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Posts
8
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137
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Beyond self-reports and perception-based outcomes, most extant studies that I'm aware of have found decreases in real output. For example, a randomized controlled trial published by the NBER found that productivity of employees randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than employees randomly assigned to work in the office:

    https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

    Another study found that output decreased by around 13% when employees worked from home, even though hours worked increased:

    https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/721803

    Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings:

    https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1218/6445994

  • Eh, us professors care pretty deeply about the plagiarism she did. Intent or even knowledge of plagiarism isn't necessary for disciplinary action in plagiarism cases at major research universities. Any one of these examples would be enough for my university's academic integrity committee to rule that plagiarism occurred:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html

    And in the case of a dissertation, plagiarism is an automatic expulsion and degree retraction from my university. At the PhD level, students certainly know that what Dr. Gay did is plagiarism (a good rule of thumb is that five sequential words, even with paraphrasing, without citing the source, is plagiarism), and that plagiarism is completely unacceptable.

    I already know of a student who made the argument that their plagiarism wasn't as bad as Dr. Gay's, so because Dr. Gay wasn't penalized, they shouldn't be penalized. Had she not stepped down, that line of argument likely would have snowballed out of control. The professors I know think her comments to Congress were out of touch, but all of us had been livid that she and Harvard were saying that she didn't plagiarize--any professor who looks at those examples will tell you that she did.

  • GPT-4 will. For example, I asked it the following:

    What is the neighborhood stranger model of fluid mechanics?

    It responded:

    The "neighborhood stranger model" of fluid mechanics is not a recognized term or concept within the field of fluid mechanics, as of my last update in April 2023.

    Now, obviously, this is a made-up term, but GPT-4 didn't confidently give an incorrect answer. Other LLMs will. For example, Bard says,

    The neighborhood stranger model of fluid mechanics is a simplified model that describes the behavior of fluids at a very small scale. In this model, fluid particles are represented as points, and their interactions are only considered with other particles that are within a certain "neighborhood" of them. This neighborhood is typically assumed to be a sphere or a cube, and the size of the neighborhood is determined by the length scale of the phenomena being studied.

  • There are still people who have terrible American accents in media. Lucifer's twin, for example, was so ridiculously bad. The only person without an American accent who I've ever seen pull one off in media was Hugh Laurie in later seasons of House. I still find most attempts amusing, even with coaching.

  • Most professors at the caliber of his institution don't teach undergraduates, or at least don't do so very frequently. If his workload is like most professors, his primary job is research, with mentoring PhD students and service to the department/college/field taking up the remainder of his time. Instructors and teaching professors are hired to teach undergraduate courses at major research universities. His Google Scholar shows he has still been publishing, so this was probably political:

    https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=byo302gAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate