Curated Commons // Edition 124
Welcome to the 124th edition of Curated Commons! Thank you for subscribing (if you haven't yet, what are you waiting for?).
Happy reading ($ indicates potential paywall).
From screen to real life
Researchers are using motion capture suits (and AI) used in movies such as Avatar to track onset of diseases that impair movement. In early tests, they were able to measure the severity of two genetic disorders “twice as quickly as the best doctors.” - Read here
Ants, but for sniffing cancer
Ants apparently have such a refined sense of smell that some researchers are now training them to detect the scent of human cancer cells! - Read here ($)
Gene Therapy to the brain
Very promising gene therapy that delivers treatment directly to the brain. - Read here
The race to the moon
There’s now at least three different firms that are hoping to land robots on the Moon in the next few weeks. But then, who owns the Moon? - Read here ($)
Words as music to ears. Literally.
A new AI system from Google can generate music, genre no bar, using words. The biggest skill, at this rate, is to improve our vocabulary and ability to be clear in our ask - there will be some AI system or the other to do the actual work! - Read here
Training data that reinforces existing biases sucks!
A journalist at MIT Tech Review tested the popular AI avatar app Lensa. Her male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers. Her avatars were a bunch of nudes. - Read here
Deepfake…handwriting
That didn’t take long. You can now generate great-looking handwritten fakes. - Head here
Have you been ‘seenzoned’? Do you ‘seezone’ others?
What is the right etiquette for responding to social media notifications from individuals? How soon/often/public should you acknowledge? When our attention span is decided by the number of notifications/minute we are bombarded with, how do we prioritize which one to respond. Thoughtful piece - Read here ($)
AI lawyers will have to wait for some more time
A ‘robot lawyer’ is easier announced than executed. Short piece on an announcement gone awry - Read here
The future of dubbing
Then: Copycat business models. Now: Dubbing viral videos
There’s apparently a very large market for video ‘explainers’ in local languages in India. And lot of youngsters from India’s hinterland have made it big in YouTube Shorts adding explanations of viral videos. Of course, it was a question of time YouTube took them down for copyright infringement - Read here
From games to TV
HBO’s Last of Us, in its second episode now, has been renewed for season 2. Basically this is a video game reenactment on TV and is now one of HBO’s fastest growing series ever. - Read here
Meet the ‘rankers’ and ‘bankers’ of Kota
The NYT discovers Kota, the ultimate destination for selling dreams. - Read here
Meet the new demographic of interest - Grandparents
Increasing life expectancy globally, coupled with shrinking families, means grandparents are now a legit demographic. Interesting piece - Read here ($)
Behold the rise of the AI-driven media organizations
The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.
"BuzzFeed to Use ChatGPT Creator OpenAI to Help Create Quizzes and Other Content... ...BuzzFeed shares more than doubled in value Thursday..." - Read here ($)
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