Wednesday, March 29, 2023

LGBTQ Rights Worldwide, Zagreb Film Cartoons, UK NFT, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

LGBTQ Rights Worldwide, Zagreb Film Cartoons, UK NFT, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Time-Sliced News Search.
This tool takes a year and query you input and generates date-restricted searches for several news search engines, including Google News, Google Books (Books, Newspapers, and Magazines are searched separately), Newspapers.com, and Chronicling America.

NEW RESOURCES

Out in Perth: New database tracks global progress and decline on LGBTI+ rights. “The ILGA World Database, a platform launched by ILGA World compiling laws, news, and references to human rights bodies and advocacy opportunities with the United Nations related to LGBTI+ people worldwide. The free, interactive, and collaborative platform gives details insights on the state of laws and proposed legislation concerning sexuality, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics issues in 193 UN member States and 47 non-independent territories.”

Cartoon Brew: Some Of The Weirdest And Most Stylish Cartoons Ever Made Are Now Free To View On Youtube. “Zagreb Film produced some of the wildest, most eclectic animated shorts of the 20th century, but their work has been exceptionally difficult to view — until now.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: NFT: Plans for Royal Mint produced token dropped by government. “Plans for a government backed non-fungible token (NFT) produced by the Royal Mint have been dropped, the Treasury has announced. Rishi Sunak ordered the creation of a ‘NFT for Britain’ that could be traded online, while chancellor in April 2022.”

ProPublica: A Rare Statue of Buddha Fails to Sell at Auction as Questions Swirl Around a Renowned Art Collection. “What happened may be a sign that objects from the collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf will have trouble finding buyers following questions about how they were acquired. The piece from Nepal was once displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Engadget: Fitbit challenges, adventures and open groups join the Google graveyard today. “If you’re a longtime Fitbit user, the demise of open groups, adventures and challenges is likely to come as a shame, particularly since two of them made the platform more social and were widely copied by the company’s competitors.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: The Ultimate Todoist Keyboard Shortcuts Cheatsheet. “Productivity is a hot topic of conversation. As such, choosing the right tool for the job is crucial. Todoist is a popular and robust app that lets you create simple shopping lists or more complex projects – including professional ones.” Extensive. No annotation, but extensive.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: How we might stop the flood of data-driven misinformation. “People are often tempted to trust statistics and algorithms as neutral arbiters. But algorithms are incapable of independently understanding the worth of what they’re generating. They’re also very good at producing the appearance of meaning, which makes it that much easier to trawl through data sets in search of the conclusions you want to see in them.”

University of Iowa Libraries: Preserving Hawkeye sports history, one digitized film at a time. “The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives and Conservation and Collections Care have an initiative to digitize about 530 films of football, men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling, and track films that date back to the 1930s and go through at least 1989. The films’ state of degradation is dramatic, especially for the older material, and many of these films don’t have much life left in them.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CoinDesk: Binance, CEO Zhao Sued by CFTC Over ‘Willful Evasion’ of U.S. Laws, Unregistered Crypto Derivatives Products. “The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued crypto exchange Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao Monday on allegations the company knowingly offered unregistered crypto derivatives products in the U.S. against federal law.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

La Trobe University: New project to track alcohol in Influencer posts. “A new research project led by La Trobe University will use artificial intelligence software to monitor social media influencers’ Instagram posts for alcohol marketing, to inform future regulation and reduce alcohol harms.”

Flinders University: Plus side of app use before bed. “Overuse of mobile devices gets a bad rap but an upside may be their ability to create a distraction and positively affect teenagers’ ability to get to sleep, new Flinders University research shows. Feedback from more than 600 teenagers from age 12 to 18 at South Australian schools between June and September 2019 has led the international research group to point to a more nuanced view on using the wide range of mobile content – led by Youtube, music apps, Instagram and Snapchat – before young people’s bedtime.”

Eos: Deluges of Data Are Changing Astronomical Science. “For scientists who study the cosmos, hard-to-grasp numbers are par for the course. But the sheer quantity of data flowing from modern research telescopes, to say nothing of the promised deluges of upcoming astronomical surveys, is astounding even astronomers. That embarrassment of riches has necessitated some serious data wrangling by myself and my colleagues, and it’s changing astronomical science forever.” 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 29, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Twitter, iPhone, Commercial Spyware, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023

Twitter, iPhone, Commercial Spyware, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ABC News: Twitter celebs balk at paying Elon Musk for blue check mark. “William Shatner, Monica Lewinsky and other prolific Twitter commentators — some household names, others little-known journalists — could soon be losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity on the social media platform.”

Axios: Musk says Twitter will only show verified accounts in “For You” timeline. “Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced Monday evening that only tweets by verified users will show up in the platform’s default main feed of ‘For You’ recommendations starting April 15.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Finally, There’s an Easy Way to Reduce Background Noise on Your iPhone. “As reported by 9to5Mac, Apple is adding Voice Isolation mode to phone calls as part of iOS 16.4. According to Apple, Voice Isolation mode ‘prioritizes your voice and blocks out ambient noise around you,’ a simple solution to clearer audio during phone calls.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rest of World: Twitter blocked 122 accounts in India at the government’s request. “Twitter blocked 122 accounts belonging to journalists, authors, and politicians in India this week in response to legal requests from the Indian government.”

Daily Beast: Elon Musk’s Twitter Makes Millions Off Anti-LGBT “Groomer” Tweets: Report. “Under Elon Musk’s leadership of Twitter, tweets linking LGBT people to ‘grooming’ have sky-rocketed, jumping 119 percent since Musk’s takeover in October 2022, according to a new report released by the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The study also found that Twitter is making millions from big-name advertisers, whose brands are appearing alongside hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: Biden administration bans federal agencies from using commercial spyware. “In an executive order signed Monday, President Biden barred federal agencies from using commercial spyware that threatens US national security or carries a risk of improper use by foreign governments and individuals.”

WIRED: A US Agency Rejected Face Recognition—and Landed in Big Trouble. “Officials working on Login.gov, used to access dozens of government sites, worried about algorithmic bias. Their decision breached federal security rules.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NHK: Japan donates washi paper to restore ancient Ukrainian texts. “The western Japanese prefecture of Tokushima has donated locally-produced washi paper to an archive in Ukraine, so that old documents can be restored.”

Washington Post: The biggest decider of who backs a TikTok ban? If they use TikTok.. “More Americans back a TikTok ban than oppose one, with a majority expressing concerns over the company’s links to China, underscoring that distrust of the foreign-owned app has spread beyond Washington, even as its domestic user base soars.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ars Technica: Hobbyist builds ChatGPT client for MS-DOS . “On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique way to converse with the popular OpenAI language model.” You don’t know how much I miss those super-solid IBM keyboards. 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 29, 2023 at 12:28AM
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“The Chills”, Royal Neighbors of America, Criminal use of ChatGPT, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023

“The Chills”, Royal Neighbors of America, Criminal use of ChatGPT, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Sinker Search
Change your Google results by emphasizing one word in the query.

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Motherboard: Here’s a Database of Media Scientifically Verified to Give You the Chills. “Chills are an innate response for most people. Whether you’re watching a scary movie, or get some harrowing news, it’s a common emotional response to stimuli. And now, scientists have created a database of certain media that has the potential to give you the chills.”

Our Quad Cities: For anniversary, Royal Neighbors unveils digital museum. “Tuesday, March 21, 2023 is the 128th anniversary of Royal Neighbors of America, the Rock Island-based fraternal benefit society and one of the largest women-led life insurers in the U.S. To celebrate its anniversary (during Women’s History Month), Royal Neighbors launched a new Historical Digital Museum that features information on its camps, chapters, leaders, timeline of current events, and archived historical documents, articles, and photos.”

Europol: The criminal use of ChatGPT – a cautionary tale about large language models. “In response to the growing public attention given to ChatGPT, the Europol Innovation Lab organised a number of workshops with subject matter experts from across Europol to explore how criminals can abuse large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, as well as how it may assist investigators in their daily work. Their insights are compiled in Europol’s first Tech Watch Flash report published today. Entitled ‘ChatGPT – the impact of Large Language Models on Law Enforcement’, this document provides an overview on the potential misuse of ChatGPT, and offers an outlook on what may still be to come.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Boing Boing: Having devalued Twitter’s blue checkmark, Elon sells Gold Badges. “No longer serving the purpose of identifying a publication or other notable source as passing whatever Twitter’s idea of verified or notable was, Elon Musk now offers a Gold Badge your company can buy for $1000/mo to prove they are a company that paid $1000.”

Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! . “Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as ‘computational superpowers’.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Indicted Chinese exile controls Gettr social media site, ex-employees say. “An exiled Chinese tycoon indicted in New York earlier this month in a billion-dollar fraud case controls the conservative social media platform Gettr and used it to promote cryptocurrencies and propaganda, former employees have told The Washington Post.”

India Today: Man clears job interview at Google but fails tenant interview in Bengaluru, here’s the full story. “A Google India employee posted on LinkedIn that a landlord didn’t accept him as a tenant because he worked for Google and thus would probably buy his own home one day.”

WFTS: Florida Sentinel Bulletin history in the process of being digitized at the C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Library. “The Florida Sentinel Bulletin Collection dates back to the 1940s. The collection highlights African American history that you wouldn’t see in other media outlets. Right now, the library is in the process of digitizing all of the items to make them more accessible to the community.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Twitter takes legal action after source code leaked online. “Twitter has revealed some of its source code has been released online and the social media platform owned by Elon Musk is taking legal action to identify the leaker.”

Reuters: Japan ruling party group eyes ban on TikTok, other apps – lawmaker. “A group of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers is planning to compile a proposal next month urging the government to ban social networking services such as TikTok if they are used for disinformation campaigns, an LDP lawmaker said Monday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: A design tool to democratize the art of color-changing mosaics. “Computational tool from MIT CSAIL enables color-changing cellulose-based designs for data visualization, education, fashion, and more.”

WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “The particular kind of data that foils AI more than anything is human language. Unfortunately, human language is also a primary form of data on the meganet. As language confounds deep-learning applications, AI—and meganets—will learn to avoid it in favor of numbers and images, a move that stands to imperil how humans use language with each other.” 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 28, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Monday, March 27, 2023

American House Museums Web Archive, Scribd Alternatives, Emoji, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023

American House Museums Web Archive, Scribd Alternatives, Emoji, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Launches the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive. “The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive, curated by librarians, library workers, and professors at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. House museums have been a key component of historic preservation in America since the mid 19th century.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 6 Scribd Alternatives to Host Your PDF Files. “Scribd is a popular document-hosting website, and if someone wanted to share a PDF file online, chances are they would upload it to Scribd. However, its interface and restrictive features are less popular, and the company modified its initial business model. Luckily, there are more than enough Scribd alternatives to choose from.”

MakeUseOf: 5 Online Tools and Websites to Make Your Own Emojis . “Have you ever wished a specific emoji existed but couldn’t find it? Well, now you can explore making your own. Fortunately, you don’t need any advanced software, or technical and artistic skills to make emojis, as there are online tools that allow you to do that. Here are five websites to use to make your own emojis.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: How Twitch lost its way. “Delivering live video content to millions of people, 24 hours per day, is expensive, and as Twitch grows, it incurs greater costs. But Twitch’s moves in pursuit of profitability have confused and upset creators, fans and staff. Creators have decried new monetization schemes that put the onus on them to run more ads.”

Reuters: Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools. “Several rival search engines have launched their own AI-powered chatbots, which aim to combine the the conversational skills of Microsoft’s ChatGPT with search engine results.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping. “Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, [Ellen] Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.”

The Verge: The Linus Tech Tips YouTube hack is the latest in a line of crypto scam breaches. “Popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has been hacked this morning, with the channel’s 15.3 million subscribers seeing videos for crypto scams instead of tech hardware reviews. It’s the latest breach in a series of high-profile YouTube accounts being hacked, with scammers regularly gaining access to prominent accounts to rename them and livestream crypto scam videos.”

New York Times: Online Troll Named Microchip Tells of Sowing ‘Chaos’ in 2016 Election. “The defendant in the unusual trial, Douglass Mackey, and the pseudonymous witness collaborated to beat Hillary Clinton. They met for the first time in a Brooklyn courtroom.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Motherboard: Microsoft Now Claims GPT-4 Shows ‘Sparks’ of General Intelligence. “Microsoft is betting heavily on integrating OpenAI’s GPT language models into its products to compete with Google, and, the company now claims, its AI is an early form of artificial general intelligence (AGI).”

The Conversation: How TikTok became a breeding ground for hate speech in the latest Malaysia general election. “Hate speech on social media is a major issue across many regions of the world, including Southeast Asia. Hate speech includes expressions to discriminate, insult, demean, or provoke violence against individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or others.” 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 28, 2023 at 12:44AM
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Build Focused Google Searches Around Associated Topics With Wiki-Guided Google Search

Build Focused Google Searches Around Associated Topics With Wiki-Guided Google Search
By ResearchBuzz

How do we ask for what we don’t know?

It’s my favorite question. I chew on it all the time like it’s a mental cinnamon toothpick because it’s such an essential question of search.

All we can bring to a search engine topic query is ourselves and what we know. And unless we’re some kind of expert on the topic, we probably know woefully little and what we know probably contains misinformation of various sorts. Our lack of understanding makes us more susceptible to junk searches or shallow, SEO-serving search results that exist only to bump up a Web site’s ranking, and not to provide knowledge.

Knowing everything is an impossible strategy. Fact-checking every single Web page you get in a search result, also impossible. So currently we tend to trust Google (or Bing or DuckDuckGo or You or whichever search engine you use) to guide us to the most useful search results available.

The problem with that is twofold: search engine algorithms are usually opaque and there is a constant conflict between the search engine trying to serve the most useful results possible and SEO black hats trying to game the system and serve results for the money/propaganda benefits/etc.

I can’t start a search engine because ResearchBuzz is just one (1) person. But I can and do try to figure out ways to make searches focused enough to break through the SEO / general knowledge fog and into richer results  with more context.

In December I made Clumpy Bounce Topic Search, which was an attempt to use Wikipedia categories to build Google queries for broad topics. And it works pretty good and it’s fun, but it’s no good for specific topics, people, etc.

I’ve been trying a bunch of different approaches to address this, to build a set of related query topics that works and provides meaningful search results without excessive weirdness and junk results. Finally I figured out a good way was to count Wikidata entry mentions across Wikipedia pages, so now there’s Wiki-Guided Google Search ( https://searchgizmos.com/wggs/ ).

Using Wiki-Guided Google Search

Screenshot from 2023-03-27 12-07-22

To use WGGS, you provide two things: a Wikipedia topic (it’s case-sensitive, so keep that in mind) and the number of times the topic should be mentioned in another Wikipedia article before that topic is included in the search results. Fewer mentions will lead to less-associated topics (and occasional nonsense.) If you’re not sure how many mentions you should screen for, start at 2 and go higher if you’re getting too many results.

Let’s stick with the default search here. Solar energy is definitely a popular topic, so it’s going to have lots of mentions. A mention filter of 5 will still find plenty of results. Click the search button.

Screenshot from 2023-03-27 12-16-32

Results include the name of the associated topic (with a link back to its Wikipedia article), a bit of excerpt, and links to Google and Google News searches for both your original topic and the associated topic.

The first time I ran this search I said out loud “Morocco?!” Morocco as a topic associated with solar energy would have taken me a while to come up with on my own, though it makes sense if you think about it. And man, does it bring great results.

Screenshot from 2023-03-27 12-29-19

Adding Morocco as additional context to our query about solar energy gets past those shallow sites about solar power and takes us straight to rich results (and, of course, a Wikipedia article.) Here’s another result, this time for “solar energy” and “Passive solar building design”:

Screenshot from 2023-03-27 12-31-34

 

I don’t have any proof to back this up, but I suspect that the formality and structure of Wikipedia’s language use helps make the results more information-oriented.

WGGS also works great for people search, especially for people who have been influential in our culture but are possibly lesser-known. My favorite pianist is Henry Byrd, who used the name Professor Longhair. He influenced any number of better-known musicians but is not well-known himself. However, if you put his name into WGGS with a filter of 4 you’ll see that his name appears in a variety of contexts:

Screenshot from 2023-03-27 12-53-50

 

And these too yield tasty search results.

Screenshot from 2023-03-27 12-58-15


March 27, 2023 at 10:52PM
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Group Wikipedia Category Pages By Age, Education, or Gender With Wiki Bunch

Group Wikipedia Category Pages By Age, Education, or Gender With Wiki Bunch
By ResearchBuzz

I think a lot about searching, but I think about search results, too, and the way information is organized.

Often search results are presented by relevance, by date, or alphabetically. But does it always have to be that way? If you’re grouping specific kinds of content there might be a host of other parameters available.

When you have the ability to sort information in different ways, you’re able to look at it from different perspectives. That leads you to different ideas or new avenues of exploration.

I wanted to make a sorter that used something besides date or alphabet. So I turned to the Wikipedia API (which is basically my personal fun park) and decided to see if I could make a people-sorter. And that’s why there’s Wiki Bunch ( https://searchgizmos.com/wikibunch/ ). Wiki Bunch takes a Wikipedia category (ideally one containing people so you get results) and sorts them by age, gender, or place of education. (Wiki Bunch also offers the option to sort by place of birth, but the parameters on that are so wide – everything from a hospital to a state – that it doesn’t work well.)

Using Wiki Bunch is really simple. Enter a Wikipedia category (you can paste the URL of the category page to make it easy) and choose what you want to group the pages by. The default is grouping American astronauts by age. When you’ve made your selection hit the blue button.

Screenshot from 2023-03-26 10-11-07

Wiki Bunch will think for a few seconds (sometimes for MANY seconds if it’s a big category) and then present you with a list of Wikipedia pages grouped by your property of preference.

Screenshot from 2023-03-26 10-12-40

 

All properties Wiki Bunch sorts by except age are available as discrete Wikidata properties. Age, however, isn’t: Wiki Bunch has to calculate it based on birth date and the current date, as well as filter out pages with death dates. This means sometimes there will be oddities; occasionally a death date property isn’t available and you’ll find a 150-year-old person on your list. Some people have incomplete birth dates (just the year, for example) and those aren’t included as they can’t be properly calculated.



March 27, 2023 at 07:09PM
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Medieval and Renaissance Women, Undeniable Street View, Introduction to Probability, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023

Medieval and Renaissance Women, Undeniable Street View, Introduction to Probability, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: The Anti-Bullseye Name Search
Most names in English are expressed in news articles and other places like this: Firstname Lastname, or possibly Firstname Middlename Lastname. TABNS takes a name and generates a Google search that searches for the name in reverse order (Lastname Firstname) and *specifically excludes* the most common expression of firstname lastname.

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Medieval and Renaissance Women: full list of the manuscripts. “Rejoice! Over the past year, we’ve been hard at work digitising and cataloguing manuscripts connected with Medieval and Renaissance Women. We can now announce that all the manuscript volumes are online, no fewer than 93 (NINETY-THREE) of them.”

Creative Review: The Undeniable Street View exposes the destruction in Ukraine. “Created by a group of Ukrainian organisations – including United24, Voices of Children, Nova Ukraine and Vostok-SOS – The Undeniable Street View offers viewers an unprecedented insight into the destruction of residential buildings and other non-military targets since the conflict began a year ago.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Stack the Odds in Your Favor and Master Probability with Wolfram Language. “I am glad to announce the launch of Introduction to Probability, a free interactive course aiming to help you learn probability intuitively, from simple to advanced concepts. Anyone who wants to learn probability for the first time, needs a refresher or is looking to apply probability professionally will find great value in this course. It will help students understand and use randomness and random variables.”

WordPress Blog: Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog. “With much activity happening in the WordPress development space every day, keeping up-to-date with the latest updates can be challenging. The new WordPress Developer Blog is a developer-focused resource to help you stay on top of the latest software features, tutorials, and learning materials relevant to the open source project.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Hollywood, music industry brace for a TikTok ban. “Since the last time the U.S. government considered banning TikTok in 2020, the app has evolved from a social platform supporting a robust ecosystem of content creators and small businesses to an entertainment powerhouse, upending Hollywood power structures and rewriting the rules of the entertainment landscape. A ban now would threaten not the livelihoods of TikTok’s biggest stars and thousands of small businesses, it could deal a massive blow to the entertainment industry, forcing movie studios, record labels, casting directors, Hollywood agents, and actors to radically shift the way they do business.”

WIRED: Your Favorite Podcast Is Probably an ‘Experience’ Now. “Podcasts have always been a deeply personal experience, thanks in part to how most people listen to them: With headphones in, on commutes or while cleaning, and without a whole lot of subsequent discussion among peers. Now, though, the most financially and creatively successful podcasts are the ones that are also cultivating their own communities, with hosts taking care to connect on a more personal level with the fans whose ears they’ve whispered into for all these years.”

Engadget: Levi’s will ‘supplement’ human models with AI-generated fakes. “Levi’s is partnering with an AI company on computer-generated fashion models to ‘supplement human models.’ The company frames the move as part of a ‘digital transformation journey’ of diversity, equity, inclusion and sustainability. Although that sounds noble on the surface, Levi’s is essentially hiring a robot to generate the appearance of diversity while ridding itself of the burden of paying human beings who represent the qualities it wants to be associated with its brand.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: At least 17 members of Congress had sensitive information exposed in data breach. “The hacking of the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority data system has triggered at least three investigations and a federal civil lawsuit against the District of Columbia government, CBS News has learned. It has also sent a significant shock through Congress and its staffers.”

Techdirt: Utah’s Governor Live Streams Signing Of Unconstitutional Social Media Bill On All The Social Media Platforms He Hates. “On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to ‘protect the children’ on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WVXU: The Cincinnati Zoo is creating a massive behavioral database to better understand its animals. “Out of uniform and hidden from the animals, Cincinnati Zoo scientists are collecting massive amounts of information on its 400 species — like Huto the Komoto dragon, hippos Fiona and Fritz, and Nutmeg the fox — so they can live their best lives in Cincinnati.”

Internet Archive Blog: The Fight Continues. “We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”

International Atomic Energy Agency: IAEA and FAO Kickstart the Development of Pioneering Protein Quality Database. “Nutrition experts from the IAEA, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization as well as national, research and academic institutions came together recently to outline the framework for a first-of-a-kind protein quality database, to help governments assess the protein adequacy of foods sold to consumers and develop optimal dietary protein requirements.” 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 27, 2023 at 05:31PM
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