Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. The light and the message go right through us," he said during a television appearance. "At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body.

Teachers are important to imparting knowledge and guiding learners, and the role of large language models (LLMs) as potential educators is emerging as an important area of study. Recognizing LLMs' capability to generate educational content can lead to advances in automated and personalized learning. While LLMs have been tested for their comprehension and problem-solving skills, their capability in teaching remains largely unexplored. In teaching, questioning is a key skill that guides students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize core concepts and principles. Therefore, our research introduces a benchmark to evaluate the questioning capability in education as a teacher of LLMs through evaluating their generated educational questions, utilizing Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy across general, monodisciplinary, and interdisciplinary domains. We shift the focus from LLMs as learners to LLMs as educators, assessing their teaching capability through guiding them to generate questions. We apply four metrics, including relevance, coverage, representativeness, and consistency, to evaluate the educational quality of LLMs' outputs. Our results indicate that GPT-4 demonstrates significant potential in teaching general, humanities, and science courses; Claude2 appears more apt as an interdisciplinary teacher. Furthermore, the automatic scores align with human perspectives.

I used to be staunchly against automatic litter boxes. Frankly, I thought moving parts could easily trap tiny kitty paws. And without daily scooping, you lose vital information--if a cat isn't urinating, that's a telltale sign that something bad is happening internally. A difference of a few days could be tragic. I have to keep a close eye on one of my own cats, Huxley, for this reason.

The future of west virginia politics is uncertain. The state has been trending Democratic for the last decade, but it's still a swing state. Democrats are hoping to keep that trend going with Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Republicans have their own hopes and dreams too. They're hoping to win back some seats in the House of Delegates, which they lost in 2012 when they didn't run enough candidates against Democratic incumbents.

Duran Duran Connects Trees to Their NFTs As Part of Initiative To Start New Micro Forests Around the World Living Trees Traceable on the Blockchain In yet another world-first, legendary British rock band, Duran Duran, has this week announced a unique project that will connect NFTs to newly-planted, native trees in New Zealand as part of an initiative to start new micro forests around the world. Duran Duran will kick-off this ambitious initiative by gifting the digital owners of the existing "INVISIBLE" NFT collection, which was released last year in support of the band's 15th studio album: FUTURE PAST. Each of the 100 people who purchased one of the "INVISIBLE" NFTs will receive a brand-new eco-friendly NFT featuring a themed artwork designed by Huxley, the AI artist with whom the band collaborated on their "INVISIBLE" music video and NFT artworks. Along with the NFT, a living tree will be planted in Jardine Park, Queenstown, New Zealand, in the person's name. Each new tree will be traceable on the blockchain via the corresponding NFT.

What do anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO campaigners have in common? Underpinning both "antis" is a shared belief that because vaccines and GMOs are "unnatural," they're bad, which for many people--whatever their feelings about vaccines and GMOs--segues into its inverse: What's natural is good. Given a choice, most people gravitate toward the natural over the artificial. After all, natural environments are preferable to garbage dumps, natural foods are nearly always healthier than stuff concocted in a chemistry lab. Yet it needs to be said loud and clear: Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good.

Alden Ehrenreich explores a Brave New World. When I first read Aldous Huxley's famous 1932 novel Brave New World, I expected something fusty and old-fashioned. I wasn't prepared for how scathingly direct or unsettlingly dark it was, and still is today. It certainly adds a dash of cursing, a touch of violence, some Radiohead and a load of people getting their kit off. But it lacks a certain directness. The Handmaid's Tale is about sexism.

With billions of books, news stories, and documents online, there's never been a better time to be reading -- if you have time to sift through all the options. "There's a ton of text on the internet," says Justin Solomon, an assistant professor at MIT. "Anything to help cut through all that material is extremely useful." With the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and his Geometric Data Processing Group at MIT, Solomon recently presented a new technique for cutting through massive amounts of text at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Their method combines three popular text-analysis tools -- topic modeling, word embeddings, and optimal transport -- to deliver better, faster results than competing methods on a popular benchmark for classifying documents. If an algorithm knows what you liked in the past, it can scan the millions of possibilities for something similar.

Hey Everyone!! My friend, Karen Mossman, would like to tell you about a book she's really excited about. Humanity is living a dream existence side-by-side their new artificial intelligence counterparts, Robokopias, which look, act, and talk like anyone or anybody you choose. Only the Pseudosynths remember the time shift to set the planet on the correct course in 2075 and the warning that went along with it before the Robokopias were produced. Why is this warning so important? In Ice, if you or one of your family members die, it is your choice is to have your thoughts and memories transferred into one of these'Robokopias' so you can continue to live.

Welcome to Engadget's newest series, Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories. Modern tech culture has long been enamored with the mythos of the lone genius achieving superhuman status (a la The Matrix). Whether it's Jack Dorsey's self flagellating dietary restrictions, Peter Thiel's obsession with "young blood" transfusions, or Tim Ferris' outright maniacal 4-hour self improvement regimens, if you're a wealthy white guy in Silicon Valley and not trying to live forever, you're doing it wrong. But for all the Bond villain-esque grifters selling the promise of eternal youth in 12 easy steps, a dedicated cadre of technologists have spent years investigating how we might actually achieve Ray Kurtweil's predicted singularity.