Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and…
Chimpanzees in Arnhem’s Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands had learned zookeepers’ rule that meals wouldn’t be served until all had assembled. But one day, as reported by Time magazine in 2007, two teenage chimps were more interested in staying out to play than coming in to eat. The others had to wait for hours,…
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More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context or doing favors for advertisers. Less than a third believe reporters correct their errors, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or…
Pope Leo XIV, who has made peace and unity priorities of his pontificate, emphasized that “the more we are reconciled, the more we Christians can bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is a proclamation of hope for all” and, in the words of Pope Francis, “a message of peace and universal…
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My classes are generally small enough that I have time to get to know each student’s writing. When a student who confuses “bias” and “biased” in a hand-written response later that day sends me an email later that day that uses “whom” and “betwixt,” I notice. I can’t prove a student is abusing AI, but…
AI is getting better at rote tasks, but it still takes a human to do 97% of typical freelance tasks (according to research published by a company that sells the services of humans who tag material to train LLMs). Last year I went through part of the training process for a job that offered “up…
I can’t stand Pinterest. I hate when Google sends me there, because Pinterest isn’t a source, it’s just a way to collect images from sources. I don’t want to interact with Pinterest, I want the images. For years I used a Chrome plugin called “Unpinterested,” which filters out the Pinterest results. Just now,…
Anyone seen “Hamnet”? I was not too impressed by “Shakespeare in Love,” which perpetuated the biographical fallacy — that the key to unlocking the one, true meaning of a literary work is listing how each detail in a literary work “could represent” some detail in the author’s life, and that once you’ve constructed that list,…
Madeline Cash reflects on her boomer mother’s use of ellipses. When I texted to thank her, she responded, ‘Enjoy . . .’ Why not Enjoy period or Enjoy exclamation point? Did she resent the gift? Are the treats poisoned? There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. ‘OK . . .’ ‘Thanks…
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Never again.
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This the sunlight at that time is shown on the map above, when the sun is set on Pitcairn, there’s still around an hour until it rises in Akrotiri and Dhekelia, meanwhile as it’s just after the spring equinox, the sun will have set over the south pole beginning it’s 6 month long night, and therefore setting on British Antarctic Territory.