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tv   ABC7 News Getting Answers  ABC  April 9, 2024 3:00pm-3:31pm PDT

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using our brand new grocery outlet app. it's been really fun seeing what everyone's doing with the extra money they save. nice shirt. just got back from vacation. a butler? super nice guy. i got to start using the app. today on getting answers a growing culture of cheating in school. is artificial intelligence really playing a role? a renowned stanford researcher and educator will
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join us to talk about it. a floating house in the bay may have been a curious sight this weekend, but it also marked the end of a houseboat community. our media partner, the san francisco standard, has the fascinating story, but first, some of the bay area's most fire prone areas will no longer be able to renew their insurance policies. starting this summer. if that's you, what are your options and recourse? you're watching. getting answers. i'm kristen sze. thanks for joining us. it's a massive worry in this disaster prone state, one of the nation's largest insurance companies, state farm, will no longer renew or issue new policies for homeowners to insure their properties. the non-renewals will impact every bay area, county, but the hardest hit is contra costa, with more than 3800 non-renewals in santa cruz county. at least 3100 policies and in sonoma county 2200 policies. not being renewed. joining us live now to talk about the impact and
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alternatives for homeowners. joel loubscher, insurance consumer advocate with united policyholders, a nonprofit that provides information and resources to consumers. joel thanks for your time. >> yes, thanks for having me, chris. >> refresh our memory. we reported this when it first came out. why is state farm not renewing and not insuring new people in a whole bunch of bay area counties? >> yeah, there are likely a couple of different reasons. one is that state farm's financial rating was downgraded recently just last month from an a to a b from am best uh- they're going to focus at state farm on rebuilding their surplus. so they're probably trying to reduce any area with a catastrophe level, risk. you know, insurers in general in california recently have been pressing for higher rates. and, you know, this is probably in
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line with that as well. that state farm is waiting to see, what what steps the department of insurance takes to allow the insurance market to charge more premiums. >> i see okay, i don't want to say it's a game, but it kind of sort of is. they have to take this step in order to get what they want. right. and of course, they're not the only insurance company doing this right. but can you tell us, like, who else? and are they the biggest? >> yeah, i think pretty much every insurer is doing some non-renewals in the most wildfire prone regions, you know, companies like state farm in particular, of course, have really, put a lot of independent agents into these, certain communities. and so they're most likely to gain bigger parts of
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the market share, than other insurers. and now they've changed their mind and don't want all that market share that they build up. but there are, you know, dozens of insurers writing insurance in california. and that's why we say, you know, you have to really start calling multiple agents to really do a thorough market search. don't, one thing we would say is, don't just settle for your, state farm agent placing you in the california fair plan. really? call a number of local agents and agents outside where you live to see if any of them represent an insurer that is still writing, and write down the name of every insurer that your that these agents, attempt to place your coverage with so that you make sure you've done a thorough search. >> all right. you mentioned the california fair plan. explain
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what that is. is that like a last resort thing that nobody can be denied from? >> yeah, that's exactly right. the fair plan is in place for homeowners and businesses, find at least the most basic of coverage. it's basically just a fire policy. it doesn't have water damage coverage like your homeowner's policy has, and doesn't have liability coverage like your homeowner's policy has. so, but at least it is something the issue is not only is it kind of a bare bones coverage, but it is very expensive because of course you're in the highest risk pool of insureds when you end up in the fair plan. so if you can get out of the fair plan, you want to do that. if you end up in the fair plan, you need to buy a companion policy. often called a dick or a difference in conditions policy that provides
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those other coverages that your homeowner's policy has, like liability and water damage. that fair plan policy does not. >> all right. hey, you know, off the top we gave some examples of some of the counties with the most drops. but there are policy holders being dropped in every bay area county. do you have any sense how many people we're talking about being affected, well, there were tens of thousands of people. it is, ranging all the way through the state, you know, all the way down to san diego county and, i actually don't remember that the number. yeah, but it is, basically thousands in, in every county. so there isn't a, you know, there's going to be a lot of competition to find those spaces available among the few insurers that are still writing competition to take my money, okay. but let's talk about take my money and be grateful that they're doing it. >> yes. >> okay. so let me ask you. so
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for state farm, it's not renewals beginning this summer. that doesn't mean you're dropped right away or that existing policies are no longer effective . right, so how many more years might people have coverage, for example? is it like a year or two years? and then when they get that notice, what should they do when they find out, oh, i'm not going to be renewed again? what should i do? >> yeah, i think state farm, at least here, is giving some kind of preemptive notice. the official notice it has to give out which policyholders will receive in the mail is a 70 day non renewal notice. so that is you know, in advance of the expiration date of your coverage. so despite you know knowing you're going to get that additional you know time to shop . since you may already be aware that you're non-renewed you should stop start shopping right now. >> all right. because obviously there's going to be a lot of
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competition. >> i know you wanted this out there because it's the resource that you your group provides. it's up write up help. org. so the letter u the letter p help org. but when people go there just quickly in the minute that we have left, you know what should they do. they have that notice you know, one, two, three give us steps that they must take. because i assume you're going to tell us not insuring is not an option. >> it isn't an option. in fact, if you have a mortgage, you're a mortgage company won't allow you to go without insurance. they will place it even more bare bones at a more expensive price. so look at our dropped by your insurer, our narrative on the u.p. health org website. also do everything you can right now to mitigate your home. look at the state of california, safer from wildfire steps or the ihs wildfire prepared home steps. they're a series of mitigation actions about, you know, clearing out some of your
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vegetation and preparing your home to make it safer from wildfires. insurers are going to be looking for homes that have done that and try our local firewise communities as well. >> look, can i just ask you, what is the long terme picture for us? i mean, obviously these insurance companies want us to pay higher premiums. is that what we can expect that premiums will rise? is there something that will improve the situation other than some technology that makes sure we don't get wildfires anymore? >> yeah, well, technology actually is part of it. >> i do think over this course of this next year, we're going to see premiums rise. but there is a lot of activity right now amongst communities and counties that are doing mitigation actions. some large ones, like shaded fuel breaks or controlled burns, that will reduce the likelihood of wildfire risk entering a community. but a lot
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of firewise communities that are doing house by house mitigation, if we really reduce that likelihood of fire, that's our best bet. there's also technology, fire sensors being placed in the in the wilderness and such so that we're aware of fire sooner and put them out before they become major fires. >> well, there's hope on the horizon. joel laubscher with united policyholders, thank you so much. >> yeah, thanks for having me. >> speaking of, technology, is cheating becoming more prevalent in our nation's schools, and does it have anything to do with ai? stanford university school of education lecturer joins us next to talk about challenges
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problem sets. but is that happening? is the technology having a detrimental effect on academic learning? a leading stanford education researcher went looking for answers, joining us live now to talk about her research. doctor denise pope, stanford senior lecturer and co-founder of challenge success, a nonprofit that seeks to improve student engagement and well-being. doctor pope, nice to have you back on the show. >> thanks so much for having me. >> yeah, this is fascinating. your team, you were part of a team that set out to explore whether the proliferate of ai tools affected cheating in schools. so how did you go about this? >> we happen to be in the right place at the right time. we have been studying cheating for many, many years in schools and so when chatgpt came out, we were set up to do a really nice pre-post with similar schools, if not the same schools that had
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surveyed with us earlier in the year than chatgpt came out, which was the more public version of some of these ai chat bots at the time. and then we got to survey the same schools, and we found that really there wasn't any difference in the cheating. it did not go up drastically as everybody was afraid of. that's the good news. the bad news is the cheating was pretty high to start out with in the first place. cheating was about, yeah, 60 to 70, at these schools. and these were some public school and independent school and a parochial school. >> so kind of across the board, only high schools or also colleges, only high schools at this point that we studied. okay. and do you suspect the actual number is maybe even a little higher than what was reported? because, you know, even though it's an anonymous survey, perhaps there are some cheaters who still don't want to say i cheated. >> right? and so the same it would be, it would have been true in the pre and the post to have that same issue of people maybe underreporting, but we would have seen a similar amount of underreporting in pre and
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post. so it's not that chatgpt is necessarily changed, more and more kids are cheating or it's unleashed, you know, this whole torrent of cheating. but perhaps they're the same. kids are just using this as a new tool to do things. one of the things that we asked them, though, is what did they want to use it for, right? what would it be good for using it for? and very few of them said to write the whole paper or to turn in the whole thing that was well below 10. most of them wanted to use it to generate ideas i see. >> in fact, that is also the same finding in a piece this morning that aired on good morning america, abc news technology correspondent becky worley, interview kids at the private school in oakland, head-royce, on what they consider cheating. listen to this. >> i feel like when you're stuck and you've, like, tried all these things, it's valid to ask chatgpt. and naturally, once you ask it, you're going to understand, like why it was the answer is the way it is. >> i also think like a lot of
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chatgpt use comes from like students being overwhelmed with schoolwork. >> okay, i want to unpack separate, and unpack the being overwhelmed part later. but first, do you agree with that kind of use of technology in chatgpt? and you know, when do you think using ai is helping versus cheating? what's the line ? >> so a litmus test that i like to use is it helping a student learn the skill that is intended to be learned or is it harmful in some way? is it not helping them? is it just using the tool to copy or plagiarize or whatnot? and you could tell in that example to ask a question, a lot of kids don't have the resources at home to ask a mom or a grandma or to look it up on the internet. they don't have the skills. ai is much more of a it seems like a person when you're talking to the internet. this could be a tool for equity that you could ask ai the question instead of having to wait for the next day, the teacher or ask your mom or whatever. so i, i think that
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that's probably a good use. >> yeah, yeah. for sure. and i think some teachers and schools are kind of coming around. right. they're still trying to draw up their policies and guidance. but now i want to go back to that student, who again was attending an elite private school, referring to being overwhelmed. how common is that? and i wonder if that's more common in many of the bay area communities. right. highly educated. maybe linked to high incomes. does that drive that sense of being overwhelmed? and does that drive cheating? >> one thing we do know that drives cheating is that sense of overwhelm, that there's just literally too much work to do and not enough time to do it or to do it. honestly, it's not that they're bad people. they even know that what they're doing is wrong. but they feel like they have to cut corners. they have to copy homework, particularly if they don't see the real meaning or purpose in it. is where that happens even more. but we see cheating like this across the board. as i said earlier, it could be public schools, independent schools, parochial schools all over the country. so it's not just a bay
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area phenomenon, although we do see when the pressure is on to get the grades, to get the scores, when everyone's talking about getting into particular colleges and universities that is one of the reasons that kids will turn to cheating is because they are under that immense pressure. >> yeah. and in fact, you know, this is going on in colleges too. i think in the stanford daily, there was actually a recent article, the editorial board wrote something about that. how, you know, i know stanford only recently decided to have proctoring for exams, which totally went against that honor code that they've had for a long time, where it's kind of a handshake between the university and students saying, we trust you, you know, you won't cheat, so we don't have to monitor you, and so they're acknowledging that this is kind of a problem. so this takes me to really all of your earlier body of research that was really quite famous about the growth mindset, and i wonder if you can talk about how this pressure, like how to get the next brass ring and, and how this relates
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to really a better mindset for kids, one that focuses less on scoring wins versus oath. >> right. well, and carol dweck is really the person who coined, growth mindset. but here at challenge success, we absolutely work with schools to help them understand that it's not just about the grades. it's not just about getting a letter. otherwise, you know, this is why we see the cheating. it's really about learning, and it's really about understanding that through mistakes, we learn through doing things again and again and getting feedback and really understanding what it is to master something. that's what we want kids to understand. so in the real world, you don't take tests and quizzes all the time and you're allowed to use the resources around you, but you need to have that mindset of it's okay to make a mistake, it's okay for me to ask a question. there's no such thing as a stupid question because this is how we learn. >> could i just thank you for pointing that out? my apologies
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to carol dweck, who is fabulous. i've always held both of you in the highest esteem when it comes to like, child education and all that. so sorry. was great. and before we let you go, one.
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community in the bay area. our media partner, the san francisco standard, has the journ
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yankee high, low. >> no. hold on. this is my. keep it all together >> now, well qualified buyers can get 1.9% apr financing on 2024 acura models.
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>> cirque du soleil presents kooza, an adrenaline rush of acrobatics and a zany kingdom of characters kooza opens april 18th under the big top at santa clara county fairgrounds. kooza thanks its official partner, air canada, for tickets on sale at cirque du soleil.com. >> you might have spotted something a little unusual in the bay yesterday. a house take a look at this browns houseboat. was being moved from moved from its old old home ind home in redwood city to its new resting place in san rafael. the journey marks the end of an era, the end of a long legal battle, one that's explored today by our media partner, the san francisco standard, with a new article that answers the question why was a house floating in the middle in the middle of of san francisco bay?
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joining us live to talk about is senior reporter at the standard, jonah owen lam. hey, jonah. >> how are you doing? >> okay, so it was a curious site. let's just look at that boat again and tell us, if you will, the story of this houseboat, it was a curious site. and in fact, i actually saw it on the ferry on the way to work. and so that. what is what raised my interest. turns out the boat was being dragged, towed by a smaller vessel, and it had originated down in redwood city, where it had been for some time in, a community of houseboats and other boats where folks lived on them. and it had to leave. so it headed north, turns out i talked with the coast guard today. it ended up in sausalito, not san rafael, as the owner had told me, but still in marin county, and so i figured i'd track down kind of where it came from. i talked to the owner, and i talked to a gentleman who lived down in, a marina called dogtown, which is the community that it came from,
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which is in redwood city, and that's kind of where the journey began and why people saw a two story house being dragged across san francisco bay real quickly. >> i know we don't have a lot of time, but what was the squabble? why were they forced to leave? what was it between that neighbor and redwood city and the dock? you know, the houseboat community. >> so the city had taken control of the land adjacent to the water and access to the water, i think, in 1945. and they leased it to folks who ran the marina for a long time. that was up until about 2015, when the folks who were running it left. and then the city started running the marina and a neighbor, mr. hanig and some other folks ended up suing the city, alleging that the marina was blocking access to public land and waters because it's on state land. that's what prompted the lawsuit, the city eventually settled, paid some money, and then agreed to use most of that money to help resettle the
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folks. there was about 60 some odd boats in the harbor at the time to eventually have them all move out, and a bunch of them have been given money. they've been given settlements, and that's kind of what prompted them all to move. i think there was some efforts down in san mateo county to have some kind of fix it, so you could keep the community there, but i think that never came to any kind of fruition. so now we have boats being moved across the bay. i was told this is just one of them. the biggest one, the gentleman that i spoke with at dock town was saying, you know, this is the biggest boat down there, and there's maybe six left, so they all should be moving out soon, and he obviously commented that the irony of, you know, a city that has not that much low income housing is being forced to get rid of a community that does house some folks, who can actually afford to pay some, some meager, meager rents in those boats. >> that is true, before we let
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you go, and this is fascinating, and i know this boat is headed to the sausalito. as you said, they have kind of a burgeoning houseboat community there, but how tricky was this actual operation towing a houseboat like that? well i'm a i'm a boater. >> i own a boat. i grew up on a boat, so. so, that houseboat is not made for moving around. it is not. it does not have self propulsion, if there were any more wind or waves on the bay yesterday, i don't think it would have made it, so i think it's really tricky. you know, you have a huge boat that weighs tons being towed by a pretty small, speed boat across a bay with really strong currents, winds and waves. so, you know, if i had been told. hey, you want to take this boat in a small little speedboat and drag it across the bay, i would have definitely said no. it was not a safe journey. from what i can tell, you're good enough just
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reporting on it. all right. thanks for solving that little mystery for us, jonah and lam. thank you so much. >> my pleasure. >> and you can read his story and check out more of the san francisco standard's other original reporting on their website, sf standard .com. we'll continue to bring you m
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