Find Relationships Between Wikipedia Entities with Crony Corral

Find Relationships Between Wikipedia Entities with Crony Corral
By ResearchBuzz

Do you sometimes feel that you should have a pen and paper for taking notes when you read the news? Do you long for a program that lists all the people involved in a news story so you can get details when they pop up after an extended absence?

It’s hard to keep up with all the current events when there’s such a ferment of things going on. It seems like your choices are either to severely restrict your news intake for your mental health, or go around in a state of half-understanding which certainly isn’t good for MY anxiety, I don’t know about you.

Even when we’re not consuming the news, though, it’s still being made. Newspapers are still publishing. And Wikipedia is still churning away, aggregating and integrating news content, as people far bolder than me try to make sense of everything.

I wanted a way to harness Wikipedia’s consistency in keeping up with news and turn it into a tool that would allow me to examine the relationships between people outside of a single news article. And, after several false starts and multiple epic discussions with Curly, I am pleased to present to you Crony Corral, at https://searchgizmos.com/crony/ .

Crony Corral accepts input of names – people names, organization names, or company names – separated by commas. Once the names are entered, CC searches for them on Wikipedia and pulls their Wikidata properties, looking for matches across 17 different Wikidata properties:

1. P159: headquarters location – Location of the main office of an organization, company, or institution.
2. P108: employer – Used to link a person to the organization or company they work or have worked for.
3. P69: educated at – The educational institution(s) a person has attended.
4. P551: residence – The place where a person lives or has lived.
5. P102: member of political party – The political party a person is or has been a member of.
6. P106: occupation – Refers to the main job or profession of a person.
7. P39: position held – Used to link a person to the political, organizational, or professional positions they have held.
8. P937: work location – Indicates the place where a person primarily conducts their work.
9. P452: industry – Refers to the main industrial sector or sectors that a company, organization, or product is involved in.
10. P17: country – Indicates the country that a geographical entity or organization is part of or associated with.
11. P1056: product or material produced – Refers to the main product(s) or material(s) produced by a company or organization.
12. P749: parent organization – Indicates the higher-level organization that a subsidiary or lower-level organization is part of.
13. P414: stock exchange – Refers to the stock exchange where a company’s shares are traded.
14. P112: founded by – Indicates the person or organization that founded a company, organization, or institution.
15. P127: owned by – Refers to the person, organization, or entity that owns a particular asset or resource. (I think institutional / stock ownership is in here too.)
16. P355: subsidiary – Used to link a parent company or organization to its subsidiaries or lower-level organizations.
17. P27: country of citizenship – Indicates the country where a person holds citizenship.

When matches are found, they’re gathered into pairs which are presented to the user in a drop-down menu. Users can choose a pair from the menu and find Wikipedia pages which the two names have in common with a relationship level of 1 (minimal relationship) to 5 (close relationship).

Here’s how it works.

Using Crony Corral

Start by entering a list of names. They don’t have to be all people names or all company names, but only people will match people and only organizations will match organizations (companies, NGOs, etc.) That’s because the two groups use different Wikidata properties. I have put in 75 names at a time without a problem, but it took a good little while to sort them all out and the menu of matches was huge.

Let’s not put in 75 names. Let’s instead use the very basic example of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Amos Bronson Alcott. Put those two names in (separated by a comma) and click the button.

After a moment the menu of sub-groups will populate. This shows all the matches from the group of names you entered. Even though we only entered two people, there’s still a long list in the menu. That’s because being family members, Amos Bronson and Louisa May Alcott of course shared many life experiences. You’ll note that they match for several residences. That’s because Crony Corral considers all values in a Wikidata property – all employers, all occupations, etc – when looking for matches. Which of these menu items  you pick, however, doesn’t matter, because they all represent the same two people.

Once you’ve chosen the pair you want to review, you need to choose the minimum mentions threshold.

What happens in this next part is that Crony Corral searches for Wikipedia pages that the two names you’re looking at have in common. It then counts the number of times each name is mentioned in that common group. Pages with only one mention of each name would be the slightest-possible affiliation, while pages with both names mentioned five times would indicate a close association.

If you want to see all mentions, set it at 1, but if you’re searching for famous people pairs you’ll get a LOT of results this way. Here’s what Amos Bronson and Louisa’s common articles list looks like with a minimum mentions setting of two:

There were nine results, covering a variety of people, places, and things. If you’re an Alcott fan some of these pages might make immediate sense (Fruitlands) or they might take a moment to put into context (I always forget the Alcotts lived in New Hampshire at one point.)

Each article has three search links under it: one for Google, one for DuckDuckGo, and one for Bing. The search links search for the title of the Wikipedia article as well as the name pair you’re searching for. If you clicked on the the Germantown Academy (not shown) Google search link, this would open in a new tab:

These search results get right to the point: Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown and that’s why the two Alcotts have a relationship to that Wikipedia page. And do you see how rich the results are, how focused they are on information? That’s because you’ve added the additional context of Germantown Academy, which is getting you past shallow SEO and ecommerce results. There might be all kinds of companies trying to rank for Louisa May Alcott or even Bronson Alcott as a search query. I don’t think anybody’s worried about ranking for Louisa May Alcott Bronson Alcott Germantown Academy.

What happens when you want to explore a network around someone but you only have one name? Use a different Gizmo first: Wiki-Guided Google Search ( https://searchgizmos.com/wggs/ .)

Getting a List of Names With Wiki-Guided Google Search

Sometimes you’ll have one name to start with and you want to explore the network of that one person – perhaps you want to explore Amos Bronson Alcott outside the context of his family. How do you get started? Use Wiki-Guided Google Search. It’s designed to find you related pages for a Wikipedia topic, so this is a little off-label use, but it still works. Set your topic search for Bronson Alcott and your minimum mentions to 1. You’ll get a long list of results, including a lot of names.

Going through this list got me over a half-dozen names, which I added to a Crony Corral query along with the original Amos Bronson Alcott search term. From there I have plenty of intersections to explore.

April 10, 2023 at 10:48PM
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Wikipedia Official Link Property Explorer (WOLPE): Get Your Web Directory On

Wikipedia Official Link Property Explorer (WOLPE): Get Your Web Directory On
By ResearchBuzz

Do you miss Yahoo and DMoz and all the other link directories that used to roam free across the vast plains of the Internet? I would put the serious decline as starting in 2011, when Google Directory shut down.

That was a while ago so if you were busy then, a bit of backstory: link directories indexed Web resources instead of spidering them. In other words, an entry for a website on a directory like Yahoo would be the name of the site and a description of a few sentences. If it was a really big/important/popular site, subsites might also be indexed and described as well. A directory’s listings were searchable by keyword as well as browsable by category and generally they were browsable by other parameters as well (most recent, most popular, editor’s picks, etc.)

A collection of Websites aggregated with such basic information is a very different search experience from that of a full-text engine like Google, which spiders and makes searchable the entire text content of sites. The limited amount of searchable text in a directory meant that general searches were more productive, while the category structure meant that you could gain context about your topic as you explored to learn more about it. I firmly believe that the Internet ecosystem would benefit from a good Web directory, though there isn’t one available.

Well, if they’re so great, why don’t major link directories exist today? I would guess a couple of reasons. First, Yahoo started charging a $299 submission fee to add links to its directory. I think it might have been intended to act as a filter for spam and so forth but it ended up filtering out all the hobbyists and labor-of-love types, the people who make really great content, because they couldn’t afford $299. Then, if I recall correctly, Yahoo decided not only did the directory require $299 as a submission fee but also as a yearly fee of $299 – and that was the beginning of the end for Yahoo. (I apparently ranted about this in late December 2014, so feel free to read that if you want more of my opinions about what lead to Yahoo’s decline.)

(If you care to draw parallels between that and the current mania of social media platforms for charging their users, with implications about how high those fees will go once users are locked in, I will sit here quietly and not interrupt.)

The second reason, I think, has to do with attention flow. Before the rise of social media, there was a tremendous amount of content curation energy focused on the Web itself. As Facebook got larger, there was still a certain amount of flow between the greater Web and Facebook. Facebook made content available by RSS and didn’t throttle the reach of external links like it does now. But as Facebook went more and more walled-garden, that curation energy became focused on Facebook to Facebook’s benefit and the Web’s deficit. And that was the beginning of the end for the Open Directory Project.

But the thing is, there’s still a lot of curation energy on the Web. Huge numbers of people contribute to Wikipedia. And more importantly, Wikidata has as one of its properties “official website.” So why not turn Wikipedia into a searchable link directory?

Sounded good to me, so I made WOLPE: Wikipedia Official Link Property Explorer – https://searchgizmos.com/wolpe/ . I really wanted to call it WikiHoo but I can’t afford a lawyer.

How to Use WOLPE

WOLPE is easy to use. You’ve got two search type options: Title Only, or Summary (which searches a brief description of the page.) Both pages have limited text, but the summary has enough that it will find closely-related keywords. Make your search general, two or three words.  WOLPE will find you Wikipedia pages with official website properties; links, in other words. Here’s what the default search, Eurythmics, looks like with the Title Only option:

Just one result. On the other hand, if you search for the summary, you’ll find the pages for the duo’s two members, as well as affiliated people and topics.

I wanted to add a third option for a full-text search of Wikipedia, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it without running afoul of Wikipedia’s API rate limits. It worked only if I rate-limited the API calls to an extent that it was just too slow.

I also want to figure out how to add a category structure, because I liked it as a mechanism for passive learning as you were exploring your chosen topic. But it’s fun to use as-is!

April 10, 2023 at 06:23PM
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Project 88 Art Gallery, Archives New Zealand, Media TikTok, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 10, 2023

Project 88 Art Gallery, Archives New Zealand, Media TikTok, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Contemporary Biography Builder
Use Wikipedia data to create lifespan-bounded searches for historical and contemporary figures. Creates searches for Google Books, Internet Archive, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and Chronicling America.

NEW RESOURCES

Mid-Day: Here is how this Mumbai art gallery has gone online to make art more accessible. “The art gallery, Project 88, is embarking on an effort to transport their physical experiences to the virtual domain with curated videos of exhibits, talks and sessions held at the gallery through their YouTube channel. Titled Art Talks, the channel was an experiment that the gallery resorted to during the Covid-19-induced lockdown two years ago, but not pursued further till now.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Radio New Zealand: National Archives reboots problematic search system. “Archives NZ says it has set up a new team to work on its breach-ridden main search system. The high-tech replacement for its main Collections search software went badly wrong last year. The $4 million Swedish system exasperated researchers, lawyers and other users with multiple shutdowns, security breaches, delays and slow searches.”

USEFUL STUFF

International Journalists’ Network: Advice for using TikTok to drive news engagement. “During a recent ICFJ Empowering the Truth Global Summit session, Openly TikTok Lead and LGBTQ+ correspondent Enrique Anarte shared with journalists how to make engaging news TikToks.”

Larry Ferlazzo: This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom. “At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Distant Librarian: ChatGPTLibrarian is still finding his (its?) voice. “One of my alerts just tripped over a new blog called ChatGPTLibrarian. The site was launched in March 2023 by librarian Victor Santiago, and I think he’s still trying to decide if he’s going to write as him, or as an AI-assisted author.”

The Independent: This is the official Twitter emoji for King Charles’s coronation. “Buckingham Palace has revealed an official emoji to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. “The colourful cartoon motif depicts the 17th century jewelled solid gold St Edward’s Crown with purple velvet cap – the regalia which will be used to crown the King on 6 May. “Buckingham Palace has revealed an official emoji to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. The colourful cartoon motif depicts the 17th century jewelled solid gold St Edward’s Crown with purple velvet cap – the regalia which will be used to crown the King on 6 May.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Washington vows to tackle AI, as tech titans and critics descend. “…policymakers arrive to the new debate bruised from battles over how to regulate the technology industry — having passed no comprehensive tech laws despite years of congressional hearings, historic investigations and bipartisan-backed proposals. This time, some are hoping to move quickly to avoid similar errors.”

KRON: Twitter sued after failing to pay over $1.2 million in Oakland rent: court docs. “Twitter has been renting space at 1330 Broadway in Oakland since the lease term began in 2021. The Delaware-based company which owns the property located on Broadway in Oakland claims they served a Notice of failure to Pay Rent to Twitter in December. In December, the company said Twitter owed a sum of $327,550.25.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNN: Academic researchers blast Twitter’s data paywall as ‘outrageously expensive’. “In an open letter this week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research — a group representing dozens of researchers and civil society organizations — said free and open access to Twitter data has historically enabled systematic, large-scale research on social media’s role in public health initiatives, foreign propaganda, political discourse, and even the bots and spam that Musk has blamed for ruining Twitter. But Twitter’s new tiered access system undercuts all of that, the researchers said.”

New York Times: A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers, Again. “Previous advances in A.I. inspired predictions that the law was the lucrative profession most likely to suffer job losses. It didn’t happen. Is this time different?”

PsyPost: Flow experiences on TikTok and Instagram linked to mental health issues. “Greater experiences of ‘telepresence’ — which refer to a user’s sense of immersion in the world created by social media apps — among both TikTok and Instagram users are linked to higher levels of depression and anxiety, according to new research published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.” Good morning, Internet…

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April 10, 2023 at 05:27PM
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Metaverse Fashion Week, Plant Identification Apps, Stable Diffusion, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023

Metaverse Fashion Week, Plant Identification Apps, Stable Diffusion, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Block: Decentraland Metaverse Fashion Week attendance plummets 76% amid ‘worrisome’ trading volume. “While the metaverse platform attracted 108,000 ‘unique attendees’ last year, the company said only 26,000 attended this year, a dramatic decline of 76% for the event that ran from March 28 through March 31. Despite top brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger and Adidas all sponsoring shows, a Decentraland spokesperson said the most people signed in at one time barely eclipsed 1,000 people.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNN: Best plant identification apps for mobile in 2023, tested by our editors. “Spring has officially sprung and people will be spending more time in the great outdoors as the season gears up. Whether you’re looking for help in identifying plants along your morning hike or in designing the flower or food garden of your dreams, there is a mobile plant identification app that can help you.”

Make Tech Easier: How to Use Stable Diffusion to Create AI-Generated Images. “Artificial intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT, have become incredibly powerful recently – they’re all over the news! But don’t forget about AI image generators (like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney). They can make virtually any image when provided with just a few words. Follow this tutorial to learn how to do this for free with no restrictions by running Stable Diffusion on your computer.” Really in-depth.

MakeUseOf: The 7 Best YouTube Channels About Cybersecurity. “Whether you’re a cybersecurity professional or just a hobbyist, reading through verbose whitepapers and case studies can get a tad overwhelming. That’s where YouTube comes in, with plenty of cybersecurity-related content. But what are the best channels to follow? Here are our top picks, in no particular order.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Tower Tree Stories. “Those of you who have followed the game jams over the years will surely recognize that name, because this is David’s fourth straight win, and the third in this category. In the past his winning games have all shared a common purpose: guiding players in an exploration of one or more paintings that had just entered the public domain that year. But this time we’ve got something very different. Tower Tree Stories isn’t based on a famous painting or an artist, but rather on something a little more low-key: the 1927 yearbook of Greensburg High School in Indiana, a full copy of which is the backbone of the game.”

CNN: The city without TikTok offers a window to America’s potential future. “At the time of its exit [from Hong Kong], TikTok had a relatively modest presence in the city and was not ubiquitous like it is in the US today. But the varied reactions to its departure, and the way users have pivoted to other platforms or even real-life offline communities, offer Americans a glimpse into their potential TikTok-less future.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bellingcat: From Discord to 4chan: The Improbable Journey of a US Intelligence Leak. “These documents appeared to be dated to early March, around the time they were first posted online on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers. However, Bellingcat has seen evidence that some documents dated to January could have been posted online even earlier, although it is unclear exactly when. Bellingcat also spoke to three members of the Discord community where the images had been posted who claimed that many more documents had been shared across other Discord servers in recent months.”

Wall Street Journal: Facebook, Twitter Rebuffed Sandy Hook Families’ Request for Data in Alex Jones Case . “Twitter and Facebook rebuffed subpoenas from families of the Sandy Hook school massacre victims, who were seeking internal company data to show how conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s false claims about the killings spread on social media, according to court documents and lawyers for the families.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring. “Mozilla, the nonprofit where I am a senior fellow, famously open-sourced the Netscape browser code and invited a community of developers around the world to contribute to it in 1998, and it has continued to push for an open internet since. So why aren’t I impressed or excited by Musk’s decision? If anything, Twitter’s so-called ‘open sourcing’ is a clever red herring to distract from its recent moves away from transparency.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: Tired Of Web Scraping? Make The AI Do It. “[James Turk] has a novel approach to the problem of scraping web content in a structured way without needing to write the kind of page-specific code web scrapers usually have to deal with. How? Just enlist the help of a natural language AI. Scrapeghost relies on OpenAI’s GPT API to parse a web page’s content, pull out and classify any salient bits, and format it in a useful way.” 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.

April 10, 2023 at 12:34AM
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Google Stadia, Twitter, Photo Editing Apps, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023

Google Stadia, Twitter, Photo Editing Apps, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Techdirt: Everything Stadia Is Now Officially Dead, Project Head Exits Google. “The tech industry is absolutely lousy with failure, of course. Ambitious projects and ideas are entertained all the time. Hell, that’s why we get so much actual cool stuff that works coming out of the industry. But for a company with the resources of Google to fail this hard, this fast, and this completely in an endeavor that really kinda should be at least partially in its wheelhouse is not a good look.”

Deadline: Elon Musk’s Twitter Wrongly Labels The BBC As Being “Government Funded”. “The BBC is not funded by the UK government. It is funded by the British public, through a system known as the license fee. The government plays a role in setting the level of the license fee, but the fee is collected by the companies contracted by the BBC through the TV Licensing authority. The BBC’s operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government.”

USEFUL STUFF

Slashgear: 12 Best iPhone Apps For Photo Editing (2023). “Apple coined the phrase, “There’s an app for that,” when marketing the iPhone 3g in 2009, eventually dedicating a whole section to the App Store for photo editing apps. We’ve compiled a list of the best photo editing apps for the iPhone. Some are more general, some are for specific tasks, but all are worthy of a place on your device.”

ZDNet: How to bookmark a Mastodon post (and why you should). “What is this feature? It’s very much like the bookmarks you use on your web browser — a convenient method of saving a post so you can easily refer to it later. You may not have used the bookmark feature on Twitter, but Mastodon is different. ”

Slashgear: 5 Tools To Convert JPG To PDF On Any Device . “When you think of JPGs, you likely think of the photos you capture with your phone camera or the pictures you download online. However, JPGs can actually be a lot of other things, such as a screenshot of a lasagna recipe or an image of your signature. In these cases, it might be better for your JPG images to be converted into PDFs instead. This way, you can readily send your PDF to anyone, and it will be more convenient for your recipients to view it.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: 21 best ChatGPT alternatives. “An important thing to remember as you go through this list: these products are at very early developmental stages. Some will rapidly develop and improve, a few will be shut down, and others will pivot away entirely from what they’re doing now.”

Ars Technica: Artists astound with AI-generated film stills from a parallel universe. “Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don’t exist. They call the trend ‘AI cinema.’ We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls ‘synthography,’ for synthetic photography.”

Carlow Nationalist: Carlow Lecture Will Examine The Significance Of Church Interiors. (I am not putting this under “events” because it is not virtual and attendable.) “The talk will also include an introduction to a spin-off project Dr Roddy is leading entitled ‘PARISH’ (Preserving and Recording Ireland’s Sacred Heritage), a collaboration between Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame in the USA. This project aims to produce an online database containing comprehensive photographic and other data records of the interiors of (initially) all Catholic churches on the island of Ireland.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PC Magazine: MSI Confirms Breach as Ransomware Gang Claims Responsibility. “A new statement from MSI says users should avoid downloading firmware and BIOS updates from third-party sources, and instead only obtain such software from the company’s official website. The statement suggests MSI is worried hackers could circulate malicious versions of the company’s BIOS software when the ransomware gang, Money Message, claims it stole the PC maker’s source code.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: Internet access must become human right or we risk ever-widening inequality. “People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socio-economic human rights such as education, healthcare, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals. Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment – or not.”

Harvard Business Review: When Celebrity ‘Crypto-Influencers’ Rake in Cash, Investors Lose Big. “[Professor Joseph] Pacelli and his colleagues analyzed about 36,000 tweets in which 180 influencers touted cryptocurrencies over a two-year period. They found that, on average, mentions of cryptocurrencies in tweets are associated with a 1.83 percent return in the first day, but are subsequently associated with significant negative returns—an average loss of 19 percent after three months. ”

Search Engine Journal: Seven Free Open Source GPT Models Released. “Silicon Valley AI company Cerebras released seven open source GPT models to provide an alternative to the tightly controlled and proprietary systems available today. The royalty free open source GPT models, including the weights and training recipe have been released under the highly permissive Apache 2.0 license by Cerebras, a Silicon Valley based AI infrastructure for AI applications company.” Good morning, Internet…

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April 9, 2023 at 05:28PM
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Iowa Veteran Services, Wolfram Language, Barbie Selfies, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 8, 2023

Iowa Veteran Services, Wolfram Language, Barbie Selfies, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Iowa Workforce Development: New IowaWorks Portal Will Ease Path For Veterans In Search Of New Careers. “Iowa Workforce Development today announced the launch of a new online portal that will make it easier for Veterans and their families to find a new career in Iowa. The new portal, http://www.IowaWorksForVeterans.gov, was created to help Veterans connect with one-on-one job search assistance and to aid employers with locating and hiring people who have experience from the armed forces.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: New in 13.2: The Beginnings of Astro Graphics. “Last year we released Version 13.1 of the Wolfram Language. Here are the updates in astro computation since then, including the latest features in 13.2.”

Digital Trends: Barbie selfie generator: how to use the barbie filter. “Here’s the good news: you don’t need to be a Photoshop pro to make your Barbie poster. Instead, all you need to do is visit the Barbie Selfie Generator website. It’s an official site created by Warner Bros., and using it is a piece of cake.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Politico: Russia is waging a disinformation war in the Middle East. “Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the United States, United Kingdom and European Union all took quick and decisive action to counteract Russian propaganda, banning its state-sponsored television channels — Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik — from the airwaves, with YouTube also blocking their channels. In the Arabic-speaking world, however, Russian disinformation still hasn’t received the same attention — and as a result, Russia is doing a lot better on that front in the wider Middle East.”

TechCrunch: Twitter won’t let you retweet, like or reply to Substack links. “Twitter is censoring Substack links by making the posts impossible to reply to, like or retweet. While quote-tweeting works, simply pressing the retweet button surfaces an error message: ‘Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter.'” This story is changing a lot – some people are accusing Twitter of offering malicious links and changing search results related to Substack. I am not interested in indexing all of EM’s antics but it looks like a security risk might have been introduced here.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mother Jones: Alleged Fraudster Guo Wengui’s Social Media App Was a Big Security Risk, Ex-Employees Say. “A Twitter-knockoff chasing the anti-woke crowd, Gettr initially branded itself as being led by ‘former President Donald Trump’s team.’ Guo’s quiet influence over the platform highlights his success in using a fortune he made in Chinese real estate to buy his way into the MAGA movement.”

Engadget: Three Samsung employees reportedly leaked sensitive data to ChatGPT. “Soon after Samsung’s semiconductor division started allowing engineers to use ChatGPT, workers leaked secret info to it on at least three occasions, according to The Economist Korea (as spotted by Mashable). One employee reportedly asked the chatbot to check sensitive database source code for errors, another solicited code optimization and a third fed a recorded meeting into ChatGPT and asked it to generate minutes.”

Ars Technica: Florida officials deleted data, stats from dubious COVID analysis: report. “Florida health officials deleted key data and statistics from a state analysis on the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, falsely making them appear unsafe for young men, according to draft versions of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through public records requests.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cornell Chronicle: AI tool gains doctors’ trust by giving advice like a colleague. “A new study led by Qian Yang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, suggests that if AI tools can counsel the doctor like a colleague – pointing out relevant biomedical research that supports the decision – then doctors can better weigh the merits of the recommendation.” As long as they don’t hallucinate the citations, I suppose…

University of Missouri: Mizzou Team Developing AI-based Tool To Predict Trends In Steel Prices. “A multidisciplinary research team at Mizzou is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a tool that can predict the trend in steel prices. Sharan Srinivas, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering (ISE), is the principal investigator on a sponsored project with Trinity Products, a Missouri-based steel supplier.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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April 9, 2023 at 12:53AM
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Tennessee Transportation Data, Edinburgh Port Leith, Microsoft Edge, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, April 8, 2023

Tennessee Transportation Data, Edinburgh Port Leith, Microsoft Edge, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, April 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Local 3 News: TDOT launches new tool making transportation data more accessible. “The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) has launched a new County Profile Tool you can use to see a variety of transportation-related information in your area.” Been a great week for state government transportation infrastructure projects.

Edinburgh Live: Incredible interactive new website brings parts of Edinburgh back to life. “Using historic street maps, vintage photos, newspaper clippings, post office directory data, and people’s own memories, Old Leith Rediscovered allows locals to explore Edinburgh’s famous port as it was at the end of the 19th century. The interactive site features a zoomable version of Charles Goad’s 1892 Fire Insurance Plan of Leith, which captured the streets and structures of the old Leith in extraordinary detail, giving information on everything from the names of businesses, what they did there and the construction materials used in individual buildings.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Microsoft Edge Now Has Bing’s Dall-E Image Creator. “Microsoft is cramming AI features into every app and service it can, from Office apps to its Bing search engine. The latest addition? A panel for the Bing Image Creator in Microsoft Edge.”

Engadget: Google’s WebGPU is coming to Chrome to boost online gaming and graphics. “Google will soon start rolling out WebGPU, a new feature that will allow Chrome browsers to use your graphics card to accelerate games, graphics and AI, the company announced. It’ll be enabled by default in Chrome 113 set to arrive in a few weeks for Windows PCs (via Direct3D 12), MacOS (Metal) and ChromeOS (Vulkan).”

The Verge: Google will shut down Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024. “Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven’t been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely.”

USEFUL STUFF

Android Police: How to install Google ChromeOS Flex on any computer. “Chromebooks are a great alternative to traditional laptops and PCs. Running ChromeOS, they are cheap, powerful devices that provide all the functionality you could ask for. Even better, the best Chromebooks on the market are relatively inexpensive. But you don’t need to buy a Chromebook to try out ChromeOS. Google lets you experience the OS on your old laptop or PC through ChromeOS Flex.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

DPReview: DPReview closure: an update. “We’ve received a lot of questions about what’s next for the site. We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and want to assure you that the content will remain available as an archive. We’ve also heard that you need more time to access the site, so we’re going to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving.”

SF Gate: Major advertisers worry about Elon Musk’s ‘racist rhetoric,’ report says. “Top advertisers have reportedly pulled out of Twitter en masse since Musk’s takeover in October, and his behavior doesn’t appear to be winning back the biggest spenders. Major marketing executives expressed skepticism about the platform under Musk’s erratic leadership in a private email thread reported on Thursday by Semafor.”

MakeUseOf: Google Keep vs. Notion: Which Note-Taking App Is Better?. “If you’re looking for a new place to jot down notes and plan your to-dos, it’s likely you’ve come across two excellent options, Google Keep and Notion. Both are great solutions for your daily to-do lists and keeping tabs on your latest projects, which can make choosing between them difficult. Want to know which app is better for you? Keep reading for a quick comparison of Google Keep and Notion.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: New Batch of Classified Documents Appears on Social Media Sites. “A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail American national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites on Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Poynter: Everything about Twitter is meaningless. “Elon Musk’s attempt this week to delegitimize NPR by labeling the public media’s primary Twitter account ‘US state-affiliated media’ is an outright troll move that will further degrade Twitter’s value to its users and its advertisers.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

University of Western Australia: Aboriginal art and knowledge unlocks mystery of fairy circles. “Fairy circles – barren patches which make polka-dot patterns in dry and desert areas – were first described by scientists in Namibia in the 1970s, sparking global debate about the phenomenon. A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, authored by a cross-cultural team of researchers and Aboriginal people from Australia’s Western Desert region, has challenged scientific theories by learning from Aboriginal people.” Good morning, Internet…

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April 8, 2023 at 05:28PM
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