This is a call for measuring teaching effectiveness that ignores the most meaningful criteria we could use: What percentage of your faculty makes a professional wage and has a teaching load consistent with disciplinary norms? I taught college for 20 years and never achieved either.

The ‘public trust crisis’ in science largely comes down to ‘scientists tell people things they don’t want to hear’. Applies equally to climate science

SEN BERNIE SANDERS: Artificial intelligence is coming for the working class. We must fight back Legislation sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders calls for a federal moratorium on new AI data centers until safeguards protect workers from mass job losses driven by Big Tech oligarchs.

Read my new Fox News op-ed: www.foxnews.com/opinion/sen-...

Failed Companies Are Selling Old Slack Chats and Email Archives to Train AI Defunct startups are pawning off their former employees conversations for up to $100,000, according to a new report.

Failed Companies Are Selling Old Slack Chats and Email Archives to Train AI
Defunct startups are pawning off their former employees conversations for up to $100,000, according to a new report.
gizmodo.com/failed-compa... Nothing online is sacred. Everything's for sale.

The USDA’s gardening zones shifted. This map shows you what’s changed in vivid detail There's a good chance your zone shifted when the USDA updated its plant hardiness map in 2023. Zoom in on what that means for your garden.

There's a good chance your zone shifted when the USDA updated its plant hardiness map in 2023. Zoom in on what that means for your garden. From the NPR archives.

New article in Discourse journal (by Marita Ljungqvist, Anders Sonesson and Neil Selwyn) Article title: Fixing teachers’ problems? exploring teachers’ repair and maintenance work around generative AI technologies Abstract: The promise that AI tools will relieve teachers of tedious tasks and liberate time for more ‘valuable’ work with students has become a dominant narrative. However, the implementation of automated technologies raises questions around how human labour is implicated and situated in these processes. From the perspective of maintenance and repair studies we approach the often-hidden labour that teachers undertake when engaging with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies. Drawing on interviews with Swedish teachers we expose the tools’ inherent limitations in teaching contexts, and highlight the pedagogical, social, and moral dimensions of educational practice. We argue that these essentially inexplicable and ungeneralizable aspects of teaching – grounded in teachers’ situated awareness, professional experience, and tacit knowledge – cannot be codified or reduced to training data. Our results demonstrate the need for a radical rethinking of the forms of AI that education could benefit from – and those it should resist

"Exploring Teachers’ Repair & Maintenance Work Around GenAI Technologies" ... new open access article from our Swedish research on the considerable behind-the-scenes repair work that teachers end up having to do when using GenAI tools to 'assist' them!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas

The collapse of the gulf stream will be catastrophic for the entire planet. The crisis in the earth's circulation system continues to be ignored while politicians promote massive oil/gas expansion.
We are killing our children's future.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Chinook salmon found naturally hatching in Upper Klamath River for first time in a century The Klamath Tribes are celebrating evidence of Chinook salmon spawning in Klamath River tributary.

After big dams on the upper Klamath River in far northern CA were removed in 2024, Chinook (king) salmon migrated upstream for the first time in 100+ years--and now they have hatched.

How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian The verification tricks that would make fact-checkers weep with joy.

open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...

Klein: I agree that it is a revolutionary technology, that it is going to transform our economy on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.

But unlike the Industrial Revolution, which created huge numbers of jobs, the goal of this revolution is to eliminate jobs.

Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal Residents of a St. Louis suburb turned out in droves to unseat four incumbents just days after the council approved a development agreement for a $6 billion data center.

The idea that data centers are now politically toxic is so wild to me.

The Grand Canyon Just Won a Massive Legal Victory Against Uranium Mining The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the designation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, protecting nearly one million acres of sacred Indigenous land and critical wildlife habitat from extractive ind...

bit.ly/4ctL3lg?fbcl...

These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help Higher education is especially reliant on computers and phones, but accessibility for people with disabilities has often been forgotten. A new federal rule could change that.

Faculty need to take ownership ... "But they have no budget, no people, and no authority."
www.npr.org/2026/04/06/n...

More Oregon water for Google’s data centers, more concern over secrecy Conservationists and The Dalles disagree about the implications of Google's thirst, but they agree the company's secrecy is sowing distrust.

"Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water in The Dalles in 2025. That’s nearly 40% of all the water consumed in the entire city and a huge jump from the year before."

www.oregonlive.com/silicon-fore...

"20 yrs ago the world took a year to add 1 gigawatt of solar.
Now it takes just half a day.

Solar costs have fallen by around 90% over past decade, & as costs fall, installations accelerate.

Nowhere is this clearer than in China 🇨🇳. It now accounts for well over half of global solar installations"

Breaking: Amazon to Pay $20.5 Million to Settle Suit Over Pollution in Oregon | Food and Environment Reporting Network A landmark class action settlement agreement between Amazon and a group of residents in Eastern Oregon today marks the first time a Big Tech company has committed to paying damages related to public…

Pretty groundbreaking class action re:data center pollution in Oregon, even if Amazon is denying the allegations and saying it's settling to "avoid the burdens and expenses of litigation" (presumably also avoiding unflattering discovery).

The next tipping point in the energy transition is approaching.

Overall, solar has already been cheaper than fossil power for a while, but upfront costs used to be higher.

That's no longer the case. Solar is now competitive upfront AND has vastly lower operating costs (no fuel).

How 50 years of climate change has changed the face of the 'Blue Marble' from space The "Blue Marble" was the first photo of the whole Earth and the only ever taken by a human. Fifty years on, new images of the planet reveal visible changes to the Earth's surface.

Fascinating story of the 1972 ‘Blue Marble’ first complete photo of Earth from space taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on a Hasselbad loaded with 70mm film. There are definite changes seen now, the shrinking of polar ice caps and expanding desertification.

The Bishop Paiute Tribe in the Eastern Sierra foothills now has high-speed, reliable internet through California’s new Middle-Mile Broadband Network — a historic effort to close the digital divide.

Was just there today. It was beautiful.

“The real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable.”

Commentary: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant Data brokers buy up huge amounts of information from cell phones and browsers to sell for targeted advertising. But the government, including ICE, also buys the data.

Data brokers buy up huge amounts of information from cell phones and browsers to sell for targeted advertising. But the government, including ICE, also buys the data.

OpenAI pulls the plug on Sora, the viral AI video app that sparked deepfake concerns OpenAI said Tuesday that it was "saying goodbye to the Sora app" and that it would share more soon about how to preserve what users already created on the app.

OpenAI said Tuesday that it was "saying goodbye to the Sora app" and that it would share more soon about how to preserve what users already created on the app. n.pr/4bMN3Dy

New Mexico jury says Meta harms children's mental health and safety, violating state law The jury agreed that Meta engaged in "unconscionable" trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children. Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million.

The jury agreed that Meta engaged in "unconscionable" trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children. Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. n.pr/4lRJ2lV

DC Schools Discriminated Against Students With Disabilities, OCR Finds The school district, which has one of highest rates of special education complaints in the nation, often forces families to sue for their kids to receive services, the U.S. Department of Education sai...

Cases like these where there are easy-to-see breaches (the bus didn't show up) seem to stand the best chance of getting attention from OCR at the moment. Anything ambiguous that will need expertise for review ... will likely be more difficult. www.disabilityscoop.com/2026/03/20/d...

Wait a Minute…What If I Don’t Want to Use AI? AI is everywhere right now. It writes summaries, explains theories, fixes grammar, and recommends playlists.But here’s the thing nobody says out loud: you’re allowed not to use it. Whether you feel…

Bless the librarians of Aberystwyth University for sending this blog out to their students: "Wait a Minute…What If I Don’t Want to Use AI?"

#LibrarySky

Earth and Environmental News, Videos and Images At Earth.com, our goal is to provide the internet with a homepage for anything and everything about our planet Earth and the environment.

Turns out that chatgpt might not be as smart as everyone thought. The moral of the story is don't ask it solve your calculus take home exam.

ChatGPT struggles with accuracy, consistency on science quizzes - Earth.com share.google/KGOhvesp730C...

Rare things become common at scale Software doesn’t scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn’t exist before, causing new downstream consequences.

If you have 1000 servers, each experiencing a fatal error randomly once every 3 years… you will get random, unpredictable, unstoppable failures every single day.

Scale is hard because it makes rare things common.

New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications A recent study in Computers in Human Behavior provides evidence that a single smartphone pop-up derails mental focus for seven seconds. Researchers found that fragmented digital habits cause more cogn...

When I disabled all the notifications on my smart phone, I felt such an enormous sense of relief. It took me a while to figure out why. It was because I wasn't being constantly interrupted
New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications www.psypost.org/new-psycholo...

My kid sister, who has a cognitive disability, is visiting me this week, and it’s wild—if sometimes something I need to work through—to be reminded how often she engages with strangers, and how comfortably and happily and amiably they most often respond.