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  • LIFE

    Q&A, truth, lies, the web and you

    Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2024

    » The online world is changing and not necessarily for the better. I'm old enough to remember what you were looking for came up as the first search result, when there was a search facility, that is. The old Bulletin Boards kept their subject matter to the topic of the board with opinions kept to opinion sites. Sites on science were not one-sided as they presented the facts along with the supporting data for checking and verification. If people disagreed, they also brought their data along to challenge a thesis and a healthy and often robust debate followed. That was then.

  • TECH

    AI is the new marketing buzzword

    Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2023

    » Some readers will remember back a decade or three when the big term was "turbo". Everything was turbo something. Turbo speed, turbo clearing, turbo graphics and so on. Today, the equivalent term is AI. I saw an advertisement recently for glasses described as AI technology that adapts to your sight. It was a regular lens with some design elements, perhaps from an AI, perhaps not, with claims of predictive focus. Rubbish. There was no inherent active or dynamic AI technology in the lenses to back up this claim and I don't think such a technology at that level is even available at any price in the current time. The same goes for many other claims preceded or appended by the AI moniker. Like turbo, it is the current marketing buzzword and since many don't understand it and what the current engineering and technological limitations are in 2023, it has become part of the mindscape.

  • TECH

    The World Wide Web turns 30

    Life, James Hein, Published on 10/05/2023

    » The public version of the World Wide Web turned 30 recently. Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext system called Mesh. The next year he added a hypertext GUI browser and editor and called the result the WorldWideWeb. Inside CERN, people loved it and by January 1993 the world had around 50 HTTP servers. By February, the first graphic browser appeared known as Mosaic and by April of that year, CERN decided the project belonged to humanity and the public domain version of the WWW was born. The rest and billions of web pages later, is history.

  • TECH

    You are being tracked and here's how to avoid it

    Life, James Hein, Published on 02/02/2022

    » I decided to spend some time this week addressing security and data sharing. This was prompted by me reading Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, watching Dr Robert Epstein on The Joe Rogan Experience, my son enrolling in a cyber security course and my experience over the years.

  • TECH

    AI-aided hope on the horizon

    Life, James Hein, Published on 13/02/2019

    » Despite some of my criticisms in the past there are some excellent examples of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I've mentioned some of these from the medical world in earlier articles but a new one caught my eye this week, figuring out in which hotel a picture was taken. No, not to help people remember where holiday snaps were taken but to track down human trafficking where pics of women are taken to sell them for sex. The three groups behind this identification technology are from George Washington University, Temple University and Adobe, all in the US. Like many AI systems a large amount of source data is used and to help with this more than a million images have been collected from 50,000 hotels worldwide. Using all the room elements in backgrounds a neural network is being trained to identify a hotel chain and then a location.

  • OPINION

    Help kids navigate the social media roller coaster

    Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2018

    » A study has come out recently, confirming what we already know. Children spending more than an hour a day engaged in social media can make them less happy. Take something like Facebook for example. You post something, people read it then they give it a like and sometimes make a comment. Now imagine you are a young impressionable child somewhere under 18. You post something and get 50 likes. Sometime later you post something else and get 65 likes and feel better. Then the third time you only get five likes and some comments about how lame it was. Now you feel worse. Multiply this by a few hundred times and the emotional roller coaster can have someone with a developing emotional platform spiralling into their first depression.

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