dennisjerz

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Wired and Business Insider remove articles by AI-generated ‘freelancer’

Journalists who can’t verify their sources, or their own humanity, face consequences. Multiple news organisations have taken down articles written by an alleged freelance journalist that now appear to have been generated by AI. On Thursday, Press Gazette reported that at least six publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have removed articles from their websites in recent months after…

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Blessing the “American sweet gum tree” that grew from a seed that Artemis I carried around the moon in 2022

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August Wilson Trifecta (Two Trains, Ma Rainey and Fences on the same day)

Fences was performed in the backyard of August Wilson’s boyhood home. Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company

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My 1951 day DuoLingo streak was fun, but...

Ever since DuoLingo announced it was pivoting away from human workers to AI, I’ve enjoyed my visits with the spunky little owl less and less. Today’s switch from the “hearts” system to the to “energy” was just too much.   It used to be, you could keep doing lesson after lesson as long as you answered correctly most of the time. But the new energy bar drops slightly after every answer you give,…

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Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now: AI can replicate the shape of a narrative, but not the struggle that makes it meaningful

Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the difficult parts of it, is exhausting. It’s often…

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Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?

Though not in a hospital setting, the “basilar ganglia” is a real error that was served up by Google’s healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini. A 2024 research paper introducing Med-Gemini included the hallucination in a section on head CT scans, and nobody at Google caught it, in either that paper or a blog post announcing it. When Bryan Moore, a board-certified neurologist and researcher with expertise…

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Ferengi Love Songs #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 20) Rom ♡ Leeta; Zek ♡ Ishka; Quark ♡ $

Rewatching ST:DS9 Much pew is pewing inside the bar, which is closed due to a vole infestation. Quark is not in the mood for Rom cheerfully announcing his engagement to Leeta, but he does accept his suggestion to visit their mother on Ferengibar. Trying to be supportive of Rom’s interest in pleasing Leeta with a traditional Bajoran wedding, O’Brien and Dax accidentally make him doubt his identity…

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Ties of Blood and Water #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 19) Kira re-evaluates a Cardassian father figure

Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is excited to welcome Tekeny Ghemor, the sympathetic Cardassian who was tricked into believing a surgically-altered Kira was his daughter (s3e5 “Second Skin”). Now that Dukat and the Dominion have displaced the legitimate government on Cardassia, Kira has high hopes that Ghemor will inspire a resistance, but before the opening credits roll, Ghemor informs her that he is…

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Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

Coders who used AI self-reported that they worked 20% faster, but an objective study found AI actually made coders 19% slower. This study confirms that while AI can help for general low-level tasks, humans with deep knowledge of the specific project could spend far more time working on higher-level tasks, rather than hunting for errors in the work generated by AI. I find that students who use AI…

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Business as Usual #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 18) Quark accepts a lucrative job offer; O'Brien carries baby Yoshi everywhere.

Rewatching ST:DS9 Playing tongo at the bar, Dax is annoyed that Quark is distracted by bad financial news. He’s put the bar up as collateral to three different debtors and he’s wiped out. At this very moment, because the opening credits are gonna roll soon, Quark’s cousin Gaila the weapons dealer shows up with a lucrative job offer. Exhausted from walking his baby to sleep, O’Brien reluctantly…

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Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025

A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago.  I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the action from the street level.  Because the event lasted from 6am until…

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I MacGyvered myself a heat sink

I’m getting ready to record about 18hrs footage from four different cameras, and I noticed my new 4K webcam was heating up pretty fast. I’m settled in a dorm room at the University of Toronto, far from the junk drawers and tool boxes that would have aluminum foil and copper wire. I suppose I could go wandering through downtown Toronto looking for an electronics store where I could buy a little…

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Cockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s drinking fountains after mastering series of complex moves

Nature is amazing. Dr John Martin, a senior ecologist at Ecosure and co-author of the study, said they stumbled on the complex behaviour at a twist-handle-operated bubbler located in a western Sydney sports field while surveying cockatoo foraging habits…. Presumably the birds first learned what to do by watching people, Martin said. “Eventually one of them got it, and then the others were like,…

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Unemployment rates for recent college grads: Overall, 5.8%; Computer science, 6.1%; Computer engineering, 7.5%; Journalism, 4.4%

The market is rough for college grads, but according to a new report, employment for journalism majors is better than average. As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired. In its latest labor market report,…

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Waiting for a talk on preserving artifacts from NASA’s Apollo program

So much to see at the Heinz History Center but I absolutely had to check in with Nellie Bly. As a child I was fascinated by a drawing of a firefighter’s pole ladder in a book by Richard Scary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one before but I instantly recognized it.

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Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!

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'Most Transparent’ White House In History Keeps Majority Of Trump’s Remarks Secret

On the White House website, there is no official record of about 80% of President Trump’s public statements.  The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their transcription, publishing just 29 transcripts…