When it comes to online dating, Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, isn't all too worried about whether his fellow dating app users will find him attractive. Rather, his biggest fear is that he might come off as "cringey." "You can get away with being ugly," Wolfram says. "But being cringey is just like--that's a character that's imprinted on you." Since he first joined Hinge at 18, he has worked hard to scrub his profile of sincerity.

In today's rapidly evolving educational landscape, traditional modes of passive information delivery are giving way to transformative pedagogical approaches that prioritize active student engagement. Within the context of large-scale hybrid classrooms, the challenge lies in fostering meaningful and active interaction between students and course content. This study delves into the significance of measuring students' earnestness during interactive lecture participation exercises. By analyzing students' responses to interactive lecture poll questions, establishing a clear rubric for evaluating earnestness, and conducting a comprehensive assessment, we introduce EIT (Earnest Insight Toolkit), a tool designed to assess students' engagement within interactive lecture participation exercises - particularly in the context of large-scale hybrid classrooms. Through the utilization of EIT, our objective is to equip educators with valuable means of identifying at-risk students for enhancing intervention and support strategies, as well as measuring students' levels of engagement with course content.

In space, no one can hear you laugh. Ridley Scott's extraterrestrial adventure "Alien: Covenant" is deadly serious about matters that he takes deadly seriously, and the only things that he derides with any irony--muffled and sardonic though it may be--are the movie's snippets of art greater than his own, by artists greater than himself--starting with Richard Wagner, whose "Entry of the Gods into Valhalla" is heard in the first and last scene. The movie's lack of irony is all the more ironic since its subject is the recklessness of mankind in daring to synthesize humans androidally in order to extend our own control over the universe. The pleasure of classic low-budget science-fiction films--the threadbare apocalypses of the nineteen-fifties--is the fusion of authentic fear with the earnestness inherent in comic-book-like creatures and effects. They were movies that, in their exuberant exaggerations, wore their own absurdity with a fiercely straight face, even as they touched on underlying terrors--largely also focussed on the hubris of recklessly manipulating nature.