Saturday, September 2, 2023

16th and 17th Century Ireland, Mütter Museum, Latinx Nebraska, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 2, 2023

16th and 17th Century Ireland, Mütter Museum, Latinx Nebraska, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 2, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Maynooth University: Unveiling the MACMORRIS Project. “MACMORRIS is an acronym for Mapping Actors and Communities: Modelling Research in Renaissance Ireland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century. It is a radically new digital-humanities project, which, for the very first time, maps the full range and richness of cultural activity in a time of change, conflict and, ultimately, transformation.”

Philadelphia Inquirer: The Mütter Museum launches new collections database, without images of human remains like Einstein’s brain. “The Mütter Museum has launched a new searchable online database of its collection of historical medical equipment and anatomical specimens that will be free to researchers and the public alike. The new database contains more than 20,000 records and photographs, including 5,100 high-resolution photos not previously available. Missing from the database, however, are images of the collection displaying human remains…”

University of Nebraska-Omaha: Preserving and Sharing Voices of Latinx Omahans. “Through a collaborative effort between UNO’s Office of Latino and Latin American Studies (OLLAS) and UNO Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections, 22 bilingual oral histories from the Voces of a Pandemic Collection, part of the Conversaciónes: Latino and Latina Voices of Omaha project have been recorded, preserved, and shared online.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo AU: Google Chrome’s New Tool Lets You Copy and Paste Screenshots From Videos. “Students, teachers, and vintage TV screencappers, the Chrome browser has a new feature that makes taking screenshots of scenes easier than before. Google used a blog post about helpful classroom tools to subtly announce the ability to copy a frame from a video. It’s available in the latest release of Chrome and will roll out to everyone this week.”

University of Sydney: Google adds health tips to extreme heat warnings based on latest research. “Important health and safety tips are being made available to millions around the world, thanks to a new Google search feature developed in collaboration with the Global Heat Health Information Network and informed by University of Sydney research.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google. “I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge.”

Ars Technica: Researcher builds anti-Russia AI disinformation machine for $400. “[Nea] Paw claims to be a cybersecurity professional who prefers anonymity because some people may believe the project to be irresponsible. The CounterCloud campaign pushing back on Russian messaging was created using OpenAI’s text generation technology, like that behind ChatGPT, and other easily accessible AI tools for generating photographs and illustrations, Paw says, for a total cost of about $400.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google Alleges ‘Deep-Seated Bias’ by DOJ Top Antitrust Official. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google told a federal court Thursday that it should be allowed to interview the Justice Department’s top antitrust official under oath, alleging his ‘deep-seated bias’ against the company led the federal government to sue it for antitrust violations.”

BBC: Anonymous Sudan hacks X to put pressure on Elon Musk over Starlink. “A hacking group called Anonymous Sudan took X, formerly known as Twitter, offline in more than a dozen countries on Tuesday morning in an attempt to pressurise Elon Musk into launching his Starlink service in their country. X was down for more than two hours, with thousands of users affected.”

The Street: FTX victims’ face doxxing threat after sensitive data taken by hackers. “Kroll, the firm managing customer data of FTX collapse victims, was hit by a data breach this month that resulted in customer data being stolen. The company was struck by ‘a cybersecurity incident that compromised non-sensitive customer data of certain claimants in the pending bankruptcy case,’ FTX said. However, Kroll announced that hackers also stole sensitive data in the hack.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Foreign Policy Research Institute: Russian Disinformation in Africa: No Door on this Barn. “In 2018, Yale scholar Timothy Snyder called Russian information operations in the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, ‘the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare.’ Likewise, recent advances of Russian disinformation in Africa have resulted in some of the swiftest successes in the history of propaganda. They lie mainly unopposed by any country, Western or otherwise.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Florida International University: Study: Revamped calculus course improves learning. ” The model, developed at FIU, focuses on mastering different ways of thinking and solving problems – skills that are important beyond the classroom. Rote memorization and large lecture halls have been replaced by active learning classrooms where students work collaboratively to solve problems. The result is greater learning outcomes and an understanding of calculus concepts, as well as better grades than their peers in traditional, lecture-based classes, according to the research.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 2, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Friday, September 1, 2023

NOAA Tidal Flooding Predictions, Isolated Indigenous Peoples, Google Forms, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 1, 2023

NOAA Tidal Flooding Predictions, Isolated Indigenous Peoples, Google Forms, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 1, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

US Department of Commerce: Commerce’s NOAA Releases New Monthly Tool to Predict High-Tide Flooding. “As high tide flooding continues to break records, the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a new monthly tool to predict high tide flooding. The new high tide flooding outlook will help coastal communities better understand when and where high tide flooding may occur and the likelihood of high tide flooding for each day in the calendar year.”

OPI: On Bruno Pereira’s birthday, Opi, Coiab and Opan launch a platform to monitor isolated indigenous peoples. (Everything with regards to this article has been machine-translated from Portuguese.) “The tool gathers information from public databases and field surveys of the Observatory’s networks. Combined, this information makes it possible to analyze the living conditions and territories of these groups. The initiative is a collaboration between [Observatory of Isolated Indigenous Peoples and of Recent Contact] and the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (Coiab) and Operation Amazônia Nativa (Opan).”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Inspiration: Post Google Forms Responses to Discord Channels. “Learn how to automatically send form responses collected through Google Forms on a Discord channel with the help of Document Studio. The tutorial also provide instructions on how to use Apps Script to post form responses to Discord using webhooks.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

404 Media: ‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon. “Amazon has an AI-generated books problem that’s been documented by journalists for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe. The New York Mycological Society (NYMS) warned on social media that the proliferation of AI-generated foraging books could ‘mean life or death.'”

The Verge: The end of the Googleverse. “For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.” Interesting article to read as someone who was there for all of it and has drawn very different conclusions in some cases.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Judge allows age-discrimination lawsuit against Elon Musk’s X to proceed. “A California federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit accusing X, the social media service formerly called Twitter, of disproportionately laying off older workers when Elon Musk acquired the company last year. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on Tuesday said the plaintiff in the proposed class action, John Zeman, had provided enough evidence that the mass layoffs had a greater impact on older employees to continue pursing the case.”

New Arab: Saudi critic sentenced to death for social media posts. “Saeed al-Ghamdi, Mohammed’s brother and an activist living in exile outside Saudi Arabia, said the case against Mohammed was at least partly built on posts on X, formerly Twitter, criticising the government and expressing support for ‘prisoners of conscience’ like the jailed religious clerics Salman al-Awda and Awad al-Qarni. Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s account on X had only nine followers, according to the Gulf Centre for Human Rights.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Engadget: Americans growing anxious as AI adoption expands, Pew Research finds . “Americans have grown more worried about AI in the last nine months. A new survey from the Pew Research Center [ed note: PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!] indicates 52 percent of respondents are more concerned than excited about rising artificial intelligence use, up 14 points since December. Meanwhile, only 10 percent say they’re more excited than worried, while another 36 percent described their views as equally balanced.”

TechCrunch: In Threads’ dwindling engagement, social media’s flawed hypothesis is laid bare. “The hard truth behind the phenomenon? For too long, social media platforms have been operating as if connectivity provides the same fulfillment as human connection. The result is, two decades later, social media’s driven our culture and communal well-being to an unprecedented loneliness epidemic that no platform seems capable of fixing, let alone addressing. It’s time for a hard reset.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

University of Central Florida: Limbitless Solutions Receives Epic MegaGrant to Create Multiplayer Prosthetics-Training Game. “UCF professors and nonprofit organization Limbitless Solutions have received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games, known for operating Fortnite and developing Unreal Engine. Limbitless Solutions is known for developing expressive, 3D-printed arms and accessibility-focused video game training. Their training games directly support producing and delivering cost-free prosthetic limbs for the limb-difference community.” 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.



September 2, 2023 at 12:44AM
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France WWI Military Casualties, Native American Boarding Schools, CIA World Factbook, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 1, 2023

France WWI Military Casualties, Native American Boarding Schools, CIA World Factbook, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 1, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Vox EU: New scores on old sores: The Morts Pour la France database on WWI fatalities in France. “As the war in Ukraine demonstrates, accurate numbers of those killed or injured in combat are hard to come by. This column describes the ‘Morts pour la France’ database, which contains individual-level data on the 1.3 million French fatalities during WWI. The database improves our grasp of geography (rural, poorer, less industrialised areas were harder hit), of battle-specific violence (the deadliest day in French history took place during the Second Battle of Champagne), and of conflict technology (the share of infantry decreased over time while the share of artillery increased).”

New York Times: ‘War Against the Children’. (This link is to a gift article; you should not encounter a paywall.) “The Native American boarding school system was vast and entrenched, ranging from small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to refurbished military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down both the West and East coasts. Until recently, incomplete records and scant federal attention kept even the number of schools — let alone more details about how they functioned — unknown. The 523 schools represented here comprise the most comprehensive accounting to date of institutions involved in the system.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Space: The CIA knows a lot about other nations’ space programs. You can too with its new ‘World Factbook’ update . “The United States Central Intelligence Agency, better known as the CIA, has released a new entry in its World Factbook that catalogues the programs and milestones of NASA, as well as other space agencies around the world. Over 90 countries and the European Union are represented in the new Space Programs section of the agency’s factbook, spanning from Algeria to Zimbabwe.”

Mashable: YouTube star KSI shares how little he’s made from X monetization. “KSI is a YouTuber with more than 24 million subscribers on his channel. He has turned his online fame into a career in music and boxing. Along with YouTuber and WWE Superstar Logan Paul, he is a co-founder of the Prime sports and energy drink company. He posts on X regularly and his tweets receive millions of views. So, how much did KSI make from Musk’s platform over the past month? $1,590.”

Search Engine Land: Bing Chat now works on Chrome, Google’s browser. “Bing Chat now works in Chrome, Google’s web browser. Microsoft initially launched Bing Chat to work only on its own browser, Edge. Then Microsoft began testing Bing Chat support on other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, but it was not fully available to all users.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Associated Press: Google to invest another $1.7 billion into Ohio data centers. “Google will invest an additional $1.7 billion to support three data center campuses in central Ohio, the company announced Monday. The tech giant now operates a center in New Albany and announced in May that it would build additional centers in Columbus and Lancaster to help power its artificial intelligence technology and other tools.”

CNBC: Google to begin selling maps data to companies building solar products, hopes to generate $100 million in first year. “Google is planning to license new sets of mapping data to a range of companies to use as they build products around renewable energy, and is hoping to generate up to $100 million in its first year, CNBC has learned. The company plans to sell access to new APIs (application programming interfaces) with solar and energy information and air quality, according to materials viewed by CNBC.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Ignored by police, twin sisters took down their cyberstalker themselves. “Some pictures landed in her father’s Instagram messages, while marketing clients told her about the nude images that came their way. Madison was at a friend’s party when she got a panicked call from the manager of a hotel restaurant where she had worked: The photos had made their way to his inbox. After two years, hoping a new Florida law against cyberharassment would finally end the torture, Madison walked into her local Melbourne police station and shared everything. But she was told that what she was experiencing was not criminal.”

University of Copenhagen: Puff bars: New project will take the steam out of illegal online selling. “With funding from TrygFonden, sociologists will map the illegal sale of disposable e-cigarettes, the so-called puff bars, and develop new interventions targeting the illicit online market. The use of puff bars has grown rapidly, especially among young people.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

RFI: Studies criticise big tech firms over Russian disinformation. “Tech titans, including TikTok and Twitter, failed to effectively tackle Russian disinformation online during the first year of the war in Ukraine, according to a study published Wednesday by the EU. A separate study points at the ways TikTok has been profiting from pro-Russian related narratives. The EU study comes after tougher rules under the Digital Services Act (DSA) kicked in this month for the world’s biggest online platforms.”

Cornell University: ‘Smart’ glasses skew power balance with non-wearers. “Currently, most work on AR glasses focuses primarily on the experience of the wearer. Researchers from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and Brown University teamed up to explore how this technology affects interactions between the wearer and another person. Their explorations showed that, while the device generally made the wearer less anxious, things weren’t so rosy on the other side of the glasses.”

Stanford Medicine: New AI tool for pathologists trained by Twitter (now known as X). “The most impressive uses of artificial intelligence rely on good data – and lots of it. Chatbots, for example, learn to converse from millions of web pages full of text. Autonomous vehicles learn to drive from sensor data recorded on millions of road trips. For highly technical tasks, like understanding medical images, however, good data sets are harder to find. In a new study, Stanford Medicine researchers have trained an AI-powered algorithm on a treasure trove of high-quality, annotated medical images from a surprising source – Twitter, now known as X.”

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September 1, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Thursday, August 31, 2023

France Accessibility, New Zealand Real Estate, California Wildfire Resilience, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 31, 2023

France Accessibility, New Zealand Real Estate, California Wildfire Resilience, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Local France: France creates new guide of disability-accessible hotels, shops and restaurants. “The French government has created a new website that lists the hotels, cafés, shops, restaurants and other public establishments that are accessible to people with disabilities. The website is called Accès Libre (free access) and it has been put together with the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games in mind – although it covers the whole of France, not just the capital.”

1 News (New Zealand): New online tool reveals 25 years of property disaster claims. “Kiwis can now easily find out if a property has been damaged in a natural disaster, over the past 25 years, using a new online tool. Launched by the Earthquake Commission (EQC), the online portal allows anyone to type in an address and see whether there’s been an EQC claim made against it.”

California Natural Resources Agency: California Launches Online Tool to Track Wildfire Resilience Projects. “The dashboard offers a one-stop-shop to access data, provide transparency, and align the efforts of more than a dozen agencies to build resilient landscapes and communities in California. It reports treatment activities such as prescribed fire, targeted grazing, uneven-aged timber harvest, mechanical and hand fuels reduction, and tree planting. Users can sort treatments by region, county, land ownership and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PCMag: Google Flights Will Tell You the Cheapest Time to Book a Ticket. “Google is trying to solve a problem that has long vexed travelers everywhere: When is the best time to book the cheapest flight? Starting this week, the company will answer that question through Google Flights.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Mainichi: ‘Like a teacher there 24/7’: ChatGPT tool supports English education at Japan univ. . “Ritsumeikan University has been experimentally introducing an English learning support tool combining ChatGPT and machine translation functions in some of its English classes since this spring, and a student reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun looked into the background and thoughts on the project.”

WIRED: Sexy AI Chatbots Are Creating Thorny Issues for Fandom. “Even if Character.AI might want you to get emotionally attached to its coding bots (your fellow ‘pair programmer’) or its grammar bots (your ‘English teacher’), it’s the characters you’ve heard of, real or fictional, that have sparked the most interest across the social web. ‘Billie Eilish’ currently has six times the amount of interaction of ‘Joe Biden’; both of them eclipse ‘Alan Turing.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Law firm Morgan & Morgan accuses marketing company of stealing potential clients . “In the lawsuit filed on Friday in state court in Orange County, Florida, Morgan & Morgan claims What If Holdings is paying Google for a so-called ‘click-to-call’ advertisement to appear on searches for the terms ‘morgan and morgan.’ When the ads pop up, a potential Morgan & Morgan client is tricked into clicking on a phone number that takes them to What If instead, the lawsuit claims.”

Rest of World: Chinese sextortion scammers are flooding Twitter. “Chinese sextortion scammer accounts have flooded X (previously Twitter) since April after the platform introduced a new blue-check policy allowing users to buy verified badges.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

AI Weirdness: AI vs a giraffe with no spots. “Image recognition algorithms are trained on a variety of images from around the internet, and/or on a few standard image datasets. But there likely haven’t been any spotless giraffes in their training data, since the last one to be born was probably in 1972 in Tokyo. How do they do when faced with photos of the spotless giraffe?”

Harvard Gazette: Need cancer treatment advice? Forget ChatGPT. “… researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital sought to assess how consistently the AI chatbot provides recommendations for cancer treatment that align with National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines. The team’s findings, published in JAMA Oncology, show that in one-third of cases, ChatGPT provided an inappropriate — or ‘non-concordant’ — recommendation, highlighting the need for awareness of the technology’s limitations.” 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.



September 1, 2023 at 01:00AM
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USPTO, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 31, 2023

USPTO, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

EVENTS

USPTO: Transitioning from TESS to new search. “Did you know the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) will soon be replaced by a new public trademark search system? Do you want to learn how to use your advanced TESS searching skills with the new system? Join our free experienced practitioner training webinar on Tuesday, September 19, from 2-3:30 p.m. ET.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Twitter Removes Its ‘No Political Ads’ Policy Ahead of the 2024 Election. “Twitter, rebranded as X, is bringing political ads back to its platform for the first time since 2019, the company announced on Tuesday. The move comes ahead of the 2024 presidential election and Twitter claims it is hiring employees to expand Twitter’s safety and election teams.”

TechCrunch: Yahoo Mail introduces new AI-powered capabilities, including a ‘Shopping Saver’ tool. “Yahoo is introducing new AI tools for Yahoo Mail that are aimed at helping users save time and money, the company announced on Monday. The rollout includes upgrades to several of Yahoo Mail’s existing AI features, and introduces a new Shopping Saver tool. Yahoo is TechCrunch’s parent company.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AFP: Oil firms pay Insta, TikTok influencers for ads. “Oil companies are paying popular influencers to pump their gas on social media, sparking a backlash from some climate-conscious fans for promoting planet-warming fossil fuels among young people. Young online celebrities best known for posting about video games, their dogs or their holidays to millions of followers are also dropping in unexpected plugs for gasoline stations, fuel rewards and club cards.”

Poynter: A policy tracker helped Nevadans make sense of the latest legislative session. “Imagine how difficult that political maze must be to navigate and understand for residents who’ve never visited a state capitol or read a bill. Making sense of the legislative session has been the goal of the Nevada Policy Tracker, a web page created by The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit news site that launched in 2017.”

Tubefilter: Kai Cenat invokes ‘Rush Hour’ with action-comedy film ‘Global Pursuit’. “Global Pursuit features solid production values, dozens of crew members, and cameo appearances — even though it was filmed in just three days, according to its star. Cenat met Global Pursuit co-star Ray H during a trip to Japan, and the pair became fast friends. They soon embarked on a filmmaking project together. The trailer for Global Pursuit hit Cenat’s YouTube channel on August 23, and the full 17-minute film dropped two days later.” I watched this and it was quite good. I found Mr. Cenat more compelling than Chris Tucker.

SECURITY & LEGAL

NDTV: Noida Call Centre Duping US Citizens Busted, 84 Arrested. “The Noida police on Thursday said they have arrested 84 people, including 36 women, after a raid at a call centre on charges of duping US citizens of crores of rupees by pretending to be American government officials. The accused had a database of around five lakh US citizens that included their names, contact numbers and some financial details which were used to target them and take them into confidence, they said.” Five lakh is 500,000. A crore is 10 million. a crore of rupees is about $120,000 USD.

Space: Hackers shut down 2 of the world’s most advanced telescopes. “The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, reported that a cybersecurity incident that occurred on Aug. 1 has prompted the lab to temporarily halt operations at its Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Other, smaller telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile were also affected.”

404 Media: iFixit Tears Down McDonald’s McFlurry Machine, Petitions Government for Right to Hack Them. “A group of right to repair activists and consumer rights advocates are petitioning the Librarian of Congress for the right to hack McDonald’s notoriously unreliable McFlurry machines for the purposes of repair, according to a copy of the petition obtained by 404 Media.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Dalhousie University: Dal researcher leads global project to empower scholars of medieval chant. “Over the next seven years, Dr. [Jennifer] Bain will create an online platform that links and synergizes plainchant databases around the world. The new digital tool will provide scholars with a vast electronic resource to deepen their understanding of the a cappella chants and those who created and recited them.”

PsyPost: The “need for chaos” is linked to the sharing of conspiracy theories, study finds. “New research suggests that a psychological concept known as ‘the need for chaos’ plays a bigger role than partisanship and ideology in the sharing of conspiracy theories on the internet. The study, published in Research & Politics, indicates that individuals driven by a desire to disrupt and challenge established systems are more inclined to share conspiracy theories.”

Euromaidan Press: Int’l architects to restore Ukraine’s war-torn cultural legacy. “In August 2023, the Architects Association of Lithuania initiated the international European cultural project ‘UREHERIT. The Architects for Heritage in Ukraine: Recreating Identity and Memory’ that will last three years and is co-financed by the European Union program ‘Creative Europe.’ The project aims to address heritage as a resource for sustainable cultural, social, environmental, and economic recovery while solving challenges of preservation, re-definition, highlighting the national and local cultural identity, and reflecting the memory in the rebuilding.” 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 31, 2023 at 05:32PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/fwMl5CQ

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Final Fantasy XIV, Library of Congress, GPTBot, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 30, 2023

Final Fantasy XIV, Library of Congress, GPTBot, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 30, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

SiliconEra: Japanese Fan Creates Database of All Final Fantasy XIV Items. “Japanese fan FF14_mirapri completed a database for all of the items in Final Fantasy XIV from Square Enix. This includes all of the cosmetics, hairstyles, seasonal event exclusives, weapons and more spanning the entire history of the MMORPG.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Library of Congress: Improvements Ahead for the Web Archives. “Users of the Library of Congress Web Archives may have recently noticed issues when trying to access archived content presented at webarchive.loc.gov. We want to give some background and explanation about the ongoing work that is happening to modernize and improve functionality, and to set the stage for future announcements about planned improvements for access to the Library’s Web Archives.”

Search Engine Land: Dozens of big brands have blocked GPTBot, OpenAI’s new web crawler. “At least 69 of the 1,000 most popular websites in the world have blocked GPTBot, the new web crawler OpenAI introduced Aug. 7, according to a new analysis. And the percentage of sites is increasing by about 5% per week, according to AI content and plagiarism service Originality.ai.”

USEFUL STUFF

Space: The rare Super Blue Moon rises on Aug. 30 and you can watch it online for free . “After sunset on Wednesday, this Super Blue Moon will rise in the east, as seen from New York City. But if conditions happen to be poor for moonwatching in your area, you’re in luck: The Virtual Telescope Project hosted by astronomer Gianluca Masi of Rome, Italy will host a free livestream of the event starting at 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 30 (0330 GMT on Aug. 31).” Shoutout to everyone else who is getting hurricane rain tonight and will miss the blue moon.

PC World: How to put Chrome’s download notifications back at the bottom. “In early August, Google changed the way Chrome displays download notifications. Instead of files being shown as big rectangular buttons in a bar at the bottom of the screen, the information is now much more discreetly tucked in the upper right-hand corner. A single, small icon shows both your progress and completion status, along with a dropdown list of recent downloads when clicked on. But if you’re finding this update difficult to adjust to, you can reverse it.”

MakeUseOf: Navidrome Is the Perfect Self-Hosted Music Server for Raspberry Pi. “Streaming music is a feature of modern life, and most people are used to the convenience of services such as Spotify and YouTube. If you have a large, privately owned music collection, you can instead use Navidrome to stream your favorite tunes to your mobile devices and listen to internet radio.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Can news outlets build a ‘trustworthy’ AI chatbot?. “News publishers have jumped headfirst into artificial intelligence, using generative AI tools to produce bland travel guides, inaccurate film blogs, and SEO-bait explainers. By and large, the goal has been: can we make more pages for ads without paying more writers? Now, a group of tech outlets is attempting to incorporate generative AI into its websites, though readers won’t find a machine’s byline anytime soon.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Blue-tick scammers target consumers who complain on X. “Consumers who complain of poor customer service on X are being targeted by scammers after the social media platform formerly known as Twitter changed its account verification process.”

WIRED: The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland’s Railway System . “SINCE WAR FIRST broke out between Ukraine and Russia in 2014, Russian hackers have used some of the most sophisticated hacking techniques ever seen in the wild… But the mysterious saboteurs who have, over the past two days, disrupted Poland’s railway system—a major piece of transit infrastructure for NATO in its support of Ukraine—appear to have used a far less impressive form of technical mischief: Spoof a simple radio command to the trains that triggers their emergency stop function.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Los Angeles Times: Michael Hiltzik: Scientists used to love Twitter. Thanks to Elon Musk, they’re giving up on it. “Concerns about the decline of X as a source of reliable information extends beyond the scientific and academic communities. During the apparent coup attempt in Russia in June, journalists noticed its relative uselessness at helping them find real-time, breaking information from the ground and sifting fact from fakery, due in part to Musk’s trashing of its account verification system.” 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 31, 2023 at 12:51AM
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Keeping an Eye on Hurricane Idalia

Keeping an Eye on Hurricane Idalia
By ResearchBuzz

Good morning, y’all. I hope everyone is safe and well and prepared for Hurricane Idalia if you need to be. I am interested in Hurricane Idalia both as a weather event (currently under a flood watch and expecting 2-5 inches of rain) and as a news event I want to monitor online even as Twitter gets worse and worse.

I’m finding myself using a lot of my own tools this morning as I set up my information traps.

1) Marion’s Monocle 2 finds FCC-licensed TV stations by state, allowing me to quickly identify TV stations in Tallahassee, Tampa, and Pensacola and integrate them into an RSS feed Google Alert. https://searchgizmos.com/mm2/

2) I used Non-Sketchy News Search 2 to keyword-search for news outlets mentioned in Wikipedia and build out the sources I’m monitoring. I was able to find some paper-based news sources this way: https://searchgizmos.com/nsns2/ .

3) I’m not even going to try to monitor Twitter for this event; I’m staying with Mastodon. I wasn’t sure what hashtags would be appropriate to monitor so I did some testing with Hashtag Harvest (looks like #HurricaneIdalia is the one to use): https://mastogizmos.com/hh.html .

4) My Mastodon instance is very small and because of that the flow of information when news breaks is pretty poor. To save myself having to find and follow tons of people every time something happens, I made Mastodon Stadium Seats. It searches for an array of hashtags across an array of Mastodon instances and displays the results on a plain screen which updates every 90 seconds. I put it up on GitHub: if you can edit an HTML page, you’ll be able to use it. https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/Mastodon-Stadium-Seats . It’s currently casting to my side monitor so I can keep one eye on the news as I work.

I hope everybody gets through this all right. Best wishes to you.



August 30, 2023 at 04:58PM
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