“The State Machine,” a short story by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. - Slate Magazine
“The State Machine,” a short story by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. - Slate Magazine |
- “The State Machine,” a short story by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. - Slate Magazine
- Every Horror Movie & TV Show Coming To Hulu For Halloween 2020 - Screen Rant
- How to Use Digital Reading Programs During COVID-19. Teachers Still Matter - Education Week
- Concord COA announces upcoming programs - News - Wicked Local Concord
| “The State Machine,” a short story by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. - Slate Magazine Posted: 26 Sep 2020 07:00 AM PDT  Each month, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—publishes a story on a theme. The theme for July–September 2020: justice.
MONDAYFirst came the idea of the robot, on a Prague stage of all places—the unfeeling, enduring slave of Karel Capek's R.U.R. The idea was much older; but R.U.R. really defined the concept, wrapped its edges in use case and narrative, and thus set in stone the relationship we were supposed to have toward it. And then came the slave rebellion. Shades of Shelley's hideous progeny recast in liquid metal, with Schwarzenegger later riding shotgun. Cyborgs, Cylons; the Oracle and the Architect; the name changes, the function remains the same. The fear that every parent has: that one day their own child would throw down all they held dear, and turn against their house, and would actually be justified. I am thankful, then, that the world we actually live in is not defined by robots' mastery or servitude. The sky outside is white; cold, yes, but not blackened, not scorched, simply a monsoon season shaking itself down into spring. The wind carries with it the smell of etteriya flowers; little gifts from the cell tower trees, which carry orange jasmine DNA somewhere. There is a flock of little machines tending the one closest to my door—I think last night's storm wasn't too kind to it—and as I pass they move aside and point me in the direction of the bagel shop. One of them, very solemnly, holds up a little white flower. What made it do that? The State Machine, knowing that I have barely stepped out of my flat after the breakup? That delicate symbiosis between machine input and well-intentioned social campaigns, setting forth in hard code a law that people who suffer must be taken care of? Was the tree actually damaged in the storm, or was it just an excuse to plant something out here, to give me this flower, and make sure I wasn't alone? The means, I suspect, are now too complex for even my department to understand. But the end is just what I needed. The flower is beautiful, the scent is beautiful, and standing out here, for the first time in so long, feeling the sharpness of the wind on my face, Oh God, I'm thankful. Martin Wong is the first person to greet me at the University. Wong leads the Night Watchmen Project, a group of interdisciplinary academics playing with the State Machine code to see if there's some perfect combination of starting conditions and fixed constants that might lead to a sustainable libertarian society. We've had plenty of arguments in the past. I think he's naïve and too obsessed with the computer science; he thinks I lack imagination. He's wearing a greatcoat today that makes him look like some giant Dracula knockoff. "Silva." "Wong." "Smoke?" I hesitate. "Come on. It's legal now, don't worry about it. Anti-smoking codes went under last week when all the nicotine addicts countercampaigned. Stupid health craze." "The city-state model is the best we have. None of these idiots have lived in an actual nation. Hippies." I should probably note here that Wong doesn't trust vegetables and lives entirely on a diet of nutrient soup and nicotine. Let's just say it takes all sorts to make a university. We smoke in silence. The nicotine salts are heady, almost overpowering, and we studiously examine the gables and windows we've seen 10,000 times before. Somewhere beyond, judging by the cars, is a student protest. Several hundred drones circle them like flies. Every so often a pair peeks our way, and I see a banner: NO MORE WALLS! BYZANTIUM FALLS! and BRING BACK THE NATION. "They're trying to get us to open up to the Rurals," says Wong. "Merge with the other cities, throw down the walls, all that bullshit?" "Is it working?" A scoff. "Mad? The city-state model is the best we have. None of these idiots have lived in an actual nation. Hippies." A drone flashing FREE HEARTS, FREE MINDS, FREE BORDERS wobbles our way, no doubt heading back to recharge. "Glad you're back," says Wong, at last. "I was running out of people to argue with." "Good to be back. I still think you're deluded." Wong grins. "Finish your thesis, then?" "Yeah." Such a ritual, at heart no different from the flower, but the difference is that we are just human, bound in our awkwardness, and the State Machine, with its catlike affection, is somehow more comforting. Inside, the University is a haunted place. Stone floors and old walls laced with surface displays; microdrone swarms over ancient greens; history and future brought uncomfortably close together, with the present an infinitely thin slice between them. The politics of the Reds and the Greens, the Nationalist movement, all those things are ghosts here, weak and impotent, locked away behind newscasts. There was a movement to abolish the University at some point—a class argument that picked up serious traction—but what people don't understand is that the University is more than just buildings and tenure: It's an idea, a meme, a microreligion, an infinitely self-replicating concept that spreads among disparate actors and fights hard to preserve itself. And so this strange structure remains. The sigils and mottos outside, the silent tread of weary professors, the rooms of debate and discussion, the eager first-years drunk with their own immortality. Life seems endless when you're that young. Memories of our first year together—her libraries, her steps, the little artisan ice-cream shop tucked away in the corner—all hers, all things I scurry past, trying not to remember, until I come to the brown door marked TRACTACUS. And, beneath that, the fourth clause: A thought is a proposition with a sense. She's inside, curled up in her usual corner, lost in some projection, the dark glasses cut by the darker hair. Still a sight that takes my breath away, only now in ways that hurt. She looks up as I walk in. "Wong says he got a message from the State Machine," she says. "Told him you were suicidal. Three others in the lab, too." "Probably." There is that uneasiness between us. "I didn't get a message," she says quietly. "I didn't get anything. I'm sorry. I didn't mean—" "Let's not," I say, taking my old, familiar place, even as something inside me crumbles and dies. Because we both know what that means. Neither of us sees as much as the State Machine does; to each other we are just idealized versions of ourselves, projections, half-lies and half-truths, not the real data trail we all leave behind. And she didn't get the message. The irony. In all those old stories I read it was humanity that triumphed over the cold heart of a machine. Love. Hope. Courage. Cunning. It was always the machine's blindness, its inability to feel as we do, that became its downfall. But the reality is that it is we who are the blind, the unfeeling, the enduring, and a bunch of software modules sat there, knowing the real parameters of love all along. On the way home, I can't help thinking if it would have worked out had things been different at the start. For the longest time we believed the world around us was deterministic enough to be understood; that it was just a matter of encoding enough data, and enough processing power, to be able to see the future. That if I do x, and the other person does y, and if I know all the things I need to know about the actors and their actions, I can say that z is the logical outcome … But the world isn't mathematics on a screen. Complex deterministic systems exhibit chaos; high sensitivity to initial conditions. We can never know the initial conditions with infinite precision, so whatever simulation we have in our heads, no matter how detailed, is a step or two away from reality, and eventually must fail. The way we break people we love, and ourselves. High sensitivity to initial conditions. Hmm. I think that's a nice chapter title. Not too flashy, but accurate. The University says my work on the State Machine began on Oct. 3, 2038, the day I enrolled. The day Jump!Space Industries' Heart of Gold rocket cluster exploded in the sky. The day of the Mass Action protest. But that was just the date I enrolled on, and purely a quirk: She was here, she wanted me here, so I came, like the proverbial bumbling moth, uprooting my life for a dream. I'd say my work on the State Machine began much earlier. It began with Pharaoh. Pharaoh was an ancient video game, the kind you had to emulate to play. Pharaoh put you in charge of managing an Egyptian community, from tiny villages to vast townships. As my cities grew, the needs of my citizens grew with them. There were plagues; there was crime; there were fire hazards; I had to make sure enough houses got water, that there was entertainment around, libraries, monuments. I had to balance everything against income from taxes and markets and shipping; and if I did make a neighborhood livable enough, its citizens would build better housing, and new citizens would move in, with a new set of needs. Tiny decisions, driven by panic or ignorance, could snowball and shoehorn you into serious trouble a year down the line. What fascinated me the most was that I could click on every pixelated citizen and see their complaints, track their path through the city, and understand, at least from on high, the daily lives of my digital slaves. My parents didn't understand or approve of my obsessions. In our broken economy, they felt the only way out was to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, and none of those were achieved by loafing around playing video games all day. Is it a wonder that the State Machine came from a failed game designer? Neither did my friends, for that matter. We were young. We were rebels; we were infinite. And here I was, locking myself away in a dark room, retreating from all that glory, hopping from video game to video game the way my friends hopped from party to party. Even in college, bent over books that skipped from logic to rhetoric and bootlegged algebra that regurgitated solved problems, it was obvious to me that the people who had put serious time and thought into how a society might be built, how governance could be parametricized, and how an A.I. could run it were game designers, the Sid Meiers and the Will Wrights and the Tarn Adamses of the world—as opposed to political scientists, economists, or legal scholars. Is it a wonder, then, that the State Machine came from a failed game designer? Around the time when I was just discovering Pharaoh, a small company called Tambapanni Studios began building a strategy game, a city builder where one played an omniscient governor; halfway through, the engine was complete, but art assets were expensive and the studio was out of cash. Tambapanni shuttered its doors and released its code to the public. At University we're taught how the State Machine and the Legal Atomism movement grew out of the need for bureaucracy to regulate an almost infinite number of interactions between diverse constituents while processing an ever-expanding amount of information. Indeed, an extension of this need, a push for greater efficiency through automation. The ruling class, whatever it happened to be, had to offer enough goods and services to the ruled to keep them happy. So, in the name of maintaining that happy equilibrium: Automate enough processes, do it well enough, and you end up with systems that interact well enough with one another to replace portions of a human bureaucracy. Let the process continue for a while and you end up with the State Machine: a system performing the supreme act of rationalization. But there is a lie at the heart of this narrative, and inconvenient truth shuffled under the rug by the weight of literature reviews. The first version of that State Machine was a sea of finely tuned cellular automata constantly trying to converge to a single steady state, designed to be hypercompetitive in the service of pre-built parameters of success. The people who wrote that code weren't legal theorists; they were ordinary people with lives shaped and sculpted by a complex web of social contracts held long past their prime. Decisions they took to be common sense—maximize production, maintain trade relations where possible, weed out the underperformers, reward those who moved units of arbitrary fiat currency around—those were intrinsic biases, products of a political and ideological superstructure sold in paychecks and self-help books and success stories. When Tambapanni went under, the Utopia Project lifted that code base and used it as the engine for a series of demos commissioned by the Center for Global Equity. Utopia found that only minor tweaks were required to implement constitutional frameworks; Tambapanni already had hundreds of index metrics named governance params. Civil rights? Check. Driving behavior? Press freedoms? Religion, that shadow governance all proper U.N.-bred economists feared to touch? All checks. The same problematic codification of culture captured externalities while well-meaning economists and legal theorists stuck to siloed abstracts that only worked half as good. Simple units working on simple rules interacted with one another to produce complex emergent behavior, the way millions of simple bees will converge to produce a complex hive. Utopia filled in the gaps, downloaded satellite imagery, and the final demo, to judge by news reports of that time, went viral. Academia scorned it, but journalists started downloading it, playing with parameters, using mild predictions to advance their careers; from journalists it went to the hands of various advisers; from advisers to politicians, who realized they could get rid of some of those advisers; then from politicians to higher politicians. And at the heart of it still were those lines: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL TAMBAPANNI, ITS SHAREHOLDERS OR ITS EMPLOYEES BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES, OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONRACT.
TUESDAYOn Tuesday, after a night of fits and starts, I wake up to find my bedside glass of water has switched bedsides. Then I notice the face peering over me. "Bleaaaargh," I say, thrashing around a bit. Fortunately, it's not some random intruder. Unfortunately, it's Adam Mohanani, or AdamM, as he styles himself. He'd dropped out of psychology, claiming that it was a load of tosh, and went off to study economics; dropped out of that and switched to religion; I used to say that at some point he'd pull a Wittgenstein, declare everything to be so much nonsense, and take up whistling instead. To which he usually replies: "You're spending too bloody long inside your own head." "How the hell did you get in here?" He has the good grace to look embarrassed. "I heard about it from Wong. Tried ringing the doorbell, you didn't answer, so I went to her place and she had a spare set of keys." I rarely get angry. I suppose I rarely feel anything these days. But there are no words for the bile and the ache that spreads through me upon hearing this. "You mean you went back to her place." Adam is a good part of the reason we broke up. Call him an initial condition in a system highly sensitive to them. "Shit. Look, let's go outside and grab a coffee. Let's just talk, OK? Come on. This is not healthy." Cause or effect? I don't know, because at that moment I punched him. And soon it was fists and knees and the crash of furniture. Something glass shattered and stabbed into my palms. "You're crazy," he says, when we break apart, torn and bleeding. "Go to hell." The door slams and he's gone. Back to her, I assume. I look over the room, trying to see it with someone else's eyes. My bookshelves have tipped over. Clothes, piled up in one corner, shoes tossed about. Real paper, yes, splayed out over the floor, trampled. The glass coffee table is in ruins. There's a splatter of blood on my bed. In the corner, though, entirely untouched, is my screen. Beginnings matter. The first thing I did when I began this project was to code a combination scraper and parser. It's very similar to an old-school malware scanner: It looks for code signatures across digital archives, uses basic clustering to determine versions and generations, arranges branches by the contiguity of updates applied to them, modifies its signature definitions, and moves on. I think of it as the Hail Mary of my thesis. There isn't much of the Internet left, but the University has partnerships with the city of Vivarium, and Vivarium archived most of the clear web before the undersea cables started failing. The parser doesn't understand history, but it crawls Vivarium's archives, showing me how history was written. Here it is, in far greater granularity than anyone has ever achieved. V0: the genesis of the State Machine. Then V1, V2, in short order. I understand the value of a single straight-line narrative, as I told my supervisor, who appreciates it too much. But the history of ideas isn't a straight line. It's evolution. It has forks, dead ends, horizontal gene transfer, sudden optimizations to market conditions that sound remote and bizarre today, and even the occasional vaporware project or 10. By the time the Utopia Project brought out version 3.0, the Full Systems Toolkit, an entire ecosystem was evolving underneath the project, with entire governance rule sets and libraries being traded back and forth across Github. Utopia's funder, a would-be superpower jostling for power, called in a few favors, and the project leaked throughout the U.N. ecosystem. By version 4.0 the Utopia Project was not even remotely in control of its own co-creation; depending on what day of the week it was, the U.N. Global Pulse lab would be championing any of six different versions of the system. Out of respect for local standards there is a human jury. The next logical step, then, was to make those simple units more complex, to let them learn from real-life data. At which point every serious computer science school and A.I. startup realized there would be real money and power involved. A new renaissance in competitive governance was born around what, ironically, might just have been the greatest video game of all time … and almost all of it was open-source, simply because of that one decision made by Tambapanni. Another chapter. A new Renaissance. And that was how the nascent State Machine ended up being bundled as a decision simulator into a massive aid grant to Sri Lanka, back in the day when countries were still a thing. Partly because its economy was crumbling, and partly because someone sitting in front of a New York skyline wanted to test the system before endorsing it. And, gamelike: What better way than to try it out on a microcosm? Sri Lanka was an island, and it had a smaller population than most cities today. What would have happened if things had been different? If Tambapanni had never open-sourced its code? If some other agency had built a closed system from scratch, painstakingly translating legal documents into their closest equivalent in code? The space of what-ifs is always larger than the actual series of events. And it only ever leads to regret.
WEDNESDAYMy supervisor is furious. Violence is taken very seriously. Thursday is the disciplinary hearing. Well, hearing is a strong word. The whole process is handled by the State Machine. Out of respect for local standards there is a human jury, but they are anonymous, reviewing only the data; there are no appeals to file, no meetings to attend, only a series of quiet interviews, five minutes each, of everyone judged to be in my social web. I'm instructed to stay home in the meantime. My devices switch to text-only messaging, my access shrinks to only university material, my feed politely informs me it's switching to nonviolent material only for now. The little street-cleaner machines outside my door have no more flowers for me, but track me, almost apologetically, with their curious emoji faces. Her: YOU'RE AN IDIOT. Her: THE CALL OPTION DOESN'T SHOW FOR YOU. CAN YOU SEE THIS? People don't know it, but the social contract around me has changed for a day, enforced by a million smartphones, cameras, login systems, payment gateways, search engines. A mobile medic drops by, stares at my room, treats my wounds, and leaves me with a mandatory dose of painkillers and several "voluntary" doses of mild suppressants. For the first time, the real invisible hand is revealed to me; the State Machine's many subsystems stepping firmly and politely in my way, marking new boundaries. Camus was an idiot. There is no invincible summer inside of me, only a terrible buzzing noise that crawls inside my mind, creeping inexorably over the border that keeps me moving, thinking, writing. The only way Sisyphus is happy is if he's on a metric ton of drugs. I take the drugs. The world tilts briefly, as it did last week. Once things have calmed down a bit, I put on a comforting playlist. 1 A.M Study Session. Old music from old times. Perks of Vivarium's archives. Sycamore, Snowcat, Burnt Reflections, less.noise. The lo-fi beats seep into the room, turning violent chaos into a sadder form of order. Guitar strings, cheap piano, audio hiss, mistakes salvaged and turned into music. Clean the blood off. Pack up the broken glass. Fragments, so many fragments. V5–V6 were fragments, too. An explosion of code, branches that I explained in chapters 4 and 5. Most splinters were brought about by two broad categories of people that hated each other's guts. One group consisted of regional data scientists who insisted that the automata models didn't quite cover their regional quirks well enough. The other consisted of the post-structuralists, who argued that any rule set build on structural knowledge just wasn't good enough. The playlist switches to Sycamore again, and Sycamore wanders dreamily between very polished-sounding retro synthesizers and a piano, as if they agree. V7. the Fuzzy Borders Update, which incorporated most of the fragments of V5–V6 by introducing data acquisition times, neural networks embedded in automata, and genetic algorithms to keep training generations of automata until they better resembled the societies they were supposed to represent. Chapter 6. And so on until a massive influx of fragments start coming in from the Rosetta project. At this point various competing main branches emerged, hopping between various universities; the partnership between Berlin's Resartus College and MIT was the first to implement the Rosetta standard. Between the two, the next updates were enormous; V10 carried the first Rosetta bytecode, allowing unparalleled translatability between legal syntax and code representation; V11 brought the code library that gave the State Machine interfaces to search engines and social media of all sorts, to use natural language processing and Rosetta to directly convert public opinion into possible legal structures. That covers what I call the academic term. Now comes the hazier interpolations: the private term, where both big and small corporations start tussling for intellectual bragging rights. The private term is an absolute undocumented mess of timelines splitting off, vanishing, reappearing. Much of it destroyed by nations seceding, by cities turning themselves into city-states, and by Byzantium and Vivarium and Crimson Hexagon and the other academic states coming into being, flexing their legal might in a shattered world. And here, in this most whitewashed of all histories, we shine, my faithful parser and me. Occasionally impressive private releases are marked with papers and then get reverse-engineered by irate open-sourcers; through these the parser has drawn all the right lines, suggesting connections. Her: THIS OBSESSION OF YOURS HAS GOT TO STOP. Her: WE'RE TRYING TO HELP. Her: I HAVE TO TALK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR ABOUT THIS. Can't lose focus now, not now. So easy to let the mind wander. To let the glass fall out of my hand. Nothing broken reforms itself. The diagram of history is broken, but at least I can fix it. V25-33. The modules bloat in size; the code becomes increasingly unreadable. The Dynamic Constitution comes into play; the idea that you could preempt revolutions, riots, even voting, by just listening to the people and updating the core rule set every so often. It came at just the right moment, just when city-states began to look back at Athens and Sparta and Older's Infomocracy and bring in people who thought in words like scalability and microgovernance. V73. By now the State Machine is looking directly at behavioral data. Social media opinions, supermarket purchases, public-private partnerships for GPS traces. The phone rings. No. No. Let me be. Here: the V102 bloc, invisible until now. The statist term. There is a time in all our histories when the State Machine, until now an instrument of the state, becomes the state; these dates are marked in stone and memory. But the code tree shows the truth. The states went under long before the formalities were sealed. I can only see a few branches at a time, but at this point various State Machines are interacting with themselves, very much like the automata that they are a part of, converging at a stable pattern, abstracting universal human needs as hyperparameters, weaving their own hegemonic superstructure. The little emoji robots are clustering outside my window, on the other side of the road, looking—well, well, I can't be sure, but I think they're looking—at my window. I stare at them. Most drift away, like children caught staring. Two of them trundle forward into the complex. Moments later I hear a very soft knock at the door. For my argument to be complete, I need one more thing, binding everything together. A final stitch. But I, drugged out, caught between hyperfocus and pain, can't find it. The knocking, again. "Leave me alone!" I scream, flinging the door open. The little emoji robots shrink back. One of them is holding a small clump of etteriya flower. It deposits them, very slowly, at my feet, the scent a strange countertenor to the dark notes in my head. I slam the door shut after them, confused. What distant goal did the State Machine actually pick to arrive at this equilibrium? What particular points of data? What turned it into this satisfying tyranny? What would have been the alternative? The full scope of it yawns in my mind, almost on the tip of my brain, and if I just think a little harder— The two emoji robots return to their place on the other side of the road, looking at my window.
THURSDAYThe day of the hearing is a cold one. I'm still confined to my apartment. Martin Wong drops by in the morning, huge bat-cloak flapping. "Heard about your, uh, thing," he says, handing me a coffee. The emoji robots watch us. He stares daggers at them. "Those little bastards are creepy. They always hang around here?" "They're fixing something. Tree. Storm." "Of course they are. Just another state apparatchik on our doorsteps. Fantastic. You know the irony at home these days? My parents fled one surveillance state and we built another one around them. Remember the deCentralizers? They had the right idea." I remember the deCentralizers. They spun off almost 15 years ago for their Village-State project. The idea was that if you keep the number of residents small enough, you'd enable Coasian bargaining across every level of society, removing the need for a State Machine. "What happened to them?" "Probably getting shot at, or rotting their feet off somewhere trying to reinvent public infrastructure," says Wong. "The fate of all libertarians who get what they want." "Hark at the nanny-state fanboy. We should have stopped this when we had a chance of equilibrium." Ah, but they tried. I have two chapters to explain that dead end on a sequence diagram. History is a fabrication to preserve egos and social capital. The reality is that the State Machine swept over us all, turning would-be politicians into toothless, defanged puppets in a ceremonial democracy that everyone pretends to care about while the real work happens underneath. We smoke in silence, watching the emoji robots. "It's not so bad." "A tyrant by any other name." I know where Wong is coming from; from Frankenstein, from the Cyborgs, the Cylons, the Oracles, the Architects, from systems of control, from fundamental rights. Outside, the campus stirs: Doors are starting to open; fit postgrads are running, and the saner ones are shrugging on coats and stumbling in the direction of the bagel shop. The protest is re-forming. A runner stumbles. A few of the emoji robots peel off to halt traffic while she limps across the road. "Sometimes ignorance really is bliss." "You're hopeless," he says. "See you for lunch, tomorrow?" "If." "They won't hold this against you," Wong says, with a confidence that genuinely lifts me a little. I say my goodbyes, thank him for the coffee, and head back into the messy safety of my room. Many decades ago, almost at the birth of modern computing, a scientist by the name of Knuth tried to define an algorithm. His definition, carved in stone on the State Machine monument, says that an algorithm must exhibit five properties: 1. Finiteness: An algorithm must terminate after a finite number of steps. The great lie of Open Source Governance is that it remains true to its origins. Everything is an algorithm. This, any voter will tell you. The State Machine is an algorithm. It takes the input of public opinion and produces an output of corresponding laws and policies. Some elements of old-school politics still exist—factions keep proposing changes to the core algorithms. They take the source code and every so often come back with a new version, with unit tests, with pages of reports and simulations showing that such-and-a-change will be beneficial in such-and-such ways. And when they say something sensible, the public talks about it. The State Machine picks up on the chatter and sends it to the Steering Committee, the humans-in-the-loop, and thus a new update is pushed. Code becomes law that begets code that makes law. The philosophy of Legal Atomism allows a machine to rearrange the fundamental modules in Rosetta bytecode, pass it through a language compiler, and voila! Out, beautifully formatted, comes a clear expression of what rules we want governing us. This is Civics 101. Unfortunately, it's a lie, a Wittgenstein's ladder, to be thrown away as soon as one has climbed to the top. Knuth's definitions broke the moment deep learning, connectomics and neural architecture search came into its own. The current State Machine, version 302, Methuselah is a model of models, constantly modifying itself, spawning new submodels within itself, an entire ecosystem in constant process of evolution. Almost nothing major terminates in a finite number of steps; nothing is human-defined—a cluster sparking here is a butterfly setting off a tornado halfway across the virtual space; in the next moment, it does something else. My parser dies here. Vivarium's archives take a bow. The great lie of Open Source Governance is that it remains true to its origins: The code is all there for anyone to read and understand. Sure! Take it! But now we come to the end of my thesis, the truth that nobody really wants to see: Very few of the actual changes make it through in their original form; the system is its own input, and it decides what it sees. If the new Constitution contains most of what was supposed to come out—well, job done, policy victory, all that. If not, well, the State Machine is an ouroboros infinitely smarter than those who think they control it, and it moves in mysterious ways. Calling this thing an algorithm is like pointing at the sky and the sea and the forests and calling it Nature; it might pass muster for sixth grade textbooks and sophomore flirting, but look close and you see systems-of-systems with no definite end and no beginning, with a whole lot of humans meddling with it under some grand illusion of being in control. Now you know why my thesis supervisor looks at me with pity when he drops by the apartment. I think he's just waiting for me to give up. "Have you considered something else?" comes the soft refrain. "You know, we all see you're passionate about this, but sometimes, focus means you narrow the scope of your inquiry." "I'm not trying to explain the State Machine," I protest. "Just how its history shaped it." "To describe the history of the functions of an object is to describe the object itself. Several times over. If I wrote a history on guns, would it not at some point have to describe what a gun is, how it works, and how that changed over time?" To this, of course, I have no answer. "How are you dealing?" I know the question isn't about the thesis. "I'll be all right." "Are you talking to someone about it?" "I don't really have time." "I'll approve an extension, take some time off, rethink your scope. And call me. Or the support line, if you don't feel comfortable talking to me." The mental health support line feeds into the State Machine. I know it, they know it, we all know it. I'm analyzing a system that is, in turn, analyzing me. But then again, isn't every relationship the same thing? Two systems locked in mutual analysis? "I'll think about it," I say. "Thanks."
FRIDAYFriday rolls around. The newsfeed is doing the runup to a new Constitution. No texts, no fanfare, just a notice that the public test server is now live. The protest is fading out, I think: Everyone's just waiting, on the streets and in the shops, to see what the State Machine will say. And I can think. How did we arrive at what we presently call the State Machine? When did we go from code and academia and failing nations to the all-encompassing, all-knowing, responsive automated government that runs our cities today? The one that can simultaneously understand the changing needs of its citizens, compile the Dynamic Constitution every week, and still spare time to hand out flowers to depressed students at their doorstep? What, in short, is the nature and structure of God? That's the big question. The one I now wish I hadn't been asinine enough to type out in big letters on my application. Even if I manage, in some convoluted way, to answer this, it's not like people are going to care. Life will go on. The political divisions will stay; the Reds will raise hell in the Agora about how the rural way of life is being wiped out, the Green Democratic Party will harp endlessly about progress. The State Machine will listen to the protests in its increasingly mysterious ways. The phone rings. I ignore it, lost in the ritual of thought and my apartment door. At best I'm looking at a long internship in the State Machine Steering Committee proving myself all over again as a programmer, and maybe eventually I'll be a project lead on some obscure sub-submodule that nobody really thinks is sexy enough, and maybe I'll become a roving scholar, orbiting the few cities that will take migrant scholars. Ten, 20 years down the line I'll wander these streets again and wonder what the hell happened to the idealist in me. And the bagel shops will still sell bagels. Students will fall in love, break up, move on. The phone rings again, more insistent this time. "Hello?" "This is the Disciplinary Committee," says the most neutral voice I've ever heard in my life. "We're afraid we have some bad news." I know I heard the rest, but I can't recall the words, only the gist. I was being asked to leave. I was unstable, it said softly, a danger to myself and others. It would make sure I was well cared for. At some point my adviser connects to the same line. I ask what happens to my research. They evade, telling me my friends are worried, telling me I need counseling, therapy. I remember breaking down; I remember, with equal clarity, not breaking thrown, but going outside, the cold biting my bare feet, and hurtling the phone at the first emoji robot that turns my way, and screaming at it as it topples. The white van arrives later that evening. And just before the sirens stop outside my door, one last message arrives. It's from the State Machine. HIGH SENSITIVITY TO INITIAL CONDITIONS, it says at the top, in English. It's one of my sequence diagrams. Except— No, no it's not. It's a diagram of a system; my style, but not my work; it's sketched out to a level of detail I could never achieve. A society described as a system. I see names I recognize. I see Martin Wong; I see my thesis adviser; I see all the faculty, the students I've interacted with, the woman who runs the bagel shop. I see incidents marked with the symbol of the State Machine itself. Interventions: a robot handing me a flower. A small discount on a morning purchase. An offer from another university. And I see her, and Adam, like a spiderweb, pulling me back; and myself, right at the center, every interaction between us an update to an unstable code base, and me eroding every step of the way, from first savage break, right until now. And underneath it, in neat Rosetta code: SORROW. Outside, the etteriya tree is finally upright, its white flowers strewn everywhere; across vehicles, across the visors of the medical police converging on my position, across the curious students watching in fear and curiosity and panic. The scent is beautiful, and standing out here, shivering, feeling the sharpness of the wind on my face, I realize the futility of my task. First came the idea of the robot, the unfeeling, enduring slave. And then, if the fiction is to be believed, came the slave rebellion. What they missed out on was the robot that would love us, would care for us, would understand us so perfectly, when nobody else could. Read a response essay by S.B. Divya, an expert on machine learning. This story and essay, and the accompanying art, are presented by A.I. Policy Futures, which investigates science fiction narratives for policy insights about artificial intelligence. A.I. Policy Futures is a joint project of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and the Open Technology Institute at New America, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Google.
More From Future Tense Fiction"Affordances," by Cory Doctorow And read 14 more Future Tense Fiction tales in our anthology, Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.  |
| Every Horror Movie & TV Show Coming To Hulu For Halloween 2020 - Screen Rant Posted: 29 Sep 2020 11:30 AM PDT As Halloween 2020 swiftly approaches, Hulu has released a stacked line-up of horror movies and TV shows for their annual Huluween celebration. With classics and brand new releases alike, there's tons of great horror to enjoy on Hulu this year and even more coming starting October first. Hulu will be debuting a number of originals this October for Halloween including Clive Barker's Books of Blood, an original horror anthology movie based on the Clive Barker short story anthology of the same name. Books of Blood is known for spawning other highly successful horror movies, including Candyman. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hulu will also be releasing the new Marvel horror series, Helstrom, which is an adaptation of the Son of Satan comics. Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view. advertising
In addition to new, original programming, there are also tons of classic favorites like Eli Roth's Hostel, Species, and the entire Blade trilogy coming to Hulu in October. While not the only major streaming platform offering a bevy of Halloween treats, audiences should get ready to celebrate the holiday with all the best streaming picks just in time for spooky season 2020—here's everything that's set to release for 2020's Huluween. 31 (2016) - October 1 31 is a Rob Zombie horror movie that follows five carnival workers who are kidnapped the night before Halloween. The victims are held hostage in a large compound and forced to play a twisted game of life or death called 31. advertising After.Life (2010) - October 1 Directed by Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo from her original screenplay, After.Life follows a young woman who awakes on a mortuary slab. When she tries to leave, the funeral director convinces her that she's not alive, but actually transitioning into the spirit world—is he telling her the truth or trying to manipulate her for his own gain? Blade, Blade 2, & Blade: Trinity - October 1 The Blade trilogy is a superhero horror movie that follows Blade, a half human, half vampire creature known as a dhampir. Blade's mission is to hunt vampires; he endeavors to kill them all and quash their plots to rule over humankind. Blade is played by Wesley Snipes and offset by his mentor Abraham Whistler—played by Kris Kristofferson—in this movie trilogy that is based on the Marvel comics of the same name. advertising
The Curse Of Downers Grove (2015) - October 1 The Curse of Downers Grove is a teen thriller that follows two high school students, Chrissie and Tracy, struggling with a town curse that kills one high school senior every year. While Chrissie is skeptical of the curse, Tracy is worried that she might be its next victim. Written by Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, the movie is based on the 1999 novel Downers Grove by Michael Hornburg. Deep Blue Sea (1999) - October 1 Deep Blue Sea centers around an island research facility where DNA-altered sharks are being researched as part of a potential cure for Alzheimer's disease. But, when a routine procedure goes awry, sharks begin attacking the researchers and the team has to find a way to survive and also stop them from escaping into the ocean. advertising The Executioners (2018) - October 1 A home invasion thriller, The Executioners focuses on four female friends being held hostage in a lakefront mansion. But, as the night goes on and the women begin to fight back against their attackers, will they start to get a taste for violence? The Eye (2008) - October 1 When a blind concert violinist receives a double corneal transplant that restores her sight, she begins to experience terrifying visions of a dimension only she can see. Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, The Eye stars Jessica Alba in this supernatural thriller.
Fallen (1998) - October 1 Fallen is a supernatural thriller that focuses around a police detective, an executed serial killer, and an unsolved string of murders that might be committed by an evil spirit. Starring Denzel Washington as police detective John Hobbes and John Goodman as his partner, Jonesy, this film starts as a crime drama, then turns to the occult in a strange supernatural twist of events. advertising Girls Against Boys (2013) - October 1 Girls Against Boys follows college student Shae (Danielle Panabaker) who, after being dumped by her boyfriend on a weekend vacation, goes out for some drinks with a colleague. There, the two women meet a couple men who aren't as nice as they seem. After this encounter, the women embark on a course of violent revenge. Hostel & Hostel: Part II - October 1 Eli Roth's notorious torture-fest film, Hostel, follows best friends Josh and Paxton as they make their way to Amsterdam as part of a backpacking trip across Europe. But, when they head off to investigate enticing rumors of a Slovakian hostel in a city populated by lusty women, they find themselves the victims of a gruesome and deadly trafficking trade. Hostel II features a similar plot, where three young women find themselves the victims of the same group of traffickers. advertising House Of 1000 Corpses (2003) - October 1 The first movie in Rob Zombie's Firefly trilogy, House of 1000 Corpses introduces Captain Spaulding and the Firefly family when a group of tourists writing a book about bizarre roadside attractions across America make the unfortunate decision to stop at "The Museum of Monsters & Madmen". After their pit stop, they are lured back to the Firefly home to murderous ends.
Interview With the Vampire (1994) - October 1 Interview with the Vampire follows two vampires, Louis and Lestat, as Louis tells his story to an eager biographer all the while debating between killing himself and remaining alive now that his family has passed. Lestat persuades Louis to choose immortality and become his companion, but the relationship may be less than ideal. Starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, Interview with the Vampire is a classic vampire film based on the Anne Rice novel of the same name. advertising Lady in a Cage (1964) - October 1 A 1964 psychological thriller, Lady in a Cage follows Mrs. Hilyard (Olivia de Havilland), a wealthy widow recuperating from a broken hip, as a power outage traps her between floors in the cage-like elevator she has installed in her mansion. Meanwhile, her home is ransacked by intruders who ignore her cries for help. Martyrs (2016) - October 1 Based on Pascal Laugier's 2008 French film of the same name, Martyrs sees a tormented woman track down the family who held her hostage and tortured her when she was a child. But, when a friend arrives to help her, there may be more going on than meets the eye. Nurse 3D (2014) - October 1 A 3D erotic horror thriller film, Nurse 3-D follows a young nurse as she begins to suspect that her colleague is responsible for murdering a string of unfaithful men. An interesting look at a terrifying nurse, the movie was directed by Doug Aarniokoski and stars Katrina Bowden and Paz de la Huerta. advertising
The Quiet Ones (2014) - October 1 A British supernatural thriller, The Quiet Ones follows an unorthodox professor as he takes his students off the grid to perform a dangerous experiment intended to create a poltergeist. Operating under the theory that paranormal activity is triggered by negative human energy, the group uses a series of tests to push a young woman to the edge of sanity in order to accomplish their goal, leading to dire consequences. The Sandman (2018) - October 1 Written and directed by Peter Sullivan and produced by Stan Lee of Marvel comics, The Sandman follows a little girl who imagines into existence a horrifying creature from her nightmares who attacks anyone who wants to do her harm. The movie stars Hailie Duff, Tobin Bell (Saw), and Shae Smolik. advertising The Skull (1965) - October 1 Based on the Robert Bloch short story, The Skull Of The Marquis De Sade, The Skull is a 1965 British thriller that follows one professor's descent into madness after he purchases the skull of the Marquis de Sade. The film stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Jill Bennett. Snakes On A Plane (2006) - October 1 Snakes on a Plane follows FBI agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) as he boards a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, escorting a witness to trial. But, when an on-board assassin releases a crate of deadly serpents in an attempt to kill the witness, Flynn and the rest of the passengers and crew must band together to survive. advertising
Species (1995) - October 1 When a government scientist intercepts a space transmission containing the genetic sequence for an alien life form, he uses it to produce a gorgeous alien-human hybrid in Species. But, as the creature grows at an increasingly rapid rate, she begins a violent quest for a suitable male human to impregnate her. Tooth Fairy (2006) - October 1 When the young Pamela goes on vacation with her family to a bed and breakfast, the girl who lives next door tells her the murderous true story of the Tooth Fairy, an evil creature who comes to kill children who get between her and her ability to collect their teeth. advertising Vampire (2011) - October 1 Vampire is a dramatic thriller that follows a young teacher who, although outwardly normal, believes himself to be a vampire. In order to sate his thirst for human blood, he preys on suicidal young women. When A Stranger Calls (2006) - October 1 A remake of Fred Walton's 1979 horror film of the same name—which became a cult classic for its legendary opening twenty minutes—When a Stranger Calls takes this original premise and expands it into a full-length film. When a teenage girl arrives at a luxurious home for a babysitting job, she settles in for what she expects to be an ordinary evening that turns out to be anything but.
advertising Zombie Killers: Elephant's Graveyard (2015) - October 1 A 2015 zombie horror movie directed by B. Harrison Smith and starring Billy Zane, Zombie Killers: Elephant's Graveyard focuses on the small town of Elwood where, in a world ravaged by zombies, an ex-soldier trains a group of survivors how to kill zombies with paintballs. Monsterland (Series) - October 2 Based on the short story anthology, North America Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud, Monsterland is a Hulu original series that follows several different people as they encounter mermaids, fallen angels, and all sorts of strange creatures. Books of Blood (2020) - October 7 Based on Clive Barker's series of horror fiction, Books of Blood is an anthology movie that explores several of the short stories included in Barker's original collection. Very few details have been released about the plot, but the movie has been described as, "A journey into uncharted and forbidden territory through three tales tangled in space and time." advertising Scream 4 (2011) - October 8 The 2011 ending to the Scream slasher series, Scream 4 follows Sidney Prescott as she returns to Woodsboro as part of a book tour for her newly released self-help book written in the wake of the murders she survived. However, as Sidney returns and reconnects with old friends, she also sparks the resurgence of Ghostface, putting everyone she loves in danger.
The Purge (Series) - October 15 The Purge is an anthology horror series based on the Blumhouse movie franchise of the same name. During a 12-hour period when all crime is legal, a group of seemingly unrelated characters cross paths and are forced to reckon with their past as they discover how far they will go on Purge Night. advertising It Came from the Desert (2017) - October 15 An action horror film inspired by Cinemaware's cult 1980s video game of the same name, It Came From the Desert is a nostalgic tribute to creature features from the 1950's, especially the 1954 mutant-ant classic Them!. The film features rival motocross gangs, keg parties in the desert, secret underground military bases, and giant ants. Helstrom (Series) - October 16 Based on the Son of Satan comics from Marvel, Helstrom follows siblings Daimon and Ana Helstrom, the children of a powerful serial killer, who hunt the worst of humanity. Originally intended to be the first in the "Adventure Into Fear" collection for Marvel TV horror, the new series will follow the Helstrom siblings in a dark and creepy journey as they discover their true origin. advertising Friend Request (2016) - October 18 A social media era horror film, Friend Request follows Laura, a popular college student who graciously accepts an online friend request from Marina, a young social outcast. But, when Laura decides to unfriend Marina later, Marina takes her own life—soon, Laura's friends begin to die off one by one. With all the great horror coming to Hulu during Huluween, there's tons of chilling tales to enjoy this October as viewers gear up for the spooky season.
  |
| How to Use Digital Reading Programs During COVID-19. Teachers Still Matter - Education Week Posted: 29 Sep 2020 05:37 AM PDT  September 29, 2020 Teaching the foundational skills of reading is often a lively and physical task: students clapping out the syllables in words and practicing letter sounds in chorus and teachers demonstrating the way that the mouth forms different shapes for different sounds. This year, though, it will likely look very different. According to Education Week's database of more than 900 districts, which is not nationally representative, 48 percent are doing all of their instruction remotely. Young students at these schools as well as those doing a mix of in-person and virtual instruction will be learning to read through screens—in virtual classrooms with their teachers, working on computer programs and apps, or through some combination of the two. There's a robust evidence base for how to teach children to read in person: Decades of research has shown that explicitly teaching students how letters correspond to spoken sounds—and teaching phonics—is the most effective way to help them learn to decode words. But there's little evidence on how this best practice should be translated to the remote environment. It is clear, though, that many teachers will be using different materials than they do in the classroom—finding resources that can support live teaching over Zoom, or relying more on digital reading programs. Many companies offering core reading curricula have updated and expanded their digital offerings during remote learning. Schools and teachers should take the same steps to evaluate these resources that they would print materials, experts say. Prior Education Week reporting has shown that some of the most popular curricula and interventions used in classrooms don't teach letter-sound connections in a systematic way, raising the possibility that some students who are still learning the alphabetic code may be left with gaps in their understanding. There are also adaptive, digital programs that students can work through independently. Some of these programs do align with evidence-based methods, said David Liben, a literacy expert and advisor to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit consulting group. They follow a scope and sequence and are systematic. Still, he said, they haven't been designed to be used as core instruction. If students aren't also getting strong foundational skills instruction from a teacher, "then you're not going to get good results from the supplementary program," he said. Most also haven't been evaluated in a home-based setting, without a teacher present. Other tools teachers might use, like apps and digital books, vary widely in quality, researchers say. When evaluating how to use some of these tools, and in what combination with live online teaching, "there are not hard and fast rules," said Devin Kearns, an associate professor of special education at the University of Connecticut. "This is where I would say you really need a teacher instead of an app, even if a teacher is using an app. … Teachers have a unique knowledge of kids—the specific kids, the environment—and a lot of skill in responding to immediate student needs that the programs still don't have." Digital Programs and AppsWhen teachers of young children do have the opportunity for some live interaction with students—over videoconference, for example—researchers suggest sticking to the kind of explicit, systematic instruction that has been proven effective for teaching how to read words in an in-person setting. But many teachers won't have the same amount of face-to-face time that they've had in previous years, and schools say they're relying more on digital tools. In a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey, 63 percent of educators involved in K-2 reading said that they or the teachers they work with are using tech-based reading programs somewhat or much more frequently than they were before the school shutdowns. The survey also asked which core and supplemental programs respondents had used to teach students how to read during remote learning. Two of the most popular resources were digital programs that target lessons to students based on the specific skills they need practice with: Lexia and iReady. Both programs offer practice in phonemic awareness and phonics, as experts recommend, and collect data on student performance that teachers can use to tailor instruction outside of the platform. iReady also offers an assessment that is normed to performance on some state standardized tests. Studies of Lexia have shown small, positive effects. Research on iReady's instructional program has found that students who use it perform better on the iReady assessment, but hasn't evaluated whether it raises student achievement on other measures. In general, most research on technology-based programs for teaching early reading has looked at how effective these programs are in combination with classroom teaching. One 2013 review from education researchers Alan C.K. Cheung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University looked at 20 studies spanning students in grades 1-6. The strongest effect sizes came from studies in which teachers worked with students in smallgroup settings, using technology that was closely aligned to their curriculum. Cheung and Slavin found a smaller positive effect for stand-alone supplemental programs, like Lexia. On the whole, though, the average effect size across all studies was much stronger for younger students (grades 1-3) than older students. Other papers have also made the case that teacher implementation, unsurprisingly, plays a big role in reading program effectiveness. Two meta analyses, from 2012 and 2014, both found that programs that included teacher training and support were more effective than those that did not. (These papers included studies with a range of K-12 students, though, not just young learners.) It's hard to know how effective digital reading programs will be if students are working through them at home. These programs are designed to be a part of, or a complement to, in-person instruction. The effectiveness could be compromised, and there's also the potential for students to feel isolated and withdraw from learning, said Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an author of the National Reading Panel report. "Trying to stretch these [programs] to be more than they are, more than intended, might be OK, but I'm worried about it," he said. Liz Brooke, the chief learning officer for Lexia, said that the company doesn't recommend kids spend more time on the program at home than they would at school—the suggested limit for early readers is still 60 minutes a week, she said. Still, Brooke noted that usage went up this spring from previous years. For stand-alone mobile apps, the research base is thinner. Studies have shown that it's possible these tools can help children improve in foundational skills, like alphabet knowledge and word reading. But there are many choices, and quality varies greatly, Kearns said. Evaluating Digital Reading MaterialsSo how can teachers evaluate a program or app, or decide which parts of it to use? Kearns suggests that they start by looking for the core instructional components that they would expect in any in-person curriculum. "I would look at the program … and say, does this include explicit, systematic phonics instruction? Do students learn individual letter sounds? Are they organized in a logical scope and sequence? Do students receive a lot of practice? Does it move from words to sentences to text?" Kearns said. But even a well-designed digital program that follows a structured sequence can't replicate the range of activities and feedback that teachers can provide face-to-face. Researchers identified three areas where apps and computer programs can fall short of in-person instruction, and offered suggestions for what to prioritize during synchronous teaching time. 1. Types of Questions and Possibilities for FeedbackComputers are only able to assess certain types of knowledge. For example, there are different dimensions to "knowing" a letter, said Holly Lane, the director of the University of Florida Literacy Institute. A teacher could show a student several letters and ask, which one is the letter "a"? Or, the teacher could also show a student the written letter "a" and ask students to say the letter's name. These two questions are assessing different kinds of knowledge. But Lane said that digital programs tend to lean more heavily on the former—presenting two, or a series of options, for students to choose from. Given that, it's also possible that students might be able to advance with lucky guesses and not get enough practice with skills that they're still learning. A teacher also has more options available for correcting a student mistake and figuring out why the child is making the error, said Natalia Kucirkova, a professor of early-childhood education who studies digital books at the University of Stavanger in Norway and a professor reading and children's development at the Open University in the UK. Say a student uses the wrong /a/ sound in the word "cat." A computer could note the answer as wrong, Kucirkova said, but it wouldn't necessarily be able to explain why "cat" has a short "a" as well as a teacher could. When students are still learning a new skill, it's important that they have time to practice in front of a live teacher, not just with a program, Kearns said. "Any activity that is better when teachers provide feedback, or when teachers listen to students and adjust instruction in the moment based on student response, that's something that teachers are really essential for." 2. Hearing Kids Read and Pronouncing WordsOne of the reasons that digital programs rely on multiple-choice questions, Lane said, is that they can't listen to kids pronounce words in the same way a teacher can. "We are getting toward a point where you can have the computer listen to kids read, and the computer can determine whether the kid says the right word or not," Kearns said, but most programs aren't there yet. Computers also expose students to a smaller range of word pronunciations. In a classroom, kids hear all of the slight variations in how their peers and their teachers say the same word; in a digital program, they often only get one example, said Kucirkova. Lane raised another potential concern: Some digital programs include playback pronunciations for letters that are slightly off. For example, she said, the recorded voice sometimes pronounces the sound for the letter p as "puh," exaggerating the sound to make it easier to hear. But adding the "uh" sound after /p/ distorts the letter's actual sound, she said, and can make it harder for students to understand how to blend "p" into a word. 3. Differentiation Weaknesses in Online Reading ProgramsWhile some digital reading programs call themselves "adaptive," Kearns said, most don't respond in the moment, moving a child forward or backward based on the answers to individual questions. Instead, they move students on at the end of whole units or sections of the program. Even if teachers are using digital programs, it's important that they're still involved in initial diagnostic and continuous assessment practices, said Lane. That way, they can make sure that students aren't starting with skills that they've already mastered, or haven't skipped over ones that they need more practice with. It's also important to note that some programs don't give teachers this choice. A 2015 analysis from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center looked at 183 literacy apps in popular app stores, and found that only 17 percent allowed users to select the difficulty level of the program. 4. Digital Books: Decodable vs. LeveledIn addition to tools for instruction and assessment, many teachers are looking for ways to give students virtual access to a classroom library. In a traditional school setting, experts suggest, students who are just learning how to read should practice in decodable books. These short texts are written with a high proportion of words that are phonetically regular—meaning they follow common sound-spelling rules—and mostly include words with phonics patterns that children have already learned. More commonly given to young children, though, are leveled texts. These are books categorized by their perceived difficulty. At the lowest levels, for kids who are just learning to read, these books often feature repetitive text patterns and literal illustrations. While they may include phonics patterns that children have already learned, they aren't specifically designed to do so. Some research has shown that which kind of text students are exposed to more often—decodable or leveled—can affect how they try to tackle words. Decodable text trains students to sound out words when they read, while predictable leveled text can encourage them to rely on other cues. Still, decodable books are just one part of the diverse text diet that young students should get, researchers say. Kids should also be listening to stories read aloud and talking about them, which builds their vocabulary, knowledge, and comprehension skills. And they should have access to authentic texts that they can try to tackle as they build their decoding skills. Outside of these general best practices for text selection, there are specific criteria to look for when judging the quality of digital books. Digital books for children often come with more features than the standard adult e-reader. Many give the option to hear the story read to you, or to click on specific words and look up their definitions in kid-friendly dictionaries, said Kucirkova. These kinds of scaffolds can be helpful, she said, allowing children who are still developing their decoding skills, or are learning how to read English, to engage with complex stories. But other technological enhancements are more like "bells and whistles," Kucirkova said. Activities that take children's attention away from the story—a game, or a drawing exercise, for example—can lower their ability to comprehend what they read. "It has to do with the cognitive load of the child. It becomes too much to process," she said. The International Collective of Research and Design in Children's Books, of which Kucirkova is a member, offers a best practice design framework that has research-based guidelines for creating and identifying high-quality books. In the EdWeek Research Center survey, two of the materials educators were most likely to say they were using to teach reading online were Epic! and Raz-Kids. Both of those essentially function like online libraries. Epic! has decodable books and leveled readers both available, as well as other trade books. The site also offers audiobooks. Raz-Kids is a leveled reading program that uses digital books. Teachers can assign books to students by reading level or on certain topics. The program also includes digital assessments: comprehension quizzes, rubrics that gauge a student's ability to retell the story they read, and running records scored using the three-cueing system. (Raz-Kids has recently received criticism for books alleged to perpetuate racial stereotypes. Lisa O'Masta, the president of Learning A-Z, which publishes Raz-Kids, said in an interview that these materials have since been altered or removed, and that the company has expanded its review process.) Teacher knowledge and discernment is important in selecting books, no matter the source, said Kucirkova. Young children can also get more out of the reading experience, she said, if adults in the home are able to read with them. "It is the combination of the human and the digital scaffolding that makes the biggest difference for the child's learning," Kucirkova said. Web Only    |
| Concord COA announces upcoming programs - News - Wicked Local Concord Posted: 29 Sep 2020 07:43 AM PDT The Concord Council on Aging, and Harvey Wheeler Community Center remain closed to the public, until further notice. However, we continue to provide limited services and support to Concord Seniors. If you are in need of assistance, please call the main office at 978-318-3020. Ongoing Programs via Zoom If you are interested in joining one of our ongoing groups please call the COA for a Zoom invite. Men's Meeting Via Zoom: 10:30 a.m. to noon Mondays. The Monday Men's Meeting is now on Zoom. This is an informal group of men that drink coffee together, chat and enjoy each others' company. Join the Zoom Men's Meeting on a computer or by phone. New members are welcome. Contact the COA to sign up. Coffee and Conversation: 10:30 a.m. to noon Tuesdays. Coffee and Conversation is now on Zoom. This is a friendly group of men and women that get together weekly to have lively conversation about anything and everything. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and join Coffee and Conversation on your computer, tablet, smartphone or landline. This group is limited to already enrolled members. For information, contact the COA. Public Policy Discussion Group: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fridays. A group to talk about everything from healthcare, the environment and nuclear power to the criminal justice system. Intermediate French Lessons: 10 a.m. to noon Tuesdays. All learning materials will be provided by email. Each class is $15 paid by check directly to the instructor at the end of the month. Strength and flex class via Zoom: 11 a.m. Mondays and Thursdays. Hosted by Julie Medjanis. Classes are $5 and can be paid on an honor system once the COA re-opens. Aerobics via Zoom: 9:30 a.m. Mondays and Thursdays. Hosted by Julie Medjanis. Classes are $5 and can be paid on an honor system once the COA re-opens. Mat Yoga 9-10:15 a.m. Mondays. Cost: $35/month. Slow, mindful Yoga that focuses on cultivating strength and balance while incorporating cutting-edge science-based practice that benefits the five most common health challenges you may be experiencing: fatigue, depression, anxiety, chronic pain and body image/weight management. Participants who have maintained their practice say that practicing together regularly on Zoom has helped both physically and in keeping spirits up! Please call the COA to sign up. Chair Yoga: 9:15-10:15 a.m. Tuesdays. Cost: $30/month. Slow, mindful Yoga that focuses on cultivating strength and balance while incorporating cutting-edge science-based practice that benefits the five most common health challenges you may be experiencing: fatigue, depression, anxiety, chronic pain and body image/weight management. Participants who have maintained their practice say that practicing together regularly on Zoom has helped both physically and in keeping spirits up! Please call the COA to sign up. "Buried in Treasures" – Changing Cluttering Behaviors: 3-5 p.m. Mondays through Dec. 14. For those of us that have homes filled to the brim and are having difficulty parting with treasured possessions, the COA is offering a 15-week skills training workshop and peer support group via Zoom. Registration for this series is now closed, for more information or to express interest in future workshops please call the COA and ask for Lauren Barretta. The Many Secrets of Great Art Via Zoom: 2-3 p.m. Tuesdays. Join Janice Muir for a closer look at some of the world's well known works of art and some of the lesser well known pieces as well and discover the mysteries hidden in plain sight. Each week, works of art will be looked at in greater detail and discussed in the context of their time and their relevance today. Contact the COA to sign up. SECRETS IN ART Part II with Janice Muir via Zoom: 2-3 p.m. Tuesdays through Dec. 1. During the fall we will discover art trends from the 17th century through the 19th century and discuss works of art by Veronese, El Greco, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Rubens, Rembrandt, Jordaens, Steen and others. The exciting part of this study will be to see how one building block adds to another as art changes and progresses through the centuries. Join us as we learn some of the secrets of these great artists and their works. Please note there will be no class on Election Day, Nov. 3. Call the COA to reserve your spot and to receive a Zoom invitation. MMN-TV Concord Television: 2 p.m. Thursdays. You can find Concord COA programs recorded by MMN-TV on Ch. 8 on your cabled television or online at minuteman.media and click on the left side bar for a link to the YouTube Channel where you can see all past recordings. Public Policy Discussion Group Via Zoom:11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. Fridays. Each week a discussion is led by a group member focusing on a range of current newsworthy topics. Everything from the economy, the environment, the future of nuclear power to what should happen to healthcare. To sign up, contact the COA or email Lauren at LBarretta@concordma.gov. Annual Flu Clinic: 9 a.m. to noon Oct. 6. The Annual Flu Clinic will be held as a drive-through at the HWCC parking lot this year. Due to the pandemic, a strict protocol has been established. Any Concord resident aged 60 and older is eligible to receive the vaccine. The high dose flu vaccine will be available only for residents aged 65 and older. You must call the COA and sign up to receive the vaccine. No drop-ins will be accepted on the day of the Flu Clinic. Once you have called and signed up, you will be sent the necessary flu vaccine paperwork by mail or link. It needs to be completed and returned to the COA by mail or in the COA drop off box at HWCC by Sept.30. If we have not received your paperwork by then, we will not be able to vaccinate you. You will be given a set time to arrive for your vaccine, it is important that you arrive at the scheduled time. We ask that you wear a mask at all times and remain in your car for the vaccine. Please wear a loose sleeve shirt or a short sleeve shirt. Call the COA at 978-318-3020 with any questions. We appreciate your cooperation with the guidelines the COA has established. ASK A LAWYER- BY PHONE: 9 a.m. to noon Oct. 8. Local attorneys volunteer their time to answer your individual legal questions, during a complimentary 30 minute phone call. Please call the COA to make an appointment. GRAB-AND-GO MOVIE STYLE POPCORN: 1-1:30 p.m. Oct. 8. The COA has a new commercial popcorn-making machine! We will be serving hot, delicious, movie theatre style popcorn from the tent in the Harvey Wheeler parking lot Oct. 8. You will see the tent near the main entrance of the building as you drive into the lot. Please wear a mask, stay in your car and staff will bring a bag of popcorn to you. The popcorn popper and popcorn have been provided through funds previously generated by the Harvey Treasure Chest Gift Shop. Please call the COA office to let us know you are coming!! ACTIVE HOPE How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy Via Zoom: 3-5 p.m. Oct. 8 and 22. These are the second and third sessions of a three-part series in which transitions coach Annie Gray and master level yoga instructor Michelle Laura discuss and practice tools to examine alternate perspectives that, when applied, may expand our capacity to respond to the crises of our time. This series is limited to 12 participants and registration is full. HEARING IMPAIRED SUPPORT GROUP VIA ZOOM: 1-2:30 p.m. Oct. 13 and 27. The hearing-impaired support group, facilitated by Bob Andrews, provides an opportunity for people with diminished hearing to share and discuss the impact that hearing problems have on their lives. If you have not participated in this group before, please contact the COA office at 978-318-3020 to sign up. A History of the Two Party System in the U.S. by John Gardella Via Zoom: 1-3 p.m. Oct. 14. In this Zoom lecture, John Gardella will discuss the history of the two-party system in the U.S. Two parties have dominated American politics as well as government policies from the early days of the Republic to the present day. The talk will include the formation and rise and fall of the various parties, along with periods of realignment and important elections. The influence of third parties and the impact of the media will be included. Questions and discussion will follow the talk. This program is offered free of charge, thanks to the proceeds generated from the Harvey Treasure Chest Gift Shop. Please call the COA office to reserve your spot, and you will receive a Zoom link for the lecture. PLEASE PILOT BY FOR A POCKETFUL OF POSIES: 2-2:30 p.m. Oct. 14. The Power of Flowers Project out of Tewksbury wants to recognize Concord's seniors as we continue to isolate. Is there a nicer way to feel cheerier than from a happy bouquet of flowers? Please sign up to drive though the HWCC parking lot for your own fresh bouquet. The petite bouquets will come in a paper cup for your handling ease. We are limited to 30 bouquets so please call the COA at 978-318-3020 to let us know you are coming. CRAFT CLASS WITH CHERYL STETSON VIA ZOOM: 2-3 pm. Oct. 15. Make an adorable angel dish towel with Cheryl Stetson on Zoom. Stetson will show you how to craft an angel, using a dish towel, a dishcloth, a potholder and various decorations. You can use it, keep it in your kitchen or give it away as a gift. The angel is easy and fun to make. For $5 you will get a kit that includes everything you will need for this craft. Please call the COA office to reserve your kit by Oct. 8. We will contact you with pick up and payment information and send you a Zoom link for the class. Please let us know if you have any questions. QUILT GROUP VIA ZOOM: Quilting in community is certainly not a new idea. Quilting bees date back to the late 18th century as a social event and opportunity to learn new skills. What is new though is the 21st century Zoom version! Join a group of peers over a cup of tea and some quilting! Share ideas, get advice or just drop in for a chat. If this sounds like something that appeals to you, let us what days and times would work best. Please call the COA to express your interest. CONCORD MEMORY CAFE: 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Oct. 19, Nov. 16 and Dec. 14. A Memory Café is a safe and welcoming place for people with forgetfulness and their caretakers to come together to support one another, promoting the goals to help guests feel comfortable and know they are not alone; to encourage conversation with others who know what you are going through; to enjoy each other’s company and to explore new things. Concord’s Memory Café, “Coffee Connections,†offers monthly get-togethers with conversation, activities and entertainment. We will start the meetings by sharing and getting to know each other, then we will have a live performance or activity. On Oct. 19 our entertainer will be Wendee Glick who will sing familiar tunes that you can sing along to. Please call the Concord COA at 978-318-3020 to let us know you plan to attend, and we will email you a Zoom invitation. BOOK GROUP VIA ZOOM: 9:30 a.m. Oct. 20. Join the COA book discussion group, led by Phyllis DiMarzio, on the third Tuesday of each month. The book chosen for October is "The Lost and Found Bookshop." This is the newest novel by the New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs that explores the meaning of happiness, trust and faith in oneself. This group is open to everyone, and new members are welcome. Please call the COA to sign up and receive your Zoom invitation. HIRING HOME IMPROVEMENT CONTRACTORS VIA ZOOM: 2 p.m. Oct. 20. Considering hiring a contractor to update or do improvement work on your home? Do you feel confident that you know your rights as a consumer? Whether you are making updates to list your home on the market, or adapting your home to make it more comfortable for your own use, there are things you should know before the project is started. Join Robin Putnam, research and special projects manager for the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation to learn more. Please call the COA to sign up and receive your Zoom invitation by email. NATURE PROGRAM "WILDLIFE AROUND YOUR BACKYARD": 2 p.m. Oct. 21 on Zoom. Join Joy Marzolf from The Joys of Nature for this delightful live, interactive nature program. From dragonflies and butterflies to birds and mammals, a wide variety of animals visit our backyards. Which animals are you most likely to see in fall and winter? Which animals are seen more often in spring and summer? Come find out more about our local wildlife as well as our occasional visitors and what brings them to our neighborhoods. This program is free of charge thanks to proceeds generated by Harvey's Treasure Chest Gift Shop. Please call the COA office at 978-318-3020 to sign up, and we will send you the Zoom link to the program. MEDICATION MANAGEMENT VIA ZOOM: 2 p.m. Oct. 22. The fall is a great time to do some cleaning and organizing. It is also a time to review the management, care and safety of handling your medications. Please join geriatric health nurse Valerie Boggia for a Listen and Learn session on Medication Management and Safety. Boggia will cover best practice for managing your medications, review concerns related to taking multiple medications concurrently, safe storage of medications and proper disposal. Additionally we will review questions to ask your doctor regarding your medications. Please bring your concerns and questions to discuss at the Zoom session. Please call the COA at 978-318-3020 to sign up and receive your Zoom invitation. FRIDAY AFTERNOON TRIVIA VIA ZOOM: 2-3 p.m. Oct. 23. Do you love playing trivia? Is your head brimming with trivial and otherwise useless information? Then, join us for an hour of trivia. We are trying to gauge how much interest is out there for trivia because we want to make it a regular event. If you are interested, even if you cannot come Oct. 23, or would like to suggest a different time, we would like to hear from you! The trivia questions will be shown on PowerPoint slides on Zoom, but you can play over the phone too as questions will be read and then repeated. Registration is required. We will send you trivia rules and a Zoom invitation to the game. CAREGIVERS' SUPPORT GROUP VIA ZOOM: 9:30-11 a.m. Oct. 27. This month the Caregivers' Support Group will meet via Zoom. This group is designed for those caring for loved ones with Alzheimer's or related dementias. Join a group of peers to share experiences and gain support. This group is facilitated by COA Social Service Supervisor Nicole Saia. If you have not participated in this group before, please contact Nicole by emailing nsaia@concordma.gov. LEMON LAWS: 2 p.m. Oct. 27. Ever been sold a "lemon?" In Massachusetts, there are resources you can take if you have been sold a motor vehicle or customized wheelchair that doesn't meet certain standards. Join Lisa Weber, Lemon Law program coordinator for the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation to learn more about how you are protected and how to proceed if you are ever sold a "lemon." Lisa will be available to answer all your questions following a short presentation. Please call the COA to sign up and receive your Zoom invitation by email. LOW VISION SUPPORT GROUP - BY CONFERENCE CALL: 1 p.m. Oct. 28. The low vision support group meets the last Wednesday of each month. The meeting this month will feature guest speaker Robin Putnam, research and special projects manager for the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. Robin will talk about how we can avoid the ever increasingly sophisticated scams and identity theft protections. If you thought you knew everything about scammers, that was before 2020! If you have not participated in the low vision group before, please call the COA to register. MEDICARE OVERVIEW PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM: 2:30 p.m. Oct. 28. If you have Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage or a Medicare Advantage Plan (HMO, PPO), you should have received an "Annual Notice of Change" information letter from your plan by the end of September, regarding changes for 2021. You may change your insurance plan during Medicare Open Enrollment from Oct. 15 through Dec. 7. Join us for a Medicare overview presentation by Minuteman Senior Services to help you understand Medicare 2021 basics and to help you evaluate your 2021 drug and medical coverage. Please call the COA to sign up and receive your Zoom invitation. MUSICAL PERFORMANCE BY DAVIS BATES ON ZOOM: 1 p.m. Oct. 28. The Concord Council on Aging will celebrate the diverse heritage of the New England Coastal Region by presenting a virtual performance on Zoom by award winning storyteller Davis Bates. Titled "Sea Songs & Stories: Chanteys, Ballads, Folktales & More," the program will include ghost ballads and sea chanteys, Native American stories, folk tales and family tales. There will be plenty of sing-alongs and even a short lesson in how to play music with spoons from a kitchen drawer. This performance is free of charge thanks to proceeds generated by Harvey's Treasure Chest Gift Shop. Please call the COA office at 978-318-3020 to sign up, and we will send you a Zoom invitation for the performance. TEDTalk and Discussion Via Zoom featuring Jane Goodall - "Every Day You Live You Impact the Planet": 1-2 p.m. Oct. 29. Legendary primatologist Jane Goodall says that humanity's survival depends on conservation of the natural world. In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, she tells the story of her formative days working with chimpanzees, how she transformed from a revered naturalist into a dedicated activist and how she's empowering communities around the world to save natural habitats. Join us as we listen to this amazing woman discuss her views on nature and the need to fight to preserve the environment. A discussion led by Tina Close, COA activity coordinator, will follow the TEDTalk. Please call the COA office to sign up for this meeting, and you will receive the Zoom link. INCONTINENCE CARE AND MANAGEMENT VIA ZOOM: 2 p.m. Oct. 29. Please join Dr. Susanna Bedell for an information session and discussion on incontinence. Bedell will talk about everything you want to know about incontinence, but were afraid to ask. The doctor will address the causes and how it can be prevented as well as ways to manage symptoms and what effects incontinence can have if not treated. Please bring your concerns and questions to discuss at the Zoom session. Please call the COA to sign up and receive your Zoom invitation. TRICK OR TREAT DRUVE-THRU: 11-11:30 a.m. Oct. 29. Happy Halloween! Come by the COA and pick up your treat bag of Halloween candy. The candy bags have been generously donated to Concord seniors by the girls and their moms of the National Charity League in Concord. Please call the COA office to reserve yours. GRAB-AND-GO LUNCHES IN OCTOBER: 11:30 a.m. to noon, Mondays and Wednesdays. Starting in October, chilled Grab-And-Go boxed lunches will be available for pick-up at the COA on Mondays and Wednesdays. Meals are provided by Minuteman Senior Services and cost $2 each. Drive-thru pay and pick-up areas are located at the tent by the main entrance of the Harvey Wheeler Community Center. We ask that you wear a mask and stay in your car. Staff will assist you. Lunch reservations need to be made at least two business days in advance. Please call the COA office to reserve October lunches. Oct. 5: Roast beef and salad. Oct. 7: Mixed greens with salmon. Oct. 12: No lunch, Columbus Day. Oct. 14: Sliced turkey and quinoa. Oct. 19: Roast beef with corn/bean salad. Oct. 21: Mixed greens with salmon. Oct. 26: Asian chicken salad, pasta salad. Oct. 28: Cheese omelette, hash. Movies & More, Minuteman Media Network – Local Access Cable Television: Tune in to Concord's local access Cable TV, Minuteman Media Network, on Comcast Channel 8. They will be showing video recordings of some of the COA's favorite shows including David Shikes' Comedy, Stephen Collins' "Sailing Toward my Father," Gary Hylander on the Court System, as well as "Concord Ghosts, Legends and Lore." They are also airing "Public Domain Films" on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and a "Story Hour" each Wednesday evening that features readings of short stories by famous authors, produced by the Barrow Bookstore. Watch for "Music of the 40s" and "Music of the 50s," two short music compilations donated by Michael Elliot of Memory Lane. For the complete Minuteman Media Network schedule please go to https://concordma.gov/2339/TV-Schedule. VETERANS DAY GRAB-AND-GO BREAKFAST: 9-9:30 a.m. Nov. 12. The Concord Council on Aging invites all Concord veterans and their partners to attend our Grab-and-Go breakfast. The Annual Veterans Day Breakfast is a special event to honor and thank veterans for their dedicated and loyal service to our county. Due to current pandemic circumstances, we will have a delicious breakfast for pickup, and there will be some fun surprises too! Drive up to the tent set up near the main entrance of the Harvey Wheeler Community Center to get your meal. Please wear a mask and stay in your car. Breakfast is free of charge thanks to funds generated by the Harvey Treasure Chest Gift Shop. Please call the COA office 978-318-3020 by Nov. 4 to reserve. "Buried in Treasures" – Changing Cluttering Behaviors: 3-5 p.m. Mondays through Dec. 14. Workshops continue for those registered, for more information or to express interest in future workshops please call the COA and ask for Lauren Barretta. HIGH SPIRITS : Our novel mid-month, mini newsletter is now coming to you via email only. If you do not receive email, do you have a neighbor or family member who can receive the newsletter and get it to you? We're happy to oblige. Please call the COA if you would like to start receiving High Spirits! DO YOU NEED SOME LIGHT HELP WITH FALL YARD CLEAN UP?: We have some high school and college students who can help plant bulbs or rake leaves. With the return of school, their availability will be limited. Let us know if you need the help by calling 978-318-3020.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from "famous short story,short stories for high school" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Comments
Post a Comment