For the past 2 weeks I have slept a lot, coughed a lot, and one of my four classes is a week behind where I had hoped to be, but I guess I’ll be okay. Still dealing with some heavy eldercare and other issues that I just don’t have the energy to write about here,…
OpenAI has already taken a toll on human workers. It’s chilling to contemplate that students and creatives are comfortable with relying on this product in any meaningful way. The business model depends on devaluing human labor, and benefitting the powerful. The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts,…
“Hospice.” Once the word is uttered aloud, there is a seismic shift. You will feel it. Like a (very short) thread through the eye of a needle, swiftly in and swiftly out. The air itself becomes thin, steely. At the periphery of your vision, an immediate dimming. The penumbra begins to shrink. In time, it…
A good article about kids and dopamine. Apps and sweets can hijack the neural pathways we need to survive, triggering tantrums and aggression. The problem describes plenty of adults, too! It’s not actually happiness we feel when we fulfill that craving. While she’s staring into the technicolor images, her brain experiences spikes in dopamine, over and…
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…
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.…
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…
I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. I’ve deleted the app from my phone, and check it a couple times a day from my laptop. I’ve been reading more news and fewer tweets. I followed a Twitter bot that reminds me to go do something else that’s not scrolling slack-jawed through tweets.…
Thinking a lot lately about masking and empathy, and my role as educator. Finding the right balance between making people uncomfortable by avoiding eye contact and making people uncomfortable by staring is one of the many unwritten rules I’ve seen autistic people struggle to master. I still mention “eye contact” in my rubric for student…
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average…
Science deniers who expect medical research to be as tidy and predictable as a chapter in a middle school textbook sometimes see conspiracy theory when they look at the twists and turns in the scientific community’s response to the COVID-19. The scientists themselves would say they are doing science in real time, adapting to the…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir shows off an electric wheelchair that he replicated to accommodate the mobility needs of Ensign Pazlar, a newcomer from a low-gravity world, and whose usual anti-grav unit “just isn’t compatible” with the station’s Cardassian design. When she arrives, Pazlar is brusque and not interested in socializing. (She is probably physically exhausted adjusting…
Amazing lead: A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog. —Yousssef Rddad, The Advocate Note that…
With the lethal threat of COVID-19 on the decline, many colleges are relaxing policies to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Disability advocates fear that high-risk individuals will suffer. “Universities aren’t necessarily listening to disabled students,” said Eiryn Griest Schwartzman, who co-founded COVID Safe Campus, an advocacy organization for students and employees with disabilities. “That…
Sister Alphonsine Ciza spends most of her day manning the micro hydroelectric plant she built to overcome daily electricity cuts in her town of Miti in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The whoops echoed through airplanes as flight attendants and pilots announced midair that a judge in Florida had tossed out the federal mask mandate that has been in effect since January 2021. On a Southwest flight from Nashville to Charlotte, passengers hooted and hollered and twirled their freshly ditched masks in the air with giddy…
In April, 2002, I was blogging about Instructions for “Asking a Girl on a Date” (autistics.org) The Inform Beginner’s Guide (I edited this book on programming text adventure games in Inform 6) Broken Links: Just How Rapidly do Science Education Hyperlinks Go Extinct? (yes, the link was broken but I linked to the backup on…