If-Then
/If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. – Fyodor Dostoevsky
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
New AI Conversational Voice Model
/Sesame's new AI conversational voice model features uncanny imperfections like stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional. Some users feel emotionally attached to the voice assistant. In one case, a parent recounted how their 4-year-old daughter developed an emotional connection with the AI model, crying after not being allowed to talk to it again. -More at ArsTechnica
AI-assisted Reviews of Student Visa Accounts Begin
/AI is being used by the US State department to find foreign students who it perceives to be Hamas supporters. Their visas will be revoked. News reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and Jewish students' lawsuits are being checked for evidence that "foreign nationals allegedly engaged in antisemitic activity." Read more from Axios
22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company
/OpenAI Announces 'NextGenAI' Higher-Ed Consortium – GovTech
This Scientist Left OpenAI Last Year. His Startup Is Already Worth $30 Billion. – Wall Street Journal
Google AI Overviews Are Secretly Killing Top Pages While Boosting Hidden Ones – Digital Information World
The ‘Spy Sheikh’ Taking the AI World by Storm – Wall Street Journal
Amazon has a ‘slew of AI devices’ coming, hardware chief says - CNN
Microsoft identifies developers it says evaded AI guardrails – Axios
Apple Vows to Build A.I. Servers in Houston and Spend $500 Billion in U.S. – New York Times
X Rolls Out AI-Generated Ads in Push to Win Advertisers Back – AdWeek
Anthropic adds advanced reasoning to latest model - Axios
Why AI Spending Isn’t Slowing Down - Wall Street Journal
Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP – The Verge
AI race's winner might not yet be born – Axios
How DeepSeek’s Lower-Power, Less-Data Model Stacks Up - Wall Street Journal
Guardian signs licensing deal with ChatGPT owner OpenAI – Press Gazette
Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget - http://ewintr.nl
An ambitious effort to track the impact of AI adoption by looking at the data on Claude – Anthropic
Deep Research and Knowledge Value - Stratechery
The hottest new idea in AI? Chatbots that look like they think. – Washington Post
AI designed computer chips so complex that humans can’t understand them – BGR
Ultra-efficient AI won’t solve data centers’ climate problem. This might. - Washington Post
Researchers claim to have created an open rival to OpenAI’s o1 ‘reasoning’ model for under $50 – Tech Crunch
The Art of Listening
/Effective listening takes practice; it’s actually a discipline. It doesn’t come easily or naturally. Listening means more than just hearing what a person says.
A counselor once told me, "Hearing captures the words a person speaks; listening captures the meaning and the feeling beneath those words."
Listening is the mental step by which we become more aware of the other person than we are of ourselves.
The best definition of listening I have ever come across is that given by Norman H. Wright” “Listening is not thinking about what you are going to say when the other person has stopped talking."
Stephen Goforth
Interview Coder
/A Columbia University student is facing a disciplinary hearing at the college after he used an AI program to help him land internships at Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. He said these interviews often cover topics no one will ever see on the job. So, he wrote a program called Interview Coder to help him and others bypass the process. Read more at Gizmodo
A Self-fertilizing Garden
/Psychologist Joyce Shaffer tells the story of a man unable to talk or walk following a stroke. Two years later, he was hiking and teaching thanks to intense physical therapy. When the man died a few years later, an autopsy showed a large area of his brain had been destroyed by the stroke. Even so, he had regained the ability to be active and productive.
Schaffer’s explanation: “Moment by moment you create your brain. It is plastic. It can change for better or worse depending on lifestyle choices … Without challenge, your brain retires. With lifestyle choices a person can turn their brain into a "self-fertilizing garden.”
Stephen Goforth
An AI-powered “wellbeing companion”
/An AI-powered “wellbeing companion” named Sonny is now available to more than 4,500 public middle and high school students in nine districts across the country, many of which are in low-income and rural areas where mental-health services are lacking. - Wall Street Journal
Overcoming an Aversion to Loss
/Most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that even something as simple as a coin toss demonstrates our aversion to loss. In a recent interviews, Mr. Kahneman shared the usual response he gets to his offer of a coin toss:
“In my classes, I say: ‘I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?’
“People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll take the gamble.”
In other words, we’re willing to leave a lot of money on the table to avoid the possibility of losing.
We see this aversion to loss play out in the lives of real people when we try to make smart money decisions, especially when it’s time to make a change to our investments. It almost doesn’t matter what change we need to make. We hesitate to change from the current situation because it means having an opinion and making a decision. And with a decision comes the very real possibility that we’ll make the wrong one. Sticking with the status quo feels much better even if we know it’s costing us money.
To get past our aversion to loss, I recommend taking the Overnight Test.
Imagine you went to bed, and overnight someone sold your losing stock and replaced it with cash. The next morning, you have a choice: You can buy back the stock for the same price, or you can take that cash and (do something else with it). What would you do?
Most people wouldn’t buy the stock back.
Just by changing your perspective (investing cash versus getting rid of the stock), you can gain clarity and have the emotional space to make the decision you know you need to make.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes. While we’ll probably never embrace loss, it’s good to know that we can find ways to work around our aversion to it when it makes sense.
Carl Richards writing in the New York Times
22 Articles with AI Predictions
/The Government Knows A.G.I. is Coming – New York Times
AI Could Usher In a New Renaissance – Wall Street Journal
AI’s Legal Storm: The Three Battles That Will Shape Its Future – Forbes
Five AI and Data Science Trends That Matter for 2025 – MIT Tech Review
AI Is Just Getting Started. Here Are 4 Ways To Prepare For The Next Leap Forward – CrunchBase
OpenAI product chief says world is "on the verge" of AI agents - Axios
An AI coding company on how computers as we know it will change – Semafor
2025 Dating Trend Predictions from Relationship Experts - The New York Times
25 experts predict how AI will change business and life in 2025 – Fast Company
Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2025 - Wall Street Journal
Is the Tech Industry Already on the Cusp of an A.I. Slowdown? - The New York Times
The GPT era is already ending something has shifted at OpenAI – The Atlantic
New Book Explores Promise and Perils of AI for Scientific Community – Annenberg Public Policy Center
How ChatGPT changed the future - Axios
Three experts discuss the rise of low-quality content and its implications for the profession, the news industry and the public sphere. – Reuters Institute
AI could soon be making major scientific discoveries. A machine could even win a Nobel Prize one day – The Conversation
Will AI kill Google? Past predictions of doom were totally wrong. – Washington Post
Google is forming a new team to build AI that can simulate the physical world – Tech Crunch
Agentic AI: Top 2025 predictions that will redefine business intelligence – Silicon Angle
Humanity May Achieve the Singularity Within the Next 12 Months, Scientists Suggest – Popular Mechanics
2025 AI Predictions for Small Business – Forbes
Can AI predict the next pandemic? A new study says yes – News Medical
AI Definitions: Symbolic Artificial Intelligence
/Symbolic Artificial Intelligence – The dominant area of research for most of AI’s history until artificial neural networks became the center of most of the recent developments in artificial intelligence. Symbolic AI requires programmers to meticulously define the rules that specify the behavior they want from an intelligent system. It works well when the environment is predictable, and the rules are clear-cut. Researchers believed if they programmed enough rules and logic into computers, they could create machines capable of human-like reasoning. Despite the fact that symbolic AI has lost its luster in the last few years, most of the applications we use today are rule-based systems. An alternative approach to AI is machine learning. Some believe the future of AI lies in a hybrid combination of these approaches.
More AI definitions here.
17 Articles about Amazing Things AI can do now
/A diagnostic tool that uses DNA sequencing & machine learning to detect multiple diseases from a single blood sample – Inside Precision Medicine
In a showdown of psychotherapists vs. ChatGPT, the latter wins, new study finds – Fortune
Matchmakers in India Now Have Competition: AI – The Walrus
AI invented a new miracle material that's as strong as steel but light as foam – BGR
How regular people are cashing in on AI - ZDnet
A new AI tool allowed me to talk to my 80-year-old self. It’s going to be quite a life. – Wall Street Journal
AI Comes to the Apple Orchard—From Pollinating to Picking - Wall Street Journal
From zero to millions? How regular people are cashing in on AI - ZDnet
Meta’s AI-Powered Ray-Bans Are Life-Enhancing for the Blind - Wall Street Journal
Using AI missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared in 2014 – Economic Times
Google’s X spins out Heritable Agriculture, a startup using AI to improve crop yield – Tech Crunch
A German startup specializing in geospatial data, is using sensing technology in autonomous vehicles to map the seafloor to strengthen underwater military defense – Wall Street Journal
AI designed computer chips so complex that humans can’t understand them – BGR
DeepMind AI crushes tough maths problems on par with top human solvers – Nature
Using A.I., Researchers Peer Inside a 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Charred by Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption – Smithsonian Magazine
Generative AI meets Venn diagrams in a quite unique interface. – SuperRandom
Cancer could be spotted early on thanks to new 'human-defying' AI-powered body scan – Daily Record
AI Hype or reality?
/"I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare. I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human history, A.I. will have been the thing that matters." -Ben Buchanan in The New York Times
Throwing Good Money after Bad
/Imagine a company that has already spent $50 million on a project. The project is now behind schedule and the forecasts of its ultimate returns are less favorable than at the initial planning stage. An additional investment of $60 million is required to give the project a chance. An alternative proposal is to invest the same amount in a new project that currently looks likely to bring higher returns. What will the company do? All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.
(This) fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one. Fortunately, research suggests that at least in some contexts the fallacy can be overcome. (It) is taught as a mistake in both economics and business courses, apparently to good effect: there is evidence that graduate students in these fields are more willing than others to walk away from a failing project.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
27 Articles about AI & Politics
/The truth about DOGE’s AI plans: The tech can’t do that – Washington Post
UK ministers consider changing AI plans to protect creative industries -The Guardian
Trump is already trying to put his stamp on AI - CNN
AI unleashes a weird new genre of political communication – The Economist
Fake Video of Trump and Musk Appears on TVs at Housing Agency – New York Times
What an AI-generated video of Gaza reveals about Trump tactics US President - BBC
AI policy must be based on ‘science, not science fiction’ – Tech Crunch
LA Times to display AI-generated political rating on opinion pieces - The Guardian
Wave of state-level AI bills raise First Amendment problems – The FIRE
AI Slop of Musk and Trump on TikTok Racks Up 700 Million Views – 404 Media
US, UK refuse to sign AI safety declaration at international summit – Semafor
Lawmakers Push to Ban DeepSeek App From U.S. Government Devices – Wall Street Journal
Vance pushes ‘America First’ AI agenda, accuses allies of overregulation – Washington Post
China has more trust in AI than the United States – Axios
DOGE's "AI-first" strategy courts disaster - Axios
A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture: We need a Clean Internet Act – New York Times
AI is Uncle Sam’s new secret weapon to fight fraud - CNN
The Department of Homeland Security Is Embracing A.I. - The New York Times
AI Is Moving Faster Than Attempts to Regulate It. Here’s How Companies Are Coping. - Wall Street Journal
State Legislatures Consider New Wave of 2025 AI Legislation – Inside Privacy
US, UK and EU sign on to the Council of Europe’s high-level AI safety treaty – Tech Crunch
How AI can be used in healthcare debated at Texas Legislature – NBC Dallas
How Will International Politics Complicate US Access to AI? – Information Week
Washington lawmakers weigh new artificial intelligence regulations – PBS
An experimental study on the political value shift in large language models – Nature
Three strategies to improve AI performance within government agencies – Washington Technology
AI Watch: Global regulatory tracker - European Union – JD Supra
AI-generated Ratings for Opinion Pieces
/Some Los Angeles Times opinion pieces will now be published with an AI-generated rating of their political content, and an AI-generated list of alternative political views on that issue. The AI-generated tool “operates independently” from the paper’s human journalists, and “the AI content is not reviewed by journalists before it is published.” - The Guardian
Self-Awareness and Critical Thinking
/At the root of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the measure of our own performance. We are constantly making judgments about what we know and don't know whether we're capable of handling a task or solving a problem. As we work at something, we keep an eye on ourselves, adjusting our thinking or actions as we progress.
Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for "about".) Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don't know when we've got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.
To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don't know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.
Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
12 Webinars about AI, Journalism & Media
/Mon, March 3 – Journalism Trends
What: What we’ll cover: The existential threat of search disruption and how publishers can respond; The evolving role of generative AI in newsrooms and its impact on talent; How product innovation is driving business growth in journalism; The rise of personalities, influencers, and the ‘creator-fication’ of news; Strategies to combat news fatigue for both journalists and audiences; The impact of intelligent agents and conversational AI on content discovery
Who: Nic Newman, Reuters Institute; George Montagu, Head of Insights FT Strategies; Sarah Dear, Senior Data Analyst FT Strategies.
When: 6 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Financial Times
Mon, March 3 - Amplify Your Impact: Effective PR Strategies for Nonprofit Success
What: This session aims to empower nonprofit professionals with the knowledge and tools needed to develop and implement effective public relations strategies.
Who: Jessica Leving Siegel, Sing Creative Group
When: 11:00 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Nonprofit Learning Lab
Mon, March 3 - Participatory Storytelling and News
What: We unpack insights from Kate Starbird’s research on misinformation and modern media ecosystems. This session explores how educators can better understand our dynamic information landscape, help students critically engage with media and the news, understand participatory narratives, and build resilience against misinformation in today’s polarized landscape.
Who: Wesley Fryer, a media literacy teacher and educational technology early adopter since the late 1990s.
When: 12:00 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Tue, March 4 - Introduction to solutions journalism
What: This webinar will explore the basic principles and pillars of solutions journalism, talk about why it’s important, explain key steps in reporting a solutions story, and share tips and resources for journalists interested in investigating how people are responding to social problems.
When: 9 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Solutions Journalism
Tue, March 4 - The power of public health storytelling
What: How can storytelling raise awareness of urgent public health issues — and begin to shape a meaningful response? This panel of skilled storytellers will share insights from their own experience and offer ideas about how journalists, authors, and community organizers can leverage personal narratives to powerful effect.
Who: Annie Brewster, Founder of the Health Story Collaborative; Vidya Krishnan, Journalist and author of "The Phantom Plague"; Predrag Stojicic, Adjunct Lecturer on Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Moderator Emily Ann Harrison, Instructor in Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Center for Health Communication at Harvard
Tue, March 4 - Pioneering the Future: Integrating AI to Revolutionize Competency Models
What: This session will explore how AI can streamline the identification of competencies for every role, specific skills related to each competency, and produce behavioral examples of each of the skills, ensuring your organization stays ahead in an ever-evolving landscape.
Who: Kelly Painter Managing Partner, SkillDirector
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Training Magazine Network
Tue, March 4 - Getting Your Learning and Development Team AI-Ready: Strategies for Adoption & Success
What: We’ll explore what it takes to get your L&D team ready to adopt AI successfully. We’ll go beyond the hype and focus on real strategies that successful teams are using today to get traction for adoption — focusing on what you can use today to build confidence and momentum for AI within your organization.
Who: Megan Torrance, CEO and founder, TorranceLearning
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Training Magazine Network
Wed, March 5 - Make facts matter again: Pushing back against misinformation and disinformation
What: How misinformation spreads, why people cling to it — rejecting accurate information — and what he thinks journalists can do to help address this crisis.
Who: Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol and one of the lead original authors of “The Debunking Handbook.”
When: 12:00 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Association of Health Care Journalists
Wed, March 5 - Engaging Public Health Officials Online: Strategies for Effective Communication
What: We will explore innovative approaches to engage public health professionals and share expert insights on building credibility in the digital sphere. Learn how to navigate non-mainstream platforms. effectively, drawing lessons from recent political campaigns to inform public health advocacy.
Who: Sarah J. Dash, former President and CEO of The Alliance for Health Policy, President and CEO of Dash Collaborations; Sandra Albrecht, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University; Nick Dean, Senior Vice President, Digital and Creative, Burness; Che Parker, Senior Vice President, Burness.
When: 12:00 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Association of Schools & Programs of Public Health
Wed, March 5 – Navigate Communication Challenges: Crisis Compass
What: Whether you’re in corporate communications, nonprofit management, public relations or executive leadership, our sessions will provide actionable insights to help you protect your brand’s reputation, maintain public trust and navigate challenges effectively.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: C2 Strategic Communications
Thu, March 6 - Storytelling that Connects and Inspires
What: Tips, techniques and tools to help keep your mission at the forefront, ensuring ethical storytelling and staying top of mind to your audience. Key Takeaways: A brief analysis of storytelling frameworks. Tools to aid in the process of compiling and refining the most compelling stories. Using social media story tools to build community and motivate action.
Who: Firespring’s Kiersten Hill
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: FireSpring
Thu, March 6 - Book Banning Webinar: A View From Bookstores, Libraries and Courtrooms
What: The panelists will discuss the dynamic legal landscape, practical challenges for librarians, bookstores, authors and publishers, and will leave attendees with resources to help stay up to date.
Who: Dentons lawyers, including retired partner Michael Bamberger, partner Tomasita Sherer, and counsel Rebecca Hughes Parker; Deborah Caldwell-Stone (Director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom To Read Foundation), Bunmi Emenanjo (author, lawyer and curator of globally diverse children's literature) and Terry Hart (General Counsel for the Association of American Publishers).
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Dentons, a worldwide law firm
Spiritual Friendship
/Spiritual friends aren’t looking to get ahead. This friend weeps with you in anxiety, rejoices with you in prosperity, seeks with you in doubts. Nothing is faked; everything is in the open. A relationship that grows into something holy, voluntary, and true is one of life’s greatest pleasures and a reward in itself. It’s a “wondrous consolation” to have someone in whom your spirit can rest, to whom you can simply pour out your soul.
Karen Wright Marsh, Vintage Saints and Sinners
Hacker Attack
/“Hackers have recently ramped up the theft of what are called session cookies, according to the FBI. These are files that are stored by your browser and save you the annoyance of logging in every time you need to read a Gmail or check up on Facebook. Think twice before clicking ‘remember me’ on that check box.” - Wall Street Journal