Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes Microsoft's friendly relationship with North Dakota, pointing out that in 2017 Microsoft's president Brad Smith said the company would provide the state "cash grants, technology, curriculum and resources to nonprofits" and also "partner with schools to strengthen their ability to offer digital skills and computer science education to the youth they serve." "We just have such a good relationship with the community. We were also excited about Doug Burgum's election as governor. We had confidence that Doug, as governor, would bring a real focus on innovation that would focus on both changes in government and changes in technology." Before being elected Governor in 2016 (with the endorsement of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and financial backing from Bill Gates), former Microsoft exec Burgum sold his Fargo-based Great Plains Software business to Microsoft in 2002 for $1.1 billion and joined the software giant, where he reported directly to Steve Ballmer (a college friend) and managed Nadella (who became chief of Microsoft Business Solutions after Burgum's 2007 departure).

"We need a national movement for coding and computer science in our public schools [...] We need to influence, we need to support, we need to reform public policy as we're seeing here in North Dakota," Microsoft's Smith exhorted to TEDxFargo attendees in his return to North Dakota. "We need to make sure that computer science counts towards high school graduation." Mission accomplished. On Friday, North Dakota's governor Doug Burgum and School Superintendent Kirsten Baesler celebrated the governor's signing of HB1398, the Microsoft-supported bill which requires the teaching of computer science and cybersecurity and the integration of these content standards into school coursework from kindergarten through 12th grade. (Two of the ten members of North Dakota's K-12 CS and Cybersecurity Standards Review Committee were from Microsoft).

The superintendent said North Dakota is the first state in the nation to approve legislation requiring cybersecurity education. "Today is the culmination of years of work by stakeholders from all sectors to recognize and promote the importance of cybersecurity and computer science education in our elementary, middle and high schools," superintendent Baesler said at Friday's bill signing ceremony.

Baesler said EduTech, a division of bill supporter North Dakota Information Technology that provides IT support and professional development for K-12 educators, will be developing examples of cybersecurity and computer science education integration plans that may be used to assist local schools develop their own plans. EduTech is a Regional Partner of tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which also voiced its support for HB1398. Code.org's Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith and CTO Kevin Scott.

Burgum, who joined Code.org's Governors Partnership for K-12 Computer Science in 2017, was also among 45 of the nation's State Governors who last July signed a Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education in their states in response to a public letter from the CEOs for CS (including Microsoft's Nadella and Smith), part of a campaign organized by Code.org that called for state governments and education leaders to bring more CS to K-12 students to meet the future demands of the American workforce. Code.org has set a goal to make CS a high school graduation requirement for every student in all 50 states by the end of the decade.

"A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun," writes a New York-based children's book author in the Atlantic. But why? The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this — most American children have smartphones by the age of 11 — as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn't the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling — and depressing — is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books....

In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early '80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost. This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: "Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language...."

[A]s several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices.... [W]e need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can't let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it's not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling. Teachers need to be given the freedom to teach in developmentally appropriate ways, using books they know will excite and challenge kids.
"There's a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now," librarian/public school teacher Jennifer LaGarde tells the Atlantic. And their article notes the problem doesn't end after grade school.

"By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group."

Duolingo, a language learning app with over 500 million users, is working on a music app, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: The Pittsburgh-based tech company currently has a small team working on a music product and is hiring a learning scientist who is an "expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science research and hands-on teaching experience," according to a job posting listed on Duolingo's career page. The company also posted a job that was soliciting a freelance music composition and curricular consultant, but the company is no longer accepting applications for that position. The job listing suggests that the app will teach basic concepts in music theory using popular songs and teachers.

It's unclear how Duolingo's music app will materialize over the next few months -- for example, we don't know whether the app will help people read music, write music, learn instruments, or all of the above -- or if it's just a tiny experiment within an organization known to love a test or 10.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Like many, parents Sai Gaddam and his wife Priyanka Rai were concerned about how well schooling and education might serve their own children. Unlike many, PhD-educated computational neuroscientist Gaddam and MBA-trained marketer Rai took matters into their own hands and are now running a micro-school in Mumbai that's inspired by the Finnish model of early education. In One AI Tutor Per Child, Gaddam explains with examples why he's so excited about the possibilities for the use of AI and Large Language Models to practically facilitate the Holy Grail of personalized learning.

"With generative AI," Gaddam explains, "we have the ability — today — to massively boost this human-human loop by inserting into it an AI tutor/assistant who also doubles as a pedagogy translator. What Seymour Papert — inventor of LOGO, pioneering educator, and the original inspiration for the One Laptop Per Child initiative — said about computers back in the early nineties ('The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes.') is even more true of AI now. We are now within touching distance of giving every child their own personal Aristotle."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016.

The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government's stance on scientific ties with China, with warnings from MI5 of a growing espionage threat, major research centers being quietly shut down and accusations by a government minister that China's leading genomics company had regularly sought to hack into the NHS's genetic database. Geopolitical tensions stepped up further this week, as the US, Australia and the UK announced a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal aimed at countering China's military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. China said the Aukus plan to build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines was "a path of error and danger."

The Foreign Office declined to give a breakdown by nationality, but data supplied by leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College suggests that, at these institutions at least, Chinese academics account for a majority of those denied clearance. Some have welcomed the policy shift, with one security expert saying the number of academics being barred is "commensurate with the threat." But leading scientists say the scheme is leaving universities struggling to recruit the best talent from abroad. "A majority of applicants are thought to be scientists seeking to move to the UK to take up offers of research degrees or fellowships," adds the Guardian. "But the Guardian is also aware of researchers, including five Chinese scientists at Imperial college, who did not pass clearance despite having already held positions at UK universities for several years -- and who may have had to leave the UK as a result."

A group of psychologists, two from Northwestern University and the third from the University of Oregon, has found via online testing that IQ scores in the U.S. may be dropping for the first time in nearly a century. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the researchers studied the results of online IQ tests taken by adults participating in the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project over a 12-year period. They found that IQ scores have dropped for all age groups, regardless of gender. They also found that the steepest declines were among young people. They also noted that while a few skills, such as spatial reasoning, were better than previous generations, other skills, such as problem solving, numerical series assessments and verbal reasoning, had all grown worse.

The researchers did not conduct any research to try to explain the drop, but suggest it might be linked to changes in the education system. They also did not address the controversial issue of the accuracy of IQ test scores in general as a means of measuring a person's intelligence. The paper has been published in the journal Intelligence.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares a fresh perspective on how the "pause" announced for building Amazon's HQ2 headquarters could impact the local community: The Falls Church News-Press notes that Amazon's pause announcement came just days after a 12-page glossy mass mailing entitled Capital Region Community Impact Report went out to thousands in the region.

Beginning with a statement from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the report spelled out "Amazon's philanthropic commitments in the Capital Region," including $32M donated to 150+ local organizations in 2021, $990M+ committed to create and preserve 6,245 affordable housing units. 13,700 people supported by Amazon-funded affordable housing investments and 23,000 students who received food, clothing, school supplies, hygiene items and other urgent support through Amazon's Right Now Needs Fund.

According to the report, the commitments also included benefits to 75,000+ students across 343 schools who received computer science education through the Amazon Future Engineer program, to 166,000+ students who participated in the CodeVA K-12 CS education program during the 2021-22 academic year, the 5.3 million free meals delivered to underserved families in partnership with Northern Virginia food banks, 10,000 meals purchased from local restaurants and donated to support Covid-19 first responders, $350,000 contributed to local community theaters and arts-focused non-profits, to 6,000 students who explored cloud computing solutions at the Wakefield H.S. Think Big in the 2021-22 academic year, the 200,000 children and families from underserved communities who received free access to the National Children's Museum through a $250,000 gift from Amazon, and the 16,700+ students served by Amazon's support for local youth sports leagues.

Not to look an Amazon philanthropy gift horse in the mouth, but should politicians be reliant on Amazon philanthropy to meet their communities' basic needs? Amazon's 2022 income taxes, by the way, were -$3.217B.

In America, the number of high school graduates going to college "was generally on the upswing," reports the Associated Press, "until the pandemic reversed decades of progress. Rates fell even as the nation's population of high school graduates grew."

Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists say the impact could be dire. At worst, it could signal a new generation with little faith in the value of a college degree.

At minimum, it appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good. Predictions that they would enroll after a year or two haven't borne out. Fewer college graduates could worsen labor shortages in fields from health care to information technology. For those who forgo college, it usually means lower lifetime earnings — 75% less compared with those who get bachelor's degrees, according to Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. And when the economy sours, those without degrees are more likely to lose jobs. "It's quite a dangerous proposition for the strength of our national economy," said Zack Mabel, a Georgetown researcher.

In dozens of interviews with The Associated Press, educators, researchers and students described a generation jaded by education institutions. Largely left on their own amid remote learning, many took part-time jobs. Some felt they weren't learning anything, and the idea of four more years of school, or even two, held little appeal. At the same time, the nation's student debt has soared.... If there's a bright spot, experts say, it's that more young people are pursuing education programs other than a four-year degree. Some states are seeing growing demand for apprenticeships in the trades, which usually provide certificates and other credentials.

After a dip in 2020, the number of new apprentices in the U.S. has rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels, according to the Department of Labor.
Community college is even free in Tennessee, the article notes. "Searching for answers, education officials crossed the state last year and heard that easy access to jobs, coupled with student debt worries, made college less attractive." They also found that restaurant and retail jobs pay better than they have before, with other high school graduates being recruited by manufacturing companies that have aggressively raised wages in response to labor shortages.

One 19-year-old making $24-an-hour at a new Ford plant gushed that "The type of money we're making out here, you're not going to be making that while you're trying to go to college."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Thursday called for regulation of artificial intelligence technology to ensure it does not hurt growth or become a national security risk, a departure from the business lobbying group's typical anti-regulatory stance. From a report: While there is little in terms of proposed legislation for AI, the fast-growing artificial intelligence program ChatGPT that has drawn praise for its ability to write answers quickly to a wide range of queries has raised U.S. lawmakers' concerns about its impact on national security and education.

The Chamber report argues policymakers and business leaders must quickly ramp up their efforts to establish a "risk-based regulatory framework" that will ensure AI is deployed responsibly. It added that AI is projected to add $13 trillion to global economic growth by 2030 and that it has made important contributions such as easing hospital nursing shortages and mapping wildfires to speed emergency management officials' response. The report emphasized the need to be ready for the technology's looming ubiquity and potential dangers.

The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning, local time in Tanegashima, failed after the vehicle's second-stage engine did not ignite. From a report: In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 am (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation." The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine.

The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost. Japanese officials expressed dissatisfaction after the rocket's failure. Japan's minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Science, Keiko Nagaoka, said the launch failure was "extremely regrettable." She added that a task force would work with JAXA to "promptly and thoroughly" determine what caused the failure.

The AI Education Project has developed curriculum to help teachers and students understand artificial intelligence. From a report: With students taking advantage of ChatGPT for homework and term papers, there's a lot of handwringing about whether artificial-intelligence tools are appropriate for school. Alex Kotran said his group wants to make sure those tools are used even more. Kotran is the chief executive officer of the AI Education Project (aiEDU), a nonprofit backed by companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and AT&T, that provides free materials and teacher training to boost AI understanding in school districts. The idea is to teach kids about the technology, its limits and promise, and prepare them jobs where they'll need to use AI.

The group on Tuesday is announcing a national call for AI education with an expanded list of backers and partner schools at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, Texas. So far, aiEDU has reached 100,000 students and has relationship with districts representing 1.5 million low-income and underserved kids across the country. The non-profit was founded in 2019, and Kotran thought it would take a few years before there was widespread demand from educators for these kinds of programs. "We were kind of wearing the T-shirt before the band was cool," he said. Instead the rapid increase in interest in generative AI with the popularity of programs like OpenAI's chatbot and Dall-E, its tool for digital images, has dramatically boosted demand, and the group could use more funding, he said.

German police said Monday they have disrupted a ransomware cybercrime gang tied to Russia that has been blackmailing large companies and institutions for years, raking in millions of euros. From a report: Working with law enforcement partners including Europol, the FBI and authorities in Ukraine, police in Duesseldorf said they were able to identify 11 individuals linked to a group that has operated in various guises since at least 2010. The gang allegedly behind the ransomware, known as DoppelPaymer, appears tied to Evil Corp, a Russia-based syndicate engaged in online bank theft well before ransomware became a global scourge. Among its most prominent victims were Britain's National Health Service and Duesseldorf University Hospital, whose computers were infected with DoppelPaymer in 2020. A woman who needed urgent treatment died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

Ransomware is the world's most disruptive cybercrime. Gangs mostly based in Russia break into networks and steal sensitive information before activating malware that scrambles data. The criminals demand payment in exchange for decryption keys and a promise not to dump the stolen data online. In a 2020 alert, the FBI said DoppelPaymer had been used since late 2019 to target critical industries worldwide including healthcare, emergency services and education, with six- and seven-figure ransoms routinely demanded.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares his perspective on the 10th anniversary of Code.org: Remember this?" asks tech-backed Code.org on Twitter as it celebrates its achievements.... "It's the viral video that launched Code.org back in 2013!" Code.org also reminds its 1M Twitter followers that What Most Schools Don't Teach starred tech leaders Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, and Drew Houston.

But 10 years later, the promise of unlimited tech jobs and crazy-fun workplaces promoted in the video by these Poster Boys for K-12 Computer Science hasn't exactly aged well, and may serve as more of a cautionary tale about hubris for some rather than evoke fond memories.

"Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find," exclaimed Zuckerberg in the video. But ten years later, Facebook's policy is firing as many employees as it can — 11,000+ and counting. Houston, who sang the praises of working in cool tech workplaces in the video ("To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible"), went on to make remote work the standard practice at Dropbox, cut 11% of his employees, and reported a $575M loss on unneeded office space. Under pressure, Gates left Microsoft, Dorsey left Twitter, and Hsieh tragically left (Amazon-owned) Zappos, and the companies they co-founded recently unveiled plans for massive layoffs and halted ambitious office expansion plans as tech employees push back on return-to-the-office edicts.

Still, there's no denying the success of what the National Science Foundation called the "amazing marketing prowess" of tech giant supported and directed Code.org when it comes to pushing coding into American classrooms. The nonprofit boasts of having 80M+ student accounts, reported it had spent $74.7M to train 113,000+ K-12 teachers to deliver its K-12 CS curriculum, and has set its sights on making CS a high school graduation requirement in every state by 2030.

Interestingly, concomitant with Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration was the release of a new academic paper — Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship — that provocatively questions whether K-12 CS, at least in its current incarnation, is a feature or a bug. From the paper: "We are currently seeing an unprecedented push of computing into P-12 education systems across the US, with calls for compulsory computing education and changes to graduation requirements.... Although computing creep narratives are typically framed in lofty democratic terms, the 'access' narrative is ultimately a corporate play. Broadening participation in computing serves corporate interests by offering an expanded labor supply from which to choose the most productive workers. It is true that this might benefit an elite subset of BIPOC individuals, but the macroeconomics of the global labor market mean that access to computing is unlikely to ever benefit BIPOC communities at scale. [...] There are several nonprofits invested in the growth of computing, many with mission statements that do explicitly cite equity (and sometimes racial equity, in particular). Some of the larger nonprofits, though, are mainly funded by (and thus ultimately serve) corporate interests (e.g., Code. org).

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. From a report: Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators project, found. What's going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. If you take a moment to conjure the university in your mind, you will probably arrive at one of two visions. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns.

This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from "Pale Fire" to "The Fire Next Time" and scaling the heights of "Ulysses" for the view. The goal of such an education isn't direct career training but cultivation of the mind -- the belief that Lionel Trilling caricatured as "certain good things happen if we read literature." This model describes one of those pursuits, like acupuncture or psychoanalysis, which seem to produce salutary effects through mechanisms that we have tried but basically failed to explain. Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It's the small-bore university of campus comedy -- of "Lucky Jim" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" -- but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn't have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.

Gmail client-side encryption (CSE) is now generally available for Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers. BleepingComputer reports: The feature was first introduced in Gmail on the web as a beta test in December 2022, after being available in Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Meet, and Google Calendar (in beta) since last year. Once enabled, Gmail CSE ensures that any sensitive data sent as part of the email's body and attachments (including inline images) will be unreadable and encrypted before reaching Google's servers. It's also important to note that the email header (including subject, timestamps, and recipients lists) will not be encrypted. "Client-side encryption takes this encryption capability to the next level by ensuring that customers have sole control over their encryption keys -- and thus complete control over all access to their data," Googled explained.

"Starting today, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events with internal colleagues and external parties, knowing that their sensitive data (including inline images and attachments) has been encrypted before it reaches Google servers. As customers retain control over the encryption keys and the identity management service to access those keys, sensitive data is indecipherable to Google and other external entities."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the decade following US President John F Kennedy's 1961 announcement of America's mission to put a man on the moon, the number of physical science PhDs tripled, and that of engineering PhDs quadrupled. Now, the country is embarking on a moonshot to rebuild the semiconductor fabrication industry. Corporations that want a cut of the $39bn in manufacturing incentives within the Chips and Science Act programme can start filing their applications for subsidies on Tuesday. In order to get them, they'll have to show that they are contributing to something that may be even more difficult than putting a man in space: building a 21st-century workforce. America has plenty of four-year graduates with crushing debt (the national average for federal loan debts is more than $37,000 a student) and underwhelming job prospects. It also has plenty of college dropouts and young people with high-school degrees who are trying to make ends meet through minimum-wage jobs supplemented by gig work.

What it lacks are the machinists, carpenters, contractors and technicians who will build the new fabrication facilities. It also needs to triple the number of college graduates in semiconductor-related fields, such as engineering, over the next decade, according to commerce secretary Gina Raimondo. Raimondo, who is well on her way to becoming the industrial strategy tsar of the administration, gave a speech to this effect earlier this month. In it, she underscored not only the need to rebuild chip manufacturing in a world in which the US and China will lead separate tech ecosystems, but also to ensure that there are enough domestic workers to do so. "If you talk to the CEOs of companies like TSMC and Samsung [both of which are launching fabs in the US], they are worried about finding these people here," Raimondo told me. She cites workforce development -- alongside scale and transparency -- as major hurdles that must be overcome to meet the administration's goals.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: They say "always be learning" — but do podcasts actually help? I've been trying to find podcasts that discuss programming, and I've enjoyed Lex Fridman's interviews with language creators like Guido van Rossum, Chris Lattner, and Brendan Eich (plus his long interviews with Donald Knuth). Then I discovered that GitHub, Red Hat, Stack Overflow, and the Linux Foundation all have their own podcast.

There's a developer podcast called "Corecursive" that I like with the tagline "the stories behind the code," plus a whole slew of (sometimes language-specific) podcasts at Changelog (including an interview with Brian Kernighan). And it seems like there's an entirely different universe of content on YouTube — like the retired Microsoft engineer doing "Dave's Garage," Software Engineering Daily, and the various documentaries by Honeypot.io. Computerphile has also scored various interviews with Brian Kernighan, and if you search YouTube enough you'll find stray interviews with Steve Wozniak.

But I wanted to ask Slashdot's readers: Do you listen to podcasts about computer science? And if so, which ones? (Because I'm always stumbling across new programming podcasts, which makes me worry about what else I've been missing out on.) Maybe I should also ask if you ever watch coding livestreams on Twitch — although that gets into the more general question of just how much content we consume that's related to our profession.
Fascinating discussions, or continuing work-related education? (And do podcasts really help keep your skills fresh? Are coding livestreams on Twitch just a waste of time?) Most importantly, does anyone have a favorite geek podcast that they're listening to? Share your own experience and opinions in the comments...

What's the best podcast about computer science?

"A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source)," reports the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Beast reports: Last month, a screenshot of a student reading Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf was reported in the system, according to the Stanford Daily. Faculty members leading the charge to shut the system down say they didn't know it even existed until they read the student newspaper, one comparing the system to "McCarthyism."

Launched in 2021, students are encouraged to report incidents in which they felt harmed, which triggers a voluntary inquiry of both the student who filed the report and the alleged perpetrator. Seventy-seven faculty members have signed a petition calling on the school to investigate in hopes they toss the system out. This comes as a larger movement by Speech First, a group who claim colleges are rampant with censorship, has filed suit against several universities for their bias reporting systems.

A former employee of a Massachusetts town is facing charges of allegedly setting up a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in a remote crawl space at a school, police said. The Associated Press reports: Nadeam Nahas, 39, was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on charges of fraudulent use of electricity and vandalizing a school, but he did not show up and a judge issued a default warrant after rejecting a defense motion to reschedule, a spokesperson for the Norfolk district attorney's office said. Police responded to Cohasset Middle/High School in December 2021 after the town's facilities director found electrical wires, temporary duct work, and numerous computers that seemed out of place while conducting a routine inspection of the school, Chief William Quigley of the Cohasset Police Department said in a statement Wednesday.

He contacted the town's IT director, who determined that it was a cryptocurrency mining operation unlawfully hooked up to the school's electrical system, Quigley said. The Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Department of Homeland Security assisted with safely removing and examining the equipment. Nahas, the town's assistant facilities director, was identified as a suspect after a three-month investigation. After a show-cause hearing, a criminal complaint was issued. Nahas subsequently resigned from his job with the town in early 2022, police said.

The Linux Foundation's European off-shoot has formally launched the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort designed to support interoperability between digital wallets through open source software. From a report: The launch comes some five months after the Linux Foundation first revealed plans to set up the OWF, shortly before it spun out a region-specific entity called the Linux Foundation Europe which is where the OWF will now officially reside. While the likes of PayPal, Google, and Apple are among the most recognized digital wallet providers, allowing consumers to conduct financial transactions in-store or online, digital wallets are increasingly being used to store all manner of virtual goods from student ID to driving licenses. On top of that, burgeoning technologies such as the metaverse and crypto are giving rise to greater use-cases for digital wallets.

But one thing all these various environments have in common is that the incumbent digital wallets, for the most part, don't play nicely with each other: an Apple Pay die-hard can't send money to their Google Pay brethren. And that is why the OWF is setting out to create an "open source engine" that can power interoperable digital wallets across myriad use-cases including identity, payments, and storing personal credentials such as employment and education certification.