Tuesday, April 18, 2023

WWI Australia, Art in STEM, Mastodon, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, April 18, 2023

WWI Australia, Art in STEM, Mastodon, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, April 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: CountryFeed
Make country-specific Bing News RSS feeds and save them as an OPML file.

NEW RESOURCES

National Archives of Australia: Paper to pixels, partnership digitises 95,000 First World War records. “The project digitised series MT1486/1, which consists of records for individuals who applied to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), and were either rejected, discharged while still in training, or went on to serve within Australia only.”

Florida State University: FSU’s ‘Art in STEM’ returns for ninth year with in-person and virtual exhibitions. “The nearly two dozen works depict topics ranging from crystal growth to nanotechnology and chemical compounds and were created by students from the FSU departments of biological science, biomedical sciences, chemistry and biochemistry, mathematics, molecular biophysics, nutrition and integrative physiology, and scientific computing.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: Thousands fled to Mastodon after Musk bought Twitter. Are they still ‘tooting’?. “Some of Mastodon’s most passionate users – who tend to be more tech-savvy than average – say it’s no problem if the community stays small. Here, things aren’t designed to go viral quickly. There’s no global search or global hashtags. Servers can easily be made private, and admins can block other servers to combat trolls. There’s also a feature to put posts behind content warnings, which users are encouraged to do for sensitive topics.” I quite like it. I just need it to integrate with IFTTT so I can curate content better.

Associated Press: Canada’s public broadcaster pauses Twitter after ‘government-funded media’ label. “The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation paused its use of Twitter on Monday after the social media platform owned by Elon Musk stamped CBC’s account with a label the public broadcaster says is intended to undermine its credibility.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: Are You Being Tracked by an AirTag? Here’s How to Check. “Even though Tile and other competitors to the AirTag exist, the vastness of Apple’s ecosystem sets the device apart. From the US Drug Enforcement Administration using it to track international drug shipments to a man in Texas using it to find his stolen car and kill the suspect, AirTags are everywhere. If you are concerned that a secret AirTag may be recording your location, these signs may help detect the tracker.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Hollywood Reporter: Why Social Media Impostors Pose a Constant Battle for Stars. “Type in any celebrity’s name on Instagram or Twitter and you’re bound to find at least a handful of accounts — if not more — posing as the celebrity, using the same profile picture and sharing photos and videos taken from their real accounts. Some of them are innocuous fan accounts dedicated to sharing the latest updates on their favorite stars with other stans. But others — the true impostors — can cause much more harm, DMing unsuspecting fans to scam users out of money, solicit nude photos or otherwise exploit a celebrity’s star status.”

Santa Fe New Mexican: Project helping preserve stories of enslaved Native Americans. “[Weston Archuleta] works as an administrative assistant for Native Bound Unbound — a multiyear project headed by former New Mexico state historian Estevan Rael-Gálvez to establish a centralized, online repository cataloging the lives of enslaved Indigenous people across the Western Hemisphere. Archuleta’s work and family history intersected Saturday at Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Arrests Two, Charges Dozens for Alleged Illegal U.S. Activities by Chinese Security Agents . “More than 40 Chinese security officers and their associates wielded thousands of fake social-media personas to discredit American policies and set up a secret police station in New York City to harass China’s critics, U.S. prosecutors charged in three complaints unveiled Monday.”

Politico: EU lawmakers: We’re coming for ChatGPT. “Key lawmakers working on the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act have promised to lay down rules to rein in general-purpose AI systems powering tools like ChatGPT. In an open letter Monday, co-rapporteurs Brando Benifei and Dragoș Tudorache — alongside 10 MEPs across the political spectrum involved in the law’s drafting — pledged to wield the law to ensure that the new wave of very powerful AI develops in a ‘human-centric, safe, and trustworthy’ direction.”

CNBC: Nine more U.S. states join federal lawsuit against Google over ad tech. “Nine states, including Michigan and Nebraska, have joined a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Alphabet′s Google which alleges the search and advertising company broke antitrust law in running its digital advertising business, the department said on Monday. The states joining the lawsuit were Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Washington and West Virginia, the department said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Slate: You Have a New Memory. “You’re reading this on the internet, most likely because some news aggregator or social media platform knows you’re anxious about news aggregators and the internet and how much time you spend on your phone, and it’s pushing that at you, since, as advanced as it is, it doesn’t yet do irony.” Yuck, no, you turned up in a Google Alert. Ew.

Engadget: Google wants you to lend your ears to help save coral reefs. “Google is calling on recruits to help repopulate coral reefs. Its new project, a collaboration with marine biologist Steve Simpson and marine ecologist Mary Shodipo, wants your help training AI to recognize aquatic wildlife sounds in hopes of replenishing them and raising awareness of the ocean’s troubled habitats.” 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.



April 18, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Monday, April 17, 2023

Digital Copyrgith, Sundar Pichai, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 17, 2023

Digital Copyrgith, Sundar Pichai, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Internet Archive Blog: Law Professor Makes Digital Copyright Book Open for All. “Geared for a general audience, the book chronicles how copyright laws were drafted, written, lobbied and enacted in Congress over time. Litman researched the legislative history of copyright law, including development of the 1976 Copyright Act, and spent two years in Washington, D.C., observing Congress leading up to the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg: Google CEO Warns Against Rush to Deploy AI Without Oversight. “Alphabet Inc. and Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in an interview broadcast Sunday that the push to adopt artificial intelligence technology must be well regulated to avoid potential harmful effects.”

Engadget: Twitter will label tweets limited due to hate policy violations. “Twitter may have a looser stance on bans under Elon Musk, but it’s still willing to flag content that runs afoul of its rules. The social network will label tweets it believes are violating its Hateful Conduct policy. You’ll see a notice that Twitter is limiting the ‘visibility’ of the problematic post with an opportunity to learn more.” I don’t think this will answer the requirements of the Digital Services Act.

USEFUL STUFF

Techdirt: The AI Doomers’ Playbook. “In just a few days, we went from ‘governments should force a 6-month pause’ (the petition from the Future of Life Institute) to ‘wait, it’s not enough, so data centers should be bombed.’ Sadly, this is the narrative that gets media attention and shapes our already hyperbolic AI discourse. In order to understand the rise of AI Doomerism, here are some influential figures responsible for mainstreaming doomsday scenarios. This is not the full list of AI doomers, just the ones that recently shaped the AI panic cycle (so I‘m focusing on them).”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: A Small Town Became the Center of a QAnon Storm. It’s Fighting Back. “The Netherlands’ most notorious conspiracy theorist was sentenced to prison, after spreading lies about satanic pedophiles in the town of Bodegraven.”

Rolling Stone: They’re Selling Nudes of Imaginary Women on Reddit — and It’s Working. “Claudia is among the first, but by no means the last, fictional adult content creator to be generated via rapidly evolving AI technology, prompting a slew of ethical questions and concerns.”

BBC: AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd song goes viral . “A song that uses Artificial Intelligence to clone the voices of Drake and The Weeknd has gone viral on social media. Called Heart On My Sleeve, the track simulates the two stars trading verses about pop star and actress Selena Gomez, who previously dated The Weeknd.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: US neo-Nazi accused of sniper plot appears to have shared instructions with Australian far-right figures. “Brandon Russell, a US neo-Nazi who was charged this year with conspiring to attack the Maryland power grid, appears to have shared instructions on how to carry out such an attack months earlier in an Australian far-right channel on Telegram.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Verge: A data scientist cloned his best friends’ group chat using AI. “Izzy Miller downloaded 500,000 messages from his seven-year group chat, then trained an AI language model to replicate his friends — learning details about their lives and imitating the way they speak.”

Wall Street Journal: Elon Musk Creates New Artificial Intelligence Company X.AI. “Elon Musk has created a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp. that is incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. Mr. Musk is the only listed director of the company, and Jared Birchall, the director of Mr. Musk’s family office, is its secretary, according to the filing made last month. X.AI has authorized the sale of 100 million shares for the privately held company.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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April 18, 2023 at 12:46AM
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Find Affiliations Between a List of People and a List of Organizations With PeopleLinx Affiliation Filter (PAF)

Find Affiliations Between a List of People and a List of Organizations With PeopleLinx Affiliation Filter (PAF)
By ResearchBuzz

In my last article I told you about the Search Gizmo PeopleLinx Affiliations Lookup (PAL), which lets you look up organizational affiliations among a group of people using Wikidata. When I showed PAL to my husband he pointed out that it wouldn’t allow you to check a specific group of organizations, which might be useful if you were interested in certain affiliations only.

I agreed that this could be useful so I bent things around a bit and made the PeopleLinx Affiliation Filter (PAF), at https://searchgizmos.com/paf/ .

Using the PeopleLinx Affiliation Filter

Screenshot from 2023-04-17 11-24-10

The PeopleLinx Affiliations Lookup requires just a list of people, but the PeopleLinx Affiliation Filter requires both a list of people and a list of companies and organizations. Make sure that you’re using formal names in the case of ambiguous cases like Apple (PAF will not match Steve Jobs with that but will match Apple Inc.)

PAF will take these two lists and use Wikidata to find any affiliations between the first group and the second.

Since the form already has examples, you don’t need any from me. Go ahead and click the Find Affiliations button.

In a moment you’ll get a list of the various affiliations between these two groups.

Screenshot from 2023-04-17 11-49-28

Each affiliation has a link to Google, Google News, Bing, and DuckDuckGo if you’d like to explore it further.

Please note that if a person is affiliated with a sub-organization of an organization you list, that affiliation might not be noted. It’s a thin line between finding all meaningful affiliations and flooding the user with the most ridiculous associations imaginable.



April 17, 2023 at 09:59PM
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Find Connections Between People Using Wikidata With The PeopleLinx Affiliations Lookup (PAL)

Find Connections Between People Using Wikidata With The PeopleLinx Affiliations Lookup (PAL)
By ResearchBuzz

Everything’s interesting, but the intersections between everything are sometimes even more interesting. And when you’re using Wikidata, there are lots of things and lots of intersections.

I was wondering if there was any way you could throw a huge amount of people at Wikidata in a useful way – no extra data, no context, just names – so I thought of intersections. Enter a bunch of names and find what they have in common. But it had to be a BUNCH of people. It wouldn’t be nearly as useful if you could only enter, say, ten people. And there had to be plenty of parameters to match by!

This turned out to be rather more difficult than I thought (as usual) but eventually I got it going and I’m pleased to offer you the PeopleLinx Affiliations Lookup, or PAL, at

https://searchgizmos.com/pal/ . And I’ve tested it with 150 names at a time and it works great, though it takes a while to group all the names.

Using PAL

Screenshot from 2023-04-17 09-47-00

Using PAL is easy: just enter a list of names separated by commas. (You don’t have to pre-screen them to see if they’re in Wikidata or not; if they’re not PAL will skip them.) PAL will go through the names and group the affiliations they have in common, then present that to you in a list.

Let’s do an example and look up the affiliations between these people:

Barack Obama, George W. Bush,  Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey

Paste that list into the text box and click on the Find Affiliations button. It will change to Loading… as all the data gets sorted.

The first part of the data you’ll get is a bar graph showing which organizations have the most affiliations to the people in the list. The big winner in this case was the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with 7 people on the list being affiliated. (I added this at the last minute because I wanted to see how the D3.js library worked, so it’s not fancy or interactive.) If you’re searching LOTS and LOTS of names you can get a LOT of bars, and the chart labels will get messy.

Screenshot from 2023-04-17 09-59-39

The second thing you’ll see is how the list of people you provided breaks out into groups. That includes person name, organization name, and affiliation.

Screenshot from 2023-04-17 10-04-33

I wanted to make sure the groups would always be distinct so PAL generates a random color for each group of people; lots of groups make it rainbow-y. Sometimes the colors make the text unreadable; highlight the text or reload the search to correct it. (I’m working on that.)

Each listing has search links for Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. The searches for those links combine the name of the person and their affiliated organization. The Google search results for the first listing, Barack Obama and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, look like this:

Screenshot from 2023-04-17 10-10-09

When I showed PAL to my husband, he agreed that it would be useful if you were trying to make sense of the connections in a group of people, but what if you were trying to make sense of the connections between a group of people and a group of companies/organizations? I agreed you’d need a different tool for that, so I made it as well. I’ll tell you about that one next.



April 17, 2023 at 08:03PM
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Twitter Labels, TikTok, Discord, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 17, 2023

Twitter Labels, TikTok, Discord, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: MegaGladys
Your own personal Wikipedia-based nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz. Enter a Wikipedia topic and get a brief overview, potential newsy days, and a list of official communication channels (when available) and external reference resources.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Crikey (Australia): ABC to continue using Twitter despite ‘government-funded media’ label. “The [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] will continue posting to its official ABC News account on Twitter despite carrying a ‘government-funded media’ label, as broadcasters in the United States plot exits from the social media platform in protest.”

Al Jazeera: New Zealand radio threatens to quit Twitter over ‘government’ tag. “New Zealand’s public radio broadcaster has threatened to leave Twitter following Elon Musk’s decision to label certain media accounts as ‘government-funded’. Radio New Zealand’s head of content Megan Whelan said on Monday that the label, which Twitter uses to describe outlets that “may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content”, does not reflect the broadcaster’s editorial independence.”

Search Engine Land: 10 minute TikTok videos are gone. “To be clear, users can still upload videos of up to 10 minutes in length. But the ability to record & capture 10-minute long videos within the app has been discontinued.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Make, Set Up, and Manage a Discord Server. “Discord is a quickly growing text and voice chat application aimed at gamers—but not just for gamers. Its sleek and simple design makes it an excellent alternative to apps like Teamspeak and Skype. It’s easy and free to get started with your own Discord server.” Solid overview that links to a lot more Discord-related content.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals. “A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.” “Now with AI features” feels more and more like 1998’s “Now with a portal!” Not that AI isn’t important, but there’s so little coherence in what we’re seeing.

Fast Company: ‘Algospeak’ is helping social media users evade algorithmic detection. “A linguistic arms race is raging online—and it isn’t clear who’s winning. On one side are social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. These sites have become better and better at identifying and removing language and content that violates their community standards. Social media users are on the other side, and they’ve come up with coded terminology designed to evade algorithmic detection. These expressions are collectively referred to as ‘algospeak.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: Social-Media Account Overseen by Former Navy Noncommissioned Officer Helped Spread Secrets. “A purported Russian blogger known as Donbass Devushka, which translates as Donbas Girl, is the face of a network of pro-Kremlin social-media, podcasting, merchandise and fundraising accounts. But the person who hosted podcasts as Donbass Devushka and oversees these accounts is a Washington-state-based former U.S. enlisted aviation electronics technician whose real name is Sarah Bils.”

XDA Developers: Despite the best efforts of Google Play Protect, the Play Store is not as safe as it may appear. “Recently, a report from Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky’s Secure List detailed how much it costs for different types of malware to function on the Play Store. For example, it costs anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 to pay for a ‘loader’ that injects an already existing app with malicious code while bypassing Google Play Protect.”

Washington Post: A new kind of leaker: Spilling state secrets to impress online buddies. “Although the Discord leaker was critical of some U.S. policies and trafficked in the same racist, antisemitic and anti-gay memes and slogans that many of his online buddies bandied about, he seemed to be driven not by ideology or political activism, but by a desire to prove himself to his online acquaintances.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Want to be a social media influencer? You might want to think again. “As experts in social media and health outcomes, we recently examined the aspirations, desires and rationales of becoming a social media influencer among young adults. We asked 750 Canadians between 16-30 years old, who were mostly women, about their social media use and thoughts about social media influencers.”

NewsWise: How AI and a mobile phone app could help you quit smoking. “According to research conducted by the University of East Anglia, a groundbreaking mobile app that utilizes location and trigger sensing technology could assist individuals in quitting smoking. Known as Quit Sense, this app is the first of its kind to employ artificial intelligence (AI) to identify locations where users have previously smoked and provide targeted support to manage those specific triggers.”

UC San Diego: AI Chatbot ChatGPT Mirrors Its Users to Appear Intelligent. “In a new paper published in Neural Computation, Professor Terrence Sejnowski of the University of California San Diego and Salk Institute, author of The Deep Learning Revolution, explores the relationship between the human interviewer and language models to uncover why chatbots respond in particular ways, why those responses vary and how to improve them in the future. According to Sejnowski, language models reflect the intelligence and diversity of their interviewer.” 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.



April 17, 2023 at 05:27PM
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Sunday, April 16, 2023

Twitter, Heardle, Genealogy, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 16, 2023

Twitter, Heardle, Genealogy, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Vox: Is Twitter finally dying?. “Vox spoke with over half a dozen current and former Twitter employees, advertising and marketing experts, and users about the current state of the company. Many of those who worked at Twitter said the platform was only alive because of the technical strength and reputation it’s built over the past 17 years.”

Engadget: Spotify will shut down ‘Heardle’ on May 5th. “Spotify has some disappointing news for Heardle fans: the company is shutting down the song-guessing game, which it bought last summer. ‘Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,’ a message on the Heardle webpage reads. ‘From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.'”

Genealogy’s Star: United States Social Security NUMIDENT records added to FamilySearch.org. “The Social Security Administration created these records to track the earnings of US workers and determine benefit entitlements. The publishable index only contains information for deceased individuals and was gathered from all three record types in the collection: applications, deaths, and claims.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Run a ChatGPT-like AI on Your Own PC. “You can run a ChatGPT-like AI on your own PC with Alpaca, a chatbot created by Stanford researchers. It supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. You just need at least 8GB of RAM and about 30GB of free storage space.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: The End of Faking It in Silicon Valley. “When start-up valuations were soaring, they were seen as visionary kingmakers. It was easy enough to convince the world, and the investors in their funds — pension funds, college endowments and wealthy individuals — that they were responsible stewards of capital with the unique skills required to predict the future and find the next Steve Jobs to build it. But as more start-up frauds are revealed, these titans of industry are playing a different role in lawsuits, bankruptcy filings and court testimonies: the victim that got duped.”

BBC: The ‘ninjas’ fighting climate change denial on Twitter. “Secretive internet vigilantes have made it their mission to fight climate change denial on Twitter. But, as a vicious information war rages online, do they risk becoming the very trolls they claim to be targeting?”

The Verge: Bluesky is my favorite Twitter clone yet. “Bluesky is really, really fun. Yes, the platform is essentially just Twitter but decentralized. And yes, the Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky is one of many services emulating how Twitter looks right now. But after spending a few hours in Bluesky since getting my beta invite this week, it’s so far the service where I feel the most joy.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Asia One: Gone in 2 hours: Retiree loses $70k in life savings after installing fake Google Play app on phone. “He had just gotten his pension totalling $30,000 in January this year. Within the same month, it was all gone, along with $40,000 of his life savings. Within two hours, his DBS bank account was near-emptied by cybercriminals.” This article takes place in Singapore. $30,000 Singapore dollars equals $22,549.61 American dollars at this writing. $40,000 Singapore dollars is just over $30,000 American.

Washington Post: Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons. “U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons, and questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February, according to previously unreported top-secret intelligence documents.”

Reuters: Google must face trial over Sonos patents, California judge says. “Alphabet’s Google received a mixed ruling on Thursday from a San Francisco federal judge in a patent lawsuit brought by Sonos Inc over wireless audio technology, failing to invalidate all of the patents before a trial but narrowing Sonos’ claims.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of California Davis: UC Davis Study Finds Tweets Can Amplify, Disrupt, Unite and Divide. “Department of Communication researchers said their findings both in an observational study and simulation speak to the ongoing debate about social media’s contributions to political polarization, misinformation and echo chambers. To conduct their research, they analyzed millions of Twitter posts across the United States, finding that, among other things, people do not always isolate in their own communities, particularly during large world events.”

Ars Technica: Hype grows over “autonomous” AI agents that loop GPT-4 outputs. “Since the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4 API last month to beta testers, a loose group of developers have been experimenting with making agent-like (‘agentic’) implementations of the AI model that attempt to carry out multistep tasks with as little human intervention as possible. These homebrew scripts can loop, iterate, and spin off new instances of an AI model as needed.” 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.



April 16, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Saturday, April 15, 2023

World Water Map, Google Currents, US Population, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, April 15, 2023

World Water Map, Google Currents, US Population, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, April 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

National Geographic: National Geographic Society and Utrecht University Launch World Water Map . “The Map provides an interactive view of the sectors of water use; how much water people consume for agricultural, industrial, and household use; and what’s left for nature. The Map, which builds on hydrological models made by Utrecht University, consists of over 40 years of historical data and will be updated periodically to monitor changes in water availability and demand.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement. “Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite.”

US Census Bureau: Census Bureau Releases New U.S. Population Estimates by Age and Sex. “In the coming months, the Census Bureau will release additional population estimates for cities and towns, as well as national, state and county population estimates by age, sex, race and Hispanic origin.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: Why Some Taylor Swift Stans Are Ganging Up On ‘Gaylors’: Report. “Researchers from the social media firm Graphika found that harassment runs amok in the fan community — and it can teach us a lot about how people behave online.”

Mashable: Popular B2B business dumps Twitter over Musk’s API price hike. “Over the past few weeks, countless indie developers have announced that they would have to shut down their Twitter-based apps due to the new exorbitant pricing that Twitter began rolling out for its API. However, it’s not just small-time developers making the decision to pass on paying $42,000 per month to Twitter. Just this week, one of the biggest companies in the customer support and live chat space made the call to drop Twitter too.”

Indiana University: IU alumnus, award-winning Black documentarian gifts collection to Black Film Center & Archive. “Now, scholars, filmmakers and members of the IU community will have access to this film and many other audiovisual materials from [Jerald] Harkness, an IU alumnus, as he makes IU’s Black Film Center & Archive the home for his film collection. The gift consists of master copies, outtakes, interviews and other production elements from Harkness’ award-winning, 30-year career. Also included are Harkness’ home movies and preliminary interviews from incomplete projects.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

University of Exeter: Nations must clarify the law of cyberspace to tackle online threats and warfare. “Cyber threats pose a growing risk to our societies by spreading misinformation, disrupting critical services and undermining trust in democratic institutions. Since most rules of international law were developed in the pre-digital age, it is far from clear how these rules apply to mitigate cyber threats.”

Associated Press: TikTok ban gets final approval by Montana’s GOP legislature. “Montana’s House gave final passage Friday to a bill banning the social media app TikTok from operating in the state, a move that’s bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America many national lawmakers envision due to concerns over potential Chinese spying.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Twitter Is Broken. Thanks, Elon.. “I’d been open to Musk’s purchase of the social network, but half a year in, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. Musk moved fast and broke nearly everything — the speed and totality with which he’s ruined the site have been almost impressive. By Musk’s own reckoning, the company is now worth less than half of what he paid for it. It has lost many large advertisers, most of its employees and, with them, much of its functionality.”

Harvard Medical School: AI Tool Predicts Colon Cancer Survival, Treatment Response. “A new artificial intelligence model designed by researchers at Harvard Medical School and National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan could bring much-needed clarity to doctors delivering prognoses and deciding on treatments for patients with colorectal cancer, the second deadliest cancer worldwide.”

Quartz: Free speech warrior Elon Musk’s Twitter is muting Indian voices worldwide. “In a BBC interview, Elon Musk claimed that India’s ‘extremely strict’ social media rules were the reason for censoring tweets critical of the Modi government.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

University of Alabama: Little Free Libraries to Pop Up Around Campus Soon. “The University of Alabama could soon see miniature libraries popping up around campus. The first one was recently established in front of the SGA office in the Student Center. The tiny stands are known as Little Free Libraries and they will house everything from fiction to textbooks.” 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.



April 15, 2023 at 05:31PM
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