Guest Thinkers — February 16, 2011

Is the Ron Clark Academy a scalable model of school excellence?

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The Ron Clark Academy looks like a wonderful school. But is it realistic to expect a significant number of our teachers to teach like this?

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

An artist's rendering of an alien planet and a red star.

Starts With A Bang

The evidence for biosignatures on K2-18b is flimsy, at best

A Cambridge-based team claims to find molecules on an exoplanet that are only produced by life on Earth. Don’t fall for the unfounded hype.

Starts With A Bang

Ask Ethan: What right do we have to colonize other worlds?

In all the known Universe, Earth is the only planet known to have native life. What should guide us in expanding humanity beyond our world?

Illustration of a clock showing 10:10 with zoomed-in views highlighting both '10' markings, on an orange background.

The Future

Are large language models dyslexic?

Surprisingly, multimodal large language models struggle to read time on analog clocks.

Starts With A Bang

Why nuclear reactions on an exoplanet won’t imply alien life

Planets can create nuclear power on their own, naturally, without any intelligence or technology. Earth already did: 1.7 billion years ago.

Starts With A Bang

Why we still don’t know how many stars are in the Milky Way

We understand many things about our Universe, and our home within it, extremely well. The number of stars in the Milky Way isn’t among them.

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Guest Thinkers

Correlation or causation? Teacher resistance to state technology initiatives

Terry Moe and John Chubb say… n A. “The average technology score [from Education Week’s Technology Counts 2008] drops as union membership grows. . . . technology seems to be […]