Cop Car's Beat

“I knew I probably wouldn’t live long enough to regret it.”

Photo: Fred First; Print: by a guy with whom I worked, whose name I do not recall at the moment - Circa 2003

That title is a sentence I stole from an old blog friend, Fred First, who used it in a posting to his seemingly now defunct blog, Fragments from Floyd. I'm fairly sure that, if my name were mentioned to Fred he would reply, "Who is Cop Car?" It has been that long ago. Fragments from Floyd was one of the first blogs that I ever took to reading regularly. I do not recall but I suspect that I learned of Fred from Bogie who introduced me, not only to blogging, but to many of her blog friends and regular reads.

Back to the title sentence: It was the answer that Fred received from a friend when Fred asked why, at his friend's age (older than Fred who was then 75), he had gotten a tattoo. That's an interesting way to look at things and one could take it up as an excuse for nearly anything - at my age. However, I don't expect to be using those words of reply concerning a tattoo. That's just something in which I've never had an interest. Of course, it took me until I was in my 50s to join other women in my family by having my ears pierced. 

More from News for Nerds - on AI gone amuk

What are AI Hallucinations?!

No one has asked me why I refuse to use artificial intelligence (AI), but these three items that I picked up from Slashdot.org nicely illustrate some of the reasons that I do not trust AI. I who have always touted the usefulness of my idea of what AI should do am appalled by what it does do. It's not ready for prime time.

Anthropic's Lawyer Forced To Apologize After Claude Hallucinated Legal Citation (techcrunch.com)29

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday May 15, 2025 @06:02PM from the honest-mistakes dept.

 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company's Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday. Claude hallucinated the citation with "an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors," Anthropic says in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg. Anthropic's lawyers explain that their "manual citation check" did not catch it, nor several other errors that were caused by Claude's hallucinations. Anthropic apologized for the error and called it "an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority." Earlier this week, lawyers representing Universal Music Group and other music publishers accused Anthropic's expert witness -- one of the company's employees, Olivia Chen -- of using Claude to cite fake articles in her testimony. Federal judge, Susan van Keulen, then ordered Anthropic to respond to these allegations. Last week, a California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with "numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations." The judge imposed $31,000 in sanctions against the law firms and said "no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing" to AI.

 

Student Demands Tuition Refund After Catching Professor Using ChatGPT (fortune.com)36

Posted by msmash on Friday May 16, 2025 @01:00AM from the ain't-paying-for-that dept.

 

A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs.

"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.

 

ChatGPT Diminishes Idea Diversity in Brainstorming, Study Finds47

Posted by msmash on Thursday May 15, 2025 @09:00AM from the discretion-advised dept.

 

A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour reveals that ChatGPT diminishes the diversity of ideas generated during brainstorming sessions. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found [PDF] that while generative AI tools may enhance individual creativity, they simultaneously reduce the collective diversity of novel content.

The investigation responds to previous research that examined ChatGPT's impact on creativity. Their findings align with separate research published in Science Advances suggesting AI-generated content tends toward homogeneity. This phenomenon mirrors what researchers call the "fourth grade slump in creativity," referencing earlier studies on how structured approaches can limit innovative thinking.

 

New joins old

When Hunky Husband moved into the memory care unit last winter, I moved the dresser from his/our bedroom and two of our recliner chairs with him, along with other odds and ends to surround him with familiar items. Unfortunately, his apartment was too small to accommodate a larger bed, so I sent the twin-sized bed from my basement bedroom. After all, it had not been slept in for two or three years - not since we had mutually decided we preferred the comfort of one another's presence and we decided to simplify my seeing that HH received attentive help should he need it, through the night. HH also had the nightstand, matching his dresser, and a small bench in his apartment. I brought a chest of drawers, a nightstand, and a makeshift dressing table up from my basement bedroom into our/my upstairs bedroom.

At my request, all of the major pieces of furniture in HH's apartment were adopted by other members of our family. In the absence of a real dresser or dressing table, a thrift-store table, originally used as a computer desk in my den, had served as a dressing table in my basement bedroom and continued to serve that function in the upstairs bedroom.

Two weeks ago, I ran errands in Wichita (main item was to buy shelled peanuts for the woodpeckers since I was expecting Elder Brother to visit). On a whim, I stopped by a furniture store along the way home. I had thought to replace the thrift-store table with a real, honest-to-goodness dressing table - or, at least, a table that would better fit in with the chest of drawers and nightstand. None of the tables/dressers that the store had was the right size. I did, however, spy a small chest. The furniture people called it an accent chest. I thought that it might work and arranged to have it delivered a week ago.

The above photo does not make clear the material from which the chest was made. Perhaps a different viewpoint would help.

Yes, the accent chest is encased on four of its six surfaces (including drawer fronts) by mirrored glass, the frame being metal. By itself, the chest would be gaudy, but it fits in nicely with existing furniture and fills the "need". The thrift-store table is now in my former basement bedroom which I am returning to its original purposing as my sewing room.

More News for Nerds - Who did your homework?

From: These Engineers are Leading the Way in Artificial Intelligence Research Around the World - TryEngineering.org Powered by IEEE

I can see this:

AI Use Damages Professional Reputation, Study Suggests (arstechnica.com)42

Posted by BeauHD on Friday May 09, 2025 @11:30PM from the double-edged-sword dept.

 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:  Using AI can be a double-edged sword, according to new research from Duke University. While generative AI tools may boost productivity for some, they might also secretly damage your professional reputation. On Thursday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study showing that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at work face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers. "Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools: Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs," write researchers Jessica A. Reif, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll of Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

The Duke team conducted four experiments with over 4,400 participants to examine both anticipated and actual evaluations of AI tool users. Their findings, presented in a paper titled "Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI," reveal a consistent pattern of bias against those who receive help from AI. What made this penalty particularly concerning for the researchers was its consistency across demographics. They found that the social stigma against AI use wasn't limited to specific groups."Testing a broad range of stimuli enabled us to examine whether the target's age, gender, or occupation qualifies the effect of receiving help from Al on these evaluations," the authors wrote in the paper. "We found that none of these target demographic attributes influences the effect of receiving Al help on perceptions of laziness, diligence, competence, independence, or self-assuredness. This suggests that the social stigmatization of AI use is not limited to its use among particular demographic groups. The result appears to be a general one."

 

It is not the same, but I can imagine that people liken the use of AI (or A1, as our very own Secretary of Education likes to call it) to the use of a direct report. It is considered poor form to take credit for the work done by another person, even if that person is a direct report to the one taking credit. We are not adept at thinking of cyber tools in the same way we think of hammers or calipers.

Personally, I am not prone to using AI because I do not trust it*. AI was developed by flawed humans and includes their biases. It is usually a pretty simple matter for me to assess the bias of a person, but more difficult when it is cloaked in the smoke and mirrors of Artificial Intelligence. Even two decades ago, when I retired from engineering work, one of my personal problems was finding that some of our young engineers did not question anything spit out by a computer and hadn't the judgement to look at numbers to see if they made sense. (Heck! It was an issue for me to be able to sanity check results in the large aircraft models with which I, personally, worked. Hunky Husband was an excellent manager who automatically sanity checked what his engineers gave/told him - which practice he and I retained, at home.)

_____________

*  I was called away from the keyboard for about 30 minutes, during which time I looked up some information using Safari on my iPhone. Usually, I am asked if I wish to use AI and I do not. This time, I was not given the option, but AI was used anyway - with the caveat at the end of the answer to the effect (I failed to save the answer and am reconstructing it from memory.) "This information was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies." The phone, then, asked if I wished to continue using AI. I told it that I did not. "AI-assisted answers have been turned off! This setting is stored in your browser, which means if you clear duckduckgo.com browser data, then you may see AI-assisted answers again." 

Finally!

Remember the above photo that was posted a few days ago, with my being disappointed that it had not fulfilled its promise of being my iris that was first to bloom in 2025? It bloomed. (See below.) I don't know whether it was just top heavy or whether wind/rain got it.

Addition of 5/5/2025 - Neglected hybrid tea roses

More News for Nerds - batteries in flight

 

iPad Jammed in Seat Forces Emergency Landing of Airplane Carrying 400 Passengers (yahoo.com)45

 

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday April 26, 2025 @09:34PM from the battery-low dept.

 

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat.

The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.

The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire.

 

My having spent time working with FEMA and other governmental agencies as a volunteer for the American Red Cross, prior to the mess our current Felon in the Whitehouse and his "world's richest" pal have unleashed on our governmental agencies, I am probably more aware of some of the work that they do. Did you know that there is a U.S. Fire Administration? Well, perhaps it no longer exists. So far, their website is still up - and providing advice on Risks and Response Strategies for Lithium-ion Battery Fires.

Weekly roundup

Google AI Fabricates Explanations For Nonexistent Idioms (wired.com)80

Posted by msmash on Thursday April 24, 2025 @02:53PM from the oops-I-did-it-again dept.

 

Google's search AI is confidently generating explanations for nonexistent idioms, once again revealing fundamental flaws in large language models. Users discovered that entering any made-up phrase plus "meaning" triggers AI Overviews that present fabricated etymologies with unwarranted authority.

When queried about phrases like "a loose dog won't surf," Google's system produces detailed, plausible-sounding explanations rather than acknowledging these expressions don't exist. The system occasionally includes reference links, further enhancing the false impression of legitimacy.

Computer scientist Ziang Xiao from Johns Hopkins University attributes this behavior to two key LLM characteristics: prediction-based text generation and people-pleasing tendencies. "The prediction of the next word is based on its vast training data," Xiao explained. "However, in many cases, the next coherent word does not lead us to the right answer."

Some of the "news" reporting on artificial intelligence (specifically on Slashdot.org from which the above item is taken, not including the graphic) is so dismaying that I'm clutching my pearls (which, truthfully, I gave away a few years ago). At times, AI makes up its facts, including making up reference sources, it seems. I speculate that our felon in the Whitehouse may have been the source of much of the training for AI.

More books (above photo) have been removed from Hunky Husband's book closet, most of which have been disposed. In browsing about, I found a plaque that HH had been awarded at a charity round of golf in 2013. I've been wearing the shirt from that event for several years now (HH did not care for it, but I really like it) without realizing that HH had actually played. I don't know enough about golf to understand whether this was an individual award or one for HH's team.

I had forgotten that I had transplanted a bunch of the clumps of root beer irises, traditionally my first irises to bloom each year, to the very front of one of the planting beds beyond the driveway from the house - the bed that is second-nearest the street. The above photo shows how they looked, yesterday. Beyond the root beer irises are the frilly irises that survived my thinning of their bed during 2023 and 2024. What are left in the original bed of root beer irises, on the other side of the house, are shown in the photo, below, as they appeared Tuesday.

The frilly iris that I had expected to win the title of earliest bloomer this season is still working up its first blossoms. I had thrown the clump onto a bare planting area last year when I ran out of steam and time in dividing and cleaning frilly irises to give to neighbors Adam and Kristi.

As Bogie assured me, last year, the two clumps of lily-of-the-valley plants that she had sent me in 2023 sent up more stalks of blossoms this year than the single stalk of last year. Thank you, Bogie.

 

 

I'll close out this roundup with the last photo for the season, of the pink dogwood. From its beginning of blossoming, when the blossoms appear almost red, they faded out as they matured to the true pink for which the tree was bred.

Wow! I just like this story.

 

The embedded video was found by way of What's The Good News?

More News for Nerds - The Outlook is strange

From Slashdot.org:

Microsoft Confirms Classic Outlook CPU Usage Spikes, Offers No Fix (theregister.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday April 16, 2025 @10:30PM from the way-of-life dept.

 

Microsoft has acknowledged that Classic Outlook can mysteriously transform into a system resource hog, causing CPU usage spikes between 30-50% and significantly increasing power consumption on both Windows 10 and 11 systems.

Users first reported the issue in November 2024, but Microsoft only confirmed the problem this week, offering little resolution beyond stating that "the Outlook Team is investigating this issue." The company's sole workaround involves forcing a switch to the Semi-Annual Channel update through registry edits -- an approach many enterprise environments will likely avoid. Microsoft hasn't announced a definitive end date for Classic Outlook, but the company continues pushing users toward its New Outlook client despite its incomplete feature set.

I am a long-time user of Outlook as my resident email accessing/handling system. Is it perfect? Don't be silly. Why have I not switched to another software package? I am weary and lazy.

Since 1959, I have coped with/used/programmed/cussed/switched/learned/forgotten so many computer systems/software packages/languages/etc that it makes my head swim. As I have always had a poor memory, anything that I do not use/do often, goes away. Thus, when I started using Outlook (who knows back when?) and found it reasonably acceptable, I bonded with it. Now, though I must check my Task Manager* before closing down my computer each night, it remains the software package that I use for email. [And then there are people who have much better memories than do I, who are much brighter than am I (I'm thinking Elder Brother, here) who assure me that they don't know what I'm talking about when I ask if they use web mail or an email software package????!!!!]

___________________________________

* This was the whole point of this posting. In order for Outlook to work properly for me, I learned several years ago that it does not always close itself down nicely when I hit the <X> in the upper, right corner. If I go into my <Task Manager> upon closing down operations each day, I can manually <End Task>, assuring proper operation the next time Outlook is opened. On occasion, this little trick is required for other software packages, but Outlook is the big player.

 

Falling apart

 

Friday morning: The spring on the center, overhead garage door installation broke. The car is immobilized as the door was bowed in process and I cannot lift it.

    Action: Called Cheney Doors to come fix the installation. They will be out Monday.

    Note: In 2008, the garage door opener installation was repaired by installation of metal gearing. The (original) nylon gearing had been chewed up. At least one spring had previously broken. I believe it to have been on the same door. Mechanisms on all three garage door installations were last serviced in 2021.

Friday evening: My right hearing aid was determined to not be working properly. The problem is intermittent with signal strength being so low, at times, that the hearing aid is of no benefit. 

    Action: I already have an appointment with audiologist on Tuesday. Will have her troubleshoot the problem then.

______________________________________________________________

RESULTS - 4/14/2025 9:54am

It took 30 minutes and $260 to fix the overhead garage door installation, including installing a new spring and installing a steel angle on the top edge of the door to relieve a little of the bowing and to slow any increase in the distortion. Installing the angle was much cheaper than installing a new door, and it looks good! Daylight no longer creeps in above the door.