skam240 writes: California has just become the first state to add Covid-19 vaccination to its list of required vaccines for in-school attendance. "The requirement will go into effect at the start of the term that follows the FDA's full approval for that grade group -- either January 1 or July 1," reports CNN, citing a release from Gov. Gavin Newsom's office. For grades 7-12 the requirement is expected to begin on July 1, 2022. Newsom's office said independent study is an option for unvaccinated students. "This will accelerate our effort to get this pandemic behind us," Newsom told CNN's Ana Cabrera minutes after making the announcement. "We already mandate 10 vaccines. In so many ways... it's probably the most predictable announcement."

"I have four young kids. I can't take this anymore. I'm like most parents, I want to get this behind us, get this economy moving again, make sure our kids never have to worry about getting a call saying they can't go to school the next day because one of the kids or a staff member tested positive," the governor added.

It turns out school reopenings are disrupting the cash flow of industrious teenagers who spent the pandemic scooping up in-demand products via bots and reselling them for a hefty profit. From a report: "Yes, I am back in school. Yea, it's very annoying," said one US high school student named Dillon, who regularly buys video game consoles and graphics cards with automated bots. "I am sitting in math class and drawing class with my computer open, and I get told to shut it down during a [product] drop sometimes," he told PCMag in an interview. Dillon may be young, but he's among the legion of online scalpers who spent the pandemic at home buying and reselling the tech world's most-wanted products. "I would say around $10,000 to $12,500 average a month," he told PCMag. "Some months it would be exponentially higher, some would be lower."

Using automated bots he purchased and installed on his computer, and intel from other online resellers, Dillon scooped up products like the PlayStation 5 ahead of other consumers and sold them off at inflated pricing. But lately, Dillon's reselling hit a snag. After months away from high school because of the pandemic, he's now back in the classroom, where computer use can be strictly controlled. "When everything closed [during the pandemic], I could do whatever I wanted because I was doing my school from home," he said. But with the return of in-classroom teaching, Dillon says his profits have now fallen by about 25%.

A computerized neural network has spoken: central banker Elvira Nabiullina needs to use simpler language if she wants more Russians to believe she can really reduce inflation. From a report: A study conducted by a pair of the Bank of Russia's own researchers came to the perhaps less-than-shocking conclusion that figuring out central bank statements takes a degree in economics. "All the main communication on monetary policy is accessible to only a professional audience right now," Alina Evstigneeva and Mark Sidorovsky, researchers at the bank's monetary-policy department wrote in an article published on a bank-sponsored website. "The potential for qualitative improvement in the language of communication is vast." The communications breakdown has important real-world implications, they argued. Ordinary Russians continue to be deeply skeptical of the central bank's commitment to keep inflation to its 4% target, with polls showing most expect price growth over the next year to be about triple that. That doubt helps keep inflation high, according to the central bank. Market professionals, who presumably have the economics education needed to understand the bank's words, are much more likely to expect inflation to be closer to target.

University students in courses from engineering to physics are having to be taught what files and folders are, The Verge reports, because that's not how they've grown up using computers. Whenever they need a file, they just search for it. PCGamer summarizes the findings: "I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it," astrophysicist Catherine Garland said. "They see it like one bucket, and everything's in the bucket." Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don't see their hard drives the same way.

"Students have had these computers in my lab; they'll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized," Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. "I'm kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files." As The Verge points out, "The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s [...] While many of today's professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today's students increasingly don't remember a world without them."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a reason to recoil in horror because how dare the youth of today do things differently, why the very idea. "When I was a student, I'm sure there was a professor that said, 'Oh my god, I don't understand how this person doesn't know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,'" Plavachan said. "This kind of generational issue has always been around." And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don't even need these subfolders," she said.

DesScorp writes:

ellithligraw writes: Last month a Stanford research paper coauthored by dozens of Stanford researchers which terms some artificial intelligence models "foundations" is causing a debate over the future of AI. A new research facility is proposed at Stanford to study these so-called "models." Critics call these "foundations" will "mess up the discourse."
The debate centers on what Wired calls "colossal neural networks and oceans of data." Some object to the limited capabilities and sometimes freakish behavior of these models; others warn of focusing too heavily on one way of making machines smarter. "I think the term 'foundation' is horribly wrong," Jitendra Malik, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies AI, told workshop attendees in a video discussion. Malik acknowledged that one type of model identified by the Stanford researchers — large language models that can answer questions or generate text from a prompt — has great practical use. But he said evolutionary biology suggests that language builds on other aspects of intelligence like interaction with the physical world. "These models are really castles in the air; they have no foundation whatsoever," Malik said. "The language we have in these models is not grounded, there is this fakeness, there is no real understanding...."

Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor at Arizona State University [says] there is no clear path from these models to more general forms of AI...

Emily M. Bender, a professor in the linguistics department at the University of Washington, says she worries that the idea of foundation models reflects a bias toward investing in the data-centric approach to AI favored by industry... "There are all of these other adjacent, really important fields that are just starved for funding," she says. "Before we throw money into the cloud, I would like to see money going into other disciplines."

jyosim summarizes an article at EdSurge: edX, founded by Harvard University and MIT a decade ago as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online education providers, has agreed [in June] to sell its operations to a for-profit company, 2U. Exactly what that means is only now becoming clear, but many observers have noted that in the end, 2U bought a giant source of leads for students that it can upsell graduate degrees to from its partner colleges. But turning edX into a marketing vehicle is a far cry from the high-minded language used when the nonprofit was founded to bring education to underserved students around the world.
In the article edX CEO and co-founder Anant Agarwal acknowledges there were tough questions after the initial announcement: But he says that the vast majority of college presidents, provosts and professors he's spoken with have been reassured by the details of the arrangement. He listed those details: that 2U has committed to continue the key mission of edX, including continuing to offer free versions of courses; that the sale price of $800 million will all go to a new nonprofit entity that will advance equity in education; that "not a single penny of the $800 million will [go] to either me or MIT or Harvard or the employees"; and that the open-source platform that edX courses run on, Open Edx, will be maintained by the new nonprofit rather than by 2U.

But there are many critics of the deal. And the positive message of Agarwal and 2U CEO and co-founder Chip Paucek doesn't square with some vocal protests of the arrangement. A dean of digital learning at MIT, Krishna Rajagopal, resigned in protest, telling colleagues in an email that he had "serious continuing reservations" about the proposed direction.
IBL News reported this week that 2U CEO Paucek "asked edX partners to give his company a shot." "All we need is an opportunity to prove that the future of edX will grow; the brand will grow," he said during an interview with EdSurge.com... "You will see us begin to advertise edX outright and grow the learner base. And I think that'll be good for everybody."
Paucek also mentioned plans to incorporate into edX's courses a 2U job placement tool (developed by a coding bootcamp 2U acquired) which charges businesses to reach prospective employees.

"China fired a fresh regulatory shot at its tech giants on Monday," writes Reuters, "telling them to end a long-standing practice of blocking each other's links on their sites or face consequences." The comments, made by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) at a news briefing, mark the latest step in Beijing's broad regulatory crackdown that has ensnared sectors from technology to education and property and wiped billions of dollars off the market value of some of the country's largest companies.

China's internet is dominated by a handful of technology giants which have historically blocked links and services by rivals on their platforms. Restricting normal access to internet links without proper reason "affects the user experience, damages the rights of users and disrupts market order," said MIIT spokesperson Zhao Zhiguo, adding that the ministry had received reports and complaints from users since it launched a review of industry practices in July. "At present we are guiding relevant companies to carry out self-examination and rectification," he said, citing instant messaging platforms as one of the first areas they were targeting.

He did not specify what the consequences would be for companies that failed to abide by the new guidelines.

Treehouse, which launched in Portland a decade ago in an ambitious effort to teach software development online, plans to lay off most of its staff by the end of the month. Oregon Live reports: CEO Ryan Carson didn't answer emailed questions about the cutbacks, but said in a brief reply Tuesday that "we are going to continue to serve our students and customers." Carson, who moved to Connecticut last month, said Treehouse is no longer based in Portland and that its remaining staff now works remotely. In an announcement sent last week over the company's internal Slack messaging channel, later viewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Treehouse notified employees that their jobs and benefits would end on Sept. 30, without severance. "A small team will be remaining, along with Ryan, to continue to support students," the company wrote to staff.

Workers later posted an online spreadsheet with the names of 41 employees looking for new jobs. Treehouse has a geographically distributed workforce and the company's employees live in cities across the country. Treehouse attracted national attention in 2013 and 2015 with two unorthodox management strategies: The company eliminated all layers of management and it moved to a 32-hour-work week. Neither experiment worked. [...] It's not clear what triggered this week's cutbacks. Online education has been booming during the pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal reports an interesting observation about America. "Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels."

Slashdot reader Joe_Dragon shared their report: At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years... In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
But numbers can be misleading. New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century." Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported... In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled "To All the Girls I've Rejected," the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: "Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive."
The Journal even reported that a former admissions officer at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon "said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become 'higher education's dirty little secret,' practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter."

But even with more women in college, the Times argues that "The raw numbers don't take into account the varying value of college degrees." (And not just because "The female-to-male gender ratio is highest in for-profit colleges, which often overcharge students for worthless degrees.")

"Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates..." Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don't pay well...

The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace quotes NBC News: Most don't have bank passwords. Few have credit scores yet. And still, parts of the internet are awash in the personal information of millions of schoolchildren.

The ongoing wave of ransomware attacks has cost companies and institutions billions of dollars and exposed personal information about everyone from hospital patients to police officers. It's also swept up school districts, meaning files from thousands of schools are currently visible on those hackers' sites.

NBC News collected and analyzed school files from those sites and found they're littered with personal information of children. In 2021, ransomware gangs published data from more than 1,200 American K-12 schools, according to a tally provided to NBC News by Brett Callow, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity company Emsisoft.

Some schools contacted about the leaks appeared unaware of the problem. And even after schools are able to resume operations following an attack, parents have little recourse when their children's information is leaked. Some of the data is personal, like medical conditions or family financial statuses. Other pieces of data, such as Social Security numbers or birthdays, are permanent indicators of who they are, and their theft can set up a child for a lifetime of potential identity theft.

theodp writes: On Monday, tech-bankrolled Code.org announced the CS Journeys program, which the nonprofit explains is designed to help teachers "excite, encourage, and empower your students to continue their CS journeys in and beyond your class." Besides live, virtual field trips to Amazon's Fulfillment Centers, kids aged 5-and-up will also participate in live, weekly classroom conversations with professionals from the likes of Google and Amazon, where they "will learn about a number of ways they can use computer science to have a positive impact, as well as different journeys that people have taken to get to meaningful careers and achieve their goals." A Googler will speak to kindergartners and other younger students about Developing responsible artificial intelligence on Sep. 22nd. Teachers are also being asked to show students inspiring Careers in Tech videos featuring employees from Facebook/Instagram, Microsoft, and Google.

Explaining that "students who hear from parents that they would be good at computer science are 2-3 times more likely to be interested in learning it," Code.org urges teachers to also "connect with parents and recruit their help in encouraging students to learn and continue on their computer science journey." Code.org even provides teachers with talking points to include in emails and letters home. A sample: "Computer science teaches students critical thinking and problem solving. In fact, studies show that students who learn computer science do better in other subjects, excel at problem solving, and are more likely to go to college. [...] Parent/guardian encouragement is critical to student success and interest in learning and success. So ask your student to see something they created in class."

The launch of CS Journeys comes less than a year after Google VP Maggie Johnson -- a long-time Code.org Board member -- reported that a Google-commissioned Gallup report showed that "students are generally unconvinced that computer science is important for them to learn," adding that "Interventions from parents, educators, community leaders, policymakers, nonprofits and the technology industry are needed to encourage girls, Black students and Hispanic students to take computer science courses. These students also need to be shown how CS knowledge can help them meet their goals in a variety of fields including the humanities, medicine and the arts." According to the report, only 22% of boys and 9% of girls "believe it is very important to learn CS."

Amazon said Thursday it will offer to pay 100% of college tuition for its 750,000 U.S. hourly employees. From a report: The e-commerce giant is following the lead of other large U.S. companies who are dangling perks like education benefits or more pay to woo workers in a tight job market. Starting in January 2022, Amazon said it will cover the cost of college tuition, fees and textbooks for hourly employees in its operations network after 90 days of employment. It will also begin covering high school diploma programs, GEDs and English as a second language certifications for employees. Operations workers include employees in Amazon's sprawling network of warehouses and distribution centers.

The benefit will apply to hundreds of education institutions across the country, Amazon said. Amazon previously offered to pay for 95% of tuition, fees and textbooks for hourly associates through its career choice program. Rival retailers, including Walmart and Target, have also beefed up their education benefits in recent months. Target in August rolled out a program that covers the cost of associate and undergraduate degrees at select schools. Walmart in July said it would pay 100% of college tuition and books costs for associates of Walmart and Sam's Club.

A robot called CIMON-2 (short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) has received a software update that will enable it to perform more complex tasks with a new human crewmate later this year. Space.com reports: The cute floating sphere with a cartoon-like face has been stored at the space station since the departure of the European Space Agency's (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2020. The robot will wake up again during the upcoming mission of German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will arrive at the orbital outpost with the SpaceX Crew-3 Dragon mission in October. In the year and a half since the end of the last mission, engineers have worked on improving CIMON's connection to Earth so that it could provide a more seamless service to the astronauts, CIMON project manager Till Eisenberg at Airbus, which developed the intelligent robot together with the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the LMU University in Munich, told Space.com.

"The sphere is just the front end," Eisenberg said. "All the voice recognition and artificial intelligence happens on Earth at an IBM data centre in Frankfurt, Germany. The signal from CIMON has to travel through satellites and ground stations to the data centre and back. We focused on improving the robustness of this connection to prevent disruptions." CIMON relies on IBM's Watson speech recognition and synthesis software to converse with astronauts and respond to their commands. The first generation robot flew to the space station with Alexander Gerst in 2018. That robot later returned to Earth and is now touring German museums. The current robot, CIMON-2, is a second generation. Unlike its predecessor, it is more attuned to the astronauts' emotional states (thanks to the Watson Tone Analyzer). It also has a shorter reaction time.

Airbus and DLR have signed a contract with ESA for CIMON-2 to work with four humans on the orbital outpost in the upcoming years. During those four consecutive missions, engineers will first test CIMON's new software and then move on to allowing the sphere to participate in more complex experiments. During these new missions CIMON will, for the first time, guide and document complete scientific procedures, Airbus said in a statement. "Most of the activities that astronauts perform are covered by step by step procedures," Eisenberg said. "Normally, they have to use clip boards to follow these steps. But CIMON can free their hands by floating close by, listening to the commands and reading out the procedures, showing videos, pictures and clarifications on its screen." The robot can also look up additional information and document the experiments by taking videos and pictures. The scientists will gather feedback from the astronauts to see how helpful the sphere really was and identify improvements for CIMON's future incarnations.

China said local governments should set the fees for after-school tutoring institutions that offer compulsory education subjects, another step in the country's efforts to overhaul the private education sector. From a report: Local governments should establish benchmark fees and floating ranges, and include them in pricing catalogs, according to a notice from the National Development and Reform Commission. Price increases from the standard level will be capped at 10%. Local governments need to release their standard price for private tutors and related polices by the end of 2021. Beijing unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its private education sector in July, banning companies that teach school curriculums from making profits or raising outside capital. It also banned any tutoring for school subjects during vacations or holidays. The shares of companies such as TAL, New Oriental Education and Gaotu, once stock market darlings, have all tumbled.

650 U.K. schools received educational kits from a charity for testing the lead levels in their water. Students at more than 14 schools then discovered their drinking water had higher lead levels than the recommended maximum. The Guardian reports: Several schools reported levels of lead at 50 micrograms per litre — five times the maximum allowed. Even low levels of lead are toxic and can reduce children's IQ and damage their nervous system... The charity conducted its own tests on samples returned by 81 schools and has confirmed that 14 samples have lead above 50 micrograms per litre, with several more showing signs of elevated levels.

The charity is now contacting the schools to alert them and filtration firm Aquaphor, which co-sponsored the project, said it would supply free water filters to affected schools.
"One of the frustrations of most school science is that it doesn't have any significance," writes Slashdot reader. "This is a story of one that revealed that lead levels were far higher than everyone was assuming..."

A spokesperson for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian that "If a school becomes aware they have lead pipework or have a test which has failed for lead, they should contact their local water company who will be required to enforce the removal of the lead pipe by the owner of the building."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Mr. President," Code.org founder Hadi Partovi told President Joe Biden and tech CEOs from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and IBM at Wednesday's Presidential Summit on Cybersecurity, "America's cybersecurity problem is an education problem. I loved [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella's wonderful analogy to the car industry, and like Satya said, we need standards for seatbelts in every car for sure. But if none of the drivers took a course in basic safety skills, our roads could never, ever be safe. That's the current state of affairs on the roads of the internet. Without proper education, we can't address our nation's weakest link. If you look around, every CEO is nodding their head because they know we need a plan to educate every American on basic cyber security hygiene, and also a plan to staff up our cyber defense workforce. This needs to start early, in K-12, and reach everybody."

A newly-released White House Fact Sheet announcing "Ambitious Initiatives to Bolster the Nation's Cybersecurity" notes that tech-bankrolled "Code.org announced it will teach cybersecurity concepts to over 3 million students across 35,000 classrooms over 3 years, to teach a diverse population of students how to stay safe online, and to build interest in cybersecurity as a potential career."

South Korea is ending a law it announced in 2011 that blocked young gamers from accessing game websites after midnight. "South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, as well as the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, say that they're ending the law to respect children's rights and encourage at-home education," reports Engadget. "The country aims to abolish the law by the end of the year when it revises its Youth Protection Act." From the report: The news doesn't mean underage gamers are entirely off the hook, though. Instead, excessive gaming will be managed by the country's "choice permit" system, which lets parents and guardians arrange approved play times. Still, that sounds more permissive than China's gaming curfew, which bans players under 18 from playing between 10PM and 8AM. Additionally, they're limited to 90 minutes of game time during weekdays, and three hours on weekends and holidays.

As Kotaku reports, the shutdown law was originally meant to curb PC gaming, but it also affected consoles. Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live ended up restricting their accounts to adults. That's why Minecraft is now an R-rated game in the country. "In the changing media environment, the ability of children to decide for themselves and protect themselves has become important more than anything," Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae said, according to The Korea Times. "We will work with related ministries to systematically support media and game-use education at schools, homes, and in society so that young people can develop these abilities, and continue to make efforts to create a sound gaming environment and various leisure activities for children."

Pearson, a London-based publishing and education giant that provides software to schools and universities has agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 data breach resulting in the theft of millions of student records. From a report: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement on Monday after the agency found that Pearson made "misleading statements and omissions" about its 2018 data breach, which saw millions of student usernames and scrambled passwords stolen, along with the administrator login credentials of 13,000 schools, district and university customer accounts.

The agency said that in Person's semi-annual review filed in July 2019, the company referred to the incident as a "hypothetical risk," even after the data breach had happened. Similarly, in a statement that same month, Pearson said the breach may include dates of birth and email addresses, when it knew that such records were stolen, according to the SEC. Pearson also said that it had "strict protections" in place when it actually took the company six months to patch the vulnerability after it was notified.

theodp writes: By purchasing items from hundreds of teachers' Wish Lists this back-to-school season," Amazon explained in a Monday corporate post, "Amazon is working to ensure teachers can fill their classrooms with the items they need, from essential school supplies like pencils and markers to books to help stock up the classroom library. [...] If you are an educator who needs help fulfilling your list, or if you know someone who does, share your Amazon Wish List on social media and tag @amazon with #ClearTheList."

In a Twitter post last week, Amazon called on its 3.7 million followers to "learn about our Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year award recipients and help them #ClearTheList." Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) is "a comprehensive childhood-to-career program aimed at increasing access to computer science education for children and young adults." Explaining the importance of #ClearTheList school funding in a video shared with Amazon's 29.2 million Facebook followers, one AFE Teacher of the Year explains, "You can't teach 21st century skills without 21st century funding, so supplies are super important for classrooms." A second AFE Teacher of the Year also endorsed #ClearTheList funding in Amazon's Monday post, explaining that ""When teachers have all their classroom supplies, they can focus on nurturing their students' curiosity." Each of the 10 AFE Teachers of the Year 2021 received a $30,000+ prize package from Amazon in June, which should clear their lists.