Category Archives: Web & Technology

Web & Technology

Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Politics, Science & Health, Web & Technology

How to stop AI deepfakes from sinking society — and science

Deceptive videos and images created using generative AI could sway elections, crash stock markets and ruin reputations. Researchers are developing methods to limit their harm.

By Nicola Jones, September 27, 2023

Illustration by Señor Salme

This June, in the political battle leading up to the 2024 US presidential primaries, a series of images were released showing Donald Trump embracing one of his former medical advisers, Anthony Fauci. In a few of the shots, Trump is captured awkwardly kissing the face of Fauci, a health official reviled by some US conservatives for promoting masking and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was obvious” that they were fakes, says Hany Farid, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of many specialists who examined the pictures. On close inspection of three of the photos, Trump’s hair is strangely blurred, the text in the background is nonsensical, the arms and hands are unnaturally placed and the details of Trump’s visible ear are not right. All are hallmarks — for now — of generative artificial intelligence (AI), also called synthetic AI.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02990-y

Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

5,000 Planets :)

5,000 Planets, StarDate: August 28, 2023

[NASA/JPL/Caltech][AUDIO: exoplanet sonification]

Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets in other star systems, most of them found by the Kepler space telescope. This graphic provides an overview of the types of worlds discoverd so far. [NASA/JPL/Caltech]

Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets in other star systems, most of them found by the Kepler space telescope. This graphic provides an overview of the types of worlds discovered so far.

That sound represents the first confirmed exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. At the end of 1992, only two such planets were known — orbiting the dead heart of an exploded star.

The first planets orbiting a star similar to the Sun were announced in 1995. By last spring, the number had passed 5,000, with thousands more possible planets awaiting confirmation. NASA put together an audio track as a timeline of all the discoveries. Each note represents a confirmed planet, with the pitch representing the planet’s distance from its star.

5,000 Planets | StarDate Online

Source: https://stardate.org/radio/program/2023-08-28

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Science & Health, Web & Technology

ChatGPT and Generative AI Tools for Learning and Research | Online Searcher | Computers in Libraries

By Bohyun Kim, September 1, 2023 (posted)

From Media Library…

Many sophisticated machine learning (ML) products recently have been introduced as general-purpose content-creation tools. The one that has garnered the most attention was ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by the large language model (LLM) GPT-3.5.

An LLM is a type of ML model that performs various natural language processing tasks—such as recognizing, summarizing, translating, and generating text; answering questions; and carrying on a conversation. An LLM is developed by deep learning techniques, and training its artificial neural networks requires a massive amount of data. Deep learning is a type of ML, and ML is a subfield of AI. Since ChatGPT outputs new content as a response to a user’s inquiry, it is considered a tool in the realm of generative AI.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…


……………………………………………………….
Original source: Library Link of the Day
http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/  (archive, rss, subscribe option

Source: https://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/jul23/Kim–ChatGPT-and-Generative-AI-Tools-for-Learning-and-Research.shtml

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Memories & History, Podcasts, Politics, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Meet the Woman Who Supervised the Computations That Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work

Naomi Livesay worked on computations that formed the mathematical basis for implosion simulations. Despite her crucial role on the project, she is rarely mentioned as more than a footnote—until now

By Katie Hafner, The Lost Women of Science Initiative on August 3, 2023

Meet the Woman Who Supervised the Computations That Proved an Atomic Bomb Would Work
Credit: Paula Mangin

Listen to the podcast: https://beta.prx.org/stories/484826

Nic Lewis: She was walking past where Oppenheimer was living. And he had walked outta his house just a little before her and he paused and waited for her to catch up. he asked all about how she was doing, what was happening in the punch card operation, what kind of results they were getting. Did she need anything?

She was astounded.

Katie Hafner: During World War II, thousands of scientists took part in the three year race led by J. Robert Oppenheimer to build an atomic bomb that would end the war. Hundreds of those scientists were women. They were physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians … and computation experts, whose calculations helped determine if the theoretical ideas behind the bomb would work.

This is Lost Women of the Manhattan Project, a special series of Lost Women of Science focusing on a few of those women.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-woman-who-supervised-the-computations-that-proved-an-atomic-bomb-would-work/

Current Affairs, Memories & History, Pleasures, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Dialog and Roger Summit: Career Bedrock

George Plosker Career Tips, Client Services, Corporate Culture, Dialog – History, George Plosker – Blog, Library Marketing, Marketing and media, Mentors, Personal narrative August 1, 2023 4 Minutes

Dialog and Roger Summit: Career Bedrock

Editor’s note: George worked with me at DIALOG.

Source: https://gplosker.com/2023/08/01/dialog-and-roger-summit-career-bedrock/

Current Affairs, Games, Memories & History, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life

Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …

By Simon Parkin, Sat 10 Jun 2023 08.00 EDT

Virtual worlds: Second Life and Metaverse. Illustration: Nicolás Ortega/The Guardian

On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier.

Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.

It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/10/who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life