More miscellaneous details

  • Could reliance on AI harm critical thinking in young people? Researchers have their worries – South China Morning Post

    According to the British study, published on January 3 in the peer-reviewed journal Societies, analysis of responses from more than 650 people aged 17 and over showed evidence of lower critical thinking skills among young people who used AI extensively. “Younger participants who exhibited higher dependence on AI tools scored lower in critical thinking compared to their older counterparts,” wrote study author Michael Gerlich from the SBS Swiss Business School. “This trend underscores the need for educational interventions that promote critical engagement with AI technologies, ensuring that the convenience offered by these tools does not come at the cost of essential cognitive skills.” […]

    In a separate study published in September, a team from Sweden identified 139 questionable papers on computing, environment, health and other research fields on the academic search engine Google Scholar. The Swedish researchers said the papers contained common responses used by ChatGPT, including “as of my last knowledge update” and “I don’t have access to real-time data”, but did not declare the use of AI. While most of the papers appeared in journals that are not indexed in reputable bibliographic databases, some were published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings, according to the study. Some of the identified papers were found in university databases and were attributed to students, the researchers said. “The abundance of fabricated ‘studies’ seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardise the integrity of the scientific record,” they warned.

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  • Attendance and absence advice for adverse weather conditions – Lewisham Services for Schools

    Following the national weather warnings across the country predicted over the coming days, we thought it would be useful to publish advice on how to apply the new attendance and absence registration codes in the event of travel disruption or school closure associated with bad weather.

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  • How to Work Better: Making a mural on Houston Street – Guggenheim

    As the critic John Kelsey notes in the Guggenheim retrospective’s catalogue, “Taken from a factory in Thailand and displayed in a supremely wealthy nation with one of the strictest immigration policies in Europe, the text becomes an ironic reflection on the way things go for commuter drones within a productively mobilized post-society, some of whom happen to be artists and curators: ‘SMILE.’” The mural’s audience in New York 25 years later is, if anything, even more subject to the piece’s ironies.

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  • Keypad used to land Apollo on the moon shrunk down to work as wristwatch – collectSPACE

    When NASA’s Apollo spacecraft launched to the moon, it had on board two briefcase-size computers that for their day would normally have required enough floor space to fill a couple of rooms. The compact devices were small, but had enough processing power and memory to guide the astronauts from the Earth to the moon. Fifty-five years later, the British start-up Apollo Instruments has been able to shrink the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) even further — to the size of a wristwatch. Now, anyone can wear the display and keyboard system, or DSKY (pronounced “disk-key”), that astronauts used on the command and lunar modules. The DSKY Moonwatch is more than just a novelty timepiece; wearers can interact with it just like the Apollo crews did and fly to the moon (rocket and spacecraft not included).

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  • DSKY: A unique Moonwatch with a true Lunar legacy – Apollo Instruments

    Introducing the highly coveted Apollo Instruments DSKY Moonwatch, a four-year endeavour that captures the essence of adventure and the spirit of space exploration. With its authentic design and immersive functionality, this watch is a must-have for any avid collector or space enthusiast.

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  • Twelve dudes and a hype tunnel: Scenes from the ‘Super Bowl for Excel nerds’ – The New York Times

    “I remember thinking ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?’” Mr. Jarman, 30, a British financial consultant who lives in Toronto, said of the tunnel. “But it’s all in good fun. And if the other e-sports do it, we should too.” Mr. Grigolyunovich said his vision for future tournaments includes more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize for the winner. For now, many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN’s annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships.

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  • The Great Wave: why has this become the defining image of our era? – The Guardian

    Okuda thinks that the image shows “the grand scale of nature v humans”. It certainly speaks to the climate crisis, and to migration. Japan was following the sakoku isolationist policy when Hokusai designed his print. Trade was restricted. Foreign nationals couldn’t enter Japan. Overseas travel was forbidden. In this context, the new and exotic Prussian blue pigment – likely imported from Europe via China – would have been startling to Hokusai’s first buyers. Maybe that is another reason why this image feels hopeful. He put the world beyond the wave on paper.
    art hokusai painting printing

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  • Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand? – The Guardian

    It is popular to assume that we have replaced one old-fashioned, inefficient tool (handwriting) with a more convenient and efficient alternative (keyboarding). But like the decline of face-to-face interactions, we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff for efficiency, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.

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  • Netflix’s UK audience reach overtook BBC1 for the first time last year – Deadline

    The unseating of Britain’s most popular channel may not have been permanent, but it represents a possible inflection point in the battle between traditional broadcasters and U.S. streaming giants. The BBC said it was “meaningless” to compare the entirety of Netflix with a single channel and that its portfolio had double the number of viewers of the Squid Game streamer.

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  • João Loureiro serves grayscale gelato at Tadao Ando’s MPavilion 10 – designboom

    On-site, customers can ask Piccolina about the flavors of the grayscale gelato, which range from light grey to almost black. João Loureiro tells designboom in an email that the flavors change every time the work is shown. ‘It depends on local flavors and the ice cream production system,’ he shares with us. Users across social platforms still try to guess the flavors, including black sesame, but only when they visit the stall at MPavilion 10 can they confirm their hunches. In a way, revealing the flavors online defeats the purpose of keeping the grayscale gelato a mystery.

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  • Washington DC residents flee ahead of Trump inauguration: ‘I can’t be here’ – The Guardian

    “I have a fundamental set of beliefs and values that differ greatly from the supporters of the president-elect, so it is best that I just remove myself,” said Butler, a human resources executive who had worked for the federal government for nearly two decades before leaving to work at a non-profit. “It says to me that we’d rather have a criminal leading our country than a person of color, or a criminal rather than a woman.”

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  • Judge ends man’s 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in bitcoin – Ars Technica

    His ex-girlfriend, Halfina Eddy-Evans, said in a recent interview with the Daily Mail that she brought the hard drive and other unwanted belongings to the dump, at Howells’ request. “I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out… I’d love nothing more than him to find it. I’m sick and tired of hearing about it,” she said.

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  • TikTok is partially back online in the US, but it’s not back in the App Store yet – The Verge

    US users were shut out of TikTok last night ahead of the federal ban coming into effect, with the app displaying a message that its services were “temporarily unavailable.” Service started to be restored on Sunday around 12PM ET in TikTok’s mobile app and on the web. The app now displays a message saying “Welcome back!” and crediting Trump with restoring service. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the message reads.

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  • Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos – TechCrunch

    With TikTok’s future in the U.S. uncertain, it feels like major social media platforms are working overtime to ship features to attract the millions of people who may want to switch: Bluesky said on Sunday that it is launching a custom feed for vertical videos in its app. … Other social networks are taking advantage of this situation as well. Elon Musk-owned X also launched a dedicated feed for vertical videos in the U.S, and Meta announced a new video editing app called Edits to rival CapCut.

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  • Billion-dollar video game: is this the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made? – The Guardian

    British-American video game developer Chris Roberts – famed for his 1990s Wing Commander spaceship fighting series – launched Star Citizen as a crowdfunded project in 2012, promising to create a digital universe so huge yet still so detailed that players would “forget it’s a game”. He raised its first $2m on Kickstarter and it has been growing ever since, fuelled by fans willing to put their money into a plan so ambitious in scope that no profit and deadline-focused publisher would consider the risk of making it. […]

    As time goes on, satisfying the community becomes increasingly important. Many fans have now given large sums of their money, including through a controversial money-making scheme in which CIG pre-sells spaceships online that they intend to make in the future. Some so-called “superbackers” have spent well over $10,000. […]

    CIG describes Star Citizen as “the largest scale open development game in existence” but that ambition has also meant the game has now been in development for well over a decade, with repeated, frustrating delays. In a 2012 interview with Roberts, the Guardian reported the plan was to release the game two years later, in 2014. Fan forums regularly question if the game will ever be properly released.

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  • Selling the collective: On Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews” – Cleveland Review of Books

    In 2021, writer Will Hall began scraping Kevin Killian’s reviews from Amazon’s servers and, thanks largely to his efforts, Semiotext(e) published Kevin Killian: Selected Amazon Reviews in November. The 697-page collection rescues from obscurity some of the over two thousand reviews the poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, editor, critic, and artist posted to the platform from 2003 until his death in 2019.

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  • Elegance and hustle – Aeon Essays

    “Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” […]

    But French writers’ loathing of journalism was underlain by a fundamental tension: those who criticised the press most vehemently were themselves journalists, and their novels of journalism were typically published in the same newspapers they excoriated. Journalism and literature were so deeply entwined that newspapers became ‘the laboratory of literature’ throughout the long 19th century, generating new literary forms, such as prose poetry and the serial novel.

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  • Century-scale storage – Harvard Law School Innovation Library Hub

    We are on the brink of a dark age, or have already entered one. The scale of art, music, and literature being lost each day as the World Wide Web shifts and degenerates represents the biggest loss of human cultural production since World War II. My generation was continuously warned by teachers, parents, and authority figures that we should be careful online because the internet is written in ink, and yet it turned out to be the exact opposite. As writer and researcher Kevin T. Baker remarked, “On the internet, Alexandria burns daily.”

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  • The Augmented City: Seeing Through Disruption – Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech (pdf)

    What is the next disruptive technology to reshape the urban public realm? And how can they better anticipate its effects upon arrival? … What are future uses of augmented reality in cities, and what are the implications for managing public space and safety? […]

    This report explores future threats and opportunities for cities posed by the next wave of potentially disruptive technologies, headlined by AI and AR. Before further unpacking these futures, it’s important to define key terms, technologies, and context — such as the difference between augmented-, virtual-, and mixed-reality (not to mention “spatial computing”). In addition, how do practices such as “luxury surveillance” and “digital redlining” combine to create “diminished reality?” And does “the metaverse” really mean anything at this point? (Not really.)

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  • The cure for disposable plastic crap is here—and it’s loony – WIRED

    Even so, in the US, only a minority of PET bottles get recycled. The main PET industry association puts the recycling rate at 29 percent, while Greenpeace says it’s 20.9 percent. In Norway, though, Infinitum recycles nearly every damn bottle. How the heck did they achieve this?

    With a combo of clever technology and deft public policy. As is often the case, the policy was the prime mover. Running a recycling program requires a lot of expensive labor and systems. You have to collect the plastic and separate it by type, which is expensive.

    So in the late ’90s, Norway passed a law that forced somebody to pay for it—specifically, companies such as Coca-Cola that make plastic PET containers. Firms got hit with a new tax if they didn’t pay to collect and recycle used bottles. If the beverage companies can prove they’re recycling 95 percent as many bottles as they sell, they pay no tax. Otherwise, the less they recycle, the more they owe—until they’re paying “hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner,” Maldum said (tens of millions of US dollars).

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  • My machine and me – Los Angeles Review of Books

    Mark Fisher described his millennial students as “a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” For the next generation, the concept of time is segmented into even shorter media blocks. When is there the opportunity to feel sentimental? Should I feel sentimental about screen time? It is odd to be grateful to the laptop you paid $2,499 for, in 12 monthly installments, for reminding you of your physicality. I doubt Fisher would approve. The laptop gives the illusion of control over work-time when in fact it facilitates the erosion of a distinction between work and life. Still, I will take the help applying pressure to the hemorrhage. I want to be startled out of the trance, to pull my shoulders back and heave myself from bed. I want to remember that I am a body.

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  • Why are we so obsessed with five-star ratings? – ArtReview

    This is not simply, as it may seem, a comment on the inferior tastes of tourists; it reflects a clash of review cultures. Japanese reviewers do not give 5 out of 5 stars for a service or establishment that is good. If it’s solid, it gets a 3. If it’s really good, it gets a 4. Nothing gets a 5. Japanese reviewers grade harshly on dimensions of service, cleanliness, ‘cosu pa’ or ‘cost performance’, the etiquette of other customers. At a soba shop near my house, low stars are given for the colour of the tempura (black), the smell (ammonia) and the presence of ashtrays (one for each table). On Tabelog, a Japanese Yelp for restaurants, if I see 3.49 stars, it gives me a little thrill. A typical review might read something like, ‘Food was super delicious. Perfect night. The server had messy hair. 2 stars.’

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  • Tech right (disambiguation) – Jasmine Sun

    I was most surprised to see that right-wing rebukes of the “Tech Right” are near-identical to those that left tech critics make (toward different ends). It makes you wonder, as Andreessen and Pethokoukis both pose, whether the more important division is not left/right but rather accel/decel.

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  • Singapore is turning to AI to care for its rapidly aging population – Rest of World

    Studies show that AI companions like Dexie can be just as effective in reducing loneliness as interacting with another person. For Singapore, where an aging population is rapidly becoming the majority and elders are getting lonelier, authorities see the potential of AI tools to assist in preventive illness care, a key emphasis of the city-state’s health care system. […]

    In 2024, the government committed over 1 billion Singapore dollars ($730 million) to boost AI capabilities over the next five years. Among the many eldercare AI projects in the pipeline is a generative AI application called MemoryLane for the elderly to document their life stories. The project is being piloted at several St Luke’s ElderCare Active Ageing Centres. Khoo Teck Puat, a local hospital, has developed a generative AI–based tool to create “visual pillboxes” to remind seniors of their pill regimens, while RoboCoach Xian, a robot trainer, is helping senior citizens stay healthy through physical exercise routines.

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  • Prophecies of the Flood – One Useful Thing

    The result was a 17 page paper with 118 references! But is it any good? I have taught the introductory entrepreneurship class at Wharton for over a decade, published on the topic, started companies myself, and even wrote a book on entrepreneurship, and I think this is pretty solid.

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  • AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it – MIT Technology Review

    Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a “zero-click” future, where search referral traffic—a mainstay of the web since before Google existed—vanishes from the scene. […]

    “We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where we’ve been in the past decade,” says Pichai. There are some real hazards here. First and foremost: Large language models will lie to you. They hallucinate. They get shit wrong. When it doesn’t have an answer, an AI model can blithely and confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, which has built its reputation over the past 20 years on reliability, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous.

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  • Your next AI wearable will listen to everything all the time – WIRED

    In the app, you can see a summary of the conversations you’ve had throughout the day, and at the day’s end, it generates a snippet of what the day was like and has the locations of where you had these chats on a map. But the most interesting feature is the middle tab, which is your “To-Dos.” These are automatically generated based on your conversations. I was speaking with my editor and we talked about taking a picture of a product, and lo and behold, Bee AI created a to-do for me to “Remember to take a picture for Mike.” (I must have said his name during the conversation.) You can check these off if you complete them. It’s worth pointing out that these to-do’s are often not things I need to do.

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  • David Lynch, conjurer of the uncanny, dies at 78 – Hyperallergic

    Lynch’s performance as Cole doesn’t feel too different from the persona he carried in his public appearances, his often-viral tweets, or his prolific YouTube channel (on which he, among other things, continued his practice of delivering weather reports). His nasal voice and halting manner of speaking made him instantly identifiable and endearing to many, elevating him to living meme status in his latter years. He was one of the few creative individuals who seemed like he could have stepped out of one of his own works (or as Dennis Lim put it, a man from another place). The world is a little less strange now without him, and poorer for it.

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  • ‘Dailyish’ – Oliver Burkeman

    If you’re prone to making yourself miserable by holding yourself to unmeetable standards, like me, “dailyish” probably sounds a bit self-indulgent. But it’s the opposite – because it involves surrendering the thrilling fantasy of yet-to-be-achieved perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete progress, here and now. Besides, it isn’t synonymous with “just do it as often as you can”; deep down, you know that if you never average more than a day or two per week on your novel/fitness plan/meditation practice/side business/whatever, then you won’t acquire the momentum to move forward. “Dailyish” involves applying more pressure to yourself than that. But (crucial distinction coming up!) it’s a matter of pressure rather than of forcing.

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  • ‘Hey, Gemini!’ Mega Galaxy S25 leak confirms major AI upgrades and lots more – Android Authority

    The leaked image above shows that the Galaxy S25 series is getting a new “Now Brief” feature that will provide users a personalized summary of their day. It feels like a rehash of the Google Now feature from yesteryears. The image shows that Now Brief will include cards with information about the weather, suggestions for using different features, a recap of images clicked during the day, daily activity goals, and more. We’re guess[ing] the feature will use AI to collate all this information from various apps and other connected Galaxy devices.

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  • iOS 18.3 temporarily removes notification summaries for news – MacRumors

    Apple is making changes to Notification Summaries following complaints that the way ‌Apple Intelligence‌ aggregated news notifications could lead to false headlines and confused customers. Several BBC notifications, for example, were improperly summarized, providing false information to readers.

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  • Why has LinkedIn become so weird? – The Guardian

    Much has been written about how tech is changing how we see ourselves and each other. Instagram pushing unattainable beauty standards and lifestyles, Facebook fake news chipping away at people’s belief in institutions, an X format that reduces a complex thought to 280 characters (no wonder nuance is impossible!), turning all of us into outrage addicts. Dating apps have commodified and gamified those most human phenomena: love and desire. Yet somehow LinkedIn has been left out of the spotlight. But here’s my contention: I think it is doing something to us, shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t. And perhaps most chilling of all, it promotes the idea that we are all just brands, and we must always – always – be selling. Apparently, LinkedIn is now being used as a full social network, a place where people talk about their marriages, make friends and maybe even date. What does that tell us about our lives outside work? Do we even still have lives outside work at all?

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  • One for all and all for none – Notes, links, etc

    You can look for available GP appointments using the NHS app. Pretty cool. Unless your local surgery has opted to use a different system. If that’s the case, you need to make sure you don’t click the ‘Check for available GP appointments’ button in the app because it will just say ‘No appointments available’. And when you phone the surgery, you’ll get a recorded message which says to use the app. So you’ll try again of course and get the same result: No appointments available. Perhaps you’ll feel bad for being a burden – because it’s flu season and the surgery must be flat out. Perhaps you’ll wait another day and when you try again you’ll find there are still no appointments available.

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  • Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra – Cadogan Hall

    Programme: Schubert Symphony No. 8, ‘Unfinished’; Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1; Ferit Tüzün Nasreddin Hoca Humoresque; Beethoven Symphony No. 6, ‘Pastoral’

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  • OpenAI ChatGPT can now handle reminders and to-dos – The Verge

    While scheduling capabilities are a common feature in digital assistants, this marks a shift in ChatGPT’s functionality. Until now, the AI has operated solely in real time, responding to immediate requests rather than handling ongoing tasks or future planning. The addition of Tasks suggests OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s role beyond conversation into territory traditionally held by virtual assistants.

    OpenAI’s ambitions for Tasks appear to stretch beyond simple scheduling, too. Bloomberg reported that “Operator,” an autonomous AI agent capable of independently controlling computers, is slated for release this month. Meanwhile, reverse engineer Tibor Blaho found that OpenAI appears to be working on something codenamed “Caterpillar” that could integrate with Tasks and allow ChatGPT to search for specific information, analyze problems, summarize data, navigate websites, and access documents — with users receiving notifications upon task completion.

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  • AI teacher tools set to break down barriers to opportunity – GOV.UK

    Kids are set to benefit from a better standard of teaching through more face time with teachers – powered by AI – as the Government sets the country on course to mainline AI into the fabric of society, helping turbocharge our Plan for Change and breaking down the barriers of opportunity. £1 million has been set aside for 16 developers to create AI tools to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored feedback for individual students in a fraction of the time, so teachers can focus on delivering brilliant lessons. […]

    The prototype AI tools, to be developed by April 2025, will draw on a first-of-its-kind AI store of data to ensure accuracy – so teachers can be confident in the information training the tools. The world-leading content store, backed by £3 million funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will pool and encode curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work which will then be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality content. […]

    Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work, according to a survey from TeacherTapp. However, most AI tools are not specifically trained on the documents that set out how teaching should work in England, and aren’t accurate enough to help teachers with their marking and feedback workload. Training AI tools on the content store can increase feedback accuracy to 92%, up from 67% when no targeted data was provided to a large language model. That means teachers can be assured the tools are safe and reliable for classroom use.

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  • Why Starmer and Reeves are pinning their hopes on AI to drive growth in UK – The Guardian

    Underneath all of this is the implication that efficiency – through AI automating certain tasks – means redundancies. The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has suggested that more than 40% of tasks performed by public sector workers could be automated partly by AI and the government could bank those efficiency gains by “reducing the size of the public-sector workforce accordingly”. TBI also estimates that AI could displace between 1m and 3m private-sector jobs in the UK, though it stresses the net rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands because the technology will create new jobs, too. Worried lawyers, finance professionals, coders, graphic designers and copywriters – a handful of sectors that might be affected – will have to take that on faith. This is the flipside of improved productivity.

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  • ‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI – The Guardian

    Under the 50-point AI action plan, an area of Oxfordshire near the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham will be designated the first AI growth zone. It will have fast-tracked planning arrangements for data centres as the government seeks to reposition Britain as a place where AI innovators believe they can build trillion-pound companies. Further zones will be created in as-yet-unnamed “de-industrialised areas of the country with access to power”. Multibillion-pound contracts will be signed to build the new public “compute” capacity – the microchips, processing units, memory and cabling that physically enable AI. There will also be a new “supercomputer”, which the government boasts will have sufficient AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second. Sounding a note of caution, the Ada Lovelace Institute called for “a roadmap for addressing broader AI harms”, and stressed that piloting AI in the public sector “will have real-world impacts on people”.

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  • Funny haha – The European Review of Books

    That joke article appeared in the Dutch platform De Speld, our version of The Onion. Pretty much every European country has an Onion — Germany’s Der Postillon (founded in 2008), France’s Le Gorafi (2012), Austria’s Die Tagespresse (2013), Ireland’s Waterford Whispers (2009), Italy’s Lercio (2012), Spain’s El Mundo Today (2009) — indeed somehow has to have an Onion. They feel almost like public utilities, which is to say that they’ve come to be taken for granted. Satirical news is as old as real news, to be sure, but it has taken a particular form in our time. The Onion started as a satirical print newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, and has served as a blueprint for satirical news media around the world. « The Dutch version of The Onion » rings a bell in a way that « The German version of Private Eye » would not.

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  • Find awe and inspiration in thousands of public domain artworks – Hyperallergic

    “Around this time last year I had the idea to gather all the images in the Public Domain Review into a separate archive, in a way freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation,” Adam Green, PDR’s editor-in-chief, told Hyperallergic.

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  • The gentrification of video game history – Felipe Pepe

    For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends’ houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc. As celebrated as these LAN Parties are in media, it’s important to remember that owning a gaming PC was still extremely expensive for most of the world at the time — especially for those in the Global South. There, unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.

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  • Glorious Trash

    Trawling the depths of forgotten fiction, films, and beyond, with yer pal, Joe Kenney.

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  • The DeanBeat: Will the metaverse bring the second coming of Second Life? – VentureBeat

    Second Life has benefited from the pandemic, just like most games, as more users are coming into virtual worlds to socialize because they aren’t so sure about meeting in real life. “Second Life is back because it never went anywhere. Just 3.5 years ago, we were the same size as Roblox,” he said. “We’re starting to grow again. Now more people are, are interacting. It’s a re-engagement strategy.”

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  • Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

    For the Lab, the move towards browser-based accessibility to Second Life is based on addressing a number of long-term pain points in using the platform: The fact that it continues to require fairly high-end computer hardware to experience it at its very best – and roughly 50% of the existing user base do not have such hardware at their disposal. The fact that it requires a dedicated viewer to be downloaded and installed by new users as a part of the sign-up process. The fact that the viewer has a sprawling and complex UI which can be both hard to master by new users. Offering a browser-based / streaming solution can overcome these issues – and that is the point of what is being called Project Zero: to allow those on low-spec systems experience SL as if they were using a gaming rig with a high-end GPU, whilst offering incoming new users direct access to coming in-world via a URL within the sign-up workflow.

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  • January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924 – Duke University School of Law

    On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain.

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  • DOOM: The Gallery Experience – Newgrounds

    DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings. In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).

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  • Egon Schiele’s landscapes tell a winter’s tale – Hyperallergic

    An eternal fall permeates most of the artist’s landscapes, in which gloomy and Gothic towns are shot through with a sense of impending doom.

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  • There’s a Squid Game Easter egg on Google – and it’s addictive – Euronews

    It’s rather addictive and not as gory as the show, as if one of your players does get caught, they walk away – as opposed to their fate on the show, which is significantly bloodier.

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  • Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 – Simon Willison’s Weblog

    A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.
    ai chatbots computing llm technology

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  • Information management toolkit for schools – Information and Records Management Society

    Simplify your compliance journey with the IRMS Records Management Toolkit for Schools and Academies. A step by step guide with templates and examples designed specifically for Schools and Academies.

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