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Category Archives: Education

Free and liberated ebooks carefully produced for the true book lover

“Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost. Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project… Continue Reading

Reading print improves comprehension far more than looking at digital text

The Guardian: “Reading print texts improves comprehension more than reading digital materials does, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Valencia analysed more than two dozen studies on reading comprehension published between 2000 and 2022, which assessed nearly 470,000 participants. Their findings suggest that print reading over a long period of time… Continue Reading

When authoritative sources hold onto bad data

NextGov – A legal scholar explains the need for government databases to retract information: “In 2004, Hwang Woo-suk was celebrated for his breakthrough discovery creating cloned human embryos, and his work was published in the prestigious journal Science. But the discovery was too good to be true; Dr. Hwang had fabricated the data. Science publicly… Continue Reading

ChatGPT Is Turning the Internet Into Plumbing

The Atlantic [read free]: What does life online look like filtered through a bot? By Damon Beres: “…Earlier today, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a partnership with the media conglomerate Axel Springer that seems to get us closer to an answer. Under the arrangement, ChatGPT will gain the capacity to present its users with… Continue Reading

Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Choi, Jonathan H. and Monahan, Amy and Schwarcz, Daniel, Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (November 7, 2023). Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-31, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4626276 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4626276 : “We conduct the first randomized controlled trial of AI assistance’s effect on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned sixty students at the… Continue Reading

I fact-checked ChatGPT with Bard, Claude, and Copilot

ZDNET: – and this AI was the most confidently incorrect. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is notoriously prone to factual errors. So, what do you do when you’ve asked ChatGPT to generate 150 presumed facts and you don’t want to spend an entire weekend confirming each by hand? Well, in my case, I turned to other… Continue Reading

Leading scholarly database listed hundreds of papers from ‘hijacked’ journals

Science: Scopus is giving suspect, non–peer-reviewed papers unwarranted legitimacy, researchers say: “Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform. But users beware, a… Continue Reading

Arab Funding of American Universities: Donors, Recipients and Impact

Arab Funding of American Universities: Donors, Recipients and Impact By Mitchell G. Bard, Ph.D. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (May 2023): “…Up until 2020, the DoE paid little attention to university compliance, and institutions did not report many of the gifts. That year the DoE began to investigate whether Yale and Harvard were complying with reporting requirements.… Continue Reading

Never-Reported Details of the Uvalde School Shooting

ProPublica: “Today, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and the PBS series FRONTLINE are jointly publishing an in-depth examination of the response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, using a trove of raw materials from a state investigation whose findings have yet to be released. The records include investigative interviews with officers,… Continue Reading

Facebook watches teens online as they prep for college

PopSci: “Picture a high school student who wants to go to college, likes to cheer on her school’s football team, and plays in a sport or two herself. .  One day after school, she signs up for an official ACT account so she can schedule her college entrance exam and see what score she gets after taking… Continue Reading