1. Some good clear analysis here from Carbon Brief of the final outcomes of COP 29 in Baku https://www.carbonbrief.org/cop29-key-outcomes-agreed-at-the-un-climate-talks-in-baku/ Tidily sorted into sections, which might lend itself to a whole class activity with pairs of students each responsible for summarising/reporting on different sections?

2. Ethan Mollick’s latest blog post, Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting – Don’t make this hard, begins as follows: While reading a new paper on doctors using GPT-4 to diagnose disease, I saw a familiar problem with AI. The paper confirmed what many other similar studies have found: frontier Large Language Models are surprisingly good at diagnosis, even though they are not specifically built for medicine. You’d expect this AI capability to help doctors be more accurate. Yet doctors using AI performed no better than those working without it—and both groups did worse than ChatGPT alone. Why didn’t the doctors benefit from the AI’s help? One reason is algorithmic aversion. We don’t like taking instructions from machines when they conflict with our judgement (my emphasis), which caused doctors to overrule the AI, even when it was accurate. But a second reason for this problem is very specific to working with Large Language Models. To people who aren’t used to using them, AI systems are surprisingly hard to get a handle on, resulting in a failure to benefit from their advice.

You will find the post here https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/getting-started-with-ai-good-enough

3. In that post, Mollick observes, In every classroom I teach in or organization I speak with, the vast majority of people have tried AI, but are often struggling with how to initially use it. And, as a result of that struggle, have not put in the 10 or so hours with AI that are required to really understand what it does. Coincidentally, and having become a bit of a Mollick groupie, I’d just signed up to a free ten-hour-or-so Coursera course of his, Transforming Classrooms with GenAI: A Practical Guide! You can sign up here https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-ai-in-education-leveraging-chatgpt-for-teaching/home/module/1 You’ll need to create a Coursera account if you haven’t already got one: click on New to Coursera? Sign up at the bottom of the page. It’s £22 if you want a certificate, which also means you get your quizzes marked – I’m holding out on that for now. So far, so interesting!

4. An NYT gift article, the review by Junot Díaz of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, which includes a reading of the first chapter, nine minutes long, by Brian Nishii  https://tinyurl.com/3d5xcr9n

5. And, finally, another NYT gift article, How Good Is Your Mobility? We lose a little range of movement as we age. Here are seven ways to test yours https://tinyurl.com/4kffnkyy It seems I’m not quite as decrepit as I thought!