Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
99% of chemicals in our food right now were added without FDA approval. Many were added in secret, through a sneaky loophole built into the 1958 Food Additives Amendment. NPR Planet Money report.
Ecosystem engineers returned to desert decades after local extinction.
Wiped off mainland Australia by the introduction of cats and foxes, burrowing bettongs are making a triumphant comeback in outback New South Wales.
A coder named [SnailMail] has taken on the challenge of writing his own text editor, from scratch, in C, on a 386. Modern IDEs, code completion and AI integration did not gel with him, so he dug up diskettes for Borland Turbo C and Turbo C++ and did it 1980s style -- poring over books and coding by hand.
This was the first programming language the young coder learned. In order to emulate the developers of the time, hardware was also limited to period PCs (an IBM he won on an auction for $630.)
[SnailMail] describes how his solution works from about 8:00 in the video (YT). No word on whether he copied that floppy.
[SnailMail] describes how his solution works from about 8:00 in the video (YT). No word on whether he copied that floppy.
Voordat Haagse Zaken in de Zomer van start gaat, tippen we in de eerste twee weken van het zomerreces afleveringen die wat ons betreft nog steeds relevant zijn.
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De door koningin Máxima geopende jubileumeditie van North Sea Jazz in Ahoy Rotterdam begon vrijdag uitbundig en overvloedig. De programmering was de eerste festivaldag zó rijk dat kiezen pijn deed.
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Old Man Hiking has added a photo to the pool:
Built in the 1920s near Dwellingup and is now part of a tourist train circuit.
Stereo Solstice has added a photo to the pool:
A long exposure photograph of the rugged coastline at Petrel Cove on the Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia. Rounded coastal boulders and jagged rock formations frame the view towards West Island beneath dramatic clouds, while the flowing water softens the foreground.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
People drifting back into the street grid, signs lowered but not gone. The city resumes, but not unchanged. Protest doesn’t end when the march does. It carries on, step by step. Guess which of these clowns was at the smaller, racist "Aussie Pride" rally.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
At the mic, flag beside them, words landing into a crowd that knows exactly what’s at stake. No soft language, no hedging. Invasion Day means something, and it’s being said out loud.
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Inside Higher Ed: For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so "it was appropriate," he said, to allow students to take their exams at home. But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it.
Administrators' response to the widespread cheating event has been "meek," he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can -- and should -- respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale. "I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong," he wrote. "That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly." Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent -- by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
Administrators' response to the widespread cheating event has been "meek," he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can -- and should -- respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale. "I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong," he wrote. "That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly." Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent -- by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.