Your brain power on distraction

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Imagine your task is to ride a bicycle for 10 miles. You begin to pedal and just as you build up speed and start making progress, something unexpectedly makes you hit the brakes. Because you had to stop, you’ve lost your momentum and have to expend more effort to get going again. Imagine you are forced to brake every time you start to go faster. You can never coast. You have to pedal — hard — all the time. How much longer do you think it’s going to take you to get to your destination? How much more difficult and frustrating do you think it’s going to be? This is your brain power on distraction, and it causes unsatisfying, unfulfilling work days.

Maura Thomas writing in the Harvard Business Review

10 Things AI Can Do Now

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dull activities can spark creative thinking

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What if boredom is a meaningful experience—one that propels us to states of deeper thoughtfulness and creativity? That’s the conclusion of two fascinating recent studies. Boredom might spark creativity because a restless mind hungers for stimulation. Maybe traversing an expanse of tedium creates a sort of cognitive forward motion. A bored mind moves into a “daydreaming” state, says Sandi Mann, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire.

The problem, the psychologists worry, is that these days we don’t wrestle with these slow moments. We eliminate them (with mobile devices). This might relieve us temporarily, but it shuts down the deeper thinking that can come from staring down the doldrums. Noolding on your phone is “like eating junk food,” she says.

So here’s an idea: Instead of always fleeing boredom, lean into it. Sometimes, anyway. When novelists talk about using Freedom, the software that shuts down one’s Internet connection, they often say it’s about avoiding distraction. But I suspect it’s also about enforcing a level of boredom in their day—useful, productive monotony.

And there is, of course, bad boredom. The good type motivates you to see what can come of it: “fructifying boredom,” as the philosopher Bertrand Russell called it. The bad type, in contrast, tires you, makes you feel like you can’t be bothered to do anything. (It has a name too: lethargic boredom.)

A critical part of our modern task, then, is learning to assess these different flavors of ennui—to distinguish the useful kind from the stultifying. (Glancing at your phone in an idle moment isn’t always, or even often a bad thing.) Boredom, it turns out, may be super-interesting.

Clive Thompson writing in Wired Magazine

9 Articles about the Impact of AI on Medicine

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Worry Deadlines

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Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to the time we allow it. Put simply, if you give yourself one month to create a presentation, it will take you one full month to finish it. But if you only had a week, you’d finish the same presentation in a shorter time.   

I’ve observed a similar principle among sensitive strivers — that overthinking expands to the time we allow it. In other words, if you give yourself one week to worry about something that is actually a one-hour task, you will waste an inordinate amount of time and energy.

Melody Wilding writing in the Harvard Business Review

Eight Suggestions about AI for Those Teaching this Fall  

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The challenges that generative AI poses to teaching requires campus-wide faculty discussions. Most students will have to use generative AI when they move into their careers, and it would be a shame for them to graduate without understanding how to use it and without having wrestled with its ethical limits. As you prepare for your fall classes consider these suggestions: 

Have a Class Discussion. Talk openly and frankly with your students about your expectations regarding the use of generative AI in your classes as well as how you are using it yourself. Invite your students to share with you in an honest discussion about these and related questions. Keep in mind that the line between which AI is acceptable and which is not is often blurry because AI is being integrated into many different apps and programs.

Keep the Door Open. Cultivate an environment in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support—whether from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Talk to them about their motivations for turning to generative AI: time pressure, curiosity, burn out, etc.  Barnard College 

AI Bias. Make the students aware that AI can reflect societal prejudices. If the AI training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Bloomberg

Vulnerable Students. Consider how chatting with AI systems might affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Privacy Issues. It is important for students to be aware that personal information provided to generative AI tools has the potential to be shared with third parties. This can may raise serious privacy concerns for your students and perhaps in particular, those students who are from marginalized backgrounds. Barnard College 

Think Through the Pedagogical Impact. What are the cognitive tasks students need to perform without AI assistance? When should students rely on AI assistance? Where can an AI aid facilitate a better outcome? Are there efficiencies in grading that can be gained? Are new rubrics and assignment descriptions needed? Inside Higher Ed 

A Syllabus Statement. Include a syllabus statement that gives clear guidance regarding your expectations for the use of generative AI in your classes. The Sentient Syllabus Project

AI Detectors. If you plan to put students’ work through an AI detector, please inform them in advance, keeping in mind that a reliable detection tool has yet to be developed. False positives carry real harm when a student is wrongly accused. English language learners, international students, and students with learning challenges might write in a style that instructors wrongly assume is AI when it is not. Washington Post

“There’s more of a danger in not teaching students how to use AI. If they’re not being taught under the mentorship of scholars and experts, they may be using it in ways that are either inappropriate or not factual or unethical.” Johanna Inman, quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Stop chasing originality

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The quest for originality is a distraction. It usually leads to a self-obsessive focus on saying what’s never been said when all that really matters is saying what you believe, saying what you feel, and saying what you mean. When you first start doing this, you might not sound very original, but this process is precisely how you find your voice. 

TK Coleman, 5 Ways to Steal Like An Artist

8 Articles about Detecting AI

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The artist is a collector

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An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

Austin Kleon, How to Steal Like an Artist

8 insightful quotes about AI Bias

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In an analysis of thousands of images created by Stable Diffusion, we found that image sets generated for every high-paying job were dominated by subjects with lighter skin tones, while subjects with darker skin tones were more commonly generated by prompts like “fast-food worker” and “social worker.” Most occupations in the dataset were dominated by men, except for low-paying jobs like housekeeper and cashier. Bloomberg

Eight years ago, Google disabled its A.I. program’s ability to let people search for gorillas and monkeys through its Photos app because the algorithm was incorrectly sorting Black people into those categories. As recently as May of this year, the issue still had not been fixed. Two former employees who worked on the technology told The New York Times that Google had not trained the A.I. system with enough images of Black people. New York Times

MIT student Rona Wang asked an AI image creator app called Playground AI to make a photo of her look "professional." It gave her paler skin and blue eyes, and "made me look Caucasian." Boston Globe 

We have things like recidivism algorithms that are racially biased. Even soap dispensers that don’t read darker skin. Smartwatches and other health sensors don’t work as well for darker skin. Things like selfie sticks that are supposed to track your image don’t work that well for people with darker skin because image recognition in general is biased. The Markup

AI text may be biased toward established scientific ideas and hypotheses contained in the content on which the algorithms were trained. Science.org

No doubt AI-powered writing tools have shortcomings. But their presence offers educators an on-ramp to discussions about linguistic diversity and bias. Such discussions may be especially critical on U.S. campuses. Inside Higher Ed

Major companies behind A.I. image generators — including OpenAI, Stability AI and Midjourney — have pledged to improve their tools. “Bias is an important, industrywide problem,” Alex Beck, a spokeswoman for OpenAI, said in an email interview. She declined to say how many employees were working on racial bias, or how much money the company had allocated toward the problem. New York Times

As AI models become more advanced, the images they create are increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photos, making it hard to know what’s real. If these images depicting amplified stereotypes of race and gender find their way back into future models as training data, next generation text-to-image AI models could become even more biased, creating a snowball effect of compounding bias with potentially wide implications for society. Bloomberg

Adapting to Change

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Understand the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present movement. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

13 creative things people are trying to get AI to do

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Can AI Read my mind?

A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words. – New York Times

Can AI translate the Bible?

USC researchers use AI to help translate Bible into very rare languages – Religious News Service

Can AI make astrological readings?

Is A.I. the Future of Astrology? – New York Times

Can AI Do your taxes?

Ready for AI to help you do your taxes? Taxfyle’s got you covered – Refresh Miami

How about answering questions from a ‘biblical’ perspective?

Christian creators build chatbots with ‘biblical’ worldview – Religious News Service

Can AI change the way wars are fought?

Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons – New York Times

Can AI replace humans?

We Went to the Fast-Food Drive-Through to Find Out – Wall Street Journal

Can AI build websites?

Mobile website builder Universe launches AI-powered designer – Tech Crunch

Can AI write sermons?

Start-up AI Platform Aims to Help Pastors Make the Most of Their Sunday Sermons – Christian Standard 

Can AI write a song?

We asked Google’s new AI music bot to write us a song. We instantly regretted it – Science Focus

Can AI pilot airplanes or drones?

AI pilots, the future of aerial warfare – Air Force Tech

Can AI bring historical figures to life?

AI Chatbots Now Let You Talk to Historical Figures Like Shakespeare and Andy Warhol – My Modern Met 

Can AI create decent headshots?

I Used AI To Create My Professional Headshots And The Results Were Either Great Or Hilarious – Digg

Lasting Love

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Lasting love is a passion that grows. The more we know the person, the more deeply we love him. There are a few who are struck like lightning. The minute they see someone they hear violins. This usually happens only in the movies. As one writer has suggested, it has to be “love at first sight” in a show that only has two hours to run.

Surveys continuously support love by growth. The overwhelming majority say they did not “fall in love” all at once. They met a person and found him attractive or interesting. Whatever caught their attention made them want to learn more. Possibly they met the person again or went on a date. At any rate, something started to grow. The person became more interesting.

Some people are frustrated because falling in love wasn’t like a divine revelation or a heart seizure. Consequently they even wonder if it is real. Such “falling” is a romantic dream that most of use have never experienced. But love which takes time can be the most enduring kind.

It is a question of expectation. Those who expect love to be automatic and instantaneous are often disappointed. It is more realistic to expect love to grow into full bloom as you live together in marriage. Then, rather than looking for an ideal experience, both lovers expect to change and grow.

William Coleman from his book Engaged

10 articles about AI limitations

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Practice Like you Play

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Officers are trained to take a gun from an assailant in close quarters, a maneuver they practice by role-playing with a fellow officer. It requires speed and deftness: striking an assailant's wrist with one hand to break his grip while simultaneously wrestling the gun free with the other. It's a move that officers have been in the habit of honing through repetition, taking gun, handing it back, and taking it again.

Until one of their officers, on a call in the field, took the gun from an assailant and handed it right back again. In a mutual astonishment the officer managed to re-seize the gun and hang onto it. The training regime had violated the cardinal rule that you should practice like you play, because you will play like you practice.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

9 AI Predictions

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The Information Riot

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The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information.

On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive.

Nicholas Carr
The Shallows

 

10 Media Webinars in the next two weeks covering journalism, AI, funding, law, science & more

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 Mon, July 31 - SPJ Sports event with Thomas Rongen 

What: Thomas Rongen will discuss his work and calling Messi's first game within Major League Soccer.

Who: Thomas Rongen, Soccer Broadcaster

When: 7 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalists

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 2 – The Path Forward: Artificial Intelligence

What: The recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and why the tech industry is at an inflection point.

Who: Longtime Silicon Valley executive Marissa Mayer; Lori Montgomery Business Editor, The Washington Post

When: 3 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Washington Post

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 2 – Covering Contaminated Sites in Your Community

What: Tips on the ways journalists can report on contaminated sites by incorporating local voices who have been personally impacted by the pollution that created the contaminated sites, and the knowledge of experts who lay out how future extreme weather events fueled by climate change may threaten to further spread that pollution if clean-up is not done quickly and thoroughly.

Who: Jordan Gass-Pooré, Creator/Host, "Hazard NJ" podcast (NJ Spotlight News/NJ PBS)

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Environmental Journalists

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 2 - Data Visualization with Business Intelligence Tools

What: Data visualization options with major Business Intelligence (BI) tools, PowerBI and Tableau. 

Who: Tech Impact Senior Consultant Erica Blake

When: 2 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Techimpact

More Info

 

Thu, Aug 3 - Chat GPT Content Creation & Custom Bots for Newspapers

What: This webinar is designed to empower newspaper publishers with the knowledge and skills needed to harness the power of Chat GPT

Who: Matt Larson, the president & CEO of Our-Hometown.com

When: 1 pm Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: $35 (registration deadline July 31)

Sponsor: Online Media Campus

More Info

 

Mon, Aug 7 – Media Law Office Hours

What: This open group session allows journalists with legal questions to help find answers on issues related to the First Amendment, Freedom of Information, copyright, defamation, or other media law matters. 

Who: Attorney Matthew Leish

When: 5 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free to members

Sponsor: The Deadline Club

More Info

 

Tue, Aug 8 - Science Essentials for Local Reporters

What: The key do’s, don’ts, and pitfalls to watch for when including science in your news reporting. Among the topics covered:  Knowing whether and how science can enhance your story; Different kinds of studies and what each can—and cannot—reveal; Practical tips for identifying credible scientist-sources and interviewing them; and How to get the essentials from scientific reports, studies, and press releases.

Who: Former longtime Washington Post science reporter Rick Weiss and Ph.D. neuroscientist Dr. Tori Fosheim

When: 2 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Environmental Journalists

More Info

 

Tue, Aug 8 - Working with a World-Class AI Grant Writing Assistant

What: How artificial intelligence will affect grant proposals and grant writing.

Who: Philip Deng Grantable.co  CEO

When: noon

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: TechSoup

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 9 - The AI Tools Marketers Actually Need Right Now

What: Unpack how incorporating AI-driven technology may be easier than you think. You’ll find out:  Why machine learning and generative AI help marketers deliver personalized campaigns at scale. How marketing automation tools are incorporating AI technology.  Advice for leveraging AI in your marketing today and in the future

Who: Vicki Brown VP, Principal Analyst  Forrester; Elizabeth Jacobi Founder  MochaBear Marketing; John Humphrey Head of Data  Platform Product Intuit Mailchimp   

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Intuit Mailchimp

More Info

 

Thu, Aug 10 - Writing a Successful Environmental Story

What: The do’s and don’ts about submitting a grant application and how to pitch an environmental

Who: Augustine Kasambule, Pulitzer Center Staff; Adrienne Engono Epse Moussang, Congo Basin RJF Advisory Committee member; Madeleine Ngeunga, Rainforest Investigations Fellow

When: 7 am, Eastern 

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Pulitzer Center

More Info 

24 Data Science & AI Articles from July 2023

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The future space economy could encompass activities that currently aren’t being pursued at scale, such as in-orbit manufacturing, power generation, & space mining, as well as scalable human spaceflight 

Will the future be filled with “networks of autonomous drones, deployed around the globe, helping humans keep conflict in check … or maybe the skies will darken with attack swarms”

A basic explanation of geospatial data & geospatial technology—how they are used and their limitations

Our hesitation, perceived or otherwise, to move forward with military applications of artificial intelligence will be punished

Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons 

The AI-powered, totally autonomous future of war Is here

Experts imagine what artificial intelligence could mean for the future of satellites, space entrepreneurship, and government defense systems 

How much coding is needed in a data science career?

10 Specific Predictions about AI

A look at what sets Meta’s Llama 2 apart from its predecessor & other large language models—here’s the technical details & implications for data scientists

US sharpens military space race plan as Space Force is challenged to compete with China  

A review of major data science and AI developments during the first half of 2023

What’s missing from ChatGPT and other LLMs?

How does Bayesian inference work when estimating noisy interactions?

A US Army project called "Real-Time Threat Forecasting" hopes to create AI that can forecast enemy actions just minutes before the enemy actually does it—and continuously update that forecast as adversaries change their tactics

OpenAI rolls out a ChatGPT Plus feature called the Code Interpreter that can write and execute python code, and can work with file uploads

A primer on large language models

The latest trends in artificial intelligence and deep learning from the metaverse to quantum computing

“I don't think generative AI will displace predictive analytics"

Understanding the difference between advanced and predictive analytics

The advantages of Causal AI over traditional machine learning

Most of the large language models developed in China are nearly 2 years behind the US—a gap that would be a challenge to close even if American firms had to adjust to regulation

A Chinese satellite manufacturer and constellation operator says it has successfully demonstrated space-to-ground high-speed laser communications— transmitting data 10x faster thanks to lasers

The engineering applications of machine learning and predictive analytics