NEW RESOURCES

HPC Wire: KL Krems Launches ecolo-zip Database, Mapping Terrain, Vegetation, and Climate Precisely. “ecolo-zip, a globally unique database offering intricate details on terrain formations, vegetation, and climate conditions across 1.5 million locations in 94 countries and regions, has been successfully developed and released.”

EPA: EPA Launches Online Tool Providing Energy Use Data and Insights from ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager®. “Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is announcing the launch of a web-based tool that enables users to explore aggregate energy use data from more than 150,000 commercial and multi-family buildings in the United States.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: New Version Of ChatGPT Gives Access To All GPT-4 Tools At Once. “OpenAI plans to unveil a new way to use multimodal GPT-4 with access to All Tools without switching and more document analysis capabilities. Screenshots shared by numerous ChatGPT Plus users on X show new capabilities for PDF and document analysis and an ‘All Tools’ feature. All Tools gives users access to all GPT-4 features without having to switch between one over the other.”

TechCrunch: X to take on newswire services with new product, XWire. “As Instagram Threads is leaning away from news, according to statements made by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, its competitor X appears to be doubling down. Executives at the company formerly known as Twitter spoke during yesterday’s all-hands internal meeting of their desire to create a new wire service called XWire, according to Bloomberg. The product would rival existing services for press releases, like Cision’s PR Newswire.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Denver Post: The Denver Art Museum has been quietly removing plundered artworks from its website without explanation. “For years, the Denver museum has carefully curated which repatriations and deaccessions — pieces removed from its collection — it chooses to publicly announce, a practice that goes against industry recommendations. Unlike some other institutions, it’s impossible in Denver to see which pieces, and how many, the museum has returned after foreign governments or U.S. authorities provided evidence that they were stolen or illegally trafficked.”

The Scotsman: Opening up ‘treasure trove’ archives of Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and George Mackay Brown. “Kept for decades in cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags, they are a treasure trove of diaries, drafts, doodles, pocketbook, lists and letters offering invaluable insights into the minds of three of Scotland’s leading writers of modern times…. Now a major appeal is underway to help open up public access to the personal archives kept by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and George Mackay Brown.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Stateline: Politicians love to cite crime data. It’s often wrong.. “Across the country, law enforcement agencies’ inability — or refusal — to send their annual crime data to the FBI has resulted in a distorted picture of the United States’ crime trends, according to a new Stateline analysis of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program participation data.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Register: Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff . “…to better assess how large language models – which interpret text input – and large multimodal models – which interpret text, images and perhaps other forms of input – actually handle problem solving, a group of ten researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Microsoft Research have devised a testing benchmark called MathVista that focuses on visually-oriented challenges.”

NOAA: NOAA uses artificial intelligence to translate forecasts, warnings into Spanish and Chinese. “Through a series of pilot projects over the past few years, NWS forecasters have been training artificial intelligence (AI) software for weather, water and climate terminology in Spanish and Simplified Chinese, the most common languages in the United States after English. NWS will add Samoan and Vietnamese next, and more languages in the future.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: A Paper Printer For Q Code Menus. “Do you miss the days of thumbing through a sticky, laminated booklet to order your food? Sick of restaurants and their frustrating electronic menus? Fear not, for [Guy Dupont] and his QR code menu printer are here to save the day.” I don’t miss sticky menus, but I really do not like scanning unknown QR codes with my phone. Good afternoon, Internet…

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