Lincoln Land Community College recognized students with academic, leadership and special awards during a May 3 ceremony.

Arenzville Daniel Wingert, Excellence in Jazz Band.

Franklin Holly Richardson, Health Professions Department honor graduate.

Jacksonville Adam Christian, Natural and Agricultural Sciences Department honor graduate; Hannah R.Deeder, Health Professions Department honor graduate; MirandaK. Elliott, Mathematics and Computer Science Department honor graduate; DrewEzard, Outstanding Student Athlete, Social Sciences and Business Department honor graduate; JacksonK. Ford, Social Sciences and Business Department honor graduate; JoeyGallo, Phi Theta Kappa president;Dee Goings, Phi Theta Kappa public relations officer; Jacob D.Hembrough, Mathematics and Computer Science Department honor graduate; KendallP. Jumper, Social Sciences and Business Department honor graduate; Ryan Maul, Outstanding Student Athlete; Alyssa Miller, Outstanding Student Athlete; WilliamRohlk, Outstanding Student Athlete; Evan Wyatt, Chemistry Club president, Natural and Agricultural Sciences Department honor graduate.

Palmyra Devin Branstner, Workforce Institute honor graduate.

South Jacksonville Carley Provo, Ron Coffman Memorial Scholarship, Social Sciences and Business Department honor graduate.

Virden Farren Ackerman, Chemistry Club Leadership; Caitlin Little, Phi Theta Kappa vice president of fellowship, Arts and Communication Department honor graduate.

Virginia NathanDanner, Workforce Institute honor graduate.

Waverly Jaime Lyons, PATH Program Award.

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Lincoln Land Community College students honored at awards ... - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

I've just watched a very interesting video by Endeavour. He compares two Canadian PSA films, made twenty years apart. They are effectively the original and the remake, since they utilize the same narrative device and techniques and handle the same issue. Thus, they are a perfect way to compare the Canadas of 1999 and 2019.

(Before I get to the actual meat, a quick tangent. I noticed that the CGI in the 2019 version is barely, if at all, better than that in the 1999 version. If something as prominent in modern culture as CGI has not improved in 20 years, that would seem to confirm the observation that we have been stultified since the year 2000.)

While the 1999 version was aimed at children (being broadcast on childrens TV channels) the 2019 version is aimed at adults (its associated website even has a section explicitly for parents). Ironically, given the 20-year gap, we can assume that the two PSAs are actually targeting the very same generation: people who were children in 1999 and young adults in 2019.

The message of the 1990 PSA is that, if you are not careful, you can get tricked into believing things that are not true, especially if the person telling you those things sounds authoritative. Therefore, it is important to always think critically, even with things you are told by so-called experts. In effect, it is warning against placing too much trust in those who are, formally speaking, above you in societys hierarchy.

The fascinating observation Endeavour made is that the 2019 PSA, while ostensibly doing the exact same thing as its 1999 predecessor, actually does the diametrically opposite thing. It tells people not to think for themselves, but to trust the experts, whether that be Wikipedia, scientists, the government, the mainstream media, or accredited fact-checkers. By contrast, the 1999 version specifically says that people can be duped when they place too much trust in authority. While it effectively said dont believe everything you see on TV, its successor effectively says believe only what you see on TV. The first warns about the danger of corrupt or dishonest experts, the second asserts that experts are your only defense against corruption and dishonesty.

While the 1999 version assumed a level of intelligence and discernment in the general public and sought to encourage those qualities, the 2019 version does the opposite, advising people to switch their mental faculties off. The only thinking you are supposed to do is that the powerful are correct, trustworthy and reliable, and are in fact your only source of safety in a world of foolish people like yourself. In contrast to its predecessor, the 2019 version assumes a public that is stupid, gullible, and constantly at risk of letting itself down and (or rather, by) defying the powerful.

This change, over a period of just 20 years, is simply remarkable. When Zoomers wonder why Millennials have nostalgia for the 1990s, this kind of thing serves to show that life really was different then.

Now, it can be argued that in 1999 the powerful also distrusted the publics ability to think, so took to persuading them via flattery (e.g. We know youre smart, so of course youll think X). This is true, but it only makes the change in dynamic more ominous. Whereas, in 1999, the powerful felt they had to pretend to respect the public, today they dont. Today they brazenly talk down to them, and even openly tell them not to trust their own judgemente.g. We know youre not smart, so you need to be told to think X. But dont worry, were here to do just that.

It gets worse when we click on the website that is linked from the 2019 PSA. While the film delivers the short insult, this website does the heavy lifting and really puts the knife into any idea you had that you were fit for this thinking malarkey. Called Break the Fake in a cutting reference to fake news, the website was funded at least in part by the Canadian government, which then as now operated under the seemingly eternal loving care of Justin Trudeau.

One of the first things on the website is a video which tells you, in not so many words, to entrust your critical thinking to Google and accredited fact-checkers. To be fair, it does also advise to check whether a claim has been made by multiple outlets or just one (potentially rogue) outlet, but that is the only good advice it gives, and even then, in this age of systematic censorship, multiple outlets corroborating a true claim can be hard to find, unless the claim is one that Google (and Trudeau) want you believing. Otherwise, Google will censor it, deboost outlets which promote it, and boost outlets which fact-check it. (And Trudeau will call people racist for complaining about this.)

Next, the website has a dedicated section on COVID-19, which has presumably been added since it went online in 2019. I couldnt bring myself to click on that.

The website lists three tests to check whether you are really thinking critically. You might expect such tests to be things like: how well does the theory fit the known facts? or does the theory have the ring of truth or does it even seem absurd? or does the theory make internal sense? or "how much does the theory explain? Not at all. Here are the tests:

What do I already think or believe about this? [testing for confirmation bias]

Why do I want to believe or disprove this? [testing for wishful thinking]

What would make me change my mind? [testing for willingness to believe otherwise]

Note that these tests relate, not to the theory itself, but to the mind that evaluates the theory.

Even the third test, which could be worded as a test of the theoryhow could this theory be proven false?is instead worded as a test of youare you willing to change your mind, or are you committed to believing this theory come what may?

The other two tests are even worse, being entirely about your motivations for believing something. While motivation is certainly relevant (nobody is as logical as they think they are) it strikes me as sinister to make this the only concern. In isolation like this, it seems more like gaslighting, browbeating the person into doubting their own ability to think and even trying to persuade them that the very motives which drive their thinking are dubiousuntil tested otherwise.

If you wanted a picture of an authority with contemptuous paranoia about the general public, there it is. It is one thing for them to believe the public are stupid, but for them to openly tell the public (in effect) that they are stupid... is just staggering. A teacher of five year-olds probably accords them more respect than the governments of the modern West accord their citizens. The teacher would encourage her pupils to work it out for yourself; the modern governments explicitly tell people dont try to work it out for yourself.

But of course there is another dimension to the message. The full version is: Dont try to work it out for yourself, and dont listen to anyone's explanation of it except ours. This relates to the democratizing effect that the Internet exerted upon society between 1999 and 2019. Enabling a multiplicity of outlets to offer explanations for things, the Internet enabled a multiplicity of rivals to the central power, potential threats to its stranglehold. Well, it turns out that democratization is not what it was cracked up to be. In fact, democratization is a threat to our democracy.

At the same time, it has to be noted that there is an assumption implicit in making PSA films like this, even the 1999 version. To see a need for such films is to believe that the public have a tendency not to think for themselves, not to be skeptical, not to question what they are told. You could almost conclude that what we really need is a new public a new genetic group that has been shorn of these tendencies towards compliance and stupidity. Such a public would be harder to control, but easier to admire.

But then, there I go, assuming that the job of ordinary people is to do their own thinking for themselves. It isnt, really, is it? They are made to follow, made to trust. So, in a grim sense, the 2019 PSA is actually more realistic than the 1999 version. The 1999 version is the kind of thing I grew up watching, and the messagethat most people are capable of independent thoughtis one I thoroughly absorbed during my formative years, and perhaps that is why I find myself constantly perplexed at how people actually are.

You couldnt say the technocrats are honest about people, but they are realistic about them.

But that takes us to the nature of the technocrats. Sociopathy bestows clarifying realism in place of empathy, both obscuring truth and obscuring the value of truth. This is the approach that an efficient predator takes towards its preybut that is a story for another time.

Millennial Woes writes at millennialwoes.substack.com.

Continued here:

Break it 'til you fake it - The Herald Journal

George Mason University will graduate its largest class in history this week, and perhaps its most traveled as wellthe nearly 11,000 honorees hail from 111 countries, 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and military installations.

Spring Commencement is set for 10 a.m. Thursday, May 18, at EagleBank Arena on the Fairfax Campus, with doors opening at 8:30 a.m. Tickets are required for guests to enter the arena, and wristbands are required for students.

Mason, the largest and most diverse public university in Virginia, will award 10,220 degrees for graduates who have filed an intent to graduate from Summer 2022, Fall 2022, and Spring 2023. The university also will award 721 certificates.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is the featured speaker, continuing a long tradition of the states chief executive addressing Mason graduates. Galilea Sejas-Machado, graduating with a bachelors degree in sociology and another in criminology, law and society, is the student speaker.

The university will present its highest honor, the Mason Medal, to Kimmy Duong, a Northern Virginia tech entrepreneur who supports Mason in many ways, including by awarding scholarships through her foundation.

The Class of 2023 reflects the universitys mission of access as well as its leading role in supplying tech talent to the region. About one in four graduates reports that they are first-generation degree earners and one in three bachelors degree recipients are in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Two of the top three masters programs with the most 2023 graduates are data analytics engineering and computer science, and two of the top five doctorate majors are information technology and computer science.

The new graduates might find encouragement in the success of their predecessors. According to a Mason Career Plans Survey, 87% of Class of 2022 graduates report a positive career outcome with a median salary of $72,000.

Some Commencement day procedures for graduates and their guests have been changed. Graduates participating in Spring Commencement must check in with their Mason ID or G# at Wilkins Plaza no later than 9 a.m. Thursday to receive a wristband, then line up for the procession to the arena.

Non-ticketed guests and students without wristbands will be directed to the Concert Hall at the Center for the Arts on Mason Pond Drive where they can watch the ceremony live on screen. The livestream will be available on Masons main YouTube channel and on the Mason homepage.

As in previous ceremonies, doctoral candidates will be individually recognized and hooded. Graduates receiving bachelors and masters degrees will be recognized as a group at their seats.

The top five undergraduate majors among the 6,265 undergraduates in the Class of 2023 are business; information technology; psychology; criminology, law and society; and computer science.

For the 3,478 students earning masters degrees, the top five majors are data analytics engineering, curriculum and instruction, computer science, special education, and business administration.

The top majors for the 337 students earning doctoral degrees are education, psychology, economics, information technology, and computer science.

There also are 140 law school graduates. The Scalia Law School will hold a convocation Friday at the Center for the Arts.

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Mason gears up to celebrate the Class of 2023 - George Mason University

A new technology developed by University of Texas at Austin scientists can turn a persons thoughts into readable text.

Its called a semantic decoder, and it uses artificial intelligence to interpret brain activity. The decoder can allow communication with someone who is mentally conscious but may be unable to speak like someone whos had a stroke.

Alex Huth is an assistant professor of neuroscience in computer science at UT-Austin. He worked with doctoral student Jerry Tang to develop this decoder. Huth joined Texas Standard to talk about their research, the technology and the legal and ethical concerns surrounding it. Listen to the story above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard:Give us an overview of this brain activity decoder youve created. What is it and how does it work exactly? This sounds like one of these almost science fiction devices.

Alex Huth:Yeah, every day were moving a little bit of science fiction into science fact. So the way it works is we put a person in an MRI scanner, kind of like the one where you would get a medical MRI. But were doing functional MRI so we can record whats happening in the brain. We build up a mapping of where different ideas, different thoughts are represented in the brain over many hours of training. And then we can use our algorithms to read those ideas out into words. So we can decode words that somebody is hearing if theyre listening to a podcast, for example, or even just thinking if theyre telling a story inside their head.

So does the person, the subject, do they have to think particularly hard about it for it to register? How does it work?

So it seems like they have to be very intentionally thinking something. So we were concerned about kind of the mental privacy implications

I was going to say, youve seen the movie Minority Report, right? I would think that there might be something like that.

So were worried about this. So we did some tests to see if the person, if they werent thinking thoughts very deliberately or if they were trying to think something else, could that upset the decoder? Could that make it not work? And it turns out it can. So the person has to be very deliberately, actively sort of thinking a sentence in their head, and then we can read that out. And of course, this only works on a person where weve trained this model with many hours of data.

You mentioned listening to podcasts, for example. This was part of your experimentation?

Oh, yes.

So is this technology, which uses the kind of artificial intelligence language model that people may know from ChatGPT, how different is it from what has been achieved in the past?

So theres a couple strands of work in this direction in the past. One, the most successful so far, has been using electrodes that are actually implanted in the brain. So this is after neurosurgery to implant electrodes, which is only done for people who are undergoing epilepsy surgery or have another medical issue. Thats been very successful, but that gets at a kind of different level of language. So that looks at how a person is trying to move their mouth to speak, for example. Whereas our technology works at this much higher level. Its about like, what are the ideas the person is thinking about or hearing about? And we can actually read that out, which means that we can do it non-invasively. So we dont need a person to have brain surgery. They can do it with an MRI, which anybody can do.

How nuanced is it?

Its okay. So its not perfect by any stretch. It doesnt get the exact words that a person is, you know, hearing or trying to say. It gets the gist. So it gets kind of what are the main ideas. Sometimes it gets phrases correct you know, specific sequences of words but its still kind of at the level of gist. This is something that were working on improving.

So you talked about how this could help people whose brains are active but cant speak. Do you see any other applications for it?

Yeah. So potentially this could become something that consumers could use at home, certainly not with an MRI scanner, but with other neuro imaging technologies.

I imagine its only a matter of time.

Hopefully. Its kind of hard to say, you know, what kinds of technologies will be available for looking at brain signals in the future, but were kind of hopeful that thats going to work. And if thats something that people could use at home, then they could potentially use it to interface with their computer. They could use it to search for things to control their computer without actively, you know, typing things in. We dont really know what the killer app for that would be yet, but I think theres a lot of possibilities.

Nolan Zunk

/

University of Texas at Austin

You know, its hard not to think about this and think about those who might use it for more nefarious purposes. Weve heard the expression thought police.

Absolutely.

What sort of ethical or legal safeguards are going to have to be built in now that we are, from the sound of it, at that threshold?

This is something weve thought about a lot in this work. So we certainly think were at the point where considering codified legal safeguards is important is something that we should be actively worrying about that people should not have this done without their consent. We think this should not be used for law enforcement purposes because its certainly not accurate enough for that. That hasnt stopped law enforcement in the past, for example, with the polygraph. We dont want to have that kind of situation repeated. We did some testing on kind of these privacy concerns to see how much control does the person have and thats where we found, again, that if the person is trying to resist it trying to make it not work then they can do that. They can shut it off. And also, we had this lengthy training procedure where the person has to lay in the scanner for many, many hours and listen to podcasts. We tried to see, can we avoid that? Can we take the model that we trained on one persons brain and apply it to a new person so we wouldnt need to do this training on them? And that doesnt work at all, currently. So right now I think the concerns are not very acute, but its on the horizon, which is why I think we should think about it.

Whats the next frontier as you see it?

The biggest kind of avenue forward that we see with this is kind of bigger and better models like bigger and better A.I. models. As these models get more effective, as we move from the kinds of things that we used in this work which was GPT-1 from 2019 now theres much more effective models out there, and we think that those things will very much improve the system make it more accurate, which which were excited about. But a lot of what were doing is really, you know, what we try to study in my lab is how our brains process language, how we understand language. Thats our scientific goal. So a lot of what were doing is taking these same kinds of models and using them to try to figure out what the brain is doing, to try to say what are the different parts of the brain responding to, how is language and meaning

More broadly beyond the technology, in other words.

Right. So what are the scientific implications? So really most of our work is in that direction.

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'Science fiction into science fact': Decoder can turn your thoughts ... - KUT