gault8121's comments

Yes, exactly - it's an interesting idea worth researching. Thanks for adding this idea!

Yes, and so that's why we need to study these things now. These aerosols dissipate - you need to continually add them to the atmosphere every few months. The point here is that this a temporary measure to bring down the temperature to prevent additional deaths caused from global warming. If it ended up causing more harm than the co2 alone, this could be stopped. However, when faced with the impossible situation all of humanity is in now, applying a tourniquet to stop the bleeding buys time for decarbonization to happen.

The article fails to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

> Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...

> "The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

The article failed to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

> Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...

> "The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

Exactly - The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45. This still scores as "Difficult to Fairly Difficult." It'd be interesting to see what the readability scores are for different amendments. > "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

Yes, exactly. You can draw whatever conclusion you'd like from the data, and many text scoring systems have issues, but there is still a clear pattern here where this text is far outlier.

Exactly - The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45. This still scores as "Difficult to Fairly Difficult." It'd be interesting to see what the readability scores are for different amendments.

> "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45.

> "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

Here are the text complexity scores from different measures for this text.

Flesch Reading Ease score: -24 (text scale) Flesch Reading Ease scored your text: impossible to comprehend.

Gunning Fog: 40.7 (text scale) Gunning Fog scored your text: EXTREMELY difficult to read.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 35.7 Grade level: College Graduate and above.

The Coleman-Liau Index: 13 Grade level: college

The SMOG Index: 25 Grade level: graduate college

Automated Readability Index: 41.7 Grade level: College graduate

Linsear Write Formula : 57.5 Grade level: College Graduate and above.

The loading bar is extremely subtle and hard to see. I missed the tooltip message in the corner. It would be helpful if there was more clear visual feedback that the query is being processed or if the tooltip stayed open until the query was finished.

That's basically what I am doing with Quill.org (I'm the founder / executive director). Quill is a platform for learning tools and games - we support six web applications that plug into a common, open source platform where teachers can assign activities to students and monitor results. At the moment, our applications are all focused on literacy, and they are more "tool-like" than "game-like". However, we use AI to assess writing, and the AI creates a game-like experience of writing different responses and getting different pieces of feedback (somewhat like a MUD RPG). We're creating the applications in-house now, and the API is not public, but the hope is to open it up in the future to allow others to launch tools and game on our platform. Quill is now serving more than six million students across the United States, about 12% of all K-12 students.

Tech non-profits: https://jobs.ffwd.org/jobs

What's the rationale for not including illustrations?

These are tools for teachers to catch plagiarism. He is saying he wants better tools to detect plagiarism because these don’t handle similarity matches well.

How did the pricing compare? What was the Render server needed to match what you were using with the Heroku Dyno? I run a high-traffic nonprofit edtech app that runs on 3-5 Heroku L Dynos, and I'm curious how well Render will perform at this level.

Has anyone done a load test comparison for Heroku vs. Render.com? The "Pro Ultra" on Render is $450/month for 32 GB RAM + 8 CPU. The Heroku Performance L Dyno is $500 a month for 14 GB RAM. The Render server seems like a much better offering.

Hi there exdsq, I run a nonprofit, Quill.org, that serves five million students in the United States, and I am building an educational tool that is very similar to the "cognitive aid" goal listed as a project idea. I'm hoping to get some feedback from someone who is familiar with this space, and I was wondering if you had a moment to scan over our application before we send it? If you're interested in taking a look, it'd be a huge help if you could reach out to me at peter (at) quill (dot) org! I'd be really grateful for your input. -- The learning tool we are building now maps to this project idea from the FTX Fund: "AI-based cognitive aids - One of the great hopes for advanced AI systems is that they might enhance human reason—allowing people to explore lines of argument more carefully and efficiently, and to detect important errors in their reasoning. We’d like to kickstart this work, so that it keeps up with AI progress as much as possible. For example, could a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 be trained to identify misleading statements, and provide the best arguments and counterarguments for different views? We’d love to see products with this sort of technology that people will actually want to use."

Awesome, thanks for following up! We also use coreference resolution - we specifically found Allen NLP's coreference to be the most accurate in an analysis of a few different offerings: http://docs.allennlp.org/v0.9.0/api/allennlp.models.corefere...

This is an interesting tool! It would be cool if you could take say 20 articles from Gothamist, Streetsblog, NYT, NY Post, Pix11, etc. and see how they all ranked in this system. That could be a really interesting blog post. -- Which tools are you using for these NLP judgments? Are you using SpaCy at all? Are there any models you've built here, or is this all rules on top of an NLP model? I'm working on NLP models for education, and we use SpaCy a ton. I'm [email protected] if you want to learn more about how we're using this.

wow, this will go down as an all-time tech fail.