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Category Archives: Education

AI Detectors Falsely Accuse Students of Cheating With Big Consequences

Bloomberg: “About two-thirds of teachers report regularly using tools for detecting AI-generated content. At that scale, even tiny error rates can add up quickly…Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought generative AI to the mainstream almost two years ago, schools have raced to adapt to a changed landscape. Educators now rely on a growing crop of detection tools… Continue Reading

Student was punished for using AI then his parents sued teacher, administrators

Ars Technica: “A school district in Massachusetts was sued by a student’s parents after the boy was punished for using an artificial intelligence chatbot to complete an assignment. The lawsuit says the Hingham High School student handbook did not include a restriction on the use of AI. “They told us our son cheated on a… Continue Reading

How the Malleus maleficarum fueled the witch trial craze

Ars Technica: “Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge of witch trials swept across early-modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur. Some have pointed to the invention of the printing… Continue Reading

How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization

Setayesh Radkani, Marika Landau-Wells, Rebecca Saxe. How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization. PNAS Nexus, 2024; 3 (10) DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae393 In polarized societies, divided subgroups of people have different perspectives on a range of topics. Aiming to reduce polarization, authorities may use debunking to lend support to one perspective… Continue Reading

The illusion of information adequacy

Gehlbach H, Robinson CD, Fletcher A (2024) The illusion of information adequacy. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310216: “How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with which people negotiate these differing perceptions depends… Continue Reading

How social media distorts perceptions of norms

Claire E. Robertson, Kareena S. del Rosario, Jay J. Van Bavel, Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 60, 2024, 101918, ISSN 2352-250X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101918.  “The current paper explains how modern technology interacts with human psychology to create a funhouse mirror version of social norms. We… Continue Reading

Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement

Over 150 groups involved in the disruptive anti-Israel protests on college campuses and elsewhere in the United States are “pro-terrorism.” The vast majority support Hamas and/or the October 7 terrorist attacks. The movement contains militant elements pushing it toward a wider, more severe campaign focused on property destruction and violence properly described as domestic terrorism.… Continue Reading

GPO Makes Available Thousands of New US Congressional Serial Set Volumes

U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has added more than 3,000 volumes of the Congressional Serial Set containing more than 45,000 individual documents and reports to GPO’s GovInfo, the one-stop site for authentic, published information for all three branches of the Federal Government. This comes as part of a multi-year effort with the Library of Congress… Continue Reading

The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes

404 Media: “A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books… Continue Reading