NEW RESOURCES

University of British Columbia: UBC researchers launch new online tool to help teachers take their classes outdoors. “Researchers from UBC and BC Children’s Hospital have launched a new online Outdoor Play and Learning tool, to help parents, caregivers and educators gain the skills and confidence to support outdoor play and learning in elementary schools from kindergarten through Grade 7.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

KOB4: Basement Films archive finds new home at CNM. “The Basement Films archives are officially moving into their new home at [Central New Mexico Community College.] The archive, which specializes in 8mm and 16mm films, was kicked out of its previous space at UNM in August. Recently, CNM offered a partnership they couldn’t refuse.”

USEFUL STUFF

Tape It: Tape It launches automated studio quality noise reduction AI for music (PRESS RELEASE). “Today, music software developer Tape It released their free AI-powered Denoiser that automatically removes background noise such as hums and hisses. It produces studio-quality results on full songs, single instrument tracks, and field recordings — not just on spoken word. Tape It launched its Denoiser as a free web app and will later implement it into the company’s flagship product, the Tape It iOS app, which helps musicians organize and record song ideas.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

9to5 Mac: Report: AI features in development for iOS 18, Siri, Apple Music, Xcode and more. “In his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Apple was caught by surprise at the sudden swell of generative AI tools this year. But they are working hard to catch up with Apple SVPs Craig Federighi, John Giannandrea, and Eddy Cue all in charge of integrating AI-powered functionality into Apple’s products and services.” It surprises me how much these big Silicon Valley companies chase after each other. It shouldn’t, but it does.

New York Times: An Industry Insider Drives an Open Alternative to Big Tech’s A.I.. “Ali Farhadi is no tech rebel. The 42-year-old computer scientist is a highly respected researcher, a professor at the University of Washington and the founder of a start-up that was acquired by Apple, where he worked until four months ago. But Mr. Farhadi, who in July became chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, is calling for ‘radical openness’ to democratize research and development in a new wave of artificial intelligence that many believe is the most important technology advance in decades.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Expedia’s Ex-COO Says Ad Fees Jumped After Google Remade Search. “About 500 million people visit Expedia’s Vrbo from Alphabet Inc.’s Google each year and that number didn’t increase even though the company’s search advertising costs grew from $21 million in 2015 to $290 million in 2019, according to Jeff Hurst, Expedia’s former chief operating officer.”

News 12 The Bronx: Authorities: Social media influencer Cesar Pina charged in multimillion-dollar Ponzi-like scheme. “Cesar Pina, 45, was charged with one count of wire fraud, U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger announced. Authorities say Pina, who advertised real estate investments offering huge guaranteed profits, was actually running a Ponzi-like scheme, in which he took money from new investors to pay off older ones, as well as pocketing some of the cash. They say he’s been running the scheme since 2017.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Associated Press: Health providers say AI chatbots could improve care. But research says some are perpetuating racism. “As hospitals and health care systems turn to artificial intelligence to help summarize doctors’ notes and analyze health records, a new study led by Stanford School of Medicine researchers cautions that popular chatbots are perpetuating racist, debunked medical ideas, prompting concerns that the tools could worsen health disparities for Black patients.”

Marcus on AI: “Math is hard” — if you are an LLM – and why that matters. “Notice anything? It’s not just that the performance on MathGLM steadily declines as the problems gets bigger, with the discrepancy between it and a calculator steadily increasing, it’s that the LLM based system is generalizing by similarity, doing better on cases that are in or near the training set, never, ever getting to a complete, abstract, reliable representation of what multiplication is.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Popular Mechanics: Scientists Figured Out How to Design Dice to Roll Any Way You Want. “Ask any Dungeons and Dragons player: dice rolls don’t always go your way. But what if you could use a complex algorithm to design dice to physically roll any way you wanted? Scientist Yaroslav Sobolev at the Institute for Basic Science in Ulsan, South Korea—along with his colleagues—have designed an algorithm that creates wonky-shaped objects called ‘trajectoids’ that mathematically travel along any set path.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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