The latest PISA assessment presents an unusually stark picture of educational performance. More than 760,000 15-year-old students across 91 participating countries and economies were assessed, producing evidence of broad declines in some
Left uninterrogated in “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? ” and “Against Theory” is what “authorial intent” means for LLMs, as well as the assertion that meaning
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No theorist in the humanities simply writes up their discoveries. The writing process is constitutive to any meaning in humanities scholarship. So, as radically focused on authorship as “Against Theory” is—undercutting all
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A graduate student who fell asleep in 1982 and woke up in 2022 might see large language models as a triumph for cultural theory. It is hard to imagine a clearer vindication
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“Can Computers Create Meanings?” The point of the wave poem in Knapp and Michaels’s “Against Theory” was neither to ask that question, nor to ask if oceans can intend to write messages
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Little more than a century ago, British and Indian archaeologists began excavating the remains of what they soon realized was a previously unknown civilization in the Indus Valley. Straddling parts of Pakistan
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“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” ~ Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West The Issue The Government of Sri Lanka, under Extraordinary
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Every time something terrible happens to me I think, ‘well, at least this would make a good story.’ In fact, the worse the something, the better the story. It’s the writer’s relief. When my
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A new mood of defiance in the Global South has generated bewilderment in the capitals of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan), where officials are struggling to answer why governments in the
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On 15 December 1972 the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A 2994 which designated 5 June as World Environment Day and urged Governments and the organizations in the United Nations system to
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We live in an era of mass migration. According to the United Nations’ World Migration Report 2022, there were 281 million international migrants in 2020, equaling 3.6 percent of the global population. That’s
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