Davisville

These days, you can get all the quick takes and snap judgments you want. They seem easier to find than facts, partly because they're catnip to the algorithms and impulses that drive social media. Today’s guest is doing something different with opinions — something more difficult, in my book, and more useful, especially in the long run. Since fall 2022, Claire Schad has been writing opinion columns for the California Aggie, the student newspaper and news organization at the University of California, Davis.

Writing opinion columns will seem like an outdated, narrow pursuit — newspapers in any format have much less influence than they did — but a good column that hits its mark generates ideas, not just reactions. It can create room for nuance, for admitting and engaging different points of view. Writers learn about people and ideas, and how to make ideas useful. How to move them forward.

Claire is graduating in June, and we talk about her experiences today on Davisville.

The Capitol Corridor trains that connect Davis with the Bay Area and Sacramento are evolving as the service recovers from the pandemic. The corridor is adding passenger cars and resuming a full weekday schedule this year, experimenting with a tap-on/tap-off payment system to eventually replace tickets, and proceeding with plans to change access in Davis so that passengers board from an expanded center platform reached via an underpass (or perhaps an overpass) from the parking lot and Olive Drive.

Longer term, the service plans to shift to hydrogen or possibly electric power for its trains. We talk about all this, as well as this year's ridership trends and efforts to improve their timekeeping, on Davisville with Rob Padgette, managing director of the service. Today’s program updates our conversation about the corridor from early 2022.

In winter 2023 we talked with Andy Jones and Margaret Merrill of UC Davis about ChatGPT, a new artificial-intelligence app that was setting off alarms for its advanced ability to "write" reports and articles. On today’s Davisville they report that among the faculty they work with, the sense of panic present then has now eased “quite a bit.” People know more about the limits of chatbots, and are asking more about how and where to use the tools in teaching, instead of just fearing them as a plagiarism machine.

We talk about handling chatbot hallucinations, resisting the biases that chatbots suck into their text databases, and hear a few examples of how UC Davis instructors are using the tools in their classrooms.

Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all.

Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.