Month: February 2023

There’s a joyous little romp in the current New Yorker. It’s a review of a book from the reviewer’s childhood. The review is called “What a sixty-five-year-old book teaches us about A.I.” Those last two initials stand for “Artificial Intelligence” in case you weren’t sure. The book in question? “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” With a New Yorker subscription, you can read all about it, here. For the rest of y’all, details are below.

What makes this relevant right now is that the machine foretold years ago in a kids’ book has come to actual fruition with the recent release of ChatGPT. Threatening to upend higher – and lower – education, the good/bad news is that latter-day plagiarists at all levels now have access to a revolutionary time-saving tool that promises to take all the sweat out of writing term papers, essays, or even – heaven help us all! – PhD theses.

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There was once a time back in the deep mists of history when a grocery store clerk would punch in the price of each item on your shopping list to a cash register keypad instead of just infrared scanning a UPC code. There was also a time when you had to go inside a bank lobby to have the teller count out your cash for a withdrawal. A time when retrieving a book at the local library required at least a rudimentary knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System. When, to spell-check a document, you actually had to flip open a musty hard-copy of Funk & Wagnalls or Merriam-Webster. And there was even a time when you couldn’t pump your own gas, fercryinoutloud. Well, brothers and sisters, those days are gone. And I for one couldn’t be happier.

Denizens of the various teaching professions may feel differently about this new chatbot technology, of course. Lord knows if I was the one assigning the homework I might be worried too. But not overly worried. Why? The end of the book review tells the tale. And when it comes right down to it, I’m not above a little casual plagiarism myself. So, read on – if you dare.

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“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” is ostensibly about computers. But it also makes an argument about homework. In a note at the beginning of the book, <the authors> write, “In all fairness to both Professor Bullfinch and Danny, we wish to point out that their position on homework is supported by Bulletin 1248-3 of the Educational Service Bureau, University of Pennsylvania.”

I haven’t managed to turn up a copy of that bulletin, which was called “What About Homework?,” but I’ve found a number of other publications, from multiple decades, that arrive at what I assume are similar conclusions. For example, in 2007 the education critic Alfie Kohn — whose many books include “The Homework Myth,” published in 2018 — wrote that “there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school,” and that in high school “the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.”

One problem with homework is that it inevitably encourages the counterproductive over-involvement of parents. (When my kids were young, I suggested to one of their teachers that he conduct a science fair for fathers only.) There’s also the issue of homework whose sole purpose is to squeeze in material that should have been covered during the school day but wasn’t. Miss Arnold offers precisely that justification for some of her huge assignments: The size of her class has nearly doubled because of rapid population growth in town, therefore she is no longer able to give individual students as much attention as she once did.

Miss Arnold also assigns homework for a suspect reason that’s described in a paper published under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Education, in 1988: “Punishing assignments exercise the teacher’s power to use up time at home that would otherwise be under the student’s control. The assignments often center on behavior rather than academic skills, and stress embarrassment rather than mastery.”

That’s what she was up to with all those sentences she made Danny write back in the first book in the series. Luckily for everyone, Danny handled his embarrassment with aplomb by writing most of the sentences during downtime in outer space. The mindlessness of the exercise did no permanent harm to his imagination. At the end of “Homework Machine”, he suddenly has “a strange, wild look in his eyes, and a faraway smile on his lips.” He says, “This is just a simple idea I had: Listen, what about a teaching machine. . . .”

 

All due respect to Mark Harmon and CBS, but I started channel surfing last night after deciding that if I had to watch even one more NCIS rerun, I was going to scream. Don’t get me wrong, I like Mark Harmon well enough – and Cote de Pablo too.

I mean, after all, the guy did 20 seasons on that show, and that’s 3X as long as I’ve ever held on to a single job, so he at least deserves kudos for longevity, right? Not only that, but the episode we were watching brought in the entire cast of NCIS Los Angeles for a guest appearance – and my wife is just crazy for LL Cool J – so there’s that. But as I said, I’d reached my limit. Lucky for you I did too.

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We get two different PBS channels. One of them is almost always showing Antiques Roadshow. The other has been on this All Creatures Great and Small kick recently. Now if there’s one thing I have less patience for than NCIS reruns, it’s a show about a feuding family of veterinarians. No, I take it back. Any Antiques Roadshow episode that’s not set at the Santa Fe Museum of Folk Art? I am completely done with it. But I digress.

As luck or fate or something would have it, last night one of those two PBS stations (I forget which one) was showing a NOVA special called “Meteor Strike.” And let me tell you, it was mesmerizing. Now I don’t expect you to go out and watch the whole thing. But the two-and-a-half minute trailer, here, is well worth the price of admission. And in case you’re unfamiliar, PBS is free. Well,  as long as you don’t mind watching trailers for upcoming attractions, that is. So give it a look-see – you’ll be glad you did. Also, you can catch the high points as I’ve summarized them below.

 

A blinding flash of light streaked across the Russian sky, followed by a shuddering blast strong enough to damage buildings and send more than 1,000 people to the hospital. On the morning of February 15, 2013, a 7,000-ton asteroid crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere. According to NASA, the Siberian meteor exploded with the power of 30 Hiroshima bombs.

A few salient points

First, terminology: Asteroids are smaller-than-moon-sized objects made of metal and rock orbiting the sun. They reside mostly in a “belt” out near Jupiter, but sometimes an asteroid wanders away from its fellows and goes into an elliptical sun-orbit that can take it into the earth’s path. That’s when it becomes a meteor. A meteorite is a meteor after it enters the earth’s atmosphere and – usually – burns up before it hits the surface. The most important part? That “usually.”

Second, the long horizon of time: The extinction event that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period was caused by earth’s collision with a 6-mile wide meteorite. The impact crater lies in what is now the Gulf of Mexico just off the Yucatan coast.  75% of all life on earth was wiped out. Only birds, cockroaches, and Mitch McConnell survived. It was a very sad day.

When can we expect the next Big One? Nobody knows: Not the astronomers, not the biologists, and sure as hell not the politicians. What we do know, and what was covered in the PBS documentary last night, is that the object observed  over Russian skies in 2013 – and that was recorded on many Russian motorists’ dash-cams – was the size of a small building.

It exploded – and for the most part disintegrated – before reaching the earth’s surface. And still that explosion – which occurred 15 miles up in the atmosphere – was strong enough to blow out windows and knock people clear out of their chairs in nearby Russian towns and villages. Had the meteorite’s angle of impact been slightly steeper, or had it been made of more hard metal and less crumbly rock, or had it broken up over a major population center, millions of people almost certainly would have been killed.

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For comparison, a similar meteorite strike in 1908 completely leveled 800-square miles of trees in Siberia. Statistically speaking, the best estimates are that objects of this size WILL collide with us on average about once every 100 years. Think about that. As one of the scientists who was interviewed on PBS put it, earthlings are traveling through space at 67,000 mph, and we are doing it without an airbag or an insurance policy. Lucky for us, we do have dash-cams. For all the good that’ll do us when the next Big One hits. I said WHEN, not if.

In the meantime…

May I suggest to the good folks at CBS that they consider a new spin-off from the NCIS franchise. Call it “NCIS Meteorite Edition.” Bring in LL Cool J to star – you know, just to keep my wife happy. Mark Harmon can come out of retirement to be Executive Producer. Bring back Cote de Pablo for a guest appearance. Shoot it on location clear across the globe, all the way from Siberia to Yucatan.

The plot line? Well, that’s obvious: Many Marines and Navy guys are in danger of going the way of the dinosaurs if the squints back at the crime lab don’t come up with an effective solution to this meteorite dilemma – and pronto. Throw in a few celestial near-misses for dramatic effect and I am telling you, it’s gonna be a big hit. And that last episode, the finale? We’re all going out with a bang.

Best of all? We won’t have to watch Antiques Roadshow or All Creatures Great and Small ever again. That’s one thing we can all be sure of.