Author: Geek Planet

When Walter Bradley passed away at age 81, the scientific and faith communities lost a rare figure: a man who combined first-rate engineering, intellectual courage, and a deep concern for human flourishing. His legacy remains alive and thriving. On ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid, talked to Robert J. Marks about Bradley’s life, work, and enduring influence. What emerged was not merely a résumé of achievements, but the portrait of a man who “lived wall to wall,” integrating science, faith, and service with remarkable consistency. Bradley was a trailblazer in the modern intelligent design movement, most notably as a coauthor of…

Kind snack bars is hedging its bets on using generative AI tools, like synthetic audiences and AI agents, to turn its business around. This year has been “an inflection point” for the Mars-owned snack brand, as Osher Hoberman, CMO at Kind North America, puts it. Kind has been struggling to capture Gen Z’s attention and faces stiff competition from private label brands, Hoberman said. That pressure over the past year has pushed the snack brand to adopt generative AI to curb marketing costs and expedite the creative process. Creative testing and learning used to take anywhere from three to four months,…

This article is republished with the author’s permission from National Review. Work continues apace toward the goal of gestating babies outside a woman’s body. Scientists have now implanted human embryos in “organoids” made of tissues that mimic the uterine lining. From, “Researchers are Getting Organoids Pregnant,” published in the MIT Technology Review: In three papers published this week by Cell Press, scientists are reporting what they call the most accurate efforts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the lab. They’ve taken human embryos from IVF centers and let these merge with “organoids” made of endometrial cells, which…

Act 2 of 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the shortest of the three acts, and it’s the most confusing. I think this entire act could’ve been cut to one, maybe two, scenes. All that’s really needed is the discovery of the Monolith on the moon and the moment when it releases its signal. The Monolith is discovered on the moon.But I understand why the writers added more because this sequence is directly inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “The Sentinel,” where a similar artifact is discovered on the moon. In both the film and short story, the artifact…

If you want high-end gaming performance without spending your nights comparing part lists and watching build guides, this iBUYPOWER Y40 Pro deal is very hard to ignore. Right now, it’s down to $1,949.99 (from a comp value of $2,449.99), which means you’re saving $500 on a prebuilt desktop that is ready to crush modern games out of the box. With an RTX 5080, a 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a roomy 2TB NVMe SSD, this setup lands well into “high-end” territory. You are getting the kind of hardware that can handle 1440p and 4K gaming, heavy…

Enthusiasm for AI implementation among marketers remains high, despite worries there’s an economic bubble forming, or that, according to a widely cited MIT study, 95% of AI pilots fail. With that dubious success rate in mind, CPG advertiser Reckitt has taken a strict approach to its own generative AI marketing projects, piloting specific use cases designed to save its staffers time and stress before rolling them out to its 700-strong marketing organization. The approach — which Bastien Parizot, Reckitt’s svp of IT and digital calls “functional reinvention” of the marketing workflow — has delivered, speeding up creative asset adaptation by 30%.…

Dr. Dembski made a list of possible contributions and offering some comments on it will clarify what I am trying to say: “Accent and Pronunciation Refinement in Language Learning” A focused speech-recognition “AI” (not a chatbot) could help students learn languages more efficiently. That tech has been around for a while. A very narrowly, ethically trained product could be useful here, but it’s no replacement for human conversation. “Creative Writing with Rhetorical Precision” This is a dangerous proposal. Writing is thinking. AI can’t be trusted to generate coherent content, nor to have a voice that is something students should emulate.…

Remember the “more personal Siri” ad that Apple pulled? Yeah, the same one where you could just say “which person I met at XYZ cafe two weeks ago” and it answered. And pulled a whole bunch of other futuristic tricks because it was armed with deep knowledge of your “iPhone life,” digging everywhere from your mail and messages to location and photos. Well, those plans still haven’t materialized.  But if you’ve been waiting for a similar convenience on Google’s side of the ecosystem, the future has just arrived. Today, Google has announced Personal Intelligence. Think of it as a more…

In the era of synthetic social, where AI slop has flooded timelines, brand marketers and agency execs have largely shrugged off concerns. The low-effort, mass produced, AI-generated content, known as AI slop, could have ripple effects on the marketing industry — misinformation, brand copyright, IP and social media saturation. Still, marketers seem unfazed, according to four brand marketers and agency execs Digiday spoke with for this piece. “AI or otherwise, the key is to make content that audiences gravitate to,” said Haley Schluter, head of North America for Buttermilk influencer agency, in an email to Digiday, later adding, “It’s only…

Editor’s note: Due to seasonal travel issues, the Monday Microsofty could not be published until today. To be a good computer scientist or engineer, you have to be a nerd. Nerds like me are offended by flawed portrayals of mathematics and physics in movies and television.  For example, in the classic 1939 Wizard of Oz Movie, when the Scarecrow got his brain, he said “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.” This mistake ruins what is an otherwise wonderful movie for me. I…