GBH Daily: Wicked windy

🚩Nor’easter alert through the weekend. Today will be cloudy and breezy, with rain starting and winds picking up tonight and highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 6:36 p.m.

This weekend’s nor’easter could bring quite a bit of rain and strong winds to southeastern Massachusetts, the Cape and Islands, but its exact track remains uncertain. Scituate Town Administrator Jim Boudreau said employees with the town’s Department of Public Works have spent the week preparing, “cleaning catch basins, looking for any low limbs that they might have to deal with,” he said. They also installed tide gates at beaches. Our meteorologist Dave Epstein said to expect rains and winds, especially along the coasts, through Monday.

GBH’s Jared Bowen, host of The Culture Show, has suggestions for indoor activities: the plays, “Purpose” at the Huntington Theatre and “All My Sons” at Lyric Stage, plus the streaming series “Furious” on Hulu.

Four Things to Know

1. Nurses eye strike: About 93% of nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital voted to authorize a strike until their union can reach a contract agreement with the hospital’s management. The hospital employs about 4,000 nurses, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association.

As of this morning, the nurses are not on strike. But the vote means the nurses approve of their union starting an indefinite strike if they can’t reach an agreement on pay raises, health insurance, and staffing levels. Mass. General Brigham, the hospital system Brigham and Women’s is a part of, had a $2.38 billion operating surplus last year. 

2. Back to school germs: Back-to-school season and the arrival of fall mean the state is seeing more confirmed COVID-19 cases — from 407 cases in the last week of August to 791 last week. Those figures capture only people who were tested at a doctor’s office, not those who tested at home or never got tested.

“Getting vaccinated is the best way to protect yourself from this virus, certainly from the severe complications, hospitalization and potential death,” said Dr. Robbie Goldstein, the commissioner of Massachusetts’ Department of Public Health. “But also, we learned a lot during the pandemic; that there are ways that you can protect yourself that are pretty simple and easy.” He suggested staying home when you’re sick, wearing a mask in public and getting tested if you’re not feeling well.

3. Bog gone: The state’s Division of Ecological Restoration is offering cranberry farmers looking to leave the industry another option. State officials can help them transform bogs into wetlands, through what they call a “green exit strategy” for farmers who are retiring or shutting down their bogs for financial reasons.

“There’s a pretty strong environmental ethic and kind of tie to the land in cranberry growers,” said Mass. Division of Fish and Wildlife Southeast District Supervisor Jason Zimmer. “They’ve worked and cared for the land for, you know, in some of these families, decades and decades. And they want to see the land continue and be protected.” The latest addition is Century Bog in Plymouth and Wareham.

4. Sheeran refunds: Anyone who bought tickets to see Ed Sheeran perform at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough this weekend is entitled to a refund after all of his opening acts and backing band left the tour, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said. Stadium owner Robert Kraft said he would not allow the rapper Macklemore to perform as an opener, saying Macklemore had not sufficiently criticized Hamas as part of his pro-Palestinian activism. Sheeran’s remaining opening acts and backing band then dropped out in solidarity.

Campbell encouraged ticket holders who no longer want to attend to request a refund from Ticketmaster as soon as possible. Keith Pagello, the founder of TicketData, said there will likely still be plenty of people in the audience. “Some of the online chatter might have you think that the sky is falling in terms of, you know, ‘There’s gonna be 10 people at this show’ — when we’re seeing that, by and large, a lot of people are still going.”

‘Cognitive surrender’: Are college students who use AI really learning?

You might have heard some version of this story already: Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm last spring. Their grades were spectacular — suspiciously so. “While the historical average of these midterm exams in previous editions of the course ranged between 65 and 80, the average this time was 96,” Serrano told GBH’s Kirk Carrapezza. 

He confronted the class, asking students whether they had used AI tools on the midterm and, if so, what they were doing at Brown. The final exam was in person, with no access to notes, computers or phones.

“A very sizable number of students dropped the course right after I made that announcement, including 22 students that had scored 100,” he told Carrapezza. “The average score in the final went down to 48 from the original 96.”

Generative AI is making educators reshape their classes. Students can get tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to generate an essay, a presentation or answers to engineering problems. Educators, meanwhile, are trying to show that generating answers is not the same as learning.

“We need to give students a more powerful cognitive toolkit,” former Southern New Hampshire University president Paul LeBlanc told Carapezza. “That includes critical thinking, their interpersonal skills, creativity, sensemaking, empathy.”

You can learn more about this “cognitive surrender” here.