Daily update – dangermouse.net

Ethics of automated AI summaries of ethics lessons

The weather here has been showery for the past several days. Intermittent sunshine, with occasional heavy showers passing across and vanishing within half an hour or so. But it looks like the showers will get more frequent and intense as we head into the weekend, with up to 100 mm of rain forecast. So that should be interesting.

It’s another long weekend, with tomorrow (Friday) being Anzac Day, another public holiday where the supermarkets are closed, so I can’t do my regular Friday morning weekly shopping for the second week in a row.

And in other news, I discovered today that Outschool is producing automated AI summaries of each of my lessons and sending them to enrolled parents after each class. I don’t recall being informed of this new feature (but it’s possible I missed it in one of the teacher newsletters that Outschool sends out periodically). Importantly, I can’t find any teacher settings to control this feature—there’s no way to disable it. I was a little puzzled as to how it was generating the summary, because when I clicked out of curiosity on the link that I’d never noticed before that said “View the AI class summary”, it showed me the following:

The teacher led a discussion about Antarctica, exploring reasons why people might want to visit or explore the continent, as well as potential challenges and risks they would face. The class considered the benefits and drawbacks of allowing countries to claim or mine parts of Antarctica, and whether it would be acceptable for people to live there in the future if global warming made the continent more habitable. The teacher provided context about Antarctica’s unique environment, the history of exploration, and the current Antarctic Treaty that regulates activities there. The class also discussed the role of science and research in Antarctica, and the potential impacts of tourism. Overall, the session focused on critical thinking about the complex issues surrounding the use and preservation of this remote and harsh continent.

This is more and more detailed information than I include in the class description text for this week’s topic. So I went back to the class that I taught an hour earlier, and it listed the following summary:

The teacher introduced the topic of Antarctica, discussing its geography, climate, and wildlife. The class explored why people might want to visit or explore Antarctica, considering both the benefits and risks, such as the extreme cold, lack of food and resources, and hazardous terrain. The teacher presented information about the history of Antarctic exploration and the current system of claims and treaties governing the continent. The class also considered the potential environmental impact of activities like mining and tourism in Antarctica. Throughout the discussion, the teacher facilitated dialogue with the students, asking questions to elicit their thoughts and perspectives on the various issues surrounding Antarctica.

Similar in content, but very different in wording. After discussing with some friends in our Discord chat, we’ve concluded it must be an automated transcript of the voice from the Zoom meeting, then fed through an AI summariser. I’m sceptical of the value of AI for many things, but in this specific application I think it’s done a reasonable job of accurately describing the class content. So I don’t actually mind it so much, as it does help to keep the parents informed of what their kids are learning. But I would like the opportunity to configure or disable it in settings if I wanted to.

On the bright side, I suppose if parents are getting these AI summaries for every single class their kids are enrolled in, hopefully they won’t be reading them all super carefully and critically.

I wonder how likely it is that one of these summaries might include some of the small-talk chat that I engage in with the kids while we wait for later arrivals to join the Zoom call. It’d be bad if the summary included something like: “The teacher asked about the pet puppy of one student and how its toilet training was going.” 🤭

Star Trek rewatch

Another thing I’m doing at the moment is rewatching all of the original Star Trek. And the Animated Series. I’m interspersing them because sometimes I have an hour in the evening to watch something, while sometimes I finish working late and only want to watch a 25-minute show before bed time, which suits the animated episodes.

Yesterday I watched “The Deadly Years“, which marks the halfway point of the original 79 episodes. Unfortunately most of the better episodes are in the first half of the run, and most of the bad ones are to come.

I’m also using this is an opportunity to reread through my own comic parody of the series: Planet of Hats. I drew these comics about ten years ago now, and haven’t looked at them much in the meantime, so I’m reading each episode after watching the TV episode, and pleasantly surprising myself with what I did for them.

Today I mostly worked on Darths & Droids comics, writing and producing two whole strips. I’m building up my buffer adequately to have enough completed before my June trip. In between I took Scully for a walk, managing to avoid the intermittent showers. These are forecast to last for the next week or so, and we might get some heavy rain on the weekend.

Tonight I made lentil dhal with potato and pumpkin for dinner – something I could keep warm on the stove for my wife to eat later after I began my three classes in a row from 5-8pm. On Wednesdays I’m eating half my dinner before 5, and half after 8pm. Which is not ideal, but it works.

Awful Australian politics

Maybe not what you’re thinking from the title. My wife has started watching the Netflix series The Residence. It’s set in the White House and there are various political characters, including one who is repeatedly referred to as the “First Lady of Australia”. It’s clear that the writers have no idea about how Australian politics works, because the spouse of the Prime Minister has no such title and no duties anything like the role of First Lady of the United States. Can’t they do even basic research to get these things right and not annoyingly wrong?

As an aside, our current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, isn’t married, being divorced from his first wife before being elected. He has a partner, and proposed marriage last year (while Prime Minister). Their wedding is expected to follow the imminent election, now just 11 days away. If he’s returned as Prime Minister, it will be the first time an Australian Prime Minister gets married while in office.

I suppose I have another story about politics. With the election very soon, the political ads are ramping up in all media. As has become usual, many of them are scare tactic ads aimed at making voters afraid of the other major party. And one of them which I heard again today is making the point that our Opposition leader wants to make Australia “more like America”. This is enough to scare Australian voters. “That guy wants to make Australia more like America” is an effective scare message to get people not to vote for that guy. And it’s working, because the Opposition is falling behind in the polls. That tells you something about our collective opinions on the US right now.

This morning my wife took Scully to work, so I had a morning free to go for a run, and took the chance to do another 5k. The weather was chilly, with intermittent heavy showers all day, but I managed to avoid them while running.

This afternoon I wrote up my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic, which is Antarctica. There are plenty of questions about why people are interested in Antarctica, who (if anyone) should be allowed to go there, live there, own it, use mineral resources, etc, etc. I did the first class this evening and it went fairly well. It’s always tricky doing the first class of a new topic, and not knowing which questions the kids will find interesting or have strong opinions on.

Tonight we had one kid who was pretty gung-ho in favour of letting people mine Antarctica, and two who were more concerned with protecting its environment, so that was interesting!

The joy and despair of roast vegetables

I’ve realised that although I love roast vegetables, the reason we seldom have them is because I really hate cooking them. I find it unenjoyable to make roast vegetables, compared to cooking most other things.

My wife and I were talking today about what to make for dinner to go with the last slices of leftover lentil loaf from Easter lunch. She suggested roasted vegetables: potato, pumpkin, onions, the usual sort of thing. My heart sank.

I’m not even sure why I dislike making roast vegetables. It’s not like it’s difficult or time consuming, other than just waiting for the oven to cook them. There’s something about all the oil, and the mess in the roasting pan… I don’t know. I love eating roast vegetables, but I really really dislike making them.

Anyway, my wife decided to take the reins and do the cooking tonight. So I got to eat roast vegetables without having to prepare them! So that was pretty good. She was home today because of the Easter Monday public holiday, and in fact only has three days of work this week due to Anzac Day being on Friday.

This evening I completed the last two ethics classes on the “Memories” topic. I did the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm experiment results with all my classes, and now that the topic is completed I can report the final result: 33/47 kids said they remembered seeing the word “sleep” on a slide that did not include that word. So that’s over 70% success rate in giving them a false memory, compared to a reported rate of about 44% for tests over many subjects. I saw that it’s more likely to work with adults and less likely to work with children, so my result is a little against the trend. But of course the numbers are not really high enough to make any significant conclusion, other than yes, it really is easy to induce false memories in people.

I claim this is ethical because I explain to the kids afterwards what happened, and how it works, and we discuss the consequences of the fact that our memories are unreliable, and how we should take this into account in our lives. It was a really good topic!

Easter lunch

You’ll be happy to know the antibiotics are working and my nose is not as swollen or sore as yesterday.

I got up this morning and had a quick breakfast before heading out for a 5k run. I took it easier today and also did the more scenic, but hillier route, so my time was slower. But I’ve been good this month and already run more than either February or March.

Then it was off to my mother-in-law’s place for Easter Sunday lunch with the family. She made roast lamb and vegetables, which was very nice. And then dessert: cheesecake and of course lots of chocolate. We had the fancy little Easter eggs and hot-cross-bun-flavoured chocolates that my brother-in-law gets from a local chocolate shop near his place. These are always really good.

We had to leave early, at 3pm, to get home in time for my first class of the evening, which began at 4:00. It’s a little tricky having them on a holiday where we normally do family stuff, but we managed okay. Fortunately the traffic coming home wasn’t bad.

And we just had some leftover lentil loaf (that I mentioned we were cooking yesterday) for dinner, since we came home with half of it from the lunch. I also have some lamb, which will be good on sandwiches for lunch tomorrow!

Easter weekend is no time to get sick

I’ve been monitoring a slightly sore nose for a few days and last night I decided it was sore enough that it’s probably infected. So I wanted to see a doctor and hopefully get some antibiotics – or reassurance that it’s not infected.

But it’s Easter weekend, and my GP isn’t open again until Tuesday. There’s a walk-in medical centre up the road, and when I checked during a wakeful period during the night I saw they opened at 8:00. They don’t take appointments, you just show up and wait for the next doctor to be available. So I decided to get up at 7:00, have a quick breakfast, and walk up to wait at the door before they opened, to ensure I wouldn’t have to wait long to see a doctor.

I got there about 7:30 and was the only one waiting until about ten minutes to go, when a queue began forming behind me. The woman behind me was fiddling with her phone, and expressing some frustration, muttering something like, “They must only activate the app when it opens.” I asked her, “Do you need an app to get an appointment?” She answered no, you can go to the receptionist, but they try to direct you to download the app.

I really hate this sort of thing. No way I want to download and install an app on my phone just to access a service like this, and doubly so for a place that I’m not a regular customer. I figured if the receptionist tells me to install an app just to get an appointment, I’ll just refuse and ask to have one without it.

Eventually the door opened and we went in. I saw next to the reception desk were huge billboards on either side, with a QR code to download the booking app, but I ignored these. I was first in the queue, so approached the receptionist first, and asked to see a doctor. She didn’t mention the app, but simply asked my date of birth and name and found my record very quickly (I’d been here once before for a vaccination), and booked me in. It only took 30 seconds at most. But by the time she’d done this, she said that I was seventh in the queue, and that being Easter Saturday there was only one doctor on duty! So… in the time it took me to walk from the door to the reception desk and get the receptionist to enter me into the waiting list, six other patients behind me had used the app to claim places in the queue ahead of me! 😡

Fortunately, a couple of other doctors apparently arrived, and they churned through the patients very quickly, so I was seeing one just before 8:30. He confirmed my nose was infected and prescribed some oral antibiotics and a topical ointment. I left with the prescription (at zero cost, thanks to Australia’s Medicare system). Next step was to find a pharmacy where I could buy the medicines. I searched online and found on down the street that said it opened at 8:30, so I walked down there, only to find a sign stuck to the window saying that it opened at 9:30 on Easter Saturday!

I walked back up the street, checking the windows of all the pharmacies—there are four of them within a few blocks. They all had later opening hours for the holiday, but I found one that opened at 9:00. By now my wife had appeared with Scully, having walked up to get some coffee. So we sat together at a cafe for half an hour until the pharmacy opened.

Unfortunately everyone else had the same idea and when I arrived at about 5 minutes past 9, there was a queue of about 8 people ahead of me with prescriptions to be filled. So that took some time, and I didn’t get home until almost 10:00. I had some antibiotic tablets and applied the ointment, and then changed to go for a 5k run.

After that and post-run stretching exercises I had a shower and it was almost time to go to the supermarket to pick up my online pick-up order. I couldn’t do this on Friday as usual because it was Good Friday and the supermarkets were all closed. And the supermarket was very busy, because tomorrow it’s closed as well for Easter Sunday and so a lot of people need to cram their shopping into Saturday on this weekend.

After all that I finally did some comics stuff in the afternoon. I helped my wife cook a lentil mushroom loaf which we’ll be taking to lunch at her mother’s place tomorrow, as a vegetarian alternative to the roast lamb. And for dinner I made enchiladas, with spinach as we had some leftover fresh spinach that needed to be used up.

Board game learning night

Today was Good Friday, but unlike most people I didn’t have a day off work. I had two ethics classes in the morning, and two in the afternoon. But in between I got to do a long walk with my wife (who had the day off work) and Scully.

After the last class I went over to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. But since most of our friends were off enjoying the long weekend with their families, there were only two of us present. We used the opportunity to teach each other some complex games that we’d been stalled on learning. I taught him Root, and he taught me Spirit Island.

I also spent some in between time writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, in preparation for the next one, scheduled in two weeks time. I divvied up the treasure and awarded experience, and most of the characters will be going up levels… or at least they will be when they get time train! At the moment they’re too busy dealing with a death curse placed on them by the God of Swords to take time out to train, so they’re going to have to defer levelling up until they (or if they) manage to avoid dying from the curse.

Australian election campaign ongoing

We’re getting towards the pointy end of the current Australian federal election campaign. Election day is Saturday 3 May, so just over 2 weeks away. It was brought more strongly into my consciousness on Tuesday when we drove over to Rose Bay.

While driving along the road to get there, I noticed that in that area there were election candidate posters attached to every single streetlight pole along the road. And also posted on many buildings and fences. it was a little surprising because it’s very different to what I’ve been seeing in the area where I live. Here there are only the odd handful of signs on people’s home fences. I walk down a street with maybe 50 houses on it, and one of them has an election sign. And there are no signs posted on any public infrastructure at all. So to go to a different part of Sydney and be accosted with hundreds of signs was a bit weird.

My electorate, which was won by an independent MP at the last election, has been abolished for this election. Residents have all been assigned to one of the three neighbouring electorates in a redistribution due to geographic population changes. The old electorate was marginal, with the independent winning by 2.9%, but my new electorate is considered a safe independent seat, with the current independent MP having won the last election by more than 10%. So I guess this seat is not being as strongly fought as some others across Sydney, possibly leading to the noticeably lower level of posters around the place.

This is a very unusual election, in that one of the most pressing issues for Australian voters is foreign policy, which usually features way down the list of relevant issues. This is caused by Donald Trump and the disintegration of the USA. Voters are worried about the economic impact of foreign trade with the USA being disrupted by Trump’s policies/actions, and about the status of our military alliance. Like Canadian politics leading up to their imminent election (28 April), we’re looking to see which prospective Prime Minister will be stronger in dealing with the USA. In fact there was a debate between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton last night, and in the ABC News article about it, the very first person mentioned in the article is… Donald Trump!

Another article on the election reports that Australian trust in the USA has fallen to very low levels, with a poll finding:

only 36 per cent of Australians expressed any degree of trust in the United States to act responsibly

And while we’re at it, I’m aware of three recent incidents where Australian travellers were stopped at the US border, detained for up to 36 hours, in one case in moved to a prison rather than just detained at the airport, and deported. Immigration lawyers are now warning Australians about the risks of travelling to the USA and advising anyone travelling there to use a burner phone, and print out bank statements and detailed itineraries to produce if demanded by US officials.

So while domestic issues such as housing affordability and inflation are on Australians’ minds heading into the election, foreign policy is playing an unusually large part this election.

Not much else to report today, it was a routine day of online classes and some time spent writing comics. I took a walk to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, as she took her in to work with her today. I got rained on along the way by a sudden shower. And I made pasta with a simple zucchini tomato sauce for dinner.

OOC stories and unreliable memories

Today I worked more on Darths & Droids story planning, getting feedback from co-writers on some of the out-of-character story arcs I brainstormed yesterday, and modifying some of them in response. I put some of them into a new strip, written and produced.

This evening I’ve run three more classes on the Memories topic. The Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm test has turned out to be pretty successful in getting kids to demonstrate false memories. Out of 9 kids so far, 6 of them said they remembered seeing the word “sleep” in a list of words that didn’t actually include that word.

It’s a little bit risky doing this over a Zoom class, because I can’t be 100% sure that none of the kids are writing down all the words, or even taking a screenshot. But if they’re doing that they’d get the question correct, so the number could potentially be even higher.

Another question I’m using is essentially the set-up for the classic 1990 Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall. I posit a future technology that could be used to create fake memories, and then ask the kids if it would be okay to use this to create pleasant memories, such as a great vacation that they didn’t really go on. Most of the kids so far have said this would be bad and unethical, but a few said it would be good and could help people be happier. So far none of them have recognised the source of the idea. One girl actually said this was an amazing idea and she wrote it down and said she’d write a story about it! I should ask her next week to share her story with me.

Otherwise I had a fairly standard day, walking Scully a couple of times. The weather is finally starting to feel more like autumn with cooler days, but apparently it’s not going to last as the forecast is back up to 30°C on the weekend!

Missed Monday and a special seaplane lunch

Wow, Monday was so busy that I didn’t even realise I forgot to post aa blog entry until my wife asked me a short time ago, “Did you post on your blog yesterday?” It wasn’t exciting-busy, it was just a lot of online ethics classes, and walking Scully, and cooking dinner, so not really much to write about. Which is maybe why I forgot it.

Today, however, we had a special day out. My wife had the day off work and we booked a restaurant for lunch. A nice one, on the harbour shore, with a view. Unfortunately the weather turned overnight and it was chilly and cloudy and windy, but not uncomfortably so from our table on the wharf.

The restaurant is the Empire Lounge, at the Sydney Seaplanes terminal in Rose Bay. This is the only seaplane terminal in Sydney Harbour and they do scenic flights over Sydney, as well as shuttle services to some locations just north of Sydney where there are fancy secluded waterside restaurants that have a seaplane wharf for guests. There are no actual destinations that the seaplanes fly to, as they’re just not practical for any destinations within range. But the site was the old terminal for Sydney’s first international airport, receiving the Empire Flying Boat service from Southport in England, which took ten days to reach Sydney.

For lunch we had some of the hummus with focaccia to start:

Then I had the pan-fried snapper (with a side of green vegetables shared with my wife, no shown):

And for dessert a baked cheesecake:

The meal was pretty good, everything tasty and delicious.

Back at home I did some story planning stuff for Darths & Droids. I tried to write a new strip, but needed to work on background material to get the story arc straight in my head first, and also look up some old strips for continuity.

This evening I had the first class in the new week’s ethics topic: Memory. I have some interesting questions about reliability of memories. I used the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm test, showing a set of words related to sleep, but not including the word “sleep”. And then hid the words after about 15 seconds and asked the kids what words they remembered. The very first word “remembered” was “sleep! I wasn’t sure how well the test would work in getting them to remember something they never even saw, but it was very successful.

On TV, I’ve started watching the new season of Black Mirror. I really like this series, but with the first new episode I got a feeling of dread, like it was giving companies ideas, kind of like the infamous Torment Nexus. … Time to watch another one!