1. Hmm! I’d never heard the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, rizz, until this morning (and it’s not in my MS Word dictionary either, not yet anyway) https://corp.oup.com/news/rizz-crowned-oxford-word-of-the-year-2023/ Are they possibly trying too hard to be cool?

This was the eight-word shortlist from which rizz emerged as the winner https://corp.oup.com/news/eight-words-go-head-to-head-for-oxford-word-of-the-year-2023/

Other dictionaries’ ‘words of the year’ were announced a little earlier https://roycross.blog/2023/11/17/friday-17th-november-cambridge/

2. I was looking for another New York Times article that I wanted to ‘gift’ – a long essay on AI – this afternoon and couldn’t find it, but I stumbled over this collection of short films about immigration to the USA, with an introduction by Viet Thanh Nguyen the author of The Sympathizer, instead, From Here to Home: five films about immigration and belonging https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/opinion/opdocs-immigration.html (Don’t think I need to ‘gift’ it, so just the standard URL.)

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on The Sympathiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sympathizer

3. And then I found the AI article under my nose on today’s front page! Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever https://tinyurl.com/y3f66984

“ChatGPT’s release a year ago triggered a desperate scramble among tech companies and alarm from some of the people who helped invent it.”

4. There may be a very simple reason for some countries’ greater success in international education surveys like the PISA test: having the same teacher for longer. Here’s Diane Ravitch’s Blog: Adam Grant: What We Can Learn From International Assessments https://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/adam-grant

Coincidentally – honest! – the 2022 PISA test results were published today: https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/

5. Two ‘and finallys’ today, as I’m not sure how this works if you don’t have a Telegraph account: Ed Cumming’s account of the supermodel, Aitana López This woman is Spain’s hottest model – but she’s not real https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/04/aitana-lopez-ai-influencer-social-media-artificial/You can register for a free Telegraph account.

6. And today’s second ‘and, finally’, an old fogey video from the BBC archive, 1977: Skateboarding Craze Hits the UK https://youtu.be/VfJjmMLbQoA?feature=shared