Kind: Bookmarks

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Bookmarked YourBeatsWithAi: Mashups and Covers Made Easy with AI (yourbeatswithai.com)

Discover the power of AI with our easy-to-use music tools. Effortlessly extract stems from your favorite tracks, create AI covers using one of the many AI voices available on the web, generate unique songs from text, and mix them all together for exciting mashups. Make music your way with cutting-edge AI technology!

Source: YourBeatsWithAi: Mashups and Covers Made Easy with AI by

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YourBeatsWithAi allows you to use YouTube songs to change the vocals or split a track into stems using artificial intelligence. I think like all of these sorts of things, sometimes it can be interesting, while other times it can just sound weird.

ᔥ “Tom Woodward” in Weekly Web Harvest for 2024-09-29 – Bionic Teaching ()

Bookmarked Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers by Joseph CoxJoseph Cox (404 Media)

A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.

Source: Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta’s Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers by Joseph Cox

Joseph Cox shares a project developed by AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio called I-XRAY.

Initially started as a side project, I-XRAY quickly highlighted significant privacy concerns. The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it. Our goal is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, raising awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.

Source: I-XRAY

The project uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses to scan faces and then use Pimeyes to lookup the user.

Bookmarked The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted by John Naughton (The Guardian)

So Dave was present at the creation of some cool stuff, but it was blogging that brought him to a wider public. “Some people were born to play country music,” he wrote at one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and remains) articulate and forthright. His formidable record as a tech innovator meant that he couldn’t be written off as a crank. The fact that he was financially secure meant that he didn’t have to suck up to anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did. So from the moment he launched Scripting News in October 1994 he was a distinctive presence on the web.

Source: The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted by John Naughton

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I am left reflecting about the idea that Winer is ‘financially secure’ and the impact that has on his voice.

Bookmarked Tupperware’s filing for bankruptcy sparks reflection from Australians who sold the famous plastic by Syan Vallance (ABC News)

A 7:30 report that aired on the ABC in 1986 described the brand’s representatives as “the army of housewives and mothers who make money selling plastic containers at parties”.

“It’s much more than plastic to them – it’s Tupperware,” said the male reporter.

“And they don’t just sell it. They believe in it.”

Source: Tupperware’s filing for bankruptcy sparks reflection from Australians who sold the famous plastic by Syan Vallance

“More than plastic, it’s Tupperware.” My mum worked for Tupperware in the office when she finished school. Early eighties, it must have been the high point of the company. When I look through our draws and our cupboard, I think we too have bought into the myth. For me, my favourite memory is the moment when Kip tests the durability in Napoleon Dynamite:

This sticks with me having had Tupperware destroyed by kids collecting basalt rocks … Not invincible!

 

Bookmarked Digital Credentials: why context matters by Doug Belshaw (dougbelshaw.com)

At their core, all credentials are relational. They represent an attestation from one party to another—a way of saying, “This person did this thing” or “We vouch for this individual.” This relational nature is fundamental to their function, yet it’s often overlooked when people are talking about digital credentials.

Source: Digital%20Credentials%3A%20why%20context%20matters by Doug Belshaw

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Doug Belshaw on the relational nature of credentials and the place of privacy.

Bookmarked https://blog.ayjay.org/behind-the-scenes/ (blog.ayjay.org)

Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything.

Source: behind the scenes – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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Alan Jacobs reflects upon the legacy of Lauren Lepow and the invisible labor associated with the roll of the copy editor. Austin Kleon recently reflected on paying ‘attention to the credits’:

If you want to be a better student of any art form, you have to pay attention to the credits! If you love an album, read the liner notes, notice the personnel involved in the recording, and seek out more of their work. (Reading the liner notes is increasingly impossible, as people do so much listening via streaming. Personally, I rely a lot on AllMusic.com or Discogs.) If you like the way a movie looks, watch the credits or check IMDB to find out more about the cinematographer. (Again, increasingly harder — Netflix skips credits by default these days, so you have to scramble for the remote at the end of a movie.) If you like the way a book is designed, check the acknowledgements or copyright page for the designer, the imprint, and the other personnel involved. This is one of the easiest ways to find more of what you like and discover what you don’t know you like yet.

Source: Collective creativity by Austin Kleon

After recently spending time with Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, I was left wondering who edited such a book and what other books they may have edited? I was also left thinking about editing a book like Anti-Oedipus?

Bookmarked https://www.theredhandfiles.com/would-you-consider-compiling-a-list-of-40-books-you-love/ (theredhandfiles.com)

formless and incoherent grab bag of titles that come to mind at this moment that, for one reason or another, I have loved over the years. I think I got carried away. I think there are fifty — in no particular order.

Source: Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #101 – Would you consider compiling a list of 40 books you love? by Nick Cave

Another list of books to consider when struggling with what to read next.

Bookmarked https://edm.com/news/aphex-twin-djs-friends-wedding (edm.com)

In footage shard by a wedding guest on X, Aphex Twin can be seen performing from a modest DJ booth with nothing more than a small projection screen behind him. Instead of family-friendly sounds and a heartwarming montage of the bride and groom, he opted for drum & bass with eye-popping visuals featuring his iconic distorted face, as seen on the album cover of 1996’s Richard D. James Album.

Watch Footage from Aphex Twin’s Latest Headline Performance – His Friend’s Wedding by Nick Yopko

I remember going to a wedding where the DJ played Nine Inch Nails. This felt odd. I think going to a wedding with Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert is next level. Would be a strange vibe.

Bookmarked https://blog.edtechie.net/open-access/the-darkish-side-of-open-licences/ (blog.edtechie.net)

This presents a quandary for open scholars – do you continue to advocate for open access for everyone, and at the same time accept that you are feeding the machine? Do you accept AI as inevitable and hope your content in some way adds to its quality (I mean, I’m not sure what my random metaphors on here will do to the learning models). Or do you seek to control content with more specific licences that might prohibit being harvested by AI but allow human access?

The darkish side of open licences by Martin Weller

Martin Weller reflects the fine line between open licensed content and the fear that it is being fed (or mostly likely, has been fed) into the AI machine. I like Weller’s point that, “There is no “CC-BY for uses I like” licence.”

Bookmarked https://youtu.be/pqWUuYTcG-o?feature=shared (youtu.be)

Tennis great-turned-philanthropist Roger Federer delivered the Commencement address at Dartmouth on June 9, 2024. The eight-time Wimbledon champion gave pointers on how to win at life. Federer received a Doctor of Humane Letters degree at the Commencement ceremony.

2024 Commencement Address by Roger Federer at Dartmouth by YouTube

Roger Federer provided three lessons about life that he has deduced from tennis:

  1. Effortless is a myth
  2. It’s only a point
  3. Life is bigger than the court

This reminds me of Patrick Dangerfield’s argument that there is always another moment.

Bookmarked Citrus gall wasp (Agriculture Victoria)

The citrus gall wasp (Bruchophagus fellis) is a native insect native to coastal regions around the border of Queensland and New South Wales. It has now spread throughout the eastern states, including South Australia and Victoria and has also been found in suburban Perth. The wasp produces lumpy, woody galls around it’s larvae on branches. The galls weaken the trees, reducing fruit size and yield and sometimes causing branch dieback.

Citrus gall wasp

Inspired by Gardening Australia, I went with ‘peal and reveal’ to deal with the gall wasp infestation.

Bookmarked “Does anyone have any questions?” Say this instead. by Written By Tony Vincent (learninginhand.com)

Instead of asking students, “Does anyone have any questions?”, try asking, “What questions do you have?” or “Ask me two questions.”

@tonyvincent https://learninginhand.com/blog/2024/8/17/does-anyone-have-any-questions

Tony Vincent collates a number of strategies for supporting students with questioning. This includes pairing students up, using sticky notes, predicting the questions of others, being clear about expectations around questions, and allow wait time. Some more strategies to add to the search for ‘a more beautiful question‘.

Bookmarked The Random Music Hiding On Gold & Platinum Records (Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.)

“I was looking at it, and I could see it has our label and I could see that it has you whatever like nine songs on the one side,” he recalled. “And I was looking at the actual gold record—it only had four songs on it.”

That was a bit of a mind blow for the trio, which immediately broke the glass, took the record out of its shell, and heard … instrumental piano recordings of Barry Manilow songs. This clearly blew the minds of both the band as well as the hosts. It’s not exactly common knowledge, but apparently the gold and platinum records are just plated and labeled with no care as to whether the actual records contain the artist’s songs.

The Random Music Hiding On Gold & Platinum Records by Ernie Smith

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To borrow from John Laws, records ain’t records?

Bookmarked Look back to move forward (EDUWELLS)

True learning is a slow contemplatory process and yet schools are ‘busy’ places with little time for teachers or students to contemplate. We are too busy being industrial and efficient,…

The lack of looking back in schools is proof of their anti-learning design in the same way the randomness of the timetabling of siloed subjects is. It makes no sense to anyone that the best immediate preparation for an hour’s study of Romeo & Juliet, is a serious deep-dive into photosynthesis but schools do it anyway because any student output allows us to compare them regardless if it fails to help them learn.

Look Back to Move Forward by Richard Wells

I remember studying the representations of Holocaust at university whilst also emerging myself into the world Baudrillard and postmodernism. My interests in literary theory could not help but bleed, let alone clash, with historical thinking. I really struggled to properly partition those different approaches. This is nothing when going from Romeo & Juliet to photosynthesis. Such transitions often feel like pulling the hard drive out before it has properly been ejected. Never feels right.

The conundrum is what a modern school looks like that is not dictated by the “production for ranking/judgement”? Yes, you can choose your pedagogy, but I feel at some point someone, somewhere is going to come asking for some sort of data and big data requires order, which often leads to classes and timetables. I guess that is your point.

I had never thought of all this as neo-eugenics exercise? I am not completely sure if this is the intent of things such as Australia’s My Schools website, but it definitely has me thinking. I am left wondering how much information getting added to student management systems is for the benefits of the student, say the emergency contact, and how much is for those managing the bigger picture?