Adaptive testing reduces collusion in online tests
“Rensselaer-developed method proven effective in reducing collusion among students”
“When a distanced online test is performed, students receive the same questions, but at varying times depending on their skill level. For instance, students of highest mastery levels receive each question after...
Source: rpi.edu
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...
Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race
"COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn’t come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have...
Source: 80000hours.org
Edtech VC survey, 5 founder mistakes, fintech liquidity, more – TechCrunch
Edtech is so widespread, we already need more consumer-friendly nomenclature to describe the products, services and tools it encompasses. I
Source: globalresearchsyndicate.com
Rashomon approach to medical education.
"The Rashomon approach was named after the 1950 film, Rashomon. In this film, a single event, a homicide is described from the different perspectives of the characters. In the Rashomon approach, teachers, like film directors, need to fully understand the big pictures so that they can engage characters = students...
Source: biomedcentral.com
New Technique Reveals Centuries of Secrets in Locked Letters
M.I.T. researchers have devised a virtual-reality technique that lets them read old letters that were mailed not in envelopes but in the writing paper itself after being folded into elaborate enclosures.
Source: nytimes.com
Ghana kicks off coronavirus vaccination campaign with COVAX shots
"Ghana began its coronavirus vaccination drive on Tuesday with 600,000 AstraZeneca doses it received from the global COVAX vaccine-sharing facility aimed at providing shots to developing nations to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic." Great to see Ghana in the news and reading about the ITU nurses getting...
Source: reuters.com
Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii
When in Rome ... or Pompeii. "Eat like a first-century Roman, using recent archaeological discoveries as your guide." "In consideration of some of this evidence, if we were to hypothesize that what we’ve read in the Latin literary record about “boiled meat,” “broth and chunks of meat,” and...
Source: atlasobscura.com
Eeek! or E484K mutation and the coronavirus pandemic
Rupert Beale · Eeek! · LRB 19 February 2021: "Uncontrolled spread – as we knew it would – led to an even greater wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths than last spring. Children were sent to school for one day before the necessary ‘lockdown’ was reimposed. The impulse to keep schools...
Source: lrb.co.uk
Dreadful user experience can be expensive.
"Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design: Citibank was trying to make $7.8M in interest payments. It sent $900M instead." The screenshot is from court records where the judge ruled against Citibank who had wanted to get their money back. The lesson is to always include...
Source: arstechnica.com
Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, evidence of superspreaders.
Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, evidence of superspreaders: Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute find the continued spread of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.
Source: princeton.edu
New Steps to Combat Disinformation - Microsoft on the Issues: Today, Microsoft announces two new technologies to help battle
New Steps to Combat Disinformation - Microsoft on the Issues: Today, Microsoft announces two new technologies to help battle disinformation – Newsguard, which will allow users to check the accuracy of the content they are reading, and Video Authenticator, which can detect deepfakes and other synthetic...
Source: microsoft.com
What makes fake news feel true when it isn
What makes fake news feel true when it isn’t? For one thing, hearing it over and over again: "The more often participants had heard a statement, the more likely they were to attribute it to Consumer Reports rather than the National Enquirer." Key features of effective fake news - should you want to...
Source: niemanlab.org
Letter to Cardiff University School of Medicine urging a review of 2020 student admissions
Just sent this to the undergraduate admissions team and the head of school at my old college. "To the admissions team Cardiff University School of Medicine. I write as an ex student of Cardiff School of Medicine having graduated in 1990. If you haven't already could I urge you to review all...
Our itch to share helps spread Covid-19 misinformation
Our itch to share helps spread Covid-19 misinformation: Study finds social media sharing affects news judgment, but a quick exercise reduces the problem. Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office.
‘The study follows others Rand and Pennycook have conducted about explicitly political news, which similarly...
Source: mit.edu
Are you a populist right wing conservative? Have you been hooked recently?
If I wanted to find those who have a "conservative ideology" - so that I could share my views or influence them - I would do the following: set up a new account and start making contactsshare several of those technology scare hoax stories that you see posted e.g. Dance of the Pope virus video, the Andrea...
Source: historynewsnetwork.org
Covid-19 could transform western societies
Martin Wolf: ‘Democracy will fail if we don’t think as citizens’ | Free to read: Covid-19 could transform western societies. But without a stable middle class, the state risks succumbing to plutocracy.
Source: www.ft.com
UK suffers second-highest death rate from coronavirus | Free to read: FT analysis of data from 19 countries finds Britain
UK suffers second-highest death rate from coronavirus | Free to read: FT analysis of data from 19 countries finds Britain suffering heavy toll from pandemic
Source: www.ft.com
Genomic epidemiology of novel coronavirus (hCoV-19)
"This phylogeny shows evolutionary relationships of HCoV-19 viruses from the ongoing novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. All samples are still closely related with few mutations relative to a common ancestor, suggesting a shared common ancestor some time in Nov-Dec 2019. This indicates an initial human...
Source: nextstrain.org
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