How to Disagree Academically: Using Graham’s “Disagreement Hierarchy” to organize a college term paper.

Journalist flexes in story about Trump Media accountant who has spelled his own name 14 different ways in official documents

Gotta love how this reporter worked the spelling variations into the story. Meet Ben F orgers (we wish we were making this up). The founder of the accounting firm hired by Donald Trump’s social media group has used 14 variations of his name in filings with the industry regulator, far more than any other US…

AI generated image that relates in no meaningful way to the content of the page on which it appears.

This is what the techbros are excited about? Really?

Some 2300 years ago in ancient Greece, Plato wrote a dialogue featuring his mentor Socrates, who argued that the ability to churn out the longest written compositions on trivial topics or the shortest compositions on important topics is a shallow skill that has nothing to do with human understanding, much like demonstrating that you can…

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

I’ve felt a bit like this guy the last few times I’ve been to in-person academic conferences. I certainly enjoy the panels and the keynotes and seeing the poster presentations, but in between sessions I just drift around and think about what I would be doing right now if I were at home, and missing…

Double Entry Journals: Your Scholarly Research Notes for College-level Critical Thinking

What is a double-entry research journal?

Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.

By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.

My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs.

The Assignment #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 5) Keiko is not herself after a trip to Bajor’s haunted Fire Caves; Rom hopes to impress O’Brien

Rewatching ST:DS9 On a bustling morning in Quark’s, Rom sours his brother’s good mood by ordering human cuisine — O’Brien’s favorite breakfast. Bashir commiserates after he accidentally killed the plants Keiko entrusted to O’Brien. Little Molly tells her daddy, “You’re in trouble.” Keiko seems strangely unmoved by the news. “They’re just plants.” When Keiko tells…

Interesting use of A.I. in a radiology journal

Medical doctors and scholars Raneem Bader, Ashraf Imam, Mohammad Alnees, Neta Adler, Joanthan ilia, Diaa Zugayar, Arbell Dan, and Abed Khalaileh are shortly going to be very surprised how many people are viewing their article, “Successful management of an Iatrogenic portal vein and hepatic artery injury in a 4-month-old female patient: A case report and…

What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

This is not only powerful material for thought, it’s also compelling storytelling. At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study…

MLA In-text citations: Writing that got you through high school won’t do in college.

Nor the Battle to the Strong #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 4) Jake Sisko, cub reporter, tests his belief in courage under fire

Rewatching ST:DS9 On an assignment to write a profile on Bashir, budding writer Jake tags along to a medical conference, and nothing really surprising happens. Their casual, character-based banter is not interrupted by a distress call from a colony in desperate need of medical assistance, and no side-quest, custom-tailored to appeal to the people who…

Persuasion: Logos, Pathos, Ethos and Kairos

New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text

Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. […] A trained and tested LLM, when presented with a new text prompt, will generate the most likely next word, append it to the prompt, generate another next word, and continue in this manner,…

How the printing press changed “you”: when reading changed, so did writing

This was before the printing press, so books were copied by hand on parchment, which made them expensive and rare. Most people didn’t read much, especially for pleasure. Instead, they listened to books at group readings for entertainment. Pero López de Ayala wrote at the end of the 14th century, “It also pleased me to…

Traces of Scribes

Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.)

Jack Rollins-Frosty the Snowman

I voiced Jack Rollins, writer of the popular holiday songs “Frosty the Snowman” and “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” in another “Whispers of the Past” documentary focused on Scottdale, Pa.

Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.” According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous,…