A theological discussion on animals and an apology
What I've been up to (and not)
First of all, if you’re interested in the sorts of things I’ve written about here, I very highly recommend you check out this video discussion between two Orthodox philosopher-friends, Joshua Matthan Brown, and Jesse Hake, on Animals and the Restoration of All Things.
The discussion was occasioned by the publication of a chapter by Jesse on the topic in a new book edited by Steven HAuse called Christ Saves All: Christian Universalist Perspectives. Jesse was kind enough to dedicate the chapter to me, and I was hoping to join the conversation as well, but couldn’t get it to work with my schedule in time. But, to be honest, it was probably better without me and my presence would only have put a lie to the very kind things they say about me in the first few minutes. All joking aside, it was a wonderful conversation that strengthened my faith. Check it out.
Secondly, I must apologize for my relative absence the past few weeks. Things tend to be a bit busier for me, and my schedule less in my control, in the summer months. But another reason is that I’ve caught a bit of the “entrepreneurial bug” and have been busily trying to code an app in a relatively short time while I’m not working at the day job. Seeing so many of my professor friends struggling with AI plagiarism, and remembering my own frustrations with the hassle of managing student writing, I thought I’d try to make an app which will both improve over the usual methods of plagiarism-detection and make the grading process a bit easier for teachers. It’s (provisionally) called PaperMind, and the gist of it is that, rather than focusing on the final product and trying to work backwards to figure out if it was plagiarized, it focuses on the process of writing: the students write their essays in an in-app editor that records all changes as they happen, and flags suspicious events like large or frequent copy-and-pastes, abnormally fast typing, lack of edits, etc. The teacher can then “play back” the whole composition process, comment on and grade the paper in the app, and email it back with the click of a few buttons. I’m hoping to have an MVP available for a few users to test in time for the beginning of the fall semester. If you are a college/university teacher, or know someone who is, please help me out by filling out or sharing this short survey I’ve made to collect some initial user data: https://forms.gle/U16eLGXDNoMKUvFC9
Normalizing an atypical publishing schedule is essential. We are human not robots churning out content in a steady never ending stream. Glad you're working on other things that are fruitful for you.
As a teacher, I've been thinking for a while that the best way to detect AI cheating would be to keep a record of the assignment's process of creation, so it's interesting to see someone who actually knows something about coding doing the same thing. It is rather depressing that the only way to stop ever more sophisticated cheating is to adopt ever more intrusive surveillence, and that will likely be the only solution as long as the laissez-faire approach to technological development continues.