“We hope to do climate coverage a little differently. Heatmap is a new media company focused on the biggest story in the world: the great climate and energy transition. We’re your guide to that transformation reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We seek to understand the new planet that’s emerging and help you… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: March 2023
Freedom in the World 2023
Freedom House – Marking 50 Years in the Struggle for Democracy – Key Findings Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year. Moscow’s war of aggression led to devastating human rights atrocities in Ukraine. New coups and other attempts to undermine representative government destabilized Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru, and Brazil. Previous years’ coups and ongoing… Continue Reading
Wikipedia + AI = truth? DuckDuckGo hopes so with new answerbot
Ars Technica: “Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today as a wide beta test for users of DuckDuckGo’s browser extensions and browsing apps. Being powered… Continue Reading
Beware of Book Blurbs
The Million: “Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess in its dual definition as both an expostulation of unrestrained emotion as well… Continue Reading
Explore the world’s searches with the new Google Trends
Google Blog: “With spring cleaning trends on our minds, we’ve refreshed the Search Trends site, making it easier to explore what’s trending around you and across the world.. You can now explore real-time trends right on the home page. These are updated every hour and are accompanied by links to relevant news articles, so you… Continue Reading
A growing plastic smog estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans
Eriksen M, Cowger W, Erdle LM, Coffin S, Villarrubia-Gómez P, Moore CJ, et al. (2023) A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0281596. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281596: “As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are… Continue Reading
Inside the Suspicion Machine
Wired: “Obscure government algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world. Here, for the first time, we reveal how one of these systems works…Machine learning algorithms like Rotterdam’s are being used to make more and more decisions about people’s lives, including what schools their children attend, who gets interviewed for jobs,… Continue Reading
5 Best Free Realistic Text-to-Speech Tools
Hongkiat: “The web is brimming with text-to-speech tools, but most of the good ones (with realistic/ natural speech) aren’t free. Nevertheless, we’ve stumbled upon some tools that are free and offer high-quality output. Following is a list of some of the best free text-to-speech tools with a brief description and their respective pros and cons.” Continue Reading
Recipes by AI
“Let’s Foodie was created to help foodies across the globe get answers to some of the most common alongside some of the most obscure questions that get asked in the kitchen. Launched in 2021, Let’s Foodie is a constantly expanding platform providing information on a range of topics including how to freeze, reheat and microwave… Continue Reading
The privacy loophole in your doorbell
Politico: “…As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin’s case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people’s own expectation of privacy for the devices they own — a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn’t fully grappled with. Questions… Continue Reading
DuckDuckGo Releases Its Own ChatGPT-Powered Search Engine, DuckAssist
Gizmodo: “DuckDuckGo launched a beta version of an AI search tool powered by ChatGPT Wednesday called DuckAssist. The addition to the company’s privacy-focused search engine uses ChatGPT’s language parsing capability to generate answers scraped from Wikipedia and related sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica. The tool is free and available on the DuckDuckGo web browsing apps… Continue Reading
Talk to Wikipedia using chatGPT
“wikipediaGPT allows you to talk to version of chatGPT that has access all of Wikipedia! It’s actually based on “Simple English Wikipedia” with some limitations due to financial constraits. If you’d like to help extend this to ALL of Wikipedia get in touch! Unline chatGPT this website can’t make stuff up and will only answer… Continue Reading
