Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. ~ Rachel Carson
Category: Community (Page 2 of 3)
On Monday, March 27, six innocent souls were taken at a Christian school in Nashville Tennessee: three of them children. Immediately, the flood of thoughts and prayers was so overwhelming, it solved the problem in an instant.
We had decided as a nation we’ve finally gone too far.
I’m lying, of course. As I type this, it’s Wednesday morning in the Pacific Northwest, March 29, and already since Tuesday there have been 25 more people killed and 62 wounded by firearms in 77 new incidents. Further proof that thoughts and prayers have no effect, and further proof that, apparently, we feel we still have not gone far enough to warrant any preventive action.
Yesterday, the day after the students needlessly lost their lives in their school, Barry Black, a retired Rear Admiral who serves as the U.S Senate Chaplain spoke at the opening of that chamber’s business:
Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers. Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’ Lord, deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous. Use them to battle the demonic forces that seek to engulf us. We pray, in your powerful name, amen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/28/us-senate-chaplain-tennessee-shooting/
Amen.
Meanwhile, several people who were elected to work in the same building as Barry Black opted to remain paralyzed. As common as “thoughts and prayers” is a response from a certain group of lawmakers to these shootings is the complaint that people are too quick to politicize [insert latest shooting].
Yesterday, the House Majority Leader said, “I really get angry when I see people trying to politicize it for their own personal agenda, especially when we don’t even know the facts.” He suggested that all “the other side” (wait – there’s another side to an epidemic of gun violence where it’s okay…?) wants to do, “…is take guns away from law-abiding citizens before they even know the facts…”
Fine. Let’s not act hastily in response to Tennessee. How about we only use facts from last year’s shootings? Parkland? Sandy Hook? Columbine?
How soon is enough damn time for these people to pull their heads out of the NRA’s ass and do something?
We have the facts already, from so many, many shootings. Let’s use them.
I don’t want your guns. I just want the guns to quit killing people in our homes, business…and schools.
Most of us are familiar with Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poetic play in which one man’s true identity is kept hidden behind another’s. I’m paraphrasing quite a bit, but the 19th century play has been performed and adapted almost continuously since its debut, finding great success on the silver screen in Steve Martin’s classic modernization in Roxanne and the gender-flipped version in The Truth About Cats & Dogs, and the small screen, showing up in venues as diverse as The Brady Bunch and Bob’s Burgers.
The story follows this general line (with apologies, to folks who want a better synopsis – and to my high school French teachers): A person who can’t express themselves well is aided by one who can, all to woo another, and hilarity ensues when the person providing the wooing words to the wooer has to come to terms with their own feelings for the woo-ee.
I bring this up because recent advances in technology have me concerned that we’re coming into an age of a cybernetic Cyranos, and it has implications we’re not going to fully understand until long after these new tools have been used for some time and become embedded in our culture and lives. The tools I speak of (as you may guess from my title) are the chatbots powered by generative “artificial intelligence” (AI) algorithms, such as ChatGPT and Bing.
My career has been in higher education, and over the years I have witnessed technological attempts to improve the response to plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct. Back in the day, it was easier than it is today to, say, get a term paper from someone geographically distant and present it as one’s own work locally. Cheaters could cheat, and could do so more easily, because, let’s face it: nothing was connected. Eventually, though, the internet came along and ruined everything. For starters, it supersized the market for, shall we say, papers on demand. But, at the same time, we started to see more and more work being submitted digitally, which allowed software tools to make some of the verification process an easier, more automagic one.
Today, plagiarism software is a big business, with enterprise-level tools deployed as a normal part of course management software. It’s not just for academia – businesses deploy these tools, and individuals using tools like Grammarly can even do a self-check before submitting their work or school projects. Even lawmakers are turning to these tools.
In less than half a year, though, the new generation of AI tools has been making headlines for the “human-like” responses created when given a prompt, to, say, write a poem or do a report on a specific subject. These new chatbots have been harvesting data from the internet, and using heuristic algorithms to catalog word-use patterns to which they then compare their own outputs, creating a feedback loop of generative critique to then reshape the response to resemble human output.
Now, I’m not a computer scientist, but that’s how I understand it. Point is, we now have machines that are capable of developing iterative understandings of patterns at a blazing speed, and just as quickly parrot those patterns. The results, I will admit, are impressive.
Sometimes scary. Not always in a good way, either…
A few months ago, the trustees of a public university were listening to a presentation from an administrator about the ongoing process of developing a new strategic plan for the campus, and he began by saying that someone in the office thought it would be fun to ask a chatbot to write a strategic plan for the university. “Actually,” he said, “it turned out pretty good.”
There is a great deal of faith that such documents will be written and vetted by the humans hired for those jobs…and yet, across the field of journalism, we have, in fact, seen some human reportage jobs trickling away while these systems are beginning to be engaged.
Which brings me back to my career. I’m what is referred to as “a creative” – that is, I create content in audio and video media…and I work in higher education. For that first distinction, think about the implications if a machine could just do what I do… In fact, this reminds me of a joke told by Woody Allen in his days as a standup comedian:
My father worked for the same firm for 12 years. They fired him and replaced him with a tiny gadget that does everything my father does, only much better. The depressing thing is my mother ran out and bought one.
For that matter, what about the folks who write strategic plans? I’ve heard from a pretty good source that a chatbot already does a good job with that task…
Joking aside, my side of these ivy-covered walls is the least of it: the implications on the teaching and learning mission of any college is being challenged by these technologies. Task forces and committees are springing up on campuses around the world to explore a very basic question: what in hell is being unleashed upon us? The implications for educators and for students are all immediately transformative. We are, today, now in a world where a person can create a term paper by robotic proxy.
Fortunately, many of these term papers are going to have flaws. My own experience dabbling with one product, ChatGPT, has shown that the machine has an easy relationship with lying, often creating, let’s call them “alternative facts,” and presenting them as if they belong in our universe of truth. You can even get them with citations…to non-publications written by non people.
Like I said earlier: the results are impressive. Sometimes scary.
If I were to write an essay and submit it to my job or for a class with fabricated “facts” and imagined sources, I would be called a lying liar. The eggheads who built these systems prefer not to say that these bots are lying in their responses, and I get it – lying is a harsh, very negative term. One could try to fancy it up by using a longer word that most folks probably don’t know means the same thing, like “prevarication” but even that’s too harsh. Because it’s true. Instead, they insist their systems are “hallucinating.”
Great…the bots are tripping and these works are just their fever dreams…
Now, even with the caveat that I know it is not right and proper to paint all students with the same big brush, it is not unthinkable that a student on a deadline could use a tool like this to create a quick draft of an essay using a real-language prompt…and not go much beyond the draft, since, hey, it is pretty good…and it’s already 2am and the essay is due at 8. It’s going to take some time for the anti-plagiarism systems to develop heuristics to learn to detect algorithmic output over human expression.
Quite frankly, it’s got a good chunk of the ivory tower types with their undies bunched up to their necks.
Let us be fair, here, and remind ourselves we can’t just point at students as a cause to worry about potential technology abuse – it can happen on the other side of the equation, too. It is eerily possible to imagine this scenario: an instructor uses a chatbot to write a lecture. You can even imagine using other AI tools to create a deep fake video for his online class to view.
I say this with such certainty because a faculty member at the Wharton School of Business who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship did just that. Not to cheat the system, but to demonstrate the breadth of opportunities these generative AI tools allow.
Which brings me back around to Rostand’s creation, you know, the guy with the big nose and great way with words, Cyrano de Bergerac. He was the unknown source for the voice of another. With the penetration of (anti)social media into almost every aspect of our daily lives, who is to say we’re dealing with the people we think we are?
Should this matter? Well, we are still struggling as a nation to cope with the impact of social media on a wide range of cultural and political issues, up to and including elections for the highest offices in the land. Who – or what – is generating the words (and images and sounds) that go viral, influencing others with propaganda? Who – or what – is generating the body of knowledge used to teach, and adding to it in academic response?
It is very likely that not only is the proverbial horse long out of the barn, and we are well beyond any hope of closing the barn doors, but that horse has met with others and is actively breeding.
Pay attention to this story, as it’s only just beginning.
We’re now a week past the election; this is the day when Oregon certifies its vote – it leaves a week window open to allow ballots to arrive by mail, and as long as they are postmarked by the deadline, they can be counted. Of the many things on the ballot this year, one of the more contentious items was Measure 114.
In short, this measure requires a permit to purchase a firearm and bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. For the permits, police agencies will have to add a process to their offices – already some sheriffs have announced they won’t comply with this addition to Oregon’s Constitution, claiming it is “unconstitutional” in part or in whole.
Funny – I thought the Constitution was pretty clear: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”
Well now: regulations. Go figure.
Measure 114 puts Oregon near the head of the pack when it comes to firearms regulations. It doesn’t take firearms away from anyone, although reading the voter’s guide and letters to the editor leading up to election day there were many dire warnings about government coming for your guns! Measure 114 just, well, regulates the sale and transfer of them going forward.
This measure came about in no small part because a number of us have been fed up with the epidemic of firearms deaths in our nation. Yesterday’s headlines tell us about the shootings at the universities of Virginia and Idaho, in a year where there have been 599 mass shootings thus far.
At the rate we’re going, by the time you read this, we’ll be past 600 mass shootings for the year.
In a few weeks, we will meet a grisly anniversary: the tenth anniversary of the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary. Sandy Hook is but one of many school shootings over the years, but it’s worth noting its anniversary for a few reasons. One is personal: Benny Wheeler, killed at six years, is the nephew of a childhood friend of mine. Another reason is that the victims’ families have been in the news recently, as a vile conspiracy theorist who maligned and slandered those families has been found guilty of his malignant slander, and faces over a billion dollars in court-ordered fines.
We’ve become numb to the daily reports of mass shootings. We’ve become numb to school shootings – over 35 this year. That’s almost one per week of the school year.
A school shooting per week.
Really?
It’s in the face of this epidemic that people started doing something. A few years back, Oregon passed a common-sense safe gun storage law. And this year, Measure 114.
It’s not a wave, but it’s a start. Maybe an early indicator of a changing tide? We can only hope.
We, as a nation, have a problem. Too many people die from firearms in the country. Period.
We can reduce that number, but we manage to avoid our responsibilities to each other in favor of a distorted sense of individual freedoms. Our nation was built on the notion of insuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare for we, the people.
And so I was intrigued to read over this morning’s Oatmeal News Network a very insightful piece by the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak. She makes a great point – we’ve been here before. Fifty years ago, we decided too many people dire from a different kind of fire: actual fire.
So we did something about it. And since then, fewer people die from fire.
And nobody has come to take anyone’s Zippos.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/14/uva-shooting-run-hide-fight-alert/
Northeast Passage is a group of dedicated individuals at the University of New Hampshire “empowering individuals with disabilities to define, pursue, and achieve their Therapeutic Recreation and Adaptive Sports goals.” In late summer 2000, a group with NE Passage trekked to the newly renovated Galehead Hut in NH’s White Mountains.
Here’s a short story we made from that weekend:
If the embedded video is not displaying for you, try watching on Vimeo
The inspiration for the trek was the uproar over upgrades that were done to the rustic cabin located on Forest Service land, which required meeting current ADA spec. Many in the AMC community thought the ADA requirements were balderdash and poppycock (although they used less colorful language) and railed that the next step would be paving the pathway itself.
For Jill and the team at NE Passage: challenge accepted. Three wheelchair users and two crutchers completed the climb, and I was charged with documenting the event. In addition to recording much of the video you see (while hiking the trail myself), I also coordinated a 2nd unit and sound recordist – couldn’t have done this without Tom & Mark – plus a “sherpa” who brought fresh production supplies. Also embedded on the trek was a reporter and photographer for the New York Times, as well as another video crew. Almost a bit of a circus swirling around the actual hikers…
Heading down the mountain after two nights in the hut, the team was met by hikers coming up the trail with a copy of the day’s NYT – we were the first story from the University of NH to make the front page of the Old Gray Lady. (Below the fold – but still!)
This video is one of the stories we made from the footage – it ran during an intermission in NHPTV’s coverage of a UNH Hockey game…and that’s how I got an Emmy on my shelf. We also completed a half-hour feature on the trek commissioned by the UNH Foundation. (I sure wish I’d saved a copy of that one, as there is a ton more footage and fun.)
To my great surprise, I was less tired or sore after getting home than I expected I would be. Something in the work and the people I was with was keeping me going with ease. Working with Northeast Passage on this project and many others informed my thinking about life and how inclusive actions make us all better people with fuller experiences. I am grateful I got to know Jill and the others, and feel lucky to have tagged along.
Meanwhile… I recently discovered a 20-year retrospective video on the trek put together by my friends at Northeast Passage. Watching it, you can see what a difference the trek made to so many people – our teams, yes, but even folks who weren’t part of the challenge.
I can’t embed the video, but you can watch it on YouTube. That’s Jill Gravink, Founder and Director of Northeast Passage at the beginning.
To this day, I have yet to experience anything like this project. It was hard work, sure – even the day before the trek we climbed some supplies to the hut and did some test footage. During the hike up, I bounced between the lead and middle teams, and probably climbed the trail twice. On the way down, again I bounced, from the middle team to the last team, at one point, I ditched the camera to lend an extra set of hands and getting chair down Jacob’s Ladder.
Then I hiked back up to retrieve it, and hustle back to leapfrog those folks and find the group further down.
I have never worked so hard for a story before, let alone a story that meant so much to so many. Thanks, Jill (and everyone!) for having me along.
When you write it out in words instead of digits, it seems more impressive.
731.
See? But here we are, that many days since a positive test came back for
SARS-CoV-2 in Snohomish County in state state of Washington.
Two years – officially – have we now been dealing with this virus, this pandemic, in our nation. We’re hitting a few milestones over the next several weeks. Two years since this, two years since that. Sitting here over my breakfast, a flood of things came to mind when I heard the two-year mark noted on the radio. The earliest days were confusing. We’d been following the progress of this disease as it quickly spread beyond first one city, then the next, then leapt borders and continents.
Then, two years ago today, a Washington public health official said, “it’s here.”
Suddenly, the images of masked people from an infected metropolis were domestic images, not international news. Schools closed. Businesses closed. Reactions were swift, and varied, and in some cases seemed like panic. Amidst the reality of the spread of COVID-19, the biggest headlines seemed to be about the toilet paper wars.
One-fifth of a decade into this plague, we’ve come a long way. Or have we? Masks seem everywhere, and yet, as I dropped Her at the bus this morning, I watched a group of young adults try to board the bus sans masks. Stopped by the driver. They were incredulous that they couldn’t ride on a public transit without a mask.
Incredulity no longer rises within me at these sites: even this far in to a pandemic, it’s become the norm that there are those who, through willful ignorance or willful disregard for the state of affairs seem to still not get it: we’re in a pandemic.
Two years in, and some folks still can’t grasp that.
I fear this is just the first of many multi-annual milestones before we start clocking the days this is (finally) behind us.
Stay safe. Stay well. Mask up, get your shots. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic folks – the middle.
Got a booster shot today. Between age, underlying conditions, and – I think – my job situation, I checked enough boxes to get through the portal and obtain an appointment. And with that little jab I’m now that much more protected here in the pandemic of the unvaccinated and unmasked.
This one was different than the first two; right now, 12 hours later, my arm hurts like heck. The original doses in the spring didn’t seem to affect me much. Maybe it’s because this time around I’m feeling Moderna in my system. Who knows?
I’m just grateful that I am able to say I have taken active, pro-public health steps and done all I can to protect myself and those around me. This whole pandemic thing is starting to get old…
This was an interesting project to work on. Looking through it, we were busy last year! University Information & Technology Year in Review 2021
A recent WaPo article tells us that leaving the facething is “Easier said than done.”
[facething] is bad! Nevertheless, more than 2 billion of us are still there — some reluctantly, some enthusiastically. Because even though the platform is a cesspool of toxicity, there are reasons to stay. Maybe it’s the only way you keep in touch with your aunt. Or find out what’s happening in your hometown. Or catch up with gossip from your high school friends. That’s [facething]’s trap: The emotional connections are inextricable from the algorithm that keeps us clicking against our own best interests.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/leaving-facebook-is-hard/2021/11/10/90172232-40bc-11ec-a3aa-0255edc02eb7_story.html
It’s easier than you think. First, download your activity to your computer. This gives you a copy on your computer of your account activity, including posts and – important for many – the photos you’ve uploaded over the years. Once you have a copy of your old life, you can deactivate or delete your account.
That’s it. Eventually you’ll not miss it.
Go ahead – give it try!
It’s a lazy-ish Sunday, and instead of looking for cupcakes and a movie, I popped open the lappy and started to go to … that site. Muscle memory? Laziness? Upon seeing the login page, I just shook my head. Old habits, especially those habits that are designed to deliver dopamine hits deep inside one’s brain, are hard to kick.
But I caught myself, shamed myself, and moved on to the newspaper site to which I subscribe so I could check the day’s headlines instead. It’s a better way to see what’s happening in the world that … that site.