Chicago Sun-Times writer Marco Buscaglia used the popular LLM ChatGPT to create the 2025 "summer reading list" they wanted for subscribers and had enough confidence in the result that he didn't check the work. The problem was that LLMs are not really AI, despite claims by companies selling this stuff that they are. They are certainly not Intelligent. So while the list had real authors,...
read moreA new paper argues that academic ecology is culturally corroded. 'Stay in your lane', 'do you want to die on that hill?' and other territorial and undermining behavior were reported by 44% of predominantly ecologists who responded to a survey. They say it was most common as graduate students, a third of the time by their own supervisor. Of those, 18 percent reported they had experienced it...
read moreA whistleblower revealed a shocking document written by the French Ministry of Agriculture to the European Commission.In response to America retaliating against Europe by placing tariffs on European goods the way European has them on American goods, the French government declared that for the first time this century they wanted 'access to innovation' - which means modern science and...
read moreIt is often joked that 'prostitution was the first profession' and, that it is not a profession aside, the sentiment may be true. Someone with a lot of food and the ability to prevent it being taken may have worked out a deal with someone who had no food but willingness to satisfy a different basic need. It would still mean food gathering was the first profession but that's not as funny.Lots of...
read moreA new paper suggests that the world's largest polluters remain safe from the environmental damage they help create and the countries least to blame face the greatest threats because of, oddly, violent conflict.This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual water". Those arguments are fine in a spreadsheet, it gets advocates worked up, but fails in the real...
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