Hitting the Books: AI is making people think faster, not smarter | Engadget

There is too much internet and our attempts to keep up with the breakneck pace of, well, everything these days — it is breaking our brains.

By Andrew Tarantola | @terrortola | March 5, 2023 10:30 AM

wenjin chen via Getty Images

Parsing through the deluge of inundating information hoisted up by algorithmic systems built to maximize engagement has trained us as slavering Pavlovian dogs to rely on snap judgements and gut feelings in our decision-making and opinion formation rather than deliberation and introspection.

Which is fine when you’re deciding between Italian and Indian for dinner or are waffling on a new paint color for the hallway, but not when we’re out here basing existential life choices on friggin’ vibes.

In his latest book, I, HUMAN: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, professor of business psychology and Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explores the myriad ways that AI systems now govern our daily lives and interactions.

From finding love to finding gainful employment to finding out the score of yesterday’s game, AI has streamlined the information gathering process. But, as Chamorro-Premuzic argues in the excerpt below, that information revolution is actively changing our behavior, and not always for the better.

Source: Hitting the Books: AI is making people think faster, not smarter | Engadget

Human dependence, human needs, Maslow, the Circle of Seven Essential Needs | by Mike Sosteric | Medium

By Mike Sosteric, Mar 18, 2021

From article…

Greetings and welcome. My name is Michael. In this presentation, I am going to talk about six related topics. I am going to talk about the myth of human independence as well as the critical importance of meeting our human needs.

I am going to talk about Abraham Maslow’s early theory of human needs and I’ll also talk about some of the problems with the iconic “Pyramid” that is still to represent his theory.

Then, I am going to introduce you to a new more modern theorization of human needs, the Circle of Seven Essential Needs (Sosteric & Ratkovic, 2020). Finally, I am going to end with a statement bout expanding our view of human nature.

Source: Human dependence, human needs, Maslow, the Circle of Seven Essential Needs | by Mike Sosteric | Medium

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

DrWeb’s Note: In honor of International Women’s Day, 2023…

From article…

Though travel and adventure have historically been publicly claimed by men, women have always been part of those narratives, too.

Each week, host and Condé Nast Traveler editor Lale Arikoglu shines a light on some of those stories, interviewing female-identifying guests about their unique travel tales—from going off-grid in the Danish wilderness to country-hopping solo—sharing her own experiences traveling around the globe, and tapping listeners to contribute their own memorable stories.

This is a podcast for anyone who is curious about the world—and excited to explore places both near and far from home. For more from Women Who Travel, visit our website or subscribe to our email newsletter. Share your thoughts on Condé Nast Traveler’s Women Who Travel podcast.

Source: Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

How to organize your books — even when you have thousands of them – The Washington Post

Serious book lovers share their strategies for displaying their collections and keeping all those titles from taking over

By Rosa Cartagena, March 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Monica Chavez, pictured, built her home library with her husband. They chipped away at it on weekends for two years. (Monica Chavez)

Here’s a riddle for you: When a book editor and political science professor downsize from a six-bedroom house in the suburbs to a 900-square-foot Manhattan apartment, how many books will they have to get rid of?

For Matthew Budman (the editor) and his wife, Cristina Beltrán (the professor), the answer was a staggering 12,000.

“We had, you know, giant yard sales, and we had people carting off thousands of books,” says Budman, author of “Book Collecting Now: The Value of Print in a Digital Age.”

The transition was tough, but he says it allowed him to recognize that quantity isn’t everything. Now, he keeps roughly 3,000 titles at home (plus thousands more in storage).

Source: How to organize your books — even when you have thousands of them – The Washington Post

Announcing the Library of Congress Festival of Film & Sound | Now See Hear! | Library of Congress

08 March, 2023, Posted by: Stacie Seifrit-Griffin

From article…

The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center announced today the inaugural Library of Congress Festival of Film and Sound, a new four-day film event celebrating the Library’s rich moving image and recorded sound collections.

The festival will be held in association with AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center and will take place June 15 to 18 at the American Film Institute’s historic theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. Festival passes are now available at AFI.com/Silver.

The Library of Congress Festival of Film and Sound will bring together film lovers with authors, historians, Library of Congress archivists, curators and staff in a fun-filled weekend set to give attendees the opportunity to enjoy recently restored and rediscovered rare silent and sound films from the 1920s through the early 1950s in AFI Silver’s beautifully restored 1938 art deco theater. Featuring many titles currently unavailable on home media or streaming services, the festival will showcase restored archival 35mm prints from the collections of the Library of Congress and other preeminent archives, as well 4K digital presentations of new restorations and rarities. All silent films will feature live musical accompaniment. This will be the first film festival devoted to showcasing the national library’s film collections.

Source; Announcing the Library of Congress Festival of Film & Sound | Now See Hear!

The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

People my age are described as baby boomers, but our experiences call for a different label altogether.

By Bruce Handy, March 2, 2023

Article screenshot…

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence.

I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964.

When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored by moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.

Source: The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

all things library and life.. from a librarian

%d bloggers like this: