During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. From a report: Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators project, found. What's going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. If you take a moment to conjure the university in your mind, you will probably arrive at one of two visions. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns.

This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from "Pale Fire" to "The Fire Next Time" and scaling the heights of "Ulysses" for the view. The goal of such an education isn't direct career training but cultivation of the mind -- the belief that Lionel Trilling caricatured as "certain good things happen if we read literature." This model describes one of those pursuits, like acupuncture or psychoanalysis, which seem to produce salutary effects through mechanisms that we have tried but basically failed to explain. Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It's the small-bore university of campus comedy -- of "Lucky Jim" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" -- but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn't have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.

Gmail client-side encryption (CSE) is now generally available for Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers. BleepingComputer reports: The feature was first introduced in Gmail on the web as a beta test in December 2022, after being available in Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Meet, and Google Calendar (in beta) since last year. Once enabled, Gmail CSE ensures that any sensitive data sent as part of the email's body and attachments (including inline images) will be unreadable and encrypted before reaching Google's servers. It's also important to note that the email header (including subject, timestamps, and recipients lists) will not be encrypted. "Client-side encryption takes this encryption capability to the next level by ensuring that customers have sole control over their encryption keys -- and thus complete control over all access to their data," Googled explained.

"Starting today, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events with internal colleagues and external parties, knowing that their sensitive data (including inline images and attachments) has been encrypted before it reaches Google servers. As customers retain control over the encryption keys and the identity management service to access those keys, sensitive data is indecipherable to Google and other external entities."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the decade following US President John F Kennedy's 1961 announcement of America's mission to put a man on the moon, the number of physical science PhDs tripled, and that of engineering PhDs quadrupled. Now, the country is embarking on a moonshot to rebuild the semiconductor fabrication industry. Corporations that want a cut of the $39bn in manufacturing incentives within the Chips and Science Act programme can start filing their applications for subsidies on Tuesday. In order to get them, they'll have to show that they are contributing to something that may be even more difficult than putting a man in space: building a 21st-century workforce. America has plenty of four-year graduates with crushing debt (the national average for federal loan debts is more than $37,000 a student) and underwhelming job prospects. It also has plenty of college dropouts and young people with high-school degrees who are trying to make ends meet through minimum-wage jobs supplemented by gig work.

What it lacks are the machinists, carpenters, contractors and technicians who will build the new fabrication facilities. It also needs to triple the number of college graduates in semiconductor-related fields, such as engineering, over the next decade, according to commerce secretary Gina Raimondo. Raimondo, who is well on her way to becoming the industrial strategy tsar of the administration, gave a speech to this effect earlier this month. In it, she underscored not only the need to rebuild chip manufacturing in a world in which the US and China will lead separate tech ecosystems, but also to ensure that there are enough domestic workers to do so. "If you talk to the CEOs of companies like TSMC and Samsung [both of which are launching fabs in the US], they are worried about finding these people here," Raimondo told me. She cites workforce development -- alongside scale and transparency -- as major hurdles that must be overcome to meet the administration's goals.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: They say "always be learning" — but do podcasts actually help? I've been trying to find podcasts that discuss programming, and I've enjoyed Lex Fridman's interviews with language creators like Guido van Rossum, Chris Lattner, and Brendan Eich (plus his long interviews with Donald Knuth). Then I discovered that GitHub, Red Hat, Stack Overflow, and the Linux Foundation all have their own podcast.

There's a developer podcast called "Corecursive" that I like with the tagline "the stories behind the code," plus a whole slew of (sometimes language-specific) podcasts at Changelog (including an interview with Brian Kernighan). And it seems like there's an entirely different universe of content on YouTube — like the retired Microsoft engineer doing "Dave's Garage," Software Engineering Daily, and the various documentaries by Honeypot.io. Computerphile has also scored various interviews with Brian Kernighan, and if you search YouTube enough you'll find stray interviews with Steve Wozniak.

But I wanted to ask Slashdot's readers: Do you listen to podcasts about computer science? And if so, which ones? (Because I'm always stumbling across new programming podcasts, which makes me worry about what else I've been missing out on.) Maybe I should also ask if you ever watch coding livestreams on Twitch — although that gets into the more general question of just how much content we consume that's related to our profession.
Fascinating discussions, or continuing work-related education? (And do podcasts really help keep your skills fresh? Are coding livestreams on Twitch just a waste of time?) Most importantly, does anyone have a favorite geek podcast that they're listening to? Share your own experience and opinions in the comments...

What's the best podcast about computer science?

"A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source)," reports the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Beast reports: Last month, a screenshot of a student reading Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf was reported in the system, according to the Stanford Daily. Faculty members leading the charge to shut the system down say they didn't know it even existed until they read the student newspaper, one comparing the system to "McCarthyism."

Launched in 2021, students are encouraged to report incidents in which they felt harmed, which triggers a voluntary inquiry of both the student who filed the report and the alleged perpetrator. Seventy-seven faculty members have signed a petition calling on the school to investigate in hopes they toss the system out. This comes as a larger movement by Speech First, a group who claim colleges are rampant with censorship, has filed suit against several universities for their bias reporting systems.

A former employee of a Massachusetts town is facing charges of allegedly setting up a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in a remote crawl space at a school, police said. The Associated Press reports: Nadeam Nahas, 39, was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on charges of fraudulent use of electricity and vandalizing a school, but he did not show up and a judge issued a default warrant after rejecting a defense motion to reschedule, a spokesperson for the Norfolk district attorney's office said. Police responded to Cohasset Middle/High School in December 2021 after the town's facilities director found electrical wires, temporary duct work, and numerous computers that seemed out of place while conducting a routine inspection of the school, Chief William Quigley of the Cohasset Police Department said in a statement Wednesday.

He contacted the town's IT director, who determined that it was a cryptocurrency mining operation unlawfully hooked up to the school's electrical system, Quigley said. The Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Department of Homeland Security assisted with safely removing and examining the equipment. Nahas, the town's assistant facilities director, was identified as a suspect after a three-month investigation. After a show-cause hearing, a criminal complaint was issued. Nahas subsequently resigned from his job with the town in early 2022, police said.

The Linux Foundation's European off-shoot has formally launched the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort designed to support interoperability between digital wallets through open source software. From a report: The launch comes some five months after the Linux Foundation first revealed plans to set up the OWF, shortly before it spun out a region-specific entity called the Linux Foundation Europe which is where the OWF will now officially reside. While the likes of PayPal, Google, and Apple are among the most recognized digital wallet providers, allowing consumers to conduct financial transactions in-store or online, digital wallets are increasingly being used to store all manner of virtual goods from student ID to driving licenses. On top of that, burgeoning technologies such as the metaverse and crypto are giving rise to greater use-cases for digital wallets.

But one thing all these various environments have in common is that the incumbent digital wallets, for the most part, don't play nicely with each other: an Apple Pay die-hard can't send money to their Google Pay brethren. And that is why the OWF is setting out to create an "open source engine" that can power interoperable digital wallets across myriad use-cases including identity, payments, and storing personal credentials such as employment and education certification.

Slashdot reader John Smith 2294 is an IT consultant and system administrator "who started in the days of DEC VAX/VMS," now maintaining networks for small to medium businesses and non-profits. And they're sharing a concern with Slashdot.

"I object to Windows 11 insisting on an outlook.com / Microsoft Account OS login." Sure there are workarounds, but user action or updates can undo them. So I will not be using Windows 11 for science or business any more.... I will be using Win10 refurbs for as long as they are available, and then Mac Mini refurbs and Linux. My first Linux Mint user has been working happily for two months now and I have not heard a word from them.

So, as an IT Admin responsible for business or education networks of 20 users or more, will you be using Windows 11 on your networks or, like me, is this the end of the road for Windows for you too?
I'd thought their concern would be about Windows is sending user data to third parties. But are these really big enough reasons for system adminstrators to be avoiding Windows 11 altogether?

Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Should production networks avoid Windows 11?

Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was formerly executive vice president for research and chief scientific officer at biotech giant Genentech, according to his page on Wikipedia. "In 2022, Stanford University opened an investigation into allegations of Tessier-Lavigne's involvement in fabricating results in articles published between 2001 and 2008."

But Friday Stanford's student newspaper published even more allegations: In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer's patients. "Because of this research," read Genentech's annual letter to shareholders, "we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer's from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease."

But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech's Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time... The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review's findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.

Tessier-Lavigne denies both allegations. Genentech said in a statement that "as part of our diligence related to these allegations, we reviewed the records from that November 2011 RRC meeting and saw no allegations of fraud or wrongdoing." The company acknowledged that "given that these events happened many years ago ... our current records may not be complete."

After the review, which began in 2011, Genentech canceled research based on the paper's findings. Till Maurer, a senior scientist at the company from 2009-2018 who said he was assigned to develop drugs based on the 2009 paper, told The Daily that his superior informed him that, in Maurer's words, "the project is being canceled and it's because they found falsified data...."

According to the executive who was part of the committee that reviewed the paper, the inquiry was thorough and left little room for doubt. Laboratory technicians and assistants were interviewed while scientists independent of the lab attempted to verify the findings of the study. "None of [the research review committee members] believed that these data were true by the time people had attempted to reproduce it," the executive said. He said that the understanding of the research committee was that the paper's supposed finding of N-APP's role in Alzheimer's had been "faked," and used "made up" figures as evidence.

A new report (PDF) from the Data Science 4 Everyone coalition reveals that data literacy skills among fourth and eighth-grade students have declined significantly over the last decade even as these skills have become increasingly essential in our modern, data-driven society. Phys.Org reports: Based on data from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results, the report uncovered several trends that raise concerns about whether the nation's educational system is sufficiently preparing young people for a world reshaped by the rise of big data and artificial intelligence. Key findings include:

- The pandemic decline is part of a much longer-term trend. Between 2019 and 2022, scores in the data analysis, statistics, and probability section of the NAEP math exam fell by 10 points for eighth-graders and by four points for fourth-graders. Declining scores are part of a longer-term trend, with scores down 17 points for eighth-graders and down 10 points for fourth-graders over the last decade. That means today's eighth-graders have the data literacy of sixth-graders from a decade ago, and today's fourth-graders have the data literacy of third-graders from a decade ago.

- There are large racial gaps in scores. These gaps exist across all grade levels but are at times most dramatic in the middle and high school levels. For instance, fourth-grade Black students scored 28 points lower -- the equivalent of nearly three grade levels -- than their white peers in data analysis, statistics, and probability.

- Data-related instruction is in decline. Every state except Alabama reported a decline or stagnant trend in data-related instruction, with some states -- like Maryland and Iowa -- seeing double-digit drops. The national share of fourth-grade math teachers reporting "moderate" or "heavy" emphasis on data analysis dropped five percentage points between 2019 and 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The U.S. Government's crackdown against Z-Library late last year aimed to wipe out the pirate library for good. The criminal prosecution caused disruption but didn't bring the site completely to its knees. Z-Library continued to operate on the dark web and this weekend, reappeared on the clearnet, offering a 'unique' domain name to all users. [...] Sites can often be seen hardening their operations to mitigate disruption caused by domain name seizures. Many have a list of backup domains that can be deployed when needed; The Pirate Bay infamously launched its hydra setup consisting of five different domain names. Z-Library is taking this hydra-inspired scheme to the next level. A new announcement reveals that the platform is publicly available once again and offering a unique and private domain name to every user.

"We have great news for you -- Z-Library is back on the Clearnet again! To access it, follow this link singlelogin.me and use your regular login credentials," the Z-Library team writes. "After logging into your account, you will be redirected to your personal domain. Please keep your personal domain private! Don't disclose your personal domain and don't share the link to your domain, as it is protected with your own password and cannot be accessed by other users." While we can't confirm that all users will get unique domain names, people are indeed redirected to different clearnet domains after logging in. After doing so, a popup message reminds them to keep their personal domain secret.

The domain names in question are subdomains of newly registered TLDs that rely on different domain name registries. Every user has two of these 'personal' domains listed on their personal profile page. If users can't access the universal login page, Z-Library says they can log in through TOR or I2P and get their personal clearnet domains there. How many new domain names Z-Library has is unclear but that's exactly the point. The site's operators want to prevent future domain name seizures and with the U.S. Government on its back, new domains are far from safe.

The University of Illinois plans to apply for a construction permit for a high-temperature, gas-cooled micronuclear reactor, reports the Associated Press, "and aims to start operating it by early 2028."

And they're not the only ones interested in the technology: Last year, Penn State University signed a memorandum of understanding with Westinghouse to collaborate on microreactor technology. Mike Shaqqo, the company's senior vice president for advanced reactor programs, said universities are going to be "one of our key early adopters for this technology." Penn State wants to prove the technology so that Appalachian industries, such as steel and cement manufacturers, may be able to use it, said Professor Jean Paul Allain, head of the nuclear engineering department. Those two industries tend to burn dirty fuels and have very high emissions....

"I do feel that microreactors can be a game-changer and revolutionize the way we think about energy," Allain said. For Allain, microreactors can complement renewable energy by providing a large amount of power without taking up much land. A 10-megawatt microreactor could go on less than an acre, whereas windmills or a solar farm would need far more space to produce 10 megawatts, he added. The goal is to have one at Penn State by the end of the decade....

Nuclear reactors that are used for research are nothing new on campus. About two dozen U.S. universities have them. But using them as an energy source is new.
Other examples from the article:

• Purdue University in Indiana "is working with Duke Energy on the feasibility of using advanced nuclear energy to meet its long-term energy needs."

• Abilene Christian University in Texas "is leading a group of three other universities with the company Natura Resources to design and build a research microreactor cooled by molten salt to allow for high temperature operations at low pressure, in part to help train the next generation nuclear workforce."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Imagine that you were provided no-cost fertility treatment and also offered a free DNA test to gauge which of those little IVF embryos floating in a dish stood the best chance of getting into a top college someday. Would you have the test performed? If you said yes, you're among about 40% percent of Americans who told pollsters they'd be more likely than not to test and pick IVF embryos for intellectual aptitude, despite hand-wringing by ethicists and gene scientists who think it's a bad idea. The opinion survey, published in the journal Science, was carried out by economists and other researchers who say surprisingly strong support for the embryo tests means the US might need to hurry up and set policies for the technology.

The new poll compared people's willingness to advance their children's prospects in three ways: using SAT prep courses, embryo tests, and gene editing on embryos. It found some support even for the most radical option, genetic modification of children, which is prohibited in the US and many other countries. About 28% of those polled said they'd probably do that if it was safe. The authors of the new poll are wrestling with the consequences of information that they helped discover via a series of ever larger studies to locate genetic causes of human social and cognitive traits, including sexual orientation and intelligence. That includes a report published last year on how the DNA differences among more than 3 million people related to how far they'd gone in school, a life result that is correlated with a person's intelligence.

The result of such research is a so-called "polygenic score," or a genetic test that can predict from genes whether -- among other things -- someone is going to be more or less likely to attend college. Of course, environmental factors matter plenty, and DNA is not destiny. Yet the gene tests are surprisingly predictive. In their poll, the researchers told people to assume that around 3% of kids will go to a top-100 college. By picking the one of 10 IVF embryos with the highest gene score, parents would increase that chance to 5% for their kid. It's tempting to dismiss the advantage gained as negligible, but "assuming they are right," Carmi says, it's actually "a very large relative increase" in the chance of going to such a school for the offspring in question -- about 67%. "The current poll found only 6% of people are morally opposed to IVF today, only about 17% have strong moral qualms about testing embryos, and 38% would probably do to boost education prospects if given the opportunity," adds the report.

China's biggest tech companies are rushing to develop their own versions of ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that has set the U.S. tech world buzzing, despite questions over the capabilities and commercial prospects of the technology. Nikkei Asia Review reports: Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, Baidu, NetEase and JD.com all unveiled plans this week to test and launch their own ChatGPT-like services in the near future, eager to show the results of their AI research efforts are just as ready for prime time as those of their U.S. counterparts. [...] Shares of Baidu surged to an 11-month high after the search giant on Monday revealed its plan to launch the ChatGPT-style "Ernie Bot," which is built on tech the company said has been in development since 2019. The company aims to complete internal testing in March before making the chatbot available to the public. Following Baidu's announcement, Alibaba said it is internally testing a ChatGPT-style tool, without revealing more details. The e-commerce conglomerate's shares closed up 3.96% in Hong Kong on Thursday. Tencent confirmed its plans in ChatGPT-style and AI-generated content on Thursday, saying relevant research is underway "in an orderly manner."

Online retailer JD.com said it plans to integrate some of the technologies that underpin applications like ChatGPT, such as natural language processing, in its own services. Gaming giant NetEase said it is researching the incorporation of AI-generated content into its education unit. Chinese media reported on Thursday that ByteDance's AI lab has launched certain research initiatives on technologies to support its virtual reality arm Pico. However, a person familiar with the matter at ByteDance told Nikkei that the report was false. "Making use of AI-generated content is a natural thing," an unnamed executive from one of the leading listed Chinese tech companies told Nikkei. "Whenever there is a so-called next big thing, multiple companies will announce that they are in this area, but some companies may be just hyping with the catchword without any concrete product."

"Another challenge is China's heavy censorship of cyberspace, which will make AI-generated content difficult, too."

How the irrational mathematics of measuring, ranking, and rating distort the value of stuff, work, people -- everything. From a report: More irrational even than pi, assessing people amounts to quantifying a relationship between unknown, usually unknowable things. Every measurement, the mathematician Paul Lockhart reminds us in his book Measurement, is a comparison: "We are comparing the thing we are measuring to the thing we are measuring it with." What thing do we use to measure undergraduates? What aspects can be compared? Quality or quantity? Originality or effort? Participation or progress? Apples and oranges at best. Closer to bananas and elephants. Even quantitative tests mark, at most, a comparison between what the test-maker thought the student should know and the effectiveness of instruction. Grades become the permanent records of these passing encounters.

And how do we grade the grader? When a physicist friend found out that a first-year Harvard student he knew -- a math star in high school -- got an F in physics, he said: "Harvard should be ashamed of itself." A Harvard grad himself, he believed that schools fail students far more often than students fail schools. Some STEM profs, I'm told, tell the class at the outset that half of them will fail. I give that teacher an F. I'm not alone in my discomfort with the irrational business of ranking, rating, and grading. The deans of Yale's and Harvard's law schools recently removed themselves from the rankings of US News & World Report, followed by Harvard Medical School and scores of others. "Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect ... educational excellence," Harvard dean George O. Daley explained. Rankings lead schools to falsify data and make policies designed to raise rankings rather than "nobler objectives." The very thing that's been eating education is now devouring everything else. My doctor recently urged me to get an expensive diagnostic test because it "makes our numbers look good." Her nurse asked me to rank my pain on a totem pole of emojis. Then after the visit, to rate my experience. The numbers are all irrational. And rather like the never-ending digits of pi, there seems to be no end to them.

Computer classes for Gen Z aren't cutting it anymore. From a report: More than a third (37%) of Gen Zers feel their school education didn't prepare them with the digital skills they need to propel their career, according to Dell Technologies' international survey of more than 15,000 adults ages 18 to 26 across 15 countries. A majority (56%) of this generation added that they had very basic to no digital skills education. It's all led to some warranted skepticism regarding the future of work: Many Gen Zers are unsure what the digital economy will look like, and 33% have little to no confidence that the government's investments in a digital future will be successful in 10 years. Forty-four percent think that schools and businesses should work together to address the digital skills gap. The findings back up past research that found nearly half of the Class of 2022 felt the top skill they were underprepared for was technical skills.

Children experienced learning deficits during the Covid pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year's worth of knowledge and skills, according to a new global analysis, and had not recovered from those losses more than two years later. The New York Times reports: Learning delays and regressions were most severe in developing countries and among students from low-income backgrounds, researchers said, worsening existing disparities and threatening to follow children into higher education and the work force. The analysis, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior and drawing on data from 15 countries, provided the most comprehensive account to date of the academic hardships wrought by the pandemic. The findings suggest that the challenges of remote learning -- coupled with other stressors that plagued children and families throughout the pandemic -- were not rectified when school doors reopened.

"In order to recover what was lost, we have to be doing more than just getting back to normal," said Bastian Betthauser, a researcher at the Center for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po in Paris, who was a co-author on the review. He urged officials worldwide to provide intensive summer programs and tutoring initiatives that target poorer students who fell furthest behind. Thomas Kane, the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, who has studied school interruptions in the United States, reviewed the global analysis. Without immediate and aggressive intervention, he said, "learning loss will be the longest-lasting and most inequitable legacy of the pandemic."

[...] Because children have a finite capacity to absorb new material, Mr. Betthauser said, teachers cannot simply move faster or extend school hours, and traditional interventions like private tutoring rarely target the most disadvantaged groups. Without creative solutions, he said, the labor market ought to "brace for serious downstream effects." Children who were in school during the pandemic could lose about $70,000 in earnings over their lifetimes if the deficits aren't recovered, according to Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In some states, pandemic-era students could ultimately earn almost 10 percent less than those who were educated just before the pandemic. The societal losses, he said, could amount to $28 trillion over the rest of the century.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Ethan Mollick has a message for the humans and the machines: can't we all just get along? After all, we are now officially in an A.I. world and we're going to have to share it, reasons the associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School. "This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently, but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT," Mollick told NPR. [...] This year, Mollick is not only allowing his students to use ChatGPT, they are required to. And he has formally adopted an A.I. policy into his syllabus for the first time.

He teaches classes in entrepreneurship and innovation, and said the early indications were the move was going great. "The truth is, I probably couldn't have stopped them even if I didn't require it," Mollick said. This week he ran a session where students were asked to come up with ideas for their class project. Almost everyone had ChatGPT running and were asking it to generate projects, and then they interrogated the bot's ideas with further prompts. "And the ideas so far are great, partially as a result of that set of interactions," Mollick said. He readily admits he alternates between enthusiasm and anxiety about how artificial intelligence can change assessments in the classroom, but he believes educators need to move with the times. "We taught people how to do math in a world with calculators," he said. Now the challenge is for educators to teach students how the world has changed again, and how they can adapt to that.

Mollick's new policy states that using A.I. is an "emerging skill"; that it can be wrong and students should check its results against other sources; and that they will be responsible for any errors or omissions provided by the tool. And, perhaps most importantly, students need to acknowledge when and how they have used it. "Failure to do so is in violation of academic honesty policies," the policy reads. [...] "I think everybody is cheating ... I mean, it's happening. So what I'm asking students to do is just be honest with me," he said. "Tell me what they use ChatGPT for, tell me what they used as prompts to get it to do what they want, and that's all I'm asking from them. We're in a world where this is happening, but now it's just going to be at an even grander scale." "I don't think human nature changes as a result of ChatGPT. I think capability did."

First, Yale Law School. Now, Harvard Medical School. One by one, some of the nation's top graduate programs are quitting the great who's-up-who's-down scorecards of higher ed: US News & World Report's rankings. From a report: Harvard, No. 1 on the publication's latest medical-school list for research, joins a growing boycott of the most famous name in US college rankings. This week, the medical schools of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania announced they will no longer participate. Yale kicked off the movement in November, and was followed soon after by Harvard, Penn and Georgetown University law schools. The big question now is whether the movement will trickle down to undergraduate institutions. Critics of the rankings say their methodology is flawed and fail to represent the student experience, while supporters argue the lists are valuable guides for students. While this may put pressure on undergraduate colleges to reconsider their participation, those who study the rankings say the exodus might take some time.

Love 'em or hate 'em, they exert a powerful hold over institutions, students, parents and even recruiters. For some schools, sliding in the rankings can mean lost funding. Undergraduate schools have been tight-lipped about what happens next, although many admissions officers privately question the rankings' value. The criticism has been mounting for years. "I am convinced that the rankings game is a bit of mishegoss -- a slightly daft obsession that does harm when colleges, parents, or students take it too seriously," Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber wrote in a 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post. In August, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called rankings "a joke."

U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss read a speech on the floor of the U.S. House that was generated by AI chatbot ChatGPT. "Auchincloss said he prompted the system in part to 'write 100 words to deliver on the floor of the House of Representatives' about the legislation," reports the Associated Press. "Auchincloss said he had to refine the prompt several times to produce the text he ultimately read. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress." From the report: The bill, which Auchincloss is refiling, would establish a joint U.S.-Israel AI Center in the United States to serve as a hub for AI research and development in the public, private and education sectors. Auchincloss said part of the decision to read a ChatGPT-generated text was to help spur debate on AI and the challenges and opportunities created by it. He said he doesn't want to see a repeat of the advent of social media, which started small and ballooned faster than Congress could react. "I'm the youngest parent in the Democratic caucus, AI is going to be part of my life and it could be a general purpose technology for my children," said Auchincloss, 34.

The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide." "There were probably about a dozen of my colleagues on the floor. I bet none of them knew it was written by a computer," he said. Lawmakers and others shouldn't be reflexively hostile to the new technology, but also shouldn't wait too long before drafting policies or new laws to help regulate it, Auchincloss said. In particular, he argued that the country needs a "public counterweight" to the big tech firms that would help guarantee that smaller developers and universities have access to the same cloud computing, cutting edge algorithms and raw data as larger companies.