Understanding humanoid robots
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
18h ago
From TechCrunch: Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms, two legs, a head — the whole shebang. Karel Čapek’s play, R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti), was a hit. It was translated into dozens of languages and played across Europe and North America. The work’s lasting legacy, however, was its introduction of the word “robot.” The mea ..read more
Visit website
Using Beat Sheets to Slant Your Memoir’s Scenes
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
19h ago
From Jane Friedman: Most memoirs involve some kind of loss—a breakup, a displacement, a dismantled dream, the death of someone dearly loved. The more painful the event, the more you’ll want to write about it. But as you revise, you’ll discover that some (or many) of your scenes aren’t needed. To figure out what’s important, and how to write about it, you need to identify your memoir’s beats. Beats are part of the Beat Sheet tool Blake Snyder created for his book Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. These turning points work together to create a propulsive story t ..read more
Visit website
More doctors use ChatGPT to help with busy workloads, but is AI a reliable assistant?
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
21h ago
From Fox News: Dr. AI will see you now. It might not be that far from the truth, as more and more physicians are turning to artificial intelligence to ease their busy workloads. Studies have shown that up to 10% of doctors are now using ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) made by OpenAI — but just how accurate are its responses? A team of researchers from the University of Kansas Medical Center decided to find out. “Every year, about a million new medical articles are published in scientific journals, but busy doctors don’t have that much time to read them,” Dan Parente, the senior study aut ..read more
Visit website
In Defense of Imagination
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
23h ago
From Public Books: In his short story “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu makes a case for imagination’s value: for its innate significance and material power. I teach “The Paper Menagerie” every year in my introduction to literary studies course at West Virginia University, and every year, it makes me and most of my students cry. Liu’s story charts the deterioration of a once tender relationship between a Chinese mother and her Chinese American son, figuring their connection through a set of magical paper animals. The creatures that Mom crafts out of recycled wrapping paper using zhezhi, or C ..read more
Visit website
In the most secret heart of every intellectual
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
2d ago
In the most secret heart of every intellectual … there lies hidden … the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man. Lionel Trilling ..read more
Visit website
Write Like a Man
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
2d ago
From The Wall Street Journal: Many years ago, at a dinner party attended by some of the ex-radicals turned Cold Warriors known as the New York intellectuals, the table talk turned to denigrating writers reputed to be soft on communism and praising the “hard” anticommunists who were fighting for democracy and freedom. Before the guests could become too complacent, however, the literary critic Diana Trilling stood up and declared: “None of you men are hard enough for me!” In “Write Like a Man,” Ronnie A. Grinberg recounts this scene to illustrate how members of this “testosterone-driven literary ..read more
Visit website
Gun violence killed them. Now, their voices will lobby Congress to do more using AI
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
2d ago
From National Public Radio “It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing,” Joaquin Oliver’s voice echoed across the U.S. Capitol grounds Wednesday. “Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have continued to happen since.” On Feb. 14, 2018, Oliver started another day as a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. By the end, he was one of 17 people murdered at the school in a mass shooting that sparked a worldwide, youth-led movement on gun violence. Now, people can hear his voice again. Oliver’s audio is one of six messages generated by artificial intelligence meant t ..read more
Visit website
Perplexity Talks About Self-Publishing
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
2d ago
PG spent a little time with Perplexity an AI writing assistant. You can decide how useful it was. He used the free version, which he found to be quite powerful. Note: Perplexity responses includes links to online sources it found and, presumably, used in formatting its responses. PG has left the live links in place at the end of each of the bullet points at the end of the bullet points. He’s not certain whether extensive use will break the links or not. PG was disappointed about the limited number of sources Perplexity apparently relied upon. He speculates that the professional version, which ..read more
Visit website
A new generation of music-making algorithms is here
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
2d ago
From The Economist: IN THE dystopia of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother numbs the masses with the help of a “versificator”, a machine designed to automatically generate the lyrics to popular tunes, thereby ridding society of human creativity. Today, numerous artificial-intelligence (AI) models churn out, some free of charge, the music itself. Unsurprisingly, many fear a world flooded with generic and emotionally barren tunes, with human musicians edged out in the process. Yet there are brighter signs, too, that AI may well drive a boom in musical creativity. AI music-making is nothing ..read more
Visit website
A Love That Endured Life’s March Madness
The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing
by PG
2d ago
From The Wall Street Journal: In 1956 the Ohio State University basketball team moved out of the drafty old Ohio Fairgrounds Coliseum and into the newly constructed St. John Arena. As a 9-year-old, I was excited to get a ticket to one of the daytime games. I have no memory of who Ohio State was playing that afternoon, but there is one thing I have never forgotten. The captain of the Buckeyes, Gene Millard, would bring the ball down the court and for the whole game there was a pretty young woman sitting in the stands near my elementary-school buddies and me, shouting enthusiastically. “Geno ..read more
Visit website

Follow The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing & Traditional Publishing on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR