Category Archives: culture

Blue Books

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They’re making a comeback on campuses as a way to get around student cheating via ChatGPT and other AI packages. I say good for those profs and schools that are requiring them for assignments and exams. Blue books make the student do his own work at the moment of truth: writing down, in class, their own answers to the varying assignments.

There is a valid beef to requiring blue books [emphasis in the original].

Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter. It would be stupid not to. These tools will be a part of their lives and knowing how to use them effectively will be an important advantage in their future workplaces.
“They will use ChatGPT all the time for all sorts of things, and that will make them more efficient, more productive and better able to do their jobs,” said Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics who gives proctored blue-book exams. “It is strange to say you won’t be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career.”

There’s an obvious solution to that problem, though, and assignments and exams easily can be used to teach the use of AI. This would apply as well to STEM courses as humanities courses.

The professors can issue assignments and exams that mandate using AI to generate answers, then in class use blue books to require the students to critique the AI answers, identify AI “hallucinations,” and to improve the AI answers. To short circuit attempts to do the critiquing and editing in advance and simply writing down nearly memorized answers, the profs could require specific edit types of specific paragraphs or blocks of code or certain arithmetic sections or…. Alternatively, the profs could do the above as Part I of the assignment or exam, and then in Part II, provide his own AI-generated answer to a question and require the students to do the critiques and edits de novo. Then, returning to/maintaining basics, use Part III to pose questions that the students will not see until that point in the in-class exercise or exam and that the students must answer via blue book on the spot.

That last, especially, is how things work IRL.

A Two-Edged…Coin

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A baby with a rare genetic disorder that’s often fatal has been cured, probably, by a newly developed targeted gene therapy.

Thanks to decades of research, gene sequencing rapidly identified KJ’s disorder.

An overnight success that was years in the making. Then there’s this:

Doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania medical school then raced to design a gene-editing therapy using CRISPR technology to correct the defective gene. …
This process ordinarily take[s] years, though doctors in collaboration with several biotech firms were able to do it within weeks. The Food and Drug Administration also rushed to approve the treatment.

Then the overnight part was itself rushed. We may be seeing the effects of rushing genetic- or RNA-centered therapies with the conflicting reports of a number of the Wuhan Virus mRNA-based vaccines. We’ll learn more about the efficacy of KJ’s gene-editing treatment over the course of his lifetime and whether other genetic-related disorders develop as he ages, particularly as his body passes through the hefty disruption of its hormonal development as it grows into adulthood.

My larger concern, though, is this. This sort of gene-editing to cure genetic diseases also can be harnessed to cure “ordinary” and “normal” genetic complements in efforts to develop “better” babies—stronger, smarter, immune to this or that, or just attempts to “improve” humans.

The disease-curing/preventing advantages of gene treatment are huge and well worth pursuing. But in parallel with that, there need to be serious and draconian controls put on the techniques in order to control (that genie is out of the molecular bottle; it won’t ever be perfectly controlled) and mitigate misuses of the technique—beginning with clear definitions of “misuses” and “better.”

The Biden Coverup

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What’s to be done about those who participated in the coverup? How do we hold them accountable—and by accountable, I mean how do we see them suitably and publicly punished?

The press’ complicity in the coverup is well known by all of us not already in thrall to their writings and television natterings. Most of us have learned to take their words skeptically, and we’ve moved on to other news and commentary sources, newer and perhaps no more trustworthy, but that’s yet to be demonstrated.

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians, though—they’re another matter. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the only Party member willing to expose the emperor was the back bencher Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who openly campaigned for President late in Party’s primary Potemkin contest on the premise that Biden wasn’t up to another four years either physically or mentally. Party castigated him as a traitor to his party, an opportunist, and a Republican cat’s paw. Then, in a remarkable—and instructive—demonstration of Party’s dedication to democratic elections and to democracy of any form, Party canceled altogether their sham primary and pronounced by fiat Kamala Harris its candidate.

Party politicians other than Phillips contributed to the coverup of Biden’s growing mental incompetence either directly through their pronouncements of his fitness or indirectly through their studied silence on Biden’s capacities.

In sum, Party politicians openly lied to us citizens, and as the WSJ also put it, they denied the American people a better presidential choice, or at least in the eyes of some 77 million of us, a better alternative candidate for the office. They denied even their own voters the opportunity to choose a better alternative.

Party and Party politicians lied to all of us about so foundational a matter as who will lead our nation in its time of peril, who will exercise American influence around the world on matters central to our economic and political national security.

If Party politicians are willing to lie to us—have lied to us—about such a basic matter, what else will they lie to us about if reelected to their existing offices, or worse, if reelected to majorities in the House and Senate and in the White House?

“here’s an idea”

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Allison Leigh Cowan, late of The New York Times had one concerning college admissions and how to weed out lawbreakers. Do some actual prescreening.

Start by asking applicants to pledge that they will be respectful, law-abiding members of the community if admitted. Assuming no one quibbles with that minimal threshold, delve a bit further using moral-reasoning prompts drawn from recent headlines. Applicants can reply with a simple “yes” or “no,” or submit longer answers:

      • Is it ever justified to spit on another human being?
      • Is it ever justified to pull a fire alarm in a crowded auditorium to protest a speaker some find offensive?
      • Is it ever justified to mar public spaces with hard-to-remove graffiti? Should perpetrators pay to clean it up?
      • Is it ever justified for a private individual to assassinate another private individual?
      • Is it ever justified to burn a Quran? What about destroying a mezuza on someone’s door?
      • Is it ever justified to restrain custodians or other bystanders as part of a protest?
      • Is it ever justified to set fire to the homes of authority figures?

These are, as Cowan acknowledges, navel-gazing questions, but diligent reviews of the answers can serve as useful prescreening.

Here’s another idea: in addition to that prescreening, a good idea in concept but as with all prescreening, it’s imperfect, take the follow-on step: those inclined to foment chaos or who change and become prone, should be expelled promptly and with prejudice when they do start to foment chaos, and those who broke laws in the doing should be criminally prosecuted, equally promptly.

I Want My…Maypo

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Late in the Biden administration, as the lede notes,

Documents obtained by The Free Press from the Environmental Protection Agency reveal that, despite handing out $20 billion in grants to eight nonprofits just before President Donald Trump took office, the federal employees who reviewed grant applications had concerns about high salaries, conflicts of interest, and oversight of taxpayer money.

After he was confirmed to the office, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin

called for a Department of Justice investigation and had the money, most of which resided in 129 Citibank accounts, frozen.

Naturally, the NGOs are suing, because they want their filch fruits restored. Just to be sure, they’re also suing Citibank, whose since the freezing has been nothing but obeying a government directive, which they have to do unless and until a court overturns the directive.

Never mind that the staffers expressed, in writing as part of their reviews of the grants during the application process, concerns about excessive-seeming pay for NGO executives; NGOs’ cost claims that had no explanation, much less rationale, for them; or apparent lack of oversight planning.

It’s illustrative of these NGOs’ entitlement mentality that they think they should have the money just because they want it. It’s also one more reason for the necessity of taking several machetes to the jungle undergrowth of Federal government spending.