Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now: AI can replicate the shape of a narrative, but not the struggle that makes it meaningful

Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…

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Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?

Though not in a hospital setting, the “basilar ganglia” is a real error that was served up by Google’s healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini. A 2024 research paper introducing Med-Gemini included the hallucination in a section on head CT scans, and nobody at Google caught it, in either that paper or a blog post announcing it. When Bryan…

Amusing / Business / Empathy / SciFi / Writing

Ferengi Love Songs #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 20) Rom ♡ Leeta; Zek ♡ Ishka; Quark ♡ $

Rewatching ST:DS9 Much pew is pewing inside the bar, which is closed due to a vole infestation. Quark is not in the mood for Rom cheerfully announcing his engagement to Leeta, but he does accept his suggestion to visit their mother on Ferenginar. Trying to be supportive of Rom’s interest in pleasing Leeta with a…

Business / Empathy / Ethics / Justice / SciFi / Writing

Ties of Blood and Water #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 19) Kira re-evaluates a Cardassian father figure

Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is excited to welcome Tekeny Ghemor, the sympathetic Cardassian who was tricked into believing a surgically-altered Kira was his daughter (s3e5 “Second Skin”). Now that Dukat and the Dominion have displaced the legitimate government on Cardassia, Kira has high hopes that Ghemor will inspire a resistance, but before the opening credits roll,…

Academia / Culture / Drama / Education / Humanities / Media / Personal

York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.

Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…

I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is “To Battle: A Fight Play.” August 1-10.

Tickets for To Battle: A Fight Play Similar:Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now: AI can replicate the shape …Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?Ferengi Love Songs #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 20) Rom ♡ Leeta; Zek ♡ Ishka;…York Plays 2025: Five…

Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

Coders who used AI self-reported that they worked 20% faster, but an objective study found AI actually made coders 19% slower. This study confirms that while AI can help for general low-level tasks, humans with deep knowledge of the specific project could spend far more time working on higher-level tasks, rather than hunting for errors…

The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)

I had a great time narrating and coming up with the character voices for this short story. Look for elements of the classic crime story, with a plot that just touches on social commentary, showing tension between a reporter and his politically ambitious boss, and tension between the reporter and his wife. The narrator lives…

Did you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree?

From an article in the Houston Chronicle: It’s still unclear who started a widely shared rumor over the weekend that raised false hopes of desperate parents that two girls had been found alive clinging to a tree around Comfort or Center Point. I first saw the rumor spread on Facebook where a user mentioned it…

Business as Usual #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 18) Quark accepts a lucrative job offer; O’Brien carries baby Yoshi everywhere.

Rewatching ST:DS9 Playing tongo at the bar, Dax is annoyed that Quark is distracted by bad financial news. He’s put the bar up as collateral to three different debtors and he’s wiped out. At this very moment, because the opening credits are gonna roll soon, Quark’s cousin Gaila the weapons dealer shows up with a…

“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Twelfth Night opens tonight!

Similar:Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now: AI can replicate the shape …Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her…

Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025

A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…

Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.

No Democratic president should send in troops trained for lethal combat into a pro-life rally, a worship service, a gun show, or any other peaceful gathering expressing solidarity on an an issue that rubs Democrats the wrong way, at least not in a land where people have first amendment freedoms (no establishment or prohibition of…

I MacGyvered myself a heat sink

I’m getting ready to record about 18hrs footage from four different cameras, and I noticed my new 4K webcam was heating up pretty fast. I’m settled in a dorm room at the University of Toronto, far from the junk drawers and tool boxes that would have aluminum foil and copper wire. I suppose I could…

How to be a Medieval Spectator (Intro to Toronto York Plays 2025)

This is what I’m in Toronto to observe. Similar:Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now: AI can replicate the shape …Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have…

Cockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s drinking fountains after mastering series of complex moves

Nature is amazing. Dr John Martin, a senior ecologist at Ecosure and co-author of the study, said they stumbled on the complex behaviour at a twist-handle-operated bubbler located in a western Sydney sports field while surveying cockatoo foraging habits…. Presumably the birds first learned what to do by watching people, Martin said. “Eventually one of…

Unemployment rates for recent college grads: Overall, 5.8%; Computer science, 6.1%; Computer engineering, 7.5%; Journalism, 4.4%

The market is rough for college grads, and especially rough for computer-related majors that the STEM-first mindset pushed as a guaranteed safe career track. According to a recent report, employment for journalism majors is not only better than CS and computer engineering, but also a notch or two better than the average employment rate for…

York Corpus Christi Pageant, Toronto, June 7

I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe and document a full production of the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The event, which took place annually for hundreds of years in the streets of the medieval city of York, dramatizes the Christian salvation story from the creation of the universe to the final judgement. The plays,…

Waiting for a talk on preserving artifacts from NASA’s Apollo program

So much to see at the Heinz History Center but I absolutely had to check in with Nellie Bly. As a child I was fascinated by a drawing of a firefighter’s pole ladder in a book by Richard Scary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one before but I instantly recognized it. Similar:Students…

Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announcements

When I was working in radio news in the late 1980s, I took a lunch break at a nearby cafe that happened to be tuned to our station. “You have a voice like a radio announcer,” said the cashier, obviously not aware that he had been listening to my hourly news bulletins all morning. Gayanne…

Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose whether to be the passengers or pilots of our lives.

We’re drawn to activities that invite us to grow, by trying and trying again, because we want to evolve as people. Life is mostly repetitive—wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat—and each day can feel like an unsatisfying circle. But repetition with variation broadens us. It makes our circular days into spiralling journeys. “The spiral is a…

Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!

The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)

I had a great time playing Hastings in this audio adaptation of a classic Agatha Christie classic. A smart, young woman must “prove her wits” in order to find her uncle’s will and receive her inheritance. Does it count if she hires the world-renowned detective, Hercule Poirot? Find out when you listen to “The Missing…

‘Most Transparent’ White House In History Keeps Majority Of Trump’s Remarks Secret

On the White House website, there is no official record of about 80% of President Trump’s public statements. The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their…

Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player “Useless”

This is what we have to look forward to, as a torrent of AI-generated slop that’s good enough for the CEOs to monetize squeezes out the human-generated content that actually matters. Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s…