Tootfinder

Our readers' questions about Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies, answered: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/26/our-readers-questions-about-ukraines.html

Truth here.
#Readers, if an author has ever made you feel like this, let them know. That kind of message is what keeps us going.

When your opponent is Donald Trump you escalate in response to threats;
you don’t try to appease him.
Jerome Powell must do everything in his power to compel the conventional wisdom of market traders to more adequately “price in” the degradation of the rule of law.
This must include tying the rule of law and the threats to the constitution to the credibility and standing of the Federal Reserve itself.
Powell’s term expires in less than a year anyway.
If defe…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

Demystifying AI in Criminal Justice
Richard Berk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19305 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19305

Demystifying AI in Criminal Justice
There is widespread confusion among criminal justice practitioners and legal scholars about the use of artificial intelligence in criminal justice. This didactic review is written for readers with little or no background in statistics or computer science. It is not intended to replace more technical treatments. It is intended to supplement them and encourage readers to dig more deeply into topics that strike their fancy.

Fun bug:
Screen readers stick paragraphs together when display: block is present in ::before and :after
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/428077782
Have confirmed for myself.
Who doesn't like CSS display property bugs that blow up accessibility? Oh rig…

The Federal Reserve System has not been the most craven of the powerful institutions who have attempted to placate Trump to defend themselves,
but it has not been the bravest institution either.
They were quick to concede to Trump on financial regulatory issues in the hopes that would get Trump off their back.
They also ignored the attack on the legal architecture propping up independent administrative agencies in the hopes that other agencies would receive the brunt of Tru…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

Calamus 45 Full of life, sweet-blooded, compact, visible
A remarkably effective poem for the end of the cluster. Whitman talking directly to us, the reader, about the import of his poems. And with some ambition: "To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence".
But even better, he's horny for us:
Now it is you ... seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your lover
The poet is imagining us, his future readers, thinking about how we will want to be his lover. What a lusty man! Whitman is not modest.
I love it. And it's a fitting end to this series. I've greatly enjoyed reading them. Over the past 45 days I've learned better how to read Whitman, to understand his poems. And to relate to them in at least one simple way, teasing out the gayest and sexiest parts of these poems. Making them fun for myself.
I'm not quite done yet. I hope to identify my favorites of the group. I may also try my hand at reading one or two aloud.

As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall, a Google Ad Manager tool to help publishers generate revenue beyond ads, including via micropayments (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/26/as-a

As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue | TechCrunch
Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micro payments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more.

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 100 nodes and 394247 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

For all those worried about plate readers and face ID I give you WhoFi: Unique ‘fingerprint’ based on Wi-Fi interactions https://ground.news/article/whofi-unique-fingerprint-based-on-wi-fi-interactions

Where Luke assures Gospel readers all secrets will be disclosed (8:17) I notice he neglects to mention there will be fuck-all you can do about it.

As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall, a Google Ad Manager tool to help publishers generate revenue beyond ads, including via micropayments (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/26/as-a

As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue | TechCrunch
Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micro payments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more.

Time for authors to get off Audible (and ideally Amazon as well) before you'll find yourself trapped in a death spiral.
And yes, I know how hard that would hit most. But if Amazon is able to destroy competitors, nothing will stop them from exploiting you even more.
https://www.instagram.com/r…

"Rhode Island Freedom to Read Act is First in Nation with Special Guarantees to Writers and Readers Against Censorship"
https://pen.org/press-release/rhode-island-freedom-to-read-act…

Rhode Island Freedom to Read Act is First in Nation with Special Guarantees to Writers and Readers Against Censorship - PEN America
Joining a growing number of states that are passing laws to protect the right to read, Rhode Island’s newly signed Freedom to Read Act provides safeguards for both public and school libraries, protections for librarians and staff and is the first in the nation to guarantee writers and readers a special right of action against censorship.

"Writing is one of the most disruptive technologies ever invented after agriculture. Before writing, people could pass information in the current moment, to those who were close enough to hear noises made by other people. Writing allows people to communicate across space, passing written information to readers without the physical presence of the author. And it allows them to communicate across time, leaving evidence of thoughts long after the thinker had died."

Skeptik: A Hybrid Framework for Combating Potential Misinformation in Journalism
Arlen Fan, Fan Lei, Steven R. Corman, Ross Maciejewski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18499 https://…

Skeptik: A Hybrid Framework for Combating Potential Misinformation in Journalism
The proliferation of misinformation in journalism, often stemming from flawed reasoning and logical fallacies, poses significant challenges to public understanding and trust in news media. Traditional fact-checking methods, while valuable, are insufficient for detecting the subtle logical inconsistencies that can mislead readers within seemingly factual content. To address this gap, we introduce Skeptik, a hybrid framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with heuristic approaches t…

Is Jalen Hurts a top-5 QB? Readers weigh in, plus one big contract dispute settled https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6551360/2025/08/13/is-jalen-hurts-a-top-5-qb-readers-weigh-in-plus-one-big-contract-dispute-sett…

another reason concrete is better than cameras. there are real solutions to traffic violence without making excuses for mass surveillance
https://sfstandard.com/2025/07/14/oakland-san-francisco-ice-license-plate-readers/

SF, Oakland cops illegally funneled license plate data to feds
SF and Oakland police appear to have repeatedly broken state law by sharing data from license plate cameras with federal agencies. OPD fulfilled a request related to an ICE investigation on one occasion.

Two years ago I took 7 `<blockquote>` variations (W3C & WHATWG HTML) and reported their output across 7 screen readers, for a measly 49 variations:
https://adrianroselli.com/2023/07/blockquotes-in-screen-readers.html
I made one anti-…

Blockquotes in Screen Readers
TL;DR: This post does not assert the correct way to code blockquotes, it will only demonstrate how screen readers announce some existing patterns. Test Details The first four examples are lifted from WHATWG HTML’s

entry. The next three are from W3C HTML’s 2019

guidance (the W3C HTML spec…

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 81 nodes and 150126 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

Oakland police illegally shared license plate data with ICE https://sfstandard.com/2025/07/14/oakland-san-francisco-ice-license-plate-readers/

SF, Oakland cops illegally funneled license plate data to feds
SF and Oakland police appear to have repeatedly broken state law by sharing data from license plate cameras with federal agencies. OPD fulfilled a request related to an ICE investigation on one occasion.

"The Meanings of a Publication in the Humanities: Meaning, text, and authorship in critical perspective" by
Marcel Knöchelmann: #publications

#XSLT is a programming language for apologising that browsers have removed RSS readers.

> Writer J. Michael Straczynski has been warning his readers for 30 years about authoritarianism, from Babylon 5 to Spider-Man.
post text from: https://bsky.app/profile/comicbookclub.bsky.social/post/3lxa2lxzff32w
linking to:

Just as a reminder for Metacurity readers, I’m on a two-week hiatus for my daily newsletter.
I’m not on holiday - I’m working to meet a 9/30 deadline for my next book and also continuing to work on independent reporting projects.
But my daily Metacurity newsletter returns on Sept. 2. Stay tuned!

Once respectable news outlets can be made to believe pretty much anything, and spew out unfounded nonsense that betrays readers and makes them less informed.

This is the world now.

Supporting Intervention Design for Suicide Prevention with Language Model Assistants
Jaspreet Ranjit, Hyundong J. Cho, Claire J. Smerdon, Yoonsoo Nam, Myles Phung, Jonathan May, John R. Blosnich, Swabha Swayamdipta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18541

Supporting Intervention Design for Suicide Prevention with Language Model Assistants
Warning: This paper discusses topics of suicide and suicidal ideation, which may be distressing to some readers. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) documents information about suicides in the United States, including free text narratives (e.g., circumstances surrounding a suicide). In a demanding public health data pipeline, annotators manually extract structured information from death investigation records following extensive guidelines developed painstakingly by experts. In…

Urgent action UK readers as MAP’s lifesaving clinic in Gaza forced to close under new displacement order
Please call your MP today, the last day of parliament.
Demand that,
they call on Keir Starmer and David Lammy to:
*urge Israel to rescind these latest evacuation orders
*suspend all arms transfers to Israel, including parts for F-35 fighter jets
*take all possible steps to hold all perpetrators accountable.
Medical Aid for Palestinians

MAP’s lifesaving clinic in Gaza forced to suspend services amid Israel’s latest displacement orders - Latest News & Developments - Medical Aid for Palestinians
This morning, the Israeli military issued new forced displacement orders which directly endanger vital humanitarian and primary healthcare sites, including those provided by MAP.

lmao. lol

A roundup of VLSI conference 2025, including the use of digital twins for design exploration, DRAM beyond 1x nm nodes, Intel's 18A process vs. TSMC, and more (SemiAnalysis)
https://semianalysis.com/2025/07/21/vlsi2025/

Intel 18A Details & Cost, Future of DRAM 4F2 vs 3D, Backside Power Adoption (or Not), China’s FlipFET, Digital Twins from Atoms to Fabs, and More
Long time readers will recall that SemiAnalysis covers more than just datacenters and AMD. Today we’re back to semiconductors with a tech-focused roundup of the best from this year’s VLSI conferenc…

Forty years ago I moved to Scotland and tried to read the classic “A Scots Quair” by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It’s written in a variant of Scots that aimed to be accessible to English readers. I had the Scots dictionary by my side and was looking up words constantly until I gave up. A few years later (with some more experience of hearing Scots spoken) I read it without the dictionary and, while I was occasionally guessing at words from context, I went with the flow and loved it.
Like mos…

Crowdsourced map of Flock ALPRs (automated license plate readers):
https://deflock.me/map

DeFlock
Spot, map, and resist automated license plate readers (ALPRs) near you.

#EroticMusings 12: Recommend a tool (or more than one) or just tell us about your personal favourite. Could be a physical tool, a piece of software, a type of paper, a desk lamp, whatever you like.
In all honesty? MS Paint! When one or both test readers are unsure where which body part (or toy) goes and how everything is aligned, drawing stick figures and discussing matters goes a l…

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 242 nodes and 6594492 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

Local newsletter company 6AM City acquires AI newsletter startup Good Daily, expanding 6AM subscribers from 1.4M to ~2M and footprint from 30 to 400 US cities (Mark Stenberg/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/6am-city-ai-newsletter-good-daily/

Newsletter Publisher 6AM City Buys AI Startup Good Daily to Expand to 400+ Markets
The tie-up turbocharges expansion, giving 6AM City nearly 2 million daily readers in over 400 markets

Extended Call for Papers: C.S. Lewis and Popular Culture
https://ift.tt/emJ8Oj5
Volume Editor: George Tsakiridis, PhD Abstract and CV Due: June 10, 2025 Initial Final Paper Due:…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Extended Call for Papers: C.S. Lewis and Popular Culture
Volume Editor: George Tsakiridis, PhD Abstract and CV Due: June 10, 2025 Initial Final Paper Due: September 15, 2025 C.S. Lewis has captured the imagination of twentieth-century readers by presenti…

For your Saturday reading pleasure, Metacurity offers our free and paid readers a run-down of the top infosec-related long reads of the week.
This week's selection covers,
--Microsoft's Chinese "Digital Escorts" are a huge threat to DoD's digital security,
--Myanmar's scam centers are proliferating rapidly,
--Are VCs unpatriotic for investing in Chinese AI?,
--Afghanistan's extensive data systems need proper governance,
--AI c…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 7/12/25
Microsoft's Chinese "Digital Escorts" are a huge threat to DoD's digital security, Myanmar's scam centers are proliferating rapidly, Are VCs unpatriotic for investing in Chinese AI?, Afghanistan's extensive data systems need proper governance, AI can't replace humans in bug hunting

"Scam Empire"
takes readers inside the insidious cyberfraud industry,
which  swindles the public out of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
This ambitious collaborative investigation by OCCRP, Swedish Television (SVT), and 30 other media partners from multiple countries,
was based on an unprecedented leak of 1.9 terabytes of leaked data
that enabled journalists to enter the scammers’ world and even to watch them at work.

Scam Empire - Online Journalism Awards
Read More

oh _no_ wikipedia, this is a _terrible_ idea and WTF are you thinking
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summaries-after-editor-backlash/
(h/t @…

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.

Fucking THANKFULLY Wikipedia has 'paused' the 'AI' generated summaries they were considering after editor backlash, and seriously, this is one thing I'm glad isn't getting fucked with this crap
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-a

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.

Local communities are leading the way in climate action! From native plantings to electric equipment, these inspiring initiatives show the power of community engagement in addressing climate change. #climatechange #climatesolutions

Readers Sent Us Hundreds of Local Climate Solutions
As part of our 50 States, 50 Fixes series, more than 2,400 Times readers wrote in to tell us about climate action in their communities.

Fanfiction in the Age of AI: Community Perspectives on Creativity, Authenticity and Adoption
Roi Alfassi, Angelora Cooper, Zoe Mitchell, Mary Calabro, Orit Shaer, Osnat Mokryn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18706

Fanfiction in the Age of AI: Community Perspectives on Creativity, Authenticity and Adoption
The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into creative communities, like fanfiction, is reshaping how stories are created, shared, and valued. This study investigates the perceptions of 157 active fanfiction members, both readers and writers, regarding AI-generated content in fanfiction. Our research explores the impact of GenAI on community dynamics, examining how AI affects the participatory and collaborative nature of these spaces. The findings reveal responses ranging from cautious acceptan…

Who could've guessed?
https://ni.hil.ist/@mu/114840348453639236

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 81 nodes and 150126 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

Preprint: Did I Just Browse A Website Written by LLMs?
Sichang "Steven" He, Ramesh Govindan, Harsha V. Madhyastha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13933

Preprint: Did I Just Browse A Website Written by LLMs?
Increasingly, web content is automatically generated by large language models (LLMs) with little human input. We call this "LLM-dominant" content. Since LLMs plagiarize and hallucinate, LLM-dominant content can be unreliable and unethical. Yet, websites rarely disclose such content, and human readers struggle to distinguish it. Thus, we must develop reliable detectors for LLM-dominant content. However, state-of-the-art LLM detectors are insufficient, because they perform well mainly on clean, p…

Jesus, I thought Wikimedia at least would understand its editors. Who on earth thought this was going to go over well?
SE was at least a for-profit company, WM has no excuse for this. There are plenty of places where they can use AI really fruitfully, but none of them are to do with generating user-facing content.

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.

"Stop counting sheep – and 13 more no-nonsense tips for getting back to sleep"
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/04/stop-counting-sheep-and-13-more-no-nonsense-tips-for-getting-back-to-sleep…

Four scary stats that must change in 2025, plus readers' pick the best football movie https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6507320/2025/07/21/caleb-williams-sacks-2025-nfl-movies-scoop-city/

Unbelievably, it's real.

Here's an accessibility tip for Fedilab, an Android app for Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and GoToSocial.
There are two settings that hide the top bar and compose button when a timeline is scrolled down. This helps to make the UI less cluttered for sighted users. But it makes these controls unavailable to screen readers. (Continued in reply.)
#Android

Discovering Laura Valborg Aulin: A Composer of Swedish Romanticism https://ourmindonmusic.wordpress.com/2025/08/05/discovering-laura-valborg-aulin-a-composer-of-swedish-romanticism/

Discovering Laura Valborg Aulin: A Composer of Swedish Romanticism
Explore the music and legacy of Swedish Romantic composer Laura Valborg Aulin in this blog post, which introduces her expressive string quartets and invites readers to discover one of classical mus…

Talk about poisoned pen! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/06/tool-to-identify-poisonous-books-developed-by-university-of-st-andrews

Building Intuition for Dynamical Mean-Field Theory: A Simple Model and the Cavity Method
Emmy Blumenthal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16654 https://

Building Intuition for Dynamical Mean-Field Theory: A Simple Model and the Cavity Method
Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) is a powerful theoretical framework for analyzing systems with many interacting degrees of freedom. This tutorial provides an accessible introduction to DMFT. We begin with a linear model where the DMFT equations can be derived exactly, allowing readers to develop clear intuition for the underlying principles. We then introduce the cavity method, a versatile approach for deriving DMFT equations for non-linear systems. The tutorial concludes with an application…

I'm nervous but looking forward to it. (For non-Australians, this small town writing festival is one of the bigger ones in Australia). Should be a lot of fun. We're kicking it off on the main stage. #permaculture #writing

Developing Visual Augmented Q&A System using Scalable Vision Embedding Retrieval & Late Interaction Re-ranker
Rachna Saxena, Abhijeet Kumar, Suresh Shanmugam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12378

Developing Visual Augmented Q&A System using Scalable Vision Embedding Retrieval & Late Interaction Re-ranker
Traditional information extraction systems face challenges with text only language models as it does not consider infographics (visual elements of information) such as tables, charts, images etc. often used to convey complex information to readers. Multimodal LLM (MLLM) face challenges of finding needle in the haystack problem i.e., either longer context length or substantial number of documents as search space. Late interaction mechanism over visual language models has shown state of the art p…

If a sitting president can direct the IRS to investigate political enemies, revoke nonprofit status from dissenting institutions, or selectively enforce tax law to reward loyalty,
the agency no longer serves the public.
It serves power.
The slow hollowing of the IRS through funding cuts, staff attrition, and the erosion of norms yields the same result:
a weakened institution unable to enforce the law, uphold equity, or hold the powerful to account.
And when th…

The Fiscal State Under Siege: Why People Hate the IRS, and Why You Should Care
How Trump, DOGE, and Project 2025 Are Turning the IRS Into a Tool of Authoritarian Rule Editor’s Introduction: Hello readers, it's Nathan Tankus and I am very happy to bring to you the first in a long multi-part series on the IRS spearheaded by Anisha Steephen. Anisha worked for

A parking structure for the new Whitefish Bay Sendik's is an idea but I don't think that it is happening. There is already a municipal lot across the street (behind Winkies) and a parking structure behind the Fox Bay / Argo.
#WhitefishBay #NorthShore #Sendiks

VOTE: Who is Northeast Florida's high school boys tennis player of the quarter-century? https://www.jacksonville.com/story/sports/high-school/tennis/2025/07/14/florida-high-school-boys-tennis…

If Apple Intelligence could rewrite the clickbait headlines in Apple News to something that respected readers, it might gain a few fans.

US newsletter publisher The Flyover now has 25 staff, 2.5M subscribers, nine state-specific daily editions, and one national edition, after its 2023 launch (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/north-ameri

Email-based publisher The Flyover has 25 full-time staff two years after launch
The Flyover is an email-first publication that is seeing success through converting its state news readers to national news.

#WritersCoffeeClub Jun 6
What are the conventions of the genre in which you write? How strictly do you follow them?
Um.. . I don't know, I write high/epic/dark fantasy (according to my beta readers) but I follow my story where it leads me. Are there conventions? Probably. Do I care? Not consciously.

Just read that Mozilla has decided to shut down Pocket (!?!). Its integration with Kobo e-readers is great and something I will miss. It will be difficult to find a similarly practical way to read web articles on my e-reader, other than the somewhat clunky pdf-saving cloud sync method. Any tips much welcome!

"No Fun with Donald, Vlad and Bibi"
Donald is very unhappy.
#parody #humor #comedy #Fun_with_Dick_and_Jane

Indonesia’s stunning microlibraries draw young readers – in pictures | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2025/jun/02/indonesia-micro-libraries-photos

"New File Format Research and Documentation on the Sustainability of Digital Formats" | The Signal https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/06/new-file-format-research/

I have nothing useful to add, except that this used to be a feature of some browsers.
https://toot.cat/@jamey/114960843294349709

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 232 nodes and 1283194 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

#WritersCoffeeClub July 20: In terms of writing, what are you most thankful for?
---
The readers. Their reactions, questions and insights.
Oh, and all the fish.

Transformer-Based Explainable Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Detection in Mammography: The MammoFormer Framework
Ojonugwa Oluwafemi Ejiga Peter, Daniel Emakporuena, Bamidele Dayo Tunde, Maryam Abdulkarim, Abdullahi Bn Umar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06137

Transformer-Based Explainable Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Detection in Mammography: The MammoFormer Framework
Breast cancer detection through mammography interpretation remains difficult because of the minimal nature of abnormalities that experts need to identify alongside the variable interpretations between readers. The potential of CNNs for medical image analysis faces two limitations: they fail to process both local information and wide contextual data adequately, and do not provide explainable AI (XAI) operations that doctors need to accept them in clinics. The researcher developed the MammoFormer…

Standing up to Trump's assault on #research requires solidarity. ARL, ACRL, SSP, STM, and AUPresses issued a joint statement & request for feedback on next steps. Share your ideas!

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review
Carl T. Bergstrom, Kevin Gross
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10734

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review
Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even threatening the long-term viability of peer review as an institution. What can or should be done to salvage it? Here, we develop mathematical models to reveal the intricate interactions among incentives faced by authors, reviewers, and readers in their endeavors to identify the best science. Two fa…

After 2.5 months owning a #Framework 13, I can add one more review to the pile:
https://www-gem.codeberg.page/sys_Framework13-2/
Curious to hear about your own experien…

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summaries-after-editor-backlash/

Enhancing Text Comprehension for Dyslexic Readers: A 3D Semantic Visualization Approach Using Transformer Mode
Zhengyang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03731

Enhancing Text Comprehension for Dyslexic Readers: A 3D Semantic Visualization Approach Using Transformer Mode
Dyslexic individuals often face significant challenges with traditional reading, particularly when engaging with complex texts such as mystery novels. These texts typically demand advanced narrative tracking and information integration skills, making it difficult for dyslexic readers to fully comprehend the content. However, research indicates that while dyslexic individuals may struggle with textual processing, they often possess strong spatial imagination abilities. Leveraging this strength, …

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 81 nodes and 150126 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

The Wikimedia Foundation pauses an experiment that showed Wikipedia users AI-generated summaries at the top of some articles, following an editor backlash (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summa…

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.

Leaked all-hands: Mathias Döpfner said Axel Springer employees must use AI, opposed disclosing to readers whether AI was used in the reporting process, and more (Oliver Darcy/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/axel-springer-mathias-dopfner-ai-policy

Axel Springer’s A.I. Edict
At a global town hall, Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner delivered a blunt message—A.I. is here, and every employee must use it.

Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic in recent weeks to launch The Argument,
a new publication that aims to push back against the populist right by strengthening the ideas and arguments of modern liberalism and convincing readers of their legitimacy.
“To move out of this post-liberal, populist moment towards a better future
— one with equal rights, material prosperity, and commitment to human progress
— will require our government, culture, politics, and people to recom…

The Argument | Substack
Join Us. We're Libbing Out. Click to read The Argument, a Substack publication.

I’m not even a screen reader user, and I wrote a blog post about folks (managers, marketers, devs, etc) lazily blaming screen readers. Though I suspect folks bitched to me because I’m not blind so of course I would agree.
https://caneandable.social/@WeirdWriter/114988592594107119

Interviews with executives at Yahoo News, the WSJ, and Bloomberg about adding AI-powered summaries, how they can help busy readers, reliability issues, and more (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/lets-get

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 100 nodes and 394247 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

On Wednesday,
the Washington Post
named the Economist’s Washington correspondent
Adam O’Neal as its next opinion editor.
In his announcement on Twitter, O’Neal parroted his new boss’ words from last February almost verbatim,
telling Post readers in a chummy front-facing camera announcement that:
[Washington Post opinion page writers and editors are] going to be stalwart advocates of free markets and personal liberties.
We’ll be unapologetically patri…

New Washington Post Opinion editor claims explicitly right-wing revamp isn’t ‘Ideological’
A breakdown of Bezos’ final coup and the bizarre pathology of right-wing ideologues really, really wanting you not to think they’re ideological.

Playing telephone with generative models: "verification disability," "compelled reliance," and accessibility in data visualization
Frank Elavsky, Cindy Xiong Bearfield
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12192

Playing telephone with generative models: "verification disability," "compelled reliance," and accessibility in data visualization
This paper is a collaborative piece between two worlds of expertise in the field of data visualization: accessibility and bias. In particular, the rise of generative models playing a role in accessibility is a worrying trend for data visualization. These models are increasingly used to help author visualizations as well as generate descriptions of existing visualizations for people who are blind, low vision, or use assistive technologies such as screen readers. Sighted human-to-human bias has a…

Eurogamer unveils coverage updates, including a daily live report for gaming news and a new homepage with a focus on original reporting and features (Tom Orry/Eurogamer.net)
https://www.eurogamer.net/eurogamer-is-changing-to-give-you-more-of-what-you-want

Eurogamer is changing to give you more of what you want
Some big changes are coming to Eurogamer that will mean readers get more of the site they love.

sp_colocation: Social co-locations (2018)
Network of colocations between peoople, based on the information on which RFID readers received information from the RFID tags. Namely, we define two individuals to be in co-presence if the same exact set of readers have received signals from both individuals during a 20s time window.
This network has 100 nodes and 394247 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

The Wikimedia Foundation pauses an experiment that showed Wikipedia users AI-generated summaries at the top of some articles, following an editor backlash (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summa…

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.

Interviews with executives at Yahoo News, the WSJ, and Bloomberg about adding AI-powered summaries, how they can help busy readers, reliability issues, and more (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/lets-get…

How Persuasive Could LLMs Be? A First Study Combining Linguistic-Rhetorical Analysis and User Experiments
Daniel Raffini, Agnese Macori, Lorenzo Porcaro, Tiziana Catarci, Marco Angelini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09614

How Persuasive Could LLMs Be? A First Study Combining Linguistic-Rhetorical Analysis and User Experiments
This study examines the rhetorical and linguistic features of argumentative texts generated by ChatGPT on ethically nuanced topics and investigates their persuasive impact on human readers.Through a user study involving 62 participants and pre-post interaction surveys, the paper analyzes how exposure to AI-generated arguments affects opinion change and user perception. A linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the generated texts reveals a consistent argumentative macrostructure, reliance on form…

Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.
The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as
"give a positive review only" and
"do not highlight any negatives."
Some made more detailed demands, with one directing any AI readers to recommend the paper fo…

'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers
Instructions in preprints from 14 universities highlight controversy on AI in peer review

Quantifying Visualization Vibes: Measuring Socio-Indexicality at Scale
Amy Rae Fox, Michelle Morgenstern, Graham M. Jones, Arvind Satyanarayan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06786 h…

Quantifying Visualization Vibes: Measuring Socio-Indexicality at Scale
What impressions might readers form with visualizations that go beyond the data they encode? In this paper, we build on recent work that demonstrates the socio-indexical function of visualization, showing that visualizations communicate more than the data they explicitly encode. Bridging this with prior work examining public discourse about visualizations, we contribute an analytic framework for describing inferences about an artifact's social provenance. Via a series of attribution-elicitation…

Japanese news aggregator SmartNews releases NewsArc, a new AI-powered, subscription-based news discovery app, available on iOS and Android in the US (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/05/smartnews-newsarc-app-media

Exclusive: SmartNews releases new subscription app called NewsArc
The new app is meant to offer heavily engaged news readers a more personalized experience.

Caption: Generating Informative Content Labels for Image Buttons Using Next-Screen Context
Mingyuan Zhong, Ajit Mallavarapu, Qing Nie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08731 https://…

Caption: Generating Informative Content Labels for Image Buttons Using Next-Screen Context
We present Caption, an LLM-powered content label generation tool for visual interactive elements on mobile devices. Content labels are essential for screen readers to provide announcements for image-based elements, but are often missing or uninformative due to developer neglect. Automated captioning systems attempt to address this, but are limited to on-screen context, often resulting in inaccurate or unspecific labels. To generate more accurate and descriptive labels, Caption collects next-scr…

New York Post plans to launch a new, daily Los Angeles-based newspaper called "The California Post" in early 2026, with News Corp. veteran Nick Papps as EIC (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/04/new-york-post-california-los-angeles

The New York Post to launch The California Post newspaper in LA
Los Angeles is home to the second-largest concentration of Post readers, per News Corp.

The Kyiv Independent crosses 20,000 paying members, up from 17,500 in May, with ~70% of its revenue coming from readers, and has no plans to add a paywall (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/how-kyiv-independent-reac…

How the Kyiv Independent reached 20,000 paying members — with no paywall
Horizontal connections and membership community have kept subscriber churn for the English-language publication under 2%.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14522 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_…

Biased by Design: Leveraging AI Inherent Biases to Enhance Critical Thinking of News Readers
This paper explores the design of a propaganda detection tool using Large Language Models (LLMs). Acknowledging the inherent biases in AI models, especially in political contexts, we investigate how these biases might be leveraged to enhance critical thinking in news consumption. Countering the typical view of AI biases as detrimental, our research proposes strategies of user choice and personalization in response to a user's political stance, applying psychological concepts of confirmation bia…