Universities have become generic, one professor and former dean argues. In the A.I. era, students may demand something they can't get elsewhere. Last week, I asked whether, as a forty-six-year-old father of two, I should keep contributing to my children's college funds, or if perhaps some combination of anti-establishment fervor, A.I., and a shifting economy could save me some money. I don't have a particularly good answer yet, at least not one good enough to inspire the purchase of a midlife-crisis car, my son's and daughter's futures be damned. But, after wrestling with that query in Part 1 of what will be a series of articles, I think there may be a better one to ask. The question is not, I think, "How will A.I. change higher education?" I wanted to talk with someone who stood outside the polite consensus which holds that college as we know it will survive, if only because, as I wrote last week, humans will always want to differentiate their children from other people's children.

Will A.I. Make College Obsolete? More and more people may decide that its stamp of approval isn't worth the cost. A few weeks ago, while I was dealing with taxes, it occurred to me that the money my wife and I were putting away in a college fund for our children might be better used somewhere else. This wasn't a novel musing, but it felt particularly pressing as I watched my account balance go down, a portion of its resources funnelled into something that can't be touched for at least the next nine years. When my nine-year-old daughter graduates from high school, in 2035, I asked myself, will the landscape of higher education look the way that it does now?

This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. YouTube's search and recommendation algorithms are driving children to Russian-language content even when they seek out videos in Kyrgyz, creating a cultural shift that concerns some parents. When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: Children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults. McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian.

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The ninth edition of the Artificial Intelligence Index Report was published on 13 April 2026. Released on a yearly basis, the aim of the document is to provide readers with accurate, rigorously validated, and globally-sourced data to give insights into the progress of AI and its potential impact on society. The 2026 AI Index Report comprises nine chapters, covering: research and development, technical performance, responsible AI, economy, science, medicine, education, policy and governance, and public opinion. AI capability is accelerating and reaching more people than ever. Model performance continues to improve against benchmarks, and 80% of university students now use generative AI.

Miniature people have been a staple of science fiction and fantasy going all the way back to Jonathan Swift's, and shrunken characters have taken the spotlight in everything from classic Hollywood movies like and to family-friendly blockbusters like and . References to these movies and others are strewn throughout the new Peacock limited series, but the drawn-out, 10-episode show isn't a particularly worthwhile addition to the sci-fi shrinking canon. Taking only the title and basic premise from Manuel Gonzales's 2014 short story, stars Elizabeth Banks as Lindy Littlejohn, a once-prominent author who now works as a university professor and has been overshadowed by her scientist husband Les (Matthew Macfadyen). Lindy, you see, feels metaphorically small in both her personal and professional lives, and is about to become literally small following an accident - or it? The most pressing problem for Lindy is that Les has yet to develop a stable antidote to his formula, and everything that he has attempted to return to its original size thus far has almost immediately exploded.

In this work, we investigate how to develop sharp concentration inequalities for sub-Weibull random variables, including sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions. Although the random variables may not be sub-Guassian, the tail probability around the origin behaves as if they were sub-Gaussian, and the tail probability decays align with the Orlicz $Ψ_α$-tail elsewhere. Specifically, for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) $\{X_i\}_{i=1}^n$ with finite Orlicz norm $\|X\|_{Ψ_α}$, our theory unveils that there is an interesting phase transition at $α= 2$ in that $\PPł(ł|\sum_{i=1}^n X_i \r| \geq t\r)$ with $t > 0$ is upper bounded by $2\expł(-C\maxł\{\frac{t^2}{n\|X\|_{Ψ_α}^2},\frac{t^α}{ n^{α-1} \|X\|_{Ψ_α}^α}\r\}\r)$ for $α\geq 2$, and by $2\expł(-C\minł\{\frac{t^2}{n\|X\|_{Ψ_α}^2},\frac{t^α}{ n^{α-1} \|X\|_{Ψ_α}^α}\r\}\r)$ for $1\leq α\leq 2$ with some positive constant $C$. In many scenarios, it is often necessary to distinguish the standard deviation from the Orlicz norm when the latter can exceed the former greatly. To accommodate this, we build a new theoretical analysis framework, and our sharp, flexible concentration inequalities involve the variance and a mixing of Orlicz $Ψ_α$-tails through the min and max functions. Our theory yields new, improved concentration inequalities even for the cases of sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions with $α= 2$ and $1$, respectively. We further demonstrate our theory on martingales, random vectors, random matrices, and covariance matrix estimation. These sharp concentration inequalities can empower more precise non-asymptotic analyses across different statistical and machine learning applications.

I Have a Warning for Everyone. Consider this my open admission. When I graduated from UC-Berkeley with my "useless" comparative literature degree, into one of the bleakest job markets in recent American memory, I thought to myself, . That was what brought me to marketing myself as an "academic editor," and an "admissions essay advisor," on various freelancing websites last fall. I figured I had done my fair share of editing for friends throughout the years, and I needed another gig to supplement my inconsistent substitute-teaching paychecks.

Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made that are unfairly biased against certain subpopulations, for example those of a particular race, gender, or sexual orientation. Since this past data may be biased, machine learning predictors must account for this to avoid perpetuating or creating discriminatory practices. In this paper, we develop a framework for modeling fairness using tools from causal inference. Our definition of counterfactual fairness captures the intuition that a decision is fair towards an individual if it the same in (a) the actual world and (b) a counterfactual world where the individual belonged to a different demographic group. We demonstrate our framework on a real-world problem of fair prediction of success in law school.

Most machine learning methods assume fixed probability distributions, limiting their applicability in nonstationary real-world scenarios. While continual learning methods address this issue, current approaches often rely on black-box models or require extensive user intervention for interpretability. We propose SyMPLER (Systems Modeling through Piecewise Linear Evolving Regression), an explainable model for time series forecasting in nonstationary environments based on dynamic piecewise-linear approximations. Unlike other locally linear models, SyMPLER uses generalization bounds from Statistical Learning Theory to automatically determine when to add new local models based on prediction errors, eliminating the need for explicit clustering of the data. Experiments show that SyMPLER can achieve comparable performance to both black-box and existing explainable models while maintaining a human-interpretable structure that reveals insights about the system's behavior. In this sense, our approach conciliates accuracy and interpretability, offering a transparent and adaptive solution for forecasting nonstationary time series.