University of Texas at Austin: Census Bureau’s Proposal Threatens Integrity of Race and Ethnicity Data

Posted on December 10, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

University of Texas at Austin: Census Bureau’s Proposal Threatens Integrity of Race and Ethnicity Data. “As a demographer and former analyst with the bureau, I support the desire to achieve accurate data for these populations. But the combined question is riddled with too many ethical and methodological flaws to be considered a viable solution. As it stands, the question conflates race and ethnicity by making both concepts co-equal and relies on a coding infrastructure that forcibly reassigns people to race groups they did not initially identify with.”

Robb Knight: Please, Expose your RSS

Posted on December 9, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

Robb Knight: Please, Expose your RSS. “Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people’s RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed. Even if people only ever add your website into their feed reader and let the app find the RSS feed (see below for more info on this), showing an RSS link reminds people that RSS exists, a win for the open web.”

Defector: Elon Musk Is Grimly Determined To Let You Know He Is Funny

Posted on December 8, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

Defector: Elon Musk Is Grimly Determined To Let You Know He Is Funny. “Not to take the comedic semiotics of Elon Musk too-too seriously, but the most interesting facet of his dogged, ever-flopping quest to be thought of as a comedy genius as well as a success entrepreneur guy is the ways in which he is consistently five or more years behind the online comedy meta-game. For someone with a stupefying amount of resources and a bizarrely overcooked opinion of the importance of his dying app, he understands precious little about the modern forms of comedy.”

South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Stop stifling the public’s right to know in Florida

Posted on December 4, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Stop stifling the public’s right to know in Florida. “Florida was a beacon to the nation. Was. It’s no longer true. The Legislature has riddled the public records laws with more than 1,000 exemptions, easily hurdling the two-thirds supermajorities of both houses that the Constitution requires. That includes corrupting clouds of darkness over university presidential searches and the extensive travels of Gov. Ron DeSantis as he seeks the presidency.”

Biodiversity Data Journal: Envisaging a global infrastructure to exploit the potential of digitised collections

Posted on December 3, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

Biodiversity Data Journal: Envisaging a global infrastructure to exploit the potential of digitised collections . “While image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applications, it is still used only on an artisanal basis in the biological collections community, largely because the image corpora are dispersed. Yet, there is massive untapped potential for novel applications and research if images of collection objects could be made accessible in a single corpus.”

New York Times: Snowplow Parents Are Ruining Online Grading

Posted on November 30, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

New York Times: Snowplow Parents Are Ruining Online Grading. “I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite Campus, and many of their anecdotes were similar to what Miller shared: anxious kids checking their grades throughout the day, snowplow parents berating their children and questioning teachers about every grade they considered unacceptable, and harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day, dealing with an untenable stream of additional communication.”

The Atlantic: Substack Has a Nazi Problem

Posted on November 29, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

The Atlantic: Substack Has a Nazi Problem. “The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.”

Opinion: Schools should ban smartphones. Parents should help. (Washington Post)

Posted on November 27, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

Washington Post: Opinion: Schools should ban smartphones. Parents should help.. “Understandably, individual schools and school districts — in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere — are trying to crack down on smartphones. Students are required to store the devices in backpacks or lockers during classes, or to place them in magnetic locking pouches. In 2024, these efforts should go even further: Impose an outright ban on bringing cellphones to school, which parents should welcome and support.”

The Conversation: Forget dystopian scenarios – AI is pervasive today, and the risks are often hidden

Posted on November 27, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

The Conversation: Forget dystopian scenarios – AI is pervasive today, and the risks are often hidden. “The Biden administration’s recent executive order and enforcement efforts by federal agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission are the first steps in recognizing and safeguarding against algorithmic harms. And though large language models, such as GPT-3 that powers ChatGPT, and multimodal large language models, such as GPT-4, are steps on the road toward artificial general intelligence, they are also algorithms people are increasingly using in school, work and daily life. It’s important to consider the biases that result from widespread use of large language models.”

The Hill: Science is littered with zombie studies. Here’s how to stop their spread.

Posted on November 26, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

The Hill: Science is littered with zombie studies. Here’s how to stop their spread.. “Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds. Identifying these inaccuracies is how science is supposed to work. Finding and correcting publications — and keeping the scholarly record up to date — is part of the process. Yet these zombie publications continue to be cited and used, unwittingly, to support new arguments. Why? Almost always it’s because nobody noticed they had been retracted.”

The Guardian: Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not

Posted on November 25, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

The Guardian: Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not. “Storing online data in perpetuity is not just about photos and texts but thoughts and ideas. Platforms such as WordPress are starting to act, but it must be at a realistic price.”

Hixie’s Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google

Posted on November 25, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

Hixie’s Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google . “Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements. I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral compass.”

Slate: How Google Really Works

Posted on November 24, 2023 by ResearchBuzz

Slate: How Google Really Works. “Obviously, governments don’t sue companies just to put private company information in the hands of the public. Nor should they. But, in this case, federal prosecutors have brought a convincing case that Google—arguably the most powerful company on the internet—abused one of its many monopolies. While monopolization cases are rare and notoriously difficult to win, the public has already won to some degree. At least we can see Google for what it really is.”

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