QNews for August 3rd 2025

Sunfest 2025 is Saturday September 13th at the Beerwah Community Hall. This is a new location closer to public transport. The address is 25 Peachester Rd Beerwah. Here is your chance to grab a bargain, catch-up with folks you haven’t seen for a while for an off-air rag chew, or just enjoy the atmosphere. Tickets this year are cheaper than last year at just $5 for general entry and $10 for a traders ticket that includes 1 general admission. There will be raffles and door prizes and a mega auction with some great items on offer.

It's Sunday 3rd of August and this is QNEWS from the Darling Downs Radio Club. Hi, I'm John VK4JPM Club Secretary. And... it's been a very exciting week. We will be able to circulate a proposed update to the Club's rules, and get comment ahead of the packet going out; and tidy up some of the documentation. We don't have a locked in date yet for the rescheduled AGM, but holding 2 September.

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. Just one month to Spring and all the thorough bred horses have had another official birthday so punters check your bets. If you follow the news you at times find gems that show the way forward but they aren’t necessarily obvious. During the past week the magical fairy that controls artificial intelligence was caught out. It seems that the AI with the prehistoric name, Groc, made a very obvious mistake in answering a query. The question related to a “who was” question and this dinosaur managed to reverse the birth year and the death years so that the subject would have been a minus quantity, never alive. Lots of people like to be early adopters of technology and trends and that is fine. You can’t really come to much harm following fashion trends or decorating with the latest home furnishings. The limit for most of us is the budget. One area that is being increasingly integrated into modern systems is a reliance on AI to complete multitudes of different tasks. Until recently, higher education was trying to solve the issue of students copying material from the internet or having paid writers complete necessary assignments. Today the concern is that AI is fulfilling those tasks and their guarantee that the work submitted reflects any learning and for that matter, whether it has been checked for accuracy against known sources of material. So this might seem the price of innovation but who would want to be taught by a teacher who only knows how to get ChatGPT to do the work? Who would prefer to be treated by a healthcare professional whose CV is littered with anonymous studies done on their laptop? There can be dangers in rushing adoption of new things and the more sophisticated the harder they may be to control. On the other hand, the news was filled by the story of the latest attempted rocket launch from near Bowen. It was almost an anticlimax that the launch took place at all after many events had caused numerous delays previously. The fact that the rocket rose off the launch pad but descended to Earth in under a minute has not been greeted as failure by the company involved. We might remember when the Space-X rockets had multiple failures, their CEO, Elon Musk, also expressed the same sentiment. For those seeking progress it is not the fact that the first or 100 th attempt was not successful but the lessons to be learned to progress development are the important factors. When we look back to an inventor and innovator called Thomas Alva Edison, he was known for his process of re-iteration, in proving an idea could be made to work the way he imagined it. I believe we can take these lessons to heart in our own activities. Don’t blindly trust all that is new or available on the internet and be prepared to think over what stopped our last experiment from succeeding. I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and that's what I think, how about you?