Radio) (Ad Fontes Media)

The very useful “media bias chart” is one of several useful ways to classify sources of journalism. While individual items published by any of these sources can vary considerably from the general location depicted in this chart, the takeaway message is that journalism can still be valid and useful even if it has a slant,…

ChatBot Helps Crack the Case of the Missing 45GB

The other day I got a last-minute request to video a show. I usually like to watch a dress rehearsal first, which gives me the chance to check out my equipment and get a sense of where the important action will take place. But yesterday I had to go in cold, and I felt a…

Students must learn how to get things wrong. Only one subject does that. [English.]

I invest a lot of energy asking my college students to unlearn the pattern of summary and personal reflection that was enough to to earn a good grade in high school. I emphasize repeatedly that their high school teachers didn’t do anything wrong by teaching them what they needed to do in order to get…

National Mall site approved for memorial to fallen journalists

Federal officials have approved a site on the National Mall for the capital’s first memorial dedicated to journalists who have died while reporting the news and to the role of the free press in a democracy, the foundation planning the project announced Monday. The Fallen Journalists Memorial will be located on a third-of-an-acre parcel in…

The Struggle to Save Ballet From Itself

A former dancer reckons with the rigors and ordeals of life in ballet. If ballet was all self-effacing torture, there would be no need to wrestle with it. But despite the inhumanity of its current training methods, Robb also makes it clear that it gave her so much. “At ballet, I had learned not only…

My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon

Marine Buffard writes a stunningly powerful guest essay in the NYTimes: Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die. I slide my hand across my chest and speak aloud, palm to my heart’s crisp beating.…

Exodus From an Elsevier Neuroscience Journal

One of the world’s largest scientific publishers refused to reduce its $3,450 fee to publish in NeuroImage. […] On Monday, every editor at NeuroImage and the NeuroImage: Reports companion journal—over 40 people—resigned. “It’s a pretty big exodus,” said Cindy Lustig, a University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychology professor and one of the eight now former senior editors of…

Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviews

An amazing story of hope and dignity. That book club helped the inmates develop their analytical and communication skills. And out of that came a surprising insight: prison inmates read 9 times more books than civilians. So together with the National Justice Council, the Carambaia publishing house created a program called The Prison Reviews. The…

NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’

NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other…

Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? Universities Aren’t Ready for the Answer | The Walrus

I’m still grappling with exactly how the rise of AI writing apps will affect my teaching. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ban technology from the classroom. While I will likely assign more in-class, hand-written activities, that strategy won’t work for online classes — and I am just not interested in requiring students to use…

You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

Some people out there will never like you, no matter what you do. Some hurting and traumatized people will latch onto you as the symbol of their insecurities, and treat all your imperfections as personal attacks. It’s important not to pay that negativity forward, or to punch down, or to take it out on yourself.…

There are two factions working to prevent AI dangers. Here’s why they’re deeply divided.

We are assigning more societal decision-making power to systems that we don’t fully understand and can’t always audit, and that lawmakers don’t know nearly well enough to effectively regulate. As impressive as modern artificial intelligence can seem, right now those AI systems are, in a sense, “stupid.” They tend to have very narrow scope and limited computing…

False equivalency in a copspeak guide to dealing with the media

Police chief and writer Cliff Couch knows his audience. In a paragraph from an article advising LEOs how to deal with reporters, Couch begins with context he assumes his readers already accept, and carefully moves from there to the new ideas he wants them to consider. The horror tales you may have heard about reporters…

The Onion’s Supreme Court Briefing on Satire Is Stunning

From October: A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday. –The New York Times,Area Man Is Arrested for Parody. The Onion Files a…

In August, 2002, I was blogging about ebook readers and email in teaching; how urban legends spread; tales of a plush Chthulu; no, the creator of D&D was not on drugs; a paperless library; Marilyn Monroe; liveblogging an epileptic seizure

In August, 2002, I was blogging about Educational technology spending that doesn’t benefit students; ebook readers that students don’t like; email as a tool in online course (all free at the time, but now behind the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s paywall) A prof spreading bad papers in order to catch plagiarists Expensive goose tracker leads…

DeSantis-backed bill would make it easier to sue news media

American law protects the free speech and press rights of all citizens, including journalists; and the courts are open for all citizens, including the subjects of new stories. Democracy has flourishes where the press is free. Despotism rises where it is not. DeSantis is framing this as a defense of the average citizen, but we…

Microsoft “lobotomized” AI-powered Bing Chat, and its fans aren’t happy

Microsoft limits long conversations to address “concerns being raised.” […] These deeply human reactions have proven that people can form powerful emotional attachments to a large language model doing next-token prediction. That might have dangerous implications in the future. Over the course of the week, we’ve received several tips from readers about people who believe…

The AI Mirror Test: Why Even the Smartest People Keep Falling Short

What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…

‘Aims’: the software for hire that can control 30,000 fake online profiles

At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan…

Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. —New York Times “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like…

Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

Ethics