Find Local News With Nothing But A Street Address: StreetScoop Local News Search

Find Local News With Nothing But A Street Address: StreetScoop Local News Search
By ResearchBuzz

I remain obsessed with the idea of meaningfully combining authoritative data with search to make richer results. When I can do it with local search, it’s all the more satisfying.

Today’s Gizmo combines the authority of the FCC TV license database with local news search. And when I say local, I mean, like, a street.

Here’s how StreetScoop Local News Search works:

– Enter an address in the United States

– The address is converted to latitude/longitude

– A dataset is consulted to find the nearest large city to that address (I had to customize a dataset I found online, thank you SimpleMaps)

– That city name is searched in the FCC’s TV permit database and the domain names of local TV stations are aggregated into a query string

– The query string along with the street name are bundled into a Google search, which opens in a new window.

Now that’s what I call local news search!

Of course, not every street in the country is going to get mentioned in the news and the address search is finicky, but wow, some of the results are amazing. Just imagine if I had access to more authoritative news source databases. Sigh.

June 1, 2023 at 10:52PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/TusEZKa

Indiana Lawyers, Gender-Diverse Children, Wisconsin Food Insecurity, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2023

Indiana Lawyers, Gender-Diverse Children, Wisconsin Food Insecurity, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

WFYI: Indiana State Bar Association expands accessibility for pro bono work with new site. “The Indiana State Bar Association is providing a new website for Hoosier attorneys, paralegals and staff to do pro bono work. The Indiana Pro Bono Academy and Resource Center offers various webinars and training on pro bono topics.”

Out in Perth: New website provides support for parents of gender diverse children. “Transforming Families – a Telethon Kids Institute-led collaboration with local and national community organisations – is a dedicated website offering resources and guidance to parents, friends and carers of gender diverse children and young people to better understand and help their loved ones.” I looked at the site briefly. The “Get Support” section is Australia-oriented, but the “Research” and “Resources” question seemed suitable for anyone no matter what their location.

WTAQ: New Tool To Combat Food Insecurity in Northeast Wisconsin. “It is called the NEW Food Access Map created by the UW-Madison Division of Extension Brown County. It’s an interactive map that allows people to find places to obtain food in Brown, Door, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc Counties.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Fierce Pharma: Eli Lilly restarts ‘limited’ Twitter posting and advertising, continues to assess social media strategy. “Eli Lilly’s self-imposed exile from Twitter is now over. Six months after the fake account furor drove it from the site, the Big Pharma has begun to tentatively reengage with the platform, resuming limited posting and advertising on its renamed corporate account while continuing to evaluate its strategy.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

TechCrunch: Web Roulette is an addictive, ‘swipeable’ web browser for the TikTok era. “If mindlessly browsing the internet is your preferred way to combat boredom and waste time, the indie app makers behind to-do list app Clear and game Heads Up! have a new product you’ll want to try: Web Roulette, a mobile web browser app for iOS built for the short attention spans of the TikTok era.”

Motherboard: A Developer Made Software to Turn Anyone Into an ‘AI Girlfriend’—Starting With His Own Partner. “Developer Enias Cailliau talks to his girlfriend Sacha on Telegram. She sends him voice memos, texts, and even the occasional selfie. But Sacha isn’t actually real, she’s an AI clone of Cailliau’s real-life girlfriend. Cailliau calls the bot GirlfriendGPT and has now shared his code online for anyone to create their own AI girlfriends too.”

Mashable: All the major generative AI tools that could enhance your worklife in 2023. “…before you attempt to automate your entire worklife, it’s important to know your company’s policies on third party app usage, its stance on AI in general, and the relevant laws, regulations, and disclosure requirements. It’s also important to drill down on some of the fine print, so there’ll be no surprises about how the information you share with generative AI tools is stored and used. With all that out of the way, here’s what’s on offer.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: RomCom malware spread via Google Ads for ChatGPT, GIMP, more. “A new campaign distributing the RomCom backdoor malware is impersonating the websites of well-known or fictional software, tricking users into downloading and launching malicious installers.”

University of Guelph: Digital Privacy in Electronics Repair Industry Worrisome, Says U of G Prof. “Privacy concerns often focus on social media and other online activities, but first-ever research from the University of Guelph reminds users the electronics repair business also has access to your data and the notion of privacy in that industry is little more than a myth.”

Daily Sabah: Social media provokes acts against Syrian refugees in Türkiye: Experts. “As anti-refugee sentiment catches up in Türkiye, social media is at the forefront of misinformation and disinformation targeting migrants. Experts say anonymous accounts on social media platforms are primarily responsible for fuelling violence, particularly toward Syrian refugees who make up the bulk of refugees in the country.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cherokee Phoenix: Language Department works to archive Cherokee language. “During the May Tribal Council Culture Committee meeting, Cherokee Nation Language Department Executive Director Howard Paden provided updates of several projects happening in the language department. The language department has two language apps in the works.”

Bloomberg: Ukraine War May Become a Proving Ground for AI. “Artificial intelligence is, suddenly, everywhere. We are awash in ideas about how we can use AI productively — from agriculture to climate change to engineering to software construction. And, equally, there are plenty of cautionary notes being struck about using AI to control societies, manipulate economies, defeat commercial opponents, and generally fulfill Arthur C. Clarke’s visions of machines dominating man in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Thus far, however, relatively little has been written about the implications of AI on warfare and geopolitics.” 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.

June 1, 2023 at 05:33PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/HZ4pYiq

Mental Health Chatbots, Twitter, Google Maps, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2023

Mental Health Chatbots, Twitter, Google Maps, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Daily Dot: ‘This robot causes harm’: National Eating Disorders Association’s new chatbot advises people with disordering eating to lose weight . “After unionizing, the staff of the National Eating Disorder Association’s (NEDA) support phone line were abruptly fired in March and replaced with a chatbot. Yesterday, many in the larger eating disorder recovery community online tested out the chatbot’s abilities and flagged how it advised them on weight loss.”

The Verge: Twitter is adding crowdsourced fact checks to images. “Twitter is expanding its crowdsourced fact-checking program to include images, shortly after a fake image went viral claiming to show an ‘explosion’ near the Pentagon.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Save Images From Google Maps. “Google Maps provides users with precise and detailed maps and imagery, allowing them to explore the world at their fingertips. Other than viewing locations on the map, users can see images taken by those who have been there. Have you ever found an image you wanted to save but couldn’t? The inability to save images with right-click is one of Google Maps’ limitations, and getting one saved may seem impossible. But there are ways to bypass this limitation, allowing you to save any image on Google Maps.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Desk: Scrapers briefly cause outage at Internet Archive. “On Monday, the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle said the website was down for about an hour after someone using virtual hosts linked back to Amazon Web Services launched ‘tens of thousands of requests’ to download Optical Character Recognition (OCR) files.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Generative Experience Early Complaints & Responses From Google. “Google began to slowly roll out the Google Search Generative Experience on Thursday and I posted many screenshots of what I found. Since then, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, responded to some public complaints and criticism of this new search experience. John Mueller of Google also responded to some questions and complaints.”

WIRED: Why Fake Drake Is Here to Stay . “We talk to Puja Patel, editor in chief of Pitchfork and cohost of The Pitchfork Review, about how AI is taking over our feeds and where it goes from here.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

AFP: Anti-LGBTQ disinformation surges online in East Africa. “Anti-LGBTQ bills in Kenya and Uganda have unleashed an unprecedented wave of online disinformation targeting the community, with experts accusing political leaders of spreading falsehoods that put lives at risk.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Daily Beast: Twitter Fails to Remove Hate Speech By Blue-Check Users: Report. “Twitter is failing to remove 99 percent of hate speech posted by Twitter Blue users, new research has found, and instead may be boosting paid accounts that spew racism and homophobia. Researchers at the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) flagged hate speech to the company in tweets from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers. Four days later, they say, 99 percent of the tweets were still up and none of the accounts had been removed.”

Newswise: Issa-kun, the artificial intelligence haiku poet. “Associate Professor Tomohisa Yamashita and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Harmonious Systems Engineering (Harmo Lab, Faculty of Information Science and Technology) devote their research to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the benefit of human happiness. One of their breakthroughs is the birth of Issa-kun, a haiku generator.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Courthouse News Service: Comedic history found in sobering tale of medieval scribe’s private library. “Centuries before ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ hit theaters, a medieval priest transcribed three brutal tales from a traveling minstrel with one recounting how a deadly run-in with a killer bunny ended with villagers bringing out their dead.” 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.

June 1, 2023 at 12:38AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/hYgTw9v

Congressional Research Service RSS, Block Party, Twitter, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2023

Congressional Research Service RSS, Block Party, Twitter, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Disruptive Library Technology Jester: Congressional Research Service Syndication Feed. “Use your favorite search engine to look for ‘Congressional Research Service RSS or Atom’; you’ll find a few attempts to gather selected reports or comprehensive archives that stopped functioning years ago. And that is a real shame because these reports are good, taxpayer-funded work that should be more widely known. So I created a syndication feed in Atom.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Popular anti-troll tool Block Party shuts down. “Last week, Twitter launched a new API subscription tier that was supposedly meant for ‘startups.’ Instead of drawing startups in, though, it’s already claiming victims. Block Party, a popular anti-harassment tool, has now gone on ‘indefinite hiatus.'”

Axios: Twitter only worth 33% of what Musk-led investors paid, Fidelity says . “In Fidelity’s latest Twitter markdown, the financial services giant estimated in a monthly report of portfolio valuations that the company is now worth about $15 billion, or 33% of the October purchase price, per a Bloomberg assessment Tuesday.”

Engadget: Bluesky now lets you choose your own algorithm. “Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized Twitter alternative, has released one of its most significant updates to date: the ability for users to choose their own algorithms. The service, which is still in a closed beta, released its ‘custom feeds’ feature, which allows people to subscribe to a range of different algorithms and make their own for others to follow.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Inside Sudan’s War, ‘There’s Another War for Art’. “Dozens of Sudanese artists and curators have fled their studios and galleries in the capital, jeopardizing thousands of artworks and imperiling an art scene central to the 2019 revolution.”

Search Engine Journal: Executive Director Of WordPress On 20 Years Of Innovation. “On May 27, 2023, WordPress celebrates 20 years of extraordinary growth. It powers approximately 43% of all websites and is the leading content management system by far. How did WordPress achieve this milestone and will it be able to continue as arguably the most successful open source project ever?”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Minnesota enacts right-to-repair law that covers more devices than any other state . “It doesn’t cover video game consoles, medical gear, farm or construction equipment, digital security tools, or cars. But in demanding that manuals, tools, and parts be made available for most electronics and appliances, Minnesota’s recently passed right-to-repair bill covers the most ground of any US state yet.”

Politico: Russia’s Wagner Group uses Twitter and Facebook to hunt new recruits. “Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group has been using Twitter and Facebook to recruit medics, drone operators and even psychologists to aid fighting operations, including in Ukraine, according to exclusive research seen by POLITICO. Job ads for Wagner, which has mercenaries operating in several countries, have reached nearly 120,000 views on the two social media platforms over the last ten months, according to Logically, a U.K. disinformation-focused research group.”

Reuters: Dutch parliament chair calls on Twitter to prevent threatening messages on platform. “The chairwoman of the Dutch parliament on Wednesday called on Twitter to act to stop threats being broadcast on the social media platform against the country’s lawmakers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Sidney Morning Herald: Anti-Voice accounts on Twitter ‘abusive with impunity’ by using false identities. “The most active Twitter accounts opposing the Indigenous Voice to parliament are people using false identities who are stoking an increasingly divisive online campaign, rather than computerised ‘bots’, an analysis reveals.”

University of Portsmouth: New research uses AI to analyse propaganda tweets on Iranian nuclear deal. “Thousands of state-sponsored propaganda tweets on the Iranian nuclear deal have been analysed using artificial intelligence by experts at the University of Portsmouth.”

The Conversation: AI is helping us read ancient Mesopotamian literature. “The primary objective of the eBL project is to advance the understanding of Babylonian literature by reconstructing it to the fullest extent possible. Additionally, the project aims to provide a user-friendly platform containing extensive transliterations of cuneiform tablet fragments, along with a robust search tool, to address the abiding problem of the fragmented nature of Mesopotamian literature.” 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.

May 31, 2023 at 05:33PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/T54Aiv1

Asteroid Mining, San Francisco Political History, AI in Classrooms, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 30, 2023

Asteroid Mining, San Francisco Political History, AI in Classrooms, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 30, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Phys .org: Want to be an asteroid miner? There’s a database for that. “Asteroid mining is slowly but surely coming closer to reality. Many start-ups and governmental agencies alike are getting in on the action. But plenty of tools that would help get this burgeoning industry off the ground are still unavailable. One that would be particularly useful is a list of potential candidate asteroids to visit. While the information has been available in various places, no one has yet combined it into a single, searchable database until now.”

Beyond Chron: 40 Years That Shaped San Francisco: The New [Tenderloin Housing Clinic] Archive. “The archive may be the largest source of stories on how San Francisco went from never passing a tenant ballot measure until 1992 to now having the nation’s strongest tenant protection laws. The city also has the most powerful protections for SRO hotels and rental housing.”

EVENTS

United Nations: UNESCO unveils new AI roadmap for classrooms. “The UN convened the first ever global meeting with education ministers from around the world to explore risks and rewards of using chatbots in classrooms, announcing on Friday a new roadmap to chart a safer digital path for all.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Review Geek: Brave Invents a Convenient Alternative to Incognito Browsing. “The Brave Browser 1.53 update, which should arrive in the coming weeks, introduces a feature called ‘Off the Record’ or ‘OTR.’ The idea is pretty simple; websites can mark themselves as ‘sensitive,’ and when visited, users will have the option to view this site without leaving a paper trail.”

USEFUL STUFF

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

WBZ: One Salem Museum Looks For Social Media Savvy Student For New Program. “One Salem museum is looking for someone with a knack for TikTok to join their team as part of a new program. Peabody Essex Museum is hiring for its first-ever TikTok Creator and Residence Program to get the museum seen from a different perspective.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hill: Ocasio-Cortez says fake Twitter account impersonating her. “The account, which has amassed nearly 100,000 followers and is dubbed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody), has tweeted a number of times with false or misleading statements while claiming to be the congresswoman from New York.”

Bloomberg Law: US Supreme Court Turns Away Social Media Sex Trafficking Case. “The US Supreme Court turned away an appeal from victims of child pornography who claimed Reddit Inc. knowingly facilitates and benefits from images of child sexual abuse. The justices without comment left in place a ruling that affirmed Reddit can’t be held liable for violating sex trafficking laws when people use its platform to post pictures of minors being abused.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stuff New Zealand: To combat AI this election, we need to rediscover the art of conversation. “ChatGPT, the AI engine at the centre of the current controversies around machine intelligence, itself suggests the negative impacts could be disinformation and manipulation, deepfake technology, biased algorithms, voter profiling and microtargeting – proving that ChatGPT might be more self-aware than the average beltway politician.”

Yale: New AI platform aims to improve disaster response. “Picture this: a magnitude 7.2 earthquake strikes San Francisco in the dead of night. As local and federal officials scramble to assess the damage and plan a response, they have a sophisticated new dashboard in front of them with real-time, on-the-ground data—informed by commercial satellite imagery and Tweets, with analysis by artificial intelligence.” 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.

May 31, 2023 at 01:06AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/JZShfjx

Belgium’s Botanical Gardens, Kentucky Public Health, War of 1812 Pension Files, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, May 30, 2023

Belgium’s Botanical Gardens, Kentucky Public Health, War of 1812 Pension Files, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, May 30, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brussels Times: Belgium’s botanical gardens and arboretums unveil massive online database. “The new website – a global first on this scale – makes 83,000 plants belonging to 25,000 different species and varieties from 25 botanical gardens and arboretums available at the click of a button. Visitors can view technical data sheets on each plant which detail their main characteristics, their origin and their location in the botanical garden in question.”

News-Enterprise (Kentucky): New website tracks county-by-county data on health factors. “The state Department for Public Health has launched a new resource for tracking a variety of topics that affect health in Kentucky…. topics include air quality, asthma, birth defects, cancer, childhood lead poisoning, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, carbon-monoxide poisoning, climate and weather, drinking water, heat-related illness, radon gas and reproductive and birth outcomes.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Fold3: War of 1812 Pension Files Digitization Moves Forward!. “We have some exciting news to share. Ancestry® and the National Genealogical Society® have recently finalized a contract with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to resume digitization of the War of 1812 Pension Files. Like so many other things, this ongoing project came to a screeching halt during the closure of NARA due to COVID-19.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Reuters: Vatican chastises bishops who stoke division on social media. “The Vatican urged bishops and high-profile lay Catholic leaders on Monday to tone down their comments on social media, saying some were causing division and stoking polemics that harmed the entire Church.”

Hold the Front Page: Editor calls for regional daily’s archive to go back online. “An editor whose newspaper’s archive disappeared from the web without explanation two months ago has called for it to go back online. Eastern Daily Press editor Richard Porritt has told readers he is ‘pushing’ for a revival of the Local Recall project, which was launched by Archant with Google funding in 2020 but went offline earlier this year.”

Slashgear: TikTok Users Are Reimagining Alternative Human Histories With Generative AI . “New AI trends just kept coming; the latest one is very thought-provoking and creative. TikTokers have created viral videos with pictures and accompanying textual descriptions of what the world would look like if human history were changed. Most of these videos try to explore different narratives by changing important details of specific historical events, for example, the victors of a pretty significant conflict in human history.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Here’s What Happens When Your Lawyer Uses ChatGPT. “A lawyer representing a man who sued an airline relied on artificial intelligence to help prepare a court filing. It did not go well.”

University of Arizona: UArizona researcher at the forefront of Indigenous data sovereignty. “The concept known as IDSov emphasizes Indigenous Peoples’ right to control data about their people, lands and cultures. Stephanie Russo Carroll, associate director of the University of Arizona Native Nations Institute, has focused her career on encouraging institutions to adopt policies and practices that recognize that right.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NiemanLab: Seeing stories of kindness may counteract the negative effects of consuming bad news. “During the pandemic, multiple studies linked news consumption to poorer mental health, documenting symptoms of depression, anxiety, hopelessness and worry. In our research, we found that spending as little as 2-4 minutes on Twitter or YouTube reading about the pandemic affected people’s moods adversely. However, our latest study has found that looking at positive news stories — specifically, videos and articles featuring acts of kindness — can actually counteract the ill-effects of seeing negative news stories.”

Poynter: Pink slime from AI content farms is a poor substitute for real journalism. “It’s pink slime on steroids. I’m writing, of course, about the creators of AI content farms that quickly churn out content related to current events using generative AI language-bots, like Open AI’s Chat GPT and Google’s Bard. A May 1 investigation by NewsGuard, an online trust-rating platform for news, found more than 49 such AI-generated content sites in seven languages: English, Tagalog, Portuguese, Thai, French, Czech and Chinese.”

Notre Dame News: The metaverse can lead to better science. “One Notre Dame researcher says we should look beyond the hype to see how virtual reality can make scientists more effective. But to realize the benefits, researchers must also plan well and avoid potential pitfalls.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The Atlantic: Life Is About to Come With Subtitles. “‘How does that feel?’ I saw the captioned words right after Alex uttered them. Because I have always watched videos with closed captions on, my initial thought was that he’d stepped out of a TV screen to talk to me.” 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.

May 30, 2023 at 05:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/bRrZ5U4

Yom Kippur War, 2020 Census Demographics, Proton Family Plan, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 29, 2023

Yom Kippur War, 2020 Census Demographics, Proton Family Plan, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Times of Israel: ‘Egypt, Syria are coordinating’: IDF estimates on eve of Yom Kippur War declassified. “The Defense Ministry on Sunday launched a website hosting dozens of newly declassified documents, images, videos and other files from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in honor of the conflict’s 50th anniversary later this year.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

US Census Bureau: Census Bureau Releases New 2020 Census Data on Age, Sex, Race, Hispanic Origin, Households and Housing. “Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released the 2020 Census Demographic Profile and Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (DHC). These products provide the next round of data available from the 2020 Census, adding more detail to the population counts and basic demographic and housing statistics previously released for the purposes of congressional apportionment and legislative redistricting.”

How-To Geek: Proton’s Family Plan Offers a Suite of Privacy Tools and Cloud Storage. “Families searching for a privacy-focused alternative to Google One now have at least one option. Proton just launched a family bundle of its own, which includes access to Proton’s full suite of apps and plenty of cloud storage.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech. “Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.”

Motherboard: Captcha Is Asking Users to Identify Objects That Don’t Exist. “People trying to use Discord are being asked to identify an object that does not exist. The object in question is a ‘Yoko,’ which appears to be a kind of mix between a snail and a yoyo.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Driver’s Licenses, Addresses, Photos: Inside How TikTok Shares User Data. “The profusion of user data on Lark alarmed some TikTok employees, especially since ByteDance workers in China and elsewhere could easily see the material, according to internal reports and four current and former employees. Since at least July 2021, several security employees have warned ByteDance and TikTok executives about risks tied to the platform, according to the documents and the current and former workers.”

Merco Press: Brazilian gov’t, Google team up to filter hate speech. “Brazil’s Ministry of Racial Equality (MIR) and Google will develop a filter to prevent hate speech, intolerance, and racism to be disseminated through the internet, Agencia Brasil reported. The South American country’s authorities contacted the internet giant after becoming aware of a video game available through the multinational technology company’s app store in which the user acted as a ‘slave owner.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Sofia Globe: Diplomacy by disinformation: Russian embassies’ role in Kremlin’s information war. “On Twitter, for example, the overall number of posts by Russian diplomatic missions increased by 26 per cent in just a month after the war began. This is according to the Hamilton Dashboard – a database created by the German Marshall Fund to track the public messages coming from Russia and other states through media and social networks. The data shows also that the number of reactions and retweets of the Russian embassies’ posts over the same interval grew by over 200 per cent, while the disinformation in them became more blatant and aggressive.”

The Conversation: DIY degree? Why universities should make online educational materials free for all. “My proposal – also outlined in this journal article – is that a proportion of educational resources generated by publicly funded universities should be made public and freely available. This could radically expand opportunity and flexibility and potentially allow students to design their own degrees, by doing multiple different units from different universities.”

McGill University: Mapping the genetic history of French Canadians through space and time. “A new McGill University-led study is now providing insight into the complex relationship between human migration and genetic variation, using a unique genealogical dataset of over five million records spanning 400 years to unravel the genetic structure of French Canadian populations.” 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.

May 30, 2023 at 12:08AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/gqheIpL