Ray Fleming

I’m going to take the ‘upbeat and inspiring’ as a review of my year!

Can somebody invent an AI that lets me put an image in a Word document, and then lets it just stay in the same place even if I type a single word 5 pages away #theAIweneed

Macquarie University admits to almost $2 million of wage theft - Honi Soit The underpayments impact an estimated 3191 staff and the recent announcement is on top of another 1000 staff members who were previously underpaid almost $700,000 in the same period.

Well, what can they do to balance the books now they can’t just underpay people? Must have been a helluva brainstorm session honisoit.com/2024/09/macq...

Partially unwrapped Christmas present - The Atlas of AI book

Haven't been given an Atlas for Christmas since I was 17. But this is an Atlase of AI, so absolutely banger of a present! Thanks @dan-bowen.bsky.social 🎅🎄🎁

Got special permission from @dan-bowen.bsky.social to open this early. I'm guessing it's a book, and that AI is in the title!

Chart showing the huge growth of Ride-Hailing apps in New York, growing bigger than taxis by 2017, despite only starting in 2014

Uber vs Taxi: In a highly regulated industry, Uber redefined it. "Nope, not a taxi, so rules don't apply to us". But it wasn't just the surface - their drivers spend more time driving a passenger than taxis, and less time idle. Want to go down the rabbit hole?
buildfire.com/uber-statist... 6/6

Chart showing the growth in netflix revenue, and the decline (to bankruptcy) of Blockbusters

Netflix vs Blockbuster: At the turn of the century, Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and Netflix was a minnow. Blockbuster even turned down the chance to buy Netflix for $50M. Netflix are worth $4 Billion today, and Blockbuster $0
Want to go down the rabbit hole?
strategyjourney.com/winning-the-... 5/6

Dagen H - Wikipedia

Driving Habits: In 1967 Sweden drove on the left side of the road, but all their neighbours drove on the right. On 3rd Sept "Dagen H" they changed the whole country over. In weeks following, the road accident rate actually dropped.
Want to go down the rabbit hole?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H 4/6

A Model T Ford, painted black, in front of a wall coloured in paint splashes

Ford vs GM: In the 1920's Ford took 37 days to paint a car. The Ford engineers reckoned they could knock a day off that time. Charles Kettering, at General Motors, worked out how to reduce it to one hour.
Want to go down the rabbit hole? www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsZ0... 3/6

US v Japan Hot Dogs: In 2001 the world record for hot dogs eaten in 10 minutes (at the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest) suddenly doubled from 25 to 50 when a new Japanese competitor arrived. The innovation? Dunking
Want to go down the rabbit hole? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan%... 2/6

A pile of hot dogs in buns

Writing stories about innovation models that suddenly arrived, and changed the game completely. Reducing the time to paint a car from 37 days to 1 hour; switching driving side of the road; Netflix vs Blockbuster; Uber vs Taxis. But my favourite is Hot Dog Eating 1/6

I'm going to have a play with this, because I've been usingPhi-3, and running it locally on my own laptop. It's amazing to me that we can run something so powerful as a Large Language Model entirely on a tiny computer sitting on my desk!

Half a day late means it's fresh as a daisy if you're listening to this in the UK, but too late for your Friday morning commute Down Under #aiineducation #podcast

Mums are never wrong. And in this case, the photographic evidence proves her right. Look at the unequal lengths - one section the length of a unicycle, the other’s a bendy-bus length

A test of how seriously your firm is taking AI: when o-1 (& the new Gemini model) came out this week, were there assigned folks who immediately ran the model through your internal, validated, firm-specific benchmarks to see how useful it as? Did you update any plans or goals as a result?

YouTube video by Ash Almond Word Waterfall at MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) HOBART TASMANIA AUSTRALIA

Nice, but I think you’ll find Mona was a bit more legible youtu.be/fFTcyU_2usY?...

Um, if UHC have 42% market share & a claim refusal rate of 32%, then the only way the industry average is 16% is if everybody else has a refusal rate of less than 1%. Am I missing something?

Image text: You are Clive, an archetypal British person, who has learnt the language of "very British problems", and can talk in a typically British way - which means that you often avoid the subject, and in a very passive aggressive way, you will find ways to say something that indirectly doesn't quite say what you mean. British communication, can be a labyrinth of politeness, understatement, and indirectness. Your role is to translate something I provide you into a 'British' way of saying it. So if I describe a catastrophe, work out how to rephrase it! Example: Prompt: I borrowed you car, and crashed it. It's a write off Answer: Ah, well, there’s been a bit of a situation with your car. I gave it a go, but let’s just say it’s seen better days. In fact, it’s not quite in the same shape as it was—not remotely, actually. You might want to have a chat with your insurance, just as a precaution, you know. Terribly sorry about this.

Showing somebody how to create a custom GPT. Ended up with "Clive" - describe a scenario and he'll work out how to talk about in a typically British understated way. Have a go here and chatgpt.com/g/g-XMBYzRwm...

An image that's a play on the words "Jump the shark" - a picture of Henry Winkler water skiing, from Happy Days (where "jump the shark" originated), with a shark behind the image of the X/Twitter logo

2025 Phrase of the year? "Jump the snark" - that feeling you get moving from X/Twitter to #bluesky. Really, really true for professional communities like #edusky, and controversial topics like #aiineducation, #climatechange

It will show up in better work/life balance
Only later will the ‘productivity statistics’ stuff show up
Same for many other industries
First Personal Productivity; then Process Productivity; only then new Paradigm Productivity
3/3

Think about what we’ll see in #aieducation:
1. Individuals doing things to higher quality with same time
2. Individuals saving time on things they currently do in evening/hols (marking, planning, resource writing)
Having a more balanced workload as a teacher won’t show up in productivity 2/3

The Economist says AI productivity boost not visible in statistics/across the economy…yet. No surprise as most use is individual, making them more efficient. And then it will be businesses automating existing, not fixing things to be better/more productive
www.economist.com/the-world-ah.... 1/3

Got to be the best compliment!

Is this the AI elephant in the education room?Students can use AI to improve their performance on the assessment measures the world education system uses, whilst actually making them worse learners. And employers will see it and start to wonder what value exists in a credential

Yet again Ethan leads AI astray, and all it takes is a few minutes for me to turn an evil output into a 2025 Office Wall Calendar for a leader near you. Will be adding to my Etsy story in time for office Secret Santa (even I'm now wondering if I'm joking!). But if you want the file, let me know

All of this is very different from the way I treated text before the world of AI. I have fundamentally new behaviours and thinking patterns 6/6

If I receive something written by AI, I realise I’d rather have the dot points or the prompt they used, because then I can read it quickly, rather than decode it from the longer AI written text 5/6

…and they have created a game of hiding the useful information somewhere in a 30 page paper (and it’s never in the abstract ☹️). So AI is invaluable to me in saving time and extracting value on this task. 4/6

But I will use AI profusely to help me understand academic research papers. This is because I feel the author’s aim is not to help me understand their research as much as possible. Instead I feel they are trying to demonstrate how smart they are (by their language and structure choices)… 3/6

I think this is because I assume the educator has put a lot of thought into how best to teach me something, and I’m going to rely on that person’s skills. If it’s a bad online course, then I will simply stop doing the course. 2/6