Google Maps: We Are Efficient. You Must Verify Our Data.
August 13, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
In the early days of digital maps, I rented a Hertz car equipped with a digital map. My destination was Belvedere Island near the Golden Gate Bridge. My client’s home had his home office, a carved wooden bar imported from Bulgaria, and a swimming pool whose glass panels could be retracted to bring the outdoors inside.
The Hertz map got me to the enclave of the super wealthy person, but the map almost directed me to drive off the road. The road was on the edge of a steep drop off to the waters below. I spotted the problem, pulled out my clunky mobile Treo, and asked my client to send someone to guide me into his lair.
Young mobile-forward explorers learn a hard truth at the top of a mountain peak. Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough.
Do I trust today’s digital maps? Sort of. When I travel, I carry a trucker’s printed map. Those maps may not be perfect, but in certain locations, I like to verify what the gee-whiz kids’ “free” online maps suggest. This behavior would be labeled “truly stupid” by someone who missed a couple of years of school due to Covid. But I am a dinobaby, and I got that way by exercising judgment and doing the verification thing.
I know that some young people perceive online output as the Truth. I have given up trying to explain the problems this type of information acceptance creates. Now I say, “Hey, I believe everything I read online.” Less friction. More nods. I am not revealing my actual intellectual habits, but I am too old to be sucked into arguments with those who live in a cloud of unknowing.
Quite a preamble to a simple blog post? Absolutely.
Now you can navigate to “A Group of Teen Hikers Relied on google Maps. It Was a Disaster.” I like the subtitle too:
A teen hiking group trusted Google Maps on a B.C. alpine trail. It ended in a helicopter rescue.
The basic idea for the story is that some young folks went for a hike. Google Maps, according to the diplomatic wording in the article, “they were trying to listen to a source that was inaccurate, and that led them down a series of poor decision points.”
Yeah, the Google data were not helpful to the young people. Just remember: I believe everything I read and see online. But I use those old-fashioned paper maps.
I assume that their education did not include an introduction to what are called topographic maps or specialized maps for mountaineering. I can hear the excuses now, “Dinobaby, you don’t know anything?”
I agree. I make errors. I am old. And I verify. Even then I make errors. But the foundational understanding of different types of maps, printed an digital and the idea of making sure the best available information is consulted exists within my febrile brain.
These folks were stupid and incredibly lucky. Google estimates times based on straight lines, not topography. Efficient calculations are not necessarily correct ones.
Several observations:
- This example illustrates that not everything output by the Google is accurate
- The near miss makes clear that government services can save the lives of clueless youth
- The fact that the clueless youth had to get life saving help proves their cluelessness.
Net net: What other misinformation are those mobile first, really smart companies outputting? My hunch is that few know or understand the question below the age of 21. The deciders of the future have trust in online. I hope there are helicopters standing by for this type of decision making.
Stephen E Arnold, August 14, 2026
Libraries Gear Up to Put AI in a Terrarium
August 7, 2026
Are you tired of Big Tech and AI invading your life? You aren’t the only one and librarians are also sick of it. What some of them are doing to combat the rise of AI and Big Tech is hosting events that are AI free events as told to TechCrunch in the story: “Librarians Are Hosting Viral ‘Avoiding AI’ Workshops For People Who Are Fed Up With Big Tech.”
One librarian named Charlie Bailey in Philadelphia started hosting these events, because he felt that AI tools were foisted onto people without their permission. He runs the events like this:
“Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. Then he walks through all of the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through turning off specific features.”
Bailey wants people to remember that they can think and do stuff with AI:
“ ‘As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,’ Bailey said. ‘It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.’”
For many of the participants who attend the AI workshops, they don’t reject the technology. They want more control and freedom over how it is being integrated into their lives. Another librarian Hannah Cyrus said:
“ ‘I think the forced adoption of AI on people’s devices might be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back in some ways,’ she said. ‘The awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have an outsized influence over us, and that we’re not really using these products in the way that we would like to.’”
Remember that humans control the technology not the other way around. Digital literacy and information literacy are more important these days as machines take away the thinking. I want more libraries to put AI in a terrarium and put the focus on reading and thinking for oneself.
Whitney Grace, August 7, 2026
Data about Humans and News
July 29, 2026
I’m always curious about how people interact and consume news, so when Reuters and Oxford released “Digital News Interactive” an intuitive way to explore the information I was intrigued. The information is described as:
“Explore more than a decade of survey data from the Reuters Institute’s research on news consumption across markets, regions and demographics.”
It appears that most people get their news from social media. TV and news websites seem to be in a gentle glidepath to a rock-strewn dry creek bed. Radio isn’t dead yet, but it, like print, are in a holding pattern but losing altitude. Heading upwards are podcasts and lamentably chatbots. (Why not ask an oligopolistic company for an unbiased answer? That’s a great idea to an increasing number of people.)
In all markets, only 37% trust news overall and 44% trust in news they chase down. The killer item is that 42% avoid the news altogether and 51% get their news through websites. What is interesting is only 17% pay for their news, 21% comment on stories, 46% remain interested in learning about what is happening, and 62% are concerned about misinformation. I wonder what the 38% of the news consumers think about being manipulated by misinformation, weaponized information, and corporate entities eager to “own” the information space. Facebook remains a big place for people to receive their news on average, while younger folks skew towards Instagram. As I reviewed the data, I noted that about half the people don’t trust the news.
None of these data points are particularly surprising. Social media continues to grow but these services face a lack of interest in the news problem. My hunch is that news outfits with money will pay the big bucks to appear at the top of algorithmic feed outputs.
Whitney Grace, July 29, 2026
Alternatives To Google Scholar
July 2, 2026
Google Scholar is a decent way to start doing research. It is free tool that checks what resources are readily available and/or known about a given topic.? ? The resources then might be available on the Internet Archive or stuck behind a paywall. That’s when you turn to libraries and interlibrary loans to locate the resources.
Google Scholar has problems, though, and Kristen Elliot wrote about it on her blog: “The Big List of Google Scholar Alternatives (And The Big Librarian Existential Crisis).” One huge problem that scares Elliot is that online databases are vulnerable. It only takes one knowledgable bad actor to strike down an archive or a lack of funding to destroy another.
She recommends searching for subject specific databases and taking advantage of public libraries with their free resources. She also points toward using university resources as well. Unpaywall is a friend for scholars who want to locate free versions of articles that are trapped behind paywalls.
Here is what she says about her list:
“The list above is by no means complete – it is purely based on stuff that I’ve come across. I haven’t looked at any AI tools because frankly I don’t want to. Other people have written eloquently about the reasons for AI refusal, and other people still will write about AI tools that might be useful.”
Elliot is a smart person and definitely knows the best websites to recommend for free academic quality research. If you’re still at a loss, visit a library and make friends with a librarian. It’ll help with information literacy and definitely make you smarter than the average bear.
Whitney Grace, July 2, 2026
AI Newspaper Archives
May 28, 2026
Did it ever occur to anyone else to use OCR, visit a library or an archive, and use old newspapers to train AI? Old newspapers are (for lack of a better term) data, and many are free or available by paying a fee. Newspapers.com comes to mind and it is run by Ancestry.com.
My personal view is that big AI tech outfits take the path of least resistance, apologize, and move on.
But I digress with a personal opinion.
There’s a new archive called snewpapers.com that dubbed itself: “The World’s First AI Newspaper and Research Platform” with the second line: “…and the only one that has read the papers.” All we can say is: This might be a useful tool.
Snewpapers.com requires a membership from $9.99/a month for a junior sleuth, $12.99 for a senior sleuth, or $19.99 for a scholarly sleuth. It can be billed annually or monthly. The archive allow users to build collections of their searches. It uses AI to actually search the articles instead of delivering blurry newspapers scans. The search is also intuitive meaning you can use more than general keywords to find information.
Founder Brett Shinnebarger said:
“At SNEWPapers, high quality OCR isn’t the goal, it’s the starting line. Wouldn’t it be nice to search for a concept, rather than a word, and get back articles instead of endless thousands of newspaper pages for you to read? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a chat with an AI Research Assistant to help you navigate the labyrinth? For us, the real prize is understanding what’s actually written in these papers. So instead of just teaching machines to recognize letters, we taught them how to truly read: to grasp context, meaning, historical nuance, and the stories hidden between the lines.”
The service warrants a look and testing. Signing up is “free.”
Whitney Grace, May 28, 2026
Britannica 11: Free at the Moment
April 22, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
If you like encyclopedias or encyclopaediae, you will find the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica interesting. The online version contains 36,663 articles across 28 volumes. I did some spot checks on favorite topics; for example, calculus and John Milton. I did spot in the calculus article an incorrect line break, but the text seemed clean. I spotted some tables, but my spot checking did not show any illustrations. These may be in the online version and just out of my reach.
Why pay attention to an old reference book from 1910. The write ups on some subjects like John Donne are informative and entertaining. Here’s an example from the entry for John Donne, a very sporty poet:
The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep, although almost wholly malign.
I think this is more sophisticated that some of the posts on X.com.
Another reason to care about this “old” volume is that many of the articles were the work of respected scholars. No AI output appears in the 11th edition. If there were a modern encyclopedia, my thought is that the descriptive and explanatory essays would be chock full of errors. I want to point out that smart software was pressed into duty to process the page images into the text displayed.
You can search the contents. However, be prepared to do some old fashioned thinking about your query and be prepared to examine several hits if you are poking around for a subject that turns up in different disciplines.
Don’t print it out or you will spend several thousand dollars on paper and consumables today. When the 11th was published aht 28 volumes cost about US$80.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2026
Academic Libraries May Get Fast Journal Access
November 3, 2025
Here is a valuable resource for academic librarians. Katina Magazine tells us, “For the User Who Needed an Article Yesterday, This Platform Delivers.” Reviewer Josh Zeller tells us:
“Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS) is a premediated browser-based document delivery platform from Research Solutions (formerly Reprints Desk). Integrated with discovery search, it provides users ‘just-in-time’ access to PDFs of articles from a vast collection of titles at a relatively low per-article cost. The platform’s administrative tools are highly granular, allowing library staff to control every dimension of user purchasing, while its precise usage statistics can help inform future collection decisions.”
For better or worse, the system is powered by AWS and typically delivers results via email in fewer than seven seconds. It works with all major academic publishers and the average cost per article is $29. Though most AGS customers are in the US, enough are based in other countries to give Research Solutions experience in foreign copyright laws and access to more resources. Zeller describes the process:
“Both the front- and back-end interfaces of the AGS platform are entirely browser-based. Users typically submit AGS document delivery requests through their library’s discovery interface, into which AGS is fully integrated. For libraries using Ex Libris Primo, this is accomplished using the system’s OpenURL link resolver (Christopher & Edwards, 2024; Hlasten, 2024). Application programming interface (API) integrations are also available for all of the major interlibrary loan (ILL) and resource sharing platforms, including RapidILL, Rapido, ILLiad, Tipasa, and IDS Project (Landolt & Friesen, 2025). AGS links can also be integrated into other discovery services, like EBSCO FOLIO and WorldCat Discovery.”
Though AGS itself does not incorporate AI, it can be integrated with the AI source-evaluation tool Scite. See the write-up for those and other details.
Cynthia Murrell, November 3, 2025
Pinboard: A Useful Resource
September 8, 2025
I’m going to be completely honest. When I visited Pinboard I didn’t have any idea what the website was. I poked around, visited some links that look me to various social media and similar websites, until I found the about page:
"Founded in 2009, Pinboard is a fast, independently run, no-nonsense bookmarking site for people who value privacy and speed.
There are no ads and no trackers of any kind. Users pay a modest yearly fee.
Pinboard lets you bookmark from any browser, connect up Twitter accounts (and favorites), and sync with popular services like Instapaper or Pocket.
For a few more bucks a year, Pinboard offers an archiving service which saves a copy of everything you bookmark, gives you full-text search, and automatically checks your account for dead links.”
I was intrigued. Services like this are all glitz and spangles these days, but Pinboard has old school simplicity with chaotic neutral hacker vibes. Say what?
By that I mean, it’s a neat service without the high price tag. These reviews say it all:
The Guardian said, “Pinboard is a very effective service… Sometimes, you don’t need glitz; you need plumbing.”
Followed by The Economist, One dude in his underpants somewhere who has five windows open to terminal servers.”
The operator of the site takes steps to neutralized SEO spammers and Telegram posting bots. This is a very good service. There is what I call a “slow SEO spammer.” The entity behind this steady stream of baby oriented cloth is an annoyance and a bit amusing.
Whitney Grace, September 8, 2025
Ten Directories of AI Tools
May 26, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
I scan DailyHunt, an India-based news summarizer powered by AI I think. The link I followed landed me on a story titled “Best 10 AI Directories to Promote.” I looked for a primary source, an author, and links to each service. Zippo. Therefore, I assembled the list, provided links, and generated with my dinobaby paws and claws the list below. Enjoy or ignore. I am weary of AI, but many others are not. I am not sure why, but that is our current reality, replete with alternative facts, cheating college professors, and oodles of crypto activity. Remember. The list is not my “best of”; I am simply presenting incomplete information in a slightly more useful format.
AIxploria https://www.aixploria.com/en/ [Another actual directory. Its promotional language says “largest list”. Yeah, I believe that]
AllAITool.ai at https://allaitool.ai/
FamouseAITools.ai https://famousaitools.ai/ [Another marketing outfit sucking up AI tool submissions]
Futurepedia.io https://www.futurepedia.io/
TheMangoAI.co https://themangoai.co/ [Not a directory, an advertisement of sorts for an AI-powered marketing firm]
NeonRev https://www.neonrev.com/ [Another actual directory. It looks like a number of Telegram bot directories]
Spiff Store https://spiff.store/ [Another directory. I have no idea how many tools are included]
StackViv https://stackviv.ai/ [An actual directory with 10,000 tools. No I did not count them. Are you kidding me?]
TheresanAIforThat https://theresanaiforthat.com/ [You have to register to look at the listings. A turn off for me]
Toolify.ai https://www.toolify.ai/ [An actual listing of more than 25,000 AI tools organized into categories probably by AI, not a professional indexing specialist]
When I looked at each of these “directories”, marketing is something the AI crowd finds important. A bit more effort in the naming of some of these services might help. Just a thought. Enjoy.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2025
Speed Up Your Loss of Critical Thinking. Use AI
February 19, 2025
While the human brain isn’t a muscle, its neurology does need to be exercised to maintain plasticity. When a human brain is rigid, it’s can’t function in a healthy manner. AI is harming brains by making them not think good says 404 Media: “Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared.” You can read the complete Microsoft research report at this link. (My hunch is that this type of document would have gone the way of Timnit Gebru and the flying stochastic parrot, but that’s just my opinion, Hank, Advait, Lev, Ian, Sean, Dick, and Nick.)
Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft researchers released a paper that says the more humans rely on generative AI the “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
Really? You don’t say! What else does this remind you of? How about watching too much television or playing too many videogames? These passive activities (arguable with videogames) stunt the development of brain gray matter and in a flight of Mary Shelley rhetoric make a brain rot! What else did the researchers discover when they studied 319 knowledge workers who self-reported their experiences with generative AI:
“ ‘The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI,’ the researchers wrote. ‘Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving.’”
By the way, we definitely love and absolutely believe data based on self reporting. Think of the mothers who asked their teens, “Where did you go?” The response, “Out.” The mothers ask, “What did you do?” The answer, “Nothing.” Yep, self reporting.
Does this mean generative AI is a bad thing? Yes and no. It’ll stunt the growth of some parts of the brain, but other parts will grow in tandem with the use of new technology. Humans adapt to their environments. As AI becomes more ingrained into society it will change the way humans think but will only make them sort of dumber [sic]. The paper adds:
“ ‘GenAI tools could incorporate features that facilitate user learning, such as providing explanations of AI reasoning, suggesting areas for user refinement, or offering guided critiques,’ the researchers wrote. ‘The tool could help develop specific critical thinking skills, such as analyzing arguments, or cross-referencing facts against authoritative sources. This would align with the motivation enhancing approach of positioning AI as a partner in skill development.’”
The key is to not become overly reliant AI but also be aware that the tool won’t go away. Oh, when my mother asked me, “What did you do, Whitney?” I responded in the best self reporting manner, “Nothing, mom, nothing at all.”
Whitney Grace, February 19, 2025
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