Group items tagged

"Teenagers in a remote Brazilian tribe have become hooked on pornography months after they were given high-speed internet access via Elon Musk's Starlink. The indigenous Marubo people, who for hundreds of years have existed in small huts along the Itui River in the Amazon, were connected to the billionaire's satellite network in September."

"We're deeply inspired by FPF, from its human, calm moderation model and design to its organic, sustainable growth and advertising model. We're awed by its incredible usefulness for services, connection, and disaster relief. There's a lot here that might be applicable to other local digital spaces. Ultimately, Front Porch Forum exemplifies the potential for social media to foster positive, engaged communities. It's a viable, real life model of a flourishing digital public space in use by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now it's up to us to make it less of a rare phenomenon."

"For many experts however, the greatest risk to the internet isn't sabotage, espionage, or even rogue anchors - but the uneven spread of the cable infrastructure that threads across the globe, binding the world's digital networks together. "There aren't cables everywhere," says Starosielski. "There is a concentration in the north Atlantic Ocean connecting the United States and Europe but there are not that many in the South Atlantic.""

"Users who once came to Facebook to connect with friends and family are increasingly complaining of random, spammy, junk content - much of it apparently generated by artificial intelligence - showing up in their feeds. Sometimes it's obviously fake, AI-generated images, like the now-infamous "Shrimp Jesus." Other times, it's old posts from real creators that look like they're being reshared by bot accounts for engagement. In some cases, it's pages sharing streams of seemingly benign but random content - memes or movie clips, shared every few hours."

"That comment sparked interest and outrage, raising concerns that the kind of AI-generated "slop" that's prominent on Facebook would soon come straight from Meta and disrupt the core utility of social media - fostering human-to-human connection. As users began to sniff out some of Meta's AI accounts this week, the backlash grew, in part because of the way the AI accounts disingenuously described themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities."

"There has also been, he says, "a real push in opinion pieces and popular-press books that are sloppy scientifically but stated so confidently. The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed." The published studies they cite tend to have small samples and no control groups, and to be based on associations rather than proving cause. "People will say: 'The iPhone was invented in 2007 and Instagram became popular in 2012 and, oh my God, look, tech use has gone up at the same time mental health has gone down!' It seems like common sense - that's why you have this kind of consensus. But it just isn't scientific." In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues looked at data from almost 12,000 children in the US aged between nine and 12 and found no impact from screen time on functional connectivity ("how different parts of the brain kind of talk to each other", he explains), as measured with fMRI scans while the children completed tasks. They also found no negative impact on the children's self-reported wellbeing. "If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, we dot our Is, we state our hypotheses before we see the data, we share the data and the code, those types of studies don't show the negative effects that we expect to see.""

"Umi is a digital wellness platform and personalized family wellness coach that integrates AI and a community of experts. By consolidating wellness data into personalized, actionable pathways for every family, Umi helps people build healthy habits and connect through wellness routines that work for everyone. And by leveraging the power of Anthropic's Claude AI model, Umi benefits from the advanced reasoning capabilities to navigate the unique challenges faced by individuals and families."

"While Google has played down the notion of rolling out anything soon (it will take years until Glass builds up enough users to make it worthwhile), marketers can't stop buzzing about the possibility of paying for ads in the physical world based on user engagement and reactions. The patent even details how a device like Google Glass could infer a user's emotional response to an ad - whether they were happy, sad or indifferent - and adjust pricing accordingly."

By connecting laptops and smartphones to enormous, remote computing banks, cloud computing gives us access to more processing power than could ever fit in any one of those devices, along with access to all our data and documents from anywhere in the world.

A system called EyeDrop uses a head-mounted eye tracker that simultaneously records your field of view so it knows where you are looking on the screen. Gazing at an object - a photo, say - and then pressing a key, selects that object. It can then be moved from the screen to a tablet or smartphone just by glancing at the second device, as long as the two are connected wirelessly.

SilliBilliBoi - this might open up your article and portfolio piece a little more...

"I've got a theory of change I call the "peak indifference" theory. The early stage of a crisis involves trying to convince people that the crisis even exists, because things haven't gotten really terrible yet and it's not obvious that there's anything to really worry about, and the people who profit from the status quo will spend liberally to convince people that there's no reason to worry or change anything (see also: climate change, Facebook, cancer from smoking)."

"Students on online courses report insufficient interaction and familiarity with their instructors and a lack of motivation. Feedback in one study included: "I want a real teacher", "I prefer a course taught by a human" and "There is no instructor personality interjected into the course". So, how do instructors overcome this perception and ensure students view them as "present" in online courses? "

"It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention and, with it, the very possibility of a democratic society is put under threat. Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called "artists" but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one's own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access."