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(credit: US State Department)

Lower-income and minority college students often have trouble sticking with higher education. But past studies have indicated they’d be less likely to drop out of school if they receive appropriate counseling once they start experiencing academic problems. A new study published in PNAS demonstrates that if students receive this kind of intervention prior to college enrollment and during their first year at college, they are more likely to avoid having academic trouble in the first place. And the counseling can be done over the Internet.

The counseling involves letting students know that it is common for students to struggle with the transition to college, and that this transition will get easier with time. This is known as a “lay theory intervention.”

The researchers conducted three double-blind randomized experiments to test the effects of internet-based interventions for students who come from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Students in experimental groups received one of the following: an intervention focused on developing their confidence; an intervention focused on developing their feelings of social belonging in college; or an intervention that included both of these.

ANDOVER, Mass.—At the front door of Raytheon's Integrated Air Defense Center, there's a reminder of how big microwave electronics used to be—the original microwave oven. The now ever-present kitchen device was invented after a Raytheon engineer discovered his candy bar melted while he was standing near a magnetron used in a radar system the company was developing. Nearly the size of a refrigerator, the original microwave looks like it would cook a whole lot more than whatever was put within its metal grate, which was meant to contain the microwaves from its magnetron.

That isn't a water cooler; it's a pioneering microwave. (credit: Courtesy of Sean Gallagher)

A few hundred yards away from the relic, Raytheon manufactures a much different microwave technology today. In a semiconductor fabrication facility, built to resemble a giant integrated circuit from above, the company produces many of the chips that go into its modern radar systems, including monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs). These tiny radio frequency amplifiers are similar to ones found in cellular phones, Wi-Fi adapters, and other wireless communications devices.

This technology is currently in the process of getting a major upgrade as the result of more than 16 years of research by Raytheon. And any MMIC evolution will be driven by the same substance that has made power-sipping LED light bulbs, Blu-ray players, and game consoles possible: gallium nitride (or, in chemical shorthand, GaN).

Sunspring, a short science fiction movie written entirely by AI, debuted exclusively on Ars in June 2016. (video link)

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room. "As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars. The actors interpreted the lines as they read, adding tone and body language, and the results are what you see in the movie. Somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world. It even has its own musical interlude (performed by Andrew and Tiger), with a pop song Benjamin composed after learning from a corpus of 30,000 other pop songs.