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A Classified Network of SpaceX Satellites Is Emitting a Mysterious Signal

2 months 2 weeks ago
A network of classified Starshield satellites built by SpaceX for the U.S. government is transmitting signals on radio frequencies reserved for Earth-to-space commands. According to NPR, it may violate international standards. From the report: Satellites associated with the Starshield satellite network appear to be transmitting to the Earth's surface on frequencies normally used for doing the exact opposite: sending commands from Earth to satellites in space. The use of those frequencies to "downlink" data runs counter to standards set by the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency that seeks to coordinate the use of radio spectrum globally. Starshield's unusual transmissions have the potential to interfere with other scientific and commercial satellites, warns Scott Tilley, an amateur satellite tracker in Canada who first spotted the signals. "Nearby satellites could receive radio-frequency interference and could perhaps not respond properly to commands -- or ignore commands -- from Earth," he told NPR. Outside experts agree there's the potential for radio interference. "I think it is definitely happening," said Kevin Gifford, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who specializes in radio interference from spacecraft. But he said the issue of whether the interference is truly disruptive remains unresolved. [...] Tilley says he's detected signals from 170 of the Starshield satellites so far. All appear in the 2025-2110 MHz range, though the precise frequencies of the signals move around.

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AI-Generated Lesson Plans Fall Short On Inspiring Students, Promoting Critical Thinking

2 months 2 weeks ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. [...] For our research, we began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a sense of what kinds of instructional plans and materials these tools provide to teachers. We decided to focus on AI-generated lesson plans for civics education because it is essential for students to learn productive ways to participate in the U.S. political system and engage with their communities. To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots -- the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model and Microsoft's latest Copilot model -- to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan. We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content. Bloom's taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between "lower-order" thinking skills, including remembering, understanding and applying, and "higher-order" thinking skills -- analyzing, evaluating and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90% of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues or engaging in civic action projects. When examining the lesson plans using Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history -- often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.

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