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Category Archives: Education

Maps Distort How We See the World

Unchartered Territories: “Maps twist our perception of the world. Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer —seem smaller than they are. This is because the world is a 3D sphere, but maps are 2D projections on a plane. That means distortion. So we develop a poor intuition for comparative region sizes. The biggest… Continue Reading

Is Artificial Intelligence Capable of Writing a Law Journal Article?

Yankovskiy, Roman M, Is Artificial Intelligence Capable of Writing a Law Journal Article? (March 8, 2023). Yankovskiy, R. M. (2023). Sposoben li iskusstvennyj intellekt napisat’ stat’yu v yuridicheskij zhurnal? [Is Artificial Intelligence Capable of Writing a Law Journal Article?] Zakon [The Statute], (3), 126-133. doi:10.37239/0869-4400-2023-20-3-126-133, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4473414 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4473414 “In this article, we… Continue Reading

There Is Always An Alternative

Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023 The human condition is…not good. We’re in the polycrisis, a widening gyre of climate emergency, inequality, infrastructure neglect, rising authoritarianism and zoonotic plagues. But that’s not the bad part. Stuff breaks. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not up… Continue Reading

Conspiracy theories aren’t on the rise – we need to stop panicking

Via LLRX – Conspiracy theories aren’t on the rise – we need to stop panicking – Several polls in the past couple of years (including from Ipsos, YouGov and most recently Savanta on behalf of Kings College Policy Institute and the BBC) have been examining the kinds of conspiratorial beliefs people have. The findings have led… Continue Reading

Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts

Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts – J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Richmond Y. Wong, Bjoern Hartmann, Qian Yang Pre-trained large language models (“LLMs”) like GPT-3 can engage in fluent, multi-turn instruction-taking out-of-the-box, making them attractive materials for designing natural language interactions. Using natural language to steer LLM outputs (“prompting”)… Continue Reading

Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It?

The New York Times: Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield. “Everyone loves reading. In principle, anyway. Nobody is against it, right? Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a… Continue Reading

What Makes News Sharable on Social Media?

What Makes News Sharable on Social Media?Chen, X., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. (2023). Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 3. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2023.007   – “With the rise of social media, everyone has the potential to be both a consumer and producer of online content. Although one might assume that people share news because they believe it… Continue Reading

PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2023

“Business leaders everywhere are prioritising transformation, but what if your most skilled people are more reinvention ready than your company culture is? And what if your employees say they are even more likely to quit now than they were last year—back when everyone thought the “great resignation” was at its peak. This is the complicated—and… Continue Reading

These ten books are considered pornography in Ron DeSantis’ Florida

Popular Information: “On March 8, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) conducted a press conference in which he purported to debunk the “book ban hoax.” During the event, DeSantis claimed that Florida schools, under his leadership, were not banning educational materials. Rather, they were simply removing “pornography” from school libraries and classrooms. DeSantis claimed the notion… Continue Reading

The Nation’s Report Card

2023 Long-Term Trend (LTT) Age 13 Reading and Mathematics Highlights: “The nation’s 13-year-olds showed the largest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term trend assessment (LTT) in mathematics, according to results released today by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The average mathematics score for 13-year-olds declined 9 points… Continue Reading

1,626 Books Were Banned in America Last Year…We Reviewed All of Them

Statecraft: What do these books have in common? By Arman Madani – “The non-profits PEN America and the American Library Association keep a catalog of banned books in the United States up to the 2021-22 academic year. In this 1 academic year alone, 1600+ books were irregularly banned from 138 school districts across America; 3.8… Continue Reading