King Charles gives a personal message to others facing the anxiety of a cancer diagnosis.
King sends heartfelt message to fellow cancer patients
Reply
Category Archives: Mind Building
Minister ‘starts to take women’s health seriously’
Jersey Health Minister Tom Binet defended his record on women’s health at a meeting.
Essay challenge: ChatGPT vs students
AI generated essays don’t yet live up to the efforts of real students – according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UK).
A new study published today compared the work of 145 real students with essays generated by ChatGPT.
While the AI essays were found to be impressively coherent and grammatically sound, they fell short in one crucial area – they lacked a personal touch.
As the line between human and machine writing continues to blur, the study underlines the importance of fostering critical literacy and ethical awareness in the digital age.
It is hoped that the findings could help educators spot cheating in schools, colleges and universities worldwide by recognising machine-generated essays..
Prof Ken Hyland, from UEA’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning, said: “Since its public release, ChatGPT has created considerable anxiety among teachers worried that students will use it to write their assignments.
“The fear is that ChatGPT and other AI writing tools potentially facilitate cheating and may weaken core literacy and critical thinking skills. This is especially the case as we don’t yet have tools to reliably detect AI-created texts.
“In response to these concerns, we wanted to see how closely AI can mimic human essay writing, particularly focusing on how writers engage with readers.”
The research team analysed 145 essays written by real university students and another 145 generated by ChatGPT.
“We were particularly interested in looking at what we called ‘engagement markers’ like questions and personal commentary,” said Prof Hyland.
“We found that the essays written by real students consistently featured a rich array of engagement strategies, making them more interactive and persuasive.
“They were full of rhetorical questions, personal asides, and direct appeals to the reader – all techniques that enhance clarity, connection, and produce a strong argument.
“The ChatGPT essays on the other hand, while linguistically fluent were more impersonal. The AI essays mimicked academic writing conventions but they were unable to inject text with a personal touch or to demonstrate a clear stance.
“They tended to avoid questions and limited personal commentary. Overall, they were less engaging, less persuasive, and there was no strong perspective on a topic.
“This reflects the nature of its training data and statistical learning methods, which prioritise coherence over conversational nuance,” he added.
Despite its shortcomings, the study does not dismiss the role of AI in the classroom.
Instead, the researchers say that tools like ChatGPT should be used as teaching aids rather than shortcuts.
“When students come to school, college or university, we’re not just teaching them how to write, we’re teaching them how to think – and that’s something no algorithm can replicate,” added Prof Hyland.
This study was led by UEA in collaboration with Prof Kevin Jiang of Jilin University, China.
‘Does ChatGPT write like a student? Engagement markers in argumentative essays’ is published in the journal Written Communication.
ENDS
Belfast public needle bin ‘not a silver bullet’
A trial for a waste needle bin in a Belfast city centre car park will be voted on at council on Thursday.
Join Conscious Growth Club Year 9 by May 1st, 2025 (Video Invite)
Here’s an easy-going video about Conscious Growth Club Year 9 to give you a sense of the vibes and direction of the club and to invite you to join us inside. It’s only about 12 minutes, so please give it a watch now because I’m taking it offline when the enrollment ends.
CGC is our core inner self-development circle. It began in 2017 and has been going strong and evolving beautifully ever since. We only open for new members to join us during one short interval each year, always during the last week of April, and this is it! So please check it out and make the correct decision for you by midnight Pacific Time on May 1st. This is our only enrollment period for 2025, so our next opening won’t be till April 2026.
After you watch the video, read through the Conscious Growth Club invite page to see if you’re a match. It’s definitely not for everyone, but for the right people, CGC is a powerful long-term source of growth fuel and support. It transforms self-development from a solo effort to a team effort.
This is a fabulous year to join CGC because we’re having our first-ever CGC in-person gathering during this new CGC year, so we’ll all get to connect in person together for 4 days in Las Vegas in April 2026. I’m really looking forward to that!
The joy of a visit when you have dementia
Visiting a friend or relative with dementia can help reinforce relationships and bring joy.
Living well with dementia
Why living with dementia can still mean living well.
NHS trust admits failures led to teenager’s death
Staff were tasked with giving one-to-one care to Elise Sebastian, an inquest hears.
Woman’s eyesight saved by cutting-edge test after mystery infection
After years of suffering, a cutting-edge test diagnosed Ellie Irwin with a rare bacterial infection.
New machine algorithm could identify cardiovascular risk at the click of a button
An automated machine learning program developed by researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in conjunction with the University of Manitoba has been able to identify potential cardiovascular incidents or fall and fracture risks based on bone density scans taken during routine clinical testing.
When applying the algorithm to vertebral fracture assessment (VFA) images taken in older women during routine bone density testing, often as part of treatment plans for osteoporosis, the patient’s presence and extent of abdominal aortic calcification (AAC) was assessed.
The algorithm shortens the timeframe to screen for AAC significantly, taking less than a minute to predict AAC scores for thousands of images, compared with the five to six minutes it would take for an experienced reader to obtain the AAC score from one image.
During her research, ECU research fellow Dr Cassandra Smith found that 58% of older individuals screened during routine bone density testing presented with moderate to high levels of AAC, with one in four walking through the door unaware that they had high AAC, placing them at the highest risk of heart attack and stroke.
“Women are recognised as being under screened and under-treated for cardiovascular disease. This study shows that we can use widely available, low radiation bone density machines to identify women at high risk of cardiovascular disease, which would allow them to seek treatment.
“People who have AAC don’t present any symptoms, and without doing specific screening for AAC, this prognosis would often go unnoticed. By applying this algorithm during bone density scans, women have a much better chance of a diagnosis,” Dr Smith said.
Using the same algorithm, ECU senior research fellow Dr Marc Sim found that these patients with moderate to high AAC scores also had a greater chance of fall-associated hospitalisation and fractures, compared with those with low AAC scores.
“The higher the calcification in your arteries, the higher the risk of falls and fracture,” Dr Sim said.
“When we look at traditional falls and fracture risk factors, things like have you fallen in the past year and bone mineral density are generally very good indicators of how likely someone is to fall and fracture. Some medications are also associated with higher falls risks. Rarely do we consider vascular health when considering falls and fractures.
“Our analysis uncovered that AAC was a very strong contributor to falls risks and was actually more significant than other factors that are clinically identified as falls risk factors.”
Dr Sim said that the new machine algorithm, when applied to bone density scans, could give clinicians more information around the vascular health of patients, which is an under-recognised risk factor for falls and fractures.
