ChatGPT and Excel -- trust, but verify

This paper adopts a critical approach to ChatGPT, showing how its huge reach makes it a useful tool for people with simple requirements but a bad, even misleading guide to those with more complex problems which are more rarely present in the training data and even more rarely have straightforward solutions. It works through four exercises in creating lookup formulas using chatbots, showing the need to test the offered solutions. They are a simple lookup, a lookup to the left, a match of two values at the same time, and intentionally confusing the models by using common language with technical meaning in Excel. It concludes with a practical guide for how to add an Excelscript button, with system and user prompts, to the ChatGPT API into the Excel desktop environment, supported by a blog post giving the technical details for those interested.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

An exploration of the development of a Network of Health Promoting Schools in the Mid-west region of Ireland 2005-2015: a complex adaptive systems approach.

Alanna O'Beirne PHD THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis explores the development of a Network of Health Promoting Schools in the Midwest region of Ireland between 2005 and 2015. It identifies supports and barriers to developing the Health Promoting School concept and process with school communities. The study draws on the literature from the fields of education and health and in particular the sub-discipline of health promotion and includes an exploration of themes of leadership, collaborative working, change, systems theory and the concept of the Health Promoting School. The overarching conceptual framework of Complex Adaptive Systems is used to pull the different theories and models together. The research adopts a largely qualitative approach exploiting a case study methodology. Four cases are presented; one case focuses on the Health Promoting Partnership which was responsible for the governance and strategic direction of the Network and the remaining three cases focus on individual school sites. In the first case partners from the agencies represented in the Partnership were interviewed and these data are combined with information from steering group meetings to provide insights into the strategic supports and barriers to establishing and maintaining a Network of Health Promoting Schools. In the three school cases, stakeholders from the school communities (Principals, Health Promoting School Coordinators, Teachers, Parents and Pupils) were interviewed and these data were coupled with individual Health Promoting School Meeting records to identify supports and barriers for the implementation of Health Promoting Schools at the ground level. One of the key findings was that the promotion of the whole school’s participation and engagement with the Health Promoting School concept was vital to successful implementation. However this was not unproblematic. While children’s participation was supported and valued, responses relating to parental engagement were more ambivalent. Another finding was that strategic supports put in place by the Partnership were highly regarded by teachers, Principals and School Coordinators. The findings indicate that while stakeholders appreciated the need for schools to place an emphasis on health, the implementation of Health Promoting Schools had to compete with a myriad of other demands pressing on a finite amount of school time. This research is likely to be of interest to those involved in implementing a Health Promoting School Model and process at the individual school level or more strategically in developing a Network of Health Promoting Schools. Researchers interested in adopting a Complex Adaptive Systems approach in their investigation of Health Promoting Schools will also find this study informative.Doctoral studies completely self funde

Constraining alternative theories of gravity using pulsar timing arrays

The opening of the gravitational wave window by ground-based laser interferometers has made possible many new tests of gravity, including the first constraints on polarization. It is hoped that within the next decade pulsar timing will extend the window by making the first detections in the nano-Hertz frequency regime. Pulsar timing offers several advantages over ground-based interferometers for constraining the polarization of gravitational waves due to the many projections of the polarization pattern provided by the different lines of sight to the pulsars, and the enhanced response to longitudinal polarizations. Here we show that existing results from pulsar timing arrays can be used to place stringent limits on the energy density of longitudinal stochastic gravitational waves. Paradoxically however, we find that longitudinal modes will be very difficult to detect due to the large variance in the pulsar-pulsar correlation patterns for these modes. Existing upper limits on the power spectrum of pulsar timing residuals imply that the amplitude of vector longitudinal and scalar longitudinal modes at frequencies of 1/year are constrained: ${\cal A}_{\rm VL} < 4.1\times 10^{-16}$ and ${\cal A}_{\rm SL} < 3.7\times 10^{-17}$, while the bounds on the energy density for a scale invariant cosmological background are: $\Omega_{\rm VL}h^2 < 3.5 \times 10^{-11}$ and $\Omega_{\rm SL}h^2 < 3.2 \times 10^{-13}$.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure