Harvard University is welcoming freshmen and some other students back to campus this fall semester, but students will have to take coronavirus tests every three days, classes will still be taught online and it won't discount tuition, the school announced Monday. From a report: Upperclassmen will be able to petition to return if they don't have sufficient technology at home or have challenging family circumstances. The total percentage of undergraduates living on campus would be limited to around 40%. "Assuming that we maintain 40% density in the spring semester, we would again bring back one class, and our priority at this time is to bring seniors to campus," Harvard said. "Under this plan, first years would return home and learn remotely in the spring." It expects to release a decision about the spring in early December. Harvard is the latest school to announce its fall semester plans as coronavirus cases continue to spike the U.S. Harvard previously announced that all teaching would occur online. Today it also said tuition will not be discounted from $49,653, although students enrolled remotely won't pay housing fees. The semester will begin as scheduled on Sept. 2 and all students living on campus will be expected to leave by Thanksgiving.

Hong Kong's government on Monday ordered schools to review and remove any books that might breach a sweeping new security law that Beijing imposed last week on the restless city. From a report: "In accordance with the four types of offences clearly stipulated in the law, the school management and teachers should review teaching and learning materials in a timely manner, including books," the Education Bureau said. "If they find outdated content or content that may concern the four aforementioned offences, they should remove them," the bureau added. Last week China enacted a security law outlawing four national security crimes: subversion, secession, terrorism and colluding with foreign forces. Authorities promptly declared political views espousing independence or self-autonomy would be viewed as illegal under the new law.

Rights groups and legal analysts have warned the broad wording of the law, which was kept secret until it was passed, would have a chilling effect of political freedoms in the semi-autonomous hub. The order for schools to review and remove any contraband books comes two days after Hong Kong's libraries said they were also pulling titles deemed to breach the law for a review. Among those withdrawn from shelves was one by prominent activist Joshua Wong, another by pro-democracy lawmaker Tanya Chan and multiple other titles written by Chin Wan, a scholar who is seen as the godfather of a "localist" movement advocating greater self-determination for the city. Hong Kong has some of Asia's best universities and a campus culture where topics that would be taboo on the mainland are still discussed and written about.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms. The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. "We sincerely apologize," a professor told us. The training set, built by the university, has been used to teach machine-learning models to automatically identify and list the people and objects depicted in still images. For example, if you show one of these systems a photo of a park, it might tell you about the children, adults, pets, picnic spreads, grass, and trees present in the snap. Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word. Applications, websites, and other products relying on neural networks trained using MIT's dataset may therefore end up using these terms when analyzing photographs and camera footage.

The problematic training library in question is 80 Million Tiny Images, which was created in 2008 to help produce advanced object-detection techniques. It is, essentially, a huge collection of photos with labels describing what's in the pics, all of which can be fed into neural networks to teach them to associate patterns in photos with the descriptive labels. So when a trained neural network is shown a bike, it can accurately predict a bike is present in the snap. It's called Tiny Images because the pictures in library are small enough for computer-vision algorithms in the late-2000s and early-2010s to digest. Today, the Tiny Images dataset is used to benchmark computer-vision algorithms along with the better-known ImageNet training collection. Unlike ImageNet, though, no one, until now, has scrutinized Tiny Images for problematic content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that U.S. health officials are keeping an eye on a new strain of flu carried by pigs in China that has characteristics of the 2009 H1N1 virus and 1918 pandemic flu. The virus, which scientists are calling "G4 EA H1N1," has not yet been shown to infect humans but it is exhibiting "reassortment capabilities," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during a hearing.

"In other words, when you get a brand new virus that turns out to be a pandemic virus it's either due to mutations and/or the reassortment or exchanges of genes," he told lawmakers. "And they're seeing virus in swine, in pigs now, that have characteristics of the 2009 H1N1, of the original 1918, which many of our flu viruses have remnants of that in it, as well as segments from other hosts, like swine." Fauci said Tuesday there's always "the possibility that you might have another swine flu-type outbreak as we had in 2009." "It's something that still is in the stage of examination," he said. It's not "an immediate threat where you're seeing infections, but it's something we need to keep our eye on, just the way we did in 2009 with the emergence of the swine flu."

A high school computer science teacher claims there's an "unacknowledged failure" of America's computer science (CS) classes at the high school and junior high school level. "Visit classrooms and you'll find students working with robotic sensors, writing games and animations in Scratch, interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers, constructing websites, and building apps with MIT App Inventor...

"Look underneath the celebratory and self-congratulatory remarks, however, and you'll find that, although contemporary secondary education is quite good at generating initial student interest, it has had much less success at sustaining that engagement beyond a few weeks or months, and has frankly been ineffectual in terms of (a) measurable learning for the majority of students; (b) boosting the number of students who take a second CS course, either in high school or college; and (c) adequately preparing students for CS college study."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In " A New Pedagogy to Address the Unacknowledged Failure of American Secondary CS Education ," high school computer science teacher Scott Portnoff argues that a big part of the problem is the survey nature of today's most popular high school CS course offerings — Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) — both of whose foundational premise is that programming is just one of many CS topics. "Up until a decade ago," Portnoff explains, "introductory high school computer science classes were synonymous with programming instruction, period. No longer."

This new status quo in secondary CS education, Portnoff argues, resulted from baseless speculation that programming was what made Java-based AP CS A inaccessible, opposed to, say, an uninspiring or pedagogically ineffective version of that particular curriculum, or a poorly prepared instructor. It's quite a departure from the 2011 CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, which made the case for the centrality of programming in CS education ("Pedagogically, computer programming has the same relation to studying computer science as playing an instrument does to studying music or painting does to studying art. In each case, even a small amount of hands-on experience adds immensely to life-long appreciation and understanding").
This teacher believes that programming languages are acquired rather than learned, just like any other human language — and concludes the solution is multi-year courses focused on one programming language until proficiency is fully acquired.

For this reason, for the last seven years he's also been making his students memorize small programs, and then type them out perfectly, arguing that "the brain subconsciously constructs an internal mental representation of the syntax rules implicitly by induction from the patterns in the data."

John J. Mooney, an inventor of the catalytic converter, the small and ubiquitous device that makes the engines that power everything from cars to lawn mowers less polluting and more fuel efficient, died on June 16 at his home in Wyckoff, N.J. He was 90. From a report: The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Elizabeth Mooney Convery said. Mr. Mooney was a high school graduate working as a clerk at a gas company when his colleagues encouraged him to pursue a college education. After earning a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, he went on to receive 17 patents during his 43-year career with the Englehard Corporation in Iselin, N.J. (now the Catalyst Division of the German chemical manufacturer BASF). Among them was the three-way catalytic converter, which has been described by the Society of Automotive Engineers as among the 10 most important innovations in the history of the automobile. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that tailpipe emissions from the newest passenger cars, sport utility vehicles, trucks and buses generate about 99 percent less smog-producing exhaust and soot than those from the 1970 models did.

Analyst Benedict Evans writes: There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon's building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well.

There's lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be 'video' and then it will disappear inside. An important part of this is that there seem to be few real network effects in a video call per se. You don't necessarily need an account to join a call, and you generally don't need an application either, especially on the desktop -- you just click on a link in your calendar and the call opens in the browser. Indeed, the calendar is often the aggregation layer -- you don't need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone's contact list- effectively it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation -- it has no graph of its own.

Incidentally, one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a 'room', where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on 'people', where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it's a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) -- Apple's FaceTime is only people (no URLs). Taking this one step further, a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account, an app or a social graph to use it: Zoom made network effects irrelevant. But, that means Zoom doesn't have those network effects either. It grew by removing defensibility.

"All the pieces are coming together for Microsoft to launch a direct competitor to Chromebooks..." argues an industry analyst writing for ZDNet: Since adopting the Chromium rendering engine, Microsoft Edge has featured virtually perfect compatibility with Chrome, right down to being able to install extensions from the Chrome app store. It's also enabled Microsoft to more easily support operating systems that Edge didn't previously support such as macOS and Linux. But now that Edge is working well, might Microsoft try to go after Chrome OS? While a "lite" version of Windows has been rumored for years, many of the other pieces are already in place or announced.

First, Microsoft has made no secret of how it covets the education market that has embraced Chromebooks. It has fought back with low-cost Windows notebooks from partners that are competitively priced with such devices but may lack Chrome OS' perception of simplicity and security.

Second, after years of having the web apps of office.com languish as Microsoft emphasized the PC versions, the online suite will be the first to take advantage of Fluid Framework, the company's open-source component framework that allows the embedding of applet functionality and collaboration into a range of container documents such as Edge pages. Third, while the idea of Microsoft limiting the opportunity for Windows developers on a platform might have been unthinkable years ago, times have changed. Many developers, Microsoft included, have made web apps mainstream. Outside of the Windows-boosting Surface team, Microsoft seems indifferent as to where you access its subscription-based client and cloud offerings.

Finally, Microsoft now has the cross-processor architecture support to take the battle to Google -- although, at least for now, it has exclusively focused on high-performance Qualcomm Snapdragon designs as opposed to Mediatek or Allwinner ARM-based chips in budget Chromebooks...

Microsoft's strongest competitive point would be the greater focus on privacy, one of the best reasons to use Edge versus Chrome today.

From a report: Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There's no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of dollars buying startups to build its very own panopticon of users' web browsing data. One of those startups, BlueKai, which Oracle bought for a little over $400 million in 2014, is barely known outside marketing circles, but it amassed one of the largest banks of web tracking data outside of the federal government. BlueKai uses website cookies and other tracking tech to follow you around the web. By knowing which websites you visit and which emails you open, marketers can use this vast amount of tracking data to infer as much about you as possible -- your income, education, political views, and interests to name a few -- in order to target you with ads that should match your apparent tastes. If you click, the advertisers make money.

But for a time, that web tracking data was spilling out onto the open internet because a server was left unsecured and without a password, exposing billions of records for anyone to find. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database and reported his finding to Oracle through an intermediary -- Roi Carthy, chief executive at cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock and former TechCrunch reporter.

A sophisticated, state-sponsored cyber attack is targeting Australian government, business, education and political organisations [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], the prime minister has warned. From a report: Scott Morrison did not reveal the identity of the state actor that was responsible for the attacks, which he said had been launched over many months. But the scale and sophistication of the malicious activity prompted cyber-security experts to speculate that China was the most likely culprit. "Based on advice provided to me by our cyber experts, Australian organisations are currently being targeted by a sophisticated state-based cyber actor," Mr Morrison said on Friday. "This act is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, and his wife, Patty Quillin, donated $120 million to the United Negro College Fund, Spelman College and Morehouse College, the largest-ever individual gift to support scholarships at historically black colleges and universities. The record donation comes amid protests after the police killing ofGeorge Floyd, and the national conversation about how to end systemic racism. That conversation has included discussions about how to provide more education and job opportunities for African Americans. Unlike the Ivy League universities that have endowments in the tens of billions of dollars -- Harvard University's endowment tops $40 billion -- the top historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, have endowments that are hundreds of millions of dollars. Spelman's, for example, is around $390 million. Mr. Hastings said he and Ms. Quillin wanted to help change that.

They have made education a primary focus of their philanthropy, and have given smaller amounts in the past several years to the same institutions. "I think white people in our nation need to accept that it's a collective responsibility," Mr. Hastings said. Mr. Floyd's killing and the emotional outpouring that followed were "the straw that broke the camel's back, I think, for the size of the donation," he added. Mr. Hastings said he hoped that the donation would lead other wealthy individuals to give to H.B.C.U.s. "Generally, white capital flows to predominantly white institutions, perpetuating capital isolation," he and Ms. Quillin said in a statement announcing the donation on Wednesday. The report adds that 7 percent of Netflix's employees in the United States are African-American, "as are 8 percent of its company leaders, which is among the highest in the technology industry (but still only about half the share of African-Americans in the overall population)."

Harvard College has joined peers in a major -- albeit temporary -- shift in college admissions: It's dropping the requirement for standardized testing for the class of 2025, as the pandemic has restricted access to the SAT and ACT. From a report: "We understand that the Covid-19 pandemic has created insurmountable challenges in scheduling tests for all students, particularly those from modest economic backgrounds, and we believe this temporary change addresses these challenges," Harvard said in a statement Monday. Ivy League peers Yale University, Columbia University and Dartmouth College are among other U.S. schools that have temporarily dropped the test requirements. A tally of higher-education testing policies shows that more than half of all four-year colleges won't require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores for fall 2021 admission, according research released Monday by FairTest, a nonprofit that has led the "test optional" movement for 30 years.

Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 writes: For several years, Zipline has deployed autonomous, fixed-wing airplane drones for medical supply deliveries in Rwanda. Now they have received permission to test their aircraft in the U.S., ferrying COVID-19 supplies from a depot to a hospital in North Carolina. The practical benefit is small: the cargo is modest amounts of PPE that could have been delivered by truck in about 20 minutes. But this is a big deal, because it required a waiver from the FAA for the planes to operate fully autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight — just launch and forget. It is happening in proximity to an airport no less.
The article notes it's America's "first drone delivery operation to be approved to fly in airspace where all air traffic is actively managed by the FAA."

But meanwhile, another headline this week at the Washington Post tells us that Google-backed drones "will drop library books so kids in Virginia can do their summer reading." Wing, a company owned by Google parent Alphabet, started delivering household goods and meals [and prescriptions] from Walgreens and local restaurants to a limited area of the southwest Virginia town that covers several thousand homes last October. The company has seen a jump in demand during the pandemic as people are increasingly staying home and avoiding crowded spaces like grocery stores, said Keith Heyde, head of Virginia operations for Wing. The company reached a high of 1,000 deliveries globally in a single week this spring, he said.
And they're not the only companies experimenting with drone deliveries, according to Forbes: UPS and CVS have also paired up with a focus on medical products. The two companies are partnering to use drones to deliver prescriptions to residents of The Villages in Florida, one of the country's biggest retirement communities. The deliveries come from a CVS store about a half mile away and mark the first paid residential deliveries by UPS's drone unit Flight Forward. The drones drop the prescriptions to a central location, where a Flight Forward employee will ferry them by golf cart to homes.
Chennai, India, and Surabaya, Indonesia have tried using drones to spray disinfectant in crowded cities. But Forbes reports that around the world, "the biggest use case has been the deployment of drones to enforce social distancing and monitor crowds."

Although at least one Paris prefect complains that there's still one problem with the drones. "Sometimes they are attacked by birds, which mistake them for rivals."

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday announced a $100 million project focused on the systemic barriers to opportunity and dignity faced by the black community, with special emphasis on education, economic equality and criminal justice reform. Details: The effort will begin in the U.S., then expand internationally over time.
It will be led by Lisa Jackson, the former EPA administrator who has led Apple's environmental efforts for the last several years.
Apple is also addressing internal issues, promising to boost its hiring of underrepresented minorities and increase its spending with black-owned suppliers. YouTube announced a multiyear, $100 million fund dedicated to "amplifying and developing the voices of Black creators and artists and their stories," according to CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: "At YouTube, we believe Black lives matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post. "We're committed to doing better as a platform to center and amplify Black voices and perspectives." As an example of content being funded under the new initiative, Wojcicki announced that this Saturday, June 13, YouTube will host livestream fundraising event produced by YouTube Originals, called "Bear Witness, Take Action."

Over the past few months, OpenAI has vacuumed an incredible amount of data into its artificial intelligence language systems. It sucked up Wikipedia, a huge swath of the rest of the internet and tons of books. This mass of text -- trillions of words -- was then analyzed and manipulated by a supercomputer to create what the research group bills as a major AI breakthrough and the heart of its first commercial product, which came out on Thursday. From a report: The product name -- OpenAI calls it "the API" -- might not be magical, but the things it can accomplish do seem to border on wizardry at times. The software can perform a broad set of language tasks, including translating between languages, writing news stories and poems and answering everyday questions. Ask it, for example, if you should keep reading a story, and you might be told, "Definitely. The twists and turns keep coming." OpenAI wants to build the most flexible, general purpose AI language system of all time. Typically, companies and researchers will tune their AI systems to handle one, limited task. The API, by contrast, can crank away at a broad set of jobs and, in many cases, at levels comparable with specialized systems.

While the product is in a limited test phase right now, it will be released broadly as something that other companies can use at the heart of their own offerings such as customer support chat systems, education products or games, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said. [...] The API product builds on years of research in which OpenAI has compiled ever larger text databases with which to feed its AI algorithms and neural networks. At its core, OpenAI API looks over all the examples of language it has seen and then uses those examples to predict, say, what word should come next in a sentence or how best to answer a particular question. "It almost gets to the point where it assimilates all of human knowledge because it has seen everything before," said Eli Chen, CEO of startup Veriph.ai, who tried out an earlier version of OpenAI's product. "Very few other companies would be able to afford what it costs to build this type of huge model."

A new study on kids' app usage and habits indicates a major threat to YouTube's dominance, as kids now split their time between Google's online video platform and other apps, like TikTok, Netflix and mobile games like Roblox. From a report: Kids ages four to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok. The latter app also drove growth in kids' social app use by 100% in 2019 and 200% in 2020, the report found. The data in the annual report by digital safety app maker Qustodio was provided by 60,000 families with children ages four to 14 in the U.S., U.K. and Spain, so its data isn't representative of global trends. The research encompasses children's online habits from February 2019 to April 2020, takes into account the COVID-19 crisis and is specifically focused on four main categories of mobile applications: online video, social media, video games and education. YouTube, not surprisingly, remains one of the most-used apps among children, the study found. Kids are now watching twice as many videos per day as they did just four years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes Wired: When students return to school in New Albany, Ohio, in August, they'll be carefully watched as they wander through red-brick buildings and across well-kept lawns — and not only by teachers. The school district, with five schools and 4,800 students, plans to test a system that would require each student to wear an electronic beacon to track their location to within a few feet throughout the day. It will record where students sit in each classroom, show who they meet and talk to, and reveal how they gather in groups. The hope is such technology could prevent or minimize an outbreak of Covid-19, the deadly respiratory disease at the center of a global pandemic...

Many schools and colleges plan to proceed gradually and carefully, while keeping kids spread out as much as possible. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines for reopening schools recommend staggered schedules that allow for smaller classes, opening windows to provide more air circulation, avoiding sharing books and computers, regular cleaning of buses and classes, and requiring masks and handwashing. Many see some form of distance learning continuing through next year. A handful also are considering deploying technology to help...

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers says she isn't aware of other schools looking to adopt detailed surveillance measures. But the AFT has issued guidelines on reopening schools and colleges that warns about vendors potentially using the crisis to expand data-mining practices. A small but growing surveillance industry has sprung up around Covid already, with firms pitching everything from temperature-tracking infrared cameras and contact tracing apps to wireless beacons and smart cameras to help enforce social distancing at work. "It's been one of the most disturbing parts of this," says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Now, Cahn says, this cottage industry is keen to find a way into classrooms. "One of the things that will be a huge profit driver, potentially, is that younger children would need specially designed devices if they don't have smartphones," he says.
An official at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education also told Wired that some state universities are "exploring" the use of people-tracking Bluetooth beacons.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Self-driving cars, long touted by developers as a way to eliminate road deaths, could likely only prevent a third of all U.S. road crashes, according to a study released on Thursday. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a research group financed by U.S. insurers, found the remaining crashes were caused by mistakes that self-driving systems are not equipped to handle any better than human drivers.

Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, a consortium of self-driving companies and researchers, said in a statement on Thursday the study wrongly assumed that automated cars could only prevent crashes caused by perception errors and incapacitation. Some 72% of crashes were avoidable, based on the study's calculations, if accidents caused by speeding and violation of traffic laws were included, the consortium said...

[N]ot all human mistakes can be eliminated by camera, radar and other sensor-based technology, according to the IIHS analysis of more than 5,000 representative police-reported crashes nationwide. Most crashes were due to more complex errors, such as making wrong assumptions about other road users' actions, driving too fast or too slow for road conditions, or making incorrect evasive maneuvers. Many crashes resulted from multiple mistakes. "Our goal was to show that if you don't deal with those issues, self-driving cars won't deliver massive safety benefits," said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research and a coauthor of the study.

"A newly uncovered form of ransomware is going after Windows and Linux systems," reports ZDNet, "in what appears to be a targeted campaign." Named Tycoon after references in the code, this ransomware has been active since December 2019 and looks to be the work of cyber criminals who are highly selective in their targeting. The malware also uses an uncommon deployment technique that helps stay hidden on compromised networks. The main targets of Tycoon are organisations in the education and software industries.

Tycoon has been uncovered and detailed by researchers at BlackBerry working with security analysts at KPMG. It's an unusual form of ransomware because it's written in Java, deployed as a trojanised Java Runtime Environment and is compiled in a Java image file (Jimage) to hide the malicious intentions... [T]he first stage of Tycoon ransomware attacks is less uncommon, with the initial intrusion coming via insecure internet-facing Remote Desktop Protocol servers. This is a common attack vector for malware campaigns and it often exploits servers with weak or previously compromised passwords. Once inside the network, the attackers maintain persistence by using Image File Execution Options (IFEO) injection settings that more often provide developers with the ability to debug software. The attackers also use privileges to disable anti-malware software using ProcessHacker in order to stop removal of their attack...

After execution, the ransomware encrypts the network with files encrypted by Tycoon given extensions including .redrum, .grinch and .thanos — and the attackers demand a ransom in exchange for the decryption key. The attackers ask for payment in bitcoin and claim the price depends on how quickly the victim gets in touch via email.

The fact the campaign is still ongoing suggests that those behind it are finding success extorting payments from victims.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In 2011, the late film critic Roger Ebert gave tech's movers-and-shakers a PLATO history lesson in his Remaking My Voice TED Talk. "When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback," explained Ebert. "I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called 'PLATO.' The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. This was a computer-assisted instruction system. Which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. The programmers said it could assist students in their learning...."

Ebert probably would have been surprised to see how the COVID-19 pandemic caught U.S. schools flat-footed in 2020. In a never-before-published chapter that didn't make it into his book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, author Brian Dear reveals that Ebert reported on PLATO's potential to deliver online learning to homebound students in a 1962 article he wrote for the News-Gazette while still in high school. Ebert's Jan. 6, 1962 story on PLATO began:

"For no more than the price of a good television set, homebound handicapped children may soon be able to get an education equal to those offered in schools. [...] Other predicted uses for the unique teaching system include [...] an education system which allows the student to set his own pace, instead of forcing him to 'stay with the class.'..."

Dear points out that the PLATO project launched the first week of June 1960, more than sixteen years before Salman Khan was even born.