The last post I put up had some impressive humanoid robots doing martial arts in China. That type of robot has since been upgraded, and its nickname is the Superman robot. Check out this latest iteration of robotics, via China. This is from ABC News.
Or watch it here:
From February, 2026, in China (over the last 6 months, some are likely more capable by now...):
In diverse communities across the US, academic achievement gaps exist. Usually, and including the one I am familiar with in my school district, these gaps are racial in nature; and this is usually tied to socioeconomic status of the families. This is the case in my experience.
Academic achievement gaps are already present in young children, and often before kindergarten. If a family is low income and struggling (families of color are over-represented in this demographics), the parents cannot afford the types of programs, clubs, sports, music and the arts, vacations, trips to the museum, home libraries, and other activities, that higher income families take for granted. The difference in opportunities at young ages create academic gaps, and by the time these kids get to high school, the academic gaps lead to more opportunity gaps that high schools offer in so many forms, which generally ensure the academic gaps does not shrink, but may still widen.
The gaps in communities can be generational. These are enormous problems for school districts, as well as society as a whole. I've worked on achievement gaps for some twenty seven years, helping create Project Excite that was working for the students and families in the program Gaps were closing before the kids got to the high school, and they were able to get into the honors and AP pathways and a brighter future than on average.
I recently used AI to help do a meta-study on what is out there in the literature and online when it comes to achievement gaps. Using this as a foundation, I went ahead and, in the last few weeks, put together hybrid books on various aspects of achievement gaps in communities, and what teachers need to consider and know, and what suggestions and options teachers have to actually work with their students to reduce and eliminate gaps.
Hybrid books refer to creating a manuscript via one's conversations with their AI, in my case ChatGPT 5.5. Based on the conversational history on these types of topics over an extended period of time, when I asked my AI to write out information and plans and possibilities for an audience of teachers, within minutes I got material for a book. The AI included information it remembers from our discussions, and added new things to think about, some that I almost certainly would not have thought of myself. The AI wrote a book that I could then edit when necessary, but by and large it did a better job than I would have done by myself, and in minutes compared to what would have been many months of research, drafting, editing, and losing sleep and hair! I created, so far, a 4-booklet series I call Cut to the Chase for Teachers for attacking the issue of achievement gaps in so many school, once and for all.
These are formatted in a style heavy in bullet points and statements of the key ideas - with no fluff or countless pages of descriptions, anecdotes, stories, and so on - so that readers can get through it in about an hours worth of time. I recommend reading and using these together with colleagues, or for PD sessions, to get A LOT of ideas and options for some aspect of AI, so that you can then create something specific for your classroom and community. In fact, teachers can use their own AI platforms to take the different options mentioned in the books and quickly write lessons and activities for your students. These books have laid out examples of K-12 planning, for teachers, administrations, and department chairs to consider and help plan specific pathways that are best-suited for your students and district. Again, there are A LOT of ideas, topics, and issues in these books that can help guide your thinking at any school, for any grade level, and for any subject areas you teach or work with students.
I think these will be quite useful - now - for teachers of all grade levels and subject areas!
If you have Peacock, streaming now is a newly released movie called "The AI Doc, or how I became an Apocoloptimist." Check out a trailer here.
Artificial intelligence, AI, and more advanced robotics are two technologies that have already been changing parts of the world for many people. Whether it is social media algorithms, causing changes in the job markets of numerous fields, allowing for new types and areas of computational and experimental research, changing how wars are fought, and countless other areas of life, AI is advancing in its capabilities and 'intelligence' so rapidly that we cannot honestly or reliably have a chance to predict what the world will look like in 6 months time.
As a teacher of junior and seniors in high school, I have no good answers when they ask, worriedly, what they should study or what the status of their field of choice will be in four or five years when they are coming out of college - no one has good guesses as to what jobs will be available years from now. But this is the world our children are inheriting, one of unprecedented and rapid change and unpredictability.
What and how should we be teaching them? While schools are mostly still working in the spirit of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, we have not been trained or have any national guidance as to what changes need to be made to the K-12 educational system. I am fairly confident what we are doing now is not optimized for a child's success in the future. While there are wonderful pockets of work being done by organizations here and abroad for AI in schools, it has not filtered down to the individual school and classroom level at the great majority of schools in the US. Some teachers use it in the classroom, but the great majority do not, certainly in my experience. This, again, is mostly due to a lack of knowledge and training for AI in the classroom, and not having a plan of any kind. In fact, ask ten people what they think AI means, and you'll get ten pretty different answers! By the way, here is a possible classroom policy for students and the use of AI, especially for middle school and high school.
I went ahead and, in the last two weeks, put together hybrid books on various aspects of AI in the classroom, and what teachers need to consider and know, and what suggestions and options do teachers have to actually work with their students and begin to give some experience, and develop necessary skills, for them to handle advanced AI and robotics in the next decade or so. Hybrid books refer to creating a manuscript via one's conversations with their AI, in my case ChatGPT 5.5. Based on the conversational history on these types of topics over an extended period of time, when I asked my AI to write out information and plans and possibilities for an audience of teachers, within minutes I got material for a book. The AI included information it remembers from our discussions, and added new things to think about, some that I almost certainly would not have thought of myself. The AI wrote a book that I could then edit when necessary, but by and large it did a better job than I would have done by myself, and in minutes compared to what would have been many months of research, drafting, editing, and losing sleep and hair! I created, so far, a 12-booklet series I call Cut to the Chase for Teachers for AI in the classroom.
I think these will be quite useful - now - for teachers of all grade levels and subject areas!
You can access them here:
These are formatted in a style heavy in bullet points and statements of the key ideas - with no fluff or countless pages of descriptions, anecdotes, stories, and so on - so that readers can get through it in about an hours worth of time. I recommend reading and using these together with colleagues, or for PD sessions, to get A LOT of ideas and options for some aspect of AI, so that you can then create something specific for your classroom and community. In fact, teachers should use their own AI platforms to take the different options mentioned in the books and quickly write lessons and activities for your students. These books have laid out examples of K-12 planning, for teachers, administrations, and department chairs to consider and help plan specific pathways that are best-suited for your students and district. Again, there are A LOT of ideas, topics, and issues in these books that can help guide your thinking at any school, for any grade level, and for any subject areas you teach or work with students.
I hope you find any of this useful, as we all must consider tweaks and modifications to how we do school, because the world our students will live in is NOT at all what we were thinking about just five years ago!
Consider that the decisions humans make today about how to proceed with and use AI, will determine how beneficial or harmful these advanced technologies will be for our children. We must consider how we will help them TODAY...for their sake!
An interesting process happens with trees and forests. Trees emit chemicals called phytoncides. When we breathe it in, it goes into the bloodstream and has remarkable effects on our bodies and health - phytoncide activates our immune system to produce more white blood cells of the natural killer (NK) variety. These can hunt down stress hormones, destroy virus-infected cells, and go after cancer cells in tumors!
Scientists have measured around a 50% increase in anti-cancer proteins after just 2 days hiking and being in forests, and this increase lasts nearly one month. Forest air lowers cortisol, blood pressure, and helps one de-stress by helping activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Fascinating! Again and again, we find Nature provides everything we need for good health, if we just recognize and accept it, and take advantage of the cycles that exist today through evolution. Life evolved that best fits into the natural environment and ecosystems that exist on earth, and forests are a big part of this.
For research, the first thought that I had with this information is to do studies of cancer rates (overall and specific types) dependent on where people live - rural vs suburban vs urban. And break it down to longtime residents near or in forest compared to longtime residents living in desert environments and urban environments, etc. Are there statistically significant differences between cancer rates, blood pressure conditions, stress related issues, and so on? This is a challenging study to do since there are SO MANY possible factors that affect health that need to be considered - we would need to learn how statistics helps do this for complex systems and studies, but it could also help guide health policy and recommendations for different regions of the country.
Just putting this out there! Physical experiments can also be done on any variety of plants, investigating what chemicals are released to their surroundings and if any of them are beneficial to human health.
The Global Teacher Prize (GTP) has been around since 2015, and has as a goal to raise the status of the teaching profession and put it on the same level as other professions. It is known as the "Nobel Prize for Teachers," and offers a $1 million prize to the winner!
Nominations for the 2027 GTP just opened, so Nominate that special teacher who has changed your life! Any K-12 teacher on the planet is eligible, so there will be many thousands of nominations of the top teachers from 80-100 countries.
This is life-changing for a teacher. When I was chosen as one of the Top 50 Finalists in 2015, I had the opportunity to meet and partner with some of the great teachers on the planet. I am in touch and collaborate with dozens, and have met so many of them personally when we had four teacher summits in Dubai from 2016-2019. I have been a reader-judge for the selection process for several years, and I am only amazed and inspired as I read through applications from all over the world.
Consider it, and nominate a teacher from your school career!
I got this off Facebook, the "Facts they don't teach you" page:
France is transforming parking lots into clean energy generators, and it may be one of the most practical climate policies introduced in recent years.
In Evanston and most diverse communities around the country, academic achievement gaps, which lead to opportunity gaps, are prevalent and tend to be generational. Our Project Excite is one approach that had found these gaps can be reduced, and even eliminated, through a long-term, comprehensive approach that begins with working with students when they are young (Excite started with Black and Hispanic 3rd graders, for instance).
As I am part of a new community-wide effort to try and get those same results on a grand scale, I used AI to do my own meta-study - a look at numerous research studies in the topic - and find the key ideas, concepts, models, and actions that are found to help attack the gaps. I'm pleased that our Excite model, which was run from 1999-2017, 'discovered' nearly all of this independently; published studies for Excite can be found here.
Check out the meta-study results, which are loaded with ideas and best practices teachers of all grade levels can do to help their students, especially students of color and lower-income students, who are most likely to fall into the gaps. Lists of references are provided.
1. Achievement gaps in general; 2. EELS role in fighting achievement gaps; 3. Effect of stereotype threat on gaps; 4. Effect and use of multiple intelligence models on gaps.
Since the COVID pandemic and shutdown of schools here and around the world, I've been fortunate to work with dozens of nationally and globally renowned teachers and educators to develop and promote the commonly called SEL skills - which I think really needs to be renamed and rebranded to what they really are, Everyday Essential Life Skills, or EELS - and provide all sorts of practical resources for teachers.
ALL of the resources are linked through this Google Sheet, so if you are an educator or just generally interested, have at it and use/copy/modify what you like and can make use of with students!
Good news for science, and more importantly, the world - scientists who were fired from NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have replaced the dismantled climate.gov site with a new climate.us site. The current administration, who openly and often calls climate change a "hoax", and has cut funding and fired some of the world's best climate scientists for political reasons, has put a massive obstacle in the way of nearly the entire rest of the world when it comes to doing something about climate change. We should be thankful to the actual scientists and experts in the field for doing this as a nonprofit, and mostly as on a volunteer basis!
GO TO CLIMATE.US for all sorts of data, analyses, and discussions of what's going on with the planet!
If you're looking to pass a little bit of time, even a few minutes, and also want to make a difference in those few minutes, try Freerice!
This is a game from the UN's World Hunger Program, and by answering questions correctly you are directly donating rice to some of the poorest and hungriest people on earth! It is a great way to pass some time, help people - many of whom are children and others who are near desperation - and learn a little because there are dozens of subject categories and topics you can choose from. If you open a free account, it will track how much rice you've donated over time...see if you like it, and feel good about playing a game! And join the ETHS Group (see instructions below)!
LET'S COLLECTIVELY SEE HOW MUCH RICE WE CAN DONATE OVER TIME:
Make an account, and JOIN the ETHS GROUP. Click on the bars in the top left of the screen when playing Freerice, and select GROUPS. When you join the group, any rice you donate when playing goes both to your individual and group totals! Let's see what the Wildkits can do over time, and try to get millions of grains donate at some point! You can join the ETHS group with this code:
Group code:A48ERJWX
ANYONE CAN JOIN THIS GROUP, SO EMAIL OR TEXT THE DETAILS TO FRIENDS AND FAMILIES!!
I’m a big fan of the television drama The West Wing, which premiered in 1999. I remember in one episode early in the second season (2000), the character President Bartlet, while campaigning, said that 1 in 5 children in the U.S. was growing up in poverty. It is a good assumption that this also implied 1 in 5 American kids is food insecure, if not routinely hungry.
Twenty six years later, we have nearly 1 in 5 children in the U.S. being food insecure. In an age of record stock markets (which have been setting all-time records since the Obama administration through the present, minus the COVID period) and humanity’s first trillionaire, we have made very little to no real progress with ensuring all of our children have ready access to nutritious food, where the 18.4% figure (from 2024 data) is over 14 million kids not knowing when the next meal is coming, at least not consistently.
I suspect most who read this will be aware, if for any other reason than common sense, that children don’t do as well in school when they are hungry. And this is the case for those students who already are coming from lower income families, which have other issues against the school children coming from those families, which include going to schools that are likely underfunded relative to the schools kids from higher-income families attend; and lower income families and children are overrepresented by children of color. For example, Black and Latino families are about twice as likely to be food insecure than White families. Food insecurity is a factor in the academic achievement gaps we see in so many diverse school districts around the country (here are data from the Evanston, IL, school districts to show examples of academic achievement gaps), and low performance in many urban school districts.
The reasons food insecurity is a factor in academic performance and student learning are numerous. Even adults are hard-pressed to remain healthy and perform at work at optimal levels when hungry. Lower income families in general have less access to high-level nutritious food, often living in the ‘food desert’ areas of cities, where fresh produce is miles away. Hunger (and the resulting decrease in the nutrition needed for good overall health) affects concentration, physical and mental health, proper brain development of children, energy levels, behavior, mood, memory, and motor skills.
I and countless other educators presently worry about the next few years when it comes to nutrition in public schools because of the politicization of federal aid to low income families, such as cuts to SNAP benefits and funding for free and reduced lunch programs around the US, which are already affecting millions of our children.
One avenue to help with this situation in schools is to consider having school gardens, both outside and inside schools. Indoor farming has become more possible in classrooms over the past decade due to efforts such as the Green Bronx Machine, founded by my friend Stephen Ritz, who has taken time to write full K-12 curricula centered around growing food in classrooms. He uses primarily tower gardens, and has helped transform his school in a poverty stricken section of the Bronx, and turn around not only the school, but the entire community. He has taken this global, and helps set up school gardens and food programs all around the world. I have tower gardens in my classroom and adjacent research center, where my students and I grow fresh produce to donate to a local food pantry over the fall and winter months, when outdoor farming is not possible around Chicago.
This past school year we grew and donated 809 bags (mostly gallon sized) of arugula, kale, chard, basil, parsley, and lettuces (166 pounds) from late September through early May, using just 5 towers, which went to dozens of families each week who rely on the food pantry. We will be expanding this with student-built grow systems both in the high school and some elementary classrooms in our feeder district. We hope to add more and more resources throughout more and more classrooms each new school year, since the need for food assistance continues to grow around the country, up to 14% of households from 10% since COVID.
The US was making some progress reducing food insecurity from highs during the Great Recession, but the percentage is rising back to those levels after the COVID pandemic.
For educators, there are two other pieces of this I’d like to mention. One is the inclusion of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into classes and community service projects. The second is to realize the future importance of indoor farming to this generation of young children, due to climate change.
The UN SDGs are something I have included in my classes for most of the past decade, after they were adopted by all nations in 2015. As a science teacher, most of the 17 issues defined as the SDGs will need STEM as a primary means of finding real solutions to those issues, and No Hunger, SDG #2, is one of those issues. Any type of classroom and school farming is something that can bring attention to our children, and make them aware of and able to help those classmates and community families who may not be as fortunate as others when it comes to food insecurity.
Things like possible population growth, and most importantly, the effects climate change (SDG #13) will have on global agriculture, will make outdoor farming more and more challenging, and likely less productive as top soil loss and nutrient level degradation in our most fertile farmlands (especially outside the US) continue to decline. The growing fresh water crisis in many parts of the world plays into this complex system. Indoor farming is something my students and I talk about as a part of the solution to feeding their world several decades from now, and it already is having an impact here and in other parts of the world, where they are investigating industrial indoor farming (mostly hydroponics). I think this is something educators can use in multiple ways of applying STEM knowledge and applications, as well as developing community service projects that begin introducing this important concept to the children who will be seeing this type of farming in their lives, and as one of the pieces of solutions to climate change the world will need to consider and develop on bigger and bigger scales, such as this massive indoor farm in New Jersey, from AeroFarms.
It is possible to link indoor farming in classrooms, regardless of STEM subject one teaches - I’m doing this as an AP Physics teacher, and the students love having the tower gardens in the room and helping feed community members, despite it being outside of our curriculum.
It is important to make students aware that not everyone is able to have consistent and predictable meals. It is important that we get nutritious food to those kids who need it, in order to help them grow and develop as healthy as possible, which in turn will optimize their learning in school. It is important this generation understands that these newer farming techniques and technologies exist and are developing here and abroad because it will become more important in the future due to climate change. We owe it to them.
As my 28th class of seniors has now graduated, I am once again impressed and inspired by the sheer amount of talent they collectively have, and also saddened by their departure. Amongst them are true scholars, humanitarians, leaders, musicians, singers, actors, athletes, community servers, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, programmers, travelers, potential politicians, journalists, and so much more. They possess good minds along with good hearts, and that is a combination I tell them will take them places in life...and we need people like this.
May they find joy and purpose in the next few years, as they discover their true selves and begin to find the pathways towards their futures! I am proud of them!
A former student wrote to me out of the blue. It was incredibly sweet and humbling, as it is every time I hear from former students who are appreciative and grateful for their time with me in high school, and how it helped determine how their academic & professional lives evolved years after graduation. This student has just completed his PhD at Stanford in environmental economics, and will soon cross the country to be an assistant professor at MIT. This alone is beyond impressive, but not surprising because of his interests and abilities in high school that allowed him to do research and actually DO science and other activities most students don't get the chance to do...and it made that long-term road to where he now is possible, because he realized he was passionate about discovery and figuring complexity out.
But then what he told me is how this approach to go beyond textbooks and the confinements of typical course curricula has made a much bigger impact on students, as well as on society. Zane roomed with two other PhD students that were also from my classes back in Evanston. They knew of others from our program who were also currently at Stanford, about to get their doctorates in STEM (and one in English, but also from Chem/Phys). They knew of 9 or 10 ETHS students who were getting their Stanford PhDs; they then checked something else, and this is the same as the number of STEM PhD candidates from the whole of the United Kingdom! If this is accurate, I'm shocked, since we are talking Stanford, and countries form the EU certainly encourage many of their best and brightest to study at Stanford and the other powerhouse STEM US universities.
There are hundreds of former students who have went on to get their Masters and Doctorates in so many STEM fields, as well as MDs and MBAs and law degrees. This is the tradition and possibility this program is designed to do for students, by not only giving AP curricula, but more importantly, offering a couple dozen different ways of pursuing their individual interests and passions, discovering what they want to do and allowing them to work on it prior to college!
Check out what our students have done while in high school. And see where they have gone to college over the last quarter century.
This is a recent video regarding the quantum computing effort at Google. These types of computers are already real, but just in their infancy stage compared to where experts expect them to go. Keep in mind that these will not replace your everyday computers and cell phones, but are valuable in advanced research and meant for highly complex calculational problems. And one application that I don't think anyone understands yet is what happens when these computing systems are used with AI and advanced robotics systems. Time will tell...
I have a number of amazing friends around the world, and I am one of the luckiest people alive to be able to say this. Right up there at the top is Stephen Ritz, who teaches in the Bronx, and found his way to having classrooms revolve around tower gardens, and emphasizing good nutrition as one of the absolute essentials for kids to do well and thrive in school. With his Green Bronx Machine organization, he has some 1100 schools with 370,000 students using his curriculum and ideas in their classrooms everyday.
He was on the 'Kelly Clarkson Show', and his segment aired today. I encourage you to check it out, and my own classroom is fortunate to use our tower gardens to help dozens of families in need of fresh produce every week in Evanston, thanks to Stephen introducing me to all this nearly a decade ago!
This is the Artemis II homepage for NASA. What an incredible mission, with splashdown happening to the minute that was planned and predicted! Congratulations to the tens of thousands who were part of this project!
Photo from Artemis II mission...remarkable!
There are 50-100 lightning strikes around the world every second! This is because at any given moment there are around 2000 storms taking place. Every bolt of lightning creates electromagnetic radiation in the form of EM waves, but an interesting thing happens between the ground and the ionosphere, which is a layer in the atmosphere consisting of a global layer and shield of ions - it forms a resonance cavity for those EM waves (i.e. the em waves are trapped between the ground and ionosphere).
Some of the waves, at certain frequencies, can overlap and add up, sort of like sound waves can overlap and resonate in musical wind instruments, forming what's called the Schumann resonance. This is something scientists can measure anywhere around the world! And the resonance depends on the number of lightning strikes. By measuring this at different times of the year, and over many years, it is another measure of global warming, since the frequency of lightning strikes is dependent on the average air temperature. The measurements are yet another confirmation of increased warming, because this is reflected in the comparisons of Schumann measurements over many years.
Nature is cool!
In my classes, we do think in terms of protons and neutrons being composed of smaller particles, called quarks. Specifically, protons are two ups and one down, and neutrons are one up and two downs.
The new particle that's been observed and measured is called a Xi baryon (baryons are particles composed of three quarks), and is two charm quarks and one down. This has a +1 charge like a proton, and is four times more massive. This was done at the CERN lab, which is in Europe between France and Switzerland.
Goes to show that there are always new discoveries waiting to be made, even with theories like the Standard Model that's been around since the late 1960s. Cool!
In my classes, over the past two weeks, the topic of other life in the universe became a topic everyone is interested in. Students asked for my opinion, and I don't hesitate in telling them that for me, and most serious scientists I know in all fields, I would be shocked if there WASN'T simple life all over the place throughout this universe! I'm talking bacterial or single-cell type life. Now, 'intelligent' - or I use the term 'complex' - life, like us or animals or plants, that is a different story that I don't think anyone has a good grasp of. This is because complex life requires hundreds of millions of years for evolution to do its thing, and that then requires very long periods of time of relative stability, which does not happen for most stars and planets, so that will be a much more challenging thing to wrap our heads around.
But bacterial type life? We estimated there could be some hundred billion trillion planets in the observable universe! And already many exoplanets have been observed in 'Goldilock's zones where there can be liquid water and other chemicals necessary for life (as we know it). The ingredients for life are all over the place when astronomers look, including water everywhere and even amino acids floating around! If there is any level of environmental and planetary stability for relatively short periods of time, simple life would have a chance to naturally evolve from basic organic chemistry.
Below is a snippet I found about the first potential evidence suggesting there could be other life on exoplanets:
James Webb Space Telescope has just delivered the strongest hint yet of alien life! Scientists studying the distant exoplanet K2-18 b (about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo) have detected methane, carbon dioxide, and a possible trace of dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—a molecule that, on Earth, is produced almost exclusively by living organisms such as marine plankton.
How small is small? How large is large? Since Quantum Mechanics was developed in the 1920s, this has been one of THE questions we've had - where is the boundary between being able to treat the world with classical, Newtonian mechanics, or treating the world with QM?
It appears that over the last 20 years, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Wojciech Zurek, has developed a theory using first principles of QM to show how many-atom objects and systems naturally yield the 'classical', everyday properties we measure. It has to do with the fact that any quantum object, such as an atom, naturally becomes 'entangled' with all other physical entities it interacts with. It is this mass entanglement process where the properties we observe behave as a continuum rather than as quantized values.
Read the article here, if you wish. If you are a student, I have a copy of Zurek's recently published book about quantum decoherence and his theory of Quantum Darwinism. It's pretty technical, but have a look if you want!
In class, we get into length contraction when it comes to Einstein's special theory of relativity. When objects move, their lengths shorten up by some amount in the direction of motion. This is a well-known conclusion from relativity. It is also really challenging to try and measure this at everyday speeds, because the length contraction is so tiny; not until a substantial fraction of the speed of light will it become more measurable.
However, it turns out that what we would actually see is surprising and different from just a meter stick being a little shorter. We would see the stick, as a stationary observer with the stick flying past us really fast, rotate by some amount! This has to do with the behavior and tiny time differences of photons coming from the stick and reaching our sensors; it was calculated by two scientists about 20 years ago, and is called the Terrell-Penrose Effect.
Now, with crazy-fast electronics and video technologies, this has actually been observed, and the real relativistic prediction confirmed, in the lab! This is a good Scientific American article, with some visuals, as to what it looks like for real! Very cool!
Why did Socrates not write anything down? What we know about Socrates and his thinking was written mostly by his student, Plato.
Socrates and Plato understood that the best way to go after truth was through conversation and questioning; hence the Socratic method. Conversation allows us to question, pose possible answers, find contradictions and flaws in our thinking, critically and rigorously dive ever deeper into a topic, and so on, all is real time. Conversation provides a the best, most efficient and rigorous way to critically think through hard problems, and hopefully dig some nuggets of truth out of the problem.
Writing is different, and not as efficient or effective. Certainly it takes longer. As we read something, we naturally (and hopefully) develop any number of questions, and needs for clarifications, and 'what if' scenarios. Reading something is open to interpretation, since we are unable to ask the author and get feedback; in so many ways, we need to try and read the mind of the author, and this requires assumptions and guesswork. The process of learning, and then questioning, and then refining our views and answers, may or may not fully happen if it is all through writing.
Now we have AI. What would Socrates and Plato think about this? This article is interesting and provides some thoughts about it. I agree with the author of the piece that there is good and bad, depending on how we use the AI in writing. It can certainly write a student assignment or a paper we publish on websites or try to submit to other publications, and we do not have to do the heavy lifting thinking. That is NOT how we should be using AI. However, what the great philosophers would likely appreciate about AI is that it can be your debating 'partner'. You can have a conversation with an AI and do the equivalent of, or at least a good approximation, the Socratic method, where we can have a back and forth of questioning with the AI to better and more rigorously develop our thoughts. That type of use is not so different than having a human partner to debate and critically think with, and this makes AI a very useful tool in writing.
Here are the 'Big 3' Greek philosophers that help create Western thought. Some 2500 years later, we still can use their thoughts and wisdom.
From the State of the Union address two nights ago, part of this administration's energy planning is to go back to burning more and more fossil fuels. This includes the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal. But of course, the talking and selling point politicians use is "clean coal".
This is an article about Clean Coal, if interested in learning a little more about it. It is not much cleaner by any standards, and is also being priced out in many markets by solar and wind energy. But, this is part of what's going on as you read this, in different areas of the US.
COMAP is an applied mathematicians organization that runs an international math modeling competition. One of our teams, consisting of juniors Brynn Litus, Keira Beaudoin, Emma Reese, and Chloe Ross, were rated as a Finalist team. This goes to the teams around the world that place in the top 5% - and there are only 8 US teams that placed this high - so it's a big deal! This is out of 1100 papers in the competition, which is now dominated by Chinese high school teams since they have some focus on real-world math modeling in their math curriculum. This is something I've been wanting in US math classes for the last 20 years, but that's another story.
Anyhow, see an Evanston Now news story about the team here! Congratulations to them, as they now prepare for both the International Math Modeling Competition (IMMC), and the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge in the next month!
A recent study found that AI algorithms identify Deep Fake images quite a bit better than humans. Humans identified them basically at 50%, which is just chance level, while an AI correctly distinguished between the images as high as 97% accuracy. However, humans still identify Deep Fake videos better than the AIs that were used in the study - the AIs were only around chance level, but humans were correct nearly two-thirds of the time.
With this being an election year, everyone is anticipating the use of Deep Fakes will spike. We should be working in unison with AI algorithms to hopefully weed-out as many of these as possible, as it will be an ongoing battle as long as these technologies exist. Let's try to maintain as much reality in our lives as possible, as we continue on into the age of mis- and dis-information. It is becoming more challenging to pick out real from fake, to be sure.
Which image below (of a NU professor) is real, which is fake???
This is a NIH summary of both the benefits and harm social media has on the teen brain. Teens are at a stage of human development where the brain is active and maturing, with things like risk-taking peaking, mental health conditions like depression beginning to develop, and social consciousness and self-worth are being formed.
It is worth checking out. One finding is that teens who spend an average of 3 hours or more per day on social media platforms are TWICE as likely as teens who don't of developing symptoms of anxiety and depression. It begins to reduce one's attention span. It makes one less social, of course, in terms of human interaction, which we need to socialize and develop skills that are necessary for our lifetime. By 2021, the average number of hours for children grades 8-10 were already at 3.5 hours. Online bullying, drops in self-esteem and body image, loss of sleep, drops in attention span and comprehension in school, and eating disorders are all rising with the increased use of social media.
Let's try to LIVE our OWN lives a little more, by watching and reading about OTHERS living their lives a little LESS - it will bring more joy to your life!
