I was out at a tech meetup last week when I mentioned I was going to a conference on stats education this week. “Sounds riveting” said someone, with the deepest sarcasm. The thing is, stats are riveting. Stats are powerful. If we’re not showing kids the magic of it all, how can we expect them to love it like we do?
Tag: education
Questioning the Answers: The Role of Scepticism in Data Science (and Education!)
What is education for, how do we measure it, how SHOULD we measure it, and how can we fix it? At the moment we're mostly measuring atar and student retention as the most important outcomes of the system. How many kids make it to year 12 and what do they score? We should be measuring: covid deniers, flat earthers, anti vaxxers, sovereign citizens, people with blind faith in technology.
Mark Stickells on AI & the role of Humanities in STEM
Taking a different tack with this episode, a wonderful chat with the remarkable Mark Stickells, AM, CEO of Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, on AI and the role of Humanities in STEM. "I fundamentally believe knowledge is a human insight. And we work with these tools that are incredibly powerful, but can be incredibly stupid." "We… Continue reading Mark Stickells on AI & the role of Humanities in STEM
Set an AI to Catch an AI
we can't detect AI enabled writing with any reasonable degree of confidence. And no, we can't mark student work with LLMs, or solve real world problems with LLMs, or replace the people doing jobs requiring judgement, compassion, or rationality with LLMs. Not without suffering painful regrets when it comes time to deal with the consequences!
Making Sense of AI
So you haven’t got time to read through hefty books about the AI industry. You’ve had fun with image generators, and you find chatbots useful although occasionally alarming. But there’s information firing at you from all directions, and it’s wildly contradictory, alarming, exciting, and horrifying, all at the same time. What the heck are you supposed to do?