Learning but slowly

Apropos the use of AI in academia, a student asked me, “We want to work more quickly in the workplace, but do we really want to LEARN more quickly? Is that even possible?”

To the latter question, I would say yes, it’s possible. I know there are concepts that one can learn in a flash. Not all fields of learning are like this, though. Think of cooking, or learning how to play the saxophone; these activities exist within the flow of time, having their own pace that demands your accommodation. Real understanding here happens by accretion and duration; it doesn’t come to you in a flash (though some insights will).

I’ve quoted this story by Anne Lamott to Psychology students in my technical writing class struggling with literature reviews for their Honours projects:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

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Autofilling the Data Gaps

My macroeconomics professor at The University at Buffalo told our class, at semester’s end, that people in his profession “had a lot to be humble about.” I loved that line and have used it hundreds of times since, to describe his and other professions, too.

I thought of the professor today when reading this recent post in Retraction Watch: No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper.

Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place. 

The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.

“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student …

The student wrote the article’s coauthor asking for an explanation and found out from him that Excel’s autofill function had “mended the data.” The program “filled in the blanks. If the new numbers turned negative, [the coauthors] replaced them with the last positive value Excel had spit out.” 

Replacing missing observations with substitute values – an operation known in statistics as imputation – is a common but controversial technique in economics that allows certain types of analyses to be carried out on incomplete data. Researchers have established methods for the practice; each comes with its own drawbacks that affect how the results are interpreted. As far as the student knew, Excel’s autofill function was not among these methods, especially not when applied in a haphazard way without clear justification.

But it got worse. [In] several instances … there were no observations to use for the autofill operation. … [The authors] had filled in thousands of empty cells in the dataset – well over one in 10 – including missing values for the study’s outcome variables. 

Interpolating data this way tends to be bad practice, but economists still do it. It’s not “cheating,” though, as long as you explain to your readers that this is what you did. Had the authors done so, however, it would have been unlikely their paper would have been published in the first place.

I have been reading Retraction Watch for years, but literally every week it publishes something that stuns me. There’s a lot of mayhem in academic publishing.

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The work international students must do in B.C.

Several years ago my late Kwantlen colleague Arley McNeney organized a class project in which her students presented research on the challenges international students at our school face. I was embarrassed when I read their report; I had been so clueless, about so much, regarding the lives of my own students. I was particularly alarmed by the report’s findings illustrating how many international students faced continual food insecurity. There were additional widespread problems these students face, including precarious living situations (usually far away from a KPU campus) and abusive work environments.

This week The Tyee published what can be read as an update of the report prepared by Arley’s class: “Cash Cows and Cheap Labour: The Plight of International Students.” One disquieting theme: Students recruited internationally were shocked by how many hours they needed to work outside of school simply to survive in Canada. One study surveyed

1,300 international students at Langara and the College of New Caledonia in Prince George. They found the vast majority of students were working, and many were struggling. Only 28 per cent of surveyed Langara students said they had enough cash to meet their basic needs.

In theory, international students need to show they have the financial means to support themselves for one year in Canada. Since the early 2000s, that figure has been set at tuition, travel costs and $10,000 in cash. The federal government has recently announced that figure will double to $20,635.

But McCartney said the government likely knew for years that the $10,000 threshold was far too little to make ends meet, especially in cities like Vancouver, where the cost of a vacant rental unit stood at $2,373 a month as of last year.

The result was that students, either by plan or by necessity, found jobs. …

“At the end of the day, I think that we all believe students shouldn’t have to work 40 hours a week to pay for their rent, their groceries, their food. I wish that was the reality,” Chirino said. “But when you look at their fees and how much they have to pay, that simply isn’t feasible.”

At least 90% of my international students have jobs, very often more than one job. But it is not rare for me to hear growling stomachs in the classroom.

A couple of weeks ago, our university president, Alan Davis, wrote an open letter to the university community on this topic:

We have done significant work to improve the experience for international students in the past few years, but we also heard what you said [in a recent large survey] and there is more to do….

This won’t be an easy road. The federal and provincial governments are taking a close look at international education and some of the changes they are making or might propose could have a significant impact on KPU. While we’ve been gradually increasing the diversity of our international student population and we’ve seen a softening of international enrolment, the emerging external factors provide additional complexity in forecasting future trends.

Our annual student satisfaction survey repeatedly shows a higher proportion of our international students have more positive views of KPU than domestic students across several important metrics, including supporting student success and feeling part of the community. We have some strong foundations, but we will build on them in a careful and considerate way.

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Leaving Substack …

One of my favourite authors, Talia Lavin, has moved her blog, “The Sword and the Sandwich,” from Substack to the Buttondown platform.

That’s because [Substack] founders stated, in no uncertain terms, that they’re not just OK with, but in principle supportive of, having loads of out-and-out Nazis on their platform. …

I must admit that there’s a fair amount of anger and resentment that comes along with this decision—anger at feckless rich crypto-fascists like Hamish McKenzie of Substack, and his many Silicon Valley peers, who all seem to subscribe to the notion that race-based hatred is just a simple quirk of the marketplace of ideas. …

Being an out-and-out antifascist for a long time, I’ve given up a lot for that cause—my safety, and the safety of my family, and the ability to do things like sign up to vote without fear without worrying I’ll be doxxed, and not receiving ominous packages, and not having accrued half a decade’s worth of psychic damage about my Judaism, my body, my ability, my worth, the value of my life. Now I’ve had to give up a platform I worked for years to build, and dive into uncertain waters. …

But I am … excited about the possibility of navigating these new waters with you and feel a certain flush of pride in having made a difficult and frankly terrifying gamble with my primary source of income, with the idea that no marketplace I belong to ought to include Nazis in it.

Another favourite writer of mine, Lux Alptraum, wrote in a post today that she “is hoping to transition away from Substack.” I asked her why. Her reply:

This has always been a problematic platform for me — even before the Nazi stuff they platformed transphobes — but it was easy and I just told myself I would never charge for the newsletter anyway so it did not matter. But the Nazi stuff… makes me feel even worse and more than that I know a lot of readers don’t want to support the platform so yeah, just getting other options up and running.

[From Jan 3:]

I’m currently in the process of building up the whole archive on my own little website — remember personal websites? — but for now, if you feel icky about supporting Substack, all posts that appear here also appear on my Patreon. They are available for free, but I wouldn’t be mad if you gave me $1 (or more!) a month. When I have a critical mass of people on Patreon I will likely wind down operations here, FYI.

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An artist’s hand

I suppose we could file this post under “learning” and “technology” – themes from our website’s subtitle. In this case the technology (the “application of conceptual knowledge for achieving practical goals”) is a carefully placed and pressing hand. The learning is the struggle.

The story is in the New York Times, and it is about opera singer Anita Rachvelishvili, who lost her ability to sing most roles after pregnancy and giving birth. “Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet’s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production at the Met. Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year’s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.”

She has sung some roles, though, if with difficulty: “Early in fall 2022, she was able to creditably sing the generally low Dalila in Saint-Saëns’s ‘Samson et Dalila’ in Naples, though her high notes were still problematic.” Here’s how she made it through:

The tenor Brian Jagde, her co-star in that “Samson” and several other productions during this period, sometimes went so far as to anchor her during scenes with a hand at her waist, to lend the lower muscular support that she no longer felt internally.

This detail really moved me.

Here’s Rachvelishvili singing “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from “Carmen,” from 2014:

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Talia Lavin’s cri de coeur

I admire the writing of Talia Lavin. Her beautifully written Substack blog, “The Sword and the Sandwich,” always charms me. This week she published “Fuck You and Your Word-Stealing Machine: A Luddite stands against AI language models and their plunder.” Faith in technology – if not always technology itself – subverts care for humans.

I’ve begun to be skeptical of progress itself; the techno-utopianism of the ‘90s feels quaint and naive. Increasingly, the promises of the rich lords of technological advancement are looking more and more like Tesla’s bizarro Cybertruck: weird and unnecessary polyhedrons that you have to rent forever, created by people isolated from human need and also the desires of the ordinary person. The derisive naming of all techno-skeptics as “Luddites”—in addition to erasing the scarcity and pain that led to that uprising—is also an effective erasure of legitimate reasons for criticism, a brush to tar those who point out all the broken people left behind under the “move fast and break things” ethos that has led us to this precipice.

I mean, obviously I’m not neutral on this; I write words for a living, generally words that are excruciatingly earnest or at least interestingly florid, and I would like to be paid for them and not have them exploited as abstracted, minute pieces of a “corpus” used to feed a machine that will eventually make money for grotesquely rich people. Living as a writer is increasingly precarious—with staff jobs for an vanishingly privileged few, the rest of us clawing at the margins—and the idea that these mega-conglomerates are eager to wrench even the few bucks from our hot little hands disgusts me.

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Stanley Park path on a Sunday.

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Threads and news reporting

In part as a consequence of the Israel-Hamas war, more journalists are posting news and analysis on Meta’s Threads platform. From QZ’s Ananya Bhattacharya:

Since its inception, Threads has decided to steer clear of handling hard news—and the Israel-Hamas war hasn’t altered its stance. Yet the platform is quickly becoming a home for reporting on the conflict.

When Meta launched its Twitter-killer app in July, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said the Threads app is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news.” He clarified that the platform won’t “discourage or down-rank” such posts but that the company won’t “court” them either. …

In a blog post today (Oct. 13), Meta said it set up a “special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation in real time.”

In the three days following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Meta removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of regional-language content. On Instagram, a number of hashtags have been restricted, and the use of live-streaming is restricted for people who have previously violated certain policies. The company also is labeling messages forwarded by people who were not the original sender, so that recipients can tell the information came from a third party.

Given the density and frequency of Hamas-related content, Meta is currently taking down content “without strikes, meaning these content removals won’t cause accounts to be disabled.” It’s also sharing tools to let third-party fact checkers more easily find and flag content, and to let users filter out offensive messages and appeal erroneous content decisions.

The whole piece is very good.

I have replaced Twitter with Threads on my iPhone, though I have not started posting there in earnest yet. I will soon. It’s a better platform at this point in terms of tone, and there are far, far fewer trolls around.

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Vancouver – straight up. Near W. Georgia and Seymour streets.

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AI and the future of music copyright

Rick Beato’s recent interview with Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA focused as much on AI technology as on the creation of ABBA’s songs and records. The co-writer of “Waterloo,” “SOS,” and “Dancing Queen” was mostly sanguine – indeed, enthusiastic – about artificial intelligence’s likely effect on human creativity generally and on musical composition specifically. (Ulvaeus – who is president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers – has some intelligent prescriptions for handing copyright and royalty protections in this new era, too.) It’s an edifying interview.

from basil.CA

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