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Meet The Writers Using A.I. To Help Them Write Their Novels
The Verge
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7/20/22
“She’s a little embarrassed to say she’s become reliant on it. Not that she couldn’t write without it, but she thinks her writing wouldn’t be as rich, and she would certainly be more burnt out. “There’s something different about working with the AI and editing those words, and then coming up with my own and then editing it, that’s much easier. It’s less emotionally taxing. It’s less tiresome; it’s less fatiguing. I need to pay attention much less closely. I don’t get as deeply into the writing as I did before, and yet, I found a balance where I still feel very connected to the story, and I still feel it’s wholly mine.””
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“168 Writing Prompts To Spark Discussion And Reflection”
New York Times
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7/13/22
“Each day of the school year we publish a Student Opinion question: an invitation for students to share their own opinions and experiences in response to New York Times stories on the news of the day. Each of these prompts is introduced with an article, interactive feature or video produced by The Times… The prompts are organized into two sections: questions that lend themselves well to persuasive writing, and questions that encourage narrative writing. We have also published a short, visual post highlighting five of the most popular questions we asked this school year.”
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“How Does Science Really Work?”
New Yorker
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9/28/21
“Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?”
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“I Teach Math, And I Didn’t Give A Single Test Last Year. Here’s What I Learned.”
Blick Bytes
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8/6/21
“Keep scrolling for the long version, but here's the TL;DR: I’m not convinced that students’ recall of math facts or procedures was any better than they would have been with traditional tests; however, I found tremendous evidence indicating that most students understood the concepts and their connections because the assessments gave students agency while requiring them to justify their thinking in connected, authentic contexts. Furthermore, the vast majority of students improved their relationship with the subject because the assessments were more meaningful and less stressful than traditional tests.”
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Brilliant, Brutal Short Film About Algorithms, The Pandemic, And Humanity
YouTube / Financial Times
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5/21/21
“We know what you did during lockdown.”
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Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker
New York Times
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6/13/20
“Work began in January with the deciphering of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. The first vaccine safety trials in humans started in March, but the road ahead remains uncertain. Some trials will fail, and others may end without a clear result. But a few may succeed in stimulating the immune system to produce effective antibodies against the virus. Here is the status of all the vaccines that have reached trials in humans, along with a selection of promising vaccines still being tested in cells or animals.”
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Excellent And Increasingly Sophisticated Modeling Of COVID-19 Futures
Ncase
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5/1/20
“This guide is meant to give you hope and fear. To beat COVID-19 in a way that also protects our mental & financial health, we need optimism to create plans, and pessimism to create backup plans. As Gladys Bronwyn Stern once said, “The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.””
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Is The Scientific Community Placing Collaboration Above Darwin’s Natural Selection?
Slate
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1/23/20
“Put simply, life is beginning to look ever more complex and ever more collaborative. All this has fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin. In response to all these new insights, some biologists instinctively defend Darwin, an ingrained impulse from years of championing his work against creationists. Others, like Margulis herself, feel Darwin had something to offer, at least in understanding the animal world, but argue his theories were simplified and elevated to a doctrine in the generations after his passing.”
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Dan Meyer: How Tech Can Help Math Instruction
EdSurge
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12/23/19
“Computers are great at storing, delivering and rewinding explanations, but that isn’t what math education needs. Math education needs visualizations that provoke students wonder mathematically. It needs a creative palette that enables students to express their mathematical ideas more fully. It needs to connect ideas and people together so that students and teachers can learn from each other’s mathematical creativity. Here’s happy news for math edtech entrepreneurs in the next decade. Computers are great at the right tasks too: visualization, creation, and connection. Let’s put them to work.”
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High School Math Teacher Removes Homework, Sees Improvement
Channell 3000
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11/4/19
“We have been able to document the improvement of our student body moving roughly 30 percent not ready for college math to almost 100 percent are ready.”
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Is It Time For Math Curricula To Focus More On Data Literacy?
Freakonomics
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10/2/19
“Most high-school math classes are still preparing students for the Sputnik era. Steve Levitt wants to get rid of the “geometry sandwich” and instead have kids learn what they really need in the modern era: data fluency.”
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“Mathematics As A Cultural Force”
Longreads
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9/1/19
“In his new book, Proof!: How the World Became Geometrical, historian Amir Alexander advances an audacious claim: that Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced not just the history of mathematics, but also broader sociopolitical reality.”
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SF Delays Algebra Until HS. Numbers Of Advanced Math Classes Surge.
San Francisco Chronicle
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1/9/19
"While more students are taking precalculus now, the enrollment in Advanced Placement calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over the past two years. Enrollment in AP Statistics, which requires only Algebra II as a prerequisite, has surged nearly 50 percent.”
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An Excellent Support And PD Network Model For Math Teachers
KQED
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10/29/18
“Teachers in the BMTN [Better Math Teaching Network] choose to focus on deepening their students’ abilities in one of three areas: connect, justify and solve. They are grouped with other algebra teachers at schools across New England working on the same skill. They each test small changes in their classrooms, iterate on those changes, and bring their findings to monthly conference calls where they get ideas, feedback, coaching and encouragement.”
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Mathematics Is Overlooked In The History Of Ideas
Aeon
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10/11/18
"Taking mathematical ideas seriously might lead to discovering that technical ideas are as important as political or religious ones. Taking mathematics seriously might also, counter to stereotypes, lead thinking away from current preoccupations with culture and power, and back to questions of aesthetics and beauty. Aesthetics and beauty are ever-present concerns in art and in mathematics, though seemingly small matters to historians and humanists today, preoccupied as they are with power.”
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Brilliant Marble Tracks That Demonstrate Physics Principles [video]
YouTube
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10/29/17
“I built these pieces as a way of introducing or reinforcing students’ ideas on motion and acceleration, inertia and kinetic energy, so let’s take a look at some of them… This piece I refer to as a Galileo Track… This piece was important because it was actually a piece that Galileo designed to help explain the idea of inertia.”
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Is Numeracy Biological Or Cultural?
Aeon
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10/26/17
"What seems innate and shared between humans and other animals is not this sense that the differences between 2 and 3 and between 152 and 153 are equivalent (a notion central to the concept of number) but, rather, a distinction based on relative difference, which relates to the ratio of the two quantities. It seems we never lose that instinctive basis of comparison.”
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“Next Generation Science Standards” - A 3-Part Curriculum
Hechinger Report
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10/11/17
"This type of project reflects the best intentions of the Next Generation Science Standards, which encourage teachers to enable students to learn science by doing… Each lesson should combine “practices,” or the behaviors of real scientists and engineers; “cross-cutting concepts,” which clarify connections across science disciplines and help students create a coherent view of the world based on science, and “disciplinary core ideas,” or the fundamental ideas students must know to understand a given science discipline.”
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Towards Interdisciplinarity: Mathematician Addresses World Problem
Politico
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9/13/17
"Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math.”
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Trace The Path Of The Eclipse With This Interactive Graphic
Washington Post
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7/28/17
"Follow the shadow of the moon as it completely blocks out the sun on Aug. 21, moving along a 3,000-mile path from Oregon’s Pacific coast to the eastern shore of South Carolina.”
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Really Extraordinary: A Game Theory Simulation Of Trust
Nicky Case
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7/26/17
“It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left their trenches, crossed No Man's Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games. Meanwhile: it's 2017, the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at trust... Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies? And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?"
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12 Lessons From The Life Of Claude Shannon
Medium
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7/20/17
“We just published the biography of Dr. Claude Shannon… We’ve distilled what we’ve learned from him over these last few years into this piece. It isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but it does begin, we hope, to reveal what this unknown genius can teach the rest of us about thinking — and living.”
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Use Lego Kits To Create Research Lab Equipment
Stanford
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3/21/17
"Stanford bioengineers have shown how an off-the shelf kit can be modified to create robotic systems capable of transferring precise amounts of fluids between flasks, test tubes and experimental dishes. By combining the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit with a cheap and easy-to-find plastic syringe, the researchers created a set of liquid-handling robots that approach the performance of the far more costly automation systems found at universities and biotech labs.”
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"The Martian” - Andy Weir Releases School Version With No Swears
New York Times
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2/24/17
"Apart from the four-letter words, “The Martian” is a science teacher’s dream text. It’s a gripping survival story that hinges on the hero’s ability to solve a series of complex problems, using his knowledge of physics, chemistry, astronomy and math, in order to stay alive on a hostile planet. (The Washington Post called the novel “an advertisement for the importance of STEM education.”)”
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The Fall Of Statistics, Rise Of Data Analytics, And Relevant Implications
Guardian
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1/19/17
"In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation… In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century.”
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The History Of Math Is The Soul Of Math
Hackernoon
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1/8/17
"Historical context gives mathematics (and mathematicians, dare I say) a rich personality that is all too often lost in formal study. It reveals the human side of mathematics; the pain and ecstasy of pursuing new mathematical frontiers. It normalises struggle and perseverance as traits of the common mathematician. It snips away the binary view that many students take towards maths and replaces it with a world replete with discovery and surprise.”
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Starting To Realize The Promise of Automated, Personalized (Math) Tutoring
Jo Boaler
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11/29/16
"Importantly, they are designing a digital environment that mimics something a teacher can do in a classroom yet many tech products fail to do – provide personalized coaching. For students who seem to display low confidence, they encourage them by showing them their past successes. For students who seem to have low self-regulation (e.g. they jumped around and gave up often), they encourage them to reflect and reconsider before they quit a level… For students who seem to display low effort, they appeal to altruistic motivation by changing language from “show what you can do; try your best” to “help us improve our software by trying your best.”
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Atul Gawande: Science, The Individual Mindset, The Collective Gain
Farnam Street
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6/23/16
"It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, ‘The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.’”
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Scientists Secretly Discuss Synthesizing The Human Genome
New York Times
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5/13/16
"Organizers said the project could have a big scientific payoff and would be a follow-up to the original Human Genome Project, which was aimed at reading the sequence of the three billion chemical letters in the DNA blueprint of human life. The new project, by contrast, would involve not reading, but rather writing the human genome — synthesizing all three billion units from chemicals. But such an attempt would raise numerous ethical issues. Could scientists create humans with certain kinds of traits, perhaps people born and bred to be soldiers? Or might it be possible to make copies of specific people?”
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New To Minecraft? This Is Your In Depth Introduction
New York Times
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4/14/16
"Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind.”
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On The Explosive Growth Of Extra-Curricular (And Joyous) Math
Atlantic
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3/1/16
"Many of these programs—especially the camps, competitions, and math circles—create a unique culture and a strong sense of belonging for students who have a zest for the subject but all the awkwardness and uneven development of the typical adolescent.”
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A History Of The Purported Decline Of The Humanities
Aeon
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12/17/15
"By the early 1970s, the significance of these non-economic returns to higher education was recognised across the OECD, highlighting the futility of ‘manpower planning’. As the OECD put it, students had their own ideas of what to study. This student demand was a natural expression of contemporary ideas of democratisation, widening participation, and the emerging value structure of the new student generation, comprising goals such as ‘self-fulfillment’, ‘quality of life’ and ‘individual development’.”
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Who Will Save Math? Dan Meyer, Not Sal Khan.
New Republic
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12/1/15
"Meyer thinks technology can change the math classroom’s reputation as a dull, mystifying, and even traumatizing place. But he doesn’t think tech can fix everything. ‘There’s limitations on what kinds of work can be done on a computer without a teacher… You’ll never see a free-form argument of the sort that students do in our best live classrooms—and those are the sorts of skills that we cherish and reward in modern working life.”
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On The Ascent Of The Data Scientist, Descent Of The Statistician
Priceonomics
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10/13/15
"Statistics was primarily developed to help people deal with pre-computer data problems like testing the impact of fertilizer in agriculture, or figuring out the accuracy of an estimate from a small sample. Data science emphasizes the data problems of the 21st Century, like accessing information from large databases, writing code to manipulate data, and visualizing data.”
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Checking In On The State Of The Maker Movement
Bright
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10/12/15
"Many educators who work in this field seem to understand at a visceral level that students are constructing meaningful and long-term knowledge with their tinkering. But the formal proof to back this theory is still being mined. The National Science Foundation is currently researching an evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning opportunities.”
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Code Schools Continue To Explode—And Place Graduates
New York Times
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7/28/15
"The graduating classes of these coding schools support the trend. They will graduate about 16,000 students this year, more than double the 6,740 graduates last year, according to a survey published by Course Report in June. The 2015 total would be about one-third of the estimated number of computer science graduates from American universities.”
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The New York Times Uses Great Math Pedagogy
Dy/dan
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6/1/15
“The Times webpage can progressively disclose the answer graph, putting up a wall until you commit to a sketch… This isn’t just great digital pedagogy, it’s great pedagogy.”
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We Don’t Need More STEM. We Need More STEM + Liberal Arts.
Washington Post
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2/18/15
"Many in government and business publicly question the value of [a liberal arts] education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment.“
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Engineering Teacher Offers Critique Of Maker Culture
Atlantic
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1/23/15
“I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.”
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Word Problems: Teach Them First. They Aid Understanding.
EdWeek
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11/19/14
“Students were more likely to even try to answer a word problem than an equation. Working through narrative problems also made students feel more empowered to explore different methods of solving a problem, rather than following a single sample process.”
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How Science Is Made: Curiosity, Wonder, Ignorance, and Serendipity
New York Review of Books
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10/23/14
“How could the public be better educated about the nature of scientific inquiry? Three recent books... lay bare the provisionality of science and may, paradoxically, actually help us find a way to address rampant denialism. Rather than focus single-mindedly on the technical aspects of science or the need to improve basic skills, they focus our attention on the psychology of science—the drives that inspire us to inquire into nature, and the limits that our minds necessarily impose on our knowledge.”
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Do We Need to Teach Algebra?
NPR
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10/9/14
“The material covered in the courses, which do include some algebraic topics, was vetted independently by the Mathematical Association of America, the American Statistical Association and other groups… [and] a report released in July showed that Pathways students, when given the same final exam as other college-level math and statistics students, scored as well or better.”
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For More Girls in STEM: Change the Feel of STEM Classrooms
Brilliant Blog
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9/10/14
“Preliminary results suggest that female students learn better when they are surrounded by female classmates—even virtual ones—and the more women in the room, the better. Perone’s and Friend’s findings suggest that the reason behind the success of the Online School for Girls may not be its stated emphasis on teaching girls differently, but simply the fact that its students know that their classmates are girls like them.”
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On Teaching Math in the US (and How Teachers Get Better)
New York Times
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7/23/14
“After a geometry lesson, someone might note the inherent challenge for children in seeing angles as not just corners of a triangle but as quantities — a more difficult stretch than making the same mental step for area. By the end, the teachers had learned not just how to teach the material from that day but also about math and the shape of students’ thoughts and how to mold them.”
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Scientists Discover Bacteria That Feeds on Pure Electrons
New Scientist
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7/16/14
“Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.”
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Coding: The Best Article Yet on Computational Thinking in Schools
Mother Jones
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6/1/14
"It was little more than a century ago that literacy became universal in Western Europe and the United States. If computational skills are on the same trajectory, how much are we hurting our economy—and our democracy—by not moving faster to make them universal?”
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Let’s Teach Calculus In Kindergarten
Atlantic
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3/3/14
“The current sequence [of math] is merely an entrenched historical accident that strips much of the fun out of what she describes as the ‘playful universe’ of mathematics... Mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and structures, rather than ‘little manipulations of numbers.’”
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Smart (and Dumb) Tech: Calculators That Makes You Guess, et al.
Brilliant Blog
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1/27/14
“You use [the QAMA calculator] just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve - but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be.”
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Explaining Art With Science Butchers Both.
New Republic
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1/18/14
“Physics can explain chemistry, which can explain biology, which can explain psychology, and psychology might someday tell us, at least in the most general terms, how we create art and why we respond to it. But it will never account for the texture, the particularities, of individual works, or tell us what they mean. Art is experiential. It doesn’t just speak of experience; it needs to be experienced itself.
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Love and Math: Reinventing a Discipline
New York Review of Books
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12/5/13
“Mathematical proofs, for all their rigorous logic, came to look more like narratives...”