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Submission + - Caffeine Has a Weird Effect on Your Brain While You're Asleep (sciencealert.com) 1

alternative_right writes: Caffeine was shown to increase brain signal complexity, and shift the brain closer to a state of 'criticality', in tests run by researchers from the University of Montreal in Canada. This criticality refers to the brain being balanced between structure and flexibility, thought to be the most efficient state for processing information, learning, and making decisions.

Submission + - What Will Universities Look Like Post-ChatGPT? (cameronharwick.com) 3

An anonymous reader writes: Lots of people are sounding the alarm on AI cheating in college.

Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

Economist Cameron Harwick says it's on professors to respond, and it's going to look like relying more on tests and not on homework—which means a diploma will have to be less about intelligence and more about agency and discipline.

This approach significantly raises the stakes of tests. It violates a longstanding maxim in education, that successful teaching involves quick feedback: frequent, small assignments that help students gauge how they’re doing, graded, to give them a push to actually do it.... Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom is probably going to have to go. If AI makes some aspect of the classroom easier, something else has to get harder, or the university has no reason to exist.

The signal that a diploma sends can’t continue to be “I know things”. ChatGPT knows things. A diploma in the AI era will have to signal discipline and agency – things that AI, as yet, still lacks and can’t substitute for. Any student who makes it through such a class will have a credible signal that they can successfully avoid the temptation to slack, and that they have the self-control to execute on long-term plans.


Submission + - Jared Isaacman pre-fired because of Musk connection (theregister.com)

Mirnotoriety writes: “Jared Isaacman, former NASA Administrator nominee, has shared how the US space agency might have looked under his leadership and blamed his connections with Elon Musk for the abrupt withdrawal of his nomination.”

"I don't like to play dumb ... I don't think that the timing was much of a coincidence ... There were other things going on on the same day."

‘There were indeed. Elon Musk's departure from the Department of Government Efficiency was also announced. "Some people had some axes to grind," said Isaacman, "and I was a good visible target."’

Submission + - Stanford is a case study in how Beijing infiltrates U.S. universities (washingtonpost.com)

schwit1 writes: Student reporters at Stanford University revealed China’s spying methods using Chinese nationals.

The Trump administration is revoking visas for Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” and revising its “visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” for students from China and Hong Kong.

This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.

To understand how China uses its students as spies, read the stunning investigative report published last month by Stanford Review reporters Garret Molloy and Elsa Johnson in which they documented the infiltration of Stanford University by the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP is orchestrating a widespread academic espionage campaign at Stanford,” Johnson told me and my co-host, Danielle Pletka, in a recent podcast interview. “Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she added, “and that’s a huge incentive for China.”..

Molloy, an economics major, visited China last summer and was shocked to meet with many members of the CCP who were educated at Stanford. “We’re educating the head of the Chinese [securities and exchange commission], we’re educating the head of Beijing’s tariff negotiators. I’m meeting all these people and they all say ‘I work for the Chinese Communist Party in a really high role. I hope that China beats the U.S. And I also went to Stanford for my undergraduate and master’s degree.’ And I’m putting this together and I’m saying it’s shocking that we are educating such high-level Communist Party officials. What’s going wrong here?”

It’s a fair question — one of many for which the Trump administration plans to get answers.

And it's not just Stanford.

Submission + - Elon Musk Goes Nuclear (theatlantic.com) 4

sinij writes:

The world's richest man and the president of the United States are now openly fighting.

Trump threatened to cancel Space X government contracts and Musk accused Trump to be a frequent flyer to the Pedophile Island. This would be highly entertaining if not for the potential to wreck companies, ruin the economy, and sabotage legislative agenda.

Submission + - Ukraine Drones Destroy Dozens of Russian Aircraft (foxnews.com)

schwit1 writes: The brazen Ukrainian blitz of Russian warplanes Sunday was 18 months in the making and the Pentagon was kept in the dark until it was over, sources told Fox News.

"Operation Spider's Web," a series of coordinated drone strikes penetrating deep into Russian territory, is believed to have taken out dozens of Russia's most powerful bomber jets and surveillance planes as they sat idle on five military airfields.

The stunning operation was personally overseen by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s security service (SBU) said.

Ukraine used small FPV drones hidden inside wooden cabins mounted on trucks. When the trucks reached their targets, the roofs opened by remote control, and the drones launched.

Submission + - The workers who lost their jobs to AI (theguardian.com) 1

Paul Fernhout writes: "From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?" by Charis McGowan in the Guardian.

Submission + - Russian nuclear site blueprints exposed in public procurement database (cybernews.com)

Mr.Intel writes: Russia is modernizing its nuclear weapon sites, including underground missile silos and support infrastructure. Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database.

Journalists from Danwatch and Der Spiegel scraped and analyzed over two million documents from the public procurement database, which exposed Russian nuclear facilities, including their layout, in great detail. The investigation unveils that European companies participate in modernizing them.

Submission + - Lotions and perfume can weaken a 'human oxidation field' made by your skin (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: Perfumes and lotions do more than soften our skin and give us signature aromas. They can chemically alter the air we breathe, weakening a phenomenon called the human oxidation field, researchers report today in Science Advances.

The new results lend further credence to the idea that the human body can meaningfully alter the chemistry of indoor air, says Nicola Carslaw, an indoor air chemist at the University of York who wasn’t involved with the research. “What’s fascinating about this paper is that it shows what simple bodies in a space can do.” Whether these chemical reactions help—or harm—us, however, remains unclear.

Scientists coined the term “human oxidation field” in 2022. A study published in Science found that when oils in our skin are exposed to ozone—an oxidant that can creep in from the outdoors or from some air purifiers—they can spawn highly reactive molecules called hydroxyl radicals. These in turn can break down other gases in the air around us, creating a haze of radicals—the human oxidation field.

The researchers are still figuring out exactly what fewer hydroxyl radicals mean for everyday life. If the radicals react with other molecules to form toxic substances, wearing personal care products could be a safeguard; if they are breaking down dangerous gases, then the same products could leave someone more vulnerable. But there’s such a wide variety of compounds in indoor air—created by everything from cooking to cleaning—that researchers don’t have any easy answers.

“We can’t give any public advice on whether this means you should wear a lot of lotion,” says study author, Manabu Shiraiwa, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine.

Submission + - The Information: Microsoft Engineers Forced to Dig Their Own AI Graves

theodp writes: In what reads a bit like a Sopranos plot, The Information suggests some of those in the recent batch of terminated Microsoft engineers may have in effect been forced to dig their own AI graves.

The (paywalled) story begins: "Jeff Hulse, a Microsoft vice president who oversees roughly 400 software engineers, told the team in recent months to use the company's artificial intelligence chatbot, powered by OpenAI, to generate half the computer code they write, according to a person who heard the remarks. That would represent an increase from the 20% to 30% of code AI currently produces at the company, and shows how rapidly Microsoft is moving to incorporate such technology. Then on Tuesday, Microsoft laid off more than a dozen engineers on Hulse 's team as part of a broader layoff of 6,000 people across the company that appeared to hit engineers harder than other types of roles, this person said."

The report comes as tech company CEOs have taken to boasting in earnings calls, tech conferences, and public statements that their AI is responsible for an ever-increasing share of the code written at their organizations. Microsoft's recent job cuts hit coders the hardest. So how much credence should one place on CEOs' claims of AI programming productivity gains — which researchers have struggled to measure for 50+ years — if engineers are forced to increase their use of AI, boosting the numbers their far-removed-from-programming CEOs are presenting to Wall Street?

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