Liberal arts and general education
For faculty deciding what to assign, not choosing a research tool. The teachable object is the failure itself, so the session should show a real failure, live if the room allows.
What the session covers
Grounding means the assistant answers from a named public record and shows you which one. For a computer science audience, grounding is a systems property — provenance, API contracts, verification. For a liberal arts audience it is a reading and writing property. The same connector that teaches a CS student about resolvable identifiers teaches a composition student about source evaluation, and teaches a political science student that a stated priority and a budget line are different claims.
- The teachable failure, demonstrated rather than described: one question, two answers, and the question of how a student would have known which to trust.
- What the tools cost, answered early, because a paid-tool dependency excludes students unevenly.
- Where the finding is an absence — a report the law requires annually whose most recent published version is years old.
- What it takes to put this in a classroom.
What it is honest about
The strongest single artifact in the session is a spreadsheet cell containing the literal string
"s". That is suppression — the city masking small counts so individual students cannot be
re-identified. A program that expects a number stops with an error when it meets one; a program
told to skip what it cannot read keeps going and reports a wrong average that looks entirely
reasonable and never announces itself.
The deck also names a tool that is not ours and is better than ours for classroom use, and discloses BetaNYC’s own Council funding so the room can look us up with the method we just taught them.
For faculty running this: the deck needs no network. Arrow keys move, N opens presenter notes,
G is a slide grid, F goes full screen. Eleven demos replay recorded, dated results; click one,
or Tab to it and press Enter.