What Machine Learning Is Teaching Us About How We Learn

“By bringing the tools of computation and machine intuition to the table, AI researchers are giving us a more complete picture of how we learn. They are also broadening the study of education to include quantitative, numerical models of the learning process itself. “The thing that AI brings to the table is that it forces us to get into the details of how everything works,” says John Laird, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. If there was any doubt that good teachers are important, machine learning is helping put it to rest.”

South America’s Favorite New Telenovelas Are Coming From — Turkey

“Dubbed into Spanish and Portuguese, [What is Fatmagul’s Fault?] has been a big hit across South America over the past year. In Argentina alone, episodes are viewed by more than 12 million people. And the show is far from a one-off, with a growing number of Turkish TV dramas among the most watched programmes across the continent.”

Political Protest, Philip Glass Operas, And ‘The Battle Hymn Of The Republic’

Alison Kinney: “I heard my first Glass opera, Satyagraha, days after a protest where I witnessed the use of unnecessary force by police against protesters … Since then, I’ve never heard the structures of Glass’s music simply as formal sound projections, onto a backdrop of historical source material. Now, I hear in the musical forms the forms of nonviolent resistance itself: holding steady, taking small steps forward, being beaten back, and getting up again.”

Book Critic: Why I Read Amazon Reader Reviews

“Here’s my semi-shameful secret: I like reader reviews. I often make a point of seeking them out. When reporters used to interview me on the subject, I’d feel obliged to note that you can find reviews on Amazon and (even more commonly) on Goodreads that are as considered, thorough, and well-written as anything that used to appear in your local newspaper. But actually I don’t care much about those reviews. I already know how people like me, people who read books professionally and with a particular set of aesthetic values, respond to a text. I go to reader reviews to see how the other half reads.”

Spock, Picard, And The Lessons Of ‘Star Trek’

“Spock’s inner struggle embodied the conflict at the heart of the series. It pitted unchecked, anarchical emotion against stoic rationality, atavism against civilization, present against future. … Picard and his crew were all human carbon copies of Spock – even-keeled, rational, and almost impossibly ethical. … That left little room for identification. You could aspire to be more like Picard, the very model of compassion and culture, but you could never truly understand his moral universe. He was nothing like us twenty-first-century humans. He was too alien.”

The Man Who Wants To Fix Barnes & Noble

Some of that decline was attributed to a lack of new big hits to compete with a string of blockbusters last year, and to a cooling off of the sale of adult coloring books. A poor retail environment that cut into store traffic was another factor hurting sales, but B&N founder Len Riggio, who has returned as CEO following the dismissal of Ron Boire in August, acknowledged that B&N “[shot] ourselves in the foot somewhat by making unprecedented inventory reductions,” as well as “cutting expenses in the worst areas, mainly retail floor personnel.”

Jerry Saltz: The Lost Generations Of Critics

“I think we lost three generations of critics to academicism, writers made skittish about their own opinions, afraid, only following a party-line of preapproved taste, deluded into believing that there is such a thing as objectivity, and only writing for a tiny audience of employed institutionalists who might dole out a job. Or maybe I’m just trying to rationalize never being offered tenure or even a full time teaching job.”