{"id":252583,"date":"2022-09-13T17:51:10","date_gmt":"2022-09-13T17:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=252583"},"modified":"2022-09-13T17:51:10","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T17:51:10","slug":"the-woman-who-is-bringing-indias-forests-back-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2022\/09\/13\/the-woman-who-is-bringing-indias-forests-back-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The woman who is bringing India\u2019s forests back to life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tulsi Gowind Gowda has spent most of her more than 80 years planting and nurturing trees in southern India. \u201cI like them more than anything else in my life,\u201d she said. She has walked for miles, deep into tropical rainforests, carefully cutting healthy branches from hundreds of trees and replanting and grafting them. Her eyes light up when she talks about rare seeds or a sapling<\/a>. And when she dies, she would like to be reborn, she says, as a big tree. Gowda \u2014 who doesn\u2019t know the year of her birth but believes she is more than 80 \u2014 has devoted her life to transforming vast swaths of barren land in her native state of Karnataka, in southern India, into dense forests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chess player Hans Niemann hits back over \u2018cheating\u2019 controversy in St Louis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Chess master Magnus Carlsen\u2019s shock withdrawal from the $350,000 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis following his third-round defeat to the newcomer Hans Niemann has triggered a variety of \u201ccheating\u201d claims. It is potentially the most serious such case for international chess<\/a> since the 2005 Toiletgate world championship match, when Veselin Topalov accused Vlad Kramnik of analysing games in the lavatory. Carlsen\u2019s loss to Niemann, 19, was his first for several years with White to a much lower rated opponent, and it was the first withdrawal of the Norwegian\u2019s entire career. His only explanation was a cryptic video clip of Jos\u00e9 Morinho saying \u201cIf I speak I am in big trouble,\u201d during a press conference about referees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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AI is making it easier for students to cheat<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first online article generator debuted in 2005. Now, A.I.-generated text can now be found in novels, fake news articles and real news articles, marketing campaigns, and dozens of other written products. The tech is either free or cheap to use, which places it in the hands of anyone. And it\u2019s probably already burrowing into America\u2019s classrooms right now. Using an A.I. program is not \u201cplagiarism\u201d in the traditional sense<\/a>\u2014there\u2019s no previous work for the student to copy, and thus no original for teachers\u2019 plagiarism detectors to catch. Instead, a student first feeds text from either a single or multiple sources into the program to begin the process. The program then generates content by using a set of parameters on a topic, which then can be personalized to the writer\u2019s specifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They built a Minecraft crypto empire. Then it all came crashing down<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Created in late 2021, Critterz incorporated nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency into the Minecraft universe, bringing a \u201cplay to earn\u201d model to the best-selling video game of all time. Players needed to own an NFT to enter the Critterz server; once inside, they could earn an in-game cryptocurrency that could be traded for real money. They could buy plots of land in the Critterz world, also represented as NFTs, and sell the constructions they built on them to other players. For a while, it worked<\/a>. Some Critterz players told Rest of World<\/em> that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As AI-generated art platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion explode in popularity, online communities devoted to sharing human-generated art are forced to make a decision: should AI art be allowed? On Sunday, popular furry art community Fur Affinity announced that AI-generated art was not allowed because it \u201clacked artistic merit.\u201d<\/a> (In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned.) Last year, the 27-year-old art\/animation portal Newgrounds banned images made with Artbreeder, a tool for \u201cbreeding\u201d GAN-generated art. Late last month, Newgrounds rewrote their guidelines to explicitly disallow images generated by AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beneath every poet, a criminal lurks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 1958, a Virginia man known as \u201cThe Poet\u201d was wanted for questioning following a string of robberies, including a liquor store, a pharmacy, and even The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s stereotype foreman. After the newspaper published a story about their accosted employee, \u201cThe Poet\u201d sent the offices some \u201clight verse,\u201d which concluded: \u201cThe moral of this poem is \/ If you like to save your bread, \/ Be more careful or you\u2019ll be dead.\u201d Less menacing, but perhaps no less dangerous, was John W. Kearney<\/a>, described in a 1927 news report as a \u201cburglar, forger, safe cracker, arch-bigamist, poet, musician and prize fighter.\u201d Held in a San Francisco jail, admitted ten simultaneous marriages, claiming \u201cWomen are easy. I met them at church, parties, dances, any kind of social gathering. Then I would sing to them, talk poetry, love them and they were mine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Mexican grandmother’s YouTube cooking channel is outperforming celebrity chefs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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(1\/9) Gordon Ramsay and Martha Stewart are being outperformed by Do\u00f1a Angela, a grandma from rural Mexico and her daughter\u2019s phone camera. pic.twitter.com\/bsj9J6XJs2<\/a><\/p>— Latinometrics \ud83d\udcca (@LatamData) September 7, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote>