature art, and a glamorous dinosaur. But out of all the wacky interpretations shown at the Mauritshuis, one artwork produced using artificial intelligence has proved especially provocative.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Turkish competition board says fines Elon Musk over Twitter takeover. “The Turkish Competition Board said on Monday it had decided to fine billionaire Elon Musk 0.1% of Twitter’s gross income in Turkey in 2022, as his takeover of the company occurred without the board’s permission.”

WFLA: Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state. “Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York University: Virtual Reality Boxing Game Effective in Reducing Stress, Improving Cognitive Function in Adolescents, New Study Finds. “In a head-to-head between virtual reality boxing and a YouTube-guided boxing exercise, VR boxing takes the win in reducing stress and improving cognitive function among adolescents, shows a new study of high school students.”

Scientific Data: Ten lessons for data sharing with a data commons . “A data commons is a cloud-based data platform with a governance structure that allows a community to manage, analyze and share its data. Data commons provide a research community with the ability to manage and analyze large datasets using the elastic scalability provided by cloud computing and to share data securely and compliantly, and, in this way, accelerate the pace of research. Over the past decade, a number of data commons have been developed and we discuss some of the lessons learned from this effort.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 6, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Ohio Caretakers, Tech Ethics, Throwaway Culture, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 5, 2023

Ohio Caretakers, Tech Ethics, Throwaway Culture, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Court News Ohio: Free Online Help for Kinship Caretakers. “Ohio Legal Help, with funding from a Supreme Court of Ohio federal Court Improvement Grant, has developed an interactive section of its website to help kinship caregivers navigate complex topics that can impact displaced children and their caretakers.”

University of Notre Dame: ND TEC launches series of animated videos explaining tech ethics concepts. “Tech Ethics Animated is a series of short animated videos unpacking central concepts and concerns in the field in a manner intended for a broad audience without an extensive background in technology ethics.” There are six videos. The first was released March 1, while the others will be released weekly for the next five weeks.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: New Online Platform on Throwaway Culture with Objects from the Museum Europäischer Kulturen. “The multilingual and interactive online platform Throwaway: The History of a Modern Crisis is now available. It offers object biographies for over seventy digitalised objects for the collections of participating museums, audiovisual stories from Europe on the topic of rubbish, blog posts, photo reportages, live event broadcasts and podcasts on many different activities and events.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Internet Archive Blog: DLARC Amateur Radio Library Adds 10,000 Magazines, Bulletins, Newsletters, and Podcasts. “Launched just five months ago, Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications has expanded to more than 61,000 items related to amateur radio, shortwave listening, and related communications. The library’s newest additions include deep historical resources and contemporary reporting about the world of radio.”

Gizmodo: FTX Confirms $9 Billion in Customer Funds Vanished. “The folks handling the ongoing FTX bankruptcy admitted Thursday it is still on the hook for around $9 billion in customer funds that it simply cannot locate under the morass of financials left over from the exchange’s collapse.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Marie Claire: Beauty 3.0. “The use of filters across platforms has emphasized impossible aesthetic standards and warped people’s sense of themselves—with perfection just a few taps and swipes out of reach. It remains to be seen just how those forces operate in the metaverse, which is at once more ‘unreal’ than social media and more immersive.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Reuters reporters’ online accounts faked to approach China activists. “Two Reuters journalists had their identities faked by an unknown person or people who then used sham social media accounts to engage with Chinese activists on several online platforms over several months.”

IFEX: New tool for fighting online violence against women in Africa, positive change in Tanzania and journalists targeted in Cameroon. “Whether private individuals or rising stars like Kenyan Elsa Majimbo, African women are often targeted with online violence. Could Resolution 522, recently adopted by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), push States to address these issues?”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Horsetalk New Zealand: Database likely to aid parentage testing in Thoroughbreds, identify gene doping. “Dr Teruaki Tozaki and his fellow researchers, writing in the journal Genes, said the database they constructed from their findings will provide useful information for genetic studies and industrial applications in Thoroughbred horses. These include a gene-editing test for gene-doping control and a parentage test using insertions and deletions for horse registration and identification.” 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.

March 6, 2023 at 01:09AM
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British Library Endangered Archives, Twitter, National Library of the Philippines, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, March 5, 2023

British Library Endangered Archives, Twitter, National Library of the Philippines, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, March 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Endangered Archives Blog: New online – February 2023. “This month we would like to highlight five new collections that can be accessed via the EAP website. Two of these are from India, with the others from Mali, Mongolia, and Brazil.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Twitter’s revenue, adjusted earnings drop about 40% in December – WSJ. ” Twitter Inc reported a drop of about 40% year-over-year in both revenue and adjusted earnings for the month of December, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday citing people familiar with the matter.”

CNN: Twitter rolls out updated, ‘zero tolerance’ policy on violent speech. “Twitter has unveiled a new policy on violent speech that expands restrictions on some types of threats uttered on its platform, including new prohibitions on using coded language to incite violence indirectly as well as a ban on wishing harm on others and on making direct threats against physical infrastructure.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

National Library of the Philippines: NHCP’s National Memory Project (NMP). “The National Library of the Philippines joins the National Historical Commission of the Philippines in democratizing public access to three of the former’s important special collections, namely the Philippine Revolutionary Records, the Historical Data Papers, and the Jose Rizal Collection. These collections will be made available online for free via NHCP’s National Memory Project (NMP).”

Variety: John Mellencamp to Donate Archives to Indiana University. “Singer-songwriter John Mellencamp, the proudest Hoosier in rock, plans to donate his archives to Indiana University, the institution announced Friday during a Mellencamp Symposium being held on campus.”

Associated Press: Betting on social media as a news destination for the young. “If young people are spending so much time on social media, it stands to reason that’s a good place to reach them with news. Operators of the News Movement are betting their business on that hunch. The company, which has been operating for more than a year, hopes to succeed despite journalism being littered with years of unsuccessful attempts to entice people in their 20s to become news consumers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Civil rights audit at Google proposes better tackling of hate speech, misinformation. “Google on Friday released an audit that examined how its policies and services impacted civil rights, and recommended the tech giant take steps to tackle misinformation and hate speech, following pressure by advocates to hold such a review.”

WIRED: This Hacker Tool Can Pinpoint a DJI Drone Operator’s Exact Location. “Every DJI quadcopter broadcasts its operator’s position via radio—unencrypted. Now, a group of researchers has learned to decode those coordinates.”

Irish Times: State accused of ‘stonewalling’ and ‘hiding evidence’ over Magdalene laundries. “The Government has been accused of stonewalling requests for access to the archives chronicling the State’s involvement in Magdalene laundries, despite a 2020 finding by the Information Commissioner that it is covered by Freedom of Information (FOI).”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Gazette: Using AI to target Alzheimer’s. “Although investigators have made strides in detecting signs of Alzheimer’s disease using high-quality brain imaging tests collected as part of research studies, a team at Massachusetts General Hospital recently developed an accurate method that relies on routinely collected clinical brain images. The advance could lead to more accurate diagnoses.”

Newswise: Scientists find that people use emojis to hide, as well as show, their feelings. “As more social interaction goes online, scientists are investigating how emojis are used to reflect our emotions in different contexts. Are there display rules that apply to emojis, and how do those affect people’s wellbeing?”

Brigham Young University: What type of GIF user are you?. “BYU communications professor Scott Church said even though people don’t think much about their GIF usage, understanding them and how we use them can help us better understand ourselves and how we communicate in today’s media environment. According to a new study by Church and a team of BYU coauthors, GIF users fall into one of three categories.” 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.

March 5, 2023 at 06:31PM
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CNET, Google, Undocumented APIs, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2023

CNET, Google, Undocumented APIs, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Wrap: CNET Lays Off 10% of Staff Just Weeks After Launching Articles Written by AI. “CNET is laying off roughly 10 percent of its editorial staff – around a dozen people, including long-time veterans of the media and reviews website – just weeks after acknowledging it has started using artificial intelligence programs to write certain articles, the Verge reported Thursday.”

Ars Technica: Google adds client-side encryption to Gmail and Calendar. Should you care?. “…Google made client-side encryption available to a limited set of Gmail and Calendar users in a move designed to give them more control over who sees sensitive communications and schedules.”

PC Magazine: Google Search Has a Surprise Easter Egg for ‘Mandalorian’ Fans. “The Mandalorian’s third season wasn’t the only thing that dropped this week: Google on Thursday introduced an Easter egg for fans of the Disney+ series’ most adorable character.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Markup: Journalists, You Should Be Looking for Undocumented APIs. Here’s How to Start. “Especially in circumstances when data is not accessible otherwise, finding an undocumented API can be the key to allowing us to do an investigation—by finding public access to the data.” This article links to a tutorial which I want to spend the next six hours splashing around in, but alas, ResearchBuzz calls. GREAT stuff.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Slate: What Happens After You Become a Main Character on Elon Musk’s Twitter. “That Twitter’s changes had produced a new generation of ‘main characters’ became apparent in January with the viral fame of ‘menswear dude,’ aka fashion blogger Derek Guy, whose @DieWorkwear account had been recommended to many tweeters with little interest in fashion.”

The Verge: Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche are getting their own in-car app store — and yes, that includes TikTok. “If you’ve long felt like the one thing missing from your Audi was in-car TikTok, fret no more. Volkswagen Group is the latest to join the in-car app party, and it’s doing it in a big way. And it’s a preview of the conglomerate’s big plans for a unified in-car software platform that will govern how its cars operate for years to come.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google ‘Incognito’ users lose appeal to sue for damages as class. “Consumers suing Alphabet Inc’s Google LLC over its data collection practices have lost their early appeal to pursue money damages as a class action seeking billions of dollars.”

Bleeping Computer: Russia bans foreign messaging apps in government organizations. “Russia’s internet watchdog agency Roskomnadzor warns that laws banning the use of many foreign private messaging applications in Russian government and state agencies came into force today.”

National Post: Google CEO, U.S. executives disregard summons to appear before House of Commons committee. “Google will send Canadian representatives to a Parliamentary committee looking into the company’s blocking of some Canadians’ access to news on its platforms — despite a summons for its top U.S.-based executives.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ironic Sans: The Funny Pages in Modern Times. “What I really wanted was to take all those ComicsRSS feeds, pull the most recent comic from each one, and display them all on a single page. But I’m not a coder and I have no idea how to do that. I know, I know. We’re all sick of talking about ChatGPT. But dammit, that thing is useful.” 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.

March 5, 2023 at 01:54AM
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