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Cf industries exec Menzel sells $325,000 in stockAs 2025 approaches, investors are being urged to position themselves strategically in response to three major megatrends that are expected to dominate the global financial landscape. According to deVere Group, one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory and asset management firms, these trends—rising geopolitical conflict, surging energy demand, and the transformative rise of artificial intelligence (AI)—are set to reshape markets and create significant investment opportunities. Geopolitical tensions are escalating in various regions, with Europe still reeling from ongoing conflicts, the Middle East facing renewed unrest, and East Asia grappling with heightened territorial disputes. The Institute for Economics & Peace reports that the global conflict index is at its highest point since World War II, with over 50 active armed conflicts worldwide. These tensions are driving defense budgets to unprecedented levels, particularly in the United States, which is expected to exceed $1 trillion in defense spending by 2025. In response to the rising threats, investments are flowing into military technologies, missile defense systems, and cybersecurity. Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, highlights that the growing demand for digital defense solutions will provide long-term opportunities for investors, especially as AI-driven threats continue to emerge. Another key megatrend is the surging demand for energy, driven by economic growth, the electrification of transport, and the rapid expansion of AI technologies. A notable shift in the energy sector is the resurgence of nuclear energy, which is being reintroduced to the global energy mix. Legacy nuclear plants are being refurbished and upgraded, offering substantial investment opportunities, especially as new projects face regulatory hurdles. Green explains that the energy transition is at a critical juncture, with nuclear energy becoming an essential part of the solution. Companies with established nuclear infrastructure are expected to experience significant growth, while offshore oil and gas exploration also sees a revival, signaling strong long-term profitability in the energy sector. Artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize industries across the globe. In the past year, the adoption of AI technologies has accelerated, with businesses across sectors racing to implement AI to drive efficiency and unlock new sources of revenue. Major investments are pouring into AI infrastructure, particularly in data centers and cloud technologies. Green stresses that AI is not just a technological trend but the cornerstone of future economic growth. Companies that are building the infrastructure to support AI’s rapid expansion will be the key drivers of market gains in the years to come. Despite concerns about overvaluation, AI’s transformative potential is still in its early stages, and investors who capitalize on this growth now are poised to benefit in the long term. In this complex environment, strategic positioning is more crucial than ever. As global markets are shaped by geopolitical risks, energy challenges, and AI-driven innovation, Nigel Green advises investors to align their portfolios with these megatrends. By doing so, they are likely to outperform those who react to short-term market shifts. According to Green, 2025 will be a year of complexity and opportunity, and proactive investors who identify and align with these forces will be well-positioned to succeed. “At deVere, we are focused on helping our clients stay ahead of the curve by identifying the forces that will truly shape the future. The megatrends of conflict, energy, and AI will define 2025. Now is the time to act,” Green concludes.
If you’re searching for the ultimate bargain from the available cordless vacuum deals , look no further than Walmart’s offer for the PrettyCare W200. Originally sold at $400, you can get this cleaning machine for an unbelievably low price of only $65. That’s $335 in savings! We’re not sure how much time is remaining before this discount expires, so if you don’t want to miss this opportunity, you’re going to have to add this cordless vacuum to your cart and complete the checkout process immediately. Why you should buy the PrettyCare W200 cordless vacuum The PrettyCare W200 cordless vacuum offers two suction modes: it can run for about 20 minutes in the stronger power mode and for about 48 minutes in the normal power mode. It’s capable of picking up different kinds of dirt, debris, and pet hair across all floor types, and it stores all of them in its 1.3-liter dust collection cup that’s easy to empty once you’re done. The cordless vacuum is also equipped with a stainless steel filter filtration system and a six-stage HEPA filtration system, so that it will capture pollutants and fine dust and only discharge clean air back into your home. To make sure that you’re able to clean every corner of your home, the PrettyCare W200 cordless vacuum comes with attachments that you can quickly swap with one another, depending on what you need for the task at hand. The floor brush has four LED headlights so you can see in dark spaces, such as underneath furniture, while the brush head will let you sweep dust so that you can pick it up easily. You’ll also get a crevice attachment to reach tight spaces. You can also convert the PrettyCare W200 cordless vacuum into a handheld vacuum, if you’re going to clean small areas such as the inside of your car. The PrettyCare W200 cordless vacuum will help you maintain clean floors in your home at an extremely affordable price of just $65, following Walmart’s $335 discount on its sticker price of $400. Stocks may sell out very soon because of the huge savings up for grabs, so if you think this machine is perfect for your family, you better proceed with your purchase as soon as possible. However, if you want a hands-off approach to cleaning, you may want to check out our roundup of robot vacuum deals instead.Towson 64, Morgan St. 60
When he’s honest and humble with himself, Damar Hamlin admits that he never saw this coming. The Buffalo Bills safety always envisioned himself making an impact in his direct community, and he has. But now, he’s making a more widespread impact across the country. The Cardiomyopathy Health Education, Awareness, and Research, and AED Training in the Schools Act of 2024 (HEARTS Act) was signed into law by President Biden on Monday. Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin greets students as he arrives with Sen. Chuck Schumer to promote the HEARTS Act in Congress which would put more automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in schools during an event at Cheektowaga Central School on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024. The HEARTS Act, backed by Hamlin, will provide direct grants to elementary and secondary schools to support CPR and automated external defibrillator (AED) training, to fund the purchase of AEDs and support the development of cardiac emergency response plans. Hamlin needed both CPR and an AED to save his life when he went into cardiac arrest on Jan. 2, 2023, during "Monday Night Football." Since then, he’s been working to make sure others will have access to the same life-saving care he received. Hamlin said this has been “super fulfilling,” as he finds yet another way to use his cardiac emergency to help future generations. Now, that will happen at the federal level. HEARTS Act – led by Bills safety Damar Hamlin, Senate leader Schumer – passes “It means completion,” Hamlin said Thursday. “It means just a process of a bunch of people coming together to make tomorrow better for people that come after us – all coming together, getting something done. So, it feels good to finally have that done.” The bill passed the House of Representatives in September, and it passed the Senate unanimously on Dec. 10. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) worked with Hamlin throughout the process. “This legislation goes beyond the field and its impacts will stretch thousands of miles outside Buffalo to help millions of kids,” Schumer said in a statement. For the 26-year-old Hamlin, his foray into the political world came with some trepidation. Though he recognized the greater good, it came with talking more and more about his traumatic event. “I was uncomfortable when I started the phase of speaking out on my situation and doing my part to get it passed,” Hamlin said. “But I knew that with time and with growth, it would all pay off. So, here’s the moment.” Teammates like veteran safety Micah Hyde have watched Hamlin evolve throughout his journey. “He’s amazing, it’s amazing,” Hyde said. “Just a resilient person to be able to go through what he went through and still be hacking away at the game of football, hacking away at life, just a positive role model for a lot of people. “And I said this way back when – I definitely look up to him and how he attacked this situation.” Hamlin said he was napping when the news broke that Biden signed the bill. He received phone from Bills safeties coach Joe Danna, his father, Mario, and from Nancy Brown, the CEO of the American Heart Association. All were reaching out to congratulate him. “Just a lot of people that are on my support team, supporting everything that I'm doing, engage with everything I'm doing, just reaching out, letting me know that we really made a legacy step there,” Hamlin said. The bill has had major support from the American Heart Association, as well as from the NFL's Smart Hearts Coalition, among other groups. “The bipartisan HEARTS Act is a monumental step in saving lives from cardiac arrest,” Brown posted Thursday on X. “Thank you to (Hamlin) for inspiring this lifesaving initiative and to the members of Congress and advocates nationwide who have worked for over two years to make our schools safer.” Sent weekly directly to your inbox!
Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the RAND Corporation have explored the application of GPT-4 to assess young students’ essay revisions, addressing a critical gap in Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems. These systems traditionally focus on final essay quality, overlooking the revision process a vital aspect of developing strong writing skills. Revision is known to be challenging for students, particularly younger ones, as they often struggle to implement feedback effectively. Studies indicate that many students fail to align their revisions with the feedback provided, leading to missed opportunities for meaningful improvement. This research emphasizes the importance of evaluating revision quality to offer targeted insights that help both students and educators refine their approaches to writing instruction. Leveraging GPT-4 for Holistic Revision Scoring The researchers employed GPT-4 to evaluate student essay revisions using a detailed rubric that classified revisions into four levels: no attempt, attempted but not improved, slightly improved, and substantively improved. The dataset comprised 600 pairs of essays from fifth- and sixth-grade students who participated in a study using the eRevise system. This system provides tailored feedback to students based on their initial essay drafts, focusing on completeness and specificity of evidence, elaboration, and connections to arguments. The study sought to determine how accurately GPT-4 could assess these revisions compared to human raters and whether its performance varied based on students' writing proficiency levels. Three prompting strategies were tested: zero-shot prompting, one-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting with human rationale examples, and one-shot CoT prompting with intermediate reasoning steps. The baseline zero-shot model achieved a moderate agreement with human raters, with an exact match rate of 52% and a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) score of 0.60. The one-shot CoT approach, which included examples and rationales, slightly improved the exact agreement to 54.5%, though the QWK remained constant. However, introducing intermediate reasoning steps in the one-shot CoT prompt led to a significant decline in performance, with agreement dropping to 36.33% and the QWK score to 0.46. These results suggest that while GPT-4 performs well when using clear and detailed rubrics, its effectiveness decreases when tasked with more complex reasoning. Challenges in Evaluating Complex Writing Tasks GPT-4’s accuracy varied significantly depending on the complexity of the revisions it was evaluating. The model excelled in simpler tasks, such as assessing whether students added evidence to their essays, achieving its highest agreement rates with human raters for essays at the lowest proficiency level. These tasks required straightforward feedback and revisions, such as adding more evidence, resulting in agreement rates of up to 65.93% and a QWK of 0.77. However, for mid-level essays requiring more nuanced revisions like elaboration and explanation of evidence, GPT-4’s performance declined. This highlights a limitation in the model’s ability to handle multifaceted writing tasks that involve synthesizing complex feedback. An interesting trend emerged where GPT-4 consistently assigned lower scores to revisions compared to human raters, particularly for those rated as high-quality by human evaluators. Human raters often accounted for developmental appropriateness, acknowledging incremental improvements as significant within the context of the students’ age and writing abilities. GPT-4, lacking this developmental perspective, applied stricter standards for what constituted substantive improvement, often underestimating students’ efforts. This discrepancy highlights the need for AI systems to integrate contextual understanding and adapt scoring thresholds to align with students’ developmental stages. Insights for Improving Automated Scoring Models The study underscores the potential of GPT-4 and similar large language models for advancing formative assessment in education, but it also reveals important areas for enhancement. While detailed rubrics helped the model achieve moderate alignment with human evaluations, the marginal gains from CoT prompting indicate that more sophisticated strategies may be required. The researchers propose exploring alternative prompting methods, such as Tree-of-Thoughts, which could enable GPT-4 to better emulate human reasoning by systematically evaluating multiple aspects of revisions. Additionally, tailoring AI models to consider developmental appropriateness and recognizing students’ efforts could improve scoring accuracy and fairness. Further, the study emphasizes the importance of combining AI capabilities with human expertise. While GPT-4 showed promise in assessing specific types of revisions, human raters provided a nuanced understanding of the context, effort, and age-appropriate expectations. This suggests that hybrid systems integrating AI-driven scalability with human judgment could offer the most effective solutions for educational applications. Implications for Writing Instruction and Technology This research highlights the value of focusing on the revision process, an often-overlooked aspect of writing instruction, to foster meaningful improvements in student writing. By identifying patterns and providing detailed feedback on revisions, educators can better support students in developing the skills needed for effective writing. The findings also underline the importance of designing AWE systems that move beyond surface-level assessments to address the complexities of revision. Although GPT-4 demonstrated potential as a tool for evaluating revision quality, its limitations call for ongoing refinements in both AI technology and educational practice. Developing AI systems attuned to students' developmental needs and capable of handling complex writing tasks will be essential for creating equitable and impactful educational technologies. This study contributes to the broader conversation about the role of AI in education, offering actionable insights into how technology can complement human expertise to improve learning outcomes. Emphasizing the importance of revisions points to a path for enhancing teaching practices and the tools supporting them.
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