ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
What Love Does
/Love doesn’t erase the past, but it makes the future different. -Gary Chapman
5 Articles about Google Security
/There's a way to delete the frightening amount of data Google has on you – CNET
Gmail’s New Encryption Can Make Email Safer—Here’s Why You Should Use It – Lifewire
Google Takedown form – Google Support
Should you log in with Facebook or Google on other sites or apps? Short answer: No. – Washington Post
How to delete Google search history – Laptop Mag
You are not what happened to you in the past
/No matter how chaotic the past has been, the future is a clean, fresh, wide open slate. You are not your past habits. You are not your past failures. You are not how others have at one time treated you. You are only who you think you are right now in this moment. You are only what you do right now in this moment.
Read more here.
10 Articles about Privacy Tools
/How to scrub yourself from the internet, the best that you can
The Washington Post’s Privacy Reset Guide
Use a second number to keep your real phone number hidden
PEN America offers some advice on keeping your accounts safe (video)
What is Signal? The basics of the most secure messaging app
Test Your Online Security Setup
When to Use a VPN—and When It Won’t Protect Your Data
The Default Tech Settings You Should Turn Off Right Away
Jumbo attempts to maximize your privacy settings across apps, and has free and paid versions.
Best Data Visualizations of 2022
/Best Data Visualization Projects of 2022 - FlowingData
New York Times “visual stories” 2022 - New York Times
Axios Visuals: 2022 in review - Axios
Fuel
/feed opportunities - starve problems
A ChatGPT-assisted academic paper
/
A ChatGPT-assisted paper is posted to the arXiv. The topic is AI use in drug discovery and the authors conclude, “AI has the potential to revolutionize the drug discovery process.”
The paper is an example of how the ChatGPT bot might be used in academic papers and offers a potential model for AI-assistance transparency. Their conclusion:
As a result of this experiment, we can state that ChatGPT is not a useful tool for writing reliable scientific texts without strong human intervention. One of the main reasons why this AI is not yet ready to be used in the production of scientific articles is its lack of ability to evaluate the veracity and reliability of the information it processes. A real risk is that predatory journals may exploit the quick production of scientific articles to generate large amounts of low-quality content. Overall, addressing the risks associated with the use of AI in the production of scientific articles will require a combination of technical solutions, regulatory frameworks, and public education.
Tuesday Tech Tools: Three “unsubscribe” tools
/Leave Me Alone - Unsubscribe from several email accounts at the same time. Will bundle newsletters as well. Free trial then $9 a month.
Clean Email- Remove yourself from email accounts and bundle newsletters. Free trial then $30 a year.
Mailstrom - Unsubscribe from lots of lists, or quickly delete many email. Works with Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo. Free trial then yearly accounts starting at $60.
The clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year
/Studies show that the parts of the brain that are primarily responsible for generating feelings of pleasurable excitement become active when people imagine receiving a reward such as money in the near future but not when they imagine receiving the same reward in the far future.
If you’ve ever bought too many boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout who hawks her wares in front of the local library but too few boxes from the Girl Scout who rings your doorbell and takes your order for future delivery, then you’ve experienced this anomaly yourself. When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
Adding two-step security to your email accounts
/The steps to protect your accounts with these tech companies by adding two-step security:
Critical Ignoring compliments Critical Thinking
/On the web, where a witches’ brew of advertisers, lobbyists, conspiracy theorists and foreign governments conspire to hijack attention, the same strategy spells doom. Online, critical ignoring is just as important as critical thinking.
That’s because, like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper, our attention careens from notification to text message to the next vibrating thing we must check. A flood of information depletes attention and fractures the ability to concentrate.
Sam Wineburg writing in The Conversation
The future
/The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely. -C.K. Brightbill
25 Data Science Articles from Dec 2022
/A Pandas DataFrame cheatsheet for exploratory analysis & data manipulation
Five ways that data roles will change in 2023 related to Chief Data Officers
10 weird things about SpaceX's more than 3,000 Starlink satellites (and that number keeps growing)
Initial specific steps toward launching a machine learning project
Adobe has just released a remarkable and free AI-powered enhanced speech tool
The four biggest trends they expect to shape the AI landscape in 2023
Synthetic data applications, limitations & vulnerabilities
A guide to the roles and responsibilities on a data migration team
A tech journalist goes back to high school to find out what OpenAI’s Chatbot can pass AP Lit
How Bayesian network structure learning can incorporate missing data
Potential uses of ChatGPT for data scientists
McKinsey on the state of AI since the research firm began tracking it five years ago
Different kinds of geospatial specialists are needed in different situations
China outpaces efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to harness power of publicly available data
The Space Dev Agency’s first major satellite launch has been delayed again
A look under the hood: How does ChatGPT work internally?
Some basics about the new AI called ChatGPT
Why Neural Network explainability is important, how to do it, & the tools for it
Challenges
/Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. -Mark Twain (born Nov. 30, 1835)
The abundance-oriented approach
/When you don't need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you're good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you're going to progress towards mastery anyway, and the fame and the power and the money and everything will come as a byproduct, rather than something that you chase directly in trying to be superior to other people.
If you were to go back to the three things that people need—mastery, belonging, and autonomy—I'd add a fourth, after basic necessities have been met. It’s the attitude or the worldview that you bring to life. And that worldview can be characterized, just for simplicity, in one of two fashions: One extreme is a kind of scarcity-minded approach, that my win is going to come at somebody else's loss, which makes you engage in social comparisons. And the other view is what I would call a more abundance-oriented approach, that there's room for everybody to grow.
Raj Raghunathan quoted in the Atlantic
Job Postings that turn out to be Scams
/Scammers are posting fake job openings on websites and are posing as recruiters in an attempt to steal everything from passwords to money and identities. Read some tips for spotting them in the Washington Post.
Circumstances
/Circumstances are designed to make us aware of his presence. -Chuck Swindoll
Tuesday Tech Tools: Adobe's AI-powered Enhanced Speech tool
/If you are playing around with podcasts or just want to make great audio, Adobe has just released an AI-powered enhanced speech tool. It will increase audio clarity by removing background noise and make your voice sound way better—even if you used a not-so-great mic in a noisy room. Try it yourself here. A free Adobe account is required. Below is an audio example and a video explanation.