#ai for students

[thisisgraeme]

AI in Education: Help Us Transform Aotearoa's Tertiary Learning Landscape (And Win $100)

Transform Education with AI: Your Insights Needed! Join us in shaping the future of AI in Aotearoa New Zealand’s adult tertiary education.  Our initiative, led by Ako Aotearoa experts Michael Grawe and Graeme Smith, seeks to empower educators and students through equitable, innovative AI applications.  Your experience and ideas are key to developing practical, inclusive strategies that enhance…

[bat-bytes-back]

haven't posted art in a bit, huh?

[transmutationisms]

it is simply not possible to angst out about the spectre of human cognitive decline, or mental atrophy or whatever you want to call it, in any non-reactionary way. "will relying on ai cause our intellectual faculties to regress" congrats you are doing degeneration theory. let's unpack your views on disabled people

[razz-berry]

call me an old fashioned wizard if you must but I cannot stand modern apprentices using scribeGPT for everything. like bffr if thou cannot even compose a simple incantation in thy grimoire doth thou really expect me to believe thou can cast it?? thour’t not the scholar here…thine orb is

[gravidasomnia]

College Students - from a request, sort of. I strongly suspect they're after nudes and ofc that'll happen but I'm loving how a lot of people enjoy "nice pic of a woman doing ordinary stuff but they're pregnant" posts as well as the more blatant erotica.

[rollercoasterwords]

like sorry but if ur actually seeing an increase in students using chatgpt 2 write essays 4 ur class why is ur first thought "oh they're being lazy" & not "have i structured this class in a way that makes this student feel the need to rely on chatgpt?" especially bc the majority of college students are overwhelmed taking multiple classes working part-time jobs caring for family dealing with health issues etc etc like there are soooo many reasons a student might decide to use chatgpt that are not just "laziness"!! consider:

the student didn't have time to complete the assignment without chatgpt -> have you created an environment where students can ask for extensions without judgment? do you only give out extensions for "emergencies" or "valid reasons" (<- subjective measure)? if so, why? what purpose do these strict deadlines serve? [think about how this overlaps with students who may have "had time" but were overwhelmed for other reasons; what kind of environment have you created for these students, and does it best serve their learning?]

the student didn't feel they had the ability to write an essay of good enough quality to receive a good grade without chatgpt -> how are you grading students' work? what grading scales have you utilized that made this person feel as though they're incapable of succeeding? do those grading scales prevent them from succeeding? if so, why? what educational resources did they or did they not have access to before entering your class? how might that change considerations about how you grade? [think about how this overlaps with students completing coursework that is not in their first language and whether your grading standards are truly equitable for these students]

the student didn't feel that they could understand the material and therefore couldn't complete the assignment -> again, have you created an environment where this student can come to you for help? how are you presenting and explaining material? what opportunities have you provided for students to seek out additional resources and support with understanding? is this assignment and its correlated grading scale designed to accommodate a variety of skill levels, or is it designed with "the best student" in mind?

the student actually just doesn't care about this class and doesn't want to do the work -> why don't they care about this class? what other classes or work are they prioritizing, and why? to what extent are you willing to accommodate students who simply will never view your class as a priority, but need to complete it to earn a degree--and how is that need tied structurally to a university that serves primarily as a class barrier? what role do you play in that university structure, and is it a role you want to play?

at the end of the day if your goal is 2 prioritize student learning that means being flexible & adapting your grading scales, assignment structures, class policies, etc. to accommodate students at their level of learning for their own purposes. like if the choice is between having a student get a zero on an assignment for "cheating" versus working with that student to create an alternative assignment which they can complete & which engages them with the course material on a level they can manage then to me it seems like a pretty clear choice between "no learning" and "some learning."

[burynr08]

Cassiopeia Black has a bit of a crush on her Potions professor.

Severus Snape x OC

[sexy-stable-diffusion]

Emma Watson schoolgirl with short hair and big breasts

@ppballin So here you go

[naughtyshirt21]

Diligent student

[blueiskewl]

Three Students Just Deciphered the First Passages of a 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Burned in Vesuvius’ Eruption

A Roman scroll, partially preserved when it was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has been virtually unwrapped and decoded using artificial intelligence.

The feat was achieved by three contestants in the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition launched in March 2023 in which people around the world raced to read the ancient Herculaneum papyri.

Papyrologists working with the Vesuvius Challenge believe the scroll contains “never-before-seen text from antiquity,” and the text in question is a piece of Epicurean philosophy on the subject of pleasure. The winning submission shows ancient Greek letters on a large patch of scroll, and the author seems to be discussing the question: are things that are scarce more pleasurable as a result?

The author, whose identity is unconfirmed, doesn’t think so: “As too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” one passage from the scroll reads.

The three members of the winning team had previously individually made significant contributions to the competition. Luke Farritor, a computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a machine learning Ph.D. student at Freie University in Berlin, had been two of the first contestants to detect a smaller number of letters, winning $40,000 and $10,000 respectively. Julian Schilliger, a robotics student at ETH Zürich, developed a tool that began to automatically segment the scrolls. They will share the $700,000 grand prize.

Nat Friedman, a tech investor and executive, and one of the challenge’s organizers, recently printed out the winning submission. “All this has been in this dreamlike digital world in my imagination before," Friedman says. "Seeing it on paper, rolling it up, it just made it so tangible.”

There’s a lot more to discover. The scroll partially decoded by the winning submission was one of 800 discovered in a southern Italian villa that was first uncovered in 1750. The combined efforts of the competitors and organizers so far have resulted in around 5% of one scroll being read.

The final scramble to read the scrolls

Since the Vesuvius Challenge launched nearly a year ago, participants had both cooperated and competed, sharing their latest techniques with each other and posting pictures of their progress. But as the race for the grand prize intensified, the Discord, a social media platform where the participants shared information, went dark, says Friedman.

Of the eighteen submissions for the grand prize, most of them were received on the last day of the contest, Dec. 31, and three were sent in the final ten minutes, according to Friedman. Friedman recalls he was at home with his family around Christmas, decorating for the holiday while compulsively refreshing his phone, when the winning submission came in. “I ran into my little office at home and popped it open,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is really magnificent.’”

In accordance with the criteria set in March 2023, the winning submission contains four passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of the characters in each of those passages recoverable by professional papyrologists. It also contains a further 11 columns of text.

It isn’t known who authored the ancient scroll, but experts have developed theories. “Is the author Epicurus' follower, the philosopher and poet Philodemus, the teacher of Vergil? It seems very likely,” writes Richard Janko, professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan. “Is he writing about the effect of music on the hearer, and comparing it to other pleasures like those of food and drink? Quite probably.” Robert Fowler, a professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, also believes the author to be Philodemus. “Like other Epicureans, he valued pleasure above all - but pleasure rightly understood, not mere indulgence,” Fowler writes of the philosopher.

In the final section of the scroll, the author appears to criticize his intellectual adversaries, who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.”

“I can't help but read it as a 2000 year old blog post, arguing with another poster,” says Friedman. “It's ancient Substack, and people are beefing with each other, and I think that's just amazing.”

What comes next

The Vesuvius Challenge has issued a new grand prize for 2024 that will allow the AI-enhanced decoding to move at a faster pace.

The competitors largely have been developing algorithms for automatic letter detection—using AI to see traces of ink on segments of virtually unrolled scrolls. Aside from letter detection, the other main challenge associated with reading the scrolls is segmentation—separating the layers and virtually unrolling the scrolls. So far, this process has been highly manual; the Vesuvius Challenge employed three full-time segmenters. In order to ensure that they’d have segmented enough of the scroll for someone to win the grand prize, Friedman bought the team new monitors and computers to boost their productivity. The challenge for 2024 is to automate the segmentation process.

Friedman admits that he has had other tempting offers of new quests to pursue. Over the last year, he says his inbox has been filled with Robinson Crusoe-esque proposals, from people alerting him to lost shipwrecks and ancient cities, undecoded languages, and strange glyphs on the sides of mountains.

But he can’t walk away. He wants to help read all of the 800 scrolls already discovered in the villa. And some archeologists believe there is a main library containing tens of thousands of scrolls, still waiting to be excavated.

To expedite the excavation, Friedman has obtained the mobile number of the Italian civil servant responsible for the villa, whom he has texted, twice. “My hope is that I won't have to go and dig it out myself,” says Friedman. “But if that's what it comes to, I will.”

By WILL HENSHALL.

[dragoonwish]

Reference

[prussianmemes]

babe wake up academia is healing:

living in a reality beyond parody.

[luthienmpl]

I know none of us actually care about the "plot" in this show but I'm calling that she's the villain anyway. The one selling the drugs at school and also the one off-screen that Zhang Teng wanted to run off with.

[trek-tracks]

It was nice while it lasted

[bleghxy]

GL (manga/manhwa/manhua) Recs:

Manga:

Sukeban and Transfer Student by Fujichika

Summary: Rinri Kanzaki, a naive and innocent transfer student, couldn't help but want Atsuko Nagumo, a lone-wolf delinquent, to say "cute words" to her! It's a cute and slightly embarrassing 80s-style school comedy between a transfer student x delinquent.

Review: This manga is literally so cute. Both of them are adorable. Their relationship is also very wholesome.

Status: Ongoing

Composing Spring in this Room where Cherry Blossoms Bloom by Tokuwotsumu

Summary: On her first day of university, Haruki had a fateful encounter with Sakura in the lecture hall. They were attracted to each other and lived together after graduation, but suddenly they had to part ways. Sakura had disappeared from this world. Five years have passed since then, and it is the fifth cherry blossom season. Haruki, who was still in a state of grief, happened to find a diary. It was the unfinished diary written by Sakura.

Review: This was so beautifully written. The grief portrayed in this manga was very realistically written. I highly recommend this!

Status: Completed

Manhwa:

Summary: Jeanne, a prostitute at address 74, took care of the fallen Janet. Jeanne wants to be friends with Janet, but Janet tries to get information out of her.

Review: I liked this a lot but I wish the author stuck to writing 13 chapters like they had originally planned because near the end everything felt a bit rushed. However, it's still a good read although I recommend keeping a box of tissues near while reading this tho.

Status: Completed

Summary: Welcome to Greywoods, a beautiful mansion isolated deep in the countryside. Its main inhabitants? Viscount Rose, his daughter Lady Eileen, the housekeeper, the butler, and a new maid, Marie. As Lady Eileen and her newest (and only) companion begin to open up to each other, do their hearts follow close behind? Now, don’t mind any lingering ghosts still haunting the grounds, they’re not real! Nor are there any enduring secrets, deep-rooted betrayals, or an air of mystery... just trust me.

Review: This is an excellent read! Although Eileen and Marie's relationship developed very fast, it didn't feel forced. Their relationship was very smoothly written I'd say. There's also a supporting character, Lynda who was very well written. I do recommend checking the trigger warnings before reading this.

Status: Completed

Summary: Andrew is the only daughter of the famous Grace family. She also has an incurable disease. Due to her family's high status in society, Andrew grew up with no friends save for her maid, Herta, whom she has become intensely infatuated with. Little does she know, her family is responsible for ruining Herta's life. Can Andrew break the hierarchy and be with her? Or will Herta end her suffering first...

Review: The two main leads are well written. The story itself is filled with angst. There are a few issues I have with this but I still liked it a lot. I do recommend checking the trigger warnings before reading this.

Status: Completed

Manhua:

Summary: Qi went to sleep embraced by her girlfriend, Yuanzi. However, when she opened her eyes she realized that she had been transported 10 years back to the past, back when she was still in high school. While she sees this as an opportunity to save the love of her life, what she doesn't realize is that her teenage self is in her adult body, 10 years into the future, and has no clue about the life Qi has built or how precious the time she has left with Yuanzi is. No matter the time, no matter the age, their love resonates as they stand by each other's side. Will they be able to conquer fate?

Review: The plot was never dragged and the pacing was very smooth. The characters are also very cute. There were issues I had with a certain side character but other than that it was a very pleasant read.

Status: Completed

A Story Concerning Sweets by Shi Yi Er

Summary: This is a story concerning sweets and two girls. One is a ghost who wanders around in the hospital, and another is a patient with a heart condition. It's cute! It's fluffy!

Review: It's cute and angsty at the same time. I recommended keeping a box of tissues near you.

Status: Completed

If you want more GL recs: