AI broke the college essay, and in-class writing is the new (old) way to go. Thus, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is key for grading student writing. I just compared the OCR output of the venerable Adobe Acrobat product to that of Gemini. Adobe is AWFUL. LLM problem, LLM solution.

RIP Jane Goodall. Two of the most inspirational books I've ever read are her works: "In the Shadow of Man" and "Chimpanzees of Gombe". Now teaching at UCLA, I honor her, her work, and what she stood for. Thank you Jane for a life so well lived, and for your example.

Day one traveling in Tanzania right now, finding my ability to small talk politics with taxi drivers much harder than usual. Swahili primer for 2025.

Great casting! deadline.com/2025/05/matt...

"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths" Lloyd-Jones & Projecto Sego advance knowledge of honeyguides again: "To Bees or Not to Bees: Greater Honeyguides Sometimes Guide Humans to Animals Other Than Bees, but Likely Not as Punishment" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Revealing how primatologists influence the endangered primates they observe is important science. An encouraging new NIA-funded study @Ngogo "Decreases in chimpanzee respiratory disease signs and enteric viral quantity following... " goo.gl/scholar/Lpxwur

Consider how inaccurate this rendered illustration of the specific fossil KNM-ER 3733 is. It is an anatomical misrepresentation. The landmarks are completely bonkers-wrong. This kind of image is allowed by OpenAI policies, but photorealistic images of hypothetical human ancestors are not?

OpenAI's restriction on generating depictions of human ancestors is based on a hodgepodge of weak arguments e.g. "Photorealism Suggests Certainty" and "Scientific Reconstructions Are Themselves Hypotheses" (no shit). By these same criteria, almost everything this tool generates should be verboten.

3/3 Then the image disappears and the error message "I wasn't able to generate the requested image, as it involves content that is currently restricted by our image generation policies--specifically, lifelike depictions of ancient human ancestors".

2/3 A first glimpse of the partially rendered image is displayed, in truly stunning detail. Wow! What a great teaching tool this could be!

1/3 ChatGPT today released new capabilities to generate truly amazing photorealistic images. Sadly, depictions of human ancestors run afoul of their content policies. WHY???? The prompt "Make a photorealistic image of the ancient human ancestor homo ergaster using an achulean handaxe".

This is probably the best paper I’ll ever be on 🤩 High-resolution tracking of large groups of ice-fishers combined with computational (+agent-based) movement and decision models, led by the incredibly talented @alexschakowski.bsky.social! 🎣🇫🇮

PSA: ChatGPT 4o can make simple maps like this. I first made a clean site map using rub-on Letraset, circa 1999 or so. I spent the 2000s fighting with evil ESRI software. Then, thankfully, came R in the 2010s. This map took 20 seconds, a 99% time saving from former tech.

The Dietary Life of the Hadzapi Tribe --Kozo Tomita 1966

Seasonal availability of important Hadza plant foods, documented by Tomita in 1966

An NSF-funded "young scholars" program in high school changed my life and literally made me a scientist. The NSF bloodbath today will have an immense negative impact upon American science and educational opportunities available to students from all backgrounds. www.wired.com/story/nation...

If you like 80s new wave bangers sung in alien languages (who doesn't?) this is definitely worth a listen. boingboing.net/2024/12/06/t...