Professor at UofT. Cuneiform and cats.

Toronto, Canada
Joined January 2013
Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Our Chief Mouser Larry is back at Downing Street following a minor operation, and is recovering well. He is feline much better but taking things one paw at a time. We are grateful to the vets for their outstanding care.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
“The president is just trolling!” Hey, here’s a wild thought. Maybe I want my country to be run by someone who isn’t a fucking internet troll.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
It’s still Twitter. It’s still the Kennedy Center. It’s still Lake Ontario. It’s still the Department of Defense. It’s still the Gulf of Mexico. And Donald Trump is still a pedophile.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
I'm going to need a bigger cannery.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Assistant Curator for Ancient Egypt and Sudan at University of Oxford jobs.ac.uk/job/DSO541/assist…
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Quarter-final status may change pending further review.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Having told me & 500 of my colleagues we’re at risk of redundancy my #university has just sent me notice of compulsory training in “Corporate Conscience”. Failure to complete the training is a disciplinary matter. Even David Lodge couldn’t make this up.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Oh, that went well over a decade ago in most UK universities. At my Employment Tribunal we had a member of the 'executive team' who was unaware our university had a charter or was defined as a charitable trust. He repeatedly called it a business ...
Universities are losing a sense of what they are for.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Incredible - dramatic improvements in air quality in London are linked to a measurable impact on Londoners' health: 9.3% drop in heart-related emergency admissions 5.1% drop in hospital admissions of all illnesses and health conditions Cleaning up our air protects our future.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Sunday, May 31, HoustonTX, Congregation Emanu El, “The Scribe and The Scientist”
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
I made a paper pyramid for my cat, and it reminds him of the old days
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street, was adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in 2011. He has just turned 19 and has already outlasted six Prime Ministers. Yesterday we could see the photographer of President Karol Nawrocki tripping over Larry after the meeting with Keir Starmer. Happy Birthday! 📷Damian Burzykowski
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Pulmonologist here - This is a walnut.
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
You never seen Piers Morgan like this before, straightly cooking starvation and atrocities denier IDF Major Doron Spielman for 4 minutes with facts - brutal
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
Poilievre saying he would “override the charter” was probably something he shouldn’t have said out loud.
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Technical question for Babylonianists: when I use the date conversion tool in MesoCalc (baptiste.meles.free.fr/site/…), I can no longer select the day. Is it just me?
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Apkallatu🌻💙🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺 retweeted
The funniest part is that I'm still in the Houthi PC small group and they still haven't noticed...
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