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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig
@nic221.bsky.social
4.9K followers 400 following 3.6K posts
E-learning dev & AI educator at U of Arizona Libraries. Former head of UX at MIT Libraries. Winner of MIT Excellence Award. nicolehennig.com. Digital nomad from 2013-17, locationflexiblelife.com. - vegetarian - car-free - universal basic income: yes
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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · Nov 13
Generative AI News https://nicolehennig.com/gen-ai-news/ (my free monthly newsletter) #AI #Substack #newsletters
10 Tips for Keeping Up with Generative AI
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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 6h
Video Overviews on NotebookLM get a major upgrade with Nano Banana https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/video-overviews-nano-banana/ #AI #NotebookLM
Text Shot: Video Overviews now look even better thanks to Nano Banana, Gemini’s latest image generation update. Plus, try a new "Brief" format for quick insights.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 16h
I Summarized the 313 Slide State of AI Report so You Don't Have to Read It—Here's the TLDR - Nate B. Jones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRhOo6uT-fM #AI #trends (worth watching/listening to)
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21h
Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-431-technological-optimism (Interesting to think about. Not sure what I think) #AI #future #capabilities
Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear
What do we do if AI progress keeps happening?
importai.substack.com
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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21h
✨ Claude Turns Ideas into Apps https://wondertools.substack.com/p/turn-ideas-into-apps #AI #Artifacts #education #tips
✨ Claude Turns Ideas into Apps
Claude Artifacts lets you make flashcards, quizzes, games—just by chatting
wondertools.substack.com
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21h
Get it in, track it down, follow up - Mike Caulfield https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/get-it-in-track-it-down-follow-up #AI #InformationLiteracy #factChecking #context
Three Moves, Six Tips Get it in Tip #1: Just select the whole claim or upload the whole image Track it down Tip #2: Click the link nearest the claim you want to verify Tip #3: To explore/source individual points feed them back into Al Mode Follow up Tip #4: Use an evidence-focused prompt for better accuracy Tip #5: Ask it to lean into the sources you value Tip #6: Keep a follow-ups file
nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21h
NotebookLM to add Magic View, Fast Research and more https://www.testingcatalog.com/notebooklm-works-on-fast-research-and-redies/ #AI #NotebookLM
Text Shot: Beyond Magic View, NotebookLM is set to introduce practical upgrades: Infographics Component: This will soon support both landscape and portrait formats, offering flexibility for those who use these visuals in reports or presentations. Fast Research Option: Added alongside Deep Research, this provides users with a quicker, more concise reporting path. This distinction helps accommodate both in-depth exploration and situations where speed is a priority, though it remains separate from the main search function for now.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22h
Meta Ray-Bans: Blind User’s Experience with Smart Glasses - ABILITY Magazine https://abilitymagazine.com/meta-ray-bans-blind-users-experience-with-smart-glasses/ #AI #accessibility #SmartGlasses
Text Shot: After using the Meta Ray-Bans for a couple months, my daily life feels less stressful and more manageable. I’m still uncovering tools that affect what might seem trivial to a sighted person but are life-altering for a blind person.
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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22h
Does AI Have A Place in Art? Architect & Professor Joshua Vermillion Answers https://sharpmagazine.com/2025/10/09/does-ai-have-a-place-in-art-architect-professor-joshua-vermillion-interview/ #AI #design #architecture
Text Shot: Vermillion foresees a world where AI could help us achieve sustainable urban environments. “Design is about making decisions. You start with a framework, and then those initial decisions start to lead to subdecisions and secondary decisions, tertiary decisions. But what if we could play out these scenarios much quicker with less wasted efficiency? What if AI can help scale buildings that don’t contribute to urban heat islands and are net producers of energy, rather than just consumers of energy? We’ve left a lot of problems for the next generation to wade through, but I’m positive. I’m optimistic that this technology can help us navigate it.”
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 1d
The China Factor in The Great Progression of the Next 25 Years https://peterleyden.substack.com/p/the-china-factor-in-the-great-progression (interesting) #AI #China #renewables
The China Factor in The Great Progression of the Next 25 Years
My recent trip to China shows the incredible material progress for its citizens and contributions to the world's clean energy future but also the dangers of their authoritarian system in The AI Age
peterleyden.substack.com
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
The Library’s New Entryway https://newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-librarys-new-entryway/ #AI #libraries #search
Text Shot: What if we could combine the LLM’s better understanding of a student’s aims with the rigorous index and robust collection of a research library? That’s what our new Northeastern University Library Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and plugin for Claude does. Here’s the same student, using NUL + Claude:
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
New report: Household upgrades could offset all new projected data center energy demand | Rewiring America https://www.rewiringamerica.org/research/homegrown-energy-report-ai-data-center-demand (good ideas) #climate #energy #DataCenters
Text Shot: Hyperscalers should pay for heat pumps, rooftop solar, and storage to get the capacity they need on the grid now, while setting us up for an affordable, reliable, and clean energy future.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
Education in the AI Age: a Teacher Rethinks Learning & Purpose, w/ Johan Falk of Graspable AI https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/education-in-the-ai-age-a-teacher-rethinks-learning-purpose-w-johan-falk-of-graspable-ai/ #AI #education (podcast episode)
Education in the AI Age: a Teacher Rethinks Learning & Purpose, w/ Johan Falk of Graspable AI
Today Johan Falk, author, speaker, and AI analyst from Stockholm, Sweden, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his work reimagining education for the AI era, exploring why teaching students to use AI responsibly is now urgent, how traditional grades and standardized tests may become obsolete,
www.cognitiverevolution.ai
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
The AI water issue is fake - Andy Masley https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake #AI #water #DataCenters
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
State of AI Report 2025 https://www.stateof.ai/ #AI #reports
Text Shot: Key takeways from the 2025 Report include:: OpenAI retains a narrow lead at the frontier, but competition has intensified as Meta reliquinshes the mantle to China’s DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi close the gap on reasoning and coding tasks, establishing China as a credible #2. Reasoning defined the year, as frontier labs combined reinforcement learning, rubric-based rewards, and verifiable reasoning with novel environments to create models that can plan, reflect, self-correct, and work over increasingly long time horizons. AI is becoming a scientific collaborator, with systems like DeepMind’s Co-Scientist and Stanford’s Virtual Lab autonomously generating, testing, and validating hypotheses. In biology, Profluent’s ProGen3 showed that scaling laws now apply to proteins too. Structured reasoning entered the physical world through “Chain-of-Action” planning, as embodied AI systems such as AI2’s Molmo-Act and Google’s Gemini Robotics 1.5 began to reason step-by-step before acting. …
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
Exclusive: First real samples of Veo 3.1 generated videos https://www.testingcatalog.com/first-real-samples-of-veo-3-1-generated-videos/ #AI #video
Text Shot: The growing anticipation around Google’s Veo 3.1 reflects the competitive pace in generative video AI, especially with Sora 2 from OpenAI now in public hands. Veo 3.1 is positioned as the next step after Veo 3, which already established a strong reputation for reliable video output. The main audience waiting for this update includes creators, marketers, and anyone interested in AI-powered content production, particularly those seeking alternatives to Sora or wishing to see what Google can deliver on the video front.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
Nature’s voice? Trees speak up in AI-powered experiment https://www.positive.news/environment/natures-voice-trees-speak-up-in-ai-powered-experiment/ #AI #nature #creativity
Text Shot: Trees that talk back might sound like something fresh out of a fairytale or a psychedelic trip, but a hi-tech stunt aimed at bridging the divide between youth culture with nature has turned fantasy into reality. London-based agency Droga5 dreamed up the campaign for the creative popup, Agency for Nature, giving voice to trees in the UK capital, in Dublin and in Austin, Texas. Bioelectrical signals from each tree were transformed into speech through an AI large language model. It was fed insights about the trees’ lifespans and histories, alongside data from biosensors that record metrics such as wind speed, temperature and soil moisture.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d
As coal fades, Australia looks to realize dream of 100% renewable… https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/australia-aims-all-renewables-no-coal #energy #renewables #climate #Australia
Text Shot: “This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. ​“Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. ​“They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.” Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels — mostly coal with some gas — to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.
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Reposted by Nicole Hennig
timothysnyder.bsky.social
Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 2d
Make your plans for #NoKings. October 18th. Free speech is action. Please join in. You'll see me at one of the events.
www.nokings.org
No Kings
As the president escalates his authoritarian power grab, the NO KINGS non-violent movement continues to rise stronger. We are united once again to remind the world: America has No Kings and the power ...
www.nokings.org
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 3d
Data centers & electricity - Part 1: They're not raising national prices https://andymasley.substack.com/p/data-centers-and-electricity-part #AI #DataCenters
Data centers & electricity - Part 1: They're not raising national prices
Yet, anyway, but they have raised local costs a bit
andymasley.substack.com
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 3d
Your Prompts, Spotify’s Personalized Picks: Introducing Spotify in ChatGPT — Spotify https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-10-06/spotify-personalized-prompts-chatgpt/ #AI #ChatGPT #apps
Text Shot: Now, Spotify can join your ChatGPT conversations, too. Starting today, both Spotify Free and Premium users can bring Spotify into their ChatGPT conversations to receive personalized music and podcast recommendations.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d
Cultural heritage institutions can offer trustworthy information, something that commercial AI systems lack – Interview with dr. Ines Vodopivec https://ai4dh.eu/2025/07/01/interview-with-dr-ines-vodopivec/ #AI #HistoricalArchives
Text Shot: One of the most interesting projects I’ve come across recently comes from the National Library of Norway. They undertook the mass digitisation of newspapers. Not just a single year, collection or issue, but everything. A huge amount of scans were created without marking the first and last pages of each newspaper. They used a human-in-the-loop approach, where people tried to identify the first pages. However, the amount of material was simply too large for manual processing. Therefore they developed an AI tool that was able to automatically detect the first pages of the newspapers. This enabled them to automate and accelerate the whole process. Another good example is the use of a chatbot in the Digital Library of Luxembourg. They have implemented a system similar to ChatGPT, but it is limited to searching within the digital library. This means that it does not hallucinate answers as it only returns information based on verified materials from the collection. Each result is…
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d
Data Centers: The Hidden Backbone of Our Modern World: Stepchange https://www.stepchange.show/p/data-centers-the-hidden-backbone (wow, this podcast was super interesting, 4 hours long, but totally worth it) #AI #DataCenters #history #climate #future
Text Shot: Every time you stream a movie, send a text message, scroll a feed, or chat with your favorite AI, you’re touching an invisible, physical empire. We call it the cloud, but it isn’t in the sky. It is astonishingly physical—alive in over 12,000 buildings around the world, consuming almost five percent of U.S. electricity, and running through cables laid across the ocean floor. This is the story of data centers. From the humming punch-card rooms of the 1930s to the Cold War projects that accidentally birthed the internet, and onward to the gigawatt-scale AI factories of today, data centers have quietly become the industrial engine of our era. Six companies—NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—now dominate global markets in part because they command this infrastructure, just as railroads, steel, and oil once defined the fortunes of the last century. Data centers are the machines behind the modern world. They shape commerce, media, communication, and now…
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d
The Shift Ahead: HBCUs, Artificial Intelligence, and a New Vision for Higher Education. - UNCF ICB https://uncficb.org/survey-finds-near-universal-ai-adoption-at-hbcus-98-of-students-and-96-of-faculty-already-using-it/ #AI #education
Text Shot: Students are confident and optimistic but need institutional support. 84% say AI improves the quality of their schoolwork, 87% are optimistic about AI’s impact on learning, and 82% expect to use it in their careers. 1 in 5 students cited cost and lack of reliable internet as key barriers to usage. 60% want formal coursework on AI; over 40% seek certifications and advanced tools. AI is viewed as a critical lever for workforce alignment. Over 90% of faculty identified student use of AI for career planning is likely to grow over the next two years; over 80% foresee increased use of AI by faculty and administrators to align curricula with workforce needs over that same time period. HBCUs are already embedding AI into curricula and exploring industry partnerships to equip students with job-ready skills.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d
Beyond the Baying Mob https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/beyond-the-baying-mob #AI #luddites #history #nuance
The real Luddites were not opposed to all mechanisation. They made careful distinctions between machines used in ways that protected workers' interests and machines used in ways that harmed them. They had specific, articulable demands: enforce existing quality standards, maintain customary wages, allow workers to organise collectively. They understood that the problem was not the stocking frame as such but the economic system within which it was being deployed. Contemporary Al critique needs to recover this specificity. Rather than demanding that Al development cease entirely, we should be asking: which applications of Al genuinely improve human welfare, and which primarily serve to concentrate power and profit? What regulatory frameworks could ensure that Al development serves broad social interests rather than narrow private ones? How can we structure labour markets and social policy to ensure that productivity gains are shared rather than captured entirely by capital? What forms of
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d
FROM THE INNOVATION LAB - Designing a Robotic Personality: A Conversation With Kyle Camuti http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/oct25/Mairn--Designing-a-Robotic-Personality-A-Conversation-With-Kyle-Camuti.shtml #AI #libraries #makerspaces #robots (by my colleague, Chad Mairn)
Text Shot: Ambit is more than a technical achievement; it is a conversation starter about the future of personalized AI and the creative potential of student innovation. In the past year or so, Ambit has undergone several iterations, spoken before an audience of more than 250 at Nerd Nite St. Pete, co-hosted a video podcast, participated in St. Petersburg College’s undergraduate research experience, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate its capabilities at the Computers in Libraries conference. Kyle Camuti has built a system that challenges our assumptions about desktop assistants, and his work exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary curiosity that library makerspaces should foster.
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