Category Archives: Web & Technology

Web & Technology

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]

https://stardate.org/sites/default/files/audio/radio/sd20230828.mp3
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…


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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

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

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

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

Ingenious librarians

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it

By Monica Westin, June 5, 2023

Monica Westin is a librarian with a background in academic libraries and scholarly publishing. She works on copyright policy at Google and lectures in the MSc Information Science programme at City, University of London.

Syracuse University’s SUPARS system was developed by Pauline Atherton as an early antecedent of what we might today call ‘search’. Photo courtesy Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections

Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state.

Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system. Their hands trembled as they touched the keyboard; several later reported that they had been afraid of breaking the entire system as they typed.

The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line, like ‘Motivation’ in line 1, ‘Esteem’ in line 2, and ‘L1 and L2’ in line 3 in order to search for papers that included both terms.

After running the query, the terminal produced a printout indicating how many documents matched each search; users could then narrow down or expand that search before generating a list of article citations. Many users burst into laughter upon seeing the response from a computer so far away.

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

P.s. Wonder if they were using really using DIALOG? 🙂

Source: https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search