Month: July 2025

It’s there, whether you like it or not.

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I’m talking about climate change.

Forgive me, please, because I’m about to be controversial again. Talking about climate change should not be political, but it is.

I want to talk about the things I have observed firsthand that tell me that our climate is getting dangerously hot.

I have been watching the weather forecasts on TV since I was about 14 or so. I am now 51. Back in the late 1980s, there were not as many “excessive heat weather alert” days forecast as there are now. And I really don’t believe that there were as many in the early 1980s, when I was in elementary school and would spend part of the summer at day camp. At day camp, part of the afternoon was spent outside playing on the playground. Nowadays, the afternoons are so hot that it makes me wonder if the day camp staff sends the children outside anymore. When the heat index is 105 degrees Fahrenheit, aren’t children prone to heat-related illnesses?

I know at least that adults are. The state of Maryland has lost 12 people to the heat this summer so far, and it’s not even August yet.

One of my friends told me that she knows a woman who sends her children outside to play at 5 o’clock in the morning every summer because it’s just too hot any other time.

My one cousin opined that pretty soon we as a society are going to have to shift summer vacation to spring so that children can be inside in an air-conditioned school all summer. I could not agree more with her. Who says you can’t get cabin fever in the summer? I often do, when it is simply too hot to be outside.

Have you personally noticed signs that the earth is getting hotter? Or have you noticed otherwise?

Becoming intelligent about artificial intelligence

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This past week I began a seven-week introductory course on artificial intelligence (AI) for editors.

The course is taught by the naturally intelligent Erin Servais, who is also a dynamic speaker.

The week before the course began, I downloaded ChatGPT and played with it a little. I had never used it before, nor Copilot, Gemini, Claude, or any other popular AI platform. ChatGPT astounded me. I told it to write a poem about Garfield the cat, and in about two seconds it brought forth a rhyming anthem about the fat cat that read like a Shel Silverstein verse.

We have only had one session so far, but I have already completed our first assignment, and the results were hilarious. (I do not feel comfortable sharing my assignment here, since it is part of the course.) I got to read the results of some of the other students as well, and they were equally humorous and outrageous. Sometimes I wonder if ChatGPT ever laughs at itself.

It frightens me that some people use AI to write research papers for them or even to write novels. Would I read a novel that was generated by AI? Only if I were fooled into believing that it was written by a human. Of course, any human who uses AI to write a novel obviously does not like to write and is doing so only to make ill-gotten money. Shame on them.

I am definitely looking forward to learning how to use AI tools to copyedit more efficiently, fact-check, and write my own macros. However, I am also anticipating the class session in which the ethical implications of AI are discussed. I have heard from numerous editors on LinkedIn that there are AI detectors that can supposedly tell whether a work was written by a human or by AI. Unfortunately, many of these editors have run works that they wrote themselves through an AI detector and seen the detector tell them that 80 percent of the work was AI-generated.

Sigh! Can we win?

With the proper skills, yes.

“What have you done lately?”

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Freelancers are often asked that. Our family and friends know that our workflow is not steady (and neither is our income), and so they want to know what kind of work we have done recently.

I actually accomplished a few big things this past spring. More happy clients, more satisfaction on my part, more money. You can’t argue with that. So what exactly did I accomplish?

First and foremost, I completed a project for a new client who was recommended to me by a good friend. This friend knew well about my skill and excellence as a copyeditor. The new client owned a small business and had a website. He was an ESL (English as a Second Language) client, and so the English on his site needed some assistance. I not only fixed the grammar and capitalization on the site, but improved the wording and flow of the language. Once the changes were made on the website, it read much better. The client told me that on a scale of one to ten, my editing was an eleven. Editors don’t get that kind of compliment every day.

I also worked with my longtime client, my friend’s company, which had recently revamped the product description pages on its website. It turned out that on some of the pages, certain links were not displayed properly and were confusing to customers who needed to click on them. It was my job to find which pages had erroneous links and record them on a Word document. This meant that I had to go over some 1,700 product pages. Thankfully, I only had to spend roughly 30 to 60 seconds on each page. I did this for a reduced rate, since it didn’t directly involve editing.

Finally, I edited marketing emails for the same company, most of which did not need any changes. I always enjoy these at least somewhat, because they have gorgeous photos on them.

Here’s to more projects coming my way. What did you accomplish this spring?

Scam-A-Rama: Beware!

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As long as there are evil people in this world, there will be scams aimed at stealing the sensitive information of others. I have learned this the hard way and I am much more vigilant as a result.

Today I will discuss two types of common scams which easily trick innocent people: text scams and email scams.

Text scams involve text messages on one’s phone (usually a smartphone, although I can imagine that those with a basic phone might be prey to them as well). The victim receives a text that spoofs a phone number or email address and pretends to be (usually) from a financial institution or government entity (such as the IRS or the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration [MVA]). The text will “inform” the victim of something alarming, such as a large sum of money having been withdrawn from their bank account or that the MVA is penalizing them and they had better pay up or else.

The truth is that a bank will never text a customer—banks usually communicate by way of email or postal mail. Nor do government entities like the MVA or the IRS communicate by text. Scam texts also often have a strange-looking email address or unknown phone number associated with them. The best thing to do if you suspect a text is a scam is to delete it. Do not touch any links or call any phone numbers that the text gives you.

Then there are email scams. In this type of scam, the victim receives an email that looks like a legitimate billing statement, often with a genuine-looking logo of a company like PayPal, Amazon, or McAfee. The statement says that the victim owes a large sum of money for a product or service that they never purchased, and provides a phone number for the victim to call if they did not authorize the sale (and they never did). Often, the “billing statement” contains grammatical mistakes or typos (this is the first thing for which I look when I receive one of these).

One word: DELETE. Calling the phone number on the fake billing statement will connect you to a scammer who will pretend to want to help you, but who will trick you into giving them control of your computer (something you should never do) and steal your personal information and/or your identity.

What kinds of scam bait have you been subjected to? (I have gotten several of both of the above.)