Wildfoods4Wildlife, AsianWeek Newspaper, Decarbonizing Massachusetts, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 22, 2023

Wildfoods4Wildlife, AsianWeek Newspaper, Decarbonizing Massachusetts, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 22, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Found via Google Alerts: Wildfoods4Wildlife.com. From the Getting Started page: “The purpose of this website is to assist permitted wildlife rehabilitators to acquire wild plant foods to feed to their wildlife patients by linking up with volunteer plant foragers. We hope to help beginner plant enthusiasts and foragers collect appropriate fruits, seeds, greens and nuts that are eaten by the Virginia wildlife that are commonly treated in rehabilitation.”

San Francisco Standard: AsianWeek, San Francisco’s Pioneering Asian American Newspaper, Has Been Reborn Online. “On Tuesday night, after years working on digitalization, the Fangs—a locally prominent family of politicos who formerly owned the San Francisco Examiner—held an event to launch an online database that includes AsianWeek’s three decades of content, searchable by article keywords, bylines, issue dates and even images.”

State of Massachusetts: DCR Launches New Online Mapping Tool Highlighting Agency’s Decarbonization Initiatives. “In celebration of Climate Week, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) today launched a new interactive online map displaying the agency’s decarbonization efforts. The Decarbonization Initiatives Map illustrates the sustainable and equitable practices, strategies, and initiatives DCR is implementing at its properties across the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Google’s Bard Just Got More Powerful. It’s Still Erratic.. “I put the upgraded Bard through its paces on Tuesday, hoping to discover a powerful A.I. assistant with new and improved abilities. What I found was a bit of a mess. In my testing, Bard succeeded at some simpler tasks, such as summarizing an email. But it also told me about emails that weren’t in my inbox, gave me bad travel advice and fell flat on harder analytical tasks.”

Philly Voice: Mütter Museum asks the public to weigh in on ethical battle over displaying human remains. “Philadelphia’s shrine to unusual medical history is in the midst of a culture war between devoted supporters and change-minded leaders who want to review the site’s practices.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 10+ Free Logo Makers and Logo Generators (Best of) . “While initiating a business, most people consider hiring an expert graphic designer to craft a logo. Although this is a good approach, it can be quite expensive. If you’re running a small to medium-sized business or a startup, you might want to consider using an online logo-making tool. These tools can help you develop a simple, yet effective, logo without burning a hole in your pocket.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Motherboard: Google Flat-Out Refuses to Bargain With Workers, Prompting YouTube Music Strike. “YouTube Music contract workers went on strike on Wednesday morning because of Google’s refusal to bargain with the union representing the workers. Google, YouTube’s parent company, claims that because the workers are employed through a third-party contractor it has no obligation to meet them at the table, according to an email from a law firm representing Google seen by Motherboard.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ABC News: Google sued for negligence after man drove off collapsed bridge while following map directions. “Philip Paxson, a medical device salesman and father of two, drowned Sept. 30, 2022, after his Jeep Gladiator plunged into Snow Creek in Hickory, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court. Paxson was driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party through an unfamiliar neighborhood when Google Maps allegedly directed him to cross a bridge that had collapsed nine years prior and was never repaired.”

Associated Press: Australia tells dating apps to improve safety standards to protect users from sexual violence. ” Australia’s government said Monday the online dating industry must improve safety standards or be forced to make changes through legislation, responding to research that says three-in-four Australian users suffer some form of sexual violence through the platforms.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

McGill University: Assessing unintended consequences in AI-based neurosurgical training. “A new study from the Neurosurgical Simulation and Artificial Intelligence Learning Centre at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) of McGill University… shows that human instruction is still necessary to detect and compensate for unintended, and sometimes negative, changes in neurosurgeon behaviour after virtual reality AI training.” 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 23, 2023 at 12:43AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/mScXObW

Aboriginal and Indigenous Law, Connecticut Parks, USPTO Trademark Search, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 22, 2023

Aboriginal and Indigenous Law, Connecticut Parks, USPTO Trademark Search, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 22, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Dalhousie University: Schulich Law showcases Aboriginal and Indigenous law projects on new website. “The Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie has launched a new website dedicated to highlighting the work of its students, faculty, and staff in the areas of Aboriginal and Indigenous law…. The website contains a large and growing repository of access to justice (A2J) projects and papers created by students for courses they have taken at Schulich Law. These are intended to be resources to help the public achieve a better understanding of issues related to Aboriginal and Indigenous law.”

State of Connecticut: Governor Lamont Announces Launch of CTParks.com: A Cutting-Edge Website Showcasing Connecticut State Parks. “Governor Ned Lamont today announced the launch of CTParks.com, the new official website for Connecticut State Parks. The website offers visitors with an innovative online platform showcasing Connecticut State Parks in a more exciting, user-friendly way to help them engage with, learn about, and access state parks and the areas around them.”

USPTO: Introducing the USPTO’s new cloud-based trademark search system with basic and advanced search options. “This new, cloud-based search system will replace our current system (Trademark Electronic Search System, or TESS) to make searching for trademark registrations and/or applications easier – a necessary step for any aspiring or current business owner looking to protect their brand. Our new system provides users with a stronger industry-standard search syntax and offers both a simplified, basic search interface as well as a more advanced search interface for more complex searching.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Google Quietly Removes ‘Written By People’ From Suggestions for Website Owners. “Google quietly removed the suggestion that the text of a website should be ‘written by people’ from its guidance for site owners who want to do better in search results, a change first spotted by Search Engine Land. The change will likely accelerate the deluge of AI-generated content that’s already beginning to spread across the web, in part thanks to tools that Google itself is building.”

TechCrunch: OpenAI unveils DALL-E 3, allows artists to opt out of training. “OpenAI’s new tool, DALL-E 3, uses ChatGPT to help fill in prompts. Via ChatGPT, subscribers to OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans, ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise, can type in a request for an image and hone it through conversations with the chatbot — receiving the results directly within the chat app.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Adults Are Panicked About Teens and Social Media. These Girls Have Advice.. “Adults have been vocal about the effects of phone and social media use on adolescents, and how to best intervene to protect their mental health. Yet rarely are young people asked what they think might be constructive, or what they already do to build healthy habits. So we spoke to girls from ages 12 to 17 who have participated in programs led by Girls Leadership, a nonprofit that teaches confidence-building and how to use social media responsibly. Here are some of their best pieces of advice for other teens — and what they want adults to know, too.”

Euronews: Social media flooded with misinformation after surge of migrants in Lampedusa. “When more than 10,000 undocumented migrants landed on the shores of the Italian island of Lampedusa last week, social media became flooded with misinformation. Euronews debunked two viral and misleading clips. In this context of heated discussions on how EU member states should handle illegal immigration, multiple misleading videos have been shared criticising the migrants arriving in Italy.”

UK Government: Regulator publishes new guidance on charities’ social media use. “The new guidance is clear that charities using social media should have a social media policy in place and should ensure the policy is followed. This is standard practice in many charities and across other sectors and industries, and can help an organisation avoid problems and address issues swiftly if they occur. The regulator says its casework has revealed a knowledge gap.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Donald Trump Jr.’s X account apparently hacked, announces father’s death. “Donald Trump Jr.’s account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter appeared to be hacked early Wednesday. One post falsely stated that former President Donald Trump had died, according to screenshots.”

Gothamist: 7 artworks, seized by Nazis, returned to descendants in NY. “An epic legal affair involving artworks looted by the Nazi regime drew to a close on Wednesday in Lower Manhattan, where the works were handed over to the descendants of a Jewish collector who was murdered during the Holocaust. The artworks, by the renowned Austrian artist Egon Schiele, were forcibly taken from Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret performer who was killed in 1941 at Dachau concentration camp, according to descendants of the artist as well as a pivotal court ruling.”

CNBC: How a North Korean cyber group impersonated a Washington D.C. analyst. “Six years ago, a well-respected researcher was working late into the night when she stepped away from her computer to brush her teeth. By the time she came back, her computer had been hacked.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Markets Insider: Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.. “A report by dappGambl found that 95% of non-fungible tokens are effectively worthless. Out of 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of them have a market cap of zero ether, based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap. By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets.” 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.

September 22, 2023 at 05:32PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/fuMsXno

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, California Plants, Nest Hub Max, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 21, 2023

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, California Plants, Nest Hub Max, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

MIT Press: The MIT Press announces the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, a paradigm shift in open access reference works. “For over a generation, the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences has been an essential resource for researchers and students of cognitive science and neuroscience. Today, the MIT Press proudly announces its intellectual successor—the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS), a dynamic and openly accessible web reference poised to guide the next generation of exploration. Thanks to generous funding from James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Allen Institute for AI, the first set of articles will be published in 2024.”

California Department of Natural Resources: DWR Collaborates With UC Davis to Expand Plant Database for Landscape Community. “The Water Use Classification of Landscape Species database offers water use data for more than 3,500 plants and helps users find the perfect plants for their water needs. Using the Water Use Classification of Landscape Species database, users can search for plants by region, water requirement, and plant type.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Google: Nest Hub Max ending Google Meet and Zoom support in September. “Video calling was originally pitched as a key feature of the Nest Hub Max, but Google Meet and Zoom are dropping support at the end of September.”

Online Journalism Blog: The third edition of the Online Journalism Handbook is now out!. “A new, third, edition of the Online Journalism Handbook is now out. A comprehensive update to the 2017 second edition, it sees the addition of a new chapter on writing for email and chat.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 8 Vintage iPhone Film Camera Apps Worth Using . “For many of us, the blemishes and imperfections that come with shooting film are a distant memory. While the fundamentals of shutter speed and aperture settings persist, the process of shooting and sharing an image has changed massively. It makes sense, then, that a subset of vintage camera apps exists designed to recreate the experience of shooting film. So, let’s look at some of the best iPhone film camera apps.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Jakarta Globe: National Museum that Houses Pre-Historic Artifacts Ravaged by Fire. “The National Museum in Jakarta, housing hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts, including prehistoric treasures, suffered a devastating fire on Saturday evening, resulting in substantial damage and the potential loss of national treasures. While the exact scope of the losses remains unknown, police have reported that at least four major rooms of the museum were completely destroyed by the fire.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Japan News: Google, X Among Six Search, Social Media Operators Subject to Japan’s New Government Regulations to Protect Personal Data. “Google LLC and X Corp., which operates the service formerly known as Twitter, are among the six companies whose services will be subject to regulation by the Japanese government from as soon as October. A council of the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry released its report Tuesday saying that it is appropriate to designate the six companies, with the aim of strengthening the protection of users’ personal information.”

The Register: Scattered Spider traps 100+ victims in its web as it moves into ransomware. “Scattered Spider, the crew behind at least one of the recent Las Vegas casino IT security breaches, has already hit some 100 organizations during its so-far brief tenure in the cybercrime scene, according to Mandiant. Further, as also witnessed in the ongoing MGM Resorts network outage, the gang, known for its social-engineering-based attacks, is now throwing data-stealing ransomware at victims, too.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Wisconsin-Madison: Machine learning analysis of research citations highlights importance of federal funding for basic scientific research. “Biomedical research aimed at improving human health is particularly reliant on publicly funded basic science, according to a new analysis boosted by artificial intelligence.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Honolulu Star-Advertiser: Lahaina’s 150-year-old banyan tree has sprouted green leaves. “The 150-year-old banyan tree in Lahaina is showing signs of life more than a month after its leaves were singed by fire. Clusters of green leaves have since grown from the iconic tree’s branches, as well as on the ground beneath it at Lahaina’s courthouse square.” 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 22, 2023 at 12:10AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/e4EY19Z

Dutch and Flemish Art Expertise, Syracuse University Football, Google, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 21, 2023

Dutch and Flemish Art Expertise, Syracuse University Football, Google, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CODART: Curators’ Specializations Now Available on the CODART Website. “In the curators overview, you will find a new filter that allows you to select from various topics in terms of geographical regions, periods, media, themes and artists. Please note that only topics related to Dutch and Flemish art from about 1350 to 1750 are included. For example, if one selects the region of Spain, curators specializing in northern artists who were active in Spain will be presented, not curators specializing in Spanish artists.”

Syracuse University: University Football Films Collection Now Available Online. “Of the 430 films digitized from the larger Syracuse University Audiovisual Collection, nearly 400 are now available through SU Digital Collections, the Libraries’ digital library portal. The content forms the core of the new Syracuse University Football Films Collection, a virtual collection created for the digital library where materials can be searched by date, keyword and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Bard Gets a ‘Google It’ Button and We’re Back at Square One, Folks . “During a press briefing on Tuesday, Google Bard vice president of engineering Amar Subramanya said one of the challenges with large language models is that they oftentimes present inaccurate information, confidently. So, to fix this issue of what he described as ‘the hallucination problem’, Google is sticking a ‘Google It’ button within Bard. Why….why not just bypass the middle bot and go straight to Google?”

TechCrunch: X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system will now let contributors consider opposing viewpoints . “X (formerly Twitter) this week changed how its crowdsourced fact-checking Community Notes feature works. In the new design, users will be able to review all the notes that have been proposed as annotations to an X post, rather than just the one note they’re currently reviewing. In other words, it will allow contributors to consider other notes before leaving their rating — and possibly, could convince them to change their mind.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Tech Fears Are Showing Up on Picket Lines. “Unions aren’t just fighting for an inflation-beating wage boost. They also are campaigning for job security at a time when workers increasingly fear that shifts to new technologies, like electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, threaten their job, and tech bosses themselves say this gloomy outlook is inevitable.”

Mashable: How social media in the classroom is burning teachers out. “[Sari Beth] Rosenberg noticed the shift about a decade ago. Her students’ attention span seemed shorter, and the teens became more prone to distraction. Conflicts over being excluded or bullied via social media became routine. Students brought that tension into the classroom and hallways. Rosenberg noticed, through observation and conversation, how social media wore down her students’ mental health.”

Hell Gate: The TikTok NPC Streamers of SoHo . “People attuned to the summer’s internet fads would have known what the brothers were doing—the Flints are NPC streamers, a genre in which a content creator will mimic a non-player character in a video game. During their livestreams, these content creators idle like a background villager in an Elder Scrolls town would, until a viewer interacts with them by throwing them a virtual token via TikTok’s reward system, in which case they’ll perform a line of dialogue and one of the animations they’ve come up with for their character.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google launches last-ditch effort to overturn $2.6 billion EU antitrust fine. “Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday made a last-ditch effort at Europe’s top court to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust fine imposed for market abuse related to its shopping service, saying that regulators failed to show that its practices were anti-competitive.”

Wall Street Journal: People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time. “Accounts on the platform are posting episodes of TV shows and full-length films in bite-sized clips that users can watch in a long continuous string. If you search for ‘Barbie,’ odds are, you’ll be inundated with fan videos and chatter, and won’t see any of the clips. But TikTok’s algorithms might promote a 90-second snippet of the movie on users’ For You pages, with a cryptic title like Part 8. Once users watch a few clips, more and more might turn up.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

HackADay: Preserving Floppy Disks . “Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.”

Axios: Most U.S. adults don’t believe benefits of AI outweigh the risks, new survey finds. “54% of the 2,063 adults in a Mitre-Harris Poll survey in July said they were more concerned about the risks of AI than they were excited about the potential benefits. At the same time, 39% of adults said they believed today’s AI technologies are safe and secure — down 9 points from the previous survey in November 2022.”

Yahoo Finance: Americans spent $71B on social media impulse buys: Survey. “Americans are spending a lot of money on social media. According to a new Bankrate survey, 48% of social media users have made an impulse purchase, spending a whopping $71 billion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 57% of buyers regretted at least one purchase.” 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.

September 21, 2023 at 05:29PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/uDSvWwZ

African-American Funeral Programs, Google Domains, TikTok, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023

African-American Funeral Programs, Google Domains, TikTok, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Buffalo News: Newly digitized funeral program collection unveiled at Merriweather library. “Interest in genealogical research has increased with new technological innovations, including online databases, but members of the Buffalo Genealogical Society of the African Diaspora long ago discovered the value of African American funeral programs – in all their low-tech glory – as rich sources of biographical information for those working on their family trees. The society recently teamed with the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, University at Buffalo and Western New York Library Resources Council to digitize a community resource that it created called the Funeral Collection project.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Google Domains halts registrations as it waits for the Google Grim Reaper. “Google Domains has registered its last domain. Google announced in July that the service was getting shut down and that it had struck a deal with Squarespace to sell off the existing customer base. Part of that transition process means winding down the existing Google Domains functionality. 9to5Google was the first site to notice that you can no longer buy a domain through the service while it waits for the Google Grim Reaper to arrive.”

TechCrunch: TikTok debuts new tools and technology to label AI content. “As more creators turn to AI for their artistic expression, there’s also a broader push for transparency around when AI was involved in content creation. To address this concern, TikTok announced today it will launch a new tool that will allow creators to label their AI-generated content and will begin testing other ways to label AI-generated content automatically.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeTechEasier: 9 Tools to Convert and Save WEBP Files to JPG . “WEBP is a file extension developed by Google to reduce the size of an image without needing to sacrifice image quality. Recently, many websites have been making use of the WEBP image format, but it’s still not natively supported by many image editors, including older versions of Photoshop or web content management systems, such as WordPress. The solution to this is to convert your WEBP image to JPG. This list includes some of the best tools to convert and save WEBP files to JPG.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Business Insider: New layoffs at Twitter hit trust and safety workers even as advertisers worry about toxic speech. “The cuts happened the first week of September, according to two people familiar with the company, one of the first targeted layoffs since he shrunk operations earlier this year. While this layoff only affected a handful of people, five to 10, it was focused entirely on workers in trust and safety.”

BBC: How will museums of tomorrow tell the Covid pandemic story?. “Covid’s arrival in early 2020 threw organisations and businesses into turmoil. But while most workers grappled with furlough, social distancing and working from home, a small band of museum officers sensed history was in the making. This is one museum service’s story of trying to collect items in real-time to capture the pandemic story for future generations.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CoinDesk: NFL Quarterback Trevor Lawrence and 2 YouTube Influencers Settle FTX Case . “As Sam Bankman-Fried prepares for a trial defense in Manhattan next month, three celebrity promoters of his failed FTX cryptocurrency exchange have opted to settle the case, according to court filings. NFL team Jacksonville Jaguars’ quarterback Trevor Lawrence and YouTube influencers Kevin Paffrath and Tom Nash agreed to settle the case on undisclosed terms. The final court order acknowledging the settlement and removing them from the case is awaiting a sign-off from U.S. Judge K. Michael Moore.”

Bar and Bench (India): X Corp (Twitter) case: Karnataka High Court suggests that government bring in minimum age for using social media. “The Karnataka High Court today suggested that the Central government consider setting a minimum age for using social media so that children are prevented from using it. A bench of Justices G Narender and Vijaykumar A Patil made the suggestion while dwelling upon the dangers of exposing children to social media.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: The Google Trial Is Going to Rewrite Our Future. “The Google antitrust trial, which began last week, is ostensibly focused on the past — on a series of deals that Google made with other companies over the past two decades. The prosecution in the case, U.S. et al. v. Google, contends that Google illegally spent billions of dollars paying off Samsung and Apple to prevent anyone else from gaining a foothold in the market for online search.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: Turning the tide: Ghana’s innovative approach to tackle marine plastic pollution with citizen science. “Working with IIASA researchers, Ghana has adopted a citizen science approach to addressing the problem of plastic pollution in marine environments, becoming the first country to integrate this type of data on marine plastic litter into its official monitoring and reporting processes. A new study presents this innovative approach on Ghana’s citizen science journey and offers a pathway that can potentially be adopted in other countries.” 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 21, 2023 at 12:08AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/P4yK208

How To Create a Mastodon Account for Your WordPress Blog In Five Minutes

How To Create a Mastodon Account for Your WordPress Blog In Five Minutes
By ResearchBuzz

I have given up trying to figure out Elon Musk’s deal. Several years ago he speculated that we’re living in a simulation. If he truly believes that, then my best guess is that he thinks the simulation is of Wreck-It Ralph. At any rate, the latest incomprehensible decision is the implementation of mandatory subscription fees, which as you might imagine has accelerated the continuing exodus from Twitter.

I really like Mastodon. The API is excellent and I find the process of creating apps for searching and browsing most instructional. I’m not the only one building tools for Mastodon (it has a thread reader now!) — in fact, I think if you tried Mastodon in November of last year and didn’t enjoy it, you’d find it a much different experience now.

Happily, if you have a WordPress blog, you can start a Mastodon account using a WordPress plugin. The plugin will connect your WordPress blog to the fediverse (a collection of decentralized networks where Mastodon resides) and automatically publish your posts on Mastodon. The plugin will also allow you to track how many people are following that account. Best of all, installing this plugin will take less than five minutes. If you’ve been thinking about joining Mastodon, this is a good way to get your feet wet while you’re exploring the options around setting up a personal account.

In this walkthrough, I’ll install the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress on RB Firehose, the blog which indexes the individual articles which make up the ResearchBuzz digest newsletter.

Please note: If you’ve done a lot of SEO tweaking you may have to take a further step or two. Furthermore, if you’re running a blog with several authors, your installation process will be slightly different.

1. Installing the ActivityPub Plugin

What’s ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a networking protocol used by many decentralized social networks, including Mastodon. You can learn more about it here. This plugin will actually make your blog accessible to several social networks in the fediverse, but for the purpose of this article we’re focusing on Mastodon.

From the Plugins section of your WordPress site, search for ActivityPub. You’re looking for “ActivityPub By Matthias Pfefferle & Automattic·”

 

If you’re using author profiles or you’ve redirected your author pages for SEO purposes, please be sure to read the additional instructions on the plugin page. You also have the option to create a single Mastodon account for your blog instead of creating individual author accounts. We’ll be creating a single account in this article. If everything looks good go ahead and install the plugin. After it’s installed, you’ll find the settings under Settings -> ActivityPub.

2. Setting Up the Plugin

Your settings page starts by showing you your Mastodon user address and profile URL.

The username part is the part that a Mastodon user would paste into a search box in their instance to follow your blog. The icon comes from the author profile, which is why the avatar is a little cartoon me.

 

I do not like this. I want to create a Mastodon account about the blog, not about me. So I will click on the Settings tab at the top of this page to change it. This page has several sections so let’s take them one at a time.

The first part of the settings lets you specify whether you want to set the account by blog authors or for the blog itself.  If you choose that you want a single account for the blog itself, you’ll be able to change the account name. Here I’ve set up a single account called researchbuzz_firehose.

The second part specifies how you want to publish your content on Mastodon and which items you want to publish (posts/pages/attachments.) There’s also a server setting here but it’s a bit outside the scope of this article. Click the Save Changes button when you’re done.

Once you’ve clicked that button and the page refreshes, you’ll see the settings page has a new page called Followers. This is the tab that will show you the people on Mastodon who are following your blog. Of course I don’t have any followers at the moment, but I’ll follow the blog from my own Mastodon account. A search of the new user name finds my account without the cartoon me. (I’m not sure where the blog avatar is pulled from, if anywhere, if anybody knows please let me know.) I’ll follow it.

 

Now when I look on my followers tab I see one follower! Yay!

To see if this is working, I’ll do a test post on ResearchBuzz Firehose.

Did this post appear on my Mastodon account? Yes it did!

 

And that’s all there is to it! If you want to create a basic Mastodon account for your blog all you need is the ActivityPub plugin and a few minutes. It’s up to you to promote your site in order to get followers, of course, but congratulations! You have taken your first step into the fediverse by getting your blog on Mastodon.

September 20, 2023 at 05:39PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/JcI2Qvo

State Court Report, FOIA Log Explorer, LGBTQ Delaware, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023

State Court Report, FOIA Log Explorer, LGBTQ Delaware, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brennan Center for Justice: Brennan Center Launches State Court Report, Website Dedicated to State Constitutions and Courts. “Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law launched State Court Report, a nonpartisan website devoted to state constitutions and courts. … State Court Report also offers a database of decisions and briefs from 550 significant state supreme court cases since 2021 across the fifty states, as well as materials from major pending cases.”

MuckRock: Browse thousands of additional FOIA requests with the new FOIA Log Explorer. “MuckRock’s users have already shared almost 90,000 public requests you can search, browse, follow or refile, but that is still just a small segment of the broader world of all Freedom of Information requests. The FOIA Log Explorer expands that view by importing data on thousands of requests from dozens of agencies at the state, local and federal level, making it easier to search through and see what kinds of materials agencies are and are not releasing, as well as helping you craft more targeted requests of your own.”

State of Delaware: Celebrate Delaware’s LGBTQ+ history with a new online resource. “This September, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs is proud to offer a sneak-peek introduction to the LGBTQ+ History of Delaware: We Have Always Been Here project!”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: YouTube suspends Russell Brand from advert income. “YouTube has suspended Russell Brand’s channels from making money from adverts for ‘violating’ its ‘creator responsibility policy’. The video platform said it was taking action ‘to protect’ its users. It comes after the Metropolitan Police received a report of an alleged sexual assault in 2003, in the wake of further allegations about the star.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Reddit Suck Less on Your Phone. “IT’S BEEN A few months since Reddit shut down the vast majority of third-party clients, and the protests have mostly died down. But using Reddit on mobile is a nightmare—it’s slow, riddled with prompts, and constantly asks if you want notifications. … There is one simple workaround: Use the web version instead. But Reddit also goes out of its way to make this annoying: There are constant pop-ups encouraging you to install the Reddit app, and they take up half the screen. Let’s talk about how to avoid these pop-ups on Apple devices and then go over a few third-party apps—including one still working on Android.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Chortle: Velvet Onion vanishes. “Alternative comedy website The Velvet Onion has disappeared from the internet. The site covered the scene from 2010 to 2018 – but now even the cost of maintaining its archive as a permanent presence has proved too much for founder Didymus Holmes.”

CNBC: Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is moving to monthly subscription fees and has 550 million users. “Elon Musk discussed his plans for Twitter, now called X, on Monday during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, Musk said the social network is ‘moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system’ in order to combat ‘vast armies of bots.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Sued by FTX. “”On Monday, FTX filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware accusing Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, longtime Stanford law professors, of using their ‘access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves.’ The lawsuit seeks to claw back millions of dollars the couple received from their son.”

The Register: Sonos secures a victory in audio patent fight against Google . “The years-long legal drama resulting from a brief fling between Google and smart speaker maker Sonos has resulted in another loss for the Chocolate Factory, which had its claims of copyright infringement tossed out by a US International Trade Commission (ITC) judge Friday.”

Ars Technica: How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse. “A security company is calling out a feature in Google’s authenticator app that it says made a recent internal network breach much worse. Retool, which helps customers secure their software development platforms, made the criticism on Wednesday in a post disclosing a compromise of its customer support system. The breach gave the attackers responsible access to the accounts of 27 customers, all in the cryptocurrency industry.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

George Washington University: Social Media May Be Used to Combat COVID Vaccine Hesitancy in Nigeria. “A social media campaign launched in 2022 helped encourage some Nigerians to roll up their sleeves for a COVID vaccine, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. ‘Our research suggests that a social media campaign can reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase the vaccination rates in Nigeria and possibly other low-income countries,’ said Doug Evans, the lead author of the paper and a professor of prevention and community health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.”

The Register: ChatGPT’s odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip . “ChatGPT, OpenAI’s fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.” 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.

September 20, 2023 at 05:30PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/j3HOW8F