Open Culture: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Internet
‘We were just trying to get it to work’: The failure that started the internet
BBC – “On 29 October 1969, two scientists established a connection between computers some 350 miles away and started typing a message. Halfway through, it crashed. They sat down with the BBC 55 years later. At the height of the Cold War, Charley Kline and Bill Duvall were two bright-eyed engineers on the front lines… Continue Reading
How to Use Images From Your Phone to Search the Web
The New York Times [unpaywalled] – “If you’re not sure how to describe what you want with keywords, use your camera or photo library to get those search results. A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don’t need to type any of them to search the internet these days. Boosted by artificial intelligence,… Continue Reading
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
Ars Technica:”A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview. In May, Google launched AI Overviews in the US, an experimental feature that populates the top… Continue Reading
NIH Bioart and Free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms
Official release is coming soon. The NIAID Visual and Medical Arts Unit in collaboration with NIAID Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB) have developed a library of biomedical and scientific icons made available for use in figures, presentations, websites, and print materials. The icons have been created by medical illustrators and biomedical visualization specialists to… Continue Reading
Introducing ChatGPT search
OpenAI: “ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores,… Continue Reading
How The New York Times is using generative AI as a reporting tool
Ars Technica: “The rise of powerful generative AI models in the last few years has led to plenty of stories of corporations trying to use AI to replace human jobs. But a recent New York Times story highlights the other side of that coin, where AI models simply become a powerful tool aiding in work… Continue Reading
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record
Internet Archives Blogs: “In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at… Continue Reading
Librarians Face a Crisis of Violence and Abuse
The New York Times [unpaywalled] – As libraries become public stages for social problems – homelessness, drug use, mental health – the people who work there are burning out: “…Like Mr. [Mychal] Threets. [a supervisor at the Fairfield Civic Center Library in Solano County, Calif], librarians around the country are struggling to reconcile their desire… Continue Reading
All of the paywall removers in one place
Archive Buttons – Simply enter the URL of the article and click the archive buttons to remove any paywall. Continue Reading
Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election
ProPublica: Reporting Highlights Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish. Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.… Continue Reading
Prebunking Elections Rumors: Artificial Intelligence Assisted Interventions Increase Confidence in American Elections
Mitchell Linegar, arXiv:2410.19202. 24 Oct 2024 – Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in the prebunking of election misinformation. Using results from a preregistered two-wave experimental study of 4,293 U.S. registered voters conducted in August 2024, we show that LLM-assisted prebunking significantly reduced belief in specific election myths,with these effects persisting for at least one… Continue Reading
