Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人

Journalism Prof at @JMSCHKU. Fact-checking at @annielab_jmsc. On Bluesky@MasatoKJ | Trust is something you earn, not build.

[Spica @CasseCool]

製造業が創出した付加価値の推移、1971年〜

日本は1994年に一瞬USを抜いている
中国に逆転されるのは2007年

[Reuters @Reuters]

In Bunia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, health experts say misinformation and mistrust are major challenges in containing the Ebola outbreak, which has caused 160 suspected deaths out of 670 suspected cases

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

Harvard University just voted to limit the number of A grades given in undergraduate classes to about 20% of the class. I’m not in favor of this. It deeply runs counter to how I believe education should be. We should hold a high bar, but also work mightily to support the success of 100% of learners, rather than a fraction.

Harvard’s administration took this step — over the objections of a large fraction of the student body — to counter grade inflation. Grade inflation is real: Many universities have been awarding A and B grades to ever larger fractions of students, and this has caused grade point averages (GPAs) to become less useful as signals of student skill. At the same time, we want students to succeed. The heart of the question is the role of educational institutions. Should our goal be:
- To help students succeed?
- To judge students?

Both of these have value. But my focus when working in education is almost entirely helping students succeed.

To me, it is clear that many people want to learn, to be empowered, to build skills that let them do new things! This is what we focus on at DeepLearningAI. This philosophy is also why my online courses (going back to my early online Stanford courses on Coursera) permitted an unlimited number of retries for graded assignments.

I believe in letting — and even encouraging — someone to redo something until they succeed. This is as opposed to standing in judgement of the fact they didn’t get it right the first time. Further, I want homework assignments to be designed primarily to help people practice and learn, rather than to judge their skill level. This is why I prefer to create “Practice Problems” and “Practice Labs” — questions that, when you think through them, help you to gain practice and reinforce what you know. As opposed to “Assessment Problems” designed primarily to judge skill.

But won’t Harvard’s move make GPAs more meaningful and help prospective employers identify strong candidates? Having hired a large number of people from Harvard and other institutions, I can say confidently that GPA is not an important signal. We have screening and interviewing processes that give far more accurate ways to figure out if someone is truly skilled. I do not need a wider spread in applicant GPA scores to figure out who's really good!

To be clear, there is also value in assessment. Even though standardized testing is much hated, high-quality tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE, TOEFL, etc. provide objective measures of ability in a domain. I find that most people want to learn and succeed. There are also people who want rigorous assessment (for example, to apply for school admissions), but this is a lesser need, and is not my focus when building educational products.

Harvard is often described as an “elite” educational institution. There are two ways to be elite: One option involves limiting enrollments, and then even among admitted students, cap the number of people that do well at 20%. I would rather pursue a different path: Set a high bar and teach elite, cutting-edge skills, but strive relentlessly to help everyone succeed. This way, eliteness is defined not by excluding people but by helping as many people as possible to be excellent.

[Original text: The Batch newsletter]

[Axios @axios]

SCOOP: Meta today began removing ads from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18. https://t.co/RRKyhgTPhY

[Hong Kong Free Press HKFP @hkfp]

All Hong Kong restaurant licences will include national security clauses from September, Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan has said.

🔗 In full: https://t.co/wU7jOwzp4c

[Tom Grundy @tomgrundy]

1/ @Google has said it will gradually open its Gemini Artificial Intelligence tool to all users in Hong Kong, with the accompanying mobile app to follow.
https://t.co/gSGyBz1mEp

For years, Hong Kong has been ranked alongside mainland China, Syria and North Korea as places where tech firms avoid rolling out their AI chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft did not comment when approached by The Wall Street Journal in 2023 as to why access in Hong Kong had been limited.

[Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人 @MasatoKJ]

I will be speaking at the 2nd Seoul Fact-Check Forum next week. I will be talking about Annie Lab and other news literacy projects in different Asian countries. https://t.co/V1iMq0biiu

[Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人 @MasatoKJ]

I hope their curriculum integrates public health communication into its core, including infodemic management. Future healthcare workers and medical professionals must have a good grasp of the information ecosystem in our community. https://t.co/SMYfZSwsol

[ICIJ @ICIJorg]

ICIJ's latest investigation The #CoinLaundry is a collaboration of 113 journalists from 38 media partners in 35 countries that exposes how cryptocurrency companies have empowered a shadow economy that lavishly profits from crime.

Here are our findings:

[World Health Organization Philippines @WHOPhilippines]

Tobacco kills more than 10 Filipinos every hour.

Read WHO’s full statement on tobacco control and governance: https://t.co/HPSzPdxTJK

[Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人 @MasatoKJ]

@tomgrundy @HKUniversity A bit of context: our undergraduate programme has always been a double-major one (students study not just journalism). Over time, we've seen shifts in what prospective students hope to do or become after graduation, reflecting broader changes in the industry (not saying good/bad)

[Tom Grundy @tomgrundy]

Redditor spots this, installed last month: https://t.co/X5l6Dmf5Pl

(HK was a British colony at the time, though local school kids are taught something different: https://t.co/okoZEzlTWC)

[Annie Lab @annielab_jmsc]

Jane Goodall, the celebrated primatologist, died on Oct. 1. Following her death, a five-year-old video has resurfaced in multiple social media posts claiming she advocated for global depopulation to address environmental issues.

These claims misrepresent Goodall’s views. In the video, which appeared on the World Economic Forum’s YouTube channel on Jan. 23, 2020, she acknowledged that human population growth has had an impact on forests. However, she did not call for forced population reduction, nor did she suggest that a smaller population would significantly improve the world.

Fact-checks by AP, AFP, and Reuters have previously concluded the depopulation claim circulating in edited clips from that WEF session, which was widely shared between 2022 and 2024, to be misleading.

AP: https://t.co/Bm1Xnd1s86
AFP: https://t.co/SGRqfrYNRH
Reuters: https://t.co/z4xEM13nIc

Original recording: https://t.co/8l6twBGyF2

[Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人 @MasatoKJ]

This proves again the value of fact-checking and keeping the record straight. The article was published more than five years ago.

[Annie Lab @annielab_jmsc]

https://t.co/pbm3XUPFMy

[Joel Chan @kjoules]

The parents of the St. Paul's Co-Ed student have released a lengthy statement apologizing for hiring a software company to write an AI medical app as part of her project. The parents will also return all awards and asked to respect her privacy

https://t.co/a2N59gqnS4

[台灣事實查核中心 Taiwan FactCheck Center @taiwantfc]

Tomorrow, Taiwan will vote in a referendum on whether to extend operations of its third nuclear power plant. False info is spreading—about energy policy, voting process & more. We’re fact-checking the key claims to help voters navigate this complex issue.
https://t.co/QStz71hXCl

[Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人 @MasatoKJ]

I can't believe it's been six years already (well, 13 years since I began teaching social media verification, come to think of it). Time flies, indeed.

[Annie Lab @annielab_jmsc]

https://t.co/NPVp2AGOew

[日本経済新聞 電子版（日経電子版） @nikkei]

日本にロシア情報工作の影　政府系メディアのX拡散3倍超、偽情報も
https://t.co/kO51hrjTa6

[Masato Kajimoto | 鍛治本正人 @MasatoKJ]

来月「預言」されている #地震、「科学的根拠なし」「地震予知は現代科学では不可能」などと言っても、#香港 では響かないよね。日本人に「血液型性格判断には科学的根拠が全くない」、「おみくじは科学的予測ではないし、お守りは未来と何の関係もない」と言ったらどんな反応するか考えれば、ねぇ。