Tag Archives: Google

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Web & Technology

FEATURE – Libraries in the Age of Artificial Intelligence | Information Today, Inc.

by Ben Johnson, February 13, 2023

Ben Johnson (bjohnson@councilbluffslibrary.org) is the adult services manager at the Council Bluffs Public Library in Iowa.

Screenshot of article online…

You can ask Google, Alexa, Cortana, Watson, or Siri—but will you be able to ask your local library? A century or so ago, electricity was a new, quasi-magical thing—a novelty with few applications. Back then, nobody could have predicted that it would give rise to telephones, production lines, and microchips. And yet, electricity transformed every industry, including agriculture, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. As a foundational springboard for so many new innovations, that novelty was the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century.

Now, in the 21st century, a new quasi-magical thing has come into our lives: artificial intelligence (AI). And just as it was in the early days of the electronic revolution, we are only beginning to grasp how completely this new technology will transform our daily lives. Nearly all of today’s emerging technologies are built on the foundation of increasingly sophisticated machine learning. Every major technology company is betting on machine learning, hoping to be a player in the coming revolution by developing proprietary machine intelligences to perform tasks that used to require human intelligence.

–from article

Today, our interactions with AI are mostly novel (“Siri, why did the chicken cross the road?”)—and the results crude—but so were the first lightbulbs and photographs.

Source: FEATURE – Libraries in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Memories & History, Pleasures

(49) The best sci-fi novel I read as a kid [ Bill Gates ] – YouTube

By Bill Gates 2.92M subscribers

(49) The best sci-fi novel I read as a kid – YouTube

265,798 views

Posted Nov 21, 2022 — Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is a fantastic story—and it was also a turning point for me as a young reader. Learn more at https://gatesnot.es/3GsUiCF

Source: (49) The best sci-fi novel I read as a kid – YouTube

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

Google’s Project Starline is the real deal | The Verge

Project Starline is the real deal. It makes a virtual call feel like a one-on-one conversation. But it’s unclear if it’s something most people will ever get to experience.

By Jay Peters / @jaypeters, Oct 13, 2022, 5:30 AM PDT

Here’s what a Starline booth looks like from a distance.
Image: Google

It looked like I could grab the apple. Jason Lawrence, a Google researcher, was sitting across from me, holding the fruit in his hand. I could see it, it was red and shiny, and my brain was telling me it was right there. But Lawrence and the apple were actually in another room — they were just being projected in front of me through Google’s Project Starline.

Project Starline is Google’s next-generation 3D video chat booth that it first introduced at Google I/O 2021. Slide into a booth, and your image is supposed to be projected to another booth in real time, as if you’re actually sitting with somebody else across a table.

In a heartwarming video, Google showed family and friends joyfully connecting with each other using Starline, and the virtual recreations looked remarkably lifelike. “That was mindblowing,” one person says in the video. “I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve never seen this,” said another.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23400870/google-project-starline-3d-chat-booth-impressions

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

Google now lets you request the removal of search results that contain personal data | Engadget

Results with your address, phone number or email will be reviewed ‘more quickly.’

By S. Dent, @stevetdent, September 21, 2022 4:49 AM

Steve Dent / Engadget

Google is releasing a tool that makes it easier to remove search results containing your address, phone number and other personally identifiable information, 9to5Google has reported. It first revealed the “results about you” feature at I/O 2022 in May, describing it as a way to “help you easily control whether your personally-identifiable information can be found in Search results.” 

If you see a result with your phone number, home address or email, you can click on the three-dot menu at the top right. That opens the usual “About this result” panel, but it now contains a new “Remove result” option at the bottom of the screen. A dialog states that if the result contains one of those three things, “we can review your request more quickly.”

Source: https://www.engadget.com/google-results-about-you-app-rolling-out-084913547.html

Science & Health, Web & Technology

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo: 5 big takeaways | PCWorld

Promising utmost privacy, DuckDuckGo in the anti-Google search engine. But what’s it really like to use?

Editor’s Note: Yes, I tried it, but I still use Google and DuckDuckGo…

By Sam Singleton, Contributor, PCWorld, Jun 9, 2022 3:45 am PDT

Katherine Stevenson/IDG

Google is far and away the most popular search engine—but sometimes it can feel more like Big Brother and less like a friendly assistant. Indeed, for those concerned about privacy, Google oversteps some boundaries by collecting your personal data, and serving you ads based on what it collects. Enter DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine with its own desktop extension and mobile browser app.

DuckDuckGo touts itself as the anti-Google, promising not to track or collect your data. It offers a clean interface and familiar layout, and provides many of the features you’ve come to expect from a search engine—but without those invasive data trackers.

On paper, DuckDuckGo seems like a worthy competitor. But how does it really stack up to Google? To find out, I switched to DuckDuckGo and used the service exclusively for a week. Here are my five key takeaways.

Source: I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo: 5 big takeaways | PCWorld

Current Affairs, Travel, Web & Technology

Google Maps adds an ‘Immersive View’ of major cities | Engadget

Pan around popular tourist destinations directly from your phone.

By A. Tarantola, @terrortola, May 11th, 2022

Google

Google Maps is getting an “Immersive View” that will offer users digitally rendered looks at major US cityscapes, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience at Google’s I/O 2022 keynote on Wednesday.

Google Maps is getting an “Immersive View” that will offer users digitally rendered looks at major US cityscapes, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience at Google’s I/O 2022 keynote on Wednesday.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BO4f4dpIRUU%3Frel%3D0
From keynote

The new feature uses computer vision and AI to blend Maps’ existing Street View function with aerial photography to create high-resolution models of the various buildings and urban features of a given location. “With our new immersive view, you’ll be able to experience what a neighborhood, landmark, restaurant or popular venue is like — and even feel like you’re right there before you ever set foot inside,” wrote Miriam Daniel, VP of Google Maps, in a blog post. What’s more, Maps’ other tools and features can be applied to the view as well, enabling users to see what the area looks like at different times of the day and varying weather conditions.

Source: Google Maps adds an ‘Immersive View’ of major cities | Engadget