Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
A New Headache for Honest Students: Proving They Didn’t Use A.I.
Students are resorting to extreme measures to fend off accusations of cheating, including hourslong screen recordings of their homework sessions.
A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.
She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15 percent of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper — a mock cover letter — to an A.I. chatbot.
“My heart just freaking stops,” said Ms. Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.
But Ms. Burrell’s submission was not, in fact, the instantaneous output of a chatbot. According to Google Docs editing history that was reviewed by The New York Times, she had drafted and revised the assignment over the course of two days. It was flagged anyway by a service offered by the plagiarism-detection company Turnitin that aims to identify text generated by artificial intelligence.
Generative A.I. tools including ChatGPT are reshaping education for the students who use them to cut corners. But the specter of A.I. misuse, and the imperfect systems used to root it out, may also be affecting students who are following the rules -- with potentially devastating academic consequences.
Americans in Race for European Residency See Doors Slamming Shut
A rising number of Americans are exploring a move overseas to escape the tumult of Donald Trump’s administration. But those looking to Europe are seeing their options narrow by the day.
Restrictions on skilled worker visas, tougher rules on citizenship-by-ancestry programs and pressure on the once widespread golden visa programs are all eroding the legal avenues Americans — and other migrants — can take to live in Europe. Popular nations such as Italy, which once offered flexible rights to those who could show ties to the country, are making the move more difficult.
The changes are fueling a race among those Americans with a clear shot at residency on the continent, such as through direct family, to secure visas and passports while they still can. Others are exploring creative strategies ranging from nomad visas to permits intended for retirees. And for some specialists, universities and research institutes across Europe are looking to attract scientists who've lost their jobs in the US, or are worried about further cuts to federal funds.
Where Does Your Weather Forecast Come From?
You're about to walk your dog, but the sky looks ominous ...
Maybe you planned a summer vacation at the beach. A week before you're supposed to leave, you hear a weather alert on the radio in your car. There's a hurricane headed toward the coast. You have plenty of time to make new plans — and spend your vacation out of harm's way.
Millions of Americans rely on weather forecasts every day. And accurate weather forecasts have never been easier to access. Hourly outlooks and severe weather warnings are available on smartphone apps and weather websites, TV and radio broadcasts and in newspapers.
But how are these forecasts made? Where does the underlying information come from?
We break it down, and explain how some of that weather information might be interrupted this year.
What El Salvador's Bukele, a Hero for the American Right, Isn't Showing the World
Victor Barahona was grateful when soldiers started rounding up gang members who had long terrorized this working-class city. No longer would his grandchildren pass drug deals or be startled from sleep by the crack of gunfire.
But when El Salvador's military started hauling away neighbors Barahona knew had no connection to the gangs, he spoke out, criticizing the arrests on his community radio program.
Soon after, police rapped on his door. Barahona said he was handcuffed and sent to prison, with no access to lawyers, no contact with family and no clear sense of the charges against him.
When he was released almost a year later — 70 pounds lighter, and with no explanation — Barahona was alarmed to see that President Nayib Bukele was winning global praise for bringing peace and prosperity to El Salvador.
A 43-year-old former adman first elected in a landslide in 2019, Bukele has been largely successful in rebranding El Salvador from a poor backwater plagued by murderous gangs into an innovative and safe nation that he compares to Singapore. In prolific social media posts, he presents himself like a tech CEO: a disrupter-in-chief willing to break norms and create what he terms a "new history."
But for all his modern trappings — his embrace of Bitcoin, TikTok and slick promotional videos — Bukele's critics say he's just following the playbook of previous Latin American strongmen, including the military leaders who ruled El Salvador as a dictatorship from 1931 until the early 1980s.
Williams Syndrome: The People Who Are Too Friendly
People with Williams Syndrome treat strangers as their new best friends. Now the condition is giving clues to our evolutionary past – and what makes us human.
Imagine walking down the street and feeling an overwhelming love and warmth for every single person that you met. That is a familiar experience for people with Williams Syndrome (WS), a rare genetic condition that affects approximately 1 in 7,500 individuals.
People with WS, often dubbed the 'opposite of autism', have an innate desire to hug and befriend total strangers. They are extremely affectionate, empathetic, talkative and gregarious. They treat everyone they meet as their new best friend, yet there is a downside to being so friendly. Individuals often struggle to retain close friendships and are prone to isolation and loneliness.
People with WS are also sometimes too open and trusting towards strangers, not realising when they are in danger, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and bullying.
A Copper Treasure Lies Hidden Beneath the Andes. But Is Getting It Worth the Danger?
The Filo del Sol deposit high in the Argentine Andes likely contains five times more metal than previously believed, but many environmental concerns remain.
An initial mineral resource estimate, exploring deeper mineralization of the Filo del Sol copper deposit in northwest Argentina, found that the area likely contained five times more metals than previously believed, making it one of the largest deposits in the world.
Although a boon for many industries in need of copper, gold, and silver, mining in the high Andes is far from easy due to high altitudes, harsh climates, and environmental concerns.
Environmentalists worry that some mines in the region may violate the country’s Glacier Law—designed to protect Argentina’s largest source of a freshwater—and use a lot of groundwater during the mining process.
She Wrote About ‘The 36 Questions That Lead to Love’— And Now, She’s Married.
Mandy Catron’s essay about her unconventional first date with Mark Bondyra went viral. Ten years later, they are rewriting the script on marriage, too.
If you have heard of “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love,” you may already know the story of Mandy Len Catron and Mark Janusz Bondyra’s first date.
Ms. Catron wrote about it in an essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” in 2015. In the piece, she described how she and Mr. Bondyra, an acquaintance at the time, had replicated a scientific experiment “designed to create romantic love.” They asked each other 36 increasingly personal questions, and then stared into each other’s eyes for four minutes.
When Mr. Bondyra offered to go to an art exhibit with Ms. Catron in July 2014, she thought they were going as friends. Unbeknown to her, he had recently become single and embarked on his “summer of irresponsibility,” as he called it. One of his goals was to go on a date with her.
That’s how they ended up spending hours together, first at a Douglas Coupland exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and then at the Morrissey, a bar in downtown Vancouver, where they did the 36 questions. She had wanted to try the questions for a long time, but was waiting for the right person.
Bonus Original Article: To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
before my husband & I married we went thru hundreds of questions together, some silly, some somwhat serious, some very serious, some about our backgrounds, some about religious beliefs... we learned a lot about each other. For Christmas this past yr, he bought me another question book
‘The Book of Questions’ by Gregory Stock, Ph.D.
Many, in our opinion, are geared for younger people (we're both 74), deal w/ questions about death (ie: would you do ... in order to extend your lifetime ... years) but are interesting none-the-less...
ETA: we answer a question from the book each afternoon before we start playing a game of pool
Here is a political one:
A movement to reduce political corruption maintains that the only way to keep politicians even close to honest is to require them to always wear tiny video bugs that record their every interaction & post them online. Would you support such monitoring of key elected officials?
What kind of people would be attracted to politics given such a loss of privacy?
How do you think such openness would affect lobbying?
What would be your biggest concern about such transparency?
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going thru this book, we're finding we agree on a lot...
perhaps related to questions:
a few words of wisdom
(1) Speak less and listen more.
(2) Never argue with fools, especially on subjects like religion, politics, and on controversies. Just agree with them and go away
(3) Be humble and polite to others. No matter how they treat you. In the future, some will regret it.
(4) Never spread secrets.
(5) Don't speak about yourself.
(6) Always make eye contact and be confident while talking to others.
(7) Don't ever try to copy someone. Be unique.
(8) Do everything with full dedication.
(9) Silence is the best answer to haters.
(10) Don't follow the mob blindly. Always make decisions on behalf of facts and logic.
(11) Don't hesitate to ask questions. It shows that you are paying attention as well as being interested in the conversation.
(13) Keep yourself engaged in something. Hobbies, social activities.
(14) Read.
Love is over rated, there is a lot more to compatibility than being in love. I met my hubby when we were in grade 9 and part of a high school band exchange. I found out a couple of decades later that the band director had a terrible time getting him on the bus to go home, and when he got home, he told his mom that he met his future wife. It took me those decades and a couple of disastrous love affairs to come to the same conclusion. Sometimes you just know, no questions needed.
I have been fortunate to have two soul mates in my life, one I married and one that used to help me strange out people in high school. I don’t know if a marriage with the high school one would have been successful, but we sure had fun before he went off to university in a school across the country. Six years later, my parents moved to an acreage that was three acreages down from his parents, so it could have worked quite well, but we will never know as we are both happily married to other people. But 45 years later, that connection is still there.
And I “know” a person with WS, I see him in the grocery store every couple of weeks. No idea who he is, but he always stops and says hi and tells me some of his life story. I see a lot of people just ignore him when he says hi, and it makes me sad. A minute of their time would make a difference in his day.