Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

“If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” I’m getting t-shirts and bumper stickers with this message.

Everyone is born a genius. Society de-geniuses them." -Buckminster Fuller

“Preparing students for traditional careers and pathways is a disservice not only to their future but also to the future is society....” can’t argue with that. So that means learning to learning, adaptability, and broad skills must dominate #education

A blog post, now with audio:
https://hackscience.education/2018/07/10/is-edtech-speeding-back-to-the-1960s/

I just heard a textbook publisher offering to buy back materials… like goggles for chemistry courses. Seriously? We don’t have safety officers saying “no” to this?

Ultimately, the quest to define science highlights its complexity. It involves more than just confirming evidence; it's about designing severe tests, showing progress, and being open to criticism.

If we can't find a clear criterion, perhaps decisions about which theories get funding or are taught should depend not just on being "scientific," but on being good theories. #GoodScience

The demarcation problem has not found an adequate solution. Is something like creationism simply "lousy science" rather than "unscientific"? The distinction remains difficult.

Beyond Popper, other possible characteristics of pseudoscience include a lack of progress over time compared to rivals, or the absence of a clear mechanism for proposed effects. But these criteria have their own issues

What makes something scientific? Philosophers call it the problem of demarcation, finding a principled way to distinguish genuine sciences from pseudosciences. It's a surprisingly hard question!

A blog post summarizing retrieval augmented generation.
https://hackscience.education/2025/05/20/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag/

Popper and the nature of science.
https://hackscience.education/2025/05/21/karl-poppers-view-of-science/

A blog post on the role of computer rooms in schools, now with audio:
https://hackscience.education/2018/06/26/edtech-for-edleaders-computer-rooms-today/ \
#edtech #edtechchat #schools #education #teaching #computers

Monitoring latency (the time from API request to response) is important for production LLM applications. Optimizing prompt design and token usage can help reduce latency.

Deploying GenAI applications to production requires managing challenges like latency, scalability, costs, quotas, and ensuring observability. Best practices address these areas.

Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, emphasized the idea that experience is the ultimate source and justification of knowledge.

Critics argue that Popper's criterion is both too restrictive (excluding some legitimate scientific claims) and too permissive (allowing some pseudoscientific theories)

Popper emphasized the asymmetry between confirmation and falsification, arguing that while no finite amount of evidence can conclusively prove a theory, a single counterexample can potentially disprove it.

A critical step for RAG with large documents is chunking – breaking text into smaller, manageable parts. This ensures relevant sections can be retrieved and fit within the LLM's context window

Building a chat application over your own data often involves RAG and a vector database. Vector databases store and allow efficient searching of data embeddings. #VectorDatabase #ChatWithData