Whenever I explain my #research at Google into mobile text editing, I'm usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile "Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What's the problem?"
Text editing on mobile isn't ok. It's actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. I wrote this post so you can understand why it's so important. https://jenson.org/text #UXDesign#UX
Ok Fediverse I'm throwing up an SOS.
I need to get my self #FediHired. I've been applying, and working with a recruiter, but so far bubkis.
I can only do #Remote work due to health reasons.
I'm a skilled #PatentSpecialist, but also have years of experience in #Accounting, #Research, and #TechnicalWriting. Pretty much if it involves a computer, I can do it (Yes, including websites and graphics). I'm fluent in #English.
HELP: looking for sources on fascist aesthetics. Why fascists (Nazi Germany, other fascist countries, and current fascist movements) like minimalism, Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and “elegant” beauty.
"De-anonymising data is surprisingly easy: if you know Tony Blair’s date of birth (a matter of public record) and the two dates during his term in office in which he was treated for a heart condition (ditto), you can pick him out of any “anonymised” pool of NHS data in seconds, and then discover all those facts about his health that aren’t a matter of public record... Dr Ben Goldacre and his team at Oxford created OpenSAFELY, a “Trusted Research Environment” that allows researchers to write programs that analyse NHS data in situ. These programs would be dispatched to run against the data held by NHS trusts, and then the system would return the results to the researchers without ever letting them handle the data – which never left the trusts’ own servers." https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/ #dataProtection#research#NHS#privacy
PS #Palantir, ... is literally named after an evil, all-seeing magic talisman employed by the principal villain of Lord of the Rings (“Sauron, are we the baddies?”)
Hey fedi I need some boosts here: after weeks of trying, I'm coming up empty handed finding a Japanese host institution for a research grant I want to submit, due next week.
Could be a university or a newspaper, or another press outlet in Japan. This is a legit project and it would be incredible to get this grant.
Friends. I’m looking for work. I’m a UX designer/researcher, information architect, and UI designer/developer. I bring over two decades of experience to the table. I’m also an accessibility/usability expert.
If you have a need I’d love to talk with you. If you know folks, I’d love a boost. Thank you! 🙌🏻
"Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and chronicle the impact of humans on the environment.
The university’s decision has left researchers reeling."
Can I please ask this amazing Mastodon community for your help? I’m doing my research studies on social media behaviors. If you have a few minutes, can you please complete 📝 this SURVEY or 🔃this toot ?
I’m from The University of Queensland 🇦🇺: , feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
THANK YOU in advance 🤩 #Mastodon#socialmedia#research#survey
One of the largest science funders, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will cease paying journal “article processing charges” and instead asks funded researchers to publish their work as preprints. This is fantastic. The costs of the current publishing system drain research funds and exclude too many scientists solely due to financial constraints. Funders are in a much better position to rock the “publishing” boat than researchers. https://gatesfoundationoa.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24810787662100-Policy-Refresh-2025-Overview
“…the Fediverse’ provides tools and technologies that are ideally suited to bring scholarly societies out of their digital caves and into the 21st century.”
“The root of their names contains their essential function, as described in 1660 for one of the first such societies, the Royal Society:
“Their first purpose was no more, then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age”.
"More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier."
Elsevier's profit margin is around 40%. Claiming that academic publishers prey on researchers, more than forty leading scientists are setting up "a nonprofit open-access journal".
mRNA derived vaccines are indeed great (I am a beneficiary), and the researchers who did the foundational work on mRNA richly deserve the honor.
A lot of people have already weighed in on the mistreatment/shutting of one of the winners, Katalin Kariko and the brokenness of academic research, bias against women, incentive structures, awards, grants etc.,
However, there is myopia/distortion/rank hypocrisy on other fronts that deserves ridicule as well.
This sentence in the citation, to put it mildly, is preposterous:
" ... contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."
In a world of roughly 8 billion people, roughly 13.5 billion doses of Covid19 vaccines have been administered so far. About 3 billion of those are mRNA vaccines (you can guess who got them). So, what do they mean when they say "human" health? Which humans are they talking about? Who do they think vaccinated the world?
This has to be either the greatest sleight of hand or complete ignorance/denial of how and what kind of Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out to save the world. It's as if the rest of the world doesn't exist or didn't as well develop vaccines quickly and save themselves.
What we witnessed the last three years was not "unprecedented ... development" using mRNA techniques to counter "one of the greatest threats to human health" as the citation points out, instead it was how the entire rich world failed so completely and spectacularly to see itself as part of a common humanity even after it had the means to do so.
I see te UK Govt. is now trumpeting that it has joined #Horizon & what a great opportunity for #research this is.... while conveniently 'forgetting' that they took us out of the programme in the first place & then spent three years arguing about how to re-enter before finally acquiescing to the EU's original conditions for becoming part of the programme.
Three lost years, entirely caused by #RishiSunak & the #Tories wrecking impulse
We worry about the spread of #misinformation and "alternative facts" while gating academic and scientific research behind paywalls that grossly limit public access.
Someone kicked a decade of seminal pre-internet communications off the internet.
We all know Google Search has seriously degraded, with tons of duplicate and garbage content from content farms (which I’m sure carry lots of Google ads, so perhaps they don’t care—we're not the customer). But also, searching for my own name (which is globally unique) no longer returns nearly as much as it used to. It used to have hundreds if not thousands of hits to various mailing lists archives, not to mention old Usenet posts, and everything I've written online since.
So for fun, I did a search and ran down the list. Basically, after about 44 results, it’s just a mix of Mastodon posts (often reshares, and not including my profile), an occasional random mailing list post, and references to my megapost on Pseudonyms from the Google+ nymwars.
But here’s the shocker.
The Usenet results are gone.
When I set the date restrictions on my name search, I can’t find anything before 1992. Some of that is because individual articles aren’t being stored on web sites anymore, and the few mailing list archives don’t have dates that Google recognizes. And I thought maybe that was the case for Usenet as well, but nope. It’s been removed from the internet because of some asshole apparently went after them with lawyers to get something redacted. I used to be able to search for things I wrote back in the early 80’s. But no longer.
That’s painful. An important part of internet history erased. (I know, people have private copies of the archive, I even know some of them, but that’s not the same).
For what it’s worth. This is what I got from Google. And there’s more details on the UtZoo Usenet archive at the bottom of this post. There's no blog posts of mine here because they are all offline right now, but I'll fix that soon. Those will go back to 1997.
The weighting here is very biased towards commercial walled gardens. It's clearly no longer based on references from other sites, or my Pseudonym megapost would be much higher. It's based on status of web sites, not content. It's biased against content.
LinkedIn
Instagram
Academia.edu
Flickr (haven't posted anything there in years)
YouTube (ditto)
www.Pinterest (very ditto, not sure I've ever posted anything there)
Quora (ditto)
Apollo.io (scraped from LinkedIn, well done Google)
<break for some images, all actually mine>
Usenix.org (paper I'm listed as a co-author on)
Goodreads
GitHub
Facebook
Foursquare (ancient)
W3C.org (mailing list post from 1996...the first hit that I'd consider old-style internet content)
Gawker (article about a blog post I made about a Sarah Lacy interview with Zuck a long time ago—I mapped twitter sentiment to the video to the interview)
ThreadReaderApp (some of my twitter threads)
Palmer House Inn (article about Sandy Neck Lighthouse that mentions me)
Infosec Exchange (finally, Mastodon, my most active social media)
opensource.apple.com (some code I wrote a very long time ago)
tr.pinterest (WTF google? Again?)
Tribute Archive (my aunt's obit)
PCWorld on abcnews.go.com (mention of a blog post I wrote analyzing the Google Orkut worm--remember Orkut?)
blogs.gnome.org (kurt von finck's blog referencing a tiny blog post I made about being in Maine)
perl.apache.org (changelog for Embperl mentioning a bug I reported)
Stack Overflow (my home page, again, old)
ScienceDirect (description of a paper I wrote for INTERACT '87)
support.google.com (support question)
Ad, offering to search about info about me in Maine (presumably because that's my current location)
cohost.org (post, summary oddly pulls in the last sentence of my bio, which is mentions my daughter)
spaf.cerias.purdue.edu (Yucks Digest V2, a (true story) joke I posted to rec.humor.funny (Hi @spaf)
Birdeye.com, a review of their dog doors four years ago.
unice.fr (a copy of the emacs bindings I made for Mac text areas)
Forbes.com (a comment on an article about Dragon Systems, with the wrong summary)
IRTF Anti-spam Research Group thread (another mailing list archive)
UCLA (reference to the web version of Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest that I maintained through 2004)
A reshared mastodon post about XYZ on DTSS
Another mastodon reshare
NetBSD (same software Apple had)
More Mastodon (this time my pixelfed account)
Playstation.net (copyright for same software again; in BSD libc)
perl.org (a mailing list post)
justia.com (a patent, the rest show up eventually elsewhere, very random)
tronche.com (Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual for X Version 11, R6. Thanks for being in the public review)
After that, it's basically Mastodon posts and occasional mailing lists, and some references to my megapost on Pseudonyms. I used to be able to find Usenet stuff using a date limit to the 80's, but not anymore. If I date limit, I find the earliest content is 1992 (A Google Groups post, a mention in the Motif Programming Manual ("just because he's cool" 🤣)), and more copies of the ICCCM manual.
Searching for my name and “usenet” gets a usenet search engine, which does not appear to be working. http://benschmidt.org/usenet/, the reason becomes clear…
Looking at archive.org/usenet, I find the quote below. As of 2020, they are offline. WTF?
> This is not a collection of the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive.
>
> In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid further costs and accusations of manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and is not currently accessible to the public.
>
> Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials.
No wonder it's not in search anymore. What the fuck.
If I search for "apollo!nazgul", I only find 7 results.
A decade of my life, of many people's lives, got erased from the internet.