Artificial intelligence has been deployed to handle facial recognition, recommend movies, and auto-complete your typing. The news that CNET had been using it to generate entire stories, however, sent a ripple of anxiety through the news media for its seeming threat to journalists. The robot-brained yet conversational ChatGPT can produce copy without lunch or bathroom breaks and…
The story goes like this: A man goes to a morgue in Galilee, RI to look at a body that had been identified as him. “Nope,” he said, “that ain’t me.” Then he left. 84 years after premature reports of his death, the late Charles Keville is going viral. Background on this story from The…
“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…
Ad Fontes Media Similar:Journey's End (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 20) Picard must relocate a North … Rewatching ST:TNG An obviously tr…CultureJournalism 101: I fixed this meme for you.I can sympathize with the sentiment, but…CultureThou shalt not commit logical fallacies Thou shalt not commit logical fallaci…AmusingA day after using an apparently altered hurricane map,…
Similar:KLINGON STYLE (Star Trek Parody of PSY – GANGNAM STYLE)Silly fun, just in time for the 25th ann…AestheticsI Cannot Begin to Tell You How Proficient I Am in Microsoft WordIs this satire? It doesn’t matter. It ga…AestheticsMy colleague @crissycp offers warm soda bread and tea every year, as part of her authentic…Academia6 Problems with our…
Get a load of the upholstery on that chair! This is a 3D visualization of the bridge of the fantasy interplanetary cruiser I created for an epic, interactive, episodic bedtime story I told my kids from about 2007-2012. Elsewhere the ship has more steampunk elements, but this part of the ship is more neo-Victorian. Something…
YouTube commenter Bob Hepple writes, “Two minds about this. On the one hand – wow! OTOH – my mental imagery (of the original 1977 Crowther and Woods Adventure game, I never played Zork as such) is so strong and precious that I kinda hate watching someone else’s version. Much like how I hate the LotR…
Similar:The Visitor #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 3) Old Jake Reflects on the life-cha…Rewatching ST:DS9 On a dark and storm…BooksThere’s Something Off About LED BulbsWhen I’m stressed, or I feel life is spi…AestheticsI apologize for this one. R2-D2 stars in Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical CATS.PersonalMore details in the powder room of my villain's lair.…
Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour. —Guardian Similar:Here is…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir is less than thrilled with Garak’s gift of a holographic adaptation of a Cardassian “enigma tale,” and explains he’s testy about his impending 30th birthday. Quark seems relieved when Bashir shoots down a shady client’s hopes of buying “biomemetic gel.” Bashir later finds that same customer (a bumpy-faced reptilian named Altovar) ransacking…
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…
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…
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…
Similar:Fake News Can Be Deadly. Here's How To Spot ItWe are all vectors by which fake news ca…Current_Events'Our worst nightmare': New legal filings detail reporting of Rolling Stone's U-Va. gang ra…The court documents, submitted as eviden…AcademiaCopspeak, "the past exonerative" tense, and punching NazisIn the Constitution, any suspect is inno…CultureA trend story about millennials, by The…
Not only is this a fantastic story about language and culture and colonialism, it’s also a great example of how a talented PR writer used journalistic storytelling strategies to turn a scholarly study into an appealing narrative. We start with a very specific, very personal story about a man returning home for his father’s funeral.…
Similar:In July 1999, I was blogging about Dante's ashes, Apollo 11, gender-neutral language, and …In July, 1999, I was blogging about: …CultureOur 2014 class banner was an iPad. I can’t believe I just noticed that today.PersonalMy student journalists sport their fashionable “What Would Jerz Do?” wristbands.AcademiaMe: Carolyn, are you ok? Carolyn:Just reminding myself that I…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, the songs “Ol Man River” from Showboat and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the novels To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) and the first Hardy Boys novel will (finally) enter the common domain in 2023. I chose my…
Similar:Confuse Students to Help Them LearnConfusing sometimes helps cats, so why n…AcademiaUmberto Eco and his legacy in open-world gamesI read “The Name of the Rose” during the…BooksMore sections of #steampunk control panel. #blender3dart #blender3d #design #aestheticsAestheticsMake Video Horizontal Again For confessionals or tapdance routi…AcademiaSold out show today. Carolyn gets tomorrow off, then a final week.PersonalA…
I’m consciously fighting confirmation bias by sharing some claims that I intuitively (irrationally?) doubt. Contrary to widespread beliefs, the share of misinformation in most people’s information diet is minimal, conspiracy theorising does not seem to have increased in recent years, and those who consume high rates of misinformation are largely hyper-partisans or dogmatists anyway. Moreover, even when people’s…
Similar:It's a thing to do.Personal"Chores" — Clip from Snow White: The Musical (Stage Right Greensburg, Sept 2012)Here’s what it sounded like at our first…CultureImpact of One-size-fits-all Web DesignI don’t particularly miss the splash lan…BusinessThis is manageable. Far better than some semesters.This is manageable. Far better than some…PersonalMy beautiful daughter says "Happy Valentine's Day" View…