Sharing Stories, Building Community
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Examples: Mobile phones, Artificial Intelligence, Self-driving cars, Jet engines, Electric cars,
Bruce Gobioff
and a new talent
It’s a new year. It’s 2023. A year we once thought of as being in the far distant future, long after “2001: A Space Odyssey”. But now it’s here, and we’d better get used to it.
And we have the perfect story to start our year. As you can tell by looking in the upper right, Bruce Gobioff is involved. But he didn’t create this issue’s article alone. Who helped him? And how?
Theresa D’Aiuto Sokol
OLLI Connects is almost three years old, and in its short lifetime, we have shared a wide variety of your fellow OLLI members’ contributions: powerful stories, rich personal experiences, fascinating nuggets of history, and humor. We’ve taken you on trips to other parts of the United States and journeys to other parts of the world. We’ve shared technology, book reviews, poetry and more. We’ve had posts that were all photographs with no more words than were needed for context.
But we’ve not had a post that was almost all video. Until today.
Theresa D’Aiuto Sokol has shared two of her blog posts, and now she shares some of her video work. (More…)
Diane Russell
No doubt you now have heard of Zoom, which is used extensively to conduct virtual meetings since the spread of COVID-19. OLLI also is considering its use for group communications.
Have you considered using Zoom to keep in touch with your family?
One of my sisters and her family live in Chicagoland, while my other sister lives in Tucson. We were together as a group most recently on Christmas Day in 2018. When my 30-year-old niece, Amy, suggested that we gather virtually using Zoom, I literally jumped at the chance. Instead of gathering as Brady Bunch heads to share our recent safer-at-home stories, we danced! (More …)
Diane White
Connecting with others in real time, whether it’s with Zoom, Facetime, Go To Meeting, or any similar video-type interactions, is a life line to combat social isolation while we are “social distancing”. But we also have to ask: How can we be safe? What do we need to know when connecting with others by video? Yes, there are some important safeguards that you may not have thought of when you participate in, or host, any video-type meeting like Zoom.
In this article, “Zoom” will apply to any video-type interaction where you are live online, connecting with others using a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. (More…)
Since you currently have more spare time for reading, we thought we’d give you an extra OLLI Connects post this week. Our featured writer is not technically an OLLI member. But if he were still living and in our area, we’re sure he would be. His work is the central piece of a larger post on the need—despite the fear it engenders—to get comfortable with online collaboration and learning the way we eventually got the hang of smart phones and Facebook. Be honest. There was a time when both of those terrified you. And now they’re integral parts of your life. COVID-19 is just giving us a kick in the pants to move us more quickly in a direction we were already kind of reluctantly going.
The first part of this post is from the most recent newsletter of UFF, the United Faculty of Florida. (More…)
Morrey Grimes
At a meeting today, I was asked about chapbooks and also about self-publishing. I have reconciled with my mistress, Valentina, and we are again on the same page (no pun intended), speaking the same language,
Valentina is my PC. I have personalized my PC, and provided it (her) with a gender. I like the mercurial energy of women better than the static energy of men. Valentina is my muse and inspiration, but also my critic.
Let me tell you about Valentina: she is smarter than I am, but I will be the first to admit that that is not too difficult of a place to be. She does not correct my mistakes, but only points them out for me to correct. Not only is she in a perpetual state of learning, but she also is constantly is teaching me something. She keeps me entertained and (More…)
Diane White
It’s not something you normally think about – remembering to go in and clear the data Google stores on you. Now Google has options to make your data disappear automatically after a set time. With these new options, once you set it – you can forget it!
I’ve also included how to take the Google privacy checkup. Just scroll to the end if you want to skip the auto-delete options.
Is setting up auto-deleting right for you?
Michael Bice
Eric Topol’s Deep Medicine is a significant contribution to American medicine and should be required reading for anyone interested in the present and future of health delivery. I read the book as a student and teacher of digital health technologies and quickly discovered that my understanding of AI and medicine is superficial at best. In my quest to overcome this deficit, I found the following observations from the Topol book to be of particular relevance.
The first major entry of AI into the practice of medicine was automated systems for reading ECGs, which were first applied in the 1970s and became routine in the 1980s.
Deep neural networks (DNN) are the driving force supporting AI innovations in health. The DNN era was made possible by these four components: (More…)
Diane White
Traveling can be stressful. What can you do? From apps to therapy dogs, I’ve put together a list of my favorite high- and low-tech travel tips for getting there, getting around, and getting a better travel experience.
Beyond the basics travel apps. If you are a frequent traveler, you may already have these basic apps on your phone: Google Maps, Kayak and your airline’s app for mobile boarding passes and travel alerts. Beyond those, here are three apps that may help your travel experience. (More…)
Diane White
Tweets are everywhere. Originally a small chirping sound that a bird makes to get attention or communicate with other birds of a feather, human tweets are now seemingly everywhere. Like them or not – you may want to understand more about them. What compels people to tweet – to make those small chirp-like comments and send them to anyone in the world? Want to join in? I’ll tell you how to get started and give you some fun Twitter trivia facts to amaze your friends, family and trivial pursuit team! (More…)
