Rotundus.com

Latino, Black enrollment in advanced math shot up after states made this change. Should it be a model?

What you can achieve with standardized testing: "Latino and Black students in advanced math courses grew when Texas districts stopped relying on recommendations and automatically enrolled qualifying students."

A boy saw 17 doctors over 3 years for chronic pain. ChatGPT found the diagnosis

Overall generative AI seems to pretty good at finding obscure connections. I wonder whether AI would be better or worse at the normal cases or the odd ones when compared against human physicians tackling each type of situation.

The Enemies of Literature Are Winning

"Banned Books Week is, or should be, eminently mockable. Its proponents trade on the moral currency of defiance (“See how brave we are, inviting people to read these daring books!”) but in practice they are doing the opposite — attempting to reify a consensus. Take a look at the “most banned and challenged” books from 2010 to 2019, according to the American Library Association. Many are war horses of junior-high English, with millions of copies in print"

Norway an EV role model? Their pathway is expensive and paid for with oil & gas exports

"In short, Norway – a major oil and gas exporter – needs to sell over 100 barrels of oil (which emits 40 tonnes of CO2) to pay for the tax breaks it gives EVs to avoid one tonne of CO2."

From the New Scientist yesterday in Ukrainian AI attack drones may be killing without human oversight:

Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence are now finding and attacking targets without human assistance, New Scientist has learned, in what would be the first confirmed use of autonomous weapons or “killer robots”. While the drones are designed to target vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry, it is almost certain that the resulting explosions are killing Russian soldiers without a direct command from a human operator

The article mentions confirmation of the use of drones in this autonomous role unlike earlier uncorroborated claims about autonomous drones in Libya that the article also describes.

A better perspective I'd say than most of what I'm seeing:

The interviewee's background:

Daniel Levy is President of the U.S./Middle East Project and served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo-B talks under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Taba negotiations under Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Stumbled across it via this tweet which says describing it:

Very telling when an ex-Top Adviser to Israel's Prime Minister is way more sympathetic to Palestinians than a BBC presenter

Definitely still not feeling optimistic.

Bumped across this in my "Watch Later" list on Youtube today on the path to peace in Northern Ireland.

Wish I felt more optimistic about the short-to-medium term prospects for peace in a particular part of the world that's popped into the news again in recent days.