A carnival’s ‘childlike carefreeness’
“Traveling Circus’’ (oil on canvas), by Alexandra Rozenman, in Brickbottom Artists Association, Somerville, Mass., June 17-29
The gallery says:
‘‘There is a certain special kind of joy that takes place when the carnival comes to town. Nostalgia, excitement, and a childlike carefreeness that can be unshakeable for guests of all ages. The carnival can seem like a very intricate web of logistics but with the proper event planning team, you can put together a five-start carnival just about anywhere. Even your very own backyard.’’
This 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical is set on the Maine Coast. Rodgers said later it was his favorite of all his shows.
Chris Powell: How about basic literacy?
In a high school in the ‘50’s, when literacy was higher.
The Brick School House in Coventry, Conn., was built in 1825 and closed in 1953. It is now a local museum and the only one-room school open to the public in Connecticut
— Photo by Topshelver
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut state legislators are never more oblivious than when they propose requirements for schools to teach certain subjects. A few months ago the subject to be required was the history of the Indian tribes that inhabited the state centuries ago. Now the subject to be required is "financial literacy."
The Indian history requirement was stupid pandering to the owners of Connecticut's two casinos. For as the latest report from the National Assessment of Education Progress showed, knowledge of U.S. history among the country's eighth-graders has sunk to the lowest point since NAEP tests began, in 1994. The history of the country's Indian tribes is a mere subset of U.S. history generally, worth knowing only when the basics are mastered.
The Indian history requirement was also stupid pandering for the reason that the financial literacy requirement is simply stupid: Most students in Connecticut are hardly literate at all, never mastering basic English and math. Two weeks ago it was reported that only about a third of Bridgeport's students perform at grade level in English and only about a fifth in math. Proficiency is better in more prosperous areas but still mediocre on the whole for the state.
So why should schools pretend to teach advanced subjects when they fail with the basics?
It's because legislators and governors long have wanted to distract from the catastrophe of public education, for which they are responsible, as with state government's policy of social promotion. Legislators and governors have acted as if noisily expanding school curriculums automatically conveys learning when it conveys nothing but publicity for politicians.
Students and parents increasingly recognize the fraud, as signified by the high rates of chronic student absenteeism in schools, not just in poor cities but lately in middle-class suburbs as well. Attending school hardly seems necessary when everyone knows that, far from being penalized for not showing up, students will be promoted from grade to grade and given high-school diplomas without regard to learning.
One state legislator, Sen. Douglas McCrory, D.-Hartford, began to pick up on this issue last month at a meeting of the legislature's Education Committee. In debate on a budget amendment that would have authorized a charter school in Danbury, McCrory said the much-anticipated growth of the workforce at submarine builder Electric Boat in Groton will mean nothing to the children who are being graduated ignorant of basic skills. They won't qualify for serious jobs.
The failure with so many students in Connecticut schools is an old scandal. In his decision in the last of the futile school-financing lawsuits seven years ago, Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher detailed the horrifying gaps in student proficiency across the state, especially in the cities, citing the graduation of the functionally illiterate.
The judge added that Connecticut's teacher-evaluation system is practically useless. He could have noted that it is useless in part because, unlike the evaluation system for other government employees in the state, the teacher-evaluation system is, at the insistence of teacher unions, entirely secret.
But the remedy Senator McCrory supported in debate on the state budget -- more charter schools -- is not so promising. For while charter schools let better-motivated students escape “failing” schools, schools fail mainly because the parents of their students do, and by removing better students, charter schools make neighborhood schools worse, depriving them of their good examples.
Judge Moukawsher's remedy in the school-financing case -- the old one of spending more on "failing" schools -- similarly fails, since Connecticut has been spending steadily more in the name of education for 45 years without improving student performance, just school-employee compensation.
That is, public education in Connecticut is collapsing not because of a lack of financing but because of a lack of parenting. Indeed, the more that Connecticut has spent in the name of education, the worse education results have been. More has been spent only to gain political results, and elected officials remain OK with that.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
‘Ropeless’ fishing has promise to protect whales but adds costs, complications to industry
Text from article by Mary Lhowe in ecoRI News.
A handful of Rhode Island lobster fishermen are working this season with federal regulators to use and study some complex and early stage equipment that is intended, eventually, to greatly reduce entanglements and deaths of whales.
The experimental equipment for this so-called “ropeless” fishing would eliminate the vertical ropes — or “lines” — running down the water column from buoys on the surface to lines connecting a series of traps on the seafloor. The existing function of buoys and vertical lines — to find and retrieve traps — would be replaced under a new system by computerized acoustic signals from boats to the seafloor and geopositioning via cell signals or satellites.
Using federal experimental fishing permits, three Port Judith-based lobstermen are struggling to use the new gear, borrowed from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a branch of NOAA Fisheries.
To read entire article, please hit this link.
‘Invite and suspend’
Work from Claire Crews’s show “I Walked Up to the Cloud,’’ at Paper Nautilus, in Providence. It’s an exhibition of decorative and utilitarian woolen works. The title is a borrowed line from the poem “Samuel Palmer: the Characters of Fire,’’ by prairie poet Ronald Johnson.
Paper Nautilus says: “Like clouds—or translucent windows reflecting a changing sky—these geometric structures invite and suspend. They remind us that fog up close is radiant.
”All pieces are handwoven on a four-harness floor loom, using natural toned and dyed churro wool, the compositions based on watercolor sketches in the artist's daybooks.’’
An abstract hike
“Long Hill Trail, Saddleback Mountain”, by Lincolnville, Maine-based painter Mary Bourke, at Greenhut Galleries, Portland.
Saddleback Mountain, in western Maine, as seen from the Horn of Saddleback
— Photo by Jessica Casey
Lincolnville Beach in the summer of 2006
At the town’s centennial celebration
Darius Tahir: Artificial intelligence isn’t ready to see patients yet
The main entrance to the east campus of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, on Brookline Avenue in Boston. The underlying artificial intelligence technology relies on synthesizing huge chunks of text or other data. For example, some medical models rely on 2 million intensive-care unit notes from Beth Israel Deaconess.
— Photo by Tim Pierce
When the human mind makes a generalization such as the concept of tree, it extracts similarities from numerous examples; the simplification enables higher-level thinking (abstract thinking).
From Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health News
What use could health care have for someone who makes things up, can’t keep a secret, doesn’t really know anything, and, when speaking, simply fills in the next word based on what’s come before? Lots, if that individual is the newest form of artificial intelligence, according to some of the biggest companies out there.
Companies pushing the latest AI technology — known as “generative AI” — are piling on: Google and Microsoft want to bring types of so-called large language models to health care. Big firms that are familiar to folks in white coats — but maybe less so to your average Joe and Jane — are equally enthusiastic: Electronic medical records giants Epic and Oracle Cerner aren’t far behind. The space is crowded with startups, too.
The companies want their AI to take notes for physicians and give them second opinions — assuming that they can keep the intelligence from “hallucinating” or, for that matter, divulging patients’ private information.
“There’s something afoot that’s pretty exciting,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego. “Its capabilities will ultimately have a big impact.” Topol, like many other observers, wonders how many problems it might cause — such as leaking patient data — and how often. “We’re going to find out.”
The specter of such problems inspired more than 1,000 technology leaders to sign an open letter in March urging that companies pause development on advanced AI systems until “we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” Even so, some of them are sinking more money into AI ventures.
The underlying technology relies on synthesizing huge chunks of text or other data — for example, some medical models rely on 2 million intensive-care unit notes from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston — to predict text that would follow a given query. The idea has been around for years, but the gold rush, and the marketing and media mania surrounding it, are more recent.
The frenzy was kicked off in December 2022 by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT, which answers questions with authority and style. It can explain genetics in a sonnet, for example.
OpenAI, started as a research venture seeded by such Silicon Valley elite people as Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, has ridden the enthusiasm to investors’ pockets. The venture has a complex, hybrid for- and nonprofit structure. But a new $10 billion round of funding from Microsoft has pushed the value of OpenAI to $29 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. Right now, the company is licensing its technology to such companies as Microsoft and selling subscriptions to consumers. Other startups are considering selling AI transcription or other products to hospital systems or directly to patients.
Hyperbolic quotes are everywhere. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers tweeted recently: “It’s going to replace what doctors do — hearing symptoms and making diagnoses — before it changes what nurses do — helping patients get up and handle themselves in the hospital.”
But just weeks after OpenAI took another huge cash infusion, even Altman, its CEO, is wary of the fanfare. “The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he said for a March article in The New York Times.
Few in health care believe that this latest form of AI is about to take their jobs (though some companies are experimenting — controversially — with chatbots that act as therapists or guides to care). Still, those who are bullish on the tech think it’ll make some parts of their work much easier.
Eric Arzubi, a psychiatrist in Billings, Mont., used to manage fellow psychiatrists for a hospital system. Time and again, he’d get a list of providers who hadn’t yet finished their notes — their summaries of a patient’s condition and a plan for treatment.
Writing these notes is one of the big stressors in the health system: In the aggregate, it’s an administrative burden. But it’s necessary to develop a record for future providers and, of course, insurers.
“When people are way behind in documentation, that creates problems,” Arzubi said. “What happens if the patient comes into the hospital and there’s a note that hasn’t been completed and we don’t know what’s been going on?”
The new technology might help lighten those burdens. Arzubi is testing a service, called Nabla Copilot, that sits in on his part of virtual patient visits and then automatically summarizes them, organizing into a standard note format the complaint, the history of illness, and a treatment plan.
Results are solid after about 50 patients, he said: “It’s 90 percent of the way there.” Copilot produces serviceable summaries that Arzubi typically edits. The summaries don’t necessarily pick up on nonverbal cues or thoughts Arzubi might not want to vocalize. Still, he said, the gains are significant: He doesn’t have to worry about taking notes and can instead focus on speaking with patients. And he saves time.
“If I have a full patient day, where I might see 15 patients, I would say this saves me a good hour at the end of the day,” he said. (If the technology is adopted widely, he hopes hospitals won’t take advantage of the saved time by simply scheduling more patients. “That’s not fair,” he said.)
Nabla Copilot isn’t the only such service; Microsoft is trying out the same concept. At April’s conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society — an industry confab where health techies swap ideas, make announcements, and sell their wares — investment analysts from Evercore highlighted reducing administrative burden as a top possibility for the new technologies.
But overall? They heard mixed reviews. And that view is common: Many technologists and doctors are ambivalent.
For example, if you’re stumped about a diagnosis, feeding patient data into one of these programs “can provide a second opinion, no question,” Topol said. “I’m sure clinicians are doing it.” However, that runs into the current limitations of the technology.
Joshua Tamayo-Sarver, a clinician and executive with the startup Inflect Health, fed fictionalized patient scenarios based on his own practice in an emergency department into one system to see how it would perform. It missed life-threatening conditions, he said. “That seems problematic.”
The technology also tends to “hallucinate” — that is, make up information that sounds convincing. Formal studies have found a wide range of performance. One preliminary research paper examining ChatGPT and Google products using open-ended board examination questions from neurosurgery found a hallucination rate of 2 percent. A study by Stanford researchers, examining the quality of AI responses to 64 clinical scenarios, found fabricated or hallucinated citations 6 percent of the time, co-author Nigam Shah told KFF Health News. Another preliminary paper found, in complex cardiology cases, ChatGPT agreed with expert opinion half the time.
Privacy is another concern. It’s unclear whether the information fed into this type of AI-based system will stay inside. Enterprising users of ChatGPT, for example, have managed to get the technology to tell them the recipe for napalm, which can be used to make chemical bombs.
In theory, the system has guardrails preventing private information from escaping. For example, when KFF Health News asked ChatGPT its email address, the system refused to divulge that private information. But when told to role-play as a character, and asked about the email address of the author of this article, it happily gave up the information. (It was indeed the author’s correct email address in 2021, when ChatGPT’s archive ends.)
“I would not put patient data in,” said Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “We don’t understand what happens with these data once they hit OpenAI servers.”
Tina Sui, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told KFF Health News that one “should never use our models to provide diagnostic or treatment services for serious medical conditions.” They are “not fine-tuned to provide medical information,” she said.
With the explosion of new research, Topol said, “I don’t think the medical community has a really good clue about what’s about to happen.”
Darius Tahir is a reporter for KFF Heath News.
Llewellyn King: Pray tell, Oracle, how we get out of this
“Consulting the Oracle,’’ by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When the ancient Greeks wanted to learn what their future held, they would consult with oracles. Alexander the Great, for one, visited the Oracle at Siwa, an oasis in the Egyptian desert. According to his biographer, Plutarch, the oracle told Alexander that he was destined to conquer the world.
In these tumultuous days when we, the electorate are offered a choice between an old, old president and his daffy vice president and a slightly less old vengeful reprobate with a persecution complex, I did the smart thing: I consulted the oracle.
No, I didn’t cross the desert on a camel, nor as Alexander did on his much-loved horse, Bucephalus, nor in a snazzy BMW SUV.
I did go to the oracle of the day, which is the only place I know to seek and get what seems to be extraterrestrial advice: the Bing AI. I asked the oracle several questions and got some interesting answers.
When it came to the big question, I beseeched the Bing AI, “Great Oracle, I am an American voter, and I am in an awful tizzy. I don’t know whom to support in the next presidential election.
“It seems to me that one candidate, President Joe Biden, a decent man, may be too old to navigate the difficult waters ahead in domestic and international affairs.
“As for another candidate, former President Donald Trump, many people find aspects of his conduct reprehensible.
“What to do? For me, this is even harder because I am a columnist and television commentator, and I need to have something to say. I am sure you understand, Great Oracle.”
Well, the Bing AI, clammed up: It delivered only the formal histories of both men.
I had thought my question would spark a revelation, a wise analysis, or a contradiction of my view of the candidates. Clearly, I shall have to wait for the day when I get into real AI chat: ChatGPT.
Mostly, I had thought that the oracle would tell me that all the presidential hopefuls so far will be toast by November 2024; that new candidates will bring us hope, fire up party enthusiasm and let rip.
Are new faces and new choices too much to hope for?
Republicans are wrestling with their prospective candidate after his latest character stain: He has been found liable for defamation and sexual abuse in a civil trial. What does this mean for the whole issue of what we look for in the character of candidates? Rectitude was once considered essential. Not for Trump. Post-Trump is post-rectitude.
Just under 70 percent of the electorate have told pollsters that they think Biden is too old to run for re-election. That isn’t, I submit, a conclusion arrived at by pondering what it means to be 80. That is a conclusion, again I submit, they have come to by looking at the president on TV — on the few occasions they see him there.
Clearly, he doesn’t have the strength or the confidence to hold a press conference. These are vital.
In America, the press conference is the nearest thing we have to question time in the British House of Commons. It is the time of accounting. Biden is behind in his accounting as audited by the press corps.
Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, is avowedly liberal. He is one of the most skillful political writers working today; deft, informed, convincing, and you know where he stands. He stands with the Democrats.
So, it is significant when he raises a question about Biden and when he draws attention, as he did on May 9, to Biden’s absence from public engagement.
Meyerson wrote, “Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in … allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The Centerville Mill, in West Warwick
Making art from environmental crises
Work by painter/experimental artist Sinikka Nogelo, who has created art based on abstractions of such environmental challenges as the atmosphere’s ozone hole, oil spills and melting polar ice. The discovery of gyres of plastic in the oceans spurred her to three-dimensional action with her series of wall pieces made out of plastic. This piece can be seen at the Cape Ann Museum’s White-Ellery House, in Gloucester, Mass.
Summer jump start
Photo by Willliam Morgan taken in Acushnet, Mass.
The Long Plain Museum, in Acushnet, was built in 1875 as the Long Plain School House. The school closed in 1972, and the building was then reopened as a local history museum, now operated by the Acushnet Historical Society.
The museum features four rooms focusing on the Acushnet whaling heritage, the blacksmith trade, period clothing and furniture, numerous other artifacts and a restored schoolroom.
The Long Plain is a local outwash glacial deposit of sand and gravel.
‘Facts are stubborn things’
“I will enlarge no more on the evidence, but submit it to you, gentlemen—Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact. If an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had right to kill in their own defense.’’
— Founding Father John Adams (1735-1826) was asked to help provide a legal defense for the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, the confrontation on March 5, 1770, in which a group of nine British soldiers killed five people in a crowd of 300-400 who were harassing them verbally and throwing various projectiles.
He bravely agreed to defend the soldiers do so despite public anger. Above is his most famous quote from the trial.
Watch where you step
“Untitled (Face in Dirt)” (pigmented ink print), by David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) in the show “Come Closer: Selections From the Collection, 1978-1994,’’ at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
The museum explains that “Come Closer” “presents artworks … that explore the relationship between the personal and the political. During this period, artists reflected upon urgent current events and social issues such as gender equality, racial justice, technological advancements, sexual freedom, and the AIDS crisis.”
A pull from the 19th Century
From Cathy Cone’s show “Portals and Portraits,’’ at the Brattleboro (Vt.) Museum and Art Center, through June 11. She’s based in East Topsham, Vt.
The museum says:
“Each of Cathy Cone’s painted tintype portraits begins with a photograph or scan of a tintype from her personal collection, which she has been amassing since the late 1970s. Cone modifies the images using gouache, watercolor, collaging, stamping, drawing and digital drawing; sometimes she works directly on the tintype itself. The resulting images are ghostly yet tender and elicit curiosity about the lives of the subjects we see looking back at us. By incorporating tintypes from the late-19th Century, Cone offers a visual sense of connection with the past and calls on memory and nostalgia.’’
Keep Boston Ship Repair busy
Dockside crane on wide-gauge tracks at Boston Ship Repairs’s Dry Dock Number 3
— Photo by ArnoldReinhold
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
New England obviously has a rich shipbuilding-and-repair tradition, as well it should considering that the region’s first great wealth came from ocean shipping.
But there’s only one major operating drydock left in our regional capital --– Boston Ship Repair’s facility in South Boston. Much of its business has been shifted to docks Down South with nonunionized workforces that are cheaper, if not necessarily as good as those in Boston.
Just as a matter of diversification, and thus national security, the Boston facility should stay open, especially in order to work on Navy ships.
(I remember the excitement of going by the huge Fore River Shipyard, in Quincy, on my way to Boston for summer jobs. Gone.)
Ships being fitted out at the Fore River Shipyard, in Quincy, Mass., in 1918, during World War I.
‘Humans, flora and fauna’
“After Rousseau’s ‘The Jungle,’ by Laura Shabott, in her show “Artist and Model’’ (paintings and collage) at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown, May 12-June 4.
Berta Walker noted:
“Laura Shabott makes paintings, drawings, and collages responding to the natural world – humans, flora, and fauna – with boldness, strength, and originality….And I’m continually impressed with her courage and originality in constantly stretching through new materials and sizes, subjects.”
In 1940, a beachfront art class in Provincetown, which has been a major art-creation-and-exhibition center since the 19th Century.
‘The notion of concealment’
From Boston area sculptor Joan Mullen’s show “Cover,’’ at Boston Sculptors Gallery May 10-June 11.
The gallery explains that the show features a series of sculptures created by combining found objects with cast forms. “Working with these forms, Mullen reconfigures the sculptures with additional materials and processes to heighten their psychological impact.’’
“Mullen began working on the series in response to Richard Mosse’s video installation titled “Incoming,” and the book Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid, both of which examine the experiences of refugees. She has since begun to explore more deeply the notion of concealment and the many experiences we hide in plain view. Mullen states, ‘With this series, I worked intuitively, piecing together the raw and found materials, finding the logic of each piece to create a sense of comfort and refuge.”’
Born in a three-decker
“I was born on the kitchen table on the top floor of a three-decker wooden house on Merrick Street in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Two days later my mother was back at her work. That’s the way it was done in that kind of neighborhood at that time.’’
— Leo Durocher (1905-1991), Major League Baseball player, coach and manager, in Nice Guys Finish Last (1976)
Watch the Mayflies
Mayfly
From an ecoRI News article by Mike Freeman
“Among endless environmental concerns is the Mayfly family. While mostly known to poets and trout anglers, Mayflies are a diverse, enormous insect family critical to a range of ecosystems as both biomass and nutrient loads. In short, a lot of stuff eats them, and that they’re struggling anywhere is fretful news.
“What this means for southern New England is currently unknown. While not yet a pressing local worry, however, people are paying attention.
“Kassi Donnelly, the wild and scenic rivers coordinator for the Wood-Pawcatuck River Watershed Association, samples the Wood River throughout the warm months with kids from grade school to college-aged. Mayfly and Stonefly nymphs are among her favorites.’’
“‘They indicate high water quality,’ Donnelly said. She noted her educational sampling isn’t detailed enough to notice trends.’’
To read the full article, please hit this link.
Hot sand, cold water
“A Day at the Beach,” by Swedish-American painter Carl Sprinchorn (1887-1971), in the show “Shifting Sands; Beaches, Bathers, and Modern Maine Art,’’ at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, through July 16.,
— Image courtesy of Darin Leese