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Category Archives: Education

Fact Checkers Take Stock of Their Efforts: ‘It’s Not Getting Better’

The New York Times [read free]: “After President Biden won the election nearly three years ago, three of every 10 Americans believed the false narrative that his victory resulted from fraud, a poll found. In the years since, fact checkers have debunked the claim in lengthy articles, corrections posted on viral content, videos and chat… Continue Reading

Our 10-point scale will help you rate the biggest misinformation purveyors

Ars Technica: “The world has been flooded with misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories bubble up on everything from the weather to vaccines to the shape of the Earth. Purveyors of this garbage may be motivated by attention, money, or simply the appeal of sticking it to the educated elite. For people who try to keep… Continue Reading

No, Chat GPT Can’t Be Your New Research Assistant

Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription req’d]: “…There’s Explainpaper, where one can upload a paper, highlight a confusing portion of the text, and get a more reader-friendly synopsis. There’s jenni, which can help discern if a paper is missing relevant existing research. There’s Quivr, where the user can upload a paper and pose queries like: What… Continue Reading

SAGE Releases Free-to-Read Collection with Research into Academic Freedom and Censorship

“Sage has launched a new collection of free-to-read research highlighting the effects of academic censorship on democracy, social-emotional learning, higher education, and more. Banned books symbolize the clash between censorship and academic freedom. The suppression of banned books undermines the core principle of academic freedom, where scholars should explore diverse ideas without fear. This freedom… Continue Reading

How ChatGPT Is Putting College Ghost Writers Out of Work

The Walrus: The custom essay-writing business is worth billions. Will AI bring it to an end? “…Paying third parties to complete your coursework is called contract cheating. While it seemingly represents a breach of academic integrity, it is technically legal in Canada—and data suggests it’s become prevalent across post-secondary institutions. According to academic ghostwriters like… Continue Reading

Behold the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Forerunner to the Kindle

Open Culture: “In this striking image, you can see an early experiment in making books portable–a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” dates back to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an English lawyer and MP, commissioned the… Continue Reading

I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book And Umberto Eco was right.

The Atlantic [read free]: “Fifteen years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the… Continue Reading

The Cambridge Law Corpus: A Corpus for Legal AI Research

The Cambridge Law Corpus: A Corpus for Legal AI Research Andreas Östling, Holli Sargeant, Huiyuan Xie, Ludwig Bull, Alexander Terenin, Leif Jonsson, Måns Magnusson, Felix Steffek. arXiv:2309.12269 [cs.CL] [v1] Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:24:40 UTC “We introduce the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC), a corpus for legal AI research. It consists of over 250 000 court… Continue Reading

The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists

WSJ (free link) – “Stanford’s president and a high-profile physicist are among those taken down by a growing wave of volunteers who expose faulty or fraudulent research papers. An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her… Continue Reading

The Importance of Words

RIPS Law Librarian Blog – Jennifer E. Chapman: “I teach my students to expand their search vocabularies and think carefully about the search terms and phrases they use during the research process. It’s important that I also think carefully about the words I use when teaching and expand my teaching vocabulary…Since language is “the medium… Continue Reading