OSINT Forest Area Tracker, Google Chrome, Hawaii Wildfires, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 19, 2023

OSINT Forest Area Tracker, Google Chrome, Hawaii Wildfires, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Bellingcat: A New Tool Shows What War Has Done to Ukraine’s Forests. “We’ve launched the ‘OSINT Forest Area Tracker’, hosted on Google Earth Engine. Our tool compares data collected by Sentinel-2, a satellite which detects changes in infrared wavelengths and can be used to study the health of forests. The tool reveals the scale and intensity of anomalous changes on land. This narrows down search areas for researchers working on environmental damage in Ukraine.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

XDA: Google Chrome will soon enforce HTTPS by default . “Currently, Chrome shows warnings if you visit websites which leverage HTTP, but many people ignore them. As such, the company has now decided that it will be taking more aggressive steps towards enforcing HTTPS in an effort to change behavior both in web authors and their audience.”

CNBC: Google’s plan to purge inactive accounts isn’t sitting well with some users. “Google said in May that, starting in December, it would begin purging inactive accounts, a warning sign of sorts to people who use multiple logins. Recently, Google has been nudging people over email to remind them what will happen to those stagnant accounts. Critics of Google’s strategy are making their voices heard.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Messenger: Wildfire Conspiracy Theories Burn on Social Media as Maui Smolders. “Conspiracy theories are circulating on online social media platforms that seek to blame the wildfires in Hawaii on various organizations and individuals, including the World Economic Forum and Oprah Winfrey.”

Texas Tribune: Gen Z influencers, quietly recruited by a company with deep GOP ties, rally to impeached Ken Paxton’s aid. “In late June, about a dozen conservative Gen Z influencers converged on Fort Worth for a few days of right-wing networking. They hit local night spots, posed for group photos and met a far-right Texas billionaire and Donald Trump’s former campaign chair. And then they took to social media to rally their many followers behind a new, controversial film about human trafficking before turning their support to impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

University of Wisconsin-Madison: Down the tubes: Common PVC pipes can hack voice identification systems. “One type of security system that is gaining popularity is automatic speaker identification, which uses a person’s voice as a passcode. These systems, already in use for phone banking and other applications, are good at weeding out attacks that try to fake a user’s voice through digital manipulation. But digital security engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have found these systems are not quite as foolproof when it comes to a novel analog attack. They found that speaking through customized PVC pipes — the type found at most hardware stores — can trick machine learning algorithms that support automatic speaker identification systems.”

The Register: South Korea ‘puts the brakes’ on Google’s app store dominance. “South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission today commenced monitoring of Google’s app store operations – an action that follows its April decision to fine the advertising and mobile OS giant for its competition-crimping activities.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mashable: Elon Musk’s X follower count bloated by millions of new, inactive accounts. “Of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk at the time the data was collected, around 42 percent of Musk’s followers, or more than 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own account. Just over 72 percent, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have less than 10 followers on their account.”

University of Calgary: Researcher works to eliminate barriers to eye exams using artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “RetinaLogik leverages the power of artificial intelligence and virtual reality by creating a portable eye test using virtual reality glasses that improve patient insights and vision screening for everyone everywhere. Not only does the platform aim to reduce misdiagnosis, improve portability and make eye exams more affordable, but the platform was designed to make it more engaging and comfortable for patients.”

Tech Policy Press: The Value of News Content to Google is Way More Than You Think. “The study, conducted by FehrAdvice & Partners AG on behalf of the SWISS MEDIA publishers’ association with oversight by leading academics, assessed the value of journalistic content on the Google search engine in Switzerland and its impact on user behavior and satisfaction, concluding that the market share of Google searches that use media content results in an estimated revenue of about $440 million per year. It suggests that if Google did not have a dominant monopoly position in web search and faced serious competition, fair compensation for the value that media content provides to Google search would amount to about 40% of total revenue, or approximately $176 million per year in Switzerland alone.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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August 20, 2023 at 12:41AM
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Twitter, Google Keep, Search Scams, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 19, 2023

Twitter, Google Keep, Search Scams, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Variety: Elon Musk Says X (aka Twitter) Will No Longer Let You Block Other Users. “Elon Musk’s latest tweak to Twitter, the former name of what he now calls X: Users will no longer be able to block other accounts — as Musk claims the feature ‘makes no sense.’ ‘Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs,’ the tech mogul posted on X Friday. ‘Makes no sense.'”

Engadget: Google Keep is finally adding version history. “Google Keep, the company’s note-taking app, is getting a long-overdue feature that unfortunately doesn’t seem fully baked. Google is adding a version history function, which could save you from having to manually retype a lot of text that you mistakenly deleted.” I like Google Keep but I never started using it seriously because I half-assumed Google would kill it off.

USEFUL STUFF

The Verge: How to delete your Twitter history. “…regardless of whether you’ve cut Twitter out of your life, the best protection you can provide yourself is the deletion of your Twitter history. Here’s where to start if you’re interested in nuking your timeline and keeping future tweets from falling into the internet’s vindictive void of posterity.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CBS News Sacramento: Call Kurtis Investigates: Placer County couple with baby scammed escaping Maui. “Here’s the big takeaway: Never trust the top three to four Google search results. They are usually sponsored; essentially, ads anyone can take out. Scammers take advantage of that, and of you, especially after a disaster. Call the wrong number or click the wrong link, you could end up scammed.”

New York Times: A New Role for Werner Herzog: The Voice of A.I. Poetry. “When asked to narrate an audiobook of machine-generated verse, Mr. Herzog readily agreed. ‘I wasn’t the best choice,’ he said. ‘I was the only choice.'”

Associated Press: Once a target of pro-Trump anger, the U.S. archivist is prepping her agency for a digital flood. “The new National Archives leader whose nomination was swept into the partisan furor over the criminal documents-hoarding case against ex-President Donald Trump says she is now preparing the agency that’s responsible for preserving historical records for an expected flood of digital documents. Colleen Shogan, a political scientist with deep Washington ties, says the spotlight on the Archives during the past year shows that Americans are invested in preserving historical materials.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: Google required to remove ads that violate trademarks, Indian court rules. “The Delhi High Court has ruled that Google’s Ads program falls under the purview of the country’s Trademarks Act and the company must remove ads that infringe upon trademarks in a major decision that may redefine online advertising’s legal landscape.”

Tech Xplore: Don’t expect quick fixes in ‘red-teaming’ of AI models. Security was an afterthought. “White House officials concerned by AI chatbots’ potential for societal harm and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested in a three-day competition ending Sunday at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas. Some 2,200 competitors tapped on laptops seeking to expose flaws in eight leading large-language models representative of technology’s next big thing. But don’t expect quick results from this first-ever independent ‘red-teaming’ of multiple models.”

CNN: ‘Bored Apes’ investors sue Sotheby’s, Paris Hilton and others as NFT prices collapse . “A group of investors is suing Sotheby’s Holdings Inc. and others over a 2021 auction and promotion of Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFTs) following a collapse in prices for the celebrity-endorsed collectibles. The four named plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit allege that the auction house ‘misleadingly promoted’ the NFTs and colluded with creator Yuga Labs to artificially inflate their prices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mongabay: Using social media images to better respond to disasters. “When disasters strike, social media gets flooded with images, warnings and calls for help. Many of the posts are sources for relevant information from disaster sites and the data can help understand the progression and aftermath of a disaster. But manually segregating and analysing the data is a time consuming, costly and often inefficient process. While deriving useful information, a new study by a multi-country research team presents a large-scale dataset and explores how to automate information processing about natural disasters from social media images.”

Foreign Affairs: How to Prevent an AI Catastrophe. “The opportunities AI offers are immense. Built and managed properly, it could do much to improve society, offering every student a personalized tutor, for example, or giving every family high-quality, round-the-clock medical advice. But AI also has enormous dangers. It is already exacerbating the spread of disinformation, furthering discrimination, and making it easier for states and companies to spy. Future AI systems might be able to create pathogens or hack critical infrastructure. In fact, the very scientists responsible for developing AI have begun to warn that their creations are deeply perilous.”

Washington University in St. Louis: Maragh-Lloyd wins grant to study influence campaigns. “Raven Maragh-Lloyd, an assistant professor of African and African American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will serve as co-principal investigator for a $1.7 million grant investigating how online influence campaigns, both foreign and domestic, manipulate the fundamental structures and relationships upon which social media is built.” Good morning, Internet…

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August 19, 2023 at 05:31PM
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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…

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August 19, 2023 at 12:46AM
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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

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

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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

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
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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
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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
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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…

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August 17, 2023 at 05:29PM
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