There’s a quote attributed to Ernest Rutherford: “That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting”. I think his point was that a lot of scientific work is just documenting things. In Rutherford’s day, there was a lot of exciting new creative work happening in physics, so perhaps physics seemed special to him.

Creating Crosswalk with chatGPT Plus. Image partially created with Dall-e Picture, if you will, the labyrinthine world of academic information management, where metadata schema mapping serves as a vital underpinning for the exchange and intermingling of data across diverse platforms and systems. This arena has long been dominated by the venerable metadata schema crosswalk, which, though serviceable, has begun to show its age.

Academic Publishing web forms meet your demise: The unstoppable rise of large language models (ChatGPT)Prompt to create DOI metadata using ChatGPT. As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, it’s worth considering how large language models will revolutionize how we interact with websites and applications. Web forms have been the dominant method for users to input data and complete tasks online for decades.

Converting DOI metadata between metadata schemas using ChatGPT Large language models have been making waves in artificial intelligence for a good reason. These models have the ability to understand and generate human language, which has far-reaching implications for the future of technology. One area where these models have a significant impact is in the realm of software development.

This is Ralph. How tall is Ralph? It seems simple, you could just hold a ruler up to the screen. But when you look at the ruler and use it to measure Ralph, are you actually measuring Ralph, or are you measuring the ruler and using that as a proxy? How accurate is your measurement? Are you including fur in the measurement? What if Ralph were to stand on his hind legs, like a mighty bear — how tall would he be then?

I haven’t blogged for a while, work and other reasons have meant I’ve not had much time to think, and mostly I blog to help me think. ChatGPT is obviously a big thing at the moment, and once we get past the moral panic (“students can pass exams using AI!”) there are a lot of interesting possibilities to explore.

Prompted by a post on Mastodon (which, like all Mastodon posts, I can no longer find), I asked ChatGPT to tell me about my own papers. The response started out well but quickly got much worse. I will indent my comments on its response. Q. What are some articles written by Michael P. Taylor?

One thing about ChatGPT is it has opened my eyes to some concepts I was dimly aware of but am only now beginning to fully appreciate. ChatGPT enables you ask it questions, but the answers depend on what ChatGPT “knows”. As several people have noted, what would be even better is to be able to run ChatGPT on your own content. Indeed, ChatGPT itself now supports this using plugins.

Guinea worm disease reaches all-time low: only 13* human cases reported in 2022 Only 13 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2022. This Neglected Tropical Disease is on the WHO 2030 roadmap to become only the second human disease in history to be eradicated, after smallpox.

I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but I really don’t like that designation as it implies some understanding.