The Covid-19 pandemic "would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner," writes Bill Gates, in a guest essay Friday in the New York Times. This ultimately would've reduced fatalities — "and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did."

But note that Gates said "treatment" — not vaccine. Gates believes most people in the public health community had expected an effective treatment would appear before vaccines became available. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Safe, effective Covid vaccines were available within a year — a historic feat — but treatments that could keep large numbers of people out of the hospital were surprisingly slow out of the gate....

In late 2021, a few of their efforts paid off — not as soon as would have been ideal, but still in time to have a big impact. Merck and its partners developed an antiviral called molnupiravir, which was shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for people at high risk. Soon after, another oral antiviral, Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, also proved to be very effective, reducing the risk of severe illness or death by nearly 90 percent among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. These drugs are useful tools for combating the pandemic, but they arrived much later than they should have and, for many, they are still difficult to access....

It's a mistake to think of vaccines as the star of the show and therapeutics as the opening act you would just as soon skip. We're lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn't, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population.... With good therapeutics, the risk of severe illness and death could drop significantly, and countries could decide to loosen restrictions on schools and businesses, reducing the disruption to education and the economy. What's more, imagine how people's lives would change if we're able to take the next step by linking testing and treatment. Anyone with early symptoms that might indicate Covid (or any other viral disease) could walk into a pharmacy or clinic anywhere in the world, get tested and, if positive for the virus, walk out with antivirals to take at home....

In short, although therapeutics didn't rescue us from Covid, they hold a lot of promise for saving lives and preventing future outbreaks from crippling health systems. But to make the most of that promise, the world needs to invest in the research and systems we'll need to find treatments much faster. That's why my foundation has supported a therapeutics accelerator at Duke University, but broader initiatives will be necessary to make lasting change. This will require substantial investment to bring together academia, industry and the latest software tools. But if we succeed, the next time the world faces an outbreak, we'll save millions more lives.
Gates offers several specific recommendations — including "investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens." And... With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's now possible to use computers to identify weak spots on pathogens that we already know about, and we'll be able to do the same when new pathogens arise. These technologies are also speeding up the search for new compounds that will attack those weak spots. With adequate funding, various groups could take the most promising new compounds through Phase 1 studies even before there's an epidemic, or at least have several leads that can be turned into a product quickly once we know what the target looks like.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: A single mom who signed up for a $30,000 income-share agreement at a for-profit coding bootcamp has filed a lawsuit in California, alleging she entered the agreement under "false pretenses." Redmond, Washington-based Emily Bruner is suing Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, and its head Austen Allred, alleging they misrepresented job placement rates, operated without a license during her course of study, and hid the "true nature" of the school's financial interest in students' success. "I feel like Lambda misled me at every turn -- about their job placement rates and about how they would prepare us for jobs in the field. I was even more shocked when I found out they were operating illegally," Bruner said in a press release. "I took time away from my young son and other career opportunities to participate in a program based on lies," added Bruner, who's seeking a refund from the school as well as monetary damages. "While I'm thankful I opted out of arbitration so I can have my day in court, I wish my classmates who were also misled could be here with me."

Income-share agreements, known as ISAs, are an alternative type of student loan financing where a borrower receives a loan, then pays a percentage of their income after graduation. The terms of an ISA depends on various factors, such as their major topic of study and projected future earnings. [...] Bruner, the plaintiff, signed her ISA on June 29, 2019 when she was living in New Mexico because she could not pay the full tuition amount to attend Lambda full-time, according to the lawsuit. She says she moved back home to North Carolina to live with her parents, who would help her take care of her baby. She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs offered by San Francisco-based Lambda, according to the complaint. Bruner started school in September 2019 and finished the following August. Students at Lambda agree to pay 17% of their post-Lambda salary for 24 months once they make more than $50,000 a year, according to the lawsuit.

After graduating, she couldn't find a job as a web developer or a software engineer, and was, according to the lawsuit, told by employers that "she did not have the technical skills for the job, and that her education had not prepared her to be a web developer." Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Lambda misrepresented the fact that it did not have necessary approval from the state regulator, the California Bureau for Postsecondary Education. She also alleged that the school falsified and misrepresented the school's job placement rates. Finally she also alleged that the school hid the true nature of its financial interest in students' success -- specifically by "falsely representing" that Lambda only was compensated when students found jobs and earned income.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon safely delivered four private astronauts to the International Space Station this past Saturday. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX capsule Endeavor reached the ISS at 8:20 a.m. EDT on Saturday, April 9, following a nearly 21-hour journey. The crew of the Ax-1 mission -- Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy -- launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The ISS is currently orbiting at a height of 260 miles (418 km) above Earth. The docking would've happened 45 minutes earlier, had it not been for a problem having to do with ISS crew members not being able to receive video from the Crew Dragon's center line camera. Ground controllers remedied the problem by routing video from a SpaceX ground station, according to NASA.

The four crew members will stay on the orbital outpost for eight days, where they will perform some 25 experiments having to do with science, education, and commercial activities. Axiom Space is aiming to build the world's first fully commercial space station, the construction of which is slated to begin at the ISS in late 2024. The Ax-1 mission represents an important milestone in the ongoing commercialization of low Earth orbit. [...] Axiom said the first day was mostly about preparing equipment for what will be a very busy week. The team has just 100 hours to complete their respective tasks.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Tech-backed Code.org reports that as part of efforts to provide scaled human-centered education, the Stanford AI Lab analyzed 711,274 solutions to interactive block-based Code.org programming assignments submitted by 3rd and 4th grade students to develop AI-based solutions for automatically grading student homework. The research project received funding from LinkedIn founder and VC Reid Hoffman, who is coincidentally a $1+ million supporter of Code.org, which provided the student data.

Autograding systems are increasingly being deployed at all levels of education to meet the challenge of teaching programming at scale. So, will AI make Computer Science grader and undergraduate teaching assistant jobs obsolete?

A lawsuit charges that Rutgers Business School sought to improve its rankings by creating bogus temporary jobs for graduating MBA students. From a report: Rutgers Business School is always keeping score. On its website, it proclaims its No. 1 ranking this year by Bloomberg Businessweek as the top Public Business School in the Northeast. Fortune bestowed a similar honor in 2021. And U.S. News & World Report rated its MBA program among the top ten for Best Overall Employment Outcomes in the U.S., as well as No. 12 for its Supply Chain Management MBA program. But in a whistleblower lawsuit filed Friday, a Rutgers administrator charged that the university fraudulently burnished those national rankings by creating totally bogus jobs to show the success its business school graduates had in finding employment.

The lawsuit by Deidre White, the business school's human resources manager, alleged the program used a temp agency to hire unemployed MBA students, placing them into sham positions at the university itself -- for no other reason than to make it appear like a greater number of graduates were getting full-time jobs after getting their Rutgers diplomas. "The fraud worked," wrote White's attorney, Matthew A. Luber of McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton. In the very first year of the scheme, they said Rutgers was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the 'No. 1' business school in the Northeast.

Zimbabwe's mobile data is so expensive, people have to rely on a signal from the next country over, Mozambique. Rest of World: Econet and NetOne had a combined 94.5% market share at the end of 2020, according to the national telecomms regulator. Analysts say that the lack of competition, combined with the high cost of running a telecomms business in Zimbabwe -- due to import tariffs on communications equipment, foreign currency risk, and weak infrastructure -- has kept prices high for consumers. "Poor collateral infrastructure, like electricity, dissuades telecomms investment and [means] fewer players, which leads to higher costs," Arthur Gwagwa, a leading Zimbabwe telecomms expert and lawyer, told Rest of World. The cripplingly high cost of internet access has slowed adoption of digital services by individuals and businesses and prevented Zimbabweans from accessing educational materials and health services online, Gwagwa said.

But for people living near the border with Mozambique, there is a workaround. Enterprising traders cross over on foot or on motorbikes, bulk-buy Movitel SIM cards, and return to Chimanimani, where they distribute the SIMs to supermarkets and corner shops, where they are sold with a markup of more than 50%. The availability of affordable internet has made the unfashionable rural district into an attractive destination for people who need to be online for work. The area was hit by a tropical cyclone in 2019, which displaced more than 11,000 people in Chimanimani alone, bringing hundreds of NGO and health workers to the area to work on the relief. Many have stayed, taking advantage of the cheap internet access to work remotely. [...] Nollen Singo, founder of NGO Orphans Dreams, which gives free math lessons to children orphaned by the cyclone, said that he's been able to stay in the region because the cheap internet allows him to connect to free education apps that can be used in the classroom. "It's so helpful being able to access Khan Academy maths app or Buzzmath app online and tutor local orphaned kids," Singo said.

Graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology overwhelmingly approved forming a union in a two-day vote this week by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. From a report: MIT is the latest Boston-area school where grad students have voted to join a union following pivotal federal ruling in 2016 recognizing grad students as employees with the ability to unionize. In all, 1,785 MIT graduate students voted in favor of unionization and 912 against, a figure confirmed by Jonathan Zong, a grad student organizer, and MIT. Three-fourths of graduate students voted, according to MIT. The vote seeks to join United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, or UE. MIT grad students were pushing for help with affordable housing, support for international students, dental insurance coverage, and a better emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion.

"We are grateful to the many members of our community, on all sides of the debate, who have engaged constructively and respectfully in this conversation," Melissa Nobles, the chancellor, and Ian A. Waitz, the vice chancellor, said in the message to grad students. The memo continued: "Indeed, as we wrote to you during this campaign: We agree that there are areas where MIT can improve, and we share many of the same goals as the MIT Graduate Student Union. ... With the election outcome now clear, we will continue to work alongside you to improve MIT for all of our students." MIT's Zong said being unionized will be a more democratic and formalized way of making grad students' concerns heard compared to MIT's Graduate Student Council. He described the council as more advisory to the school's administration.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Book banning is not new -- in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book New English Caanan and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts. But the American Library Association said Monday that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000.

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021. It's a significant jump: Last year the group noted 156 challenges -- and in 2019, there were 377. Although the 2020 number was impacted by the pandemic, which forced schools and libraries to shut down, the ALA said they don't usually get more than 500 book challenges in any given year. And sometimes, those challenges contain more than one book title. The number of individual books challenged in 2021 totaled 1,597. In a press release, ALA President Patricia Wong said: "We support individual parents' choices concerning their child's reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others. Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives."

The organization is launching a nationwide initiative meant to empower readers to fight censorship.

School surveillance companies are not doing enough to determine whether their products unfairly target minority groups, according to a report released by U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey. From a report: Democratic senators sent questions to four of the most prominent companies that make education software monitoring students' online activity. The resulting report about their findings said that parents and schools are not fully informed about the extent and risks associated with the tracking software made by GoGuardian, Gaggle.Net, Bark Technologies and Securly. The report also said that because the products could increase students' contact with law enforcement, the software "may be exacerbating the school-to-prison pipeline."

Online education during the pandemic led to unprecedented levels of digital surveillance of children, as schools rushed to find ways to keep track of students, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in October. Private equity-backed GoGuardian, officially named Liminex, is one of the most popular makers of education surveillance tools. Its software helps teachers and administrators track what students are doing on school-issued devices, and sometimes personal devices when kids are logged into school accounts. The senators' report says none of the companies has assessed whether their algorithms are biased or track whether they over-target students of color or LGBTQ students. Each of the companies told the senators' offices that they do not study the effects of their products on specific populations due to privacy concerns.

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it will once again require applicants to take the SAT or ACT, reversing a Covid-era policy that made the standardized tests optional and rejecting the idea that the tests hurt diversity," reports CNN. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a blog post announcing the decision, writing: From the policy announcement, there's an excess of delicacy -- to the point where you might find it funny or terribly disturbing: "Our research can't explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics -- and mathematics examinations -- in our education. All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics [...]. The substance and pace of these courses are both very demanding, and they culminate in long, challenging final exams that students must pass to proceed with their education. In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive."

Did the entire admissions department threaten to quit? Or did the incoming class turn out to be morons? "Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT," Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill wrote in the policy announcement.

"We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy."

A number of elite schools, including Harvard and University of California, announced plans to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams. Last May, Colorado became the first state to ban "legacy" admissions and signed a bill that removes a requirement that public colleges consider SAT or ACAT scores for freshmen.

theodp shares a report from Chicago Sun-Times, written by Frank Main: When the school system [Chicago Public Schools] shifted to having students learn remotely in the spring of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic, it lent students iPads, MacBooks and Windows computer devices so they could do school work and attend virtual classes from home. CPS then spent about $165 million to buy Chromebook desktop computers so that every student from kindergarten through senior year in high school who needed a computer could have one. Students borrowed 161,100 Chromebooks in September 2020. By June 2021, more than 210,000 of those devices had been given out. Of them, nearly 40,000 Chromebooks have been reported lost -- nearly a fifth of those that were lent.

"Schools have made repeated efforts to recover the lost devices from families without success," according to a written statement from CPS officials in response to questions about the missing school property. Also missing are more than 9,600 iPads, 114 televisions, 1,680 printers and 1,127 audiovisual projectors, among many other items. Officials say CPS has bought new computer devices to replace the missing ones. Longtime Slashdot reader theodp notes that "there were 340,658 students enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at the start of the 2020-2021 school year."

"I've been teaching college English for more than 30 years," writes Elisabeth Gruner, a professor of English at the University of Richmond. "Four years ago, I stopped putting grades on written work, and it has transformed my teaching and my students' learning. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner."

The practice she's adopted is called "ungrading," where students are given formative rather than summative feedback. "At the end of the semester they submit a portfolio of revised work, along with an essay reflecting on and evaluating their learning," writes Gruner. "Like most people who ungrade, I reserve the right to change the grade that students assign themselves in that evaluation. But I rarely do, and when I do, I raise grades almost as often as I lower them." Here's here reasoning (via The Conversation): I stopped putting grades on written work for three related reasons -- all of which other professors have also cited as concerns. First, I wanted my students to focus on the feedback I provided on their writing. I had a sense, since backed up by research, that when I put a grade on a piece of writing, students focused solely on that. Removing the grade forced students to pay attention to my comments.

Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student's background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

Third, and I admit this is selfish: I hate grading. I love teaching, though, and giving students feedback is teaching. I am happy to do it. Freed from the tyranny of determining a grade, I wrote meaningful comments, suggested improvements, asked questions and entered into a dialogue with my students that felt more productive -- that felt, in short, more like an extension of the classroom.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Energy bills for people living near onshore wind farms could be slashed under new reforms, according to a cabinet minister. Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi also suggested he supports more onshore wind farms but only if they are backed by the local community. Boris Johnson has committed to publishing a British energy security strategy although when asked about onshore wind farms, the Prime Minister stressed there is a "massive opportunity" for the UK with offshore wind.

Mr Zahawi told Sky's Sophy Ridge On Sunday program: "I would say that if we are going to make sure that we carry the will of local people, whether it's onshore wind or nuclear, we have to learn from how it's done well in other countries. "The way you do that is to make sure the local community has a real say. "But also we've seen great examples of other people where if they build a nuclear power station, within a certain radius of that power station they get free power. So it's right to look at innovation to make sure we wean ourselves off hydrocarbons, we have to do that, we have to do that well, part of that is making sure we look after the will of the local people." Mr Zahawi insisted there "isn't a row" around the Cabinet table about onshore wind.

More students are being exposed to historical narratives through game play -- but what exactly are they being taught? From a report: Analyzing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn't colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games. "The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV," Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, "games are about systems; they're about the mechanics," Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can "teach" people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. "The major challenge is getting players to recognize and think explicitly about these systems," Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you'll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you're unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox's Second World War simulator, and you'll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: "General Frost." The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works -- what The Atlantic's Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric."

Paradox's titles don't take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe's rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralized states in Europe and their rise to global primacy. The game uses a mechanic of "institutions," such as the printing press and the Enlightenment, which appear in a preset order at 50-year intervals, almost always in Europe, before slowly spreading around the world. Without these institutions, new technologies can be adopted only at much greater cost, meaning that over the centuries Europe slowly pulls ahead of the rest of the world technologically. The player is taught that what made Europe exceptional was the adoption of these institutions, which allowed technological growth to flourish and thereby gave European countries the advantage they used to dominate the world.

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing." When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies....

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today....

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined...

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. "

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."

According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. "is nearer to collapsing than it appears." He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense. Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test.

It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)

Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.

Pamela Burdman, the executive director of Just Equations, a policy institute focused on the role of math in education equity, writes in an op-ed for Scientific American: All routes to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees run through calculus classes. Each year, hundreds of thousands of college students take introductory calculus. But only a fraction ultimately complete a STEM degree, and research about why students abandon such degrees suggests that traditional calculus courses are one of the reasons. With scientific understanding and innovation increasingly central to solving 21st-century problems, this loss of talent is something society can ill afford. Math departments alone are unlikely to solve this dilemma. Several of the promising calculus reforms highlighted in our report Charting a New Course: Investigating Barriers on the Calculus Pathway to STEM , published with the California Education Learning Lab, were spearheaded by professors outside of math departments. It's time for STEM faculty to prioritize collaboration across disciplines to transform math classes from weed-out mechanisms to fertile terrain for cultivating a diverse generation of STEM researchers and professionals. This is not uncharted territory.

In 2013, life sciences faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a two-course sequence that covers classic calculus topics such as the derivative and the integral, but emphasizes their application in a biological context. The professors used modeling of complex systems such as biological and physiological processes as a framework for teaching linear algebra and a starting point for teaching the basics of computer programming to support students' use of systems of differential equations. Creating this course, Mathematics for Life Scientists, wasn't easy. The life sciences faculty involved, none of whom had a joint appointment with the math department, said they resorted to designing the course themselves after math faculty rebuffed their overture. The math faculty feared creating a "watered-down" course with no textbook (though after the course was developed, one math instructor taught some sections of the class).

Besides math, the life sciences faculty said they experienced "significant pushback" from the chemistry and physics departments over concerns that the course wouldn't adequately prepare students for required courses in those disciplines. But the UCLA course seems to be successful, and a textbook based on it now exists. According to recently published research led by UCLA education researchers, students in the new classes ended up with "significantly higher grades" in subsequent physics, chemistry and life sciences courses than students in the traditional calculus course, even when controlling for factors such as demographics, prior preparation and math grades. Students' interest in the subject doubled, according to surveys.

Princeton University has a research center studying "digital technologies in public life," which runs a web site with commentary and analysis "from the digital frontier, written by the Center's faculty, students, and friends."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp summarizes the site's recent warning on the dangers of "philanthrocapitalism," in a piece noting ominously that "The tech industry controls CS conference funding." "Research about the influence of computing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), on society relies heavily upon the financial support of the very companies that produce those technologies," writes Princeton Research Fellow Klaudia Jazwinska of the dangers of 'philanthrocapitalism'. "Corporations like Google, Microsoft, and IBM spend millions of dollars each year to sponsor labs, professorships, PhD programs, and conferences in fields like computer science (CS) and AI ethics at some of the world's top institutions. Industry is the main consumer of academic CS research, and 84% percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding."

"Relying on large companies and the resources they control can create significant limitations for the kinds of CS research that are proposed, funded and published. The tech industry plays a large hand in deciding what is and isn't worthy of examination, or how issues are framed. [...] The scope of what is reasonable to study is therefore shaped by what is of value to tech companies. There is little incentive for these corporations to fund academic research about issues that they consider more marginal or which don't relate to their priorities."

Jazwinska concludes, "Given the extent of financial entanglement between Big Tech and academia, it might be unrealistic to expect CS scholars to completely resist accepting any industry funding—instead, it may be more practicable to make a concerted effort to establish higher standards for and greater transparency regarding sponsorship.

schwit1 writes: Two separate lawsuits against American University and George Washington University have new life after an appeals court revived cases that allege both institutions violated contractual obligations to students when they shifted to online instruction in early 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic [Qureshi v. American University, No. 21-7064 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 8, 2022); Shaffer v. George Washington University, No. 21-7040 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 8, 2022)].

At the core of the issue is the refusal of both universities to refund students' tuition and fees. The plaintiffs allege that both universities had a contractual commitment to provide in-person education and should have offered at least partial tuition and fee refunds for students forced into online classes. Plaintiffs in both cases are seeking class action status for their lawsuits.

The lawsuits against American University and GWU are just two among dozens of similar suits filed by students and families since 2020, which have had various outcomes in courts across the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A Chinese government-backed hacking group has breached local government agencies in at least six US states in the last 10 months as part of a persistent information-gathering operation, investigators at cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Tuesday. The wide range of state agencies targeted include "health, transportation, labor (including unemployment benefit systems), higher education, agriculture, and court networks and systems," the FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in a separate, private advisory to state governments obtained by CNN. For agencies in two states, the hackers broke into networks using a critical software flaw that was revealed in December just as the Biden administration was scrambling to respond to the flaw's discovery, according to Mandiant.

The hackers' motives aren't clear, but their victims are "consistent with an espionage operation," the firm said. The list of state agencies affected by the hacking could grow as the investigation continues. CISA on December 10 publicly warned that Log4J -- software used by big tech firms around the world -- had a vulnerability that hackers could easily exploit to gain further access to computer systems. Hundreds of millions of computers around the world ran the vulnerable software, US officials later estimated. For weeks, US officials urged companies to update their software; the White House hosted a meeting in January with tech executives to try to address the root problem of software that is not secure by design. Within hours of the CISA advisory, the Chinese hackers had begun using the Log4J flaw to break into the two US state agencies, according to Mandiant.

Agencies in four other states were hacked via other means. In one state, Mandiant said, the hackers accessed personal data on some Americans, including names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers. Mandiant declined to name the US states or agencies affected. While the hackers' ultimate objectives are unclear, state agencies could provide a wealth of useful information to foreign spies, whether data related to elections or government contracting. Mandiant blamed the hacking campaign on a group that the Justice Department has linked with China's civilian intelligence agency. That hacking group, according to a US indictment unsealed in September 2020, has been linked to attempts to breach hundreds of organizations around the world, from hardware makers to pro-democracy politicians in Hong Kong.