I joined Twitter for the first time during a session at an academic conference, and since then have mostly used it to keep in touch with academics who share my professional interests. But many of those professional contacts feel about Twitter the way I do, and have moved much (though not all) of their activity…
In the backstory for the interactive bedtime stories I told my kids from about 2007-2012, a young Benjamin Franklin discovered glowing green aether (which expands & glows when exposed to radiation), used it to power his printing press and light the streets of Philadelphia. When he threatened to share it with France, King George reluctantly…
Rewatching ST:DS9 After losing to O’Brien at darts, Sisko visits Kira in her quarters (where she is praying before a memorial for Bareil) to report that the scheming Kai Winn, already the spiritual leader of Bajor, has been elevated to First Minister. During a routine meeting with Odo, a distracted Kira vents about her recent…
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The first few weeks of June were very busy for me. I spent a week leveling up my skill in ChoiceScript, I pivoted to marking AP English papers for a week, then I prepped a workshop for the Computers and Writing 2023 conference, which I attended remotely last weekend. The other day I returned to…
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How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future? AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s…
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TikTok influencers and celebrities are increasingly taking over from journalists as the main source of news for young people, according to a report published Wednesday by the Britain-based Reuters Institute. The figures were based on interviews with some 94,000 people across 46 countries, conducted for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of…
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is…
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Years ago I spent some time in Second Life, taking my young son to visit a display of NASA rockets and historical sites from classical history, and for my own amusement wandering through a few Star Trek exhibits, and exploring the mostly empty landscapes. My university bought an island, and I was briefly excited at…
I rather miss teaching HTML and doing my own web design on the side. These days, when my students propose to make a web page, they have already decided to use Google Sites or Wix. Sometimes I can talk them into using WordPress, but there just isn’t room in my curriculum to teach them everything…
A good article about kids and dopamine. Apps and sweets can hijack the neural pathways we need to survive, triggering tantrums and aggression. The problem describes plenty of adults, too! It’s not actually happiness we feel when we fulfill that craving. While she’s staring into the technicolor images, her brain experiences spikes in dopamine, over and…
Great story about the art of photographing theatre performances. Given that the choreographers and lighting designers and set designer and costume, hair and make-up people have already done a lot of work, not to mention the contributions of performers themselves, I just love grabbing 1000 or more shots during a show, and culling them down…
As Mike Edwards notes, “AI doomers will eagerly tweet this article, unaware that it’s not about the dangers of LLMs: it’s about *information literacy*”
In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that the chat bot could lead him astray.
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