Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
Since the announcement of the cancellation of the GCSE and A Level examinations, Year 11 and 13 students have been faced with plenty of time on their hands. Having spent mine so far pursuing an online machine learning course [1] at the suggestion of Dr Hedges, I thought it might be interesting to apply the result of these endeavours back to their causation, namely in explaining a possible method for exam grade generation. Before proceeding, I’d like to point out that this is not based on any evidence other than my own thought experiment, and so should be treated as such. To begin with, what is machine learning and why does it apply to this problem? Well machine learning is the science of getting computers to perform tasks without being explicitly programmed, specifically those involving data and predictions. For example, we might train a machine learning algorithm to predict some result, e.g. banana prices, based on some input data such as supply, demand and quality. In our case...