Pac-12, 10, 9, 4 . . .
Are you constantly refreshing your feed to find out what’s happening with the Conference of Champions? While the Cardinal faithful await their destiny, here’s a bit of backstory for those of you who aren’t sure of the difference between lacrosse and field hockey. After 108 years, the Pac-12 as we know it has imploded. USC and UCLA announced in June 2022 that they would leave the conference in August 2024. But in the past three weeks, six more members announced their departures. That leaves Stanford, Cal, Oregon State, and Washington State like so many awkward wallflowers at the dance.
How on earth does the winner of 26 Directors’ Cups and a major producer of American Olympians find itself on the outs? Two words: TV revenue. Conferences are attracted to schools that can bring in money, and money is brought in by football viewership. The payout of a conference membership funds the Olympic sports at a university. So without membership in a lucrative conference . . . it’s not a good situation. And no, they can’t just use the endowment for that. But hey, at least we have a former secretary of state involved in the negotiations. Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution and part owner of the Denver Broncos, is serving as a special adviser on athletics.
While we wait for answers, you can catch up on the changing paradigm of intercollegiate athletics in Stanford magazine. Alternatively, distract yourself with a good book or some small-space gardening.
A spicy story.
Lead poisoning has irreversible effects on children’s cognitive abilities, and one in three kids around the world has blood lead levels that the World Health Organization considers unacceptable. In 2015, data from Bangladesh showed high levels of lead in pregnant women, and there were no obvious causes. That is, until Jenna Forsyth, PhD ’19, with her adviser, professor of medicine Stephen Luby, followed a hunch and jumped into an investigation that eventually involved X-ray guns and a sting operation, all in the name of getting to the root of the problem: lead chromate dusted over turmeric to improve its color.
Pet project.
Photo: Alex Kekauoha
When undergraduate engineering students started building Pupper robots for their AI and robotics seminar, they knew the high-tech canines needed to be small, playful, and safe. Last month, they took their robotic dogs to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, where the pups walked, jumped, and danced with patients. According to Tom Caruso, a clinical professor of anesthesia, novel and distracting technology like Pupper can help mitigate the pain and anxiety of a hospital stay. For 12-year-old patient Tatiana Cobb, Pupper unleashed joy. “He makes me feel like I’m back at home with my own puppy again and not in my room just watching TV and taking medication,” she said.
Artificial intelligence, hold the intellect.
Is 1 a prime number? For the answer, you might want to ask Google (or a sixth grader) rather than ChatGPT. In March, two researchers from Stanford and one from Berkeley quizzed the AI model’s newest version, GPT-4, and found that it correctly identified prime numbers 97.6 percent of the time. A few months later, when they quizzed it again, it correctly identified prime numbers just 2.4 percent of the time. So what happened? Did ChatGPT get distracted by the cute AI model next door? Did humans literally dumb it down? The researchers say it’s complicated. “It’s very difficult to say, in general, whether GPT-4 or GPT-3.5 is getting better or worse over time,” said James Zou, an assistant professor of data science and a co-author of the preprint study.
It may appear that the AI is getting dumber, but the researchers point out that it also provided fewer potentially offensive responses and was less likely to offer ideas on how to break the law. Plus, they say, it wasn’t actually “smart” to begin with. Since ChatGPT is a large language model trained to generate human-sounding text, it might, in fact, never have assessed primeness at all but rather produced answers based on incidental trends in its training data. ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, doesn’t discuss how it trains ChatGPT, so as it adds new training data—which could change the way the model responds—researchers and users are left to speculate. “While the majority of metrics have improved,” the company said, “there may be some tasks where the performance gets worse.” In the meantime, the Loop can help you out with this minor mathematical mystery: 1 may be lonely, but it’s not prime.
But wait, there’s more.
What Oppenheimer got right, and missed, about the story of the world’s first atomic bomb.
Law professor David Sklansky, a criminal law expert and former federal prosecutor, opines on the federal charges against former President Trump to overturn the 2020 election.
When Tiffani Ashley Bell, MSM ’21, discovered that 100,000 Detroit residents had no water at home because of past-due utility bills, she became a matchmaker, putting customers-in-need with donors.
Charles Ogletree, ’75, MA ’75, a Harvard law professor and former member of Stanford’s Board of Trustees, has died. The civil rights lawyer rose to prominence in the 1990s, representing both high-profile and indigent clients, and helping reframe debates around criminal justice, school desegregation, and reparations.
Routines don’t have to be forever. In a world where long-term consistency is king, Indistractable author Nir Eyal, MBA ’08, is giving props to short-term routines. Experimenting with temporary routines (journaling every day until you’re no longer feeling low or exercising as much as possible for one month), he said, can feed our need for novelty, better fit our ever-evolving selves, and provide stepping stones to sustained change.
Move over (a lane), Michael Phelps. Swimmer Katie Ledecky, ’20, won her 16th individual gold medal at this summer’s World Aquatic Championships, putting her ahead of Phelps for the most golds in history.
The video game industry brings in $180 billion per year, yet nearly nine out of 10 classic games are in danger of disappearing because of outdated hardware and software requirements. (RIP, Game Boy.) Stanford Libraries started collecting video games and other software programs in the late 1990s and is now exploring how best to preserve these “orphaned” games, ancestors of an important cultural platform.
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