Movies Based on True Stories - History vs. Hollywood
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Better Images of AI
Have you noticed that news stories and marketing material about Artificial Intelligence are typically illustrated with clichéd and misleading images ? Humanoid robots, glowing brains, outstretched robot hands, blue backgrounds, and the Terminator. These stereotypes are not just overworked, they can be surprisingly unhelpful. Images representing AI as sentient robots mask the accountability of the humans actually developing the technology, and can suggest the presence of robots where there are none. However, finding alternatives can be difficult! That’s why we, a non-profit collaboration, are researching, creating, curating and providing Better Images of AI. Not only are all images in this gallery Creative Commons licensed, each includes a background explanation of imagery plus cut and paste attribution.
Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud | PetaPixel
A popular “photographer” who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
HyperCard | The software erector set.
It is forever.
AI 101 for Higher Ed - by Lance Eaton
"On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to talk to the staff at North Shore Community College, which some folks know is a place near and dear to my heart. This was a slightly different talk than my previous two types of talks. Typically, I’ve been talking with faculty or folks in career counseling. Those continue to be areas where I’ll have conversations. This conversation though was more focused on the institution as a whole and helping staff to consider the role(s) generative AI will play in their different work—so not just teaching and learning but all the other things the institution might be doing. As I continue to do, I made an annotated slidedeck as part of the process and you’re welcome to it (and the slidedeck itself is included)." Worth seeing! is the slide deck https://bit.ly/NSCC-AI101
Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass | Nature
Humanity has become a dominant force in shaping the face of Earth1–9. An emerging question is how the overall material output of human activities compares to the overall natural biomass. Here we quantify the human-made mass, referred to as ‘anthropogenic mass’, and compare it to the overall living biomass on Earth, which currently equals approximately 1.1 teratonnes10,11. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020(±6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20years, will surpass all global living biomass. On average, for each person on the globe, anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her bodyweight is produced every week. This quantification of the human enterprise gives a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene.
Deploy a Static WordPress Site to Kinsta for Free
WordPress is an excellent Content Management System (CMS). We can achieve almost anything with it. Because of its dynamic nature, we can change any content with a click of a button. And while this is amazing, it also brings some dangers, and it can get difficult to maintain under heavy traffic. Converting your WordPress website into static might solve those problems.
Generative AI Activities for the Writing & Language Classroom.pptx - Google Slides
4K Rivers Landscape
An ongoing series of vibrant river and delta images from North America and other parts of the world. The images are constructed using high-resolution elevation data. Images are ideal for hi-res screen wallpaper and are licensed Creative Commons BY NC-ND created by Daniel Coe https://dancoecarto.com/ h/t Tom Woodward for the link
The Future of Twitter as a Global Town Square - The Atlantic
In the summer of 2013, Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, reflected on his vision of the company as a “global town square.” The social network is “all public, real-time conversational, and widely distributed, and public is the first word in there,” he told an audience at the Brookings Institution.
Stories from the Land: Indigenous Place Names in Canada
published by the Geographical Names Board of Canada The naming of places is a cultural phenomenon dating back to the earliest of human history. Assigning names to places is a practice that serves many purposes. Indigenous place names reinforce an intimate relationship with the land, convey a broad range of knowledge such as travel routes and traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and are touchstones for history and legends. They also embody and honour the teachings of Elders, and are a tool for educating youth. Geographical naming is a continuous work in progress. Place names are not static and landscapes evolve, and so too will the map below. Over time, as additional Indigenous place names are adopted across Canada, this map will be updated to show the changes.
Eduaide: The AI Teaching Assistant
Collaborate with Generative AI to create, refine, and personalize instructional materials. Eduaide.Ai was created by two public school teachers and an engineer who saw Large Language Models as tools to eliminate teacher burnout and democratize access to high-quality teaching resources.
Aaron Tay's Musings about librarianship : List of academic search engines that use Large Language models for generative answers and some factors to consider when using
This is a non-comprehensive list of academic search engines that use generative AI (almost always Large language models) to generate direct answers on top of list of relevant results, typically using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Techniques. We expect a lot more! This technique involves grounding the generated answer by using a retriever to find text chunks or sentences (also known as context) that may answer the question. Besides generating direct answers with citations, it seems to me this new class of search engine often but not always a) Use Semantic Search (as opposed to Lexical search) b) Use the ability of Large Language Models to extract information from papers such as "method", "limitations", "region" and display them in a literature review matrix format
The #ViewSource Affordance
Despite the fact that the web has a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with the notion of free software, the early web none-the-less had a radically open developer culture. In fact, in some important and practical ways, the early web had a more open developer culture than what was achieved by the free software movement. The #ViewSource affordance available in browsers allowed people to understand and “own”, at least in an informal way, the web in a way that even most FSF-conforming applications could not: you had direct access to the “source”, or at least part of the source, of the application available from within the application itself. You could copy-and-paste (or save) the “source” (HTML, JavaScript & CSS) and start modifying it, without a complicated build tool chain or, indeed, without any tool chain at all. This radical openness of the web allowed many people, often not formally trained computer programmers, to learn how to create web pages and applications in an ad hoc and informal way. In strict free software terms, this was, of course, a compromise: as a user of a web application, you had no visibility into how a server was constructing a given hypermedia response. But you could see what the server was responding with: you could download and tweak it, poke and prod at it. You could, if you were an advanced user, use browser tools to modify the application in place. And, most importantly, you could learn from it, even if you couldn’t see how the HTML was being produced. This radical openness of the client and network protocol, and the culture it produced, was a big part of the success of the early web.
Using the Web Speech API - Web APIs | MDN
The Web Speech API provides two distinct areas of functionality — speech recognition, and speech synthesis (also known as text to speech, or tts) — which open up interesting new possibilities for accessibility, and control mechanisms. This article provides a simple introduction to both areas, along with demos.
Save new Gmail attachments to Google Drive
It can be difficult to track down files attached to emails. Zapier can simplify your email and file management by automatically saving your email attachments to Google Drive for safekeeping. Whenever you get a new email in Gmail with an attachment, this Zap will save it to the Google Drive folder you want - just be sure to pick one when setting this up, otherwise we'll add the file to the root of your Drive. Get a step-by-step walkthrough in our tutorial on how to set up this Gmail-Google Drive Zap.
I ATE THREE EGGS EVERY SINGLE MORNING FOR A WEEK - HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED - Every Day Should Be Saturday
a clever way to weave a story
Building Bridges for Open Content: Flickr Foundation’s Link between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons | Flickr Blog
Flickr is a primary source of imagery for Wikimedia Commons. This new bridge between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons—called “Flickypedia”— aims to create a streamlined experience, where every image shared retains its rightful attribution and licensing credentials, amplifying the spirit of responsible creativity. This, in turn, will expand and enhance the visual appeal and accuracy of Wikipedia articles, catering to the diverse interests and inquiries of users worldwide. Flickypedia is one of the flagship projects of the Flickr Foundation and this partnership helps support Flickr Foundation’s ongoing commitment to promoting open, responsible access to creative works, while furthering the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission of providing free and accessible knowledge to everyone
The case for AI hallucination | Louis Charron | Medium
AI generated images are getting more realistic. From the first version of DALL-E in 2021 to Midjourney’s latest model, the trajectory is clear. Realistic images might be more pleasing for the viewers and more impressive for the users generating them, but from a creative point of view, AI images are becoming more similar and less surprising. When did they become dull? How did the mystery and the poetry of the early AI images disappear? Midjourney’s images are becoming AI generated soulless stock photography, familiar images leaving no room for interpretation, no blanks to fill with our imagination and very little space for poetry.
Learning & Technology Library (LearnTechLib)
LearnTechLib is the premiere online resource for aggregated, peer-reviewed research on the latest developments and applications in Learning and Technology by the world's leading publications and authors. Developed and supported for and by researchers, librarians, and educators. This respected resource is more than a typical PDF database of content but is a multi-purpose service and tool. LearnTechLib encompasses 30+ years and 135,000+ peer-reviewed full-text documents and abstracts of published international journal articles, conference papers from 265,000+ leading authors and additional multimedia-rich resources including: Journal articles, Conferences papers, e-Books, Reports, Dissertations, Videos, Keynote Talks, Presentation slides, Webinars, Collections of articles with more added daily.
Little Gopher Client
Little Gopher Client is a client for the Gopher protocol written in Free Pascal and Lazarus with support for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. It is mainly made to browse and read articles in gopherspace, so for the moment it only supports menus and text content - no downloads, images or queries. In the future i might add features for these.
Project Gemini
Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth.
The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet | HuffPost Los Angeles
Kubrick, the template that launched millions of beautiful blogs and helped transform the Internet, will be retired mid-year as the default theme for the popular WordPress blogging platform.
Landscapes of Retreat
Landscapes of Retreat are portraits of climate adaptation. Retreat is found in the land that is left behind as settlement patterns shift due to a changing climate. The term landscape refers to the earth animated by the aliveness of creatures and organisms, and the term retreat suggests that human patterns are not fixed but might also be enlivened. Taken together, the stories in this book suggest that communities are more likely to adapt to change when the landscape is appreciated, so that retreat can be valued. The results cutacross history, fieldwork, citizenship, and geography in order to rethink and rework “change” as a means toward shared climate futures.
Our Natural Human Defenses Against A.I. Culture
Culture is made of humans, and A.I. doomsdayers haven't explained why we'll all fall in love with A.I.-made creative work, when there is so much evidence to the contrary. There is no doubt that talented humans will harness A.I. as a tool for creating vital new artifacts, just as they did with photography, motion pictures, desktop publishing software, and computer graphics. And there are certainly many legitimate worries about A.I. in terms of spreading misinformation and replacing human labor. But it’s misleading to declare generative A.I. the obvious end of human cultural creation, when culture is inherently made of humans. The entire value of culture is rooted in individuals sharing conventions with others in their communities — and we have natural barriers that prevent us from centering our communal lives around A.I.-created artifacts.
Generative AI exists because of the transformer
Over the past few years, we have taken a gigantic leap forward in our decades-long quest to build intelligent machines: the advent of the large language model, or LLM. This technology, based on research that tries to model the human brain, has led to a new field known as generative AI — software that can create plausible and sophisticated text, images and computer code at a level that mimics human ability. As the technology is rapidly woven into our lives, understanding how LLMs generate text means understanding why these models are such versatile cognitive engines — and what else they can help create.
Whispers of A.I.’s Modular Future | The New Yorker
ChatGPT is in the spotlight, but it’s Whisper—OpenAI’s open-source speech-transcription program—that shows us where machine learning is going.
Scripting News: Federation vs Small Pieces Loosely Joined
As you know, I went to a conference this week with lots of web thinkers, people I worked with 20 years ago. And after listening to them about the state of social networks, this is what I've come up with.
Guide on the use of Generative AI - Canada.ca
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools offer many potential benefits to Government of Canada (GC) institutions. Federal institutions should explore potential uses of generative AI tools for supporting and improving their operations. However, because these tools are evolving, they should not be used in all cases. Federal institutions must be cautious and evaluate the risks before they start using them. The use of these tools should be restricted to instances where risks can be effectively managed. This document provides preliminary guidance to federal institutions on their use of generative AI tools. This includes instances where these tools are deployed by federal institutions. It provides an overview of generative AI, identifies challenges and concerns relating to its use, puts forward principles for using it responsibly, and offers policy considerations and best practices. This guide also seeks to raise awareness and foster coordination among federal institutions. It highlights the importance of engaging key stakeholders before deploying generative AI tools for public use and before using them for purposes such as service delivery. These stakeholders include legal counsel, privacy and security experts, and the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS). The guide complements and supports compliance with many existing federal laws and policies, including in areas of privacy, security, intellectual property, and human rights. The guide is intended to be evergreen as TBS recognizes the need for iteration to keep pace with regulatory and technological change.
Hugging Face Audio Course
Welcome to this course on using transformers for audio. Time and again transformers have proven themselves as one of the most powerful and versatile deep learning architectures, capable of achieving state-of-the-art results in a wide range of tasks, including natural language processing, computer vision, and more recently, audio processing. In this course, we will explore how transformers can be applied to audio data. You’ll learn how to use them to tackle a range of audio-related tasks. Whether you are interested in speech recognition, audio classification, or generating speech from text, transformers and this course have got you covered. To give you a taste of what these models can do, say a few words in the demo below and watch the model transcribe it in real-time!