My favourite tech hacks ... a thread
I started a thread on Bluesky of my favourite tech hacks earlier in the year and just added a couple more. Will keep a parallel list running here. Invidious (YouTube alternative front end) Pixabay (photos with appropriate Copyright) Etherpad (collaborate on a document with colleagues very easily)...
Source: bsky.app
These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI
Generative AI took the world by storm in 2023. Its future—and ours—will be shaped by what we do next. TL;DR 1. Will we ever mitigate the bias problem? (Probably) 2. How will AI change the way we apply copyright? (A lot) 3. How will it change our jobs? (Maybe not as much as feared but things will...
Source: technologyreview.com
The legal framework for AI is being built in real time, and a ruling in the Sarah Silverman case should give publishers
That an AI model was trained on copyrighted material does not make all of the model's outputs a copyright violation.
Source: niemanlab.org
The UK’s (new) Bill of Rights
An authoritarian resistance to scrutiny. Very un-British.
“it is becoming abundantly clear that the true objective underpinning this Bill (and the Government’s wider project) concerns not the so-called restoration of parliamentary sovereignty or the strengthening of democracy, but the entrenchment...
Source: publiclawforeveryone.com
Mountain gorillas: The ripple effect of conservation
Justin Rowlatt finds out what gorilla conservation can teach us about protecting other species. 'The secret of this success? Dr Gladys Kalema Zikusoka was the Uganda Wildlife Authority's first vet in 1995, then she set up the charity Conservation Through Public Health. Perhaps surprisingly, she says,...
Source: bbc.com
The AI Hierarchy of Needs | Hacker Noon
Sometimes you come across something that someone has written which makes what was a whole complicated mess in your head very simple indeed. Monica Rogati has done that with AI using an analogy of Maslow's (in)famous hierarchy of needs. For AI it translates to something like collecting, storing, preparing,...
Source: hackernoon.com
Blended learning is brighter, broader, and here to stay - eCampus News
Blended learning has transformed higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and institutions should continue to leverage its benefits.
Source: ecampusnews.com
What happened when a 'wildly irrational' algorithm made crucial healthcare decisions
Advocates say having computer programs decide how much help vulnerable people can get is often arbitrary - and in some cases downright cruel
Source: theguardian.com
World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'
"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com
Opinion: VC Jim Breyer: Silicon Valley still has a bright future. But Austin's time is now
My decision to start Breyer Capital Austin has more to do with Austin's strengths than any of the Bay Area's flaws.
Source: cnn.com
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...
Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race
"COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn’t come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have...
Source: 80000hours.org
Moving fast and breaking us all: Big Tech’s unaccountable algorithms
Much of the technology driving revenues for the world’s most powerful digital platforms is accountable to no one—not even the companies themselves.
Source: rankingdigitalrights.org
Over 27,000 students share how colleges and universities could improve digital learning
"A Jisc survey of 27,069 higher and further education students reveals that most are pleased with their digital learning, but areas such as wellbeing, mental health and staff digital skills need more attention." Get the basics right (like college WiFi)Make learning sessions more interactive Record lessons...
Source: jisc.ac.uk
Google fires Margaret Mitchell, co-lead of its Ethical AI team
"Last December, Gebru was fired from Google after she tried to be outspoken about unethical AI. This prompted some 225 Google employees to club together to create a union, in the hope of preventing further unfair dismissal and protecting employee rights. Mitchell was a member of said union, but that...
Source: techspot.com
Using the right tools for the job
Since this blog has been up I've fiddled with some text analysis stuff by analysing the text and making recommendations for similar blog entries. Did it all in PHP and MySQL just to understand how the algorithms work. Eventually it started to take about 5 hours to: tokenise and stemming the textcalculate...
Police Across Canada Are Using Predictive Policing Algorithms
Police Across Canada Are Using Predictive Policing Algorithms, Report Finds: Police across Canada are increasingly adopting algorithmic technology to predict crime. The authors of a new report say human rights are threatened by the practice.
Source: vice.com
Investing in Libraries is the Right Thing for Administrators To Do, Even if There Are Fewer Resources Overall - The Scholarly
Investing in Libraries is the Right Thing for Administrators To Do, Even if There Are Fewer Resources Overall - The Scholarly Kitchen: Library budgets shrank for 2 decades. They can't shrink any further because of COVID-19. In fact, they should grow despite contracting college budgets
Source: sspnet.org
ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine prevents SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in rhesus macaques: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine prevents SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in rhesus macaques: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in December 20191,2 and is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic3. Vaccines are an essential countermeasure urgently needed to control the pandemic4. Here, we...
Source: nature.com
Are you a populist right wing conservative? Have you been hooked recently?
If I wanted to find those who have a "conservative ideology" - so that I could share my views or influence them - I would do the following: set up a new account and start making contactsshare several of those technology scare hoax stories that you see posted e.g. Dance of the Pope virus video, the Andrea...
Source: historynewsnetwork.org
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