Thumbs: State is using robots to grade STAAR

We won’t have to wait decades for artificial intelligence to become our robot overlords, at least not when it comes to our kids’ brains. The Texas Education Agency is using an “automated scoring engine” to grade the essays that public school students have been writing this week for the STAAR exam. Yes, that’s right, the same kids who get flunked if they’re caught using AI to do their homework are now being graded by AI. Perhaps aware of the hypocrisy, TEA claims their cost-cutting tool — $15-20 million saved by reducing the number of graders from 6,000 to fewer than 2,000 — isn’t real AI because it won’t be continuously trained to get smarter, and humans will check a quarter of the responses. Hmm. We wonder if they used ChatGPT to craft that drivel? Whether or not they keep refining the tool, they would have used machine learning to train their scoring engine. Consider this: Future state takeovers of Texas school districts may well be based on these AI-graded test scores. With stakes that high, we should come up with the money to pay humans to read that most human assignment we give our kids — expressing their humanity through the written word. Besides, English majors will need those grading jobs after Uber switches to AI-driven vehicles. If young Texans get fed up enough with the way things are run around here, they can always move to … southern Illinois? That’s the message on a billboard by Loop 610 in southeast Houston. “Imagine anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion,” the advertisement for Southern Illinois University reads. How’s that for recruiting off the culture wars? As the University of Texas and other public universities fire employees dedicated to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives in order to comply with a new state law, other states are more than happy to hitch their rain barrels to the inevitable brain drain.

The Houston Rockets turnaround season may not have gotten them to the playoffs, but they’re still figuring out ways to make fans happy, even the ones cheering for the other team. On Sunday, with four minutes and 44 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of an away game against the Los Angeles Clippers, Rockets center Boban Marjanovic missed the first of two free throws. Even though the hometown fans knew their team had little chance of winning, they began cheering with greater and greater energy. Turns out the Clippers organization offers fans free chicken if the opposing team misses two free throws in a row in the fourth quarter. With a big smile on his face, Marjanovic — a career 76.4% free-throw shooter — missed the second shot on purpose. “He’s a man of the people!” the television color commentator shouted as the crowd erupted in appreciation.

Alex Jones has burrowed into a remote corner of the desert, which has a bizarre and sordid history that seems to befit the conspiracy monger. Texas Monthly reports the host of the Infowars podcast has moved to a ranch outside Terlingua near Big Bend National Park. After he was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims for defamation and setting loose his legions of fans to harass them, Jones and his wife still managed to buy 20 acres of off-grid dust where David Kaczynski, brother of the Unabomber, retreated to escape the media, and where Judith Broughton kept her dead mother beneath her kitchen floor while collecting her Social Security benefits. We can only hope Jones’ solar panels don’t have enough juice to power a comeback for his noxious profiteering off the suffering of others.

Closer to home, ranchers between Houston and Beaumont triumphed this week in the DeVillier v. Texas case before the US Supreme Court. For four generations Richie DeVillier’s family has tended cattle and never had a problem with flooding until the state rebuilt I-10 with a barrier down the middle designed to keep the south lanes dry as an evacuation route during heavy rains. When Tropical Storm Imelda hit in 2019, the design worked as intended. Turning our land into lakes for the public good is justifiable, the ranchers say in the lawsuit, but we’ve got to be compensated. Attorney General Ken Paxton, a so-called defender of property rights, managed to get a lower court to dismiss the case with a bait-and-switch move. He moved the case from state to federal courts, and then argued the plaintiffs don’t have standing. Well, in unanimous decision, the Supreme Court justices decided the lawsuit can go ahead in state court. That didn’t stop Paxton from trying to spin his loss as a win. For all the folks out there whose neighborhoods have been turned into occasional lakes by the Texas Department of Transportation, it appears that storing an inflatable raft in the garage isn’t your only option for relief.

Rockets center delivers chicken, and ranchers beat Paxton