Friday, August 18, 2023

Google Chrome, Text Extraction, Information Dissemination, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 18, 2023

Google Chrome, Text Extraction, Information Dissemination, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Hacker News: Google Chrome’s New Feature Alerts Users About Auto-Removal of Malicious Extensions. “Google has announced plans to add a new feature in the upcoming version of its Chrome web browser to alert users when an extension they have installed has been removed from the Chrome Web Store. The feature, set for release alongside Chrome 117, allows users to be notified when an add-on has been unpublished by a developer, taken down for violating Chrome Web Store policy, or marked as malware.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Extract Text From Images and PDFs With Google Drive. “There may have been times when you wished you could easily extract and use the text from images, like when researching a project or making a pitch presentation. Perhaps you’ve wanted to grab some notes from PDF files or a quote from a picture online. Using Google Drive, you can extract text from most images and PDF files. You’ll be glad that it’s easy and takes a few clicks. This feature can save you time and enhance your productivity.”

International Journalists’ Network: How to respond to disinformation spread on social media. “The path that disinformation often follows is like a trumpet: it begins in small circles, such as Telegram and WhatsApp groups, or other smaller social networks. As it gains traction, it moves to more open platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, among others. Identifying the spaces in which disinformation circulates can buy us time to prepare before the harmful narratives hit the big social networks and reach hundreds of thousands more people.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Stanford Daily: S.B.F. is leaving campus. But Stanford’s ties to his case are deeper than previously known. “Crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to speak to a Stanford class this winter, The Daily has learned. The topic of the course? Tech ethics. Bankman-Fried wouldn’t have the opportunity to give that lecture, though — instead, before the winter quarter even began, he was placed under house arrest just a stone’s throw away from the lecture hall, confined to a home on campus owned by his parents, Stanford Law School (SLS) professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried.”

Mashable: ‘Zepotha’: The horror movie going viral on TikTok that doesn’t exist. “What is this Zepotha film people can’t stop talking about? It’s a horror movie from the ’80s with one very important twist: it’s not actually real. It is, in fact, a creation of 18-year-old musician and Tiktokker Emily Jeffri, who shared a post over the weekend suggesting the idea of creating a fake horror movie to try and convince people that it’s real — and all the fan culture that goes with it.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Chek News: Langford asks Google to stop redirecting traffic down Finlayson Arm Road. “The City of Langford is pleading with Google to stop directing vehicles down the small, winding Finlayson Arm Road when traffic gets busy. The issue seems to arise when traffic backs up along the Trans-Canada Highway heading into Goldstream Park, particularly on Fridays and Saturdays.”

WIRED: A Huge Scam Targeting Kids With Roblox and Fortnite ‘Offers’ Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight . “THOUSANDS OF WEBSITES belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Heritage algorithms combine the rigors of science with the infinite possibilities of art and design. “The model of democracy in the 1920s is sometimes called ‘the melting pot’ – the dissolution of different cultures into an American soup. An update for the 2020s might be “open source,” where cultural mixing, sharing and collaborating can build bridges between people rather than create divides. Our research on heritage algorithms aims to build such a bridge. We develop digital tools to teach students about the complex mathematical sequences and patterns present in different cultures’ artistic, architectural and design practices.”

Tech Xplore: Europeans want decisive action against disinformation on the Internet. “People in the EU want more to be done in the fight against the deliberate spreading of untrue and fake content on the Internet. Overall, 85% of the EU’s citizens feel that policymakers should do more to prevent the spread of disinformation, while 89% say that the operators of social media platforms should take more action as well.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Newswise: Classic rock music can be recreated from recorded brain activity. “Researchers led by Ludovic Bellier at the University of California, Berkeley, US, demonstrate that recognizable versions of classic Pink Floyd rock music can be reconstructed from brain activity that was recorded while patients listened to the song. Published August 15th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the study used nonlinear modeling to decode brain activity and reconstruct the song, ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’. Encoding models revealed a new cortical subregion in the temporal lobe that underlies rhythm perception, which could be exploited by future brain-machine-interfaces.” 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.



August 19, 2023 at 12:46AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/x9SDoni

A Baker’s Dozen of Mastodon Tools for You

A Baker’s Dozen of Mastodon Tools for You
By ResearchBuzz

A month and a day ago I wrote about MastoGizmos.com, my collection of tools to search and browse #Mastodon. At the time there were eight tools. Now that TweetDeck has vanished behind a paywall and people are talking about social media options again, I wanted to remind you about MastoGizmos and let you know that the site now has thirteen gizmos — JavaScript-driven, one-page apps — for searching and browsing Mastodon. They’re all free, ad-free, and will work on your phone.

Here’s what they are:

MastoTrends

A screenshot of MastoTrends. It's showing six "cards" of information about trending news stories. The layout is just CSS so I think you should be able to see it okay if you're visually-impaired. If that's not the case please let me know.

https://mastogizmos.com/mtrends.html — MastoTrends polls the Instances.Social API, selects ten large instances at random, pulls their trending link lists, and displays them to you.

MastoWindow

A screenshot showing results from MastoWindow. In this case there's a search for the hashtag #botany showing results about a new species from Vietnam, a botany quiz, and I think an announcement.

https://mastogizmos.com/mw.html — Find Mastodon instances by language via Instances.Social, then browse them individually for hashtags. If you want a slow way to get into Mastodon, this is for you. It brings you to explore and browse one instance at a time. (Many of the tools on MastoGizmos are designed to search multiple instances at a time.)

Hashtag Harvest

A screenshot of the first part of Hashtag Harvest. In this case the hashtag searched for was Mastodon, and related hashtags found include fediverse, Twitter, science, johnmastodon, etc.

This is the bottom part of Hashtag Harvest's results, showing accounts that posted several times in search results for the hashtag Mastodon.

https://mastogizmos.com/hh.html — Hashtag Harvest gives you related hashtags for a hashtag you specify. It does this by querying four large Mastodon Instances for your hashtag and aggregating the other hashtags that appear in the results. In addition, Hashtag Harvest also shows you frequently-posting accounts and their details from the search results.

KebberCloud Mastodon

This is a result from KebberCloud Mastodon, showing a tag cloud of the hashtag search "botany" on the instance infosec.exchange. Hashtags include ecology, nature, trees, science, wildlife, biodiversity, etc.

https://mastogizmos.com/kcm.html — KebberCloud Mastodon makes tag clouds out of hashtag search results of individual instances. (The instances are generated via an Instances.social call, so you don’t have to supply your own.) Click on a tag in a cloud to open a instance search for that tag in a new tab.

Gift Article Gazette

A screenshot of Gift Article Gazette, showing a gift article from The New York Times called "For an Atlanta Reporter, a Trump Scoop Long in the Making."

https://mastogizmos.com/gag.html — Gift Article Gazette automatically aggregates articles with the hashtag #GiftArticle across the largest Mastodon instances and displays them to you in a list. Articles are listed by the number of shares and expire after two weeks, so the list changes frequently.

MastoWindow2 

Screenshot showing results for the MastoWindow2 search. The search is for the hashtag RSS and the results are showing for 251 instances.

https://mastogizmos.com/mw2.html — Search for a hashtag across hundreds of Mastodon instances at a time. If you’re searching for an at least marginally-popular hashtag you are going to get LOTS of results.

Two-Hashtag Mastodon

A screenshot showing Two-Hashtag Mastodon. At the top is a search box with inputs for the first and second hashtag you're searching. In this case the search was for the hashtags "rss" and "Mastodon" across 394 instances. 79 results were found.

https://mastogizmos.com/2tags.html — Just what is says on the tin. Searches across hundreds of Mastodon instances for two hashtags at a time. Does not display in order of date and does not display images from posts.

Mastodon Social Signal Search

A screenshot from the Mastodon Social Signal Search. There's a hashtag search box at the top and three dropdowns to let you limit your results by a minimum number of replies, reposts, and favorites (up to 4 of each.) Three cards below show a few of the many search results.

https://mastogizmos.com/msss.html — Mastodon Social Signal Search lets you filter your results by a minimum number of replies/reposts/favorites. How many instances you search across depends on how many options you’re using to filter – it ranges from 10 to 130.

Madeline’s Mastodon Search

A screenshot of Madeline's Mastodon Search. The search filters by verified users, breaks the verification out by domain, and presents it to you in a drop-down list so you end up running a search and then reviewing the verified users by domain.

https://mastogizmos.com/mms.html — Madeline’s Mastodon Search lets you  hashtag search across Mastodon and return results only from those users who have verified at least one link in their Mastodon profile. Verified users are listed by the domain they used to verify. Anybody can verify their links on Mastodon, it’s not a top-down process like it is on Twitter or Facebook.

Mastodon Web Space Search 

A screenshot from the Mastodon Web space search, showing the results for a keyword search by instance (science) with a list of instances and checkboxes, ready to be selected and bundled into a Google search.

https://mastogizmos.com/mwss.html — I quite like Mastodon’s search restrictions to hashtags, but many users don’t. Mastodon Web Space Search lets you search for Mastodon instances on Instances.Social and bundle the instances you find into a Google search. This lets you do full-text searches if you must (assuming the instance is allowing itself to be indexed on Google.)

Mastodon Username Helper

A screenshot showing the results from Mastodon Username Helper. It lists the instance name, profile page URL, RSS feed, hashtag feeds, etc.

https://mastogizmos.com/muh.html — Mastodon usernames can be confusing if you’re not used to decentralized social media. Enter your user name and Mastodon Username Helper will show you your instance name, profile page URL, where your accounts RSS feed can be located, and even where your instance’s hashtag RSS feed is located.

Wikipedia Mastodon Thing

A screesnhot of results for Wikipedia Mastodon Thing. A search for NASA has several results, including for the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and a couple of researchers.

https://mastogizmos.com/wmt.html — Wikidata has, among its thousands of data points, a parameter for Mastodon addresses. Wikimedia Mastodon Thing allows you to keyword search Wikipedia and find pages/people with Mastodon addresses.

RSStodon

A screenshot of RSStodon, which generates RSS feeds for a hashtag. The first text entry is for two-letter language code, and the second text entry is for the hashtag you want to get feeds for.

https://mastogizmos.com/rdon2.html — RSStodon lets you specify a hashtag and a language, and automatically generates on OPML file of RSS feeds for your hashtag across the 10 largest instances using the language you specify. If you want to do some basic Mastodon monitoring without joining an instance, here you go.

 

 



August 18, 2023 at 08:32PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/fNEkUAT

Yiddish Pulp Fiction, Historical NASCAR Races, Oregon Campaign Finance, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, August 18, 2023

Yiddish Pulp Fiction, Historical NASCAR Races, Oregon Campaign Finance, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, August 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Forward: Thousands of Yiddish pulp fiction stories finally seeing the light of day. “Beginning in the 1890s, newspapers, including the Forverts, tried to appeal to a broader audience by publishing popular fiction derisively called ‘shund’ or ‘trash.’ Yiddish authors like Sholem Aleichem and Y.L. Peretz strove to create a national literature. Shund stories, on the other hand, were written to make a profit, veering into the sensational and melodramatic — tales of romance, adventure, anything that would sell.”

Road & Track: NASCAR Just Released Over 1000 Archived Race Broadcasts At Once. “For the past two decades, anyone wanting to watch a historic NASCAR race was best off looking for a video of a VHS tape of a decades-old broadcast uploaded directly to YouTube. That changed this week, with NASCAR uploading a massive archive of over 1000 official broadcasts and condensed races to a new NASCAR classics website. The archive starts with the 1951 race at Daytona Beach and continues all the way through to last month’s Cup Series race at Richmond.” Access is free as far as I can tell.

The Oregonian: Oregon secretary of state to publish database of campaign finance violations . “Oregon’s new secretary of state plans to publish a database with information about campaign finance scofflaws. Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said Monday the new database and other website updates are part of the office’s initiative Clear, which is not an acronym.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CBS Detroit: Ford releases images, brochures for over 300 past concept cars. “The Ford Heritage Vault was launched in June of last year, giving car fans a place to see thousands of photos from the company’s past. The recent addition includes over 1,600 images and brochures for over 300 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury concept cars.”

Search Engine Land: The new Bing has failed to take any market share from Google after six months. “When the new Bing launched, it felt like the dawn of an exciting new era in search. Microsoft seemed to have a legitimate chance to erode some of Google’s dominance and become a truly worthy competitor to Google, thanks to its new conversational and generative AI take on search. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: Two brands suspend advertising on X after their ads appeared next to pro-Nazi content. “At least two brands have said they will suspend advertising on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, after their ads and those of other companies were run on an account promoting fascism. The issue came less than a week after X CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly affirmed the company’s commitment to brand safety for advertisers.”

The Register: Tinker Tailor Soldier Pi? Asus’s ‘NUC-sized’ SBC aims to out-Pi the Raspberry. ” Asus has released a new addition to its Tinker Board line of Arm-based single-board computer (SBC) systems, giving hobbyists and embedded developers another design option with a plethora of ports.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Stockholm Center for Freedom: 13 OnlyFans content creators detained after tossing dollar bills around central İstanbul. “Turkish police have detained 13 content creators from the OnlyFans internet subscription service after public outrage over their tossing dollar bills around central Taksim Square in İstanbul earlier this week, Turkish Minute reported, citing the Serbestiyet news website.”

Teen Vogue: Illinois Just Passed the Country’s First Law Protecting Children of Influencers. “The bill was passed through the Illinois Senate unanimously in March and was signed into law On August 11. The Illinois law will ‘entitle influencers under the age of 16 to a percentage of earnings based on how often they appear on video blogs or online content,’ AP reports. The money must be held in a trust which the child can access when they turn 18. Currently, there are no laws that protect child influencers, or children whose parents post them online for monetary gain.”

Associated Press: Russia fines Google $32,000 for videos about the conflict in Ukraine. “A Russian court on Thursday imposed a 3-million-ruble ($32,000) fine on Google for failing to delete allegedly false information about the conflict in Ukraine. The move by a magistrate’s court follows similar actions in early August against Apple and the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts Wikipedia.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PsyPost: Low self-esteem and high FOMO are psychological mechanisms that play an important role in trolling, study suggests. “New psychology research sheds light on why people engage in online trolling behavior, which involves purposely causing conflict and stress on the internet. The findings, published in Psychological Reports, provide evidence that trolling behavior is more common among those with low self-esteem and a high fear of missing out (FOMO).”

CNBC: Google A.I. researcher says he left to build a startup after encountering ‘big company-itis’. “Llion Jones had a big role at Google, where he worked for almost 12 years. He was one of eight authors of the pivotal Transformers research paper, which is central to the latest in generative artificial intelligence. However, like all of his co-authors, Jones has now left Google.” 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.



August 18, 2023 at 05:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/9fovK1m

Thursday, August 17, 2023

The Nib, Google Business, Data Journalism, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2023

The Nib, Google Business, Data Journalism, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Nib: The Nib magazines are free to download! . “The Nib is wrapping up ten years of publishing and closing down at the end of August. But before we go, we are making all 15 issues of our Eisner and Ignatz award-winning magazine available for anyone to download for free. That’s more than 1,600 pages of comics, including our out of print Secrets, Nature, Food, and Color issues.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google Business Profiles to let you manage your social links. “Google may soon allow businesses and organizations to manage their social media links that show up on their local listing within Google Search and Google Maps. Google added a new help document on how to manage your social links in Google Business Profiles.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Markup: Magic Spreadsheets That Equip the Public. “In The Markup’s first citizen science project, we built tools and an experimental blueprint that enabled anyone to test for internet disparities in the U.S. without having to write a line of code. The same underlying tools are useful for any story that compares a dataset with demographic information from the American Community Survey (ACS). I’ll walk through the decisions we made for our investigation at The Markup in the hopes that this will help you test for neighborhood-level disparities for your next story.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Michigan Daily: ‘I’ve learned a lot’: Donovan Edwards addresses antisemitic retweet. “As Donovan Edwards’ press conference wrapped up on Friday, the junior running back had spoken on a wide variety of topics pertaining to his role with the Michigan football team. He had spoken to his relationship with senior running back Blake Corum, opined on the necessity of maintaining health and even weighed in on the plight of NFL running backs in contract disputes. However, there was one topic that reporters in the room had not yet broached, and when the media had run out of their allotted questions, Edwards stayed behind and chose to address it himself.”

Gizmodo: NYU Professor Locked Out of Twitter After Reportedly Declining to Meet With Elon Musk. “New York University professor and Kara Swisher’s podcasting buddy Scott Galloway voiced his outrage at being banned from posting on Twitter in a Threads post on Tuesday. Galloway claims he’s been locked out of Twitter (aka X) two days after allegedly declining an invitation to meet with the chief Twit himself.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Messenger: A DOJ Crackdown Targets Social Media. “U.S. Justice Department crackdown on the governance of competing companies has led to the resignations of 15 directors from 11 company boards over at least the past eight or nine months. Now it is now focusing on social media.”

Politico: The EU wants to cure your teen’s smartphone addiction. “Countries are now taking the first steps to rein in excessive — and potentially harmful — use of big social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. China wants to limit screen time to 40 minutes for children aged under eight, while the U.S. state of Utah has imposed a digital curfew for minors and parental consent to use social media. France has targeted manufacturers, requiring them to install a parental control system that can be activated when their device is turned on.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Vox: How does Elon Musk get away with it all?. “The vulnerability of Musk’s carefully crafted image helps mask the power he wields: He becomes a victim at the mercy of a wicked press and an ungrateful human race. For the romantic hero, trolling is just one more bad-boy affectation to be stripped away by the right person, by the person who can fix him while he’s busy saving the world. Which surely he will do. Any day now.”

NiemanLab: What a yarn! Journalists are turning to crochet to tell data stories. “If you’ve only seen one crochet data viz project, you’ve probably seen a temperature blanket, where each row is color-coded to reflect the highs and lows for a year. Can this be used for other data? Sure. Some use the technique to visualize their mental health and this TikTok account recently went viral for cataloging her, um, digestive regularity. Yarn has also been used to visualize train delays in Munich, infant sleep patterns, Russian population growth, and daily news feeds.” 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.



August 18, 2023 at 12:30AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3AU78pK

Renewable Energy Materials, Joan Donovan, Genealogy Photography, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2023

Renewable Energy Materials, Joan Donovan, Genealogy Photography, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

National Renewable Energy Laboratory: How Do We Inventory the Materials Needed To Build Wind and Solar Farms?. “Working with partners from other national laboratories, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have created a new database, the Renewable Energy Materials Properties Database (REMPD), which examines materials needs for both wind and solar power plants.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Boston University: Joan Donovan, Nationally Recognized Expert in Misinformation and Disinformation, Joins BU Faculty. “Joan Donovan, a renowned expert in online misinformation and disinformation campaigns, will join Boston University this fall as an assistant professor in the College of Communication. Donovan begins September 1 and will start teaching in the spring. She will hold joint appointments in the Division of Emerging Media Studies and in the journalism department.”

MyHeritage: Introducing PhotoDater™, an Exclusive, Free New Feature to Estimate When Old Photos Were Taken. “Using powerful technology developed by our AI team, PhotoDater™ gives its best guess when a photo was taken. This can help you unlock further clues about who appears in the photo and the event at which it was taken, to solve mysteries in your genealogy research. PhotoDater™ is completely free!”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Government Technology: Stanford Social Media Platform ‘Fizz’ Gaining Popularity. “Formerly known as Buzz, an anonymous social media platform created by Stanford students is gaining traction on college campuses, having expanded to at least 80 schools and brought in $41.5 million in total funding.”

Mashable: Snapchat’s My AI chatbot posted a Story then stopped responding. Users freaked out. . “Snapchat users have reported that the messaging app’s AI chatbot had a few issues on Tuesday night. Specifically, My AI posted a mysterious Story to its profile and no longer responded as usual in text chats, causing more than a few users unease.”

KRQE: Massive New Mexico film archive at risk of being lost. “[Bryan] Konefsky is the one who has been responsible for looking over more than 10,000 film reels for the last seven years. They have been housed in the basement of a University of New Mexico (UNM) Film Department building out in Mesa Del Sol for free, but that won’t be the case in the near future.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: British Museum worker sacked over missing items. “The British Museum in London has sacked a member of staff and police are investigating after treasures were reported ‘missing, stolen or damaged’. Items including gold, jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones were among those found to be missing, stolen or damaged.”

Techdirt: Guinness World Records Did An Automated Copyright Strike Oopsie On YouTubers. “Apparently the wider world is okay with this kind of collateral damage clown show, since it sure doesn’t appear to be changing. The most recent example comes to us courtesy of the Guinness World Records company, which hit at least two YouTubers with copyright strikes for having the phrase ‘World Record’ on their videos. The first to note this publicly was a YouTuber going by ‘Ducky.'”

NBC News: Witnesses of Buffalo mass shooting file rare lawsuit against social media and gun companies. “In a rare legal move, more than a dozen people who last year witnessed a white gunman open fire and kill 10 Black people at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, have sued over the trauma they endured. The lawsuit, brought Tuesday by the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety and exclusively obtained by NBC News, names multiple defendants, including YouTube and Reddit, online spaces where the shooter was allegedly radicalized, as well as the retailer that sold the shooter’s gun and the manufacturer of his body armor.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Oregon: UO researchers make waves by turning ocean data into sound. “For a three-year pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation, Bellona and a national team of researchers have transformed a year of carbon dioxide readings taken off the coast of New England into sound. Their audio exhibit is one of five case studies they created to help museums, aquariums and other informal learning environments make data more accessible.”

Newswise: Nearly 50% of environmentalists abandoned Twitter following Musk’s takeover. “In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter (recently renamed X), which had previously served as the leading social media platform for environmental discourse. Since then, reports a team of researchers in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution on August 15, there has been a mass exodus of environmental users on the platform—a phenomenon that could have serious implications for public communication surrounding topics like biodiversity, climate change, and natural disaster recovery.”

The Guardian: Chinese social media filled with anti-black racist content, says watchdog. “Chinese social media is littered with racist videos, particularly content that mocks black people or portrays them through offensive racial stereotypes, research by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.” 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.



August 17, 2023 at 05:29PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/Yl0nrIG

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

WWII Aerial Photography, Microsoft Copilot AI, Twitter, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 15, 2023

WWII Aerial Photography, Microsoft Copilot AI, Twitter, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BBC: World War Two aerial photos opened to public for first time. “A collection of photographs taken during World War Two have been opened to the public for the first time. The aerial images were taken by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) Photographic Reconnaissance units while stationed at bases across England in 1943 and 1944.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Microsoft’s Copilot AI can now help deploy field workers. “Microsoft is bringing generative AI to frontline field workers by integrating its Copilot AI assistant into its field services platform, streamlining workflows but also enabling supervisors to know what technicians are doing on the job.”

TechCrunch: X, formerly Twitter, slowed down access to Threads, The New York Times, Bluesky and more. “X, formerly known as Twitter, was throttling traffic to websites that the social network’s owner Elon Musk publicly dislikes. The platform slowed down the speed it takes when accessing links to a handful of websites, including The New York Times, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, Threads, Reuters and Substack. The platform appears to be reversing the slow access to news sites on Tuesday afternoon.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The Best Snapchat Filters List and Essential Snapchat Lenses . “This list of the best Snapchat filters and lenses covers the essentials: the basic filters Snapchat offers, the names of some big Snapchat filters, how to access your local geofilters, and some of the best Snapchat lenses to use.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI. “TIMNIT GEBRU DIDN’T set out to work in AI. At Stanford, she studied electrical engineering — getting both a bachelor’s and a master’s in the field. Then she became interested in image analysis, getting her Ph.D. in computer vision. When she moved over to AI, though, it was immediately clear that there was something very wrong.”

ABC News (Australia): Nurse stranded in desert without food, water after Google Maps gave her wrong directions. “Police are urging travellers to properly prepare before driving in the outback after botched Google Maps directions left an Alice Springs nurse stranded in the Central Australian desert without food or water.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: When Hackers Descended to Test A.I., They Found Flaws Aplenty. “The hackers tried to break through the safeguards of various A.I. programs in an effort to identify their vulnerabilities — to find the problems before actual criminals and misinformation peddlers did — in a practice known as red-teaming. Each competitor had 50 minutes to tackle up to 21 challenges — getting an A.I. model to ‘hallucinate’ inaccurate information, for example. They found political misinformation, demographic stereotypes, instructions on how to carry out surveillance and more.”

Ars Technica: Illinois just made it possible to sue people for doxxing attacks. “Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who ‘intentionally’ publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled ‘doxing.’)”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Wisconsin-Madison: During pandemic, proponents of ‘doing your own research’ believed more COVID misinformation. “According to a new study Chinn and Hasell published recently in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review, people who were supportive of the phrase ‘doing your own research’ were more likely to be distrustful of scientists and more likely to believe misinformation about COVID-19. Even when controlling for the type of media they consumed, the DYOR fans among the researchers’ panel of about 1,000 survey respondents grew more distrustful and more ill-informed about COVID-19 even as news of successful vaccine trials emerged.”

UC Davis: UC Davis Researchers Exploring Data and AI Tools for Animal Health Diagnosis and Treatment. “The rise of AI based technology may play an important role in human healthcare from diagnostics to treatment. Using a data-driven approach, AI may be able to help doctors analyze and assess diseases more efficiently. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, are now exploring ways to use AI for the benefit of animal health.” 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.



August 17, 2023 at 12:10AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/pBA2EXG

Maryland Vaccination Clinics, Israel Cartography, Twitter, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 16, 2023

Maryland Vaccination Clinics, Israel Cartography, Twitter, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

This issue is far more Twitter-oriented than I prefer. The afternoon issue will be better.

NEW RESOURCES

Maryland Department of Health: Maryland Department of Health launches new website listing vaccination clinics at local health departments statewide. “The Maryland Department of Health has launched health.maryland.gov/vaccines, which lists vaccination clinics offered by local health departments statewide, including children’s back-to-school and COVID-19 clinics. The new site will also list flu vaccination clinics when available.”

Times of Israel: National Library expands cartographic holdings with 400 rare maps. “The National Library of Israel received some 466 rare maps and 120 books with prints, illustrations and maps of the Land of Israel, from collector Howard Golden…. The National Library cataloged and digitized the maps for preservation and research purposes, which are online, downloadable and available free-of-charge for students, researchers and visitors from Israel and abroad.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Axios: Scoop: X shuts down $100M promoted accounts ad business. “X, the company formerly known as Twitter, will no longer allow advertisers to promote their accounts within the platform’s timeline to attract new followers, according to an email to advertising clients obtained by Axios.” This is crazy. Twitter probably doesn’t have a golden goose anymore, but this is at least an aluminum goose and it doesn’t make sense to toss it in the recycling bin.

TechCrunch: X (formerly Twitter) makes X Pro (formerly TweetDeck) a subscriber-only product. “Elon Musk-owned social network X, formerly Twitter, has made X Pro — which was previously known as TweetDeck — a subscriber-only product. Several users noted on the platform that while trying to access TweetDeck they were shown a popup prompting them to buy a Blue subscription.” When this happens, my already severely-curtailed use of Twitter will drop another 99%. Catch me on Mastodon: researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host .

PC World: TL;DR: Google is adding AI web page summaries to Chrome. “Google is bringing one element of its AI-powered ‘Search Generative Experience’ (SGE) to Google Chrome, following in the footsteps of Microsoft and its migration of Bing Chat into Edge and mainstream search experiences.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Quickly Create Quality YouTube Shorts. “Want to publish more shorts on YouTube? Looking for an easy-to-use tool? In this article, you’ll discover why you should prioritize short-form content for YouTube. You’ll also learn how to create shorts from existing videos with YouTube native tools.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CityLife: Google’s Gemni: A High-Stakes Move in Artificial Intelligence. “In a bold move, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai decided to merge two major artificial intelligence (AI) teams within the company in April. This decision was driven by the need to catch up to and surpass competitors like OpenAI. Now, Google is preparing to launch a series of large machine-learning models, collectively known as Gemini, in the upcoming fall.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t all right, critics say. “Debate continues to rage over the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which seeks to hold platforms liable for feeding harmful content to minors. KOSA is lawmakers’ answer to whistleblower Frances Haugen’s shocking revelations to Congress. In 2021, Haugen leaked documents and provided testimony alleging that Facebook knew that its platform was addictive and was harming teens—but blinded by its pursuit of profits, it chose to ignore the harms.”

Rolling Stone: X, Formerly Twitter, Wants Lawsuit From Music Publishers Thrown Out. “In the motion, reviewed by Rolling Stone, X cited a 2005 supreme court ruling from MGM Studios v. Grokester and maintained that the suit should be tossed because the publishers ‘do not allege that X encouraged, induced, or intended to foster the infringement of Plaintiffs’ works,’ further arguing that the music publishers ‘must allege that the defendant took active steps with the intent of encouraging infringement.'”

CNN: Special counsel investigating Jan. 6 sought Trump’s direct messages from Twitter, court transcripts reveal. “The special counsel’s investigation into Donald Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election sought the former president’s Twitter direct messages, of which there were many, federal prosecutors and lawyers for Twitter revealed in newly unsealed transcripts from February court hearings about the search warrant.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Platformer: Elon Musk’s creep show . “To his dwindling fan base, all this will no doubt play as more swaggering derring-do from their real-life Iron Man. But to his employees, his investors, his family and his friends – I wonder if they don’t see something stranger, and darker, going on. For the rest of us, it’s another cringeworthy sideshow on the road to X’s eventual bankruptcy. And one more example of Musk as that most familiar figure: the noisy forum shitposter, forever writing checks with his mouth that his body can’t cash.”

Sydney Morning Herald: Twitter is dead, but what about me?. “Twitter is dead. If we didn’t know it for sure before, the last few weeks have confirmed it. It’s a shambles. It’s glitchy, full of ads, and becoming progressively more unusable. Elon tried changing the entire thing to ‘X’, like a teenager trying to rebrand because nobody at his new school knows he’s a loser yet, but with every new decision the app is hemorrhaging advertisers and users.” 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.



August 16, 2023 at 05:28PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/5rpbiyo