High school students struggle in places afflicted with poverty, family breakdown, and other social woes. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that students from wealthier regions are demonstrating academic excellence.
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The findings from experiments with polycephalum have been “contentious,” probably because they raise issues about how these traits actually work.
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Visit a typical classroom in the United States and you’re bound to see just about every student “taking notes” behind a computer screen as the professor lectures at the helm.
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GPT-3, released by OpenAI in November, swiftly undermined the integrity of many a student’s academic work. Professors across disciplines have had to contend with how to discern machine vs. human-generated work. Now, with a new school year underway, that challenge remains. Due to ChatGPT’s popularity, many schools are seeking ways to integrate the technology into their learning environments. But the question of how to do this remains murky. Bloomberg reports, But professors and administrators seeking to integrate generative AI into their curriculums are left with a big question: How? They need to find the right middle ground, said Steve Weber, vice provost of undergraduate curriculum and education at Drexel University. Educators can’t completely prohibit use of the tool and neglect to teach it, but Read More ›
This past October, I wrote that educational testing was being shaken by the astonishing ability of GPT-3 and other large language models (LLMs) to answer test questions and write articulate essays. I argued that, while LLMs might mimic human conversation, they do not know what words mean. They consequently excel at rote memorization and BS conversation but struggle mightily with assignments that are intended to help students develop their critical thinking abilities, such as Lacking any understanding of semantics, LLMs can do none of this. To illustrate, I asked GPT-3 two questions from a midterm examination I had recently given in an introductory statistics class. Both questions tested students critical thinking skills and GPT-3 bombed both questions. I was hopeful Read More ›
Technology innovations are rapidly changing the nature of work. Advancements in artificial intelligence are especially transforming the workforce landscape at an accelerating rate. Jobs of tomorrow will not resemble those of decades past, nor even those of today.
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According to a recent article in The Scientist, in the mid-twentieth century, several labs produced results that suggested that one-celled organisms could learn, in the sense that they could alter future behavior based on past experience. At the time, such findings were dismissed as flukes or mistakes because it was unclear how a unicellular life form like paramecium, with no brain or nervous system, could store memories. Today, a team from Harvard, Rutgers, and MIT is taking a second look at the findings of learning in paramecium: We exhume the experiments of Beatrice Gelber on Pavlovian conditioning in the ciliate Paramecium aurelia, and suggest that criticisms of her findings can now be reinterpreted. Gelber was a remarkable scientist whose absence Read More ›
Essentially, the user keeps the phone but must leave the venue to unlock it. Barring a reasonable excuse, that might be like excusing oneself to go outside to smoke.
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