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  • Forum on Generated Text and the Future of College Writing at BMCC, April 2, 2-4pm

    decorative flyer, text in body

    I’ll be speaking on a discussion panel about Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and College Writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY (BMCC), Fiterman Hall 1304 on Wednesday, April 2 from 2-4 PM. If you’re free, it would be great if you could join us for what I think will be a lively in-person conversation. Details are below and the event flyer is posted above and below.

    The Spring 2025 Robert Lapides Faculty Forum

    Wednesday April 2 Fiterman Hall 1304 (245 Greenwich St.) 2-4 pm

    A Step Toward the Unified Macro-Mind or a Cybernetic Lawnmower in the Groves of Academia? :
    Generated Text and the Future of College Writing

    Recently, Large Language Models and generated texts have sent shockwaves through the academic community. Do they represent the initial glimmerings on a new horizon of transhuman creativity or are they, in Noam Chomsky’s phrase, merely “glorified autofill,” a “high-tech plagiarism” based on a self-cannibalizing database? Where old-fashioned plagiarism now seems like a relatively simple matter of ethics and originality, Artificial Intelligence and the looming specter of the Literary Chatbot bring a whole host of more tangled issues of Perception, Knowledge, Autonomy, and Class Warfare into the classroom.

    Many believe the neural net models of cognition don’t begin to pierce the mystery of the mind—Roger Penrose and others remain unconvinced that human thinking can be reduced meat-puppet computation, while John Searle’s Chinese Room parable undermines the idea that mere symbol-juggling can ever result in emergent consciousness. Still, techno-optimists believe we are at the precipice of an age of cyborg enhancements in which human potential will be radically expanded and the primate mind will be uploaded into Cloud-dwelling immortality.

    We will be discussing these issues and many others in an open symposium with CUNY professors Jason Ellis, Carlos Hernandez, Lisa Sarti, and Shane Snipes. We encourage our colleagues to come to voice their concerns and hopes on this increasingly crucial and urgent matter.

    pictures of four scholars speaking at the event

    The event is named in memory of Robert Lapides, a past English department professor at BMCC. Reading his obituary, you get the sense that he did good work that saved voices from the past from erasure, and created space for voices in the present to carry the work forward.

    “Robert Lapides, professor emeritus in the English Department, husband of Professor Diane Dowling, died on January 1, 2021. At BMCC for over 40 years, Professor Lapides will be remembered for his passion, his life-long fight for social, economic, and racial justice, and his commitment to building communities where differences can be expressed. Never afraid to speak up or ask questions, he was genuinely interested in his students and colleagues. His intense curiosity about people, places, politics, history, literature, psychology, religion–about what it means to be human–informed all his efforts. He encouraged his students to embrace their humanity, including the parts of themselves they felt they needed to hide, building their courage to write honestly. His legacy can be found in his influence on the many students and colleagues he worked with, the online communities he created, in his faculty magazine Hudson River, and for editing Lodz Ghetto, collected writings left behind by Jews confined to the Lodz Ghetto in WWII. Until the end, he was working on his book about the creative development of Charles Dickens, which will be published posthumously” (from Ellen Moody’s Under the Sign of Sylvia blog, 25 Mar. 2021).

  • Creating a Digital Signature With Your Phone’s Camera

    cursive text: making your digital signature

    Last week, I showed my students how to create a digital signature that they can insert into letters that they write in their word processor of choice. It’s very easy to do and simplifies things if you need to send a PDF of a letter without having to print, sign, and scan it.

    Follow these steps:

    1. Take a clean, white sheet of paper and sign your name using a black pen or marker.
    2. Lean your paper on a completely flat, inclined surface and avoid a light behind you so that you don’t cast a shadow over your signature.
    3. Take out your phone and enter the camera app. Carefully align your camera so that it takes a photo of your signature straight on (meaning, your camera’s photo sensor should be parallel to the piece of paper with your signature). It can be helpful to zoom in slightly with your camera app so that you don’t have to be very close to the paper with your signature. If there’s any question about focusing, take the time to tap your signature on the screen so that the camera app focuses on your signature.
    4. Open your signature photo in your phone’s image editing app. First, crop the image to just your signature. Then, maximize the brightness and maximize the contrast, which will make the paper appear pure white and your black signature pops. Save this edited version of your photo.
    5. Email your edited version of your signature photo to yourself so that you can download it on your computer.
    6. Drag the saved image into your word processor document where you left space between your closing and typed name, or use your word processor’s image insert option. If the image appears very large, click on a corner of the signature image and drag to resize the signature.
    7. Depending on your word processing software, you might need to change the image alignment settings for the signature image (so that it is placed where you want and the typed text of your letter doesn’t fall behind or around it in a strange or unexpected way.
    8. Save your document and export it as a PDF to email to wherever it needs to go.
    9. As a bonus, save your signature image someplace safe so that you can reuse it as needed.
    screenshot of a business letter featuring what appears to be a real signature but is in fact an image of a handwritten signature

  • Octavia Butler’s Observation on Leaders in Parable of the Talents

    Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the celebrated science fiction writer, imagined a near-future dystopia set approximately in the United States of our time now. As I tell my students, she was extrapolating from her here-and-now to write stories set the future. While she was imagining what the future might be like, she was also writing about her present due to it being her initial starting conditions. For her novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), she wrote in recognition of the effects of climate change–especially in California, concern for the push for de-regulation by the wealthy, and response to an earlier president who used the campaign phrase “Make America Great Again,” Ronald Reagan. The following passage is the epigraph to chapter eleven in Parable of the Talents. It has stayed with me. All of her points can allude to today and serve as a warning for considering our leaders in the future:

    Choose your leaders
   with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
   is to be controlled
   by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
   is to be led
   by the opportunists
   who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
   is to offer up
   your most precious treasures
   to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
   is to ask
   to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
   is to sell yourself
   and those you love
   into slavery.

  • Green-Wood Cemetery’s Ghostface is Buried in Snow

    ghostface from the film scream is buried in snow with only his head poking through the snow drift

    Ghostface is buried in a snowdrift in Green-Wood Cemetery. He’s seen better days.

  • Remember to Clean Your PC’s Air Intake

    dust covering the front air intake of a midtower PC

    Due to the noise my workstation makes during AI inference, I keep it on the floor under an adjacent desk. Down there, it’s in the shadows. So, I was a little surprised how dusty the front air intake was after being in operation just a little over a month. It probably says a lot about how bad the air quality is in my apartment despite running three HEPA air cleaners in a roughly 600 square foot space. I know that it would be better for the PC to be up off the floor–on the desk, for example. Unfortunately, its noise and disco lights on the CPU fan and white light on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 make this an undesirable choice. I’ll have to remember to vacuum it every two weeks or so, and I might add a foam sheet behind the front grill to help catch more dust before it goes into the case and lands on the components’ heatsinks and fans.

    I’m reminded of The Crafsman‘s “Don’t Forget Your Dust Mask.”