Latest news with #university
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
ChatGPT prompts students to think amid fears that AI makes us stupid
ChatGPT has unveiled a 'study mode' feature that will ask students to think through questions instead of giving them easy answers. The feature in the popular AI chatbot will encourage schoolchildren and university students to tackle problems step by step, replacing the instant, comprehensive responses that it is known for. It follows accusations that chatbots have become a crutch preventing children from deeply engaging with a subject. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have threatened to upend education, allowing school pupils to generate essays and solve problems instantly rather than thinking for themselves. The new feature, which parent company OpenAI said had been developed with learning experts, instead uses hints and further questions to nudge users in the right direction. For example, when asked a computer science question regarding which of two algorithms would be more efficient, the feature would ask follow up questions before arriving at the answer. In comparison, the regular version of ChatGPT simply answers the question without further prompting. 'ChatGPT is becoming one of the most widely used learning tools in the world,' the company said. 'But its use in education has also raised an important question: how do we ensure it is used to support real learning, and doesn't just offer solutions without helping students make sense of them?' The feature will be an option that students have to select, and they will still be able to use the standard version of ChatGPT that will furnish them with easy answers. Lower brain activity A series of studies have suggested that over reliance on AI is inhibiting critical thinking. One from researchers at MIT's Media Lab found that students relying on AI models when writing essays showed lower levels of brain activity than those using search engines or relying solely on their own faculties. More than a quarter of 13 to 17-year-olds have used ChatGPT for schoolwork, according to the US Pew Research Centre. Oftsed said last month that 'dependence on AI tools might hinder the development of pupils' critical thinking and problem-solving skills if they are not used effectively'. Labour has unveiled plans to encourage schools to make more use of AI, including drawing up lesson plans and marking homework. The Conservatives have warned that this risks 'starving children of the ability to think critically'.
BBC News
a day ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Sue Gray appointed to governing body of Queen's University
Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff Sue Gray has been appointed to the governing body of Queen's University Gray quit as the prime minister's chief of staff in October 2024 after rows over her pay and has now been named as one of four new members of the senate at Queen's University of Belfast (QUB), a role that comes without a senate is the university's governing body, responsible for the oversight of strategy, finances and performance. Ms Gray has been appointed a pro-chancellor at QUB, so will attend ceremonies like graduations to becoming the prime minister's chief of staff, Ms Gray had worked in government in Northern was once described as "the most powerful civil servant you've never heard of" when she had a job in the Cabinet Office. Ms Gray was also the so-called Partygate critical report into lockdown gatherings in Downing Street contributed to the resignation of Boris Johnson as prime Conservative MPs expressed anger when Ms Gray subsequently took up a high-profile role with the Labour Party in after resigning as the prime minister's chief of staff, Ms Gray subsequently decided not to become the government's envoy to the nations and was appointed to the House of Lords at the end of leaving Downing Street she has also chaired the board of a business and investment consultancy, and has now been announced as one of four new members of the QUB university's vice-chancellor Prof Ian Greer said the pro-chancellors at the university played "a crucial role in upholding the highest standards of accountability and leadership."Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has been the chancellor of QUB since is a mainly ceremonial role, though the university has faced opposition from some staff and students over Ms Clinton's stance on the conflict in Gaza.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
San Francisco in Talks With Vanderbilt to Bring Campus Downtown
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and Vanderbilt University said they're in talks to bring a new campus to the city's struggling downtown. The negotiations, which were reported earlier on Monday by the San Francisco Chronicle, are part of a longtime plan by the city to fill downtown vacancies with university campuses. For Vanderbilt, San Francisco would provide another outpost as it continues to expand beyond its home campus in Nashville.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Edinburgh University's ‘skull room' highlights its complicated history with racist science
Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets. Most carry faded, peeling labels, some bear painted catalogue numbers; one has gold teeth; and the occasional one still carries its skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's 'skull room'. Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others came from executed Scottish murderers; some Indigenous people's skulls were brought to Scotland by military officers on expeditions or conquest missions. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist science of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character. Among them are the skulls of two brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not recorded in the skull room catalogue, but cross-referencing of matriculation and death records suggests they were George Richards, a 21-year-old medic who died of smallpox in 1832, and his younger brother, Robert Bruce, 18, a divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833. Exactly how the Richards brothers' skulls came to be separated from their bodies, recorded as interred in the South Leith parish church cemetery, is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial difference. Researchers believe their case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which, it has now emerged, played a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference from the late 1700s onwards – ideas taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who dispersed across the British empire. University records studied by Dr Simon Buck suggest the brothers were of mixed African and European descent, born in Barbados to George Richards, an Edinburgh-educated doctor who practised medicine on sugar plantations and who owned enslaved people – possibly including George and Robert Bruce's mother. Edinburgh Phrenological Society's 1858 catalogue records the skulls (listed as No 1 and No 2) as having belonged to 'mulatto' students of divinity and medicine. 'It can be assumed that the racialisation of these two individuals as 'mulatto' – a hybrid racial category that both fascinated and bewildered phrenologists – is what aroused interest among members of the society in the skulls of these two students,' Edinburgh's decolonisation report concludes. The brothers' skulls are among the roughly 400 amassed by the society and later absorbed into the anatomical museum's collection, which now contains about 1,500 skulls. These are held in the Skull Room, to which The Guardian was granted rare access. Many of these ancestral remains, the report states, 'were taken, without consent, from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields', with others 'having been stolen and exported from the British empire's colonies', often gifted by a global network of Edinburgh alumni. 'We can't escape the fact that some of [the skulls] will have been collected with the absolute express purpose of saying, 'This is a person from a specific race, and aren't they inferior to the white man',' said Prof Tom Gillingwater, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, who now oversees the anatomical collection. 'We can't get away from that.' The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by George Combe, a lawyer, and his younger brother, Andrew, a doctor, with roughly a third of its early members being physicians. Both were students at the university, and some Edinburgh professors were active members. Through its acquisition of skulls from across the globe, the society played a central role in turning the 'science' of phrenology, which claimed to decode an individual's intellect and moral character from bumps and grooves on the skull, into a tool of racial categorisation that placed the white European man at the top of a supposed hierarchy. George Combe's book, The Constitution of Man, was a 19th-century international bestseller and the Combe Trust (founded with money made from books and lecture tours promoting phrenology) endowed Edinburgh's first professorship in psychology in 1906 and continues to fund annual Combe Trust fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Phrenology was criticised by some of Edinburgh's medical elite for its unscientific approach. But some of its most vocal critics were nonetheless persuaded that immutable biological differences in intelligence and temperament existed between populations, a study by Dr Ian Stewart for the university's decolonisation report reveals. These included Alexander Monro III, an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh medical school, who lectured 'that the Negro skull, and consequently the brain, is smaller than that of the European', and Robert Jameson, a regius professor of natural history, whose lectures at the university in the 1810s included a hierarchical racial diagram of brain size and intelligence. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh, and its accuracy was heavily contested by Edinburgh academics, the skull room, which is closed to the public, was built partly to house its collection by the then professor of anatomy Sir William Turner, when he helped oversee the construction of its new medical school in the 1880s. Among its reparatory justice recommendations of Edinburgh's investigation is that the university provide more support for the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities. This, Gillingwater suggested, possibly underplays the complexities involved – even for cases such as the Richards brothers. He regards the circumstantial evidence in their case as 'strong' but says it does not meet the forensic threshold required for conclusive identification. 'From a legal perspective, it wouldn't be watertight,' said Gillingwater. 'I would never dream of returning remains to a family when I didn't know who they definitely were.' Active engagement surrounding repatriation is taking place in relation to several of the skulls from the phrenology collection; more than 100 have already been repatriated to their places of origin. But each case takes time building trust with communities and in some cases navigating geopolitical tensions over which descendent community has the strongest claim to the remains. 'To look at perhaps repatriation, burials, or whatever, it's literally years of work almost for each individual case,' said Gillingwater. 'And what I found is that every individual culture you deal with wants things done completely differently.' Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'That is something that keeps me awake at night,' said Gillingwater. 'For some of our skulls, I know that whatever we do, we're never going to end up with an answer.' 'All I can offer at the minute is that we just continue to care for them,' he added. 'They've been with us, many of them, for a couple of hundred years. So we can look after them. We can care for them. We can treat them with that dignity and respect they all deserve individually.'
Khaleej Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Kajol cheers for daughter Nysa at graduation ceremony
It was a moment of pride for Bollywood actor Kajol as her daughter Nysa Devgn completed her graduation from a university in Switzerland. In a video from the graduation ceremony, Kajol was seen cheering enthusiastically for her daughter. What caught the attention of the netizens was the way she applauded Nysa. Her enthusiastic cheer reminded many fans of her iconic character, Anjali, from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., in which her character praises her son at a school function. Ajay Devgn's daughter wore the traditional graduation robe as she walked up the stage to receive her degree. Kajol's excitement was reflected as she shouted for her daughter. One fan commented, "This is so Anjali from K3g energy" Ajay and Kajol got married in 1999. The star couple welcomed their daughter, Nysa, on April 20, 2003. Seven years later, their son Yug was born on September 13, 2010. Kajol is being lauded for her role in Kayoze Irani's directorial Sarzameen. Directed by Kayoze Irani, the film stars Prithviraj Sukumaran as Vijay Menon — a man torn between a father's love and a soldier's duty, Kajol as Meher — a mother who fights against all odds to keep her family intact, and Ibrahim Ali Khan as Harman, a vulnerable young man caught at a crossroads. She will be seen hosting a talk show with Twinke Khanna. Titled Two Much With Kajol and Twinkle. Produced and conceptualised by Banijay Asia, the show is described as a "bold, fiery, and candid" entry into the talk show space, featuring a guest list that includes the "biggest names" in Bollywood and the film industry's who's who.
