Good morning, hope you had a lovely weekend. We’ve got a few things happening in techland to share with you. Here they are.
1. Nationwide Vocus outage
If you’re a Vocus customer, you may have had a bad time yesterday evening doing anything on the internet. Per the Vocus status page, just before 5 pm AEST Sunday, there was a service disruption affecting Vocus Internet services located in all states. By 7:30 pm, services had been restored. But, at 9:50 pm, Sydney services were back on the blink, with a message that read, “Please be advised of a service disruption affecting IP services around the area of Sydney. Our T3 teams have been engaged to investigate and identify the cause of the disruption. An ETR will be provided once our initial investigation is complete.” Anyway, before midnight rolled in, Vocus was back to business as normal.
2. Coning in San Fran
You may have seen videos hanging around the internet of a group of activists in San Francisco placing cones on driverless cars. Per NBC Bay Area, the group are called Safe Street Rebel and they’re behind the “coning”, which essentially places an orange witches hat on the bonnet of the car, hoping to confuse and disable it. The group want the cars off the roads entirely or at the very least, severely limited. Per the report, we learn city officials could grant Cruise and Waymo full self-driving approval as early as next week. Video below from ABC7 News Bay Area.
3. Kids as young as 11 treated for ‘gaming addition’
Over to WA now and the West Australian is reporting that since the state’s Fiona Stanley Hospital started treating kids for “gaming disorders” in November, more than 80 patients have been through the clinic, some as young as 11. That article is hidden behind a paywall, but one kind user on Reddit uploaded the newspaper article here. We all know how addictive video games can be, especially those that are basically poker machines in disguise, but one quote from the article stood out: “The issue is not gaming itself … the problem is when it comes a disorder – when it takes priority over other activities”.
4. Google’s AI bot in use at hospitals
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google’s medical AI chatbot is being tested for use, including at the Mayo Clinic research hospital. I’ve reached my free article limit and the WSJ knows how to block paywall bypasses, but luckily The Verge has prepared its own report. The Verge notes Google’s Med-PaLM 2, a variant of PaLM 2 (announced at Google I/O in May) is the language model underpinning Google’s Bard. Google believes its updated model can be particularly helpful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.”
5. AI claims in the research sector
Ending with The Guardian today and over the weekend, the publication looked into claims that some peer reviewers at the Australian Research Council may have used ChatGPT to assess research proposals. Per the report, several researchers claimed that some assessor feedback provided as part of the latest Discovery Projects round of grant funding included generic wording suggesting they may have been written by artificial intelligence. You can read more here.
BONUS ITEM: Maybe don’t drink heaps of this.
See you tomorrow.
