Can You Reclaim Your Mind? To feel mentally alive, you have to do more than defeat distraction. Looking back over the columns I've written in 2025, I can see that a lot of them, broadly construed, have been about reclaiming one's mind. I wrote about living in the present, picturing the future, and exploring one's memories; about reading, learning, and making the most of one's spare time; and about whether artificial intelligence will end up expanding our thinking or limiting it . The shared subject was resistance to the forces, malevolent or inertial, that can render us mentally exhausted and scattered.

In August, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a quiet stretch at Asheham, the country house that she and her husband, Leonard, rented in rural Sussex. "We've been practically alone, which has a very spiritual effect upon the mind," Woolf wrote to a friend, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell. After six months spent in such isolation, Woolf quipped, "I should be a kind of Saint, and Leonard an undoubted prophet. We should shed virtue on people as we walked along the roads." Alas, any pretensions to holiness had been dispelled by the arrival of house guests the previous evening: "I had such a bath of the flesh that I am far from unspotted this morning.

At the end of 2024, we [Better Images of AI] launched a public competition with Cambridge Diversity Fund calling for images that reclaimed and recentred the history of diversity in AI education at the University of Cambridge. We were so grateful to receive such a diverse range of submissions that provided rich interpretations of the brief and focused on really interesting elements of AI history. Dr Aisha Sobey set and judged the challenge, which was enabled by funding from Cambridge Diversity Fund. Entries were judged on meeting the brief, the forms of representation reflected in the image, appropriateness, relevance, uniqueness, and visual appeal. This image is inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in "A Room of One's Own," her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future--that of queer literary criticism. Do not blush," Woolf cautioned her audience. "Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women." Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be ...

An artificial intelligence program that has impressed the internet with its ability to generate original images from user prompts has also sparked concerns and criticism for what is now a familiar issue with AI: racial and gender bias. And while OpenAI, the company behind the program, called DALL·E 2, has sought to address the issues, the efforts have also come under scrutiny for what some technologists have claimed is a superficial way to fix systemic underlying problems with AI systems. "This is not just a technical problem. This is a problem that involves the social sciences," said Kai-Wei Chang, an associate professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering who studies artificial intelligence. There will be a future in which systems better guard against certain biased notions, but as long as society has biases, AI will reflect that, Chang said.

Billie Eilish has fielded countless interview questions during her meteoric rise to fame, but this week was the first time that they've been asked by a bot. Fresh from sweeping the boards at the 2020 Grammy Awards, the 18-year-old songstress sat down with the AI interviewer in a video for Vogue -- and the bot proved a more original interlocutor than many of its human rivals. Its abstract questions provoked some surprising insights into the singer's mind. Viewers learnt that Eilish used to dream of working at Jamba Juice or Trader Joe's, and once wore a wig out to dinner to avoid attracting attention -- but she doesn't want to go back to being anonymous. "How much of the world is out of date?" the AI asked.

This article is adapted from GreenBiz's newsletter, VERGE Weekly, running Wednesdays. If you think your organization has a challenging energy consumption profile, try running a network of cold storage facilities -- with most sites in not-so-cold locations, such as California and Georgia. One of the more intriguing examples of smart power management I've come across in recent months is an initiative under way at Lineage Logistics, which runs more than 200 warehouses across North America, Europe and Asia. It handles food for more than 2,500 customers, which are all businesses themselves, such as grocery stories and food services organizations. Each of the Lineage buildings -- an average of 1 million square feet in size -- basically stores about the same amount of food that you'd find in 770,000 home freezers.

Computer Scaence Department Yale University THE COGNITION AND PROGRAMMING PROJECT (CAPP) in the Computer Science Department at Yale University is an interdisciplinary group exploring a wide range of issues in programming. 'This project is currently being funded by NSF RISE, under grant number SED-81-12403 'This project is currently being funded by NSF IST, under grant number IST-81-14840 We have also shown that when the language construct, agrees with people's natural problem solving strategies they can learn to use such constructs effectively. The implication is that language dcsigners should be more sensitive to cognitive capabilities which people bring to programming and that computing educators should be aware of the systematic misconceptions which arise due to cognztively poor programming language constructs. Using our theory of programming plans, we are developing measures of program complexity that are based on the underlying mental effort needed to understand programs. This approach is in contrast to typical measures of program complexity which are sensitive to only surface features of programs.

This article focuses on contributions that AI can make to address longterm educational goals. Challenges are described that support: (1) mentors for every learner; (2) learning 21st century skills; (3) interaction data for learning; (4) universal access to global classrooms; and (5) lifelong and lifewide learning. A vision and brief research agenda are described for each challenge along with goals that lead to development of global educational resources and the reuse and sharing of digital educational resources. Instructional systems with AI technology are described that currently support richer experiences for learners and supply researchers with new opportunities to analyze vast data sets of instructional behavior from big databases that record elements of learning, affect, motivation, and social interaction. Personalized learning is described that facilitates student and group experience, reflection, and assessment.

Our world as we know it is running on artificial intelligence. We have cars that park themselves, and air traffic control is almost fully automated. Virtually every field has benefited from advances in artificial intelligence, from the military to medicine to manufacturing. However, almost none of the recent advancements in artificial intelligence have advanced the education industry. Why is education lagging behind?