Agreed but I think that the average adult is far less capable that you think. If you want a good scare look at the average level of education that people achieve, it is much lower than you think. This makes them more susceptible to charismatic individuals offering plausible (to them) sounding solutions. It's worth remembering that Hitler was democratically elected because people thought he could solve the serious problems that Germany was facing at the time.

Blaming the people is a very dangerous, and frankly extremely undemocratic approach to take. If you look around the western democracies I think the problem is that voters are getting increasingly fed up with politicians who are not addressing the increasing problems that they are facing: salaries rising slower than inflation, house prices going through the roof, immigration out of control etc. Mainstream politicians on both the left and the right seem either incapable or unwilling to address these problems.

This has opened the door for more extremist politicians on either the right or left who promise to fix things by whatever means necessary and people are increasingly voting for them because it looks like they are the only ones who may be capable of actually addressing their problems. It's not that people are broken, it's that when you are drowning in problems you'll reach out to whomever is offering to help, regardless of who they may be.

So it was worse than falling asleep at the wheel - they bent the knee to him. That is what has largely amazed me seeing this play out as a non-American. For all the bluster about how free and democratic the US is, the courts, politicians, press and companies all seem to have just largely capitulated and accepted Trump's rule by proclamation and speech-suppression by firing/intimidation tactics.

How do you figure that? A human generally can't tell AI generated text from human generated text although I will admit that I'm getting a bit of an AI-vibe from your post.

How do you figure that? The fee is $100k _per year_ not just one off!

As someone with a PhD, although I arrived in the US with it, I left as soon as it was reasonable to do so and that was in the early 2000's. What I found interesting was that when I arrived most of the discussion amongst my fellow European immigrants was jobs in the US but within a few years it changed very much looking at jobs in Canada, Europe and elsewhere - far fewer were considering staying in the US and I suspect that number has now cratered given that I'm a member of an international collaboration where a lot of the European members are now not even willing to visit the US.

Could I have earned a bit more had I stayed in the US? Probably but the point of money is to make your life easier and more enjoyable and frankly being treated like crap (and I don't just mean as a foreigner - your government and many companies often treat even US citizens like crap too) undid for me any benefit of slightly more money. So for me it was an easy choice even back then, although even now I still enjoy visiting the US - but you could not pay me enough money to make me want to live there.

No, we use the J-1 visa, or at least we used to. H-1B is aimed at businesses, not research.

Indeed, I'm sure it will be so remote that it will not happen in the US at all.

It's not science, it's art. As a physics professor I can definitely say that a large number of new pedagogical methods are tested on students without much, if any, research backing them up. Even when an attempt at measuring objective outcomes is made it rarely, if ever uses a control group where two instructors teach two equivalent groups of students in two different ways. Instead it usually uses subjective interviews with students which are then analyzed in an attempt to extract some degree of mildly objective data.

Even when you have something that seems to have credible research backing it someone else can try the method only to find that it completely fails for them. The conclusion I have arrived at over the years is that education is far more of an art than it is a science. Indeed, I think a lot of it is based on your enthusiasm as a teacher for the method and subject matter. If you see or develop a cool new idea for teaching something then your enthusiasm is picked up by students who then enjoy the material more and generally learn more.

....unless you make education the primary and overriding goal of schools again. Schools today are seen and used more as day care and social welfare providers. We need to return them to being first and foremost educational establishments focused on providing different educational outcomes to different students...and that means being willing and able to fail students who don't make the required standards.

How accurate is this tool for modern text through? It claims it is 99.85% accurate on text generated before 2021 but styles and use of language change over time, especially in the sciences. As the article itself notes there may be a false positive rate that is increasing over time as our use of language diverges from what it was trained on. Also it cannot differentiate between passages written by AI vs. written by humans and edited by AI and the later is exactly how AI should be used.

Then there is the question as to why this is at all relevant. Decades ago papers were edited and typed by human secretaries with the scientists responsible for ensuring accuracy. How is use of LLMs any different from that? In science what matters is whether the paper is correct and reveals some new truth about our universe not how the text was generated. What would be useful is to know whether papers it flags with AI content have more retractions or errata than non-AI papers and whether the rate scales with the fraction of AI-edited or generated text - that would be a useful indication that people are misusing AI which would be good to know but simply using AI appropriately to edit and improve text is no different from using a spellchecker to fix spelling mistakes.

There are two problems with this. First what happens if the components are resistors? Is this some new rule you have invented that only applies to capacitors while resistors in the exact same arrangement will not be connected in parallel just because they cannot generate their own EMF? Next this argument seems to distinguish whether something is in parallel or series based on the addition of two unconnected wires. If I remove those two, unconnected wires are you trying to tell me that this will convert the connection from parallel to series? Really? If A and B are connected to some external circuit with a current flowing through it then you have a parallel connection. If that circuit is removed then the circuit becomes the capacitor loop and that's a simple series loop - two unconnected wires with no current in them make no difference.

No, it only behaves that way relative to an external circuit applying a pd between A and B. If A and B are disconnected then one capacitor can be driving a current around that, now series, loop and charging the other and good luck describing that circuit with a single capacitor.

Yes, when the switch is closed those capacitors are connected in parallel to the battery. When the switch is open the battery is no longer part of a circuit and the capacitors are connected in series with each other because now any current will have to flow around the capacitor loop. Simply adding superfluous, unconnected components to a simple series loop does not convert it into a parallel connection.

Yes, now see the text directly under the diagram which says, and I quote, "Things hooked in parallel (Figure 1.1) have the same voltage across them.". So no the source of the EMF is not shown but it is clearly there as the text underneath states. Thank you for proving my point.

The line you quoted answers the question you asked: if the current does not divide between two or more paths then the devices are not connected in parallel. Apply that to your situation: if there is a current and it splits to pass through two devices you have a parallel circuit. If not, you do not. It's literally that simple. Apply that simple rule to whatever ideas you come up with and it will tell you if it's connected in parallel. It's not pedantic, it's simple and easy and the definition of a parallel circuit. Switches break circuits and so yes, it should not be a surprise to someone who has Horowitz & Hill on their shelf that they can change whether something is connected in parallel. In fact it's really easy to imagine using switches to convert a parallel circuit to a series circuit.

The literal definition of a parallel circuit is one where the circuit divides and the current is split between two components - look it up. That is not possible if your circuit consists of two capacitors and nothing else. If there is not more than one path for the current the circuit is not parallel. This is not a physics vs. engineering definition, it is THE definition of what parallel means.

Unfortunately for the vi-faithful it's going to be emacs because it can actually run DeepSeek.