Breaking Through The Wall

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The squeegee of window washer Jan Demczur is in the Smithsonian. His determination and willingness to use what was handy on the morning of September 11, 2001, put it there.

The Polish immigrant was riding in a north tower World Trade Center elevator when a hijacked plane hit the building. The elevator came to a stop on the 50th floor. That's when Demczur and other stranded workers pried open the door, revealing a solid wall.

Rather than give up, Demczur used his brass squeegee handle to hack away at it. He eventually broke through the wall and led the group to safety just moments before the tower fell.

Got a wall to break through in your life? There's probably a tool at your disposal. Work with what you've got and refuse to give up.

Stephen Goforth

20 Articles about AI & Writing

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A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer – Hechinger Report  

GEO for PR - MuchRack 

The AI cheating panic is missing the point - The Washington Post  

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks – Nature

AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Meet the early-adopter judges using AI – MIT Tech Review

One-fifth of computer science papers may include AI content – Science.org  

Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles – 404 Media

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die – Washington Post

Springer Nature launches new tool to spot awkward, tortured phrases – Chemistry World 

The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor - Gizmodo

AI is flattening language — and redistributing power – UX Design

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students. – New York Times

ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation – Scientific American

I am no longer chairing defenses or joining committees where students use generative AI for their writing – Stat Modeling

454 Hints That a Chatbot Wrote Part of a Biomedical Researcher’s Paper – New  York Times

Duke Just Introduced An Essay Question About AI—Here’s How To Tackle It - Forbes

AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. - Chronicle of Higher Ed 

I Tested Three AI Essay-Writing Tools, and Here’s What I Found – Life Hacker

Getting hired in the age of AI

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If you can say you worked a job where you had to show resiliency and adaptability, those are things that employers are looking for. We are individuals with unique experiences, unique energy and unique resilience. That's what we're going to get hired for. – Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20250825-aneesh-raman-young-people-employment-opportunities-katty-kay-interview

AI definition: SQL

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SQL - Structured Query Language (SQL pronounced ess-kew-ell or sequel) is the most widely used method of accessing databases. This programming language can be used to create tables, change data, find particular data, and create relationships among different tables. For data scientists, SQL is second in importance after Python. Similar in structure and function to Excel, SQL can work with Excel and is able to handle billions of rows in multiple tables and thousands of users can access this data securely at the same time.

More AI definitions here

22 Recent Articles about AI & Teaching

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Will AI Choke Off the Supply of Knowledge? - Wall Street Journal

Universities could bolster democracy by fostering students’ AI literacy – The Conversation

How Are Instructors Talking About AI in Their Syllabi? – Chronicle of Higher Ed

The AI cheating panic is missing the point - The Washington Post

An AI Tool Says It Can Predict Students’ Grades on Assignments. Instructors Are Skeptical. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI-driven private schools are popping up around the U.S., from North Carolina to Florida – Axios  

How to Use AI in Online Courses and Teach Your Students to Use It Too – Faculty Focus

The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started – The Atlantic

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser - Elroy 

These College Professors Will Not Bow Down to A.I. – New York Times 

Faculty Latest Targets of Big Tech’s AI-ification of Higher Ed – Inside Higher Ed 

ChatGPT’s Study Mode Is Here. It Won’t Fix Education’s AI Problems – Wired

What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom - LitHub

I'm a college writing professor. How I think students should use AI this fall – Mashable  

ChatGPT’s new Study Mode is designed to help you learn, not just give answers – Arstechnica

The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor - Gizomodo

In California, Colleges Pay a Steep Price for Faulty AI Detectors – Undark

ChatGPT's new study mode won't give you the answers - Axios

What the panic about kids using AI to cheat gets wrong - Vox

AI Has Done Far More Harm Than Good in My Classroom - Education Week

How teachers say they're embracing AI in the classroom – ABC News

In training educators to use AI, we must not outsource the foundational work of teaching - Chalkbeat  

I got an AI to impersonate me and teach me my own course – here’s what I learned about the future of education - The Conversation

Handling offensive behavior

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Whenever possible, express your feelings about offensive behavior from a positive rather than a negative perspective. Negative expressions state your dislike, as in “I hate you when you do that,” “You make me angry,” “You make me feel insecure and unloved,” or “You’re insensitive and overbearing.” You can be more effective if you focus on the common goals and the shortcomings of the interaction, rather than your hatreds.

Goal oriented statements might be, “I think that your behavior and my reaction to it are preventing us from having a pleasant relationship.”

You might try new ways to express your feelings, using metaphors on describing the concrete aspects of your emotional reactions. Thus you might express embarrassment by the metaphor “I feel naked and exposed,” or express conflict by “I feel my head spinning in two directions at once.” Striking metaphors may produce a greater impact than the accustomed “emotional words” that have been worn out in your interchanges with others.

Sharon and Gordon Bower, Asserting Yourself

AI automation versus collaboration

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"Using AI well will require knowing when to automate versus when to collaborate. This is not necessarily a binary choice, and the boundaries between human expertise and AI’s capabilities for expert judgment will continually evolve as AI’s capabilities advance. Although collaboration is not intrinsically better than automation, premature or excess automation—that is, automation that takes on entire jobs when it’s ready for only a subset of job tasks—is generally worse than collaboration." -David Autor and James Manyika writing in The Atlantic 

24 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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Peer Review Paranoia The system is built on trust between scholars. AI is undermining that. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI Makes Research Easy. Maybe Too Easy. – Wall Street Journal

AI-generated scientific hypotheses lag human ones when put to the test – Science.org

JAMA Editors on Artificial Intelligence in Peer Review – JAMA  

AI tool labels more than 1000 journals for ‘questionable,’ possibly shady practices - Science.org

AI for Scientific Integrity: Detecting Ethical Breaches, Errors, and Misconduct in Manuscripts – Frontiers  

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks - Nature

Image fraud in nuclear medicine research – Springer

Does ChatGPT Ignore Article Retractions and Other Reliability Concerns? - Wiley

NIH to reject research applications written by AI – Beckers Hospital Review

AI-based fake papers are a new threat to academic publishing says journal editor – Times Higher Ed 

AI-Assisted Tools for Scientific Review Writing: Opportunities and Cautions. – ACS Publications 

Comparing AI-generated and human peer reviews: A study on 11 articles – Science Direct 

Evaluating the potential risks of employing large language models in peer review - Wiley

One-fifth of computer science papers may include AI content – Science.org

Artificial intelligence as author: Can scientific reviewers recognize GPT-4o-generated manuscripts? - Science Direct 

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds – New York Times 

AI can’t learn from what researchers don’t share – Research Professional News

AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back.” - Nature

AI can simplify the process enormously and help publishers get ahead of the industry’s upheavals,” says publisher’s head of marketing. – Research Information

 AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Make all research data available for AI learning, scientists urge – Research Professional News

Machine learning model flags almost 10 percent of cancer research literature as being paper mill papers – Biorxiv

AI-based research mentors: Plausible scenarios and ethical issues – Taylor & Francis Online  

The DuckDuckGo AI Option

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When you use ChatGPT, Claude or Llama technology within DuckDuckGo’s chatbot, the company acts as a middleman that limits what the AI companies know about you and what you’re chatting about. DuckDuckGo says that when you use its chatbot, your conversations aren’t used to train AI for DuckDuckGo or any of its partner AI companies. Your chats may be saved only anonymously for, at most, 30 days, with limited exceptions. And the AI companies don’t have access to personal information such as your device’s unique digital ID number, which could be used to assemble dossiers on your habits. -Washington Post

This is a Mistake

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A few years ago, I saw a cartoon of a man on his deathbed saying, “I wish I’d bought more crap.” It has always amazed me that many wealthy people keep working to increase their wealth, amassing far more money than they could possibly spend or even usefully bequeath. One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. Many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self-worth only in pecuniary terms, he explained, so they stay on the hamster wheel, year after year. They believe that at some point, they will finally accumulate enough to feel truly successful, happy, and therefore ready to die. This is a mistake, and not a benign one.  

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

A truth about today’s AI Tools

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"A truth about today’s AI tools: They’re not really information experts. They have challenges determining which source is the most authoritative and most recent. It’s fair to ask whether relying on any of these AI tools as your new Google is a good idea. In many ways, AI is best suited for complex questions that take some hunting. In the best cases, AI tools could find needles in a haystack — answers that weren’t obvious in a traditional Google search." - Washington Post

25 Professional Journalism Organizations

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CS Grads Can't Find Jobs

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A recent graduate triple-majored in computer science, math, and computational science and has completed the coursework for a computer-science Ph.D. He would prefer to work instead of finishing his degree, but he has found it almost impossible to secure a job. “We’re in an AI revolution, and I am a specialist in the kind of AI that we’re doing the revolution with, and I can’t find anything.” -The Atlantic

20 Recent Articles about the Impact of AI on Students

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What the panic about kids using AI to cheat gets wrong - Vox 

How AI Is Changing—Not ‘Killing’—College – Inside Higher Ed

AI Makes Research Easy. Maybe Too Easy. – Wall Street Journal 

The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting – The Atlantic

Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now – Chronicle of Higher Ed

These workers don’t fear artificial intelligence. They’re getting degrees in it. – Washington Post

Almost all the class of 2026 are using AI to do their work – The Atlantic

Duke Just Introduced An Essay Question About AI—Here’s How To Tackle It - Forbes

ChatGPT’s Study Mode Is Here. It Won’t Fix Education’s AI Problems – Wired  

AI is helping students be more independent, but the isolation could be career poison – The Markup

I'm a college writing professor. How I think students should use AI this fall - Mashable

ChatGPT's new study mode won't give you the answers - Axios

University students feel ‘anxious, confused and distrustful’ about AI in the classroom and among their peers – The Conversation

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students. – New  York Times

How Are Students Really Using AI? Here’s what the data tell us. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

So long, study guides? The AI industry is going after students – NPR

At one elite college, over 80% of students now use AI – but it’s not all about outsourcing their work - The Conversation

Students have been called to the office — and even arrested — for AI surveillance false alarms – Associated Press  

AI in education's potential privacy nightmare - Axios 

AI to the Rescue It’s an all-purpose study tool — it’s changing students’ relationships with professors & peers - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Selling Out

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We "sell out" whenever we fail to take ownership of who we are. It's much easier to default to the expectations of friends/work/society/church rather than taking responsibility for our thinking and actions. Turning control over of what we have been entrusted with to someone (or something) else is an attempt to take the responsibility off our shoulders, so there’s someone else to blame.