Black workers at the Free Library of Philadelphia have penned an open letter about racism in the workplace. The letter by the Concerned Black Workers of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which was posted online but not delivered directly to management, says Black staff are bearing the brunt of COVID...
Amanda Jones (wakelet.com)After you defeat the early book nooks, you face the final boss pic.twitter.com/ck1YWud50C
— Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) May 28, 2020
Helpdesk support back in the day of the middle age with English subtitles. Original taken from the show "Øystein og jeg" on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)in 2001. With Øystein Backe (helper)and Rune Gokstad (desperate monk). Written by Knut Nærum.
Even for people who have lost jobs or income during the coronavirus epidemic, there are books and reading material available online for free.
A collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.
500 sheets of paper, books, playing cards, some pulp and other paper products vs. our 144 ton Hydraulic press on this experiment where we test which is the most dangerous paper of them all!
Do not try this at home!! or at any where else!!
Journalists provide quality information. Librarians help people find quality information. Both fields are rooted in promoting civic engagement. Both are contextual experts in the communities they serve. And both are working to reinvent themselves in the digital world.
It just makes sense that news outlets and libraries collaborate. That’s something we at the News Co/Lab have believed from the beginning, and it’s something we’ve seen work very well in our partnerships ❧
Perhaps this is a good incubator for the idea Greg McVerry and I have been contemplating in which these institutions help to provide some of the help and infrastructure for the future of IndieWeb.
Annotated January 08, 2020 at 04:12PM
I also note that this article was syndicated to this site from this original: https://newscollab.org/2019/06/19/6-newsroom-library-partnerships-to-check-out/
While some people are scrambling to collect log-ins for Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu and, now, Disney Plus, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal is working on a different kind of hustle. She signs up for any public library that will have her to find and reserve available e-books.
I liked the tip about putting one’s e-reader into airplane mode to keep it from updating and removing overdue books. Of course there are some more technical methods of stripping DRM or even pirating books which I was a bit surprised they didn’t delve into, but which are frequently mentioned with respect to college textbook related articles.
Library Extension lets you instantly see book and eBook availability from your local library
h/t to E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers
Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)This newsletter has not been written by a GPT-2 text generator, but you can now find a lot of artificially created text that has been.
For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.
This isn’t a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in *[An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise](https://amzn.to/32JWDSn)*. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.
November 13, 2019 at 08:33AM
The most interesting examples have been the weird ones (cf. HI7), where the language model has been trained on narrower, more colorful sets of texts, and then sparked with creative prompts. Archaeologist Shawn Graham, who is working on a book I’d like to preorder right now, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence, fed GPT-2 the works of the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and then resurrected him at the command line for a conversation about his work. Robin Sloan had similar good fun this summer with a focus on fantasy quests, and helpfully documented how he did it.
Circle back around and read this when it comes out.
Similarly, these other references should be an interesting read as well.
November 13, 2019 at 08:36AM
From this perspective, GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd. Reflecting on that process can be the source of helpful self-awareness—about our past and present views and inclinations—and also, some significant enjoyment as our minds spin stories well beyond the thrown-together words on a page or screen.
And it’s not just happening with text, but it also happens with speech as I’ve written before: Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016 In fact, in this mentioned case, looking at transcripts actually helps to reveal that the emperor had no clothes because there’s so much missing from the speech that the text doesn’t have enough space to fill in the gaps the way the live speech did.
November 13, 2019 at 08:43AM
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.
The question now is how to leverage its nature to make it maximally useful and used.
