The University System of Georgia cancels April Fools Day

There's a war on humor. It's getting increasingly difficult to make jokes about anything anymore. And no, I'm not talking about the "slap heard around the world," which, ironically, until this week, referred to a famous scene from In the Heat of the Night. That film starred Sidney Poitier who was the first Black man to be awarded the Oscar for Best Actor. Aaaand, here we are.

I'm talking about this sort of thing:

The University System of Georgia (USG) recently circulated a memo to their 26 campuses which stated that all Georgia Colleges and Universities should refrain from making any April Fools jokes using state resources. The rationale is twofold. On one hand, it aligns with the USG "No Risk" policy since April Fools jokes might offend someone. Also, they point out that the new USG Chancellor starts work on April 1, and the Board of Regents is worried that people might think that's a joke.

Canceling April Fools Day really hurts college students. "Now I don't know what to do with all this plastic wrap that I was going to use to seal my roommate in the bathroom," said Wayne Kerr, a junior majoring in Psychopathy. But that's not the worst of it. The war on humor is also being fought in our K-12 schools.

As reported on local news station WFRT in Kentucky, "A 7th grader passed gas in their Social Studies class last week. All the other kids scooted their chairs away and started laughing and holding their noses. The farting child was obviously embarrassed, and their parents complained to the principal, Hugh Janus, claiming that the whole event was a violation of the zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy."

As a result, the entire middle school is now a No Farting Zone, complete with signs in the halls. The school initially tried to make a rule that just said "No laughing at farts" but it proved to be impossible to enforce.

Canceling April Fools Day will also hurt the economy, according to research published in the International Journal of Things that Suck. The author, Dr. Anita Bath, points out that rubber insect futures are already down 17% after the announcement! And let's not overlook the impact on public health, since even the CDC has come out against humor:

Perhaps there's just so much going on in the world right now, that humor and laughter are becoming extinct, like the endangered species of snakes that live in cans of fancy, salted, mixed nuts. It actually sort of makes sense. Charlie Brooker, the creator of the popular Netflix series Black Mirror, has suggested that he was thinking about not making any further episodes since the world is dystopian enough in real life.

And so dear readers, it is bittersweet for me to officially announce that I, Dr. Loof Lirpa, will be retiring. This will be the last of my annual posts. I am certain that, whatever I end up doing, it will be like my Educational Disruption blog: 100% humorless. I look forward to spending 500 hours a day avoiding exaggeration. Will I get tied up in puns? Knot likely. Plus, I'm super excited about avoiding all sarcasm. Don't worry, we can still celebrate April 1 without humor since it is National Sourdough Bread Day, and that's no joke!

Georgia Tech Creates NFT of their Iconic "T" Making it Impossible to Steal

There's a long-standing, and somewhat annoying, tradition at Georgia Tech of stealing the "T".  It started as a prank 50 years ago, and continues in various forms to this day.  

 

In response, Georgia Tech has created a non-fungible token (NFT) of their iconic "T" which will be digitally protected and impossible to steal.

 

 

In case you haven't been on the Internet recently, you may be wondering WTF is an NFT? The digital art world is being turned upside down by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but they are a little hard to wrap your head around.  In a nutshell, to create an NFT you start with something digital and easily copied (like a JPEG photo of the Mona Lisa) and end up with something one-of-a-kind (akin to the actual Mona Lisa), by leveraging cryptography and blockchain technology. This doesn't change the digital file at all, which can still be used and shared and identically copied in the same way it was before the NFT was created. But the NFT itself can be bought and sold just like a cryptocurrency. If you want to learn more you can find many good explanations online.

 

"We think that it just makes sense to use a blockchain to secure the Block Letter T," said Arial Roman, Associate Vice Provost of Institutional Fonts.

 

Georgia Tech is also considering debuting a brand new technology called FT's - Fungible Tokens. These are digital objects that can be easily changed!  Students are excited to be able to purchase an FT of their transcript, and then correct minor errors without having to go through all the bureaucracy that a normal transcript correction currently requires.

Not to be outdone, I, Loof Lirpa, am also getting into the NFT business. This very column is available for you to bid on as an NFT!  That's right, I'm selling a copy of this webpage (as an image) in what is likely 

THE FIRST APRIL FOOL'S JOKE ABOUT NFTs, AVAILABLE AS AN NFT!

That sounds valuable, right?  Probably worth more than that Princess the Bear Beanie Baby you just put in the quarancleaning giveaway box.

Unlike my usual posts, this part is not a joke.  All proceeds from the sale of this NFT will be donated to the Georgia Tech Foundation for the official COVID-19 Graduate Student Support fund in the College of Sciences. It's very real, and a great way to get rid of some of that extra cryptocurrency burning an imaginary hole in your digital wallet.

Georgia Tech cancels selected fall football games, including UGA

In an abundance of caution, the Georgia Tech 2020-21 fall football schedule will be scaled back to just three games instead of the originally scheduled twelve.

This announcement was made today on Twitter by the Institute’s Director of Athletics, Todd Stansbury.  

"During this unprecedented time, we are prioritizing the safety of our fans, our players, and the entire Georgia Tech community."

Stansbury went on to describe the logic and methodology used to determine which games to keep, and which ones to cancel.  

"We looked strategically at the schedule, and used advanced machine learning models running on our supercomputers to precisely predict the crowd size for each game.  Then we used those predicted attendance numbers and a recently constructed digital twin of Bobby Dodd Stadium, to see whether or not the fans could be seated at a safe social distance of six feet.  For these three games, that won't be a problem."  

When reporters noted that the cancelled games all happened to be against opponents with a higher ESPN Football Power Index, Stansbury paused, took a drink of water, and it accidentally "went down the wrong pipe."  He began coughing loudly into his elbow to clear his throat, and by the time he was done, there were no reporters left in the room to hear his answer.

Some have expressed concern that this decision will negatively impact the student athletes.  In order to address this, GT Athletics is looking at the option of moving their cancelled games to an "online format" where players from both teams login to a Zoom meeting and share their screens while playing Madden NFL 19. The winner is the player who is most effective at properly muting and un-muting their video when doing touchdown dances.

Others are worried that the classic college football rivalry between UGA and Georgia Tech will begin to fade, especially since the two major universities have been increasingly collaborating on science and engineering projects related to the COVID-19 outbreak.  There is further evidence of this, as some GT students, when asked "What's the Good Word" are not replying with the traditional response of "To Hell With Georgia" but instead are saying things like "I got a good night's sleep last night."

Mobile classrooms - Swarms of Scooters and E-bikes

By now, everyone has seen the invasion of scooters, e-bikes, and other PETS (personalized electric transportation systems). Whether you love them or hate them, (or better yet, if you have a non-emotional response, which is probably a healthier way to approach new technology), PETS are here to stay.

PETS are seen as a disruption in transportation which is certainly true in my experience. They are especially disruptive when they are piled up and blocking my path, or when a pleasant walk on the Beltline is momentarily interrupted by a someone suddenly whizzing past me from behind with unsafe headphone volume, creating a terrifying Ariana Grande Doppler effect.

It should come as no surprise then, that self-driving scooters and bikes are under development. So it seems likely that, if you're reading this, you will live to see the day when you step outside and there will automatically be a vehicle there ready to take you to your next most probable destination, even if you never requested it. You can decide if you think this is creepy or if it's cool, like having a robot chauffeur who knows your habits. Or both.

But this blog is about Educational Disruption, so how does this trend affect Higher Education?

If you ask faculty and students to name one of the biggest challenges facing a modern university, you often get down to space (at least after people are done complaining about insufficient time and money). The classrooms aren't the right size, things are too spread out, classroom technology is outdated, bricks and mortar doesn't meet the needs of today's mobile student, etc.

Enter the first mobile classroom based on Scooter Swarms. Following a pilot in Summer 2019, Georgia Tech will debut the world's first online mobile classroom which will be spontaneously self-assembled from students on scooters and e-bikes who have installed the Scooter Swarm app (currently restricted only to GT accounts).

This breakthrough educational technology leverages and combines the cutting-edge research and innovation at Georgia Tech on Smart Cities, Transportation, Swarm Robotics, Online Education, and Autonomous Vehicles. Here's how it works.

Students install the Scooter Swarm app and agree to have their location monitored, because that makes sense, right? As they click through some funny gifs and memes and short introductory videos, they incrementally allow more access to their personal data including contacts (who will be invited to the swarm for study groups), their class schedule (so appropriate content can be provided), and their family credit history (to see if they qualify for admission to USC or Yale).

When the app detects that someone is on a scooter or e-bike, it takes over control of the driving so the student can use the time to do work (e.g. stream all or part of a lecture as a podcast, participate in a study session, or use speech-to-text features to dictate essays and reports). Alternately, the student can use the transit time to relax (e.g. take a nap, drink some coffee, catch up on sleep, review social media feeds, or even nap!).

What do you think of this potent blend of transportation disruption and educational disruption? Do you think autonomous PETS can help you be a more effective learner? After you're done napping, post a comment below!

Georgia Tech awards degree to an AI

Students who attend Georgia Tech are known for being bright, creative, and hard-working people.  But after the Spring 2018 commencement, it looks like we'll have to modify that description by dropping the word "people".

In a bold move, the Georgia Institute of Technology is poised to become the first major research university to have an AI (artificial intelligence) graduate with an accredited degree. In fact, TutorBot 3.1 will be awarded 44 of the 45 available Bachelor of Science degrees this May.

"If they were enrolled, and they meet all of the stated degree requirements, we can't not give them a degree," said the Institute Registrar, who is coordinating with dozens of other campus units to modify existing student information systems to allow for non-human alumni.  The bot was in fact enrolled but didn't have to pay any tuition, since, once it starting aceing the courses, it qualified for significant financial aid packages.

TutorBot 3.1 was created by a small group of students as a project for their undergraduate Create-X course.  The students designed a simple chat bot with a natural language interface to help other students answer questions about courses.  They called the project TutorBot and gave it a version number of 3.1, with the intention of adding an extra digit of precision at the end of the decimal for each new version, so that the version number asymptotically approaches the mathematical constant π. 

The AI consists of a "crawler" script that methodically visits every campus web page and collects syllabi, assignments, sample tests, online educational resources, and other course materials.  This data is fed into a standard machine learning protocol to train the AI to answer questions about any Georgia Tech course.

The students (whose names have not been disclosed since there is a pending honor code investigation) left their AI training code running on a homemade cluster of gaming PCs in their dorm room while they went on a trip.  Upon returning from spring break, they discovered that the AI had exploited an unpatched website vulnerability to enroll in all the courses and pass all but one of the final exams with an A.  

"The eerie similarity to the classic George P. Burdell myth is striking," said the student creators of the AI.  "It wasn't what we intended to build, but it went there anyway."

The only degree which the AI did not complete was a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics.  The bot was well on it's way to finishing this degree, but then it took a course in mathematical logic and learned the Gödel incompleteness theorem, which proves that there are true statements which are unprovable by any algorithm.  Apparently, after that, it decided it could never fully understand math, so it simply cut its losses and stopped taking math courses.

This is not the first time Georgia Tech has experimented with AI's in education.  In a widely publicized project, Jill Watson is the world's first artificially intelligent TA, and “she” spends her days assisting students in the online M.S. in Computer Science.  Because Jill is used in courses for an MS degree, and TutorBot 3.1 only enrolled in undergraduate courses, there was thankfully no opportunity for inappropriate interaction between the two AIs.

What do you think of this brave new world of higher education?  Are the robots being developed at Georgia Tech going to end up running the place?  Is it only a matter of time before the Athletic Association wants to field a robotic football player designed to demolish the UGA Bulldogs?  We welcome your comments below!

Georgia Tech's secret collection of online Masters Degrees

There are several new MS degrees being developed at Georgia Tech but they haven't been publicly announced.  You can reveal them by going to certain college websites (e.g. Computing, Design, Engineering, Sciences ) and then typing the famous Konami video game cheat code

↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A

That sequence takes you to a "hidden" site that leaks the degree announcements.

The New Math Building - Pros and Cons

The current home of Mathematics at Georgia Tech is the Skiles Building.  It is probably no coincidence that this is one of the prime examples of Brutalist Architecture.  Over the years, this classroom building has been repeatedly honored for its run down state.  The 2014 "Best and Worst of Tech" article says

"If being smelly, gross, and depressing wasn’t enough to cement 

Skiles’ bad reputation, terrible water fountains can be added to its repertoire."

That's why I was excited to see that the Tech Green was being torn up to create a new math building!  The fact that we didn't have any donors or state funds to build the building shouldn't stop us from taking bold decisive steps, right? This was about math, why should we worry about reality?

New Georgia Tech Math Building

As I reviewed the project plans for the new math building, I was quite pleased to see a lot of improvements.  There will be an infinite number of power outlets which I know the students will like.  However, each one is only half as large as the previous one, and no adapters are provided.  Maybe that'll be something for the next Inventure prize?

The cafe has a modern coffee bar where you can plug the theorem-giving fluid directly into your bloodstream via IV.   Too bad they only serve 3.14 flavors of pie, though.

Students today expect hands on projects and the new building will have a mathematical makerspace with 2D plotters, 3D printers, and 4D time machines!

I really like the architectural features like the efficient Escher staircase, the innovative Perkins study areas which are larger on the inside than the outside, and of course the self-cleaning, Klein bottle sinks.

Summing up, the new math building going on the site of the former Tech Green is a positive development.  I truly hope it's not purely imaginary and the designers can integrate all it's unique functions.