Questões

NASA’s Nuclear Frontier: The Plum Brook Reactor Facility

    There are three main types of nuclear reactors: power, research, and test. Research and test reactors as scientific tools are more common than most people realize. While power reactors frequently appear in newspaper headlines and are conspicuous because of their size and power, research reactors can be quietly tucked away, even in the midst of a college campus. Power reactors generate heat, which can easily be converted to other useable forms of energy, such as electricity. Research reactors operate at very low thermal power levels – so low, in fact, that they do not even require any type of forced cooling. They are used to measure nuclear parameters and other characteristics, which can then be used to build other reactors or to design experiments for test reactors. Test reactors are more powerful than research reactors and are able to produce much more intense radiation fields. Though they are still much less powerful than the power reactors, they generate enough heat to require a closed-loop forced-circulation coolant system. This system will remove the heat from the reactor by transferring it to a secondary cooling system, which releases it into the atmosphere through cooling towers.

NASA’s Nuclear Frontier: The Plum Brook Reactor Facility. Pages 36 to 40. 

Text 3

Digital habits across generations 

Today’s grandparents are joining their grandchildren on social media, but the different generations’ online habits couldn’t be more different. In the UK the over55s are joining Facebook in increasing numbers, meaning that they will soon be the site’s second biggest user group, with 3.5 million users aged 55-64 and 2.9 million over-65s.

Sheila, aged 59, says, ‘I joined to see what my grandchildren are doing, as my daughter posts videos and photos of them. It’s a much better way to see what they’re doing than waiting for letters and photos in the post. That’s how we did it when I was a child, but I think I’m lucky I get to see so much more of their lives than my grandparents did.’ Ironically, Sheila’s grandchildren are less likely to use Facebook themselves. Children under 17 in the UK are leaving the site – only 2.2 million users are under 17 – but they’re not going far from their smartphones.

Chloe, aged 15, even sleeps with her phone. ‘It’s my alarm clock so I have to,’ she says. ‘I look at it before I go to sleep and as soon as I wake up.’ Unlike her grandmother’s generation, Chloe’s age group is spending so much time on their phones at home that they are missing out on spending time with their friends in real life. Sheila, on the other hand, has made contact with old friends from school she hasn’t heard from in forty years. ‘We use Facebook to arrange to meet all over the country,’ she says. ‘It’s changed my social life completely.’ Teenagers might have their parents to thank for their smartphone and social media addiction as their parents were the early adopters of the smartphone. Peter, 38 and father of two teenagers, reports that he used to be on his phone or laptop constantly. ‘I was always connected and I felt like I was always working,’ he says. ‘How could I tell my kids to get off their phones if I was always in front of a screen myself?’ So, in the evenings and at weekends, he takes his SIM card out of his smartphone and puts it into an old-style mobile phone that can only make calls and send text messages. ‘I’m not completely cut off from the world in case of emergencies, but the important thing is I’m setting a better example to my kids and spending more quality time with them.’ Is it only a matter of time until the generation above and below Peter catches up with the new trend for a less digital life?

Source: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org

         A lawyer used ChatGPT to prepare a court filing. It went horribly awry.

 A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing on behalf of a man suing an airline is now all too familiar with the artificial intelligence (AI) tool’s shortcomings — including its propensity to invent facts. 

  Roberto Mata sued Colombian airline Avianca last year, alleging that a metal food and beverage cart injured his knee on a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss the lawsuit based on the statute of limitations, his lawyer submitted a brief based on research done by ChatGPT.

        While ChatGPT can be useful to professionals in numerous industries, including the legal profession, it has proved itself to be both limited and unreliable. In this case, the AI invented court cases that didn’t exist, and asserted that they were real. The fabrications were revealed when Avianca’s lawyers approached the case’s judge, saying they couldn’t locate the cases cited in Mata’s lawyers’ brief in legal databases.

        “It seemed clear when we didn’t recognize any of the cases in their opposition brief that something was amiss,” said the airline’s lawyer. And soon they figured it was some sort of chatbot of some kind. On the other hand, the passenger’s lawyer said that it was the first time he’d used ChatGPT for work and, therefore, he was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false. 

Internet: <www.cbsnews.com> (adapted).

READ TEXT I AND ANSWER THE FIVE QUESTION THAT FOLLOW IT

TEXT I

National Assessment Reform: Core Considerations for Brazil

    Education has been an integral part of Brazil’s success story. With expanded access to basic education and improvements in literacy rates, young Brazilians are entering today’s workforce with higher levels of education than previous generations. This educational progress has contributed to and benefited from the economic growth that helped improve living standards and, during the first decade of the millennium, lifted more than 29 million people out of poverty. Trend data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that Brazil’s increasing school participation rates have been realised alongside progress in education quality. This is a remarkable achievement considering that many of the new students progressing through the education system come from disadvantaged backgrounds and often lack the socio-economic support that helps enable learning. Nevertheless, PISA also reveals that the overall performance of Brazil’s education system is well below the OECD average and other emerging economies, such as parts of China and the Russian Federation. One reason for this is Brazil’s high share of students who do not achieve baseline proficiency, or Level 2 in PISA. Results from PISA 2018 show that 50% of Brazilian students failed to reach Level 2 in reading, meaning they can only complete basic tasks. Brazil’s share of low-performers was even higher in Mathematics and Science (68% and 55%, respectively). At the other end of the spectrum, few students in Brazil were able to answer more difficult PISA questions, like inferring neutrality or bias in a text, which require skills that are increasingly important in today’s world. The new approach to education, set out in the BNCC, aims not only to ensure that all students achieve basic cognitive skills but also develop the higher-order skills needed to solve complex problems of everyday life.

Adapted from: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/333a6e20- en.pdf?expires=1728831657&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=CD292865CAA9F4B A019D2FE4378B5D2D