False equivalency in a copspeak guide to dealing with the media

Police chief and writer Cliff Couch knows his audience. In a paragraph from an article advising LEOs how to deal with reporters, Couch begins with context he assumes his readers already accept, and carefully moves from there to the new ideas he wants them to consider. The horror tales you may have heard about reporters sneaking past checkpoints, spying on people, or outrageously violating officers’ privacy usually involve out-of-town reporters who are there for a big national story. They’re under intense pressure to do whatever is necessary to advance their career, and they might not care who they upset in…

‘We’re back’: Bushy Run’s 2023 battle reenactment will be held

I’m glad to know that this recent controversy has been resolved in a way that lets Bushy Run respectfully continue its scheduled historic August re-enactment, and I hope that appropriate safety and cultural sensitivity checks will preserve the educational value of the event, while not romanticizing the violence.  HARRISBURG — This year’s Battle of Bushy Run reenactment is back on after Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission members unanimously voted to allow the Penn Township site to hold the event this August. The fate of future reenactments has yet to be determined. The commission plans to conduct a study and hold…

Through the Looking Glass #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 19) Sisko Must Rescue Collaborator Mirror Jennifer from Evil Mirror Kira

Rewatching ST:DS9 The teaser gives Odo and Quark a comic scene that shows Sisko in Space Dad mode. A casually dressed O’Brien says he wants to speak to Sisko, then pulls a weapon and orders him to the transporter pad.  Sisko realizes he’s been taken to the Mirror Universe, and learns his counterpart was killed while leading a Terran rebellion against the Klingon-Cardassian alliance, and Smiley has kidnapped him in oder to get him to complete an important mission — to stop a scientist from inventing new sensor technology that will let the bad thugs spot the good rebels in…

Microsoft “lobotomized” AI-powered Bing Chat, and its fans aren’t happy

Microsoft limits long conversations to address “concerns being raised.” […] These deeply human reactions have proven that people can form powerful emotional attachments to a large language model doing next-token prediction. That might have dangerous implications in the future. Over the course of the week, we’ve received several tips from readers about people who believe they have discovered a way to read other people’s conversations with Bing Chat, or a way to access secret internal Microsoft company documents, or even help Bing chat break free of its restrictions. All were elaborate hallucinations (falsehoods) spun up by an incredibly capable text-generation machine.…

Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. —New York Times “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine. | At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should…

Security is Sleeping in the Back Seat of the Car

For decades, my mother collected paperbacks that contained a year’s worth of Peanuts newspaper strips. I seem to remember each new year’s book appearing on a rack near the greeting cards. One summer when I was a tween around 1980, I found a big stack of these Peanuts paperbacks in the storage room under the stairs to the basement, and started reading through the whole series, from the very first strips in the 50s.  I have a great sensory memory of bounding down the stairs after I came home from school and smelling the basement smell (humidity on concrete, and…

Pa. agency explains why it enacted new ‘no force-on-force rule’ for Bushy Run, other sites

Attending the re-enactment of the Battle of Busy Run was a favorite and familiar part of our homeschool curriculum. The end to battle reenactments at Bushy Run Battlefield has left many members of the community saddened and frustrated. But in Harrisburg, officials with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission consider the new “no force-on-force” policy a positive for state history. “There are more impactful and safer educational methods through which we can teach the public about the complex mix of ideas, events, social structures, etc. that led to violent conflict,” PHMC external affairs director Howard Pollman wrote via email. […]…

People Thought an AI Was Brilliantly Analyzing Their Personalities, But It Was Actually Giving Out Feedback Randomly

“To begin our hoax scenario, we intended to build participants’ trust in the machine by pretending that it could decode their preferences and attitudes,” the study authors wrote. “The system included a sham MRI scanner and an EEG system, that supposedly used neural decoding driven by artificial intelligence (AI).” […] In other words, participants were made to believe that using advanced neuroscience, the machine could tell them what they thought, not just how they thought. And according to the study, participants ate the results right up, convinced that the machine knew them better than they knew themselves. “As the machine seemingly inferred participants’ preferences…

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You can be a Trek fan without loving TOS. But if we think tolerance and empathy are good things, it makes sense to practice tolerating and empathizing with our own past.

I was born in 1968 and grew up with reruns of TOS. I can only remember seeing a handful of episodes for the first time (and those are some of my earliest memories). Some of the episodes are awful, and the third season is overall very weak. You can be a Trek fan without loving TOS. As a college English professor, I regularly teach classic works that my students struggle to understand, much less appreciate, because they’re uncomfortable confronting the values and unquestioned assumptions of past centuries and different cultures. I remind them that we are all products of our…

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it…

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Visionary #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 17) Time-jumping O’Brien Must Suffer

Rewatching ST:DS9 The episode starts with O’Brien on the floor, as Bashir exposits that he was exposed to plot contrivance particles. On his way to meet a Romulan delegation, Sisko passes rowdy, drunken Klingons whose ship is in for repairs. O’Brien, trying to relax, talks Quark into setting up a dart board. He’s about to throw when suddenly he is on the promenade deck, watching another O’Brien talking to another Quark. Our O’Brien and the other O’Brien lock eyes, and O’Brien is back at the bar, looking queasy. Bashir says hallucinations are “a fairly common side-effect of radiation poisoning.” The…

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Prophet Motive (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 16) The Nagus’s eccentricities annoy, alarm Quark

Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark is enjoying an ear massage from a humanoid woman who is clearly more interested in a business deal when they are interrupted by the arrival of Grand Nagus Zek. In the B story, Bashir is nominated for a prestigious Federation medical award, yet he seems aggressively unenthusiastic. (Some good character bits, and in retrospect this subplot could be seen as laying groundwork for the “Bashir is genetically enhanced” storyline, but that’s a charitable reading.) In a sitcom-worthy scene, Quark is annoyed to live in his brother’s cluttered quarters, but Rom stands his ground. Zek surprises them both…

i trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries – so that i could engage in real-time dialogue with my “inner child”

I kept a journal from Feb 3 1983 (the day my freshman high school English teacher assigned a journal entry as homework) through about 1992 (when I was busy in grad school, though I did write long emails to my fiancee). As I was wrapping up my dissertation, I started blogging in 1999. At no point in my life did I write the kind of free-flowing personal musings that I imagine would help an AI bot let you converse with your younger self. This is a fascinating experiment in time travel. i kept diaries for about 10+ years of my…

Combating Shakespearean shrinkage – Shakespeare & Beyond

The worst reaction to Shakespeare’s complicated language, it seems to me, is thinking that it should be hard for an audience to understand. This will only cause Shakespeare shrinkage to expand, creating entire productions that are difficult to understand, not just occasional moments, and alienating audiences who have been disappointed too many times. Shakespeare should never be a chore: It’s some of the greatest music ever written serving some of the greatest characters ever created, and we should ensure that every syllable crackles with intensity and specificity. Otherwise, they’re just “words, words, words,” …with little meaning and few compelling reasons to watch. —CombatingAustin Tichenor

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. I’ve deleted the app from my phone, and check it a couple times a day from my laptop. I’ve been reading more news and fewer tweets. I followed a Twitter bot that reminds me to go do something else that’s not scrolling slack-jawed through tweets. Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue…