ChatGPT answers physics questions like a confused C student
The first thing you’ll notice when you ask ChatGPT a question is how smart and knowledgeable its answer sounds. It identifies the proper topic, speaks in intelligible sentences, and employs the expert tone of an educated human. The million-dollar question is: Does the AI give correct answers? While ChatGPT (or any other chatbot) is obviously not sentient, its output is reminiscent of a person in certain ways. That’s not surprising, given that it mimics human language patterns. I’ve described ChatGPT as a parrot watching a million years of soap operas. The AI is very good at stringing together sentences simply because it has seen so many of them — it just doesn’t understand them. Continued here |
Today, people fear Twitter. In the 1850s, they feared telegrams
Telegrams were the first instant messages, allowing people to send short notes rapidly over long distances. Telegraphy was developed in the 19th century and tweets were created about 150 years later, but despite the vast time difference, they were received and critiqued in strikingly similar ways. Some early reactions to telegrams included one 1858 commentary in The New York Times calling them “superficial, sudden, unsifted” and likely to “render the popular mind too fast for the truth.” The exact same criticisms have been leveled at social media today. In both cases, the short, character-constrained nature of the messages was seen as a problem, leading to a lack of depth and context. Continued here |
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Global Internet Connectivity Is at Risk from Climate Disasters
Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable lining the seafloor are vulnerable to sea-level rise, storms and other climate impacts, research shows The flow of digital information through fiber-optic cables lining the sea floor could be compromised by climate change. Continued here |
New Space Radar Will Hunt Planet-Threatening Asteroids
The new ngRADAR at the Green Bank Telescope offers unprecedented Earth-based views of the solar system When a baseball pitcher throws a fastball, the speed pops up on the jumbotron thanks to radar. The technology is also useful for air traffic control, highway speed traps and weather forecasting—and it’s not reserved for Earth. Astronomers have used radar to probe the planets and asteroids around us, measuring their speed as they whiz around the sun and imaging the details of their surface. A new tool promises to ramp up this brand of science by offering more detailed astronomical radar capabilities than ever before. The team behind a pioneering radar system at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia released their first results last month at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, revealing unprecedented detail on the moon and detecting a near-Earth asteroid. The telescope’s novel radar system, called Next Generation Radar (ngRADAR), “produced results that were beyond expectations,” says Flora Paganelli, a project scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO’s) radar division. Continued here |
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Neurolaw: A brain scan test for trademark infringement
In 2003, neurologists at the University of Virginia reported what has become the best-known case study in the emerging field of neurolaw: that of a patient who developed a frontal lobe tumor that caused pedophilic behavior. Since then, brain scans and other neuroscientific evidence have been used increasingly to sway juries toward one verdict or another. But in many cases, its use is less clear-cut and more controversial. For example, although brain scans cannot unequivocally determine if a defendant has schizophrenia or psychopathy, their submission as evidence can be mitigating or aggravating, depending on the case. Similarly, several private companies offer brain-scan based lie detection tests, whose submission as evidence leads to more guilty verdicts than the traditional polygraph lie detector test, even though they are no more reliable. Continued here |
The massive machines cleaning Earth's atmosphere
To restrain global warming, we know we need to drastically reduce pollution. The very next step after that: using both natural and technological solutions to trap as much excess carbon dioxide from the air as possible. Enter Orca, the world's first large-scale direct air capture and storage plant, built in Iceland by the team at Climeworks, led by climate entrepreneur Jan Wurzbacher. This plant is capable of removing 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. With affordability and scalability in mind, Wurzbacher shares his vision for what comes after Orca, the future of carbon removal tech -- and why these innovations are crucial to stop climate change. Continued here |
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The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs
The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. Continued here |
Why Design Thinking Works
While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity. Continued here |
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How Apple Is Organized for Innovation
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments. Continued here |
Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet's Favorite Movie Site
By the time Les Adams arrived in Eastland, Texas, in the 1960s, he was about 50 years late for the town's oil boom. But Adams came searching for another kind of treasure. He had received a tip from his former boss at a bowling alley, a politician named Preston Smith, that a printing company in Eastland was changing up its business. For years it had been a major source of promotional materials for the movie industry, but it was moving on to a new market in restaurant menus. The company, Smith said, had some leftover pressbooks—brochures created by film distributors to market new flicks—that might interest Adams. Bearing a handwritten note from Smith, Adams found the owner, Victor Cornelius, at his office on Main Street. "I still don't know what Preston told Victor," Adams told me. "But I do know I ended up getting the pressbooks. He had them upstairs in a blocked-off room—shelves and shelves. It started in 1930, in alphabetical order." Adams borrowed a pick-up truck and made five trips, ferrying three decades of film history to his own collection of memorabilia back in Lubbock, about a four-hour drive away. "I was buried in paper," he recalled. Victor Cornelius' company became one of the largest menu-printing outfits in the country. Preston Smith became the 40th governor of Texas. But Les Adams would become a leader in something arguably even grander and farther-reaching. Continued here |
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Underdog stories can inspire us to greatness (or to break the rules)
We all tell stories about who we are. Consider any simple “I am” phrase: “I am a parent,” “I am a writer,” “I am a survivor,” or “I am a hard worker.” Within such sample-sized autobiographies, you’ll find a narrative crafted to express identity, the meaning of someone’s experiences, or their relationship to the world. The same is true when we construct collective identities in the form of businesses, societies, and cultural groups. “Story is essential. It’s who you are, what your mission is in the world, why you do it, and what you aspire to do,” Beth Comstock, former vice chair of GE, said in an interview. “I always urge companies, in telling their story, you’re trying to create that relevance, that connection. You’re carving just a little tiny piece of yourself into someone’s brain.” Continued here |
How to Install the Google Play Store on an Amazon Fire Tablet
For the money, most Android tablets aren't very smart buys. At the high end, hardware is marred by less than stellar software offerings. (If you're going to spend $500 on a tablet, get an iPad.) At the low end, Amazon's Android-powered Fire tablets are hamstrung by the very limited Amazon Appstore, which doesn't include Google apps, among others. Android tablets are finally getting a boost, but what if you could buy a Fire Tablet for $60 (as you generally can during Amazon Prime Day) and install the Google Play Store? A $60 tablet that's capable of 95 percent of what a $330 iPad can do is a pretty good deal. In this how-to, we'll show you how to get Google Play running on your Amazon Fire Tablet. Continued here |
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Navigating Uncertainty About Your Role During a Reorg
While you may have limited influence over your company’s reorganization, you absolutely have control over your response in moving forward. In this piece, the author offers strategies to help you successfully navigate through a corporate state of flux: 1) First, talk to your manager and emphasize how you bring value. 2) Nurture your network. 3) Do some scenario planning. 4) Make time for career maintenance. 5) Manage your emotions, and be kind to yourself. Continued here |
Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers
David Wakeling, head of London-based law firm Allen & Overy's markets innovation group, first came across law-focused generative AI tool Harvey in September 2022. He approached OpenAI, the system’s developer, to run a small experiment. A handful of his firm’s lawyers would use the system to answer simple questions about the law, draft documents, and take first passes at messages to clients. The trial started small, Wakeling says, but soon ballooned. Around 3,500 workers across the company’s 43 offices ended up using the tool, asking it around 40,000 queries in total. The law firm has now entered into a partnership to use the AI tool more widely across the company, though Wakeling declined to say how much the agreement was worth. According to Harvey, one in four at Allen & Overy’s team of lawyers now uses the AI platform every day, with 80 percent using it once a month or more. Other large law firms are starting to adopt the platform too, the company says. Continued here |
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Why Leaders Should Rethink Their Decision-Making Process
Many people believe that leaders instinctively make the best decisions based on past experience, almost like muscle memory. But Carol Kauffman, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the Institute of Coaching, says falling back on automatic patterns of behavior is often wrong—especially in a crisis or high-stakes choices. Instead, she explains a framework of stepping back, evaluating options, and choosing the tactics that work best in each situation. Kauffman is a coauthor, along with View Advisors founder David Noble, of the HBR article “The Power of Options” and the book Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High. Continued here |
ChatGPT failed my course: How bots may change assessment
One of the most unpleasant aspects of teaching is grading. Passing judgment on people is never fun, and it’s even less fun when you’ve spent months interacting with those people on a daily basis. Discovering that your students have tried to get a leg up by using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT has made the process even more unpleasant. From a teacher's perspective, it feels a bit like betrayal—I put in all this effort, and you respond by trying to do an end-run around the assessment. Continued here |
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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything
In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into “stealth mode” to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from the people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for. Continued here |
China is exporting its tiny EV obsession The Wuling electric vehicle is an object of fascination. Priced at around $5,500 and famously outselling Tesla in China, it’s a tiny, comically square car, produced in joint partnership with General Motors and SAIC. The micro EV has been fodder for articles and YouTubers — even while it’s remained unavailable outside China. Until last summer, that is, when Wuling attempted to go international. First stop: Indonesia. With its Air model selling at a mere $16,000 — less than half the price of alternatives — the minimalist EV was depicted in advertising as a gateway to the future, a slick solution for busy Indonesian city-dwellers. Continued here |
Ex-Christian America: How social media created more "nonverts" and atheists
Excerpted from Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America by Stephen Bullivant. Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Bullivant and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Suppose that you are a small-town teen with religious doubts and dissatisfactions. Everyone you know, in your family, at school, and at the suite of church youth programs you’re involved with, is some kind of believing Christian. Maybe there are others you know who feel like you do. But how would you know? Sure, those weird Goth kids at school talk the talk about Marilyn Manson and Cradle of Filth — but aren’t they, like, Satanists or something? And besides, those kids are just posers; your mom knows their moms, and you know for a fact that they dress up nice for church and when Grandma comes to visit. Continued here |
Single JWST image encodes science's three greatest mysteries
Although we’ve learned so much about the Universe since the dawn of the 20th century, a number of the cosmic mysteries that our investigations have revealed remain unsolved. Arguably, the three greatest ones are: And yet, we can be confident that dark energy, dark matter, and a cosmic matter-antimatter asymmetry all exist, even if we don’t know how or why they came to be. Remarkably, one single JWST image, assembled as a composite from an imaging campaign known as the UNCOVER survey, allows us to measure and further investigate all of these mysteries, as well as revealing so much more about how our Universe grew up. Here’s what we can learn from this one tiny region of the sky, and the lessons it holds for our entire cosmic history. Continued here |
What Is Disruptive Innovation?
For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents. Continued here |
You Need an Innovation Strategy
Without such a strategy, companies will have a hard time weighing the trade-offs of various practices—such as crowdsourcing and customer co-creation—and so may end up with a grab bag of approaches. They will have trouble designing a coherent innovation system that fits their competitive needs over time and may be tempted to ape someone else’s system. And they will find it difficult to align different parts of the organization with shared priorities. Continued here |
Oxytocin’s effects aren’t just about love
When love is in the air, what’s happening in the brain? For many years, biologists would answer, “Oxytocin!” This small protein — just nine amino acids long — has sometimes been called “the love hormone” because it has been implicated in pair-bonding, maternal care and other positive, love-like social behaviors. But lately, neuroscientists have been revising their thinking about oxytocin. Experiments with mice and other lab animals suggest that instead of acting as a trigger for pro-social behavior, the molecule may simply sharpen the perception of social cues, so that mice can learn to target their social behavior more accurately. “It turns out it’s not as simple and straightforward as ‘oxytocin equals love,’” says Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. If something similar is true of humans, that may, among other things, add a fresh wrinkle in attempts to treat social disorders such as autism by tinkering with the oxytocin system. Continued here |
Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise
Social entrepreneurship has emerged over the past several decades as a way to identify and bring about potentially transformative societal improvements. Ventures in this realm are usually intended to benefit economically marginalized segments of society that can’t transform their prospects without help. But the endeavors should be financially sustainable, because there’s no guarantee that subsidies from taxpayers or charitable givers will continue indefinitely. Grameen Bank is a famous example of a social venture that met both goals. Continued here
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