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There's a good podcast called "Remembering Yugoslavia."

https://rememberingyugoslavia.com/


The bill to watch on age verification is S-209 (the "S" because it originates in the Senate). Section 12(2) includes the requirements for potential verification methods. https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/S-209/first-...

Keep an eye on michaelgeist.ca. If there are petitions to sign to oppose it, you'll probably find out there.


Carney also recently signaled that he was open to a "debate" on a child social media ban. Such a ban would likely be enforced by age verification.

You should preemptively be messaging the Liberal cabinet ministers. And make sure to explicitly demand that anything that could force age verification or age assurance on Canadians is rejected:

> Marc Miller (Heritage Minister, the minister responsible for the upcoming online harms legislation that might implement such a ban): Marc.Miller@parl.gc.ca

> Sean Fraser (Justice Minister): sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca

> Mark Carney (Prime Minister): mark.carney@parl.gc.ca

> Mélanie Joly (Minister of Industry): melanie.joly@parl.gc.ca

It may also be worth messaging:

> Gary Anandasangaree (Minister of Public Safety): gary.anand@parl.gc.ca

> Rechie Valdez (Minister of Women and Gender Equality): rechie.valdez@parl.gc.ca


This -- and you might just learn how to conduct some research along the way.


Avoid the theory-heavy disciplines. You won't be told what to think (as often) if you take History and Geography rather than Sociology and Gender Studies.


Interesting. I'll have to keep an eye out for this!


Do you have any evidence to back this up or is it speculative?

My institution subscribes to TurnItIn's AI detector. The documentation is quite clear that the system is tuned in a manner that produces a significant number of false negatives and minimizes false positives. They also state that they don't report anything under "20% AI-generated" content.

So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish administrators that the software is not going to generate false accusations.

That being said, I have no idea whether the marketing claims are true. The software is a black box.


Fair point, the "tuned to flag aggressively" claim was speculative on my part. Turnitin's own documentation says they favor false negatives over false positives.

That said, their accuracy claims have been disputed before. Inside Higher Ed [1] reported that Turnitin's real-world false positive rate was higher than originally asserted, and the company declined to disclose the updated number. And, USD also noted that while Turnitin claimed <1% false positives, a Washington Post investigation found a 50% rate on a smaller sample, and that non-native English speakers / neurodivergent students get flagged at higher rates [2].

Now, those are from 2023 and the product (and AI in general) has been updated drastically since. But the broader incentive problem holds even if the detector itself is conservatively tuned. The product is a black box. And the downstream cost of errors falls entirely on students, not on Turnitin's renewal rate. You don't need aggressive tuning for the incentive structure to be broken.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/01/t...

[2] https://lawlibguides.sandiego.edu/c.php?g=1443311&p=10721367


>So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish administrators that the software is not going to generate false accusations.

This is it, right here. All policy I've seen lately has been geared towards students having expanded "due process" rights.


This assumes that the assignments and the exam cover the same material. That's not always the case.


That would be really poor course design :-)


There are many disciplines in which students work on effectively distinct projects.

For example, the life-changingly-well-designed newswriting course I took in college assigned every single student a different story to spend several weeks reporting out so that we wouldn't all be out harassing the same poor people for interviews.


Genuinely interested. What was the final like? This seems more in the experimental science (ok, journalism) category. I may have to adjust my thinking to be more expansive and also include things like "vocational".


Grammar and AP style rules, iirc. (I may not. It's been enough years now. I did try and fail to find the syllabus in my box of five-star notebooks. We mostly used reporters notebooks for this class, and I took it over the summer. The materials are probably in a plastic bag somewhere...)


So I'm guessing that this is what those stylish wood grain Weatheradio cubes in the Radio Shack catalog were for?


It's missing one:

gopher://hngopher.com/1


You might be better off with duckduckstart.com instead. It's the best of both worlds: you get Google results via startpage by default and can use duckduckgo !bangs when necessary.


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