Infodemic, MetaGPT, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, May 9, 2023

Infodemic, MetaGPT, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, May 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Syracuse University: ‘Infodemic’ Reporting Project Investigates Impact of Scams, Disinformation. “‘Infodemic’ includes more than 30 stories packaged with photos, videos, illustrations, audio, data visualizations and other interactive media. The wide-ranging report was released May 1 on TheNewsHouse.com, a multimedia news site for Syracuse University to teach practical and digital skills needed for the media industry, in conjunction with WAER-88.3 and The Stand South Side newspaper.”

Interesting Engineering: New tool uses ChatGPT to make websites using only text-based prompts. “WhimsyWorks, a New York-based company, has unveiled MetaGPT – an app to build websites, apps, and much more using only text-based prompts. This is much like the no-coding website builders that you see around on the internet, except that it is powered by ChatGPT.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Government Technology: Government Begins to Ask: When Do We Leave Twitter?. “For years, Twitter has been an indispensable piece of government communications — especially during emergencies, public officials turn often to the app as one of the fastest options for telling people what’s happening. But last week at the annual Government Social Media Conference in Reno, Nev., a government communications professional stood up and in front of a room of her peers and called Twitter a ‘hellscape,’ asking the panelists on stage: When do you know it’s time to pull the plug on Twitter?”

Public Record Office Victoria: New PROV Public API. “Up until now to ‘talk’ to or query an API you needed to understand how the API works and speak its own particular language. But all that’s changed. With the help of a very talented developer, we’ve created a simple form or interface that will allow you to not only open the bonnet but reach deep into the data (i.e. the engine that drives the PROV collection search) and download it for your own purposes.”

Ars Technica: After 18 months, GitHub’s big code search overhaul is generally available. “GitHub has announced the general availability of a ground-up rework of code search that has been in development for years. The changes include substantial new functionality that is significantly more aware of context. The company says its new code search is ‘about twice as fast’ as the old code search and that it ‘understands code, putting the most relevant results first.'”

USEFUL STUFF

New York Times: How to Automatically Edit and Enhance Your Smartphone Photos. “Vanity-driven repairs are popular, but A.I.-powered editing can even fix fuzzy focus or entirely remove that inebriated fellow photobombing your family beach portrait with just a few screen taps. Here’s an overview of what you can do.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Dallas Morning News: Tracking misinformation about the Allen mass shooting and response. “After any massive tragedy, it’s common for bad actors to take advantage of a void in verified information to spread falsehoods — and for well-meaning yet unwitting members of the public to amplify that false information. The same happened after Saturday’s massacre at Allen Premium Outlets. In the days after the mass shooting, which killed eight people and wounded seven others, very little information has been shared by authorities and public officials.”

Reuters: New York Times to get around $100 million from Google over three years – WSJ. “The New York Times is getting around $100 million from Google over three years as part of a broad deal that allows the Alphabet Inc unit to feature Times content on some of its platforms, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Business Insider: Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced ex-CEO of FTX, is trying to dismiss 10 out of 13 criminal charges against him. “Bankman-Fried’s lawyers argued in a Monday filing to the Manhattan federal court that the US government had brought the original indictment against Bankman-Fried on December 9 in a ‘classic rush to judgment’ less than a month after FTX’s bankruptcy.”

NPR: People are trying to claim real videos are deepfakes. The courts are not amused. “The liar’s dividend is a term coined by law professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron in a 2018 paper laying out the challenges deepfakes present to privacy, democracy, and national security. The idea is, as people become more aware of how easy it is to fake audio and video, bad actors can weaponize that skepticism.”

Santa Monica Lookout: Remains Found in Santa Monica ID’d As Founder of Sobriety App. “The remains of a man who had been missing for nearly a year and a half were identified Saturday after being found in the courtyard of an abandoned building in Santa Monica last month, police said. The Los Angeles County Coroner positively identified the remains as those of Beau Mann, the founder and head of Sober Grid, a social mobile networking app for people struggling with substance abuse.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford University: Feedback from an AI-driven tool improves teaching, Stanford-led research finds. “A new Stanford-led study, published May 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, found that an automated feedback tool improved instructors’ use of a practice known as uptake, where teachers acknowledge, reiterate, and build on students’ contributions. The findings also provided evidence that, among students, the tool improved their rate of completing assignments and their overall satisfaction with the course.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 9, 2023 at 05:28PM
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King Charles III Web Archive, Cleaning Dirty Data, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 8, 2023

King Charles III Web Archive, Cleaning Dirty Data, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

British Library: Regal Reflections: Exploring a New UK Web Archive Collection on King Charles III. “As we bear witness to a new era of the British monarchy and reflect on its role within the UK, the UK Web Archive is recording and preserving this momentous occasion by capturing websites in a special collection about King Charles III. Work started in earnest on this collection on 8th September 2022 when the late Queen, Elizabeth II, passed away and Charles became King, however, it also forms part of a larger series of collections about the British monarchy in the early 21st Century, curated by staff in the UK Legal Deposit Libraries.”

USEFUL STUFF

Online Journalism Blog: What is dirty data and how do I clean it? A great big guide for data journalists. “If you’re working with data as a journalist it won’t be long before you come across the phrases ‘dirty data’ or ‘cleaning data’. The phrases cover a wide range of problems, and a variety of techniques for tackling them, so in this post I’m going to break down exactly what it is that makes data ‘dirty’, and the different cleaning strategies that a journalist might adopt in tackling them.”

WIRED: Your Twitter Feed Sucks Now. These Free Add-Ons Can Help . “A few simple tools can help filter out most Twitter Blue users (but still see the ones you like).”

MakeUseOf: The 5 Best Websites for Copyright-Free Fonts You Can Use Commercially. “…finding fonts that you can use commercially and without fear of copyright can be difficult, especially if you don’t know where to look. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of different websites out there that feature copyright-free fonts that you can use commercially. Here are five of the best for your consideration.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

TechCrunch: Vint Cerf on the ‘exhilarating mix’ of thrill and hazard at the frontiers of tech. “Vint Cerf has been a near-constant influence on the internet since the days when he was helping create it in the first place. Today he wears many hats, among them VP and chief internet evangelist at Google. He is to be awarded the IEEE’s Medal of Honor at a gala in Atlanta, and ahead of the occasion he spoke with TechCrunch in a wide-ranging interview touching on his work, AI, accessibility and interplanetary internet.”

NiemanLab: How archivists are working to capture not just tapes of old TV and radio but the experience of tuning in together. “Even today, more Americans use standard AM/FM radio broadcasting than TikTok. At a time when most Americans get their news from local TV stations and broadcast television networks, and radio remains pervasive, it might seem frivolous to express concern about preserving technologies so deeply embedded in daily life. Yet a media evolution is occurring, as paid subscription video streaming and audio services climb in popularity, and fewer Americans are consistently tuning in to broadcast media.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: OpenAI’s regulatory troubles are only just beginning. “OpenAI managed to appease Italian data authorities and lift the country’s effective ban on ChatGPT last week, but its fight against European regulators is far from over.”

New York Times: Judge Dismisses F.T.C. Lawsuit Against a Location Data Broker. “A federal judge in Idaho on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit against Kochava, a major location data broker, brought last year by the Federal Trade Commission. In a ruling, the judge wrote that regulators had not provided sufficient evidence to back up their claims that the company was unfairly selling information on the precise locations of millions of people’s mobile phones.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Le Monde: May Day demonstrations: Why fewer fake AI-generated images were spread. “On March 19, on the sidelines of the fourth day of demonstrations against the French pension reform, fake photos of Emmanuel Macron in the streets of Paris circulated on the internet. On March 29, the day after another round of protests marked by clashes with the police, a fake image of an old man with a face swollen by a beating went viral. But despite a protest movement on a scale not seen for 20 years and scenes of urban chaos, no AI-generated image has yet appeared on social media from the protests on International Workers’ Day, on May 1.”

PsyPost: Scientific analysis of massive Twitter datasets links preferred pronouns in bios to left-wing politics. “More and more users have been including preferred gender pronouns in their Twitter bios over time, according to new research published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. The research also provides evidence that words and phrases related to left-wing politics are more likely to be used alongside pronoun lists.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 9, 2023 at 12:37AM
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Digital Robotics Archive, Circular Startup Index, Bing Chat, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, May 8, 2023

Digital Robotics Archive, Circular Startup Index, Bing Chat, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, May 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Carnegie Mellon University: Robotics Project Releases Toolkit, Digital Robotics Archive. “The website, which is hosted on the open-source digital repository system Islandora, allows users to click through historic robotics artifacts in the collection, read about their history, learn about key researchers and watch videos of technology in action.”

Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Discover hundreds of circular economy startups with our new database. “Innovation is key to accelerating the circular economy transition — and there are thousands of circular startups on the market right now, designing and developing innovative solutions to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature. The Foundation’s Circular Startup Index is a searchable, public database featuring more than 500 startups across a range of sectors, industries, and geographies, providing unprecedented visibility of these circular solutions.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Microsoft Opens Bing Chat To All With New Upgrades. “Microsoft had an event yesterday in NYC showing off some new features for Bing Chat, touting some growth figures and announcing it removed the waitlist for the co-pilot feature.”

Mashable: More than half of Twitter Blue’s earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed. “Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile.”

CNN: Despite TikTok ban threat, influencers are flocking to a new app from its parent company. “In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch: How to ask OpenAI for your personal data to be deleted or not used to train its AIs . “While there are lots of reasons why individuals might want to shield their information from big data mining AI giants there are — for now — only limited controls on offer. And these limited controls are mostly only available to users in Europe where data protection laws do already apply. Scroll lower down for details on how to exercise available data rights — or read on for the context.”

Hongkiat: 10 Best Free Note Taking Apps. “Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just someone who likes to jot down ideas as they come, this article is for you. Here is a compilation of the 10 best free note-taking apps that we reckon will help you find the one that meets your need.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: ChatGPT is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour. “[Alexej] Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next. The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits.”

New York Times: Twitter Criticized for Allowing Texas Shooting Images to Spread. “Though gruesome images have become common on social media, where a cellphone camera and an internet connection make everyone a publisher, the unusually graphic nature of the images drew sustained outcry from users. And they threw a harsh spotlight on Twitter’s content moderation practices, which have been curtailed since Mr. Musk acquired the company last year.” If you’re still using Twitter, I recommend TweetDeck as a client. Each column has a setting allowing you to turn media previews off.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: New York State AG proposes broad regulations for the cryptocurrency industry. “Attorney General Letitia James has proposed a law, the CRPTO Act (Crypto Regulation, Protection, Transparency and Oversight), that’s meant to thwart cryptocurrency fraud and protect investors. Whether or not it’s the ‘strongest and most comprehensive’ set of crypto regulations that James touts, it would theoretically prevent repeats of some high-profile incidents.”

The Register: DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs. “The collaborative event, which AI Village organizers describe as ‘the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models,’ will host ‘thousands’ of people, including ‘hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities,’ all of whom will be tasked with finding flaws in LLMs that power today’s chat bots and generative AI.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Listen Up: Using AI to Build Personalized Assistive Hearing Devices. “EARLIER THIS YEAR, Cochlear, the manufacturer of cochlear implants, announced a collaboration with Google and Australian Hearing Hub members, the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL), Macquarie University, the Shepherd Centre, and NextSense. The aim is to improve existing hearing-assistance technologies, like hearing aids and cochlear implants, and to develop new solutions for folks experiencing hearing loss.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 8, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Prehistory Earth, Portland Metro RLIS, Soft Robotics, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, May 7, 2023

Prehistory Earth, Portland Metro RLIS, Soft Robotics, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, May 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BGR: See where your home was at the time of the dinosaurs using this interactive map. “A new website lets users pinpoint their home city and then see where it was located during the time of the dinosaurs, as well as during other periods of time across ancient Earth. Additionally, the map also showcases how the continents have shifted since the time of ancient Earth and even how ice covered the land throughout history.”

Oregon Metro Government: Nearly 200 GIS layers of Metro’s RLIS now open data. “Metro is eliminating the annual subscription for the Regional Land Information System, greater Portland’s comprehensive geospatial data resource.”

MIT News: Open-source platform simulates wildlife for soft robotics designers. “Since the term ‘soft robotics’ was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One source of inspiration: the way animals move in the wild. A team of MIT researchers has taken this a step further, developing SoftZoo, a bio-inspired platform that enables engineers to study soft robot co-design.” I had never heard the term “soft robotics” before, so I used Wiki-Guided Google Search on it and was lead to this article from the Encyclopedia of Robotics. The article gets complicated but there’s plenty there for even a non-technical reader to learn.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: New Twitter rules expose election offices to spoof accounts “Tracking down accurate information about Philadelphia’s elections on Twitter used to be easy. The account for the city commissioners who run elections, @phillyvotes, was the only one carrying a blue check mark, a sign of authenticity. But ever since the social media platform overhauled its verification service last month, the check mark has disappeared. That’s made it harder to distinguish @phillyvotes from a list of random accounts not run by the elections office but with very similar names.”

Ars Technica: Google will retire Chrome’s HTTPS padlock icon because no one knows what it means. “Browsers going all the way back to Internet Explorer have used a small padlock icon to denote that a connection is using HTTPS. But according to the team behind the Chromium browser engine, most people still don’t know what that padlock icon actually means.” It is definitely something that isn’t emphasized as often as it used to be.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Native News Online: A New Online Tool Will Let Native Americans Search for Relatives Who Attended Indian Boarding Schools. “The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) plans to launch a website this summer that will allow Native Americans to search for information on relatives who attended Indian boarding schools.”

Android Police: You can blame this Pixies song for Google Assistant canceling your alarm. “After noticing their alarms didn’t seem to go off on certain days, one Redditor woke up early to get to the bottom of the issue. The Pixies song Where Is My Mind? started playing since it was in a Spotify playlist the user had set as their music alarm in the Google Clock app. If you’re familiar with the song, it starts with a person singing ‘Oooh,’ then someone else cuts them off by exclaiming ‘Stop!’ before music starts playing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PC Magazine: Twitter Says ‘Security Incident’ Caused Circles Tweets Leak. “Twitter has admitted that an incident where private tweets intended for posters’ close friends that ended up on strangers’ feeds happened because of a security breach, The Guardian reports(Opens in a new window). Twitter Circles permits users to set a list of close friends and post tweets that only they can read. The incident last month saw Circle tweets popping up in the For You timeline of users who followed the Circle tweet poster but aren’t in their Circle.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Indiana University: Internet search trends reflect concerns following Supreme Court health care decisions. “The study, published April 28 in JAMA Health Forum, analyzed internet searches for abortion- and contraception-related terms following the June 24, 2022, ruling by the United States Supreme Court on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Researchers found that searches increased much more in states where reproductive health care access was more likely to be immediately restricted following the decision.”

The College of New Jersey: Computer science research team explores how machine learning can translate sign language. “Services like Google Translate can help millions of people communicate in over 100 languages. Users can type or speak words to be translated, or even translate text in photos and videos using augmented reality. Now, computer science professor Andrea Salgian and Ben Guerrieri ’26 are working to add one more language to the list: American Sign Language.”

Binghamton University: Data points: How inclusive metadata fosters diversity in museum collections. “Metadata — literally data about data — helps channel that stream, explained Binghamton University Art Museum intern Eliana Ellerton, a senior history major who will finish her master’s degree in 2024 through the 4+1 program. Since last year, Ellerton has been working with Art Museum Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Claire Kovacs on formulating inclusive metadata guidelines, or protocols on how the museum approaches diversity within its archives.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Phys.org: ‘Zero plant extinction’ is possible, says plant ecologist . “Like animals, many plant species are struggling to adapt to a human-dominated planet. However, plants are often overlooked in conservation efforts, even though they are cheaper and easier to protect than animals and play a pivotal role in bolstering our food, fuel and medical systems.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 7, 2023 at 06:23PM
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Yiddish Literature, News Minimalist, Open Scholarship in GLAMs, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023

Yiddish Literature, News Minimalist, Open Scholarship in GLAMs, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Forward: Yiddish literature scholar David Roskies’ extraordinary archive now accessible online. “This week marked the official unveiling of a new, freely accessible Yiddish archive composed of previously unpublished teaching materials, scholarship, literature, notes and ephemera from the collections of Yiddish literature scholar David G. Roskies.”

Boing Boing: Minimalist news site powered by AI. “News Minimalist is another site that presents topical headlines in a plain, fast-loading format. This one aims not for the old-timey plaintext look but for the contemporary darkmodish style, garnished with data science.” I took a quick look. A nice mix of international news and it has an RSS feed. yes please.

EVENTS

British Library Digital Scholarship Blog: Webinar on Open Scholarship in GLAMs through Research Repositories. “If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, then join us on 18th May, Thursday for an online repository training session for cultural heritage professionals.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress News: Safely Jazz Up Your Website With Staging Sites on WordPress.com. “We’re excited to announce that staging sites are now available for all customers on our Business and Commerce plans. This powerful feature allows you to test changes and updates of all your site elements in a safe and stable environment.”

ABC News (Australia): Google Maps diverts drivers away from country road after fatal Strathmerton crash. “The popular mobile phone navigation app, Google Maps, will no longer send drivers along a regional Victorian road as first preference after a crash that killed five people last month.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Mozilla acquires review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox . “Fakespot, a useful service that explains how products you’ve never heard of could have 12,000 reviews with a 4.6-star average, has been acquired by Firefox-maker Mozilla, and Mozilla plans to integrate it into Firefox.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NDTV: Google Ordered To Take Down Videos Claiming Indian Spices Contain Cow Dung. “The Delhi High Court has directed internet giant Google LLC to block or take down from YouTube certain ‘defamatory’ videos, which targeted major brands including ‘Catch’ by alleging that Indian spices contain urine and cow dung, in case they resurface.”

Washington Post: Computer system used to hunt fugitives is still down 10 weeks after hack. “A key law enforcement computer network has been down for 10 weeks, the victim of a ransomware attack that has frustrated efforts by senior officials to get the system back up and running — raising concerns about how to secure critical crime-fighting operations.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Oxford: Online consumers at risk from ‘intelligent’ price manipulation: Oxford and Imperial experts . “Sophisticated computer algorithms used to set prices in online marketplaces put consumers at risk of collusion among sellers, according to a study today [thurs] from computer scientists at the Oxford Internet Institute and Imperial College.”

Washington Post: Google shared AI knowledge with the world — until ChatGPT caught up. “In February, Jeff Dean, Google’s longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: They had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world. For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research’s website. But the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 7, 2023 at 12:24AM
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Mapping May 4, Grimes’ Voice, Gmail, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023

Mapping May 4, Grimes’ Voice, Gmail, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Kent Stater: Mapping May 4 project connects history to its location. “The Mapping of May 4 is a website, and it takes short audio clips of stories from oral histories in the Kent State archives and puts them on a map. It covers the historical events between May 1 and May 5, 1970.”

Complete Music Update: Grimes launches website to replicate her voice using AI. “Grimes has launched a new website making it easier to replicate her voice using AI, should you want to. It was only last month that the musician gave her blessing for people to do so. The website allows users to upload audio of themselves singing or to record directly into the software via their computer microphone. Once processed, the same audio will be returned but with a computer-generated Grimes voice.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Gmail ads are getting more annoying. “Gmail is getting more persistent advertisements that have started popping up in the middle of some users’ inboxes, as first reported by 9to5Google. Several screenshots posted to Twitter show promotional messages mixed in with actual emails on Gmail’s desktop site, and users aren’t very happy about it.” Giving me strong AltaVista vibes.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Tricycle: A Nontoxic Social Media Experience. “The app departs from other social media apps in that there’s no feed, no photos or videos, and no texting element. Rather, Landed connects users one-on-one via audio messages. Each week, on Sunday, users are prompted to share three things they were grateful for in the last week, and, if they want, to share a challenging experience. A few days later, they’ll receive an audio message from their randomly assigned match for the week, and then the matched pair can exchange audio for the rest of the week.”

NPR: Digital news sites fight to survive as online ad dollars dry up. “Online news sites are fighting to survive as online ad dollars dry up. And at the same time, large social media companies, the backbone of the modern internet, are slumping. NPR’s Bobby Allyn reports on what the future of digital news looks like in this uncertain era.”

Yahoo News: People with disabilities have built a community on TikTok. They fear its loss if the app is banned.. “[Katriel] Nopoulos, who uses they/them pronouns, soon discovered that TikTok could be a life-changing tool. Nopolous was born without a lower jaw, so they communicate by using American Sign Language. TikTok allows creators to easily deploy a computer-generated voice to read text out loud. This is both an accessibility issue — so that the blind and visually impaired can absorb their content — and a liberating innovation for Nopoulos. For the first time in their life, Nopoulos could be heard — literally.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Europol: International art trafficking sting leads to 60 arrests and over 11 000 objects recovered. “Law enforcement has arrested 60 people, and recovered 11 049 stolen artefacts as part of a major international art trafficking crackdown across 14 European countries.”

Associated Press: Colorado politicians seek power to block social media users. “Colorado lawmakers pushed a bill to the governor’s desk that would allow politicians to block social media users from their private accounts, just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider to what extent that’s legal.”

Courthouse News Service: Fired Twitter employees ordered to arbitrate wrongful termination claims. “Billionaire and new Twitter owner Elon Musk won a first round in federal court Friday when a judge granted Twitter’s motions to dismiss wrongful termination claims from employees fired last fall, ordering them to arbitration instead.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Kyiv Post: OPINION: Russia Getting Beaten by Hackers. “Russia has long prided itself as having the world’s “second greatest army” and the world’s ‘best’ hackers with a large number of hacks against the United States, Europe, and in Ukraine. However, in the past few weeks, it appears that Russia’s reputation was judged too highly, as it has faced one disastrous hack after another by anti-Putin or pro-Ukraine hacking groups.”

Fast Company: New research: Twitter bot detection tools aren’t very good. “A new paper suggests that the field of bot detection is based on a flawed premise due to poor-quality original data. The research, presented this week at the Web Conference (where it was awarded best paper), found that bot detection tools can rely on funky, flawed data sets that replicate mistakes made within one another, rather than trying to actually accurately identify bots.”

WIRED: Twitter Really Is Worse Than Ever. “A YEAR AGO, Elon Musk announced that he wanted to buy Twitter to clear it of bots and turn ‘the de facto public town square’ into a place for unfettered free speech. Social media experts worried that would mean the platform would stop moderating what users post, and warned that the consequence of Musk’s stated absolutism would be that the platform would be overrun with violent and hateful content. It turns out they were right.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 6, 2023 at 05:34PM
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Species Awareness Index, Reddit, AI-Generated Content, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023

Species Awareness Index, Reddit, AI-Generated Content, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Natural History Museum: Monitoring changes in Wikipedia pageviews could help save wildlife. ” Monitoring changes in how people view the natural world could prove invaluable in gaining support for tackling the biodiversity crisis. Many current metrics that monitor these changes are not published in real-time, often due to a lack of resources…. But now researchers have developed a new tool called the Species Awareness Index (SAI), which can track the real-time rate of change in online biodiversity awareness. The index looks at the monthly change in average daily page views for around 40,000 species across 10 of the most popular Wikipedia languages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Reddit makes easier to share and view linked posts on social media sites. “Admitting that ‘we didn’t make it easy to’ share posts on other social media platforms, Reddit has announced that it’s rolling out new features to fix that issue. Those include an updated “shared link” preview for text posts shared via messaging services, new sharing for Instagram Stories, one-tap screenshot sharing and more.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: AI-written content isn’t the web’s future. It’s already here . “Generative AI tools have captured the world’s attention since ChatGPT’s November release. Yet a raft of online publishers have been using automated writing tools based on ChatGPT’s predecessors, GPT-2 and GPT-3, for years. That experience shows that a world in which AI creations mingle freely and sometimes imperceptibly with human work isn’t speculative; it’s flourishing in plain sight on Amazon product pages and in Google search results.”

The Tablet: Church Must Protect Its Huge Audiovisual Archives, Media Assets, Pope Says. “There is real ‘cultural urgency’ for the entire Catholic Church to preserve its audiovisual, documentary and other media archives and assets, Pope Francis said. Even recently created materials are ‘a fragile asset that require constant care,’ he wrote.”

College of the Holy Cross: Holy Cross Associate Professor: Poetry More Accessible Today Thanks to Technology. “Technology continues to change the way humans live, communicate and even write, the latter thanks to ChatGPT, the news-making artificial intelligence natural language processing tool. And while AI and technology advances like ChatGPT could appear as a threat to literature and its works, the opposite is true, according to poet Oliver de la Paz, associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and poet laureate for the city of Worcester. Technology has led to the democratization of poetry’s accessibility, he said, not its demise, and should be embraced for the opportunities it affords artists to more broadly share their work.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: TikTok Tracked Users Who Watched Gay Content, Prompting Employee Complaints. “TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said.”

Smart Cities Dive: Dallas ransomware attack causes critical service outages. “Dallas, the ninth-most populated city in the U.S., is responding and attempting to recover from a ransomware attack that shut down multiple critical systems, including websites for the police department and city hall. The city continues to receive and dispatch emergency 911 calls, and service from police and fire remain unaffected, Dallas said in a statement issued Wednesday night.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Notre Dame News: Companies hide negative news by issuing unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings, study shows . “To distract investors from bad news, companies strategically issue unrelated press releases on the same day they file negative news with the SEC via Form 8-K, according to a new study from the University of Notre Dame. Form 8-K is the report publicly traded companies must file with the SEC between quarterly reports to notify shareholders of any major events. Sometimes the news is positive, sometimes it’s negative.”

Nationwide Children’s: Survey: Half of Parents Believe Their Children’s Mental Health Suffered Due to Social Media during the Past Year. “According to a new national survey conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of The On Our Sleeves Movement For Children’s Mental Health, half (50%) of parents of children younger than 18 feel their child(ren)’s mental health has suffered during the past 12 months because of social media use.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 6, 2023 at 01:18AM
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