iatheia

[iatheia]

I'm not sure I entirely agree? I would love nothing more than if every single student in my class got an A, if they demonstrated they understood the material, and demonstrated it in the homeworks and on the exam. But, there is always a fraction of students who refuse to even show up or do the barest minimum. And plenty of students would half-ass it. And after you taught a class enough times, you can pretty well intuit not "this is the bell curve distribution, and it has to be maintained no matter what" but "this student is doing comparatively to all those who have earned this grade in the past". I strive to have a consistent grading, but it isn't necessarily imposes a particular distribution of grades on a particular class, just that on average you would get certain types of students year after year.

Of course, if you have multiple people teaching the same class, you should communicate with your fellow instructors, striving to have consistency. You want to be fair to the students, if they answer the question incorrectly, but they answer it in the same way, that deserves the same grade, you shouldn't have the case where one student would get a B, and another a D for the same submission assignment in the same class, with the only difference being who is grading them. But this is solved through having a consistent rubrics, not through it being free-for all for the TAs and then trying to match each other's grade distribution.

My opinion on ChatGPT is that it is a tool like any other. And if you know how to use it, great. But in order to use it effectively, you already need to know quite a bit about the material. Even the thing that it is supposedly good at, writing computer code, it cannot handle anything more than the most trivial of tasks without hand-holding. About half of my class involves programing. And it is incredibly obvious when a student uses it. So many times they ended up generating random data instead of using the data provided to them, because a student mindlessly copied over what chatgpt has given them and didn't care if it is correct or not.

Obviously it isn't a problem unique to ChatGPT. A decade ago, there was a different type of assignment that I gave, they needed to go outside and record some observations. And if you know what you are doing, these "recordings" are incredibly easy to fake, and I would have been none the wiser. But if you don't know what you are doing... I had a student trying to convince me that they have never seen the Moon in their life after I caught them trying to "observe" it when it was below the horizon.

But generative AI amplifies the problem more. Even if you wanted to use Spark Notes, at least you needed to read those, and engage with the material to at least some degree. They were also written by people who understood the material, so even if students regurgitate that, they wouldn't be lead quite as far astray. With ChatGPT, students don't even need to read what it wrote to submit it, but they are also more blindsided when it takes them astray.

There were a couple of students I ended up calling out on its usage. One of them has admitted that he had no idea what he is doing, and I sat with him, and I walked him through the assignment, from the beginning to the end. And he is still not great at it, it doesn't come to him naturally at all, but you can definitely see him improving after he started doing stuff without resorting to AI. I can see him being more engaged, more interested in trying to succeed. The other student... is a bit of a hopeless case. They don't care, and I have no idea what is it is they are trying to get out of not just my class, but their major as a whole, because what they are getting out it so far ain't much...

Point is, yes, a diploma doesn't make a person more special than someone who doesn't have one. What matters is your passion, and whether you are willing to put in the work. Classes are meant to encourage cognitive development, to broaden the perspective, to gain at least some skills that would be useful to you later in life - they aren't the only way to get these skills, of course, you can do it in other settings if you chose to apply yourself elsewhere instead. But, if you chose to pursue higher education, then I would hope that by the end of the 4 years, you would get something meaningfull out of it, and this would only happen if you actually put in at least some modicum of effort. Otherwise you might as well buy your diploma off the street, and that would benefit absolutely nobody, least of all yourself.

(taken from a post about AI)

speaking as someone who has had to grade virtually every kind of undergraduate assignment you can think of for the past six years (essays, labs, multiple choice tests, oral presentations, class participation, quizzes, field work assignments, etc), it is wild how out-of-touch-with-reality people’s perceptions of university grading schemes are. they are a mass standardised measurement used to prove the legitimacy of your degree, not how much you’ve learned. Those things aren’t completely unrelated to one another of course, but they are very different targets to meet. It is standard practice for professors to have a very clear idea of what the grade distribution for their classes are before each semester begins, and tenure-track assessments (at least some of the ones I’ve seen) are partially judged on a professors classes’ grade distributions - handing out too many A’s is considered a bad thing because it inflates student GPAs relative to other departments, faculties, and universities, and makes classes “too easy,” ie, reduces the legitimate of the degree they earn. I have been instructed many times by professors to grade easier or harder throughout the term to meet those target averages, because those targets are the expected distribution of grades in a standardised educational setting. It is standard practice for teaching assistants to report their grade averages to one another to make sure grade distributions are consistent. there’s a reason profs sometimes curve grades if the class tanks an assignment or test, and it’s generally not because they’re being nice!

this is why AI and chatgpt so quickly expanded into academia - it’s not because this new generation is the laziest, stupidest, most illiterate batch of teenagers the world has ever seen (what an original observation you’ve made there!), it’s because education has a mass standard data format that is very easily replicable by programs trained on, yanno, large volumes of data. And sure the essays generated by chatgpt are vacuous, uncompelling, and full of factual errors, but again, speaking as someone who has graded thousands of essays written by undergrads, that’s not exactly a new phenomenon lol

I think if you want to be productively angry at ChatGPT/AI usage in academia (I saw a recent post complaining that people were using it to write emails of all things, as if emails are some sacred form of communication), your anger needs to be directed at how easily automated many undergraduate assignments are. Or maybe your professors calculating in advance that the class average will be 72% is the single best way to run a university! Who knows. But part of the emotional stakes in this that I think are hard for people to admit to, much less let go of, is that AI reveals how rote, meaningless, and silly a lot of university education is - you are not a special little genius who is better than everyone else for having a Bachelor’s degree, you have succeeded in moving through standardised post-secondary education. This is part of the reason why disabled people are systematically barred from education, because disability accommodations require a break from this standardised format, and that means disabled people are framed as lazy cheaters who “get more time and help than everyone else.” If an AI can spit out a C+ undergraduate essay, that of course threatens your sense of superiority, and we can’t have that, can we?

[iatheia]

instagram: smacmccreanor

[iatheia]

Ok, so with all these posts going around aboht election interference and calling for a recount, i wanted to find evidence that weren't twitter screenshots

Bomb threats at polling places:

This claim is legit, as well as the source being from russian email domains. No actual bombs were placed or set off.

Burning ballot boxes:

3 incidents of burning ballot boxes have been confirmed for this election in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington, both of which are suspected to be from the same individual. Republican and Democrat officials have spoken out against this, ballot boxes were guarded after the incidents started, and fire suppression systems inside the ballot boxes saved the majority of the ballots, except for one box where 488 ballots were damaged due to a malfunction of the fire suppression system.

Fires were also confirmed in Arizona by a man who apparently just wanted to be arrested and had no political motivations.

No fires were confirmed in Georgia, despite repeated claims that most of the fires were in Georgia. Georgia changed their election laws in 2021 in regards to absentee votes. Ballot boxes have been notably targetted for election conspiracy and mistrust. Take this into account when you see outcry about ballot boxes in any way.

Votes not being counted:

The screenshots im seeing particularly note California, which is the state with the largest amount of registered voters. California is also dealing with massive wildfires rn. Its gonna take a couple days, and the election isnt officially over yet. Calm down

20 million unaccounted votes:

Yall . . .

This shit takes time. Theyre not "throwing your ballots out" or "deliberately not counting votes". Be so for real

Some of this shit is valid, and should probably be known. Some of this shit is making yall sound like trumpers in 2020. Be smart. Have critical thinking.

If youre gonna reblog or comment with claims i better see credible evidence to back your claims up or youre getting blocked

[iatheia]

Has anything actually gotten better, for all the work you talk about doing? Or is it just treading water in misery forever?

Anon, ten years ago gay people couldn't get married in large parts of the US. AIDS was an almost certain death sentence when I was in high school. I was looking at job boards the other day and found a part time gas station job that had health insurance as a benefit, which NEVER would have happened 15 years ago. When I was a kid, hitting your child was extremely normalized in the US and my parents were the weird ones for not doing it. There is a vaccine for chicken pox. I didn't meet anyone who had transitioned until my 20s because it was so uncommon to transition in the aughts, and now there are some states that protect your right to have gender affirming care provided by your health insurance. It's not all states, but it's better than the number of states that had it in 2010, which was zero. THERE ARE TENANTS UNIONS NOW. WE HAVE A VACCINE AGAINST CERVICAL CANCER.

And all of that has been the work of a lot of individuals and organizations and research teams and activists.

[iatheia]

Ok this is the best one i've seen.

[iatheia]

[iatheia]

Friend has the sad???!!??!!!!!

I’m coming friend I’ll save you from the sad!!

I am here now you’re going to be okay!!!

You are so beautiful and i love you!!!

[iatheia]

what if there was a show where every character was gay and you had the token straight guy character who acted really stereotypical and was into cars beers and women and everyone was like OH STRAIGHT LARRY YOU’RE SO FUNNY AND STRAIGHT

[iatheia]

the inquisitor

[iatheia]

remember when i said every presidential election comes down to the absolute most checked the fuck out people in the country

[iatheia]

[iatheia]

my bf has many interesting stories and observations from his new job as a 911 operator

my favorite is how meandering people are, even in the midst of a terrible emergency

they respond to “what is the emergency” with “well, the thing is, four weeks ago–”

and then he’s like “WHAT IS THE EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW”

and they’re like “so what happened this morning was, i said to my wife, i said–”

“WHAT IS CURRENTLY HAPPENING AT THIS MOMENT”

“oh i’m having a heart attack”

my second favorite is how specific he has to get sometimes

like, “what is your emergency?”

“i’m sitting in a pool of blood.”

“… is it… your blood?”

“yes i think so”

“do you know where it’s coming from?”

“probably the stab wound”

“have you been stabbed?”

“oh yah definitely”

[iatheia]

I hate to be that person (it's a lie, I love to be that person).

It technically isn't just light. It is specifically emission from the ions from the Sun spiraling into our magnetic fields.

Let's assume solar wind density of 20 particles per cm^3, and a mean molecular weight of 1.7 relative to a hydrogen atom.

From wiki: "Auroras are most commonly observed in the "auroral zone",[8] a band approximately 6° (~660 km) wide in latitude centered on 67° north and south", and, "most of the light is produced between 90 and 150 km (56 and 93 mi) above the ground".

So, approximately, volume of 2*pi*6378.1 km*cos(67)*660*60, so about 6x10^8 km^3, just in one hemisphere.

Volume times the number density, times the mass per particle would give us 33 grams producing the emission at any given time. Not a whole lot, but...

Ions deexite pretty quickly. One reference suggests something on the order of 0.1 seconds - seems slow, actually, but let's go with that. Let's assume an average duration of 20 min, so 12000 "generations".

That gives us an order of magnitude estimate of the total mass of ~400 kg.

how much does the aurora borealis weigh