What We Are Reading Today: ‘How Birds Evolve' by Douglas Futuyma
In this multifaceted book, Futuyma examines how birds evolved from nonavian dinosaurs and reveals what we can learn from the 'family tree' of birds.
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Al Arabiya
5 days ago
- Al Arabiya
‘Writing is thinking': Do students who use ChatGPT learn less?
When Jocelyn Leitzinger had her university students write about times in their lives they had witnessed discrimination, she noticed that a woman named Sally was the victim in many of the stories. 'It was very clear that ChatGPT had decided this is a common woman's name,' said Leitzinger, who teaches an undergraduate class on business and society at the University of Illinois in Chicago. 'They weren't even coming up with their own anecdotal stories about their own lives,' she told AFP. Leitzinger estimated that around half of her 180 students used ChatGPT inappropriately at some point last semester -- including when writing about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), which she called both 'ironic' and 'mind-boggling.' So she was not surprised by recent research which suggested that students who use ChatGPT to write essays engage in less critical thinking. The preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed, was shared widely online and clearly struck a chord with some frustrated educators. The team of MIT researchers behind the paper have received more than 3,000 emails from teachers of all stripes since it was published online last month, lead author Nataliya Kosmyna told AFP. 'Soulless' AI essays For the small study, 54 adult students from the greater Boston area were split into three groups. One group used ChatGPT to write 20-minute essays, one used a search engine, and the final group had to make do with only their brains. The researchers used EEG devices to measure the brain activity of the students, and two teachers marked the essays. The ChatGPT users scored significantly worse than the brain-only group on all levels. The EEG showed that different areas of their brains connected to each other less often. And more than 80 percent of the ChatGPT group could not quote anything from the essay they had just written, compared to around 10 percent of the other two groups. By the third session, the ChatGPT group appeared to be mostly focused on copying and pasting. The teachers said they could easily spot the 'soulless' ChatGPT essays because they had good grammar and structure but lacked creativity, personality and insight. However Kosmyna pushed back against media reports claiming the paper showed that using ChatGPT made people lazier or more stupid. She pointed to the fourth session, when the brain-only group used ChatGPT to write their essay and displayed even higher levels of neural connectivity. Kosmyna emphasized it was too early to draw conclusions from the study's small sample size but called for more research into how AI tools could be used more carefully to help learning. Ashley Juavinett, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego who was not involved in the research, criticized some 'off base' headlines that wrongly extrapolated from the preprint. 'This paper does not contain enough evidence nor the methodological rigor to make any claims about the neural impact of using LLMs (large language models such as ChatGPT) on our brains,' she told AFP. Thinking outside the bot Leitzinger said the research reflected how she had seen student essays change since ChatGPT was released in 2022, as both spelling errors and authentic insight became less common. Sometimes students do not even change the font when they copy and paste from ChatGPT, she said. But Leitzinger called for empathy for students, saying they can get confused when the use of AI is being encouraged by universities in some classes but is banned in others. The usefulness of new AI tools is sometimes compared to the introduction of calculators, which required educators to change their ways. But Leitzinger worried that students do not need to know anything about a subject before pasting their essay question into ChatGPT, skipping several important steps in the process of learning. A student at a British university in his early 20s who wanted to remain anonymous told AFP he found ChatGPT was a useful tool for compiling lecture notes, searching the internet and generating ideas. 'I think that using ChatGPT to write your work for you is not right because it's not what you're supposed to be at university for,' he said. The problem goes beyond high school and university students. Academic journals are struggling to cope with a massive influx of AI-generated scientific papers. Book publishing is also not immune, with one startup planning to pump out 8,000 AI-written books a year. 'Writing is thinking, thinking is writing, and when we eliminate that process, what does that mean for thinking?' Leitzinger asked.
Arab News
5 days ago
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Wildlife of the Eastern Caribbean'
Author: STEVE HOLLIDAY AND GILL HOLLIDAY This is the first photographic field identification guide to Eastern Caribbean birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, land crabs, dragonflies, and butterflies. Beautiful and easy-to-use, the guide covers 17 island groups stretching from the Virgin Islands south through the Lesser Antilles, from Anguilla to Grenada, where a unique range of flora and fauna evolved in relative isolation. Around 30 percent of all the species included are endemic to the region.
Al Arabiya
5 days ago
- Al Arabiya
Major reports about how climate change affects the US are removed from websites
Legally mandated US national climate assessments seem to have disappeared from the federal websites built to display them, making it harder for state and local governments and the public to learn what to expect in their backyards from a warming world. Scientists said the peer-reviewed, authoritative reports save money and lives. Websites for the national assessments and the US Global Change Research Program were down Monday and Tuesday with no links, notes, or referrals elsewhere. The White House, which was responsible for the assessments, said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law but gave no further details. Searches for the assessments on NASA websites did not turn them up. NASA did not respond to requests for information. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which coordinated the information in the assessments, did not respond to repeated inquiries. 'It's critical for decision makers across the country to know what the science in the National Climate Assessment is. That is the most reliable and well-reviewed source of information about climate that exists for the United States,' said University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs, who coordinated the 2014 version of the report. 'It's a sad day for the United States if it is true that the National Climate Assessment is no longer available,' Jacobs said. 'This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people's access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts.' Harvard climate scientist John Holdren, who was President Obama's science advisor and whose office directed the assessments, said after the 2014 edition he visited governors, mayors, and other local officials who told him how useful the 841-page report was. It helped them decide whether to raise roads, build seawalls, and even move hospital generators from basements to roofs, he said. 'This is a government resource paid for by the taxpayer to provide the information that really is the primary source of information for any city, state, or federal agency who's trying to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate,' said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who has been a volunteer author for several editions of the report. Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in NOAA's library. NASA's open science data repository includes dead links to the assessment site. The most recent report, issued in 2023, included an interactive atlas that zoomed down to the county level. It found that climate change is affecting people's security, health, and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority and Native American communities often disproportionately at risk. The 1990 Global Change Research Act requires a national climate assessment every four years and directs the president to establish an interagency United States Global Change Research Program. In the spring, the Trump administration told the volunteer authors of the next climate assessment that their services weren't needed and ended the contract with the private firm that helps coordinate the website and report. Additionally, NOAA's main website was recently forwarded to a different NOAA website. Social media and blogs at NOAA and NASA about climate impacts for the general public were cut or eliminated. 'It's part of a horrifying big picture,' Holdren said. 'It's just an appalling whole demolition of science infrastructure.' The national assessments are more useful than international climate reports put out by the UN every seven or so years because they are more localized and more detailed, Hayhoe and Jacobs said. The national reports are not only peer-reviewed by other scientists but examined for accuracy by the National Academy of Sciences, federal agencies, the staff, and the public. Hiding the reports would be censoring science, Jacobs said. 'And it's dangerous for the country,' Hayhoe said, comparing it to steering a car on a curving road by only looking through the rearview mirror: 'And now more than ever we need to be looking ahead to do everything it takes to make it around that curve safely. It's like our windshields being painted over.'
