Isegoria

AI Lessons from Uncle Screwtape

November 6th, 2026

A few months ago, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, mused on stage, Tim Harford says, about the impact of generative AI on society:

“I don’t know how we’ll respond,” he told Kenny Malone of NPR’s Planet Money. “A hundred years ago, CS Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters, about a demon in Hell whose job is writing letters to their boss, a senior demon, a manager demon, about their attempts to corrupt a person on Earth. And they have a letter where they say, Wonderful news. My human has just got an invention called the telephone.”

And what’s wrong with the telephone, one might ask? Clark recalls the junior demon explaining, “Whenever my person is alone and would otherwise introspect on themselves and be drawn closer to God, they will instead pick up the phone and call their friends, which brings them closer to Hell. Now, what does that get right and wrong? What it gets right is that things like phones actually massively changed how people relate to one another.”

Why, then, did CS Lewis argue that the telephone was a shortcut to the inferno? Fans of Lewis will have guessed at the answer: he didn’t. Jack Clark had misremembered almost all of his claims. Lewis didn’t write The Screwtape Letters (1942) a century ago; they are not letters from a junior demon, but addressed to him from his uncle, Screwtape. And there is no mention of the telephone at all.

Without wishing to criticise Jack Clark too harshly for misspeaking in an onstage conversation (it’s easily done) there is something magnificently symbolic about hearing such an authority on generative AI produce a string of charming, thought-provoking and believable claims about CS Lewis, all of which turn out to be factually incorrect. Planet Money added a “clarification” to their recording of the conversation, noting that CS Lewis had “talked about the downsides of gadgetry, including the wireless radio” in “a different private letter”.

Curious as to exactly what CS Lewis said about the radio, I tracked down a quotation widely attributed to him — an ironic piece of advice explaining how to avoid God: “Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation.”

But where did he originally write those words? I pasted the quote into Google, but ahead of any search results, Google’s AI Gemini hastened to misinform: “You are quoting or closely paraphrasing CS Lewis from The Screwtape Letters.” Nice try, senior tempter; they were written two decades after Screwtape.

Posted in Media, Technology | No Comments »

He wanted them to think like experts

November 5th, 2026

The fourth episode of the second season of Sold a Story looks at a poor, Black neighborhood in Houston, where Principal Thaddeus Lott transformed a struggling elementary school with Direct Instruction and laments that critics doubted his amazing results:

Wesley hadn’t become the best school in Houston. There were still about 20 schools — all with higher income populations — that were scoring better than Wesley. But Wesley was doing better than some schools in wealthy, white neighborhoods. And no school with as many kids from poor families was performing anywhere close.

Gayle Fallon, who was the head of the Houston teacher’s union, appeared in an interview with Chris Wallace of ABC News in 1991:

Chris Wallace: Why the suspicion?

Fallon: I think they suspect them because they are poor, Black children and because in the mindset in the administration they don’t believe poor, Black children can outperform suburban white children. And they are doing it. And they are doing it routinely.

Wallace: Ms. Fallon, you’re, you’re making a very serious charge.

Fallon: Right.

Wallace: You’re basically accusing the school district, the top administrators, of racism.

Fallon: Yes. I think probably racism of the worst kind. You know, it’s not even conscious racism. It’s a racism of lowering your expectations for minority students.

Raymond: That’s totally fallacious. It’s absolutely not true.

We’re supposed to be indignant that anyone would be skeptical of a school suddenly wildly outperforming its history.

The fifth episode covers what makes Direct Instruction effective:

There have been hundreds of studies since Project Follow Through. Direct Instruction is now one of the most researched education programs out there.

And there’s another body of research that’s relevant. Cognitive science — research on how people learn.

That science was still relatively new when Direct Instruction was first being developed.

But a lot of what Zig and his colleagues built into their programs lines up remarkably well with what cognitive scientists later figured out.

[…]

The idea is that a teacher can communicate something so clearly that students will learn what you want them to learn.

Zig and Doug had a name for this: Faultless communication.

[…]

You have to be really clear, so kids learn what you’re trying to teach them.

But you can’t teach kids everything. There’s not enough time in the school day for that.

And you don’t need to teach kids everything.

You need to give kids a foundation, so they can learn things you haven’t taught them.

[…]

Kids figuring things out on their own. You’ve heard that before.

That’s the goal of discovery learning — for kids to become independent learners.

Zig wanted kids to become independent learners too.

The disagreement was about how kids get there.

[…]

An expert already knows a lot about a topic. When they encounter something new, they have knowledge to draw on. They can connect the dots. Come up with insights and ideas of their own.

That’s what Carl wanted his students to do. He wanted them to think like experts.

But they weren’t. They were still beginners.

[…]

His students needed to know more.

And the cognitive science research he was reading kept pointing to the benefits of teaching things directly. Especially for beginners. And especially for certain kinds of knowledge.

[…]

Jean and her team went through all the studies they’d found. They excluded some for things like poor research design. Took the more than 300 studies that were left and calculated what is known as an “effect size.”

[…]

The average overall effect size for Direct Instruction across all the studies was .56.

That might not sound like a big number. But it’s a big number in the land of education and effect sizes. Researchers generally consider an effect size of .25 to be educationally significant.

Direct Instruction’s average effect size was more than twice that.

[…]

Several of the studies tracked students for years. In some cases, from elementary school all the way through high school. And students who’d had Direct Instruction were still doing better.

That kind of staying power is unusual. A lot happens to a student as they move through school — different teachers, different classes. But years later, the Direct Instruction advantage was still there.

And Direct Instruction worked for all kinds of students. Not just kids in special education. Not just kids in certain racial or ethnic groups. Not just kids from low-income families.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago

November 4th, 2026

In America, book-reading is up:

Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that thirty-eight per cent of American adults read one to five books in 2025, and fourteen per cent read at least twenty. The global book market is expected to grow five per cent annually for the next several years; for the generation now entering college, book sales are at a lifetime high.

In its lament for fading literacy, the Atlantic mentioned current data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose reading survey of thousands of students began in 1971. “Just 35 percent of high-school seniors were ‘proficient’ at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument,” the magazine’s staff writer Rose Horowitch observed. That sounds bad, but the same figure a decade ago was thirty-seven per cent—just two points higher—and in the gloriously unwired age of 1992 it was forty. And the survey’s broad news was good. American nine-year-olds performed much better on reading assessments in 2025 than in 1971, and thirteen-year-olds’ performance held steady. The reading skills of English learners have risen in the past two decades, and, unlike in 1971, the top quarter of Black and Hispanic students today out-read the average white child.

“I thought that piece in the Atlantic made some good points, but the idea that reading has finished and we have moved into a kind of post-literate dark age strikes me as absurd,” Robert Darnton, a historian of the book and a former director of the Harvard University Library, told me. “ I have a little collection of jeremiads, and one is from 1928, when Walter Benjamin said, ‘Everything indicates that the book is nearing its end.’ ” He added, “There’s this unprecedented change in the technology of reading, and people are naturally reacting to that, because it’s disorienting. How do we make sense of changes that have hit us so fast?” “Every decade, there is a new scapegoat for why the reading public is diminishing,” Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand Book Store, told me. “The fact of the matter is that books are one of our most enduring forms of human expression.”

The illusion of decline might come in part because people consume books differently. Pew reported that, in 2025, the number of adults who read a print book during the year was eight percentage points less than it was in 2011—but that the number who read an e-book and the number who listened to an audiobook each increased by almost double the same proportion.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

England is, and has been, close to a meritocracy for many generations

November 3rd, 2026

Gregory Clark, the economic historian behind A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises, has released the final installment of his trilogy on economic development and social mobility, To Have and Have Not:

Unlike its predecessors, To Have and Have Not did not come out through Princeton University Press—nor through any academic book publisher, for that matter. The peer reviewers just aren’t having it. Some won’t even read it.

Clark’s manuscript instead appears online in PDF form, free of charge but with the occasional typo still intact, via Econ Journal Watch, a publication focused on debates within economics.

[…]

The book advances a provocative argument, drawing together several of Clark’s recent academic papers—and several enormous datasets—to claim that social status not only persists strongly within families but does so specifically through genetic inheritance, to a far greater degree than virtually anyone has claimed.

[…]

To Have and Have Not is built on an incredible trove of historical information, including centuries’ worth of English genealogies and marriage records, as well as the population registers of modern Sweden and Denmark. The sheer scale of these data allows Clark to see how social status runs in families—across many links in the tree, both horizontal (from siblings to distant cousins) and vertical (from parents to kids to grandkids)—and to measure status in several ways, including occupational prestige, education, and housing quality.

[…]

To take a typical example, in Clark’s data on Britons born from 1910 to 1996, siblings’ home values correlated at about 0.33. In other words, if someone has an extremely expensive house, three standard deviations above the mean, our best guess would be for their sibling to have a merely nice house, one standard deviation above the mean—closer to the overall average than to the sibling.

[…]

When one moves from siblings all the way to cousins in that same housing-value analysis, the correlation drops only modestly, to 0.21. The general rule he discovers—across many different status measures, and across several centuries notwithstanding massive changes to society and technology—is that these correlations, despite starting out at a modest level, drop by only about one-fifth with each extra degree of relatedness. (Cousins are two steps more distant than siblings in this sense.)

[…]

When variables are measured poorly, or when they fail to capture important details of an underlying concept, the resulting correlations will appear artificially weak.

Thus, our focus shouldn’t linger on the modest correlations among immediate family members. Those aren’t a beautiful testament to the randomness of life and the possibility of change; they’re just misleading. Rather, the very slow decay of the correlations as we move through family trees is where the action is. It reveals a “latent” status that is extremely persistent. Clark finds measurable links in status even among fourth cousins, whose shared ancestors are five generations back.

[…]

Clark’s answer is assortative mating. If people marry others who are similar in their “latent” genetic social status—presumably by matching on a mix of education, intelligence, social graces, work ethic, family connections, and so on—each link in the family tree doesn’t simply add genetic randomness but rather springs from a careful romantic match of like with like. Using a formula that goes back to the pioneering British statistician and geneticist Ronald Fisher, Clark is even able to calculate how strong matching on this latent status must be: to explain the slow decay of social status across degrees of relatedness through genes alone, spouses must be correlated on their genetic status at 0.57. If someone has genetic social status one standard deviation above the mean, he’ll marry someone of status 0.57 standard deviations above it, on average.

[…]

Clark’s own takeaways from his analysis include that “England is, and has been, close to a meritocracy for many generations,” that “much of the 10 percent of national income typically spent on education by high income economies is largely a social waste,” that genetic transmission of status implies “an incentive to select high status immigrants, and reject low status ones,” and that the “relative fecundity of people at the top and the bottom of social abilities” will affect future social outcomes.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Lead in their tooth enamel shows that production had restarted by the middle of the seventh century

November 2nd, 2026

Britain’s medieval lead industry had restarted by the mid-600s:

According to a charter summary attributed to the year 835, a nobleman named Humberht paid the rent on an estate in Derbyshire in lead bars, having to organize its transport all the way to Canterbury.

A new study has found an older record of the Peak District’s medieval lead industry, in the teeth of the people who worked it.

Lead in their tooth enamel shows that production had restarted by the middle of the seventh century and that, by about AD 750, children around the mines at Castleton were growing up in heavily polluted homes.

[…]

Roman and medieval lead waste was re-smelted again and again between the 16th and 19th centuries, which erased many of the traces archaeologists would normally use, according to the University of Nottingham.

“Enamel does not remodel after its initial formation, so these samples provide a closed record of lead concentrations during childhood, between the ages of approximately four and 12 years,” the authors write.

[…]

The researchers sampled 17 people: ten from two Castleton cemeteries, Joule Yard (seventh to eleventh centuries) and Spital Field (twelfth to fifteenth), five from a seventh-century cemetery at Wigber Low, and two from the Iron Age site of Eldon Hole.

Lead in teeth is measured in parts per million (ppm), and according to the study values below 0.5 ppm reflect natural background levels, while anything above 0.6 to 0.7 ppm points to human activity.

“All but one of the medieval individuals had lead concentrations of more than 10ppm,” the authors write, “indicating substantial anthropogenic lead exposure in childhood.” Four of the 15 medieval people had levels above 40 ppm.

Even in the seventh century, the team says, the most exposed children in these Derbyshire mining communities carried as much lead as people in industrial cities of about 1750 to 1850, or more.

At Wigber Low, the pattern seemed to follow rank. A man buried in the seventh century with a sixth-century sword, probably an heirloom, had just 2 ppm, about what people in Iron Age and Roman cemeteries outside lead regions carried.

A young woman from the same cemetery, who died at about 17, had 69.1 ppm. A man in an unfurnished grave, who may have grown up in western Britain, had 29.5 ppm.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Most of the Russian ships were unregistered and sailed without transponders

November 1st, 2026

As recently as the summer of 2026, hundreds of Russian tankers and dry cargo ships plied the Sea of Azov and the adjacent Black Sea:

Most of the Russian ships were unregistered and sailed without transponders, making them a kind of regional adjunct of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil and other goods to the global market in defiance of international sanctions.

The Black Sea shadow fleet has, or had, a more limited remit. It helped supply Russian forces in southern Ukraine—in particular, the Crimean Peninsula, which functions as a kind of unsinkable aircraft carrier for Russian air power.

On July 7, Ukraine’s deep strike drone force finally started hunting the Russian ships—starting with the tankers that represented the bulk of the shadow fleet. By day five of the counter-shipping effort, the Ukrainians had hit and damaged no fewer than 76 tankers and even a few tugboats sent to assist the damaged tankers.

“To be clear, 76 tankers comprise a massive fraction of Russia’s shadow fleet” of unregistered ships, RAND analyst Michael Bohnert explained. “At this rate, in two weeks, there will be next to no Russian tankers in the Black Sea,” Bohnert predicted.

In fact, it took a bit longer for Ukrainian drones to effectively erase Russian shipping from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But they did do so—mostly with propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1s and FP-2s. After four weeks, the drones had struck more than 200 Russian ships: the majority of the regional shadow fleet.

The basic, $50,000 FP-1 carries a 130-pound warhead 600 miles under satellite, 5G and mesh radio control. Trading range for firepower, the FP-2 carries a 440-pound warhead out to a distance of around 120 miles.

Upgraded versions of both the FP-1 and FP-2 extended the range of each and also added A.I.-assisted targeting that helped the drones strike ships’ bridges and machinery without also penetrating their hulls and risking environmentally damaging oil spills.

Absent a strong Russian response, the Black Sea countershipping campaign could have ended in a decisive victory for Ukraine. The problem for the Ukrainians is that the Russians also have drones—and, equally importantly, a substantial inventory of cruise and ballistic missiles.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Boo!

October 31st, 2026

I’ve written about Halloween and horror quite a bit over the years:

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hilger is willing to say truths that are often not said

October 30th, 2026

Almost everyone, Alex Tabarrock notes, will find something to hate about The Parent Trap:

Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.

I can’t imagine why those parents might be unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world.

No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.

Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.

[…]

In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination.

Yes, those Chinese railroad workers were known for their immense human capital.

Parental investment is surely important but Hilger overstates his case. He writes as if poorer parents have neither the abilities nor the time to teach their children while richer, better educated parents simply invest lots of hours and money imbuing their children with skills.

[…]

The parental investment story also doesn’t fit my experience. I didn’t spend six hours a week helping my kids with their homework. I doubt most parents do. I simply assumed my kids would do their work. I do recall that we signed my kids up for tutoring at Kumon, the Japanese math education center. My kids would complain bitterly when we took them for drill on the weekend. It was mostly filling out rote forms and my kids would hide or bury their drill sheets so we were always behind. Driving my kids to the Kumon center, monitoring them. and forcing them to do the work when they rebelled like longshoreman on work-to-rule was time consuming and it was ruining our weekends. I felt guilty, but after a while, my wife and I gave up. Today one of my sons is a civil engineer and the other is a math and economics major at UVA.

At this point in the book, Tabarrok notes, it was almost inevitable that we were going to get yet another paean to the Perry Preschool Project:

The Perry Preschool project started in the 1960s and had just 123 participants (58 in treatment and 65 in control!). There are more papers about the Perry Preschool project than there were participants. I am jaded.

Aside from the small sample size, the project had imperfect randomization and missing data and most importantly limited external validity. The Perry Preschool project treated a small group of disadvantaged African American children with low-IQs (IQs of 70-85 were part of the selection criteria). The treatment is usually described as “active learning pre-school” but it was more intrusive than that. Every week counselors would go to the homes of the kids to teach the parents (mostly mothers) how to raise their children. The training was important to the program. Indeed, Hilger notes, without sense of irony, that “facilitating greater skill growth in low-income children was so complicated that it required home visitors with advanced postsecondary degrees.” (p. 89). And what were the results?

The results were good! (Heckman et al. 2010, Belfield et al. 2006). But in the popular literature the impression one gets is that the program took a bunch of disadvantaged kids and helped them read and write, making them more middle-class and successful. Some of that happened but the big gains actually happened because the participants, especially the boys, were so socially dangerous and destructive that even a bit of normalization made life substantially better for everyone else. In particular 82% of the treated group of 33 males had been arrested by age 40, including for one murder, 4 rapes, 8 robberies, 11 assaults and 14 burglaries. The control group were worse. In the control group of 39 males there were 2 murders. Indeed the reduction of one murder in the treatment group accounts for a significant benefit of the entire Perry PreSchool project.

Hilger, to his credit, is reasonably clear that what is really needed is an intensive program for disadvantaged African Americans, especially males.

Tabarrok hated much of the book, but “Hilger is willing to say truths that are often not said and for that I would rather applaud than cancel.”

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

There’s no safe place for ammo dumps or command posts

October 29th, 2026

Drone-guided artillery strikes have made Ukraine the graveyard of command posts:

On tomorrow’s battlefield, there’s no safe place for ammo dumps or command posts. Drones will buzz constantly overhead, AI-powered algorithms searching for any sign of life — movement, body heat, wireless signals — that they can target for precision strike. So how can commanders and their staffs survive this new threat, when their very function requires communication?

Ditch that smartphone. Hide in a basement. Turn off every radio you can. Use electronic warfare sensors to scan your own troops for detectable transmissions and shut them off. Offload every function you can to higher headquarters further out of range, transmitting only essential data through an encrypted cloud.

Break up big staffs, like the 200-plus personnel in a divisional Main Command Post, into half a dozen smaller “sub-nodes,” each hiding in a different building or hastily dug bunker, communicating with each other not over Wi-Fi or tactical radio but over ruggedized fiber optic cables a quarter-mile (400 meters) long, unspooled by soldiers through the shelling-shattered windows and rubbled streets.

And every few hours, one of the sub-nodes takes its turn to shut down for a few hours and move a few hundred yards — never too far for those fiber cables — so that, within a day, the entire formation has relocated, slithering undetected across the battlefield like an amoeba.

That’s the prescription from the US Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, helmed by Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, a South Carolinian who’s served everywhere from Afghanistan and Iraq to South Korea.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

3 lessons from past lab accidents

October 28th, 2026

Alison Young shares 3 lessons from past lab accidents:

Lab workers can be infected without a recognized accident

Initial local media reports said Shipilova broke a test tube before becoming ill, but Russian authorities have since told the WHO that no biosecurity incidents occurred in the laboratory.

Studies of lab-acquired infections have documented for decades that when workers become infected, they often can’t recall having any kind of exposure incident.

As far back as the 1950s, studies found that just 16% of lab worker infections involved recognized accidents.

[…]

Infected workers may not realize their illness came from their lab

Initial Russian media reports, which government authorities dispute, suggested that Shipilova died from pneumonic plague. This lung infection can be lethal if not treated within 24 hours of initial symptoms, which include shortness of breath and coughing.

It remains unknown what killed Shipilova or whether her lab work played a role. Before she died with severe pneumonia, her illness seemed like a typical respiratory infection, Russian health officials told the WHO earlier this month. Tests didn’t detect any microorganisms associated with her work, Russian authorities have said.

[…]

When a tularemia researcher at the prestigious U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases — often referred to as USAMRIID — started feeling ill with a fever, chills, and headache in 2009, she never alerted the lab’s medical team because she assumed she had just caught something from her children, who also were sick.

[…]

That same year University of Chicago plague researcher Malcolm Casadaban died after becoming infected with a weakened form of the Yersinia pestis bacteria he was studying. This particular strain was not known to cause lab infections or fatalities.

[…]

The public rarely learns the details of laboratory accidents

As I report in my book, “Pandora’s Gamble,” there is no universal, mandatory system for reporting lab accidents and lab-associated infections. Not in the U.S. or worldwide.

There also isn’t any comprehensive system to analyze biosafety breaches and share lessons learned so that safety can be improved. This makes it difficult to know how often accidents happen and how often workers become infected.

The 2025 systematic review of published reports during 2000 to 2024 identified 712 laboratory-acquired infections worldwide, including 276 infections and eight deaths involving research facilities. The researchers cautioned that the findings are likely an underestimate because biosafety lapses occur more frequently than are reported.

[…]

For example, after the critical lab waste sterilization plant serving USAMRIID at the Army’s Fort Detrick in Maryland suffered a catastrophic leak in 2018, the government assured the public that no safety threat occurred.

Only through months of digging into the government records behind the official statements was I able to report that a leaking tank had spewed thousands of gallons of unsterilized lab wastewater into an area with an open storm drain that emptied into a public waterway. While no illnesses were connected to the event, community leaders expressed concern about how they’d been kept in the dark about the extent of the incident.

USAMRIID used to publish some statistics about its lab incidents online. But the data was removed in 2022, around the time I was asking officials why more recent data hadn’t been posted. At that time, USAMRIID said the removal was part of a website update. A spokesperson for USAMRIID did not answer questions last week about why the institute hasn’t resumed posting the statistics.

Russia has its own history of concealing laboratory accidents. After dozens were killed by an accidental anthrax release from a Soviet biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk in 1979, Soviet authorities blamed contaminated meat. It wasn’t until 1992 that the government acknowledged the outbreak was caused by military bioweapons research.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

A telltale sign of bird flu infection in humans is eye redness

October 27th, 2026

The strain of bird flu that’s ripped through American barns for the last four years has killed two people who caught it from sick animals, but as far as anyone can tell, humans can’t spread it:

The virus has remained a true “bird” flu, tailored to attach to avian cells, not invade human throats and noses, where coughing and sneezing reliably spew droplets.

Under the right conditions, however, that could change. A single mutation could give the bird flu a foothold in people and spark a pandemic that experts fear could be deadlier than COVID-19.

For that to happen, this bird flu would likely need to find an intermediate host — an animal vulnerable to viruses that infect both birds and humans. These animals would be crowded together, each infection raising the odds that a new strain could arise through mutation. Then, for that strain to jump across species, it would have to have access to humans and time to spread among them undetected.

That perfect petri dish exists right now, a ProPublica investigation found. For over two months, an outbreak of bird flu has raged uncontrolled on a Utah farm that raises thousands of mink for fur. Mink have lungs and airways that on a cellular level are remarkably similar to those of people; they have caught and spread other flus and infected some humans with COVID-19.

[…]

Utah agriculture officials learned in mid-August that mink were dying of bird flu on C&T Fenn Farms, about an hour’s drive south from Salt Lake City, according to communications released under the state’s public records law.

Had poultry been infected, the playbook would have been clear: The strain is so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the whole flock to protect other farms as well as public health. Poultry farmers are reimbursed for the loss.

But there are no federal rules for how to deal with sick mink.

[…]

A telltale sign of bird flu infection in humans is eye redness. It is present in over 90% of cases and is often the sole symptom a person displays.

Last Saturday, a ProPublica reporter tracked down two people who worked at the Utah mink farm. One had a visibly red eye.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

The idea was to “follow through” on the promise of Head Start

October 26th, 2026

Sold a Story Season 2, Episode 3 looks at Project Follow Through, The Forgotten Experiment:

The idea was to “follow through” on the promise of Head Start.

The study began in 1968. And lasted nearly a decade. It was one of the largest educational experiments in the history of the world. Nearly 60 years later, that’s still the case.

And Project Follow Through ended up providing some answers. Some information that could have influenced the direction of American education.

But it didn’t.

[…]

The government initially focused its data collection on basic academic skills. That worried the developers of some of the other programs. They thought it would give Direct Instruction an unfair advantage.

[…]

In response to complaints, the government added other measures. There were tests that looked beyond basic skills to things like abstract reasoning and problem solving. And there were measures to assess things like self-confidence and attitudes about school and learning.

[…]

The first year of data arrived on their desks. And it did not look good. In fact, it looked so bad that they decided — we can’t let people see this.

[…]

It showed that students in the Follow Through models were not doing better than students in traditional classrooms. Some of them were doing worse. That was bad news for the government because the goal was to find better approaches.

[…]

The government collected data for nearly 10 years. It had test scores and other information about more than 350,000 students in thousands of classrooms all over the country.

[…]

The government’s evaluation showed that Direct Instruction had outperformed all the other models.

It had done especially well compared to the other models when it came to math, reading and spelling skills. Exactly what Direct Instruction was trying to do.

But it had also done well when it came to things like abstract reasoning and problem-solving.

And perhaps the biggest surprise? Direct Instruction performed the best on those measures of self-confidence and how kids felt about school and learning.

[…]

The data showed that Direct Instruction was the only model that had positive results in every category that was measured. In all the other models, the kids did worse — on average — on at least one set of measures.

[…]

According to the government’s evaluation, the models that didn’t succeed — on average — had some schools that did relatively well. The teachers, the coaches, the principals — they made it work.

And the models that did succeed — on average — didn’t succeed everywhere. Even Direct Instruction had schools where things did not go well, where kids did not do better.

And that’s what Ernest House and his group focused on in their critique of the government’s evaluation.

[…]

Project Follow Through had not revealed a program that worked equally well everywhere, every time it was implemented. And for that reason, Ernest House and his group concluded that there was no Project Follow Through winner. There couldn’t be a victor.

[…]

After the critique by Gene Glass and Ernest House, the government did two things.

Number one: It started giving more money to the Follow Through models that had not done well. The rationale was that those models needed more support, more time to prove themselves.

And number two: The Office of Education shifted its focus from highlighting successful Follow Through models to highlighting successful Follow Through schools.

By doing this, it was possible for the government to showcase many of the Follow Through models because most of them had a school somewhere that was doing reasonably well.

[…]

The model that did the best — after nearly a decade with lots of kids in lots of schools in one of the largest education studies of all time — was a highly structured program that relied on carefully sequenced lessons and didn’t expect students to discover things on their own.

It was an answer. But it was not an answer a lot of people wanted to hear.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

The core of the original Project Maven was spotting potential terrorist targets in mind-numbing hours of drone surveillance video

October 25th, 2026

Pentagon planners and military staffs made unprecedented use of artificial intelligence during the 38-day air war against Iran:

“Operation Epic Fury leveraged Palantir’s Maven Smart System in order to conduct strike missions across the entire battle space, 13,000 targets in 38 days,” the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Officer (CDAO), Cameron Stanley, told the SCSP AI+Expo Thursday, adding that troops have shown an “insatiable appetite” for the tech. “[AI tools] allow us to take all of this data, synthesize the data, and make better decisions, faster, on the battlefield.”

MSS is an AI tool suite that evolved from the original Project Maven experiment to a multi-purpose military planning tool built by contractor Palantir. (A separate offshoot of Maven is run by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.)

During Epic Fury, MSS saw unclassified usage surge by 38 percent and classified usage by 89 percent, a Pentagon spokesperson told Breaking Defense, measuring month-to-month. Measured by “tokens,” the individual mathematical operations underlying generative AI, peak daily usage rose 4,425 percent.

At one point, the spokesperson told Breaking Defense, daily usage hit approximately 20 billion tokens. For comparison, in civilian contexts, a single question-and-answer with a chatbot can require several hundred tokens, while an individual power user with a high-level paid account — someone using AI to write code, for instance — can burn up to a quarter-million tokens a day.

[…]

The core of the original Project Maven was spotting potential terrorist targets in mind-numbing hours of drone surveillance video, for instance. But over time, the toolkit has expanded into what contractor Palantir calls “a live, synchronized view of the battlespace” that “enables synchronized mission planning and execution” and features “automated object detection” and “centralized target identification and management.”

The tech analyzes complex combinations of video, satellite imagery, and other highly technical sources of intelligence, according to Palantir and published reports. Maven Smart System can also sift through vast libraries of intelligence reports and draft summaries or potential future courses of action, the Pentagon spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

Posted in Technology, War | 3 Comments »

It’s just carving with a laser

October 24th, 2026

Hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo corrective eye procedures each year, including LASIK, which uses a laser to reshape the cornea and improve how the eye focuses light, but now researchers are investigating a very different approach:

Michael Hill, a professor of chemistry at Occidental College, puts it more bluntly: “LASIK is just a fancy way of doing traditional surgery. It’s still carving tissue — it’s just carving with a laser.”

[…]

Hill and collaborator Brian Wong are studying a technique called electromechanical reshaping (EMR). Rather than physically removing tissue, EMR uses a small electric potential to temporarily alter the chemical environment inside the tissue.

“The whole effect was discovered by accident,” explains Wong, a professor and surgeon at the University of California, Irvine. “I was looking at living tissues as moldable materials and discovered this whole process of chemical modification.”

The approach takes advantage of the chemistry that helps tissues maintain their shape.

The cornea contains large amounts of collagen, a structural protein also found in skin, cartilage, tendons, and other tissues. Within collagen-rich tissue, electrically charged components attract one another and help hold the structure firmly in place.

Because these tissues also contain a large amount of water, applying an electric potential can change their pH. The pH scale measures how acidic or basic something is. Lowering the pH makes the tissue more acidic and temporarily weakens some of the electrical attractions that keep its structure rigid.

During that brief window, the tissue becomes easier to reshape. Once its normal pH returns, those interactions are restored and the tissue can remain in its new form.

Researchers had previously used EMR to reshape cartilage-rich rabbit ears and to modify scars and skin in pigs. The cornea was an especially intriguing target because its precise curvature determines how effectively the eye focuses light.

For the new experiments, the researchers built specialized platinum “contact lenses” designed to act as molds for the desired corneal shape.

They placed the lenses over rabbit eyeballs immersed in a saline solution intended to mimic natural tears. Because platinum conducts electricity, the lens also functioned as an electrode. When a small electric potential was applied, it produced a carefully controlled change in pH inside the cornea.

Within about a minute, the curvature of the cornea shifted to match the shape of the platinum lens.

That is roughly comparable to the amount of time involved in the laser portion of LASIK, but the experimental EMR method required no incision and potentially could use simpler, less expensive equipment.