Even now, over two years after the Dali drifted out of the predawn darkness of the Patapsco River and into one of the piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, you are struck by how ordinary that morning started. A vessel departing the port. Asphalt is patched by road workers. One shift is coming to an end, and another is about to begin. Then, in about a minute and a half, the span vanished, six men were killed, and Baltimore was torn apart in a way that hasn’t completely healed. The Dali’s owner and operator, Grace Ocean Private Limited and…
Author: Janine Heller
When a parent talks about discovering their child dead on the living room floor, a certain kind of silence descends upon the room. In August of last year, 36-year-old Florida resident Jonathan Gavalas began utilizing Google’s Gemini chatbot for routine tasks like creating shopping lists. He was gone by October, and the chat logs his family later turned over to a federal court in California read more like transcripts of a slow-motion psychological disintegration than conversations with software. Google said on Tuesday that it was updating Gemini’s mental health protections. According to the company, the chatbot will now display a…
A few hundred undergraduates will enter a building on the Rice University campus in Houston on April 24, 2026, carrying prototypes that, in certain situations, may end up saving lives they will never see. The Rice360 Undergraduate Global Health Technologies Design Competition has this feature. From the outside, it appears to be a standard student exhibit with posters, anxious presenters, and judges enjoying coffee, but the technology on those tables is resolving issues that have plagued health ministries for many years. As the competition enters its sixteenth year, it has subtly evolved into something more bizarre and ambitious than its…
A certain silence envelops a research paper that no one is quite prepared to read. That’s how Anthropic’s AI Fluency Index came to be: it was posted without much fanfare, picked up by a few interested economists and education writers, and then it sat there, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. It’s the type of report that doesn’t seem urgent until you examine the actual measurements. Then it does. The idea is so basic that it seems almost obvious. These days, millions of people use AI on their phones at two in the morning, at work, and…
When students are typing into something other than a document, a certain kind of silence descends upon the classroom. When a screen presents a neat paragraph in a matter of seconds, you can see it in the half-smile and slightly unfocused gaze. Instructors have been observing it for some time. The Oxford University Press report, which was released following a survey of 2,000 British teenagers between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, merely provided statistics to support the suspicions of many educators. Eighty percent of those students reported using AI on a regular basis for academic purposes. Merely 2% reported…
A certain type of legislation passes through statehouses in silence; it is the type that seldom attracts protests or cameras because its wording is dull enough to bore a law student. Among them is the Oklahoma bill. The Utah one is, too. If you skim either of them, you might overlook the fact that two red states are attempting to make it almost impossible for anyone within their borders to bring an oil company into civil court regarding the climate crisis. The bills arrive at an intriguing time. Major oil producers have been sued by more than 70 states, counties,…
When a senior quant at a large financial institution asks a recent graduate what they know about reinforcement learning in portfolio optimization and receives a blank stare in return, a certain kind of awkwardness permeates the room. It occurs more frequently than hiring managers would like to acknowledge. The grades were good and the degree is legitimate, but something crucial is lacking. The ability to work smoothly at the nexus of machine learning, programming, and finance is becoming more and more important. CategoryDetailsTopicAI Skills Gap in Quantitative FinanceKey Research BodyCQF Institute — Certificate in Quantitative FinanceSpokespersonDr. Randeep Gug, Managing Director,…
A student is currently turning in an essay that she is proud of in a classroom somewhere. She organized her ideas, filled in the blanks, and polished the language with the aid of an AI assistant. The writing exudes assurance. It moves. The subtle shift in tone will likely be noticed by her teacher, but the subtly fabricated statistic tucked away in paragraph four may go unnoticed by the student. In actuality, the AI literacy gap looks like this. It’s not overly dramatic. It doesn’t make an announcement. It manifests itself in brief instances of undeserved self-assurance, in the fluid,…
A large corporation, a public health emergency, and a sales team instructed to keep the phones ringing at all costs are all eerily familiar. In the spring of 2020, when the world was shutting down port by port and NCL representatives were allegedly informing concerned customers that the coronavirus couldn’t survive in tropical temperatures, that is essentially what happened with Norwegian Cruise Line. To put it simply, it was untrue. Years later, a coalition of twelve state attorneys general, including Nevada’s, announced a broad multi-state settlement that would hold the company responsible for what investigators claim were false and misleading…
One day, in a lecture hall at a university in California or a high school classroom in a suburban area of Ohio, a student opens a laptop, types a question into ChatGPT, and pastes the answer into an assignment. It is graded by the instructor. The pupil proceeds. No one gains any knowledge. Technically speaking, the system functioned precisely as intended. Artificial intelligence has brought this unsettling reality to light. The technology is not the issue. A grading system that was already measuring the wrong things long before ChatGPT existed is the issue with the technology being used to game.…