WWII Alderney, Green Bay Estuary, Project IDX, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
BBC: Website set up for Alderney Nazi death camp review. “A dedicated website has been launched, external to share the latest research as part of a review into the number of deaths in Alderney during World War Two. The island – along with the rest of the Channel Islands – was occupied by Germany and housed four forced/slave labour sites, including the concentration camp Lager Sylt.”
University of Wisconsin Green Bay: Green Bay Estuary digital archives collection launch. “UW-Green Bay is the state lead for the designation of a Green Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR). As a part of that designation process, UW-Green Bay and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources partnered to create the Green Bay Estuary Digital Archives Collection, which includes original materials related to the region’s water history, science, and cultural impact from the UW-Green Bay Archives collections. The digital collection seeks to tell the story of the Green Bay Estuary through photographs, postcards, maps, oral history interviews, and historical records.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TechCrunch: Google launches Project IDX, a new AI-enabled browser-based development environment. “Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue, and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works.”
Mashable: OpenAI launches webcrawler GPTBot, and instructions on how to block it . “OpenAI has launched a web crawler to improve artificial intelligence models like GPT-4. Called GPTBot, the system combs through the Internet to train and enhance AI’s capabilities. Using GPTBot has the potential to improve existing AI models when it comes to aspects like accuracy and safety, according to a blog post by OpenAI.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Washington Post: Fleeing Elon Musk’s X, the quest to re-create ‘Black Twitter’. “Prominent Black users are now moving to other sites, attempting to re-create Black Twitter on a dizzying array of emerging services, from Mastodon to Meta’s just-launched Threads. Smaller apps also have cropped up or gained users, including the safety-focused Spoutible and Black-owned Fanbase and Somewhere Good. The latest entrant is Spill, a Twitter alternative launched in June by a Black Twitter executive — one of many fired by Musk.”
Mexico News Daily: The Herculean task of digitizing Mexico’s vast Indigenous history. “The challenge of the 21st century is how to convert over a century of audio, video, text and more into digital formats before it is too late. In the thick of this for Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous People (INPI) is head archivist Octavio Murillo Álvarez de la Cadena and his staff, who say that their work is particularly important because ‘Indigenous peoples have been historically marginalized,’ not to mention that many Indigenous cultures are threatened with disappearing or complete assimilation.”
Gyrovague: archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet. “Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, odds are you’ve already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, and you’ll get back a snapshot of the page, full content included.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
University of Maryland: UMD Researchers Uncover Privacy Risks in Cellphones Won at Police Auctions. “Their recent study found that many of the phones sold at police property auction houses—which sell devices seized in criminal investigations or that have gone unclaimed from lost-and-found inventories—are not properly wiped of personal data. The study, conducted over two years with cellphones bought from the largest police auction house in the U.S., uncovered troves of personal information from previous owners that potentially put them at risk of harm from identity theft to blackmail.”
New York Times: Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match. “Porcha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.”
The Hill: Georgia Republicans eyeing legislation requiring parents’ permission for kids’ social media accounts. “A duo of Georgia Republicans have announced a legislative push to require children to have their parents’ permission to use certain social media accounts. In a news conference Monday, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones (R) and state Senate Majority Caucus Chairman Sen. Jason Anavitarte (R) said they plan to introduce the bill during the state’s 2024 legislative session.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Financial Mirror (Cyprus): Digital reunification of Swedish Archaeological Mission. “Academics from Cyprus and Sweden intend to digitally reconnect the findings of the Swedish Archaeological Mission, undertaken on the island from 1927 to 1931, but the items are held in separate collections. According to the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), half of the Cypriot archaeological finds are exhibited in Stockholm and the other half in Nicosia since the mission took place.”
North Carolina State University: A New Weapon in the War on Robocall Scams. “The new tool, SnorCall, essentially records all robocalls received on the monitored phone lines. It bundles together robocalls that use the same audio, reducing the number of robocalls whose content needs to be analyzed by around an order of magnitude. These recorded robocalls are then transcribed and analyzed by a machine learning framework called Snorkel that can be used to characterize each call.” Good morning, Internet…
Content Creator Management, Affordable Connectivity Program, Google, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Tubefilter: This database helps content creators find managers. “The database–which is free to access–has information about more than 10,000 managers and agencies who work with content creators. Creators can filter search managers/agencies by dozens of content categories, like beauty, education, ASMR, gaming, narrative storytelling, podcasts, pets, food, and more. They can also search by general geographic location and by the size of the management company/agency.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Ars Technica: FCC prepares $75 monthly broadband subsidies for “high-cost” areas. “The Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for $75 monthly subsidies to make broadband service more affordable for low-income households in certain ‘high-cost’ areas. The $75 subsidy will be part of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that generally offers $30 monthly discounts to people with low incomes. The ACP was created by Congress in late 2021 and implemented by the FCC to replace a previous pandemic-related subsidy program.”
The Verge: Google Search can now critique your grammar. “The grammar check feature appears to have been available since at least last month, although Google warns its suggestions might not be 100 percent accurate.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
New York Times: A New Frontier for Travel Scammers: A.I.-Generated Guidebooks. “The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms — like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon’s policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission.”
WCVB: Boston City Hall Plaza Playground’s ‘Cop Slide’ now appears on Google Maps. “‘Cop slide’ appears to be sticking as the unofficial name for the massive slide at Boston’s City Hall Plaza playground. The attraction, which earned its nickname for the viral video of a Boston police officer taking a ride that became a tumble, now appears on Google Maps.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
TorrentFreak: Z-Library Rolls Out Browser Extensions in Anticipation of Domain Name Troubles. “Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has launched browser extensions that should make it easier for users to find the site if its current domains are seized in the future. While the site doesn’t explicitly mention the U.S. Government crackdown, it likely plays a key role in the decision to make these extensions available.”
Bloomberg: India House Approves Privacy Bill in Boon for Google, Meta. “The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 that has been years in the making allows companies to export data to any country except those specified by New Delhi. The move is a boon for global enterprises such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. as it eases data flows and reduces their compliance burdens.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Los Angeles Times: Column: A few sick days made it clear — Twitter is dying, and so is social media as we know it. “For over a decade, logging onto social media — especially Twitter — has been among the first steps of the day for countless professionals, students, and the very online; a way to instantaneously reenter the fray; get up to date on the latest news, trends and memes. Over the years, despite the chaos that tumbled down its feed, it became an orienting force; a way that we parsed and organized information for the coming day, or week. That force is, for all intents and purposes, extinguished.”
FedScoop: State Department shutters AI-based project that aimed to forecast violence and COVID-19. “The State Department is no longer pursuing an artificial intelligence project that aimed to ‘test the statistical relationship between social media activity overseas and activity by violent extremist organizations,’ an agency spokesperson told FedScoop. The shuttered pilot is one of several initiatives disclosed in the agency’s AI use case inventory and is still listed on the State Department website.”
Fast Company: Google Maps has become an eyesore. 5 examples of how the app has lost its way. “Google Maps still holds around 80% of the mobile market. But in recent years, I’ve found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the Google Maps experience, especially when it comes to general navigation and exploration of a map area. Here are the five main reasons Google Maps has become a cluttered, frustrating mess—and why I find myself turning to Apple Maps more often.” Good afternoon, Internet…
Scientific Data: ReCANVo: A database of real-world communicative and affective nonverbal vocalizations . “Here, we present ReCANVo: Real-World Communicative and Affective Nonverbal Vocalizations – a novel dataset of non-speech vocalizations labeled by function from minimally speaking individuals. The ReCANVo database contains over 7000 vocalizations spanning communicative and affective functions from eight minimally speaking individuals, along with communication profiles for each participant.”
USEFUL STUFF
Smashing Magazine: Designing Accessible Text Over Images: Best Practices, Techniques, And Resources (Part 1). “In this two-part series of articles, Hannah Milan covers the best practices when using various accessible text over images techniques for designing your web and mobile app content. These practices can help you to make the text over images more accessible while retaining an aesthetically pleasing look. Get ready to deep-dive through the subtle changes in your design, such as the text’s position, size, and background style, and explore the importance of using real text for accessibility purposes, as opposed to using images of text.”
WIRED: How to Automatically Delete Passcode Texts on Android and iOS. “IT’S NOT ALWAYS easy juggling digital accounts when you’re signed up to dozens of them—or perhaps even hundreds (you know who you are). While password managers can ease some of the strain, we’re also big fans of two-factor authentication, which helps those services make sure you are who you say you are. That’s where passcodes come in.”
Cabin Radio: Google and Apple aren’t sure if the highway’s open, either. “Head spinning from the number of recent NWT highway closures brought on by nearby wildfires? You aren’t alone. Major tech companies seem to be struggling to stay on top of the situation, too. Early on Saturday, several Yellowknife residents reported an inability to plan any Google Maps route to or from Yellowknife involving Highway 3.”
The Hill: Wisconsin judge orders release of records on fake elector. “A judge ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) on Friday to release records related to one of its members accused of posing as a fake elector in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 election results for former President Trump.”
CBS News: Cyberattack causes multiple hospitals to shut emergency rooms and divert ambulances. “Cybercriminals attacked the computer systems of a California-based health care provider causing emergency rooms in multiple states to close and ambulance services to be redirected. The ransomware attack happened at Prospect Medical Holdings of Los Angeles, which has hospitals and clinics in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas. Prospect Medical is investigating how the breach happened and is working on resolving the issue, the company said in a statement Friday.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Bleeping Computer: New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy. “A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%. When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.”
Wall Street Journal: Why ChatGPT Is Getting Dumber at Basic Math. “But new research released this week reveals a fundamental challenge of developing artificial intelligence: ChatGPT has become worse at performing certain basic math operations. The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
Hackaday: Browser-Based Robot Dog Simulator In ~800 Lines Of Code. “[Sergii] has been learning about robot simulation and wrote up a basic simulator for a robodog platform: the Unitree A1. It only took about 800 lines of code to do so, which probably makes it a good place to start if one is headed in a similar direction.” Good morning, Internet…
Mastodon’s Search Limitations Are Good and Can Be Used For Good
By ResearchBuzz
I don’t know if it’s because it’s Monday or because it’s way too humid to exercise outside and I just exercised outside anyway, but I find myself especially irritated at all the complaining about Mastodon search I keep seeing. You can’t search Mastodon across multiple instances! It’s terrible to not have full-text search! Etc etc etc.
First of all, you can search Mastodon across multiple instances. I know this because I made tools to do it. More about them later. Second, it’s not terrible that search is limited to hashtags only. In fact, it’s good.
In this article I’m going to look at the ways Mastodon’s search is limited and why those limitations are good. Then, I’m going to look at Mastodon’s extremely-open API and show you some ways that I have used it to make useful search tools that abide with, and indeed make the most of, Mastodon’s search limitations.
Mastodon’s Hashtag-Only Search
If you’ve spent any time posting on Twitter, you’ve probably had this experience: You post something or reply to someone and a stranger enters your conversation. Sometimes this is a good thing – maybe they’re an expert or they have a similar interest. Sometimes, however, it’s a bad thing. The third-party has an axe to grind about a topic you’re discussing or worse, it’s a bot designed to attack/solicit/annoy any post with certain keywords in it. What started out as a conversation, or an attempt to make community online, ends in a lot of noise and probably lots of people/bots being blocked.
This happens on Twitter because until relatively recently there has only been one public post volume: loud. You could lock your account and interact only with your followers, or you could post to the world, have your tweets searchable, and leave yourself open to unpleasant interaction. It’s only been recently that Twitter has tried to create curated audience spaces via Twitter Circles; unfortunately the feature has had some privacy issues.
By limiting its search to hashtags, Mastodon makes public conversation opt-in. If you don’t use hashtags, your content is not findable in an aggregate. (I’m saying that to distinguish from the fact that your content is still available as an RSS feed, possibly via local instance search, etc.) You can choose to have quieter, instance-level or follower-level conversations in a way that makes them unknowable to the greater public of Mastodon.
And that’s good because it’s a much better allegory for public interaction. If you go to a bar or a party, it’s rare that everyone there is in one group talking. Usually there’s a bunch of groups, or one big loud group and several smaller groups, and so on. Searching for hashtags and hashtags only makes it possible to both cultivate groups of like minded people via an aggregate search and leave them privacy to create and maintain online community.
You might be surprised I feel this way about full-text versus hashtag search. After all, I’m a search engine and online information collection nerd. Wouldn’t I find hashtag-only search inefficient? Wouldn’t I want to full-text search all the things?
Well, no. Because Mastodon is not Google or any other full-text engine, nor should it be. It is a platform for community and conversation. Just as conversations do not echo in an enclosed space forever, conversation search should be somewhat ephemeral.
Mastodon Search Lets Conversations Live a Natural Life Cycle
Twitter has for a long time tried to position itself as the place where life happened. Where official accounts made their official statements – no need to visit their Web site, Twitter’s all you need. Where the famous people clapped back or sometimes got the worst of it from us unwashed masses. Where news happens in real time and gets repudiated or joked about or responded to by everybody.
Mastodon, as a distributed network, can’t take Twitter’s place as some kind of constantly-written history book (which, again, is a good thing.) Conversations start, they exist, they die, they vanish. Participants in conversations have the means to do personal archiving if they wish (via RSS feeds of participants and public instance feeds) but Mastodon makes more general, impersonal information aggregation difficult, as it should be on a conversational platform.
Remember, social media as a cultural phenomenon is less than 20 years old. Normalizing full-text search and retention on conversational platforms means confronting issues like the postdoc who doesn’t qualify for a grant because when they were fifteen they said on Facebook that so-and-so has a tonker like a pool noodle. Aside from that, people are different over time. They age, they grow, they change their minds. Do you really want to have to repeatedly check all your online conversations for opinions you no longer have out of fear that someone may ask you to support your argument that James Patterson is the greatest writer in the history of the world?
People say stupid things when they’re being mean, when they’re being ignorant, and when they honestly intend well and their brain misfires. Even on a conversational platform with ephemeral search, the mean statements can be held accountable. Mean people, when they are mean over and over and over, contribute nothing to the community and make themselves known as people who contribute nothing to the community and therefore can be avoided/blocked/muted.
On the other hand, people who make human communication errors and are allowed to have them expire can continue to exist within the community (or contribute to the community) without building a reputation of errors or of having one-off errors held against them.
(I understand that one person’s communication error can cause deep offense in another person. I don’t mean to trivialize that at all. By saying that I think the community as a whole should be more tolerant of communication errors via ephemeral search doesn’t mean I think the recipient of the error should be tolerant.
If someone says something awful to you on Mastodon – if someone says ANYTHING to you on Mastodon – neither you nor the people around you are obligated to assess their intentions before you mute them, block them, yeet them into the sun, or otherwise banish them from your social space. Doing so is neither aggressive nor an act of censorship; it is taking appropriate responsibility for one’s online experience andshould be lauded. Offense can be caused by one action, is subjective, and should have an option for immediate individual (muting/blocking/yeeting) response. Offensiveness, on the other hand, is a pattern of behavior (or a single particularly-outrageous act) that is more easily assessed and dealt with at a community (moderator) level. )
Mastodon’s hashtag-only search is good for the platform and I believe it will be good for developing online community as well. Further, Mastodon’s extremely open API makes all kinds of search tools possible. I have been having a ball for the last few weeks exploring that, and I’m nowhere near finished.
Making Mastodon’s Hashtag-Only Search Work Better
Mastodon’s search is limited by hashtags, but it’s also expanded by Mastodon’s open, information-packed API. Instead of complaining about what we can’t do with Mastodon’s search, a better tactic is to explore the API and start experimenting with the huge amount of material it gives you.
I have been using a combination of the Mastodon API and the Instances.Social API to create tools that make the most of Mastodon’s API and the hashtag search limitation. There are a dozen of them available, free and ad-free, at MastoGizmos.com . I want to talk about a few here and how, even when your search is limited to just hashtags, you can use Mastodon’s API data to get powerful results for your queries.
As I noted earlier, social media as a cultural phenomenon is less than 20 years old. But in that time period we as a culture have gained a lot of knowledge about how it works. We know about replies and reposts and favorites and shares.
Yet it’s rare that we’re able to apply that knowledge to a social media search. If we search Twitter we can get stories that are recent and stories that are “Top,” for some reason, but if we want to search specifically by retweets, likes, and favorites, we have to dig down into the advanced search. (Twitter’s advanced search used to be right up front, but it seems like Twitter’s making it a little more obscure these days.)
Mastodon’s API includes information about reposts, likes, and favorites, making it easy to narrow down your search even while using hashtags as queries. That’s what I did with Mastodon Social Signal Search.
MSSS lets you specify a hashtag and then filter the results by specifying that they have a minimum of up to 4 replies, reposts, or favorites. (I chose 4 because Mastodon is not a large network compared to other platforms and I did not want to offer a larger maximum and have people searching via filters that constantly return no results.) Further, the results show the number of replies, reposts, and favorites both via text and a green bar. (Results with the highest social activity levels are shown first.)
I had a little trouble with this tool because I wasn’t sure how to define the pool of instances to be searched. On one hand, I wanted to search enough instances that I could get results for a search for OpenSource with at least four reposts and replies. On the other hand, I didn’t want to produce an overwhelming number of results when someone’s looking for #beer posts with 2 replies.
How I handled it was by using the user preferences to determine the number of instances to be searched. (Basically, (number of preferences * 10) + 10.) That’s another advantage of creating search on a distributed network; you can generate data pools on the fly in all kinds of different ways. In this case I’m changing the number of instances I’m searching, but for other tools on MastoGizmos the instances to be searched are filtered by language, or by whether they’re open to new users or not.
Some users may find searching a limited number of instances to be unsatisfying because it isn’t “all Mastodon.” The thing is I’m not sure we can get “all” anywhere anymore. Is Google displaying every last result for your keyword search from every page they’ve ever indexed? I suspect the Web is way too big for that now. Like Google I want my search to focus ideally on quality results. By starting my search via the larger instances (and sometimes limiting it there depending on what I’m doing) I can use their activities and moderation to filter for posts with useful social signals.
But does every Mastodon search require that you restrict the number of instances you search for best results? No, you can narrow your results in other ways, like via verified users.
Mastodon’s verification system is different from Twitter’s. Instead of a centralized system that dispenses verification, users can verify themselves via placing a specially-formatted link on their Web site. (You can learn more about that here.) Though it’s not as thorough an identity check as, say, looking at a driver’s license, it’s still a method to filter our results away from fraudsters and toward expertise. Of course, this search only works as well as the number of people across Mastodon choose to verify themselves, but I find that even now I can get pretty good results with Madeline’s Mastodon Search, which searches across 200 instances.
Madeline’s Mastodon Search (named after Madeline Albright; 100 points if you get the joke) restricts its results to posts from users who have verified at least one link in their bio. Results are grouped by the domain of the verified link; users choose a domain from a dropdown menu to see search results.
Because everybody can get verified on Mastodon, verification becomes less about status and gatekeeping and more about a useful enhancement for your search results. As in the case above, where I’m filtering the #news hashtag by a known news organization (ProPublica), you can see how applying a verified-identity filter to a hashtag that might otherwise be fraught with disinformation can protect you and make your search results less misleading.
For my last example of how Mastodon’s hashtag search can be applied differently I want to focus on presentation, not filtering. Mastodon’s hashtag search, with its focus on meaningful, informative words, is an excellent candidate for a visual instead of a text presentation of search results. Like for example in a tag cloud.
KebberCloud is not so much a search tool as a Mastodon exploration tool. Specify a hashtag you want to search and choose from one of ten randomish instances provided by the Instances.Social API. KebberCloud will do a search for your hashtag on that instance and generate a cloud of all hashtags that appear in your search results. Clicking on a hashtag in the cloud opens a new tab with a search for that hashtag on that instance.
KebberCloud helps me when I’m not sure what hashtags would be most useful for my search. Even if hashtags in the results cloud aren’t related to my query in a way that’s immediately obvious, they’re still giving me ideas about how other people are thinking and talking about my search topic. Furthermore, the drop-down menu and visual presentation of the hashtags makes it easy to explore with quick glances and without slogging through a long list of words.
Conclusion
It is the case that Mastodon and its distributed structure looks different from the centralized social media we’re used to, as does its search. That doesn’t mean that Mastodon’s search should be considered inferior or even faulty. By limiting search to hashtags, Mastodon has created a way to clearly delineate a way to opt-in to public conversations while defaulting to more private ones. By offering an open, extensive API, Mastodon has created a vast number of ways to filter search results in meaningful, productive ways. We have barely begun to scratch that surface. Less complaining, more exploring!
August 8, 2023 at 01:24AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/8kJdYHp
Philippines Cultural Heritage, FemBase Kenya, North Carolina Breastfeeding Support, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
PhilStar: NHCP kicks off History Month with free online archive launch. “Want to read Jose Rizal’s ‘El Filibusterismo’ in Tagalog and Ilokano or learn the rich history of Bohol and Cavite? The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) got historians and history buffs covered through the National Memory Project (NMP). The website, featuring digitized records and publications about Philippine and local history, went live on Tuesday, August 1, to kick off this year’s History Month.”
Music in Africa: Goethe-Institut Kenya launches database for female creatives. “Goethe-Institut Kenya has launched a database for female creatives called FemBase. FemBase aims to connect individuals or organisations looking to engage the services of female creatives in Kenya.”
North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services: New Comprehensive Resource Available to Support Breastfeeding. “The information provided on BreastfeedNC.com is reliable, up-to-date and designed to enhance knowledge and confidence in breastfeeding and pumping. Partners can also learn about techniques to support mothers during breastfeeding and how to foster a supportive environment. For those who struggle with breastfeeding, resources include links to support groups, lactation consultants, lactation education resources and WIC. For those who do not or cannot breastfeed for whatever reason, consulting with their child’s health care provider on what formula to use can help ensure their child receives the right nutrition.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: Shortwave Is the Spiritual Successor to Google’s Inbox. “Enter: Shortwave, a relatively new email app from ex-Google designers. As reviewed by The Verge, Shortwave instantly evokes the experience of using Inbox, down to the UI. The biggest similarity, and the one feature former Inbox users are likely to be excited by, is its use of bundles to group similar emails together.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Washington University in St. Louis: New Grant to Preserve Unseen Interviews with Civil Rights Activists. “The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) awarded the Washington University Libraries Film & Media Archive a grant of $36,275.85 under its Recordings at Risk program to preserve over 100 interviews with civil rights activists.”
South Sound Magazine: Tacoma Public Library Secures Funding for Large-Scale Digitalization Project . “The Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room’s local history and archives center is launching a $200,000 digitization project to digitalize a photo archive of The News Tribune. Once completely digitized, it is estimated that more than 10,000 photographs will have been added to the Northwest Room’s online database.”
BBC: TikTok influencer Mahek Bukhari guilty of murdering men in crash. “A social media influencer and her mother have been found guilty of murdering two men who died when their car was rammed off the road. Saqib Hussain and Hashim Ijazuddin, both 21, died when the car ‘split in two’ near Leicester in February 2022. It happened after Mr Hussain threatened to reveal an affair he and Ansreen Bukhari had been having, jurors heard.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Government of Western Australia: Secure linked data to improve wellbeing of Western Australians. “Up to 75 million unique records containing current and archival data have been linked for the first time as part of a new data linkage platform. Launched today, PeopleWA will revolutionise the way researchers access data, helping to address the State’s most complex social, health, environmental and economic issues.”
Bellingcat: Solving World War II Photo Mysteries With Open Source Techniques. “…the ‘Finding the location WW1 & WW2’ Facebook group seeks to employ geolocation techniques to identify where unknown and undated images from the first and second World Wars were taken. Recently, Bellingcat was able to uncover new information about a series of photos from the International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) archives that were posted to this Facebook group. The techniques used to locate the photos are easily transferable to other scenarios.” Good afternoon, Internet…
10 Million Names, Global Useful Native Trees, Prehistorical Sites Worldwide, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
PR Newswire: New Project Will Recover the Names of Up to 10 Million People Enslaved in America Before Emancipation and Locate their Living Descendants (PRESS RELEASE). “American Ancestors, a national center for family history, is partnering with family historians, leading African American scholars, and cultural institutions to recover the names of the 10 million people of African descent who were enslaved between the 1500s and 1865 in the territory that is now the United States of America. The project—10 Million Names—will centralize genealogical and historical information about enslaved people of African descent and their families on a free website.”
University of Tübingen: Database with 2,400 prehistoric sites. “Scientists from the research center ROCEEH (“The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans”) have compiled information on 2,400 prehistoric sites and 24,000 assemblages from more than 100 ancient cultures. The digital data collection is available for free to scientists and amateurs and was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE.”
USEFUL STUFF
Digital Inspiration: Emojis in Google Sheets. “Learn how to use emojis in Google Sheets and the challenges they pose during conversion of Google Spreadsheets to PDF files.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
NPR: Movie extras worry they’ll be replaced by AI. Hollywood is already doing body scans. “After four weeks of working as a background actor on the Disney+ series WandaVision during the pandemic, Alexandria Rubalcaba was told by the production crew to report to a tractor trailer. Dozens of other background actors were wrangled to the same site, where, one by one, they were told to step in front of a series of cameras on metal rigs behind glass.”
Hongkiat: Integromat vs. Zapier: Features, Prices, Pros & Cons (2023). “Connecting unrelated applications, making them work together, and automating several manual processes sounds like a lot of work for people, especially for those who have no coding knowledge. But thankfully, tools like Integromat and Zapier exist. These platforms enable users to connect applications easily with minimal coding involved and, in many cases, none at all. This article is for decision makers who want to streamline and optimize their processes. If you’re here, most likely, you’ll benefit from either of these two.”
CBC: National archives to digitize, transfer 6 million pages of Indian day school records, official says. “Canada’s national archives is working to identify, digitize and transfer six million pages of federal Indian day school records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), the department head says. That kind of paper would fill multiple tractor trailers to the brim, said Leslie Weir, librarian and archivist of Canada, who hopes to finish the work in three years time.”
Tokyo Metropolitan Government: Tokyo 2020 Archives Assets actually used in the Tokyo 2020 Games Opening Ceremonies will be exhibited in Yurakucho!. “In order to convey the historical value and social significance of the Tokyo 2020 Games to future generations, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government （TMG） will open a venue on the first floor of SusHi Tech Square in Yurakucho, Tokyo where everyone can see an exhibit of Tokyo 2020 Games assets and experience competitions. In addition, approximately 1,000 archives assets and other physical assets managed by the TMG will be digitized and posted on the Tokyo 2020 Digital Archives website, and some of them will be available for 360 degree panoramic viewing.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Bloomberg: Google Illegally Cut Contract Staffers Who Worked on AI, Union Alleges. “The Alphabet Workers Union accused the internet giant of violating federal labor law, which prohibits retaliation against employees for organizing. More than 70% of the proposed bargaining unit — which includes 118 writers, graphic designers and launch coordinators who create internal and external Google content — were told in July that they will lose their jobs, according to a Thursday filing with the National Labor Relations Board.”
Reuters: Senegal Blocks TikTok in Widening Clampdown on Dissent. “Senegalese authorities on Wednesday blocked access to social media app TikTok, widening a clampdown on dissent days after they dissolved the main opposition party and detained its leader.”
New York Times: What Can You Do When A.I. Lies About You?. “The harm is often minimal, involving easily disproved hallucinatory hiccups. Sometimes, however, the technology creates and spreads fiction about specific people that threatens their reputations and leaves them with few options for protection or recourse. Many of the companies behind the technology have made changes in recent months to improve the accuracy of artificial intelligence, but some of the problems persist.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Fast Company: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is a reminder that social media is not real life. “Of course, toxic online behavior exists in all online communities. But it represents the words of a smaller minority of users within the already small minority of people who post content online. Media narratives that emphasize certain groups as toxic based on online behavior—whether they are describing fandom or politics—fall into the trap of confusing the internet with real life.” Good morning, Internet…
Carol Hardgrove and Hulda Evelyn Thelander, Twitter, CSS and Accessibility, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
University of California San Francisco: New Digital Collections: Carol Hardgrove Papers and Hulda Evelyn Thelander Papers. “The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce the digitization of the Carol Hardgrove papers and the Hulda Evelyn Thelander papers. The digitization of the collections is part of our current grant project, Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics, supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Rolling Stone: X, Formerly Twitter, Seizes @Music Handle From Its Longtime User, Who Is ‘Super Pissed’. “AS ELON MUSK continues Twitter’s confounding rebrand into ‘X,’ the social media platform has now seized the account handle for @Music, much to the chagrin of the username’s original user. X user Jeremy Vaught shared a message the company had sent him on Thursday, notifying him that the account name he created about a year into Twitter’s existence is no longer his as the handle is now affiliated with X Corp.”
USEFUL STUFF
Smashing Magazine: CSS And Accessibility: Inclusion Through User Choice. “It is challenging to accurately understand the preferences of over 7.8 billion people at any given time. Carie Fisher outlines which CSS media features are available for detecting user preferences and how they are used to design and build more inclusive experiences.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
The Verge: Google’s $99 a night company hotel advertises ‘no commute’ as a perk. “Google is offering its employees a new incentive to come into its Mountain View, California office: discounted hotel stays. The company is promoting $99 per night rates for its on-campus hotel to help remote employees transition into a hybrid working schedule, according to a report from CNBC.” This is disturbing.
Ars Technica: “Absurd”: Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale. “Google resisted pleas to extend the lifetime of Chromebooks set to expire as of this June and throughout the summer. Thirteen Chromebook models have met their death date since June 1 and won’t receive security updates or new features from Google anymore. But that hasn’t stopped the Chromebooks from being listed for sale on sites like Amazon for the same prices as before.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Engadget: Google is making it easier to remove your private information from Search. “Google has announced several updates to Search aimed at making it easier for people to control information about them that appears in results. The company released a tool last year to help people take down search results containing their phone number, home address or email. Now, the company has updated the ‘results about you’ tool to make it more effective.”
Vox: The AI rules that US policymakers are considering, explained. “AI policy is still pretty virgin terrain in DC, and proposals from government leaders tend to be articulated with lots of jargon, usually involving invocations of broad ideas or requests for public input and additional study, rather than specific plans for action. Principles, rather than programming.”
Techdirt: Legal Subreddit Bans All Ex-Twitter Links Due To Safety Risk. “Elon Musk has decided to reenable accounts suspended for posting CSAM while at the same time allowing the most basic of CSAM scanning systems to break. And, that’s not even looking at how most of the team who was in charge of fighting CSAM on the site were either laid off or left. And, that’s made Ex-Twitter a much riskier site in lots of ways, including for advertisers who have bailed. But also for anyone linking to the site. r/law, a popular subreddit about the law announced last week that it was completely banning links to Twitter for this reason.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
TechCrunch: Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades “A group of researchers said they have found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats — for free. By doing this, the researchers essentially found a way to jailbreak the car.”
University of Michigan: Building reliable AI models requires understanding the people behind the datasets, UMSI researchers say. “Social media companies are increasingly relying on complex algorithms and artificial intelligence to detect offensive behavior online. These algorithms and AI systems all rely on data to learn what is offensive. But who’s behind the data, and how do their backgrounds influence their decisions?” Good afternoon, Internet…
