Sam Koritz

#ScienceNews, #InstrumentalMusic, #rewilding, #deextinction, #bayareacali, #books, #tech, #AI, #Evolution, AI evolution
Following ≠ agreement.

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

#AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️ #CatsAreFamily d @NationalGallery #GROKまるなげポスト

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM applicants, @jaweedkaleem, Los Angeles Times

More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students.

The UC Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force Report (2020) said use of test scores could actually boost admission rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and school districts. The report found that test scores are a better predictor of college performance than high school grades.

Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Caltech each restored standardized testing requirements.

A UC San Diego Academic Senate work group report said it documented a roughly thirty-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level. 70% of those students fell below middle school levels.

Work group members advocated for a 'systemwide reexamination of standardized testing'.

#CollegeAdmissions

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

The Undoing Project (2016 @wwnorton) is the story of how Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky pioneered behavioral economics. This seemed fluffier than Michael Lewis's Big Short & Going Infinite, but it's still enjoyable & interesting. One thing I noticed this time is Lewis's use of blunt personal descriptions. For example, the title of this book's first chapter, 'Man Boobs', is the insulting nickname given by talent scouts to a basketball player, due to his physique.

K&T described situations in which expert opinion fails (when there's infrequent & unpredictable feedback). An Oregon Research Institute study found that an algorithm outperformed every expert & a group of experts on X-ray analysis. This is an area in which AI particularly excels, suggesting that current AI may not be as post-algorithmic as commonly thought.

As Lewis recommends, if you're interested in this subject you should read Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll of Democrats & Dem-leaning independents

half want the party to move to the center but 4/5 think the US political & economic system 'needs major changes' (3/5) or 'needs to be torn down entirely' (1/5)

1/4 of young Democrats & 1/4 of non-white Dems think the political & economic system 'needs to be torn down entirely'

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

did The Platters invent ska?

1956 https://t.co/pL7xBVGowf

[Bachtrack @bachtrack]

“I do want an orchestra again... I want to have a place,” Elim Chan told us in an interview earlier this year. Well, now she does as she has just been announced as the next Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony @SFSymphony! 🥳
📸Cody Pickens

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

from 2024, Price’s last year in office, to 2025, Jones Dickson’s first year, felony filings increased by 36% and misdemeanor cases by 35%.

[East Bay Times @EastBayTimes]

Sadly, recalled predecessor Pamela Price, who doesn’t know when to call it quits, is trying to get her old job back. https://t.co/aYhjjREosZ

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

#AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

'Coyote's epic swim to Alcatraz Island started much farther away than San Francisco, National Park Service says', @CarlosJr62, CNN

Alcatraz water dog swam from Angel Island two miles away

#dogpride

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

'Renewable energy just broke a 100-year-old streak; Coal’s century at the top of the world’s power mix is over', by Bryan Walsh @bryanrwalsh, Vox

According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal.

Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40 years, a pattern so durable it has its own name, Swanson’s law, the observation that the price tends to drop by 20 percent every time the total number of solar panels ever built doubles.

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 - 1924, by Orlando Figes, @PenguinBooks

Orlando Figes tells the story of the Russian Revolution, emphasizing the things that support his belief that the Soviet Union was created for Russian reasons, rather than being the result of the importation of a philosophy from Western Europe (Marxism).

The book begins after the emancipation of the serfs, at which time most Russians are peasants. Even many urban workers are former peasants with ongoing ties to peasant culture, which Figes describes as xenophobic, provincial, violent, traditionalist, patriarchal, illiterate, & innumerate.

Many peasants lived & worked on community-owned land. This wasn’t a system of communal labor, with people working together on large farms; rather, a rotating roster of individual families was temporarily allowed to farm small strips of land, often in separate locations. This was inefficient compared with Western European farming systems but was resistant to reform, due to community hostility, & because vital infrastructure, such as roads & grazing grounds, were also communally owned. Unable to modernize their way out of poverty, peasants eyed the large estates owned by the aristocracy.

Meanwhile, nationalism was growing in Europe, leading non-Russian ethnic groups to increasingly demand autonomy or #independence from the Russian empire. Additionally, Slavic and Germanic ethnonationalism was growing, along with the expectation of a showdown between these groups. The tsar hoped to galvanize the empire’s Slavs by joining the Great War in defense of fellow Slavs. But the opposite happened, as the war became increasingly costly and painful.

At this point, Figes suggests, land seizure by peasants was inevitable, Russia could no longer fight in the world war, & the struggle for power in Russia needed to be settled by military violence. Of the various political parties, only the Bolsheviks combined these three policies; so they were the winners.

Figes ends this book – published in *1996* – by warning against post-Cold War Western triumphalism: since the Soviet Union was formed for Russian reasons, there was no reason to believe that the Soviet successor would be a Western-style liberal democracy.

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

'How the war in #Iran is landing with Republicans, according to a new AP-NORC poll', AP News, @mikecatalini @LinleyAnn

Only 1/5 of Republicans back deploying American ground troops vs Iran.

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

"Hershey’s vows to return to real chocolate after backlash from Reese’s inventor’s grandson; After the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup inventor’s grandson called out Hershey for ‘quietly replacing’ ingredients, the company has announced a return to real chocolate by 2027, " Deseret News, @Deseret

#FoodLovers

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

5/15 #AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

"Pompeii's House of Dionysian Delights; Vivid frescoes in an opulent dining room celebrate the wild rites of the wine god," by Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology Magazine @archaeologymag

“While drinking wine, banqueters would have experienced an altered state of consciousness, and probably would have thought that the god was there.”

@MollySwetnamB

#mythological

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

'San Francisco Killed 8th-Grade Algebra. Now It’s Set to Come Back; The San Francisco school board will vote on a plan to restore algebra as an option at all middle schools, more than a decade after it was removed over equity concerns', by Dana Goldstein @DanaGoldstein, NY Times

The plan is based on the results of a two-year experiment, in which the district tried several approaches to middle school math. The results were tested by Thomas S. Dee @ProfTDee, a Stanford University economist.

The data showed “dramatic gains” in math scores for students who enrolled in algebra and Math 8 concurrently — equivalent to nearly a full extra year of learning.

#Educación

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

#AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️ @TheAnselAdams d

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

"To Address Farm Labor Shortage, Trump Administration Turns to Migrant Workers," by Linda Qiu @YLindaQiu, #nytimes

The administration is making it cheaper for farmers to hire immigrant farmworkers on temporary visas.

Immigration hawks and labor unions alike are opposed, arguing the move will only increase the share of foreign workers and hurt native workers and suppress their wages.

Only 0.4 percent of farmers in California reported losing workers directly to farm raids, according to a new survey by the California Farm Bureau and Michigan State University.

Under the new changes, the Labor Department adjusted how wages paid to H-2A farmworkers are calculated, effectively lowering hourly rates by between $1 and $7 depending on the state, according to some estimates.

The reduction in wages has prompted a lawsuit from the United Farm Workers of America, which represents thousands of field workers. It argues that the rule will adversely harm American farmworkers by lowering their wages as well or pushing them out of the labor pool entirely.

“These actions are going to displace domestic farmworkers who have been working in the fields and putting food on dinner tables for decades, and bring a workforce that is even more vulnerable to abuse,” Teresa Romero, the president of the union, said in an interview, noting that H-2A workers are often exploited and trafficked.

In 2025, only 182 of more than 415,000 advertised positions received a domestic applicant.

The number of certified H-2A visa positions has risen sharply, to nearly 400,000 in the 2025 fiscal year from about 50,000 in 2005.

(About 40 percent of crop workers are unauthorized migrants and about a third are American citizens, according to the latest government estimates.)

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, estimated that the methodological changes would result in a $2 billion cut to the annual wages of guest farmworkers — and a $3 billion cut for U.S.-based farmworkers.

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

'Mexico; Migrant tents dismantled as mass deportations don’t materialize', by Julian Resendiz, Border Report @BorderReportcom

Government officials have dismantled most tents as the mass deportations they feared have not materialized.

#Migrantes

[Sam Koritz @KoritzSam]

Are We #Smart Enough to Know How Smart #Animals Are?, by Frans de Waal (2016)

Frans de Waal initially intended for this book to be an update on recent results of primate cognition #research, but the scope expanded &, eventually, it became a multidisciplinary defense of Charles Darwin’s (1871) claim:

“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”

Much of the book consists of de Waal describing other scientists’ claims that (non-human) animals aren’t conscious or intelligent because #consciousness & intelligence require such-&-such, and only humans have that such-&-such, followed by scientific evidence that some other animals do, in fact, have those allegedly human-only qualities.

Mostly, de Waal is here to defend animal consciousness & intelligence, so his view of their language ability is surprising: evidence for complex language in other animals is almost entirely lacking. But it’s not that important: many #people believe, incorrectly, that humans think in #words – so they assume that creatures without #complex language must be unable to think. In an interesting aside, de Waal says that he speaks three languages & doesn’t find himself thinking in any of them. This reminds me of the discourse of recent years regarding aphantasia & hyperphantasia – the inability vs ability & compulsion to literally visualize.

Healthy people living normal lives have significantly different cognitive experiences depending on their place on the visualization spectrum. #Internal monologue is probably another example of this. Sometimes I’ve asked people who speak a language different than the one they used growing up what language they think in, & the answer is rarely quick & confident. Yet #writers often say that they’ve been mentally narrating their lives since childhood. Animals’ lack of complex language is probably one of the main reasons people deny their consciousness & intelligence.

Anyone who cares about this subject – especially “anthropodenialists” – should read ‘Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?’