The reasons are not yet fully understood, but researchers consider societal influences that encourage greater compliance among girls as a potential cause.

En 1925, une jeune astrophysicienne de 25 ans démontrait que l’hydrogène était l’élément dominant dans l’Univers.

À la fin de novembre, le secrétaire américain à la Santé, Robert F. Kennedy fils, a balayé d’un revers de main de nouvelles normes imposant des tests sur la présence d’amiante dans les produits cosmétiques contenant du talc. La controverse sur l’amiante dans le talc perdure depuis plus de 15 ans. La Presse vous explique.

Le Québec est en train de se fracturer, comme bien d’autres sociétés en occident, sur une autre ligne. L’économie.

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Voilà 36 ans que Stéphane Guay porte un regret secret lié à une ferme conviction : de tous les témoins de la tragédie de Polytechnique, il croit qu’il était le mieux placé pour arrêter l’auteur de l’attentat qui a tué 14 jeunes femmes le 6 décembre 1989.

The Law of Democratic Memory has unleashed an avalanche of applications for Spanish nationality, with more than 1 million files already initiated and another 1.3 million pending processing. Madrid's consular network, with 178 offices worldwide, is facing collapse.

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A new book, Goliath’s Curse, will reset everything you thought you knew about the rise and fall of civilisations – with worrying implications for our world now.

British Columbia has more doctors than ever, so why are there such long waits for medical attention in primary and acute care settings? That’s the question a UBC professor set out to answer, putting him on a road that has him making provocative and uncomfortable recommendations to government.

Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing. The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian … Continue reading The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

I can’t stand AI-assisted writing anymore. It’s all over Substack. It’s in my LinkedIn replies. It’s everywhere. Like a disease slowly infecting our literary consciousness. I even see it from people who I _know_ aren’t bad writers. For example, a prominent person in the wealth management space recently posted the following: > Your dollar lost 53% of its purchasing power over the past 30 years. > That’s not an anomaly. > That’s the system. > Inflation isn’t just a number – it’s a silent thief. There’s nothing wrong with this message (I agree with it), but it’s clearly written by AI. The “It’s not X, it’s Y” motif is the clearest giveaway of AI-assisted writing, especially _when that motif is repeated back to back_. The message might as well say “It’s not human, it’s AI.” But here’s the crazy part—even the people complaining about AI are using it in their writing! I was recently reading an article from a history professor about how all of his students use AI to write their essays. As he stated: > I largely receive 400 variations on the same essay. The wording, structure, transitions, tone, even the closing sentences are largely identical. But then _the very next line_ reads: > This isn’t about a few students cheating. It’s about the collapse of an entire pedagogical model. The mass lecture, the take-home prompt, the standardized rubric—all built for a world that no longer exists. > > What AI has done is not simply make cheating easier; it has made my entire form of assessment obsolete. It’s the classic “It’s not X, it’s Y” motif followed by a list of three items with the em-dash (another AI writing tactic) and finally closing with _another_ “It’s not X, it’s Y” style line. Excuse my language, but what the hell is going on? If the history professor complaining about AI-assisted writing is passing off AI-assisted writing as his own, we’re cooked. If the ultra-successful wealth management professional can’t help but use AI (or have his social media team use AI), we’re done. Don’t get me wrong, using the “It’s not X, it’s Y” style is not _always_ indicative of AI-assisted writing. But when you see it so many times in the same piece, it’s obvious. Why do people post stuff like this? Do they think no one will notice? I’m not here to bash anyone in particular (which is why I didn’t link to the original posts above). However, I’m disappointed in how much AI has infiltrated the writing space. This is what it must have felt like for natural bodybuilders when anabolic steroids showed up on the scene. AI is a performance-enhancing drug for mediocre writers. And, like bodybuilders on steroids, it leaves behind obvious clues when used. But using AI isn’t the core issue. How people use AI is. The root of this problem is that no one wants to _think_ anymore. They want to outsource their thinking to machines. And, once you start doing that, it’s hard to stop. Trust me, I know the feeling. In early 2023 I used AI to help me write about various topics for SEO purposes. And it worked! My search engine traffic went up 6x from the beginning of 2023. But, within a few months, I had to stop. As I publicly admitted, writing for a search engine was soul-killing work. I wasn’t writing for me, I was writing for an algorithm. To get my passion for writing back, I had to start thinking for myself again. I know how tempting it is to have AI write an entire article for you. After all, writing is cognitively demanding. It would be so much easier to just “push the AI button” and watch it do its work. But you have to fight that urge. Because once you cross that line, your writing dies. And your soul dies with it. More importantly, you have to fight back because this is the last edge you will have. As more and more people outsource their cognition to AI, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they are going to be smarter? Do you think they are going to be more knowledgeable? Not a chance. In fact, the opposite is already happening. A recent scandal broke out at UC San Diego (UCSD) after it was revealed that the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level “increased nearly thirtyfold, reaching roughly one in eight members of the entering cohort.” Shockingly, 25% of students in UCSD’s remedial math course got the following question wrong: > Fill in the box: 7 + 2 = ☐ + 6 It’s 3. There’s no gotcha here. 7 + 2 = 3 + 6. If this is happening at UCSD, which is a great school, imagine what’s happening elsewhere. We don’t have to imagine though because the data paints a clear picture. As the _New York Times_ recently reported, high school seniors had the worst reading scores since 1992 and the worst math scores since 2005. There are many possible reasons for this, and the heavy reliance on AI isn’t helping. College students in particular use AI at exceedingly high rates. This chart from Sherwood News illustrates how ChatGPT use drops off as college students leave school for the summer (in early June) and then starts to pick up again as they return (in late August): ChatGPT usage by itself isn’t a problem. But when so many educators are complaining about the rapid decline in cognition among college students, it is. I’m not saying this to complain about the next generation. I’m saying it because it foreshadows what could happen to the rest of us if we aren’t careful. The more we rely on AI to do our cognitive tasks, the more we will mentally atrophy. **Unfortunately, there is no substitute for thinking.** This will be as true today as it is in a decade. While the AI tools will get “smarter” at various tasks, outsourcing everything to them will only make you more vulnerable. As the American journalist Sydney J. Harris once said: > The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. This is why thinking is the last edge we have. Because while everyone else is having AI draft their emails, write their code, and plan their lives, those who still dare to do _some_ of the mental work themselves will win out. As the proverb goes, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Thank you for reading. **If you liked this post, considersigning up for my newsletter.** This is post 479. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering: https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data * * *

The world’s longest and deepest undersea road tunnel is being built in Norway, intended to cut travel time between major cities and become part of a ferry-free highway along its western coast.

Pour avoir prescrit des traitements controversés de la maladie de Lyme, le Dr Amir Khadir a écopé d’une radiation de six mois.

Des experts en santé publique brandissent la menace d’un empiètement du fédéral.

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI (www.nature.com) 11-29  ↑ 108 HN Points

Le manque d’encadrement de l’IA, de plus en plus utilisée en radiologie, en radio-oncologie et en imagerie médicale, est décrié par les physiciens médicaux.

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