Mathematics Education as Dystopia: A Future Beyond

We argue that scholars and practitioners of mathematics education need to find new directions through recognition of its dystopic characteristics, and embrace these characteristics as both the source of challenges and method of response. This contrasts with the generally utopic approach of most scholarship in the field. We offer critical ethnomathematics education as a model, since it has its own origins in lingering dystopic legacies. A perpetual hopelessness and disempowerment is one implicit curriculum of contemporary mathematics education, where the mathematics one learns might help to describe things, yet hardly assists in transforming the reification of power and agency in society. Embracing dystopia rather than trying to circumvent it generates new questions and pathways

Storytelling to save the planet: who gets to say what is sustainable, who tells the stories, and who should listen and change?

In the last decade, storytelling has been popularised as a method for societal sustainability transformations. With this growing popularity, there has also been a rapid increase in those identifying as storytellers. Perhaps because storytelling for sustainability has an innocent ring to it, it has not yet been studied from a power perspective. However, as it is fast-spreading and has explicit change purposes, it is important to clarify assumptions about knowledge, power and change. This article offers a first step towards understanding and evaluating the wide variety of applications behind the label of storytelling for sustainability. We perform a frame analysis of how storytellers describe their storytelling for sustainability. Our findings demonstrate that the label of storytelling for sustainability encompasses fundamentally different ideas about whose knowledge counts. The article raises critical questions that can help assess the legitimacy and appropriateness of different applications of storytelling for sustainability

Using nanopublications as a distributed ledger of digital truth

With the increase in volume of research publications, it is very difficult for researchers to keep abreast of all work in their area. Additionally, the claims in classical publications are not machine-readable making it challenging to retrieve, integrate, and link prior work. Several semantic publishing approaches have been proposed to address these challenges, including Research Object, Executable Paper, Micropublications, and Nanopublications. Nanopublications are a granular way of publishing research-based claims, their associated provenance, and publication information (metadata of the nanopublication) in a machine-readable form. To date, over 10 million nanopublications have been published, covering a wide range of topics, predominantly in the life sciences. Nanopublications are immutable, decentralised/distributed, uniformly structured, granular level, and authentic. These features of nanopublications allow them to be used as a Distributed Ledger of Digital Truth. Such a ledger enables detecting conflicting claims and generating the timeline of discussion on a particular topic. However, the inability to identify all nanopublications related to a given topic prevent existing nanopublications forming a ledger. In this dissertation, we make the following contributions: (i) Identify quality issues regarding misuse of authorship properties and linkrot which impact on the quality of the digital ledger. We argue that the Nanopub community needs to be developed a set of guidelines for publishing nanopublications. (ii) Provide a framework for generating a timeline of discourse over a collection of nanopublications by retrieving and combining nanopublications on a particular topic to provide interoperability between them. (iii) Detect contradictory claims between nanopublications automatically highlighting the conflicts and provide explanations based on the provenance information in the nanopublications. Through these contributions, we show that nanopublications can form a distributed ledger of digital truth, providing key benefits such as citability, timelines of discourse, and conflict detection, to users of the ledger

14 Examples of How LLMs Can Transform Materials Science and Chemistry: A Reflection on a Large Language Model Hackathon

Chemistry and materials science are complex. Recently, there have been great successes in addressing this complexity using data-driven or computational techniques. Yet, the necessity of input structured in very specific forms and the fact that there is an ever-growing number of tools creates usability and accessibility challenges. Coupled with the reality that much data in these disciplines is unstructured, the effectiveness of these tools is limited. Motivated by recent works that indicated that large language models (LLMs) might help address some of these issues, we organized a hackathon event on the applications of LLMs in chemistry, materials science, and beyond. This article chronicles the projects built as part of this hackathon. Participants employed LLMs for various applications, including predicting properties of molecules and materials, designing novel interfaces for tools, extracting knowledge from unstructured data, and developing new educational applications. The diverse topics and the fact that working prototypes could be generated in less than two days highlight that LLMs will profoundly impact the future of our fields. The rich collection of ideas and projects also indicates that the applications of LLMs are not limited to materials science and chemistry but offer potential benefits to a wide range of scientific disciplines

Semiotics in Mathematics Education

Mathematics Educatio

Dagstuhl News January - December 2008

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

14 Examples of How LLMs Can Transform Materials Science and Chemistry: A Reflection on a Large Language Model Hackathon

Large-language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 caught the interest of many scientists. Recent studies suggested that these models could be useful in chemistry and materials science. To explore these possibilities, we organized a hackathon. This article chronicles the projects built as part of this hackathon. Participants employed LLMs for various applications, including predicting properties of molecules and materials, designing novel interfaces for tools, extracting knowledge from unstructured data, and developing new educational applications. The diverse topics and the fact that working prototypes could be generated in less than two days highlight that LLMs will profoundly impact the future of our fields. The rich collection of ideas and projects also indicates that the applications of LLMs are not limited to materials science and chemistry but offer potential benefits to a wide range of scientific disciplines

Gender issues, core curriculum, and statewide content standards

This project is a discussion of the continuing need to address gender issues while teaching core curriculum in English classes at the secondary level