Pegasus: Spyware sold to governments 'targets activists'
Israeli tech firm NSO denies media reports that its software has been sold to authoritarian regimes. The Android and iOS spyware can apparently see photographs and contacts, log everything that is typed, and turn on the camera and microphone.
Source: bbc.com
Can Money Buy Happiness? A Review of New Data
Everyone knows the adage “money can’t buy happiness,” although few of us seem to believe it.
The best-known theory on this topic is that money actually can buy happiness, but only up to a point. This comes from a study by two Nobel Laureates, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010), which found...
Source: givingwhatwecan.org
Clubhouse And Education
"New App Has Exciting Potential For Today’s Educators | Emerging Education Technologies" I've used Clubhouse for a couple of months and it certainly provides the opportunity for communities to come together and invite expert speakers. It is refreshing in that it doesn't have screen time and you can...
Source: emergingedtech.com
What happened when a 'wildly irrational' algorithm made crucial healthcare decisions
Advocates say having computer programs decide how much help vulnerable people can get is often arbitrary - and in some cases downright cruel
Source: theguardian.com
An approach to Bloom's taxonomy
Taking inspiration from Don Clark http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html this is another approach to Bloom's taxonomy. I've included a worked example in diabetes. Writing learning outcomes is core tool for instructional designers. My rule of thumb is to aim high.
Source: agnate.co.uk
Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?
"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com
Taking an invention from idea to the marketplace
Lockdown spurred many people to invent new products, but how did they get to market?
Source: bbc.com
Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create...
Source: eff.org
World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'
"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com
Using Markov chain model to evaluate medical students’ trajectory on progress tests and predict USMLE step 1 scores---a
Background Medical students must meet curricular expectations and pass national licensing examinations to become physicians. However, no previous studies explicitly modeled stages of medical students acquiring basic science knowledge. In this study, we employed an innovative statistical model to characterize...
Source: biomedcentral.com
5 failures of political leaders during a public health crisis
“There are five traps political leaders can fall into when it comes to a public health emergency: 1. delay and downplay; 2. fudge the science; 3. isolation from the international community; 4. absence; and 5. double standards.” Sophie Harman Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University...
Source: qmul.ac.uk
Build for a crisis: Ideas for the future of local news
Enjoyed this story of the ingenuity of local newspapers when struck with the crisis of extreme weather. What does it say for our other complex technology and business layers? When crisis strikes perhaps that's when you find the lowest common tech that works and exactly what purpose you are using it for....
Source: niemanlab.org
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...
International dual and joint degrees to get green light
"India is set to greenlight dual and joint degrees awarded by Indian universities with international partners as part of its internationalisation plan being pushed through forcefully since its inclusion last year in the National Education Policy (NEP), a blueprint for the next decade." These dual and...
Source: universityworldnews.com
Over 27,000 students share how colleges and universities could improve digital learning
"A Jisc survey of 27,069 higher and further education students reveals that most are pleased with their digital learning, but areas such as wellbeing, mental health and staff digital skills need more attention." Get the basics right (like college WiFi)Make learning sessions more interactive Record lessons...
Source: jisc.ac.uk
PAIRED: A New Multi-agent Approach for Adversarial Environment Generation
This Google AI blog describes a method for machine learning using paired agents. The gap between the one that did the best and the one that did the worst is regret. That feeling of 'could have done' better is what pushes the 'unsupervised environment design' algorithm towards a better solution. "The...
Source: googleblog.com
Quantum computing and pharmaceutical research
"Theoretically, quantum computers can prove more powerful than any supercomputer. And recent moves from computer giants such as Google and pharmaceutical titans such as Roche now suggest drug discovery might prove to be quantum computing’s first killer app." In January this year Boehringer-Ingelheim...
Source: ieee.org
Data trusts: what are they and how do they work?
"The trade unions of the data economy." "How do we, the general public, gain greater control over the estimated
2.5 quintillion bytes of data that is recorded, stored, processed and
analysed, every day?" This also links to the DataSkop project from AlgorithmWatch.
Source: thersa.org
Some like it hot: don’t forget to warm up online learning spaces
‘Warming up’ the screen needs to become a priority for educators, especially for video-based tutorials and seminars, says Lucinda McKnight
Source: timeshighereducation.com
How private equity squeezes cash from the dying U.S. coal industry
Private equity firms are proving there’s still plenty of profit in the U.S. coal industry despite a decade of falling demand for the fossil fuel. They are spending billions of dollars buying coal-fired plants on the cheap - and getting paid even when they are not providing...
Source: reuters.com
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