EMBER

EMBER offers great data and nice visual data explorers for all kinds of domestic and international energt data. The data are available for download as CSVs and the interactive charts as PNGs and the data for each chart as CSVs as well = great!

• US Electricity Data Explorer
• Electricity Data Explorer (international)

The Global Building Atlas Downloader

The Global Building Atlas is cool, but most people (and especially my students) cannot handle a GitHub respository. But, thanks to Maps Mania, we now have a convenient downloader into GeoJSON: The Global Building Atlas Downloader. Thanks!

Times New Roman vs Calibri

This argument is old and the facts are clear, but of course this is back in news recently with the State Department switching back to Times New Roman because Calibri is too woke for them.

The NYT has a nice article: Is Times New Roman Better Than Calibri for the State Department?

Personally, I have been using Calibri for my slidedecks for a long time: it is simple, looks good, and is easy to read. But...maybe a little boring. For text I prefer Garamond - I think it looks elegant & sophisticated. But...Arial is Google Docs default & thus most of my text is now in Arial.

The Top-20 Programming Languages

Here's the latest TIOBE index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

• Learn Python, it's that simple!
• Or, one of the many versions of C!
• Don't bother with any of the other!

ChatGPT Edu

This - or something like that - is what we need at Westfield State University:

• AI Tools @ CSU
• ChatGPT Edu @ CSUN

Lonnie Thompson: Canary

Worth a watch!

AI chatbots can effectively sway voters – in either direction

AI chatbots can effectively sway voters – in either direction & that sounds scary. The article in Nature is better, but behind a paywall: AI chatbots can sway voters with remarkable ease — is it time to worry?

And why are we surprised? An engaging back-and-forth conversation with a nice 'person' that can synthesize a lot of information in conversational way has always been a great way to learn and maybe change your mind. The challange was scaling this.

How can we leverage this for teaching & learning? If chatbots are so effective, why are we not using them in-class or as homework assignments: Have a 10-minute chatbot chat about Topic X & synthesize the main points handwritten on this piece of paper.