December 11, 2022
We are used to learning in a mass market approach of a giant classroom that moves at the same pace, maybe smaller seminars at the graduate level. The Oxford approach lets each student move at their own pace, explore their own interests, by having one advisor available. Here I am building on that concept.
This interaction with ChatGPT show the promise of having a personal tutor for learning, knowledgable in all subjects and available at all times for as much time as needed. Most of what I read is fear at replacing jobs or losing skills, to me this is extreme excitement at breaking free of some false limitations and resource constraints, to give extreme power to humans to think and learn and be creative.
Education is an area of resource constraints, and this has driven what we are used to: the factory approach where all students must advance at the same rate, whether comprehension has been achieved or not: grades are assigned, but future work assumes ability and comprehension of prior - something like an A+. Kings and Queens can hire tutors, but before technology this is too costly for most people. With software generating problem sets as needed, and micro-videos on specific points (and allowing the ability to search and imbibe needed background material quickly), technology has started to make this more available. This concept is explained well by Sal Khan here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_let_s_teach_for_mastery_not_test_scores
ChatGPT shows the promise of taking this to another level, a college or graduate level - though we can also imagine running this backwards to letting children start this way from the cradle - imagine how far they will get.
Radiometric temperature retrieval used as a search term brought me to numerous academic papers and research where I could go into more detail.
I would never have thought to ask about that straight away. It never even occurred to me that temperature could be sense with radar waves - though I had the inkling some information could come back (i.e. position, velocity).
Seeing how this is used in satellites for weather detection, and in planetary flybys, I had to rethink what infrared thermal and microwaves were; two concepts that seemed completely different - different use cases, costs, implementations, strengths - yet really when you come down to it these are sensors that measure waves.