Until COVID, I did not read audio books. Now, I read them all the time. (Yes, listening to an audio book is reading; I learn as much from listening as from reading print. I use audiobooks for different purposes, sometimes listening to a book before buying a print copy, or listening to books I’ve already Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
Teaching in the AI World: A Time for John Dewey
Appropriate Proper Reasonable I’ve been as educator for a long time. In the 1980’s, the folks who taught me how to do the work connected me with John Dewey. I have continued to read his work over my career and wondered what he would have thought of new technologies and how he would integrate them Read More
Is It Time to Reject Intelligence as a Construct?
Decades ago, I first read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. The book was published first in 1981, then a revised edition in 1996 which included essays critical of the 1994 book The Bell Curve. It was this second edit that led a colleague to tell me is was “one of the most profound Read More
Sometimes AI is Post-on: The End of Average Again
My summer reading always includes listening to Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. I discovered Gould in 1984 and have been a lifelong fan of his essays and books. Especially this year, I have been thinking more and more about intelligence and the really weak definitions of it that characterizes our understanding of it. Read More
Owning Knowledge and AI
103: Ownership of Knowledge and AI It is July 2025. “The MIT Article” is all anyone is talking about. This is the article on arXiv.org in which researchers compared the essays written by those using ChatGPT, web search, or only their brains. It is a long and interesting preprint article. The article is surely of Read More
Preprint Research
There is a paper that has been causing lots of chatter recently. It is a paper released by authors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it suggests that using generative AI (in this case ChatGPT) has important effects humans write essays. Folks who I associate with are educators and technology experts, so they have Read More
Data Governance
a post for students in my database course Ever wondered what keeps all that digital information flowing smoothly, securely, and ethically in the vast world of data? It’s not magic, it’s data governance. Think of data governance as the traffic laws, road signs, and even the emergency services of the data highway. Without them, it Read More
Visualizing Your Data: A Guide for Database Students
Welcome, aspiring data navigators! In your journey through the world of databases, you’ve likely spent a lot of time learning how to store, organize, and retrieve information. But what happens after you pull all that valuable data? How do you make sense of large tables filled with numbers and text? This is where data visualization Read More
Reports: Sharing Your Data with the World
a post for students in my database course Effective communication is paramount in the field of data analytics, and often, the culmination of a data professional’s hard work is presented in a report. These reports are not merely collections of numbers; they are powerful tools designed to translate complex data into actionable insights, enabling informed Read More
Cleaning Data
a post for students in database course Ever heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out”? It’s a fundamental truth in the world of data analytics. Imagine you’re trying to bake a perfect cake, but half your ingredients are spoiled, or you’ve accidentally doubled the sugar in one bowl and forgotten it entirely in another. Your Read More