More Mastodon Tools for You: One New Web App and Three New GitHub Repositories

More Mastodon Tools for You: One New Web App and Three New GitHub Repositories
By ResearchBuzz

As I spend more time digging into Mastodon’s API and considering the possibilities of decentralized social media search, the extant search engines around me seem rather… flat.

That makes sense inasmuch as Google and Bing and other search engines are designed to get you from point A to point B with minimal effort on your part. There have been criticisms about Google’s efficiency at that lately, but putting those criticisms aside, that’s what search engines were designed to do.

After getting under the hood of Mastodon’s API, I find myself unsatisfied with web search. Google is 25 while web search is roughly 30, which means that web searching as an aspect of our daily life is maybe 20 years old. And yet our current search engines don’t take advantage of the fact that the searching audience has become more sophisticated over time. Even if you don’t use social media, you understand the social signals of reposts, replies, and favorites. Even if you don’t use Twitter you can understand the impact that verified identities had on that platform when they worked (and the havoc they’re wreaking now that they don’t.) (These shortcomings don’t even address search engines’ failure to wield user-intuitive persistent metadata to shape search spaces, but I’ve already ranted about that.)

Mastodon’s fully-open API is giving me the opportunity to explore how search might look and I intend to take full advantage. MastoGizmos is now at fourteen one-page Web apps to make your searching and exploring of Mastodon easier, and I’ve added three new GitHub repositories as well. Here’s the update.

Browser Mastodon Instance Directories: David’s ‘Dex

The #1 complaint I hear about Mastodon  is that it’s too hard to find people to follow. I’m trying to help with that — I’ve made Hashtag Harvest and MastoWindow and Wikipedia/Mastodon Thing. To your Mastodon fam-finding toolbox I’d like to also add David’s ‘Dex. David’s ‘Dex lets you explore Mastodon instances users by the domains they link to in their profile.

 

Start by choosing a Mastodon instance to review. David’s ‘Dex will crash if you try it with really big instances like Mastodon.Social – journa.host is set as the default. Once you specify an instance, DD will download the instance’s user directory, organize the users by the links they use in their profile metadata, and present those to you in a drop down directory, with an additional checkbox available to filter for only those links which have been self-verified by users. Once you’ve chosen a domain you’ll get a list of users who have that link in their profile (in this case verified.)

Click on a user and you’ll get their user information in the middle with a clickable link to their profile page. In the third column you’ll get the links from their metadata fields and their last three Mastodon posts. I had a grand time yesterday finding science- and humanities- instances and looking at the users who linked to GitHub, ResearchGate, ORCID, etc, clicking on the profile links of all kinds of cool people. And if I wanted to follow them? Following someone on Mastodon outside of your Mastodon client can be a little awkward, but I made it easy-peasy with a bookmarklet.

Easy Mastodon Follows: Mastodon Follow Bookmarklet

Bookmarklets are bookmarks with JavaScript added in. As you might imagine the addition of JavaScript adds lots of possibilities. With Mastodon Follow Bookmarklet , you highlight a Mastodon user name, click on the bookmarklet, and get taken to your instance’s follow confirmation page. Boom! Done.  The GitHub repository is a snippet of JavaScript. Just save it as a bookmarket after following the directions to customize it with your Mastodon instance name. (If you’re not sure what your instance name is, plug your username into Mastodon Username Helper.)

Even if you follow tons of people on Mastodon you might find your information flow unsatisfactory when breaking news happens. That’s because the decentralized nature of Mastodon means you’re only seeing a limited amount of content. Much more content flows through big instances than small ones.

There are instance-level tools to address the problem of limited information flow to instances, but I think that users should have options as well. So I made a couple.

Monitoring the News From a Small Instance With Mastodon

Make a News Monitoring Perch With Mastodon Stadium Seats

The first time I tried to follow a scheduled political event on Mastodon – a  debate – it was a disaster. I had to run around trying to find the liveposters and the flow of posts from the hashtags I set up was just sad. So I made Mastodon Stadium Seats (which has little CSS and is very rough.) It’s an HTML file. Download it and customize it with the hashtags you want to monitor and the instances you want to monitor, and you’ll get a plain, full-screen display of the last 14 posts from those hashtags on those instances. It’ll automatically refresh every 90 seconds.

Set Up a Passive News Screen With VibesMasto News

A plain, frequently-updating screen is fine when there’s breaking news, but what about when you want to keep a more general eye on what’s happening? That’s what VibesMasto News is for. It monitors general trending links on Mastodon.Social and a list of Mastodon hashtags you specify, but it also has a section for an external RSS feed (the default feed is the front page of the New York Times.) Like Mastodon Stadium Seats, VMN is an HTML that you download, customize, and open in your browser. When nothing specific is happening, I cast this page to a monitor that’s beside my computer.

 

I’m just getting started. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

September 7, 2023 at 08:43PM
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Proceedings of the ACM on Networking, Open and Engaged Conference, Earthly Podcast, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 7, 2023

Proceedings of the ACM on Networking, Open and Engaged Conference, Earthly Podcast, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

EurekAlert: ACM publishes new journal of Proceedings of the ACM On Networking. “ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has announced the publication of the first issue of Proceedings of the ACM on Networking (PACMNET), a new peer-reviewed journal. Issued quarterly, PACMNET publishes original research papers on new technologies, novel experimentation, creative use of networking technologies, and new insights into network management. The journal features articles on system design and performance evaluations of computer networks, experience learned from deployments, traffic engineering, and network programmability from academic experts as well as practitioners working in public or private settings.”

EVENTS

British Library Digital Scholarship Blog: Open and Engaged 2023: Community over Commercialisation. “The British Library is delighted to host its annual Open and Engaged Conference on Monday 30 October, in-person and online, as part of International Open Access Week. In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open and Engaged 2023: Community over Commercialisation will address approaches and practices to open scholarship that prioritise the best interests of the public and the research community.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Clemson News: New Clemson University podcast aims to explain the natural world. “Clemson University has launched a new science podcast titled Earthly that will explain the science behind some of world’s most pressing issues in agriculture, natural resources, wildlife, and the earth sciences.”

Politico: Trump social media startup wins more time to go public. “Investors on Tuesday granted a last-minute lifeline to the company looking to take former President Donald Trump’s social media venture public, handing executives another year to finish the transaction ahead of a do-or-die deadline this week.”

Search Engine Land: Google will allow NFT gaming ads under updated cryptocurrency ad policy. “Google will allow NFT gaming ads, provided they don’t promote gambling content, from next month. This change will take place on September 15 when Google issues its updated advertising policy for cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based games.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Tuscon Sentinel: Tucson’s Molly Holzschlag, known as ‘the fairy godmother of the web,’ dead at 60. “Molly Holzschlag, whose pioneering work in online design standards led to her being dubbed ‘the fairy godmother of the web,’ has died at age 60. Holzschlag, a longtime Tucson resident, dealt with a series of illnesses over the past decade, including being diagnosed with aplastic anemia. She was found dead Tuesday at her home, family said.”

CBC: That feeling when your grandma becomes a social media star. “In one of her recent posts, Joan MacDonald twirls on a beach and smiles radiantly into the camera. In another, the 77-year-old exhales heavily as she squats under a weighted bar in a gym. Among the so-called ‘granfluencers’ on social media, the Cobourg, Ont., native is something of a heavy weight who says she’s still getting used to flexing her social media muscles and notes that ‘not in 1,000 years’ did she see herself becoming an influencer in her 70s.”

Gizmodo: Want to See How Bad Twitter’s Bot Problem Is? Ask for Crypto Help.. “For the past year, Don Marti has been tweeting requests for help with ‘MetaMask support.’ MetaMask is one of the more popular wallet services for people to store their cryptocurrency and NFTs. Its users are the subject of widespread and relentless scamming attempts. Fortunately, there are countless robots patrolling Twitter promising to help. Marti, an executive at an ad tech company, tweets about it every couple of weeks. Without fail, dozens of scam bots always come calling. Some even pretend to be beautiful women, and lately, the robots have even started getting poetic in their responses.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Google Turns to a Steady Old Hand to Fight Antitrust Charges. “Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are facing their most significant legal challenge. They are preparing to face off next week in federal court against the Justice Department and a collection of states, which claim the tech giant illegally abused its monopoly power to keep its search engine on top. The Justice Department has argued that Google illegally used agreements with phone makers like Apple and Samsung, as well as internet browsers like Mozilla, to be the default search engine for their users, preventing smaller rivals from getting access to that business.”

Reuters: Google reaches tentative settlement in US Play Store lawsuit. “Alphabet’s Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) on Tuesday tentatively settled a class action suit alleging that its U.S. Play Store had violated U.S. federal antitrust rules by overcharging customers, according to a court filing. Details of the settlement were not disclosed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Daily Beast: Enough! Advertisers and Governments Must Dump Elon Musk.. “You can, as you have demonstrated, flush billions of dollars down the toilet on a whim. But the rest of us still have some clout left, too, and you have made it clear that it is time to mobilize our influence and utilize the mechanisms at our disposal to stop you before you do even greater harm. It is time for the United States and other like-minded governments to stop subsidizing your ventures. It is time for advertisers to recognize that every dollar they give you to support the site formerly known as Twitter goes to amplify the views of hate-mongers, racists, and despots.”

Bloomberg: UK Back in EU’s Horizon Science Program After Brexit Freeze. “Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave the go-ahead for the UK to rejoin the European Union’s €95.5 billion ($103 billion) Horizon science program, allowing closer ties between Europe’s top research hubs following a two-year gap because of post-Brexit political wrangling.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 7, 2023 at 05:28PM
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Renewable Energy Land Use, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, The Conversation, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 6, 2023

Renewable Energy Land Use, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, The Conversation, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

PV Magazine: Online mapping tool to identify policy-suitable land for renewables. “The tool is reportedly able to determine the number of rooftop or ground-mounted solar projects that can be deployed in a given area, as well as the maximum number of wind turbines within a site considering site geometry and the minimum distance required between each turbine. It can also identify buildings that can be connected to a district heating network within a specified distance.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Axios: Biden administration hires Twitter security whistleblower. “Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, the high-profile hacker and Twitter security whistleblower, is joining the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Why it matters: Zatko’s hire brings more muscle to an agency that lacks — and doesn’t appear to want — regulatory authorities.”

The Conversation: The Conversation launches in Brazil. “Since The Conversation launched in Melbourne in 2011 we have grown around the world, with teams in New Zealand, large parts of Africa, Spain, France, the UK, US, Indonesia and Canada. Yesterday we welcomed a new team to our fold, working in Brazil and publishing in Portuguese, our fifth language.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Vice: Twitter Users Are Warning Each Other About Its Junk Ads With Community Notes. “Mainstream advertisers have fled the platform in droves since erratic billionaire Elon Musk took over the site, and what’s replaced them is a flood of dropshipping companies and scammy video games. The problem has gotten so bad that users have taken it upon themselves to warn each other about the site’s junky ads: Often, they come with a community note informing users that this product ad, made by one of the few people willing to still give Elon Musk money to advertise on Twitter, is actually misleading.”

Rolling Stone: Dionne Warwick Wants a Word With ‘Young Man’ Elon Musk About Changes to X. “DIONNE WARWICK IS not totally impressed with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now known as X. Earlier this week, People asked the singer what she thought of Musk’s plan to remove the social media platform’s blocking feature. ‘I have yet to speak to that young man and I intend to because I am not quite sure what he’s doing or if he knows what he’s doing,’ Warwick replied. ‘So until that happens, I’ll reserve my answer to that question.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Channel News Asia: Malaysia mulls rules for Google, Meta to pay news outlets for content. “Malaysia said on Tuesday (Sep 5) it is considering regulations that will make internet giants Alphabet’s Google and Facebook parent Meta Platforms compensate news outlets for content sourced from them.”

Bloomberg Law: FDA’s ‘Not a Horse’ Covid-19 Twitter Posts Are Agency Actions. “‘Tweet-sized doses of personalized medical advice are beyond’ the Food and Drug Administration’s statutory authority, the Fifth Circuit ruled as to the agency’s social media posts that discouraged using ivermectin to treat Covid-19. A lower court must decide whether the case from three ivermectin-prescribing doctors has “any other jurisdictional” or standing issues that would prevent it from moving forward so remand was appropriate, the appeals court also said.”

Associated Press: Carmakers fail privacy test, give owners little or no control on personal data they collect. “Cars are getting an ‘F’ in data privacy. Most major manufacturers admit they may be selling your personal information, a new study finds, with half also saying they would share it with the government or law enforcement without a court order. The proliferation of sensors in automobiles — from telematics to fully digitized control consoles — has made them prodigious data-collection hubs.” Never thought I’d be glad our car is 15 years old.

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Verge: Elon Musk paid for our attention, but the price to keep it is getting higher. “I see Elon Musk has pivoted from pretending he’s going to physically fight Mark Zuckerberg to pretending he is going to sue the Anti-Defamation League. Okay. There are people who still take Musk seriously, and I wish them well on their journey. This blog is for the rest of us.”

The Guardian: Manchester Museum hands back 174 objects to Indigenous Australian islanders. “Manchester Museum’s return of the objects is significant because repatriation projects normally revolve around sacred or ceremonial items…. In this case, Manchester is returning everyday objects with a more mundane backstory. They include dolls made from shells, baskets, fishing spears, boomerangs, armbands and a map made from turtle shells, all being sent back to the Anindilyakwa community, who live on an archipelago in the Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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September 7, 2023 at 12:15AM
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G20 Tourism and SDGs Dashboard, Web Archiving Expertise, Digital Library of Georgia, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 6, 2023

G20 Tourism and SDGs Dashboard, Web Archiving Expertise, Digital Library of Georgia, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

United Nations World Tourism Organization: UNWTO And G20 Launch Dashboard To Support Tourism In Advancing The SDGs. “Ahead of the G20 Leaders’ Summit next 9-10 September, UNWTO has worked with the Presidency through India’s Ministry of Tourism on the G20 Tourism and SDGs Dashboard…. The Dashboard showcases the pillars of the Goa Roadmap for Tourism as a Vehicle for Achieving the SDGs around the five priority areas set for the Tourism Working Group, which are: 1. Green Tourism; 2. Digitalization; 3. Skills; 4. Tourism MSMEs and 5. Destination Management.”

EVENTS

Library of Congress Blog: The Web Archiving Team Answers Questions About the Web Archives. “Have you ever wondered what exactly is web archiving? How the Library select which websites to preserve? Or how you would find and search the web archives? The Web Archiving Team’s Senior Digital Collection Specialists gathered to answer these questions and more in a live webinar during the Preservation Directorate’s celebration of Preservation Week. If you missed it, we have good news– a video is now available to watch on the Library’s website, and you can also read a short summary of the presentation here.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Library of Georgia: The Digital Library of Georgia has made its 3 millionth digitized and full-text-searchable historic newspaper page available freely online. . “The title page of the first edition of the May 22, 1917, issue of the Atlanta Georgian reports on the destruction caused by the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 and the city’s effort to control the damage. This issue marks the 3 millionth page digitized by the Digital Library of Georgia.”

CBS News: Google eases wartime restrictions in boost for Ukrainian entrepreneurs, but digital hurdles remain. “One month after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Vladyslav Lysenko surveyed the damage to his egg warehouse outside Kyiv. Russian soldiers had occupied the building for weeks and destroyed most of his stock. ‘At that moment,” he said, “I realized that I had the opportunity to do something new.’ His dream had always been to open a restaurant, so after meeting Ukrainian ‘MasterChef’ finalist Ivan Kozyr while volunteering to help internally displaced people, he hatched a plan.”

Bloomberg: NFTs, Once Hyped as the Next Big Thing, Now Face ‘Worst Moment’. “Nonfungible tokens, most popularly associated with the digital artwork and other collectibles recorded on crypto blockchains, have lost most of their value after once capturing the imagination of crypto enthusiasts as the next big thing. The hype and FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” around NFTs has faded since their all-time peak in January 2022, leaving beaten-down buyers and sellers struggling to find long-term value in the speculative assets. Monthly trading volume for NFTs plummeted 81% between January 2022 and July 2023, data from DappRadar shows.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Gizmodo’s owner shuts down Spanish language site in favor of AI translations. “Matías S. Zavia, a writer at Gizmodo en Español, posted that the publication was shut down on August 29th and that it would now publish automatically translated articles. Gizmodo en Español previously had a small staff who wrote original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo.”

Politico: The Global South’s missing voice in AI. “Tanzanian politician [Neema Lugangira] (from the country’s ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi political party) is the founder of the African Parliamentary Network on Internet Governance, a pan-regional network of 35 lawmakers from 30 countries. The goal: to include African voices in increasingly complex global discussions on digital policy — many of which have turned, in recent months, to reining in artificial intelligence.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Missouri Independent: Kansas City police made arrests based on rescinded warrants, records show. “The issue arose when the police department switched from one software for tracking warrants to another. It’s unclear how long it went on or how long the individuals were held.”

Ars Technica: Hacker gains admin control of Sourcegraph and gives free access to the masses. “An unknown hacker gained administrative control of Sourcegraph, an AI-driven service used by developers at Uber, Reddit, Dropbox, and other companies, and used it to provide free access to resources that normally would have required payment.”

TorrentFreak: Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of ‘Pirate’ URLs Last Year. “Google remains committed to tackling online piracy. In a recent letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the company says that it blocked hundreds of millions of URLs before they appeared in the search engine. These preemptive takedowns are part of a broader strategy that also deals with advertisements for streaming piracy that hasn’t happened yet.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: Fast-tracking fusion energy’s arrival with AI and accessibility. “As part of their strategy to accelerate fusion energy’s arrival and reach carbon neutrality by 2050, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has announced new funding for a project led by researchers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and four collaborating institutions.”

Android Authority: Five months later, I still don’t want to use Google Bard. “Fast forward to today and we’ve crossed the five-month threshold since Google’s chatbot became publicly available. Despite that, Bard hasn’t found the same kind of success that ChatGPT achieved virtually overnight. But even as Google’s chatbot continues to fade from public discourse, the company hasn’t stopped working on it just yet. So after noticing the last set of updates, I decided to give the troubled chatbot a fair chance. Unfortunately, it only took a few tests to find out why I stopped using Bard in the first place.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 6, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Apps By Apple, South Africa Used Cars, AI-Generated Sports News, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 5, 2023

Apps By Apple, South Africa Used Cars, AI-Generated Sports News, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

KnowTechie: Apple quietly launches new website to showcase its own apps. “Quickly and quietly, Apple launched a new website for its app, named Apps by Apple, weeks before its iPhone 15 event. The new website is designed to promote the company’s in-house apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV.”

CarMag: South Africans Can Now See if Used Cars Have Been Written Off with VIN-Lookup Website. “The South African Insurance Association has launched its VIN-Lookup website, which allows the public to receive a brief description of a vehicle using its VIN to ensure it has not been previously written off.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Futurism: USA Today Owner Pauses AI Articles After Butchering Sports Coverage. “The Dispatch — which is notably owned by USA Today publisher Gannett — only started publishing the AI-generated sports pieces on August 18, using the bot to drum up quick-hit stories about the winners and losers in regional high school football and soccer matches. And though the paper’s ethics disclosure states that all AI-spun content featured in its reporting ‘must be verified for accuracy and factuality before being used in reporting,’ we’d be surprised if a single human eye was laid on these articles before publishing.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Bunch Of Google Search Interface Tests & Experiments. “There have been a number of Google Search user interface tests and experiments I haven’t been able to post yet. Being that today is Labor Day (here in the US), I figured I’d cover a bunch of them in one story – since many of you want stories today.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Archinect: The Cultural Landscape Foundation acquires photographer Alan Ward’s archive. “The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has just announced a gift of landscape photographer and architect Alan Ward’s digital archive, a donation they say provides both the public and scholars exposure to one of the profession’s most beloved practitioners.”

ABC News: Google’s Chromebooks thrive in US classrooms but generate waste, costs, critics say. “While many classrooms have come to depend on Chromebooks, the products have shown a tendency to malfunction or fail within a handful of years for reasons unrelated to user treatment, critics told ABC News. On top of that, the Chromebooks are difficult to repair, generating harmful waste, imposing significant replacement costs and disrupting student learning, they added.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: US appeals court curbs Copyright Office’s mandatory deposit policy. “The U.S. Constitution bars the U.S. Copyright Office from demanding that a publisher deposit physical copies of its books with the office or pay a fine, a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court said on Tuesday.”

Minnesota Star-Tribune: Attorneys decry Minneapolis demands for private data in government transparency lawsuit. “A government transparency group engaged in a two-year legal battle with Minneapolis over access to police misconduct records is accusing city officials of attempting to intimidate their board members — many of whom are journalists — by demanding private data such as Social Security numbers through the discovery process.”

AFP: Half of Switzerland’s large companies have been the victim of a cyber attack. “Almost half of Switzerland’s large businesses have been the victim of cyber attacks, often with disastrous consequences, according to a study published on Monday. A report by SwissVR Monitor found that 45% of Swiss companies with 250 or more employees claim to have suffered at least one cyber attack.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

El País: Seismographs record tremors from the war in Ukraine. “In a groundbreaking paper published in the prestigious journal Nature, a group of researchers demonstrates how a seismological network designed to detect nuclear tests thousands of miles away can also pick up explosions from the war in Ukraine. There are far more of those than either side acknowledges.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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September 6, 2023 at 12:58AM
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AI Litigation Database, ED Games Expo, NREL Podcasts, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 5, 2023

AI Litigation Database, ED Games Expo, NREL Podcasts, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The George Washington University: A Database from GW Law Informs Users on Litigation Relating to AI. “Legal scholars and others familiar with databases such as those maintained by LexisNexis and Westlaw know that they report opinions from finished cases. The AI Litigation Database tracks cases from the time they are filed. The cases are searchable by keyword, the jurisdiction in which they were filed and area of application, among other terms. Application areas include employment, intellectual property, facial recognition and many more.”

EVENTS

US Department of Education: Announcing the 9th Annual ED Games Expo. “The ED Games Expo is the annual public showcase of game-changing education technology (EdTech) innovations created through more than 50 programs at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the U.S. Department of Education (ED), and across government. The multi-day event engages a broad audience, including EdTech developers and researchers, organizations across the education ecosystem, students and educators, members of the public including families and children, and representatives and leaders from Federal agencies and offices.” The event includes both in-person and virtual components.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NREL: NREL Launches Science and News Podcast. “Forty-six years ago, the research organization that would become the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was born. This year, on July 5, NREL’s birthday, the laboratory launched its news podcast, ‘Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast.’ Every other Wednesday, podcast hosts Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle provide news about research at the laboratory and the ways NREL’s work is impacting the clean energy space.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Fights Back Against Misleading Ads With New Policy. “This policy targets unfamiliar or lesser-known advertisers whose ads may have a higher risk of being scams or misrepresenting themselves. Under the new protocol, Google will limit how widely these types of ads are shown across its platforms to mitigate the potential for users to encounter deceptive advertising content.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Sierra Club Magazine: Why Did Public Lands Agencies Get Snarky On Social Media?. “Agencies from the National Park Service to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation have adopted the communication style many of us are used to seeing online to create content that both educates and entertains.”

UC Riverside: UCR California Digital Newspaper Collection receives grant to archive regional newspapers serving Black communities . “The grant will be used to digitize a collection of newspapers serving Black communities in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas between World War II and 1963. UCR’s project is part of the NEH initiative American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future, emphasizing the role of the humanities in tackling contemporary social challenges. ”

The National News: From WaterTok to IceTok, how social media is bringing ice in from the cold. “TikTok is awash with videos and posts about ice – showing different flavours, textures, shapes and freezing methods – with videos of people creating different moulds viewed in their millions. Starbucks made headlines in May when it announced plans to switch from cubes to nugget ice, sparking an online discourse about the merits of smaller pellet shapes over blocks and how it affects the quality of cold beverages.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses. “The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK, or Canada.”

404 Media: Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It. “Hackers are able to grab a target’s IP address, potentially revealing their general physical location, by simply sending a link over the Skype mobile app. The target does not need to click the link or otherwise interact with the hacker beyond opening the message, according to a security researcher who demonstrated the issue and successfully discovered my IP address by using it.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Centre for Economic Policy Research: The effect of copyright on the digitisation and availability of visual artworks. “This column exploits a change in copyright protection in the US to examine how copyright affects the digitisation and distribution of artworks over the internet. The authors find a strong increase in online image availability for original artworks that move into the public domain. Analysis of worldwide Google image search data reveals that digital artwork surrogates made available online are heavily reused downstream, suggesting they are of measurable high public and commercial value.”

North Carolina State University: An ‘Introspective’ AI Finds Diversity Improves Performance. “An artificial intelligence with the ability to look inward and fine tune its own neural network performs better when it chooses diversity over lack of diversity, a new study finds. The resulting diverse neural networks were particularly effective at solving complex tasks.”

Stanford University: Two Tessier-Lavigne papers retracted on his last day as president. “Prominent journal Science issued retraction notices for two high-profile Marc Tessier-Lavigne papers today, the same day his tenure as Stanford’s 11th president officially ends. Tessier-Lavigne, who had previously defended the studies that have now been withdrawn, acknowledged that the research contained manipulated data in the notices.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 5, 2023 at 05:31PM
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UK Intellectual Property Office, Reddit Content Moderators, Museum of Classic Chicago Television, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 4, 2023

UK Intellectual Property Office, Reddit Content Moderators, Museum of Classic Chicago Television, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UK Government: Powerful new search tool will help IPO maintain patent quality. “‘SEARCH’ is based on the state-of-the art patent search tool developed and used by the European Patent Office (EPO), widely regarded as the best such tool in the world. The IPO has worked with the EPO to develop ‘SEARCH’ as the national office version. The IPO is the first national IP office to implement the tool when conducting patent searches, and is already experiencing the benefits.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge. “Did you know that improper food canning can lead to death? Botulism—the result of bacteria growing inside improperly treated canned goods—is rare, but people can die from it. In any case, they’ll certainly get very ill. The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons). Both were recently moderators on the r/canning subreddit and hold science-related master’s degrees.”

TorrentFreak: TV Museum Will Die in 48 Hours Unless Sony Retracts YouTube Copyright Strikes. “Rick Klein and his team have been preserving TV adverts, forgotten tapes, and decades-old TV programming for years. Now operating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television has called YouTube home since 2007. However, copyright notices sent on behalf of Sony, protecting TV shows between 40 and 60 years old, could shut down the project in 48 hours.”

Bloomberg: Big Tech firms bracing for EU’s biggest antitrust crackdown; Apple, Alphabet, Meta likely to be affected. “Big Tech is bracing for the European Union’s biggest ever clampdown on anti-competitive practices in the digital economy, potentially provoking a new wave of legal battles between regulators and Silicon Valley. By Sept. 6, antitrust regulators will announce a list of services likely to include Alphabet Inc.’s Google Search, Apple Inc.’s App Store, Amazon.com Inc.’s marketplace and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, to be targeted by rules aimed at preventing the most powerful firms from wrecking new markets before it’s too late to act.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Chess .com: How A Bolivian Junior Chess Champion Became A Social Media Star. “WCM Alexandra Prado, also known as AlexandraChess, is the mind behind some of the internet’s most-viewed chess content, with hundreds of thousands of followers across different platforms. How did a young chess champion from Bolivia become one of the world’s most-followed chess influencers? Read her story to find out!”

New York Times: We Used A.I. to Write Essays for Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Here’s How It Went.. “While the chatbots are not yet great at simulating long-form personal essays with authentic student voices, I wondered how the A.I. tools would do on some of the shorter essay questions that elite schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth are requiring high school applicants to answer this year. So I used several free tools to generate short essays for some Ivy League applications. The A.I. chatbots’ answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Ruby Franke, Utah family YouTuber, arrested on abuse charges after malnourished child in duct tape is found. “Ruby Franke, the Utah mom behind the now-defunct family YouTube channel ‘8 Passengers,’ was arrested Wednesday on child abuse charges after authorities found a malnourished minor with open wounds and duct tape on their extremities, officials announced.”

WWLP (Massachusetts): Private investigators seek new record access law. “A bill before the Joint Committee on Transportation would allow licensed private investigators and detectives to digitally access records managed by the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Industry experts say they are already legally entitled to this information under the Driver Privacy Protection Act, but must go in-person to the registry where they sometimes end up waiting for hours alongside those renewing their license or scheduling a road test.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Daily Dot: Is it fair to film people with dementia and put it on TikTok?. “While many of the parents shown in these videos are consenting to being filmed—or, at least to videos of them being posted—some TikTokers film their parents with dementia reacting to gimmicks or just going about their day. Dementia is the umbrella term for diseases that can develop with age that result in the loss of cognitive functioning, like retaining memories or even being able to take care of oneself.”

UCLA: Bringing the history of L.A. workers’ movements into the present – and future. “A course being developed by UCLA labor studies professor Tobias Higbie will aim to inspire a new generation of change-makers.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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September 5, 2023 at 01:00AM
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