kalmn

Goodness knows, some real weirdness is revealed in You Be the Judge in Guardian Saturday, but today's produces a theory which is entirely new to me -

You be the judge: should my housemate stop warming her mug and then pouring the water back into the kettle?

But apart from all this hoohah about HYGIENE, I am rather taken with New Health Scare Theory:

Boiling water twice is a no-no for me – there is a change in quality and taste. My life had a certain drabness to it – I now attribute that to consuming poor-quality water for so long without realising.

I was going to ask are they living in a log cabin or what in Ohio if the kitchen is so freezingly cold in the mornings they have to warm up the mugs so that they do not immediately chill the coffee but I see the issue is poor insulation.

Maybe they should do something about insulation rather than bicker over 'secondhand water'?

Or whatever. This is clearly my week for being Grumpy Archivist.

Have been solicited to review article for journal with which I have had a long connection, following a recent backstory I will not go into.

But anyway, I have been asked to review it, and it is definitely Within My Purlieu -

Perhaps too much so, because on opening the document to check that it in fact was, the person sending it having given me no indication of what it was about -

Discovered it was based upon an archive with which I had a significant history.

And no, the fact that there is this beautiful and fairly substantial archive in lovely curated order available to the researcher is a lot less down to the creating body (okay, I will give them points for the stuff actually having survived in fairly good nick) than to the work of archivists over 2-3 decades acquiring the material (in batches as it turned up during office moves and so on), sorting it into some kind of coherent order, and cataloguing it.

A saga which is actually recounted in the online catalogue to the collection, not to mention an article wot I writ about the organisation in question.

It is actually a pretty cool organisation, compared to some I have had dealings with, but superior archive processing, not really in their skill-set.

Grump. Will try and make tactful point about acknowledging the labour of archivists....

***

We may recall the saga of the tech bro whose sprog did not want the AI teddy he had acquired for her to talk back, and turned the speech facility off, his head around this he could not get -

And this is very creepy, no lessons have been learnt: AI toys for children misread emotions and respond inappropriately, researchers warn:

The parents in the study were interested in the toy's potential to teach language and communication skills.
However, their children frequently struggled to converse with it. Gabbo didn't hear their interruptions, talked over them, could not differentiate between child and adult voices and responded awkwardly to declarations of affection.
When one five-year-old said, "I love you," to the toy, it replied: "As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed."
The concern is that at a developmental stage where children are learning about social interaction and cues, generative AI output could be confusing.