Technology

”Perplexed No Longer”

~ Elizabeth ~ 26 Comments

Reading my genealogical magazine, I learned of a search site called “Perplexity.” Unlike search engines such as Google, it uses AI in a creative way. You type a question and it searches a variety of sources to produce an answer. You can then ask additional questions to elaborate on what you have found in the first response. Each answer shows the sources used, all reliable ones.

I tried it out with my research for the book on Great Aunt Lucy. Knowing that she was a landscape painter in Chicago in the 1870’s I began to search for more detail. After asking a general question “who was Lucy Durham a landscape painter in Chicago in the 1870’s” I was given citations in two catalogs listing her water colors. Knowing nothing about water colors, I began asking a series of questions such as “when did watercolor painting become recognized as fine art in the United States?” After learning that she was part of a new wave in painting, I naturally wanted to know all about the paints themselves in the 1870’s. Perplexity let me know the colors available to her at that time which gave me an idea of what her works might have looked like. No illustrations exist on line or off that show her actual work.

At a family dinner we used Perplexity to entertain ourselves last week with a series of macabre queries, courtesy of my teen grandson, about still at large serial killers. (Beetley Pete would be impressed.) I curtailed the research when I was worn out from all the banter.

Free to use, Perplexity also offers a “pro” version allowing many more “pro” searches than the free one. I tried out the free one first, and then spent for one month of the enhanced one to see if it was worth it. So far it has been.

I hope that it is available world wide. It is the first use of AI that I can fully embrace. No more scrolling through hundreds of useless search engine results to find very specific answers. I hope it gives Google a run for its money. We’ll see.

(I am no influencer! I receive no kickbacks for recommending things or books.)

Thank You Gregg

~ Elizabeth ~ 4 Comments

greggs

Back in the “olden days” girls all had to learn to type. Since my high school curriculum was full of academic classes, I had to take typing in the summer. We learned using the Gregg method. I never got a job where I needed to type. That’s because I was never hired after I took the timed typing test and got a word count below what was needed for the job. The timed test made me nervous and I made many mistakes, all of which reduced my count. In those days, there was no auto-correct, so all mistakes had to be carefully “whited out” with a little brush. If the paper was important, it had to be mistake free, since the white out was ugly. I used to use so-called erasable paper in college which still left a tell-tale smudge but beat having to type the whole page over.

Then, after graduate school, I never needed to type again. Until computers! Who would have guessed in 1963 when I sat in that hot summer school classroom learning to touch type that I would use the skill on a keyboard.

So now I touch type on my Mac. I can easily correct errors with the handy delete key. It alerts me if I make a mistake by underlining it in red. I don’t have to use carbon paper to make duplicates. I can push a button and a printer makes as many copies as I need. I impress all the younger hunt-and-peck typists in my life with my touch typing skills.

I miss the “ding” that the typewriter made when it got to the end of the line and needed you to return the carriage back to the left margin. If you have no idea of what I am talking about, I refer you to the You Tube video titled “Typewriter Training “Basic Typing I:Methods.” (I don’t yet know how to embed a video link)

Now if I could only get my fingers to write instant messages with the same dexterity!

 

 

Let’s Hear It For Technology

~ Elizabeth ~ 1 Comment

1948-50s-370

Here I am writing with chalk on blackboard in 1953. Now I am “writing” on a keyboard on a computer about to “publish” my thoughts on a blog which will go out on the internet. There is not a single noun in the preceding sentence which I could have understood in 1953.  Well, maybe “thoughts.” I look very thoughtful here.

I was reminded of how swiftly things have changed when my seven year old grandson was examining a turntable.

“What is this thing? What do you put on it? How does it work? Do you pick up this lever(the arm) and put it down again? Does it go around?”

I tried to explain the whole thing to him. When I was done he remarked, “Boy, that’s some technology!”