USB – Thought grazing

David W: This is great information. The explanation of cognitive changes in normal aging caught my attention. Both in terms of my profession and personal experience. I reserve morning when I’m fresh for financial matters, for example. Dividing attention refers to going back and forth between stimuli. I’m pretty certain the Trailmaking Test, created for enlistees in WW1, is open source. It’s a very good tool for assessing seniors cognitive health.

Iain: This is an interesting example of the genie being put back in the bottle. Drivers prefer physical controls to touchscreens in cars and studies have shown that they are safer. The safety regulators are now encouraging a return to physical controls for basic driving functions.

David W: I enjoyed the article. I’m interested in the interaction between normal aging and technology. Something to be aware of is that multitasking is a myth. The mind processes only one stimulus at a time. It divides and shifts attention back and forth and does so less quickly as we age. The interface that works fine at 22 may not be suitable at seventy. Because of this I never use the phone while driving.

Iain: This is an interesting study by Anthropic of how US students actually use Claude. The key finding:

Nearly half (~47%) of student-AI conversations were Direct—that is, seeking answers or content with minimal engagement. Whereas many of these serve legitimate learning purposes (like asking conceptual questions or generating study guides), we did find concerning Direct conversation examples including:

Provide answers to machine learning multiple-choice questions
Provide direct answers to English language test questions
Rewrite marketing and business texts to avoid plagiarism detection

I’ve been using Perplexity to the exclusion of any other search engine now for about a month and have had no need as yet to do deep research – but perhaps I’ll now give it a try. If anyone would like to do a comparative test of Gemini or ChatGPT, that would be interesting.

Not just Perplexity, but ChatGPT too … you can talk to Perplexity from WhatsApp
https://lifehacker.com/tech/you-can-now-talk-to-perplexity-ai-directly-from-whatsapp

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining
Watching OpenAI’s new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life. This link should show Open AI acting like Sherlock Holmes and deducing the location shown in a photograph. Impressive and worrying in equal measure!

LG’s Integrated TV Ad Tech Analyzes Your Emotions

AI of dead Arizona road rage victim addresses killer in court
Clip of Chris Pelkey, who died in 2021, says: ‘I believe in forgiveness’ after his sister fed an AI model videos of him.

Tag: USB

Meeting 8th May 2025