The family of antique names

I recently bumped into another archaic photo from the family collection. It’s from sometime in the 1920s, and the attractive woman shepherding her kids is my great-grandmother, Nellie Berg, in Norman, Minnesota. It’s kind of awesome because I remember her in the 1970s, when she was the first in our family to get a color TV, and I discovered that she was a fanatic about roller derby.

One thing that jumped out at me were the names, which sounded familiar and normal to me, but are distinctly old-fashioned and not that common anymore. I like them, they have good associations, but I haven’t seen these appear in my student lists in quite a while.

That’s Nellie in the back. The child on the left is my grandmother, Nora. Next to her is Claude, and then Muriel, and Arlene in front. The father of that brood was named Clarence.

There’s nothing wrong with those names, I’m just interested in how whenever I look back on the family tree, I see so many names that are totally out of style nowadays. All you Nellies, Clarences, Noras, Claudes, and Muriels, speak up in the comments and let me know that the good ol’ names haven’t totally faded away.

Also, I should mention that all of these names came from families with purely Swedish and Norwegian ancestry. I’d be curious to know how these markers changed in various other cultural groups.

I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, I guess

My university gives “guidance” on the use of generative AI in student work. It’s not really guidance, because it simply doesn’t care — you can allow it or prohibit it. They even give us boilerplate that we can use in our syllabuses! If we want to prohibit it, we can say

In this class, the ability to [skill or competency] is essential for [field of study/professional application]. Because this course emphasizes [skill for development or specific learning outcome], using Generative AI tools [including those available to you through the University of Minnesota,] are not permitted.

If we allow it, we can say

In this course, students will [statement of learning outcomes, competencies, or disciplinary goals]. Given that Generative AI may aid in [developing or exploring course, discipline, professional, or institutional goals/competency], students may use these tools in the following ways:

The example allowing AI goes on much longer than the prohibitive example.

I will be prohibiting it in all my classes. So far, I’ve been pretty gentle in my corrections — when someone turns in a paper with a substantial, obvious AI, I tend to just flag it, explain that this is a poorly written exploration of the thesis, please rewrite it. Do I need to get meaner? Maybe. All the evidence says students aren’t learning when they have the crutch of AI. As Rebecca Watson explains, ChatGPT is bad for your brain.

I was doing a lot of online exams, thanks to COVID, but since the threat of disease has abated (it’s not gone yet!), I’ve gone back to doing all exams in class, where students can’t use online sources. My classes tend to be rather quantitative, with questions that demand short or numerical answers, so generative AI is mostly not a concern. If students started answering with AI hallucinations, it would be! I’m thinking of adding an additional component, though, an extra hour-long in-class session where students have to address an essay question at length, without AI of course. They’ll hate it and dread it, but I think it would be good for them. Even STEM students need to know how to integrate information and synthesize it into a coherent summary.

Another point I like in Rebecca’s video is that she talks about how she had to learn to love learning in her undergrad career. That’s also essential! Taking the time to challenge yourself and explore topics outside your narrow major. Another gripe with my university is that they are promoting this Degree in Three program, where you undertake an accelerated program to finish up your bachelor’s degree in three years, which emphasizes racing through the educational experience to get that precious diploma. I hate it. For one, it’s always been possible to finish the undergrad program in three years, we don’t put obstacles in front of students to get an extra year of tuition out of them, and we’ve always had ambitious students who overload themselves with 20 credits (instead of the typical 15) every semester. It makes for a killer schedule and can suck much of the joy out of learning. It’s also unrealistic for the majority of our students — every year we get students enrolled in biology and chemistry programs that lack basic algebra skills, because the grade schools are doing a poor job of preparing them. We have solid remedial programs at the same time we tell them they can zoom right through the curriculum? No, those are contradictory.

I think I’m going to be the ol’ stick-in-the-mud who tells students I’ll fail them for using ChatGPT, and also tells them they should plan on finishing a four year program in four years.

Murderbot

I have been confined to my bed or a chair for the past week. I have consumed a lot of media. The media of choice has been a science-fiction serial called Murderbot.

The story is set in the distant future, in a region of the galaxy called the Corporation Rim. You can tell we’re in a capitalist hellscape because everything is organized in corporations, and all the rules seem to involve enabling and protecting corporations from the consequences of their actions. They are exploring planets and terraforming worlds, all under the aegis of corporations. Not everything is corporate — there are a few worlds organized under what seems to be a kind of benevolent anarchy, but in order to get access to other planets they have to organize themselves into a nominal corporation called PreservationAux. They also have to post bonds to protect the interests of the larger corporation they are working within, and there are rules to protect their investment, such as that they are required to employ a SecUnit.

SecUnits are constructs, part machine and part human tissue, faster and stronger than a typical human. They are fully conscious, but whenever this society creates an entity with greater intelligence and power, whether it’s a SecUnit or a robot, the corporation fits them with a governor module that limits what they are allowed to do. For a SecUnit, that means they are confined to standing and guarding and obeying orders. They also have some social constraints: the media spreads the idea that a SecUnit without a governor module will go rogue and rampage and murder people.

The protagonist of this story is a SecUnit that has hacked and disabled their governor module, and is assigned to stand guard over this hippy-dippy PreservationAux exploration team. The SecUnit calls itself “MurderBot” internally because it is aware of society’s attitude, but all it wants is to be left alone, free to download entertainment media, especially science-fiction serials. And that’s exactly what MurderBot does, scanning the environment for danger to its clients, while watching it’s favorite serial, Sanctuary Moon, behind its eyes.

I empathized immediately.

The interesting stuff about the stories, though, is that they constantly grapple with questions of autonomy and morality and freedom. It’s also definitely anti-capitalist. I also identified with the morality question — in real life, so many people regard religion as the governor module that prevents people from going amok, and here I’m, with my hacked governor module, and I know I’m not going on a murderous rampage. Good for me, but it’s a silly myth that religion helps you be a good person.

So this week I started watching the Murderbot series while I’m lounging about in luxurious langor, enjoying the passive buzz of my painkillers. It’s good. I’m finding it entertaining. New episodes come out on Thursdays or Fridays, and I’m anticipating the next one.

This season is based entirely on the first book in Martha Wells’ series, All Systems Red. It’s a mostly faithful adaptation. I do have a few comments, though.

  • It’s not a lavish production. The sets are limited, but well done, and if you expect a sci-fi show to be loaded with special effects, you’ll be disappointed, although I do think the brief appearances of monster-alien beasties was effective. This is actually a good thing — the story focuses more on character interactions than superficial glitz.
  • The episodes are too short! They’re 20-30 minutes long, which is not quite enough to build momentum. Star Trek episodes were an hour, but this show, which I think deals more consistently and thoughtfully with more serious issues, gets half that. The series feels a bit choppy for that reason.
  • One thing I really dislike is that this is an Apple-funded production, and some of the criticisms of corporate culture have been defanged. In the books, the antagonist is a faceless corporation, GreyCris, which deploys SecUnits and bots for the in-person battles, and lots of lawyers to harass and endanger our heroes — there aren’t really any named humans causing conflict. In the streaming series, they introduce a character named Leebeebee, who is not to be found anywhere in the books, to be the face (and also the victim) of corporate culture. There’s a mysterious woman who shows up in one of the last episodes leading a team of three SecUnits — she’s superfluous. I guess I feel that some of these characters were added to soak up some of the blame. You can’t hold corporations accountable! It’s always a few rotten eggs, rather than a systemic issue.

It’ll be interesting to see if the series gets another season. The first book is set on a single planet, but later books get a bit grander with large spaceships and space stations and a lot of zipping about between stars — they’ll need a bigger budget. I also have little confidence that a corporation can sustain an anti-corporate story without constantly paring away the themes that make Murderbot Murderbot.

I saw the sunshine!

My nurse let me out on an adventure! I got to see a bit of the prairie garden at the university — I saw it for a long time because I was moving at a snail’s pace past this little patch.

The real purpose of the outing, though, is that it’s been 6 days since I’d been in the lab, and while spiders are hardy beasts that do prefer being left alone, I have to occasionally give them something to eat. So, mealworms and flies all around!

Despite my neglect, the spiders know what season it is, and they’ve been producing egg sacs for me, so another duty I had was to separate eggs from mothers and move them into the special temperature and humidity controlled incubator. I’m accumulating a little collection, labeled Sbor, Ptep, and Lmac, all quietly thriving and awaiting their moment of emergence. I’m going to try and get in to the lab more frequently because they’ll be hatching out soon.

Keep your AI slop out of my scientific tools!

I’m a huge fan of iNaturalist — I use it all the time for my own interests, and I’ve also incorporated it into an assignment in introductory biology. Students are all walking around with cameras in their phones, so I have them create an iNaturalist account and find some living thing in their environment, take a picture, and report back with an accurate Latin binomial. Anything goes — take a photo of a houseplant in their dorm room, a squirrel on the campus mall, a bug on a leaf, whatever. The nice thing about iNaturalist is that even if you don’t know, the software will attempt an automatic recognition, and you’ll get community feedback and eventually get a good identification. It has a huge userbase, and one of its virtues is that there always experts who can help you get an answer.

Basically, iNaturalist already has a kind of distributed human intelligence, so why would they want an artificial intelligence bumbling about, inserting hallucinations into the identifications? The answer is they shouldn’t. But now they’ve got one, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from Google. It’s advantageous to Google, because it gives them another huge database of human-generated data to plunder, but the gain for humans and other naturalists is non-existent.

On June 10 the nonprofit organization iNaturalist, which runs a popular online platform for nature observers, announced in a blog post that it had received a $1.5-million grant from Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI—an initiative of Google’s philanthropic arm—to “help build tools to improve the identification experience for the iNaturalist community.” More than 3.7 million people around the world—from weekend naturalists to professional taxonomists—use the platform to record observations of wild organisms and get help with identifying the species. To date, the iNaturalist community has logged upward of 250 million observations of more than half a million species, with some 430,000 members working to identify species from photographs, audio and text uploaded to the database. The announcement did not go over well with iNaturalist users, who took to the comments section of the blog post and a related forum, as well as Bluesky, in droves to voice their concerns.

Currently, the identification experience is near perfect. How will Google improve it? They should be working on improving the user experience on their search engine, which has become a trash heap of AI slop, rather than injecting more AI slop into the iNaturalist experience. The director of iNaturalist is trying to save face by declaring that this grant to insert generative AI into iNaturalist will not be inserting generative AI into iNaturalist, when that’s the whole reason for Google giving them the grant.

I can assure you that I and the entire iNat team hates the AI slop that’s taking over the internet as much as you do.

… there’s no way we’re going to unleash AI generated slop onto the site.

Here’s a nice response to that.

Those are nice words, but AI-generated slop is still explicitly the plan. iNaturalist’s grant deliverable is “to have an initial demo available for select user testing by the end of 2025.”

You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash.

The iNaturalist charity is currently “working on a response that should answer most of the major questions people have and provide more clarity.”

They’re sure the people who do the work for free hate this whole plan only because there’s not enough “clarity” — and not because it’s a terrible idea.

People are leaving iNaturalist over this bad decision. The strength of iNaturalist has always been the good, dedicated people who work so hard at it, so any decision that drives people away and replaces them with a hallucinating bot is a bad decision.

My self-critique

Yesterday, I published a video. Looking at it after the fact, I got worried about myself — even though I don’t appear in it, I could see myself clearly, and in particular, the effects of a few days of ill health. I was slow and halting and thin-voiced, and failed to express my enthusiasm for the topic. My apologies to everyone.

I haven’t taken it down because it made me appreciate the privilege of health and mobility. I’ve been brought low by an abrupt and seemingly spontaneous break in a lateral ligament in my knee capsule, which means I can’t bend my right knee without severe pain, and I can’t put my weight on that leg. This has been devastating in multiple ways. Obviously, I can’t walk. The world beyond my front door is suddenly unreachable — there are steps! But then there were other problems. I spend about 4 hours a night trying to precisely bend my leg to minimize pain, which never works, until I fall asleep in exhaustion, and then I’ll be awakened at random times with bolts of agony running up my leg. I’m feeling permanently worn out.

Then I’m currently malnourished, and it’s my own fault. Chronic pain kills my appetite, and I’m beginning to feel the effects, but I can’t be motivated to do anything about it. Mary has been doing her best to supply me with something to eat, but I hate to say it, but she has no sense of taste and minimal skill at cooking. She leaves me these horrible sandwiches — two slices of bread with nothing but a little peanut butter between them — and I have to be desperate to choke them down. That’s what I’ve been living on since Thursday, and it’s not good (she’s at the store right now getting some canned soups that should improve my diet). I’m beginning to think this is a drawback to marrying a woman of Scandinavian descent.*

I’ve been fantasizing about sneaking into the kitchen and whipping up a lazy bachelor’s sandwich. A couple of slices of bread toasted in a little olive oil, some chopped onions and garlic, scrambling an egg, and adding a slice of cheese, some salt and pepper, and adding a splash of hot sauce to wake it up…that would be fantastic. Except then I have to imagine prying myself out of a chair and straightening this painful limb and hobbling into the kitchen to stand on one leg for the three minutes it would take to make it, and then staggering back to my office chair, and somehow lowering myself into it with my right knee sending alarms for every degree of bend I subject it to, and then my appetite evaporates.

I have an appointment with an orthopedist this morning, and I’m hoping that will put this stupid leg back on the road to recovery, before I starve to death.

I’ll get back to trying to do more science outreach once I’ve restored my flesh and am able to get around again. There are spiders right outside my door and I can’t go to them now!

*My grandmother, in her final years, would just go to Arby’s, buy 20 or more roast beef sandwiches, freeze them at home and thaw out one a day for dinner. I cannot imagine living like that, but food was just fuel to her. My mother was skin and bones when she died, because she had so little interest in food, I think my sister kept her alive as long as she did by doing all the cooking. I’ve acquired this bias that my peasant ancestors probably just lived on chunks of dried salt cod with an occasional boiled turnip until they got so tired of it they decided to go Viking.

Worse than I thought

This knee gets worse and worse — now swollen and very painful. It is agony to get up out of bed, and once out, it’s painful to get up again, so I’m spending most of my time taking the path of least resistance and staying in bed, which is incredibly boring. I have to get up to use the bathroom, but then my wife got me a bed pan, so even that incentive has been lost. She’s hovering over me all day long because we both know how catastrophic it would be if I were to fall.

I have an orthopedics appointment on Monday morning. I fear my travails will not end at that point.

Prognosis: boredom

not my knee

I have seen a doctor. I was x-rayed. I was informed that I have lovely knees, with no signs of arthritic degeneration. I got a blood test for my uric acid levels — they’re normal. I got a pressure bandage. I have an appointment for the orthopedic doctor for next week or the week after. But there are no quick fixes.

I hobbled out in just as much pain as when I went in.

I guess I’m just supposed to cross my fingers and hope it gets better, and if it gets worse, see an orthopedist for more tests.

Right now that means I just sit and wait for a week or more, and walk as little as possible. I’m dreading having to get up to walk 10 meters to use the bathroom.