"This was a Wayne's World scene gone awry..." says an attorney for 23-year-old Andrew Harris. "They were Wayne and Garth in a blue Pacer with a dumb idea and a mixed run of luck," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer: Harris previously had filed an application for federal student aid, and noticed that the government form would redirect to the IRS and import his own tax returns automatically. Harris and his fellow classmate Justin Hiemstra wondered: What would happen if they posed as one of Trump's offspring? Could they use an application for aid to land the returns and scoop the nation's biggest newspapers? Tiffany Trump had graduated in May 2016 from the University of Pennsylvania and had announced she was going to graduate school at Georgetown University. It could work.

Six days before the 2016 election, Harris and Hiemstra went to Haverford College's computer lab and logged in using another student's credentials. They accessed a Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA). When they attempted to register under the name of Trump's child, they were stunned to discover an application under that name already existed. Using Google, they successfully guessed most of the answers to a series of challenge questions to reset the password. Stymied four times on one of the security questions, they gave up.

What they didn't realize was that the Department of Education was monitoring all traffic on the FAFSA site. The failed attempt sent up a red flag. The IRS dispatched federal investigators to Haverford shortly after.
Last month Pulitzer Prize-winning tax journalist David Cay Johnston told the paper "It's surprising they didn't catch them until four tries." They also reported that while Harris was expelled from the college, 22-year-old Hiemstra was allowed to graduate, and both men have pleaded guilty to accessing a computer without authorization and attempting to access a computer without authorization to obtain government information.

When sentenced in December, they'll face a maximum of two years in prison, two years of supervised release, and a $200,000 fine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who regularly consume soft drinks have a higher risk of an early death, researchers have found, with the trend seen for both sugared and artificially sweetened drinks. While experts say the study cannot prove soft drinks are a driver of an increased risk of death, they say the work -- which is the largest study of its kind -- supports recent public health efforts to reduce consumption of soft drinks, such as the UK's sugar tax. Writing in the journal Jama Internal Medicine, Dr Neil Murphy, a co-author of the research from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and colleagues report how they analyzed data from more than 450,000 people, 70% of whom were women, across 10 European countries including the UK. Participants had an average age of just over 50, and those with health conditions such as cancer, heart disease or diabetes at the outset were not included in the analysis. Individuals joined the study between 1992 and 2000 and were then followed up for an average of 16 years, during which time more than 41,600 deaths were recorded.

When participants signed up they were asked a number of questions about aspects of their lifestyle such as exercise, smoking and weight as well as diet and nutrition -- including their average consumption of drinks such as fizzy drinks, fruit squash and energy drinks. Fruit juice consumption was not included. The results show 9.3% of those who drank less than one glass of soft drink a month died during the study, compared with 11.5% of those who drank two or more 250ml glasses a day. The team say that once factors such as body mass index, diet, physical activity, smoking and education were taken into account, that translates to a 17% higher risk of death among those consuming two glasses a day compared with those drinking less than one glass a month.

As a new generation grows up surrounded by AI, researchers find education as early as preschool can help avoid confusion about robots' role. From a report: Today's small children, aka Generation Alpha, are the first to grow up with robots as peers. Those winsome talking devices spawned by a booming education-tech industry can speed children's learning, but they also can be confusing to them, research shows. Many children think robots are smarter than humans or imbue them with magical powers. The long-term consequences of growing up surrounded by AI-driven devices won't be clear for a while. But an expanding body of research is lending new impetus to efforts to expand technology education beyond learning to code, to understanding how AI works. Children need help drawing boundaries between themselves and the technology, and gaining confidence in their own ability to control and master it, researchers say.

AI is already causing plenty of jitters among adults, says Craig Le Clair, a principal analyst with Forrester and author of a new book on workforce automation. Many workers are worried about programming AI-driven equipment on the job, or fear AI will eliminate their positions altogether. "Machinists are having nervous breakdowns," he says. "We need to teach children the attitude that, 'I can collaborate and work with machines. I'm not threatened by them,'" he says. "And that education has to begin in preschool." Preschoolers can understand more about AI than you think. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are finding some surprising successes teaching AI to children as young as age 4, helping them program robots to learn from patterns or features in data.

theodp writes: The challenges of competing against free have long been noted. In the K-12 Computer Science education space, those who build a better mousetrap will still face the formidable challenge of competing with free offerings from tech giants such as Microsoft, which on Tuesday highlighted a new collaboration marrying tech-backed nonprofit Code.org's free CS Discoveries curriculum and Microsoft OneNote for Education. "Microsoft is a key Code.org partner," reminds a Microsoft blog post, "and the organizations have worked together over the past several years to boost computer science education globally." Free K-12 CS education offerings tied to their own products (or even expansion plans) are also pushed on educators by the likes of Google, Apple, and Amazon. We've already seen some of the hidden costs of free social media -- so should the tech-bankrolled 'free' K-12 CS education model promoted and led by Facebook and others, which apparently even involves monitoring every coding move schoolchildren make ("Young women want you to interact with their apps! They use 10% more interactive elements in their App Lab projects than boys"), set off any alarms?

The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT college admissions test, after facing criticism from educators and parents. Instead, it will try to capture a student's social and economic background in a broad array of data points (Warning: source paywalled, alternative source). The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn't combine the metrics into a single score. The Wall Street Journal reports: The original tool, called the "environmental context dashboard," combined about 15 socio-economic metrics from a student's high school and neighborhood to create something college admission officers called an "adversity score." Landscape is designed to help colleges compare an applicant's test scores to other students in their high school and beyond, the College Board said. It also aims to give a picture of the quality of the school and relative wealth and stability of the neighborhood.

Six "challenge factors" provide the "summary neighborhood challenge indicator" and the "summary high school challenge indicator," according to the College Board. The six factors are college attendance, household structure, median family income, housing stability, education levels and crime. Colleges have long considered students' high schools and neighborhoods when making admissions decisions, but with more applications coming from more places, incorporating consistent information about every high school and neighborhood becomes difficult, according to college admissions officers. Colleges will receive more than 10 million applications form students attending more than 30,000 high schools. Admissions officers who tested Landscape estimate they lack high school information for about 25% of all applications, the College Board said.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, a year after LinkedIn had purchased online learning portal Lynda.com. This year, 2019, Microsoft is moving all Lynda.com customers to LinkedIn Learning... As students and faculty return to school, many are just discovering now that their colleges, universities and libraries are undertaking this move. But not everyone's onboard. Specifically, some libraries are up in arms over a new requirement for library patrons to create a LinkedIn profile in order to access the LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com service...

The American Library Association said earlier this summer that it believed the requirement of a LinkedIn profile "would significantly impair library users' privacy rights." Library users were able to log into Lynda.com using a library card and a PIN with no other personal information required. Microsoft isn't backing down, as this LinkedIn Learning blog post from June, entitled "Our Commitment to Libraries," makes clear....

In addition to citing authentication reasons for the LinkedIn profile requirement, Microsoft also is pitching the creation of a LinkedIn profile as a way to get better curated, customized content. Microsoft also is looking to LinkedIn Learning as a way to potentially upsell users to LinkedIn's Premium Career features, such as InMail, access to who's viewed their profiles and "competitive insights on other job applicants," as this Frequently Asked Questions document about the Lynda.com to LinkedIn Learning migration indicates.

San Mateo High School administrators have instituted a new policy to lock up students' cellphones. "Each school day, nearly 1,700 students place their devices in a Yondr pouch that closes with a proprietary lock," reports NBC News. "School administrators unlock them at the end of the day." The goal is to help students focus on the teacher and other students. From the report: While administrators and teachers say they have already noticed a positive effect on students, the policy has elicited mixed reactions from researchers who argue its long-term effectiveness. Devices remain in the student's possession, but they aren't able to access them, the school said. The program was funded with a $20,000 grant. The pouches have been assigned to students at no cost, but losing one will cost the high-schoolers a $25 replacement fee.

Some technology experts feel the new policy is a step in the right direction and will curb distraction in the classroom. "Taking cellphones out of the classroom is a no-brainer," said Calvin Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Students tend to perform worse when they have access to network connectivity in the classroom, he said. "The ability to be free of distraction and concentrate on things is increasingly valuable, so it's a good general function of our schools to be a place where our students get trained to keeping their concentration on one thing at a time," he added.

While many researchers have focused on the benefits of cutting out devices from the classroom, others worry about taking away something young people depend on. Larry Rosen, a research psychologist at California State University, said young people constantly check their phones to alleviate anxiety. They are anxious about staying on top of things, and that anxiety will build up if they are forced to ditch the devices cold turkey, he added. Taking away phones doesn't work for everyone, he argues. Instead, he believes "technology breaks" are a much happier medium.

Fooled by gibberish and highly susceptible to human bias, automated essay-scoring systems are being increasingly adopted, a Motherboard investigation has found. From a report: Every year, millions of students sit down for standardized tests that carry weighty consequences. National tests like the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) serve as gatekeepers to higher education, while state assessments can determine everything from whether a student will graduate to federal funding for schools and teacher pay. Traditional paper-and-pencil tests have given way to computerized versions. And increasingly, the grading process -- even for written essays -- has also been turned over to algorithms. Natural language processing (NLP) artificial intelligence systems -- often called automated essay scoring engines -- are now either the primary or secondary grader on standardized tests in at least 21 states, according to a survey conducted by Motherboard. Three states didn't respond to the questions.

Of those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human. But in the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students' essays -- it varies between 5 to 20 percent -- will be randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine's work. But research from psychometricians -- professionals who study testing -- and AI experts, as well as documents obtained by Motherboard, show that these tools are susceptible to a flaw that has repeatedly sprung up in the AI world: bias against certain demographic groups. And as a Motherboard experiment demonstrated, some of the systems can be fooled by nonsense essays with sophisticated vocabulary. Essay-scoring engines don't actually analyze the quality of writing. They're trained on sets of hundreds of example essays to recognize patterns that correlate with higher or lower human-assigned grades. They then predict what score a human would assign an essay, based on those patterns.

"As someone who studies cybersecurity and information warfare, I'm concerned that a cyberattack with widespread impact, an intrusion in one area that spreads to others or a combination of lots of smaller attacks, could cause significant damage, including mass injury and death rivaling the death toll of a nuclear weapon," warns an assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University: Unlike a nuclear weapon, which would vaporize people within 100 feet and kill almost everyone within a half-mile, the death toll from most cyberattacks would be slower. People might die from a lack of food, power or gas for heat or from car crashes resulting from a corrupted traffic light system. This could happen over a wide area, resulting in mass injury and even deaths... The FBI has even warned that hackers are targeting nuclear facilities. A compromised nuclear facility could result in the discharge of radioactive material, chemicals or even possibly a reactor meltdown.

A cyberattack could cause an event similar to the incident in Chernobyl. That explosion, caused by inadvertent error, resulted in 50 deaths and evacuation of 120,000 and has left parts of the region uninhabitable for thousands of years into the future. My concern is not intended to downplay the devastating and immediate effects of a nuclear attack. Rather, it's to point out that some of the international protections against nuclear conflicts don't exist for cyberattacks...

Critical systems, like those at public utilities, transportation companies and firms that use hazardous chemicals, need to be much more secure... But all those systems can't be protected without skilled cybersecurity staffs to handle the work. At present, nearly a quarter of all cybersecurity jobs in the US are vacant, with more positions opening up than there are people to fill them. One recruiter has expressed concern that even some of the jobs that are filled are held by people who aren't qualified to do them. The solution is more training and education, to teach people the skills they need to do cybersecurity work, and to keep existing workers up to date on the latest threats and defense strategies.

There can be more than one correct answer for academic tests of programming ability, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: Take the first of the Free-Response Questions in this year's AP CS A exam, which asked 70,000 college-bound students to "Write the static method numberOfLeapYears, which returns the number of leap years between year1 and year2." The correct answer, according to the CollegeBoard's 2019 Scoring Guidelines, entails iterating over the range of years and invoking a provided helper method called isLeapYear for each year.

Which does work, of course, but what if a student instead took an Excel-like approach to the same problem that consists of a (hopefully correct!) single formula with no iteration or isLeapYear helper function? Would that be a worse — or better -- example of computational thinking than the endorsed AP CS A Java-based solution? (Here's a 7-minute AP Conference discussion of how to correctly grade this problem)?

So, how have you seen schools and companies deal with unexpected-but-correct approaches to coding test questions?

Google announces in a blog post: Today's students face a tricky challenge: In an age when they can explore every idea imaginable on the internet, how do they balance outside inspiration with authenticity in their own work? Students have to learn to navigate the line between other people's ideas and their own, and how and when to properly cite sources. We've heard from instructors that they copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if student work is authentic, which can be repetitive, inefficient and biased. They also often spend a lot of time giving feedback about missed citations and improper paraphrasing. By integrating the power of Search into our assignment and grading tools, we can make this quicker and easier.

That's why Google is introducing originality reports. This new feature -- with several reports included free in every course -- will be part of Classroom and Assignments, which was also announced today. We create originality reports by scanning student work for matched phrases across hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. When assigning work in Classroom and Assignments, instructors will have the option to enable originality reports. Students will then be able to run up to three originality reports on documents they attach to the assignment before submitting their work. This heads-up gives students an opportunity to proactively improve their work, and also saves time for instructors.

Goldsmiths, a part of the University of London, is fighting climate change by taking beef off the menu. "[The university] will no longer serve beef burgers, beef burritos and the like on its campus," reports CBS News. From the report: Goldsmiths will take beef products off the menu starting in September, it announced Monday. The effort is part of a mission to become carbon neutral by 2025. Removing beef products on campus isn't the only action the university is taking. It also plans to install more solar panels, switch to a 100% clean energy supplier, plant more trees and make climate change education more accessible to students. Perhaps the biggest change the university is making aside from the elimination of beef is a fee of 10 pence (12 cents) on bottled water and single-use plastic cups. The goal is to "discourage use, with the proceeds directed into a green student initiative fund," the college's new warden, Professor Frances Corner, said.

The Boston Public School District held a contest to determine the best solution for busing around 25,000 students to school every day. The winning algorithm improved the efficiency of the routes in 30 minutes. From a report: In 2017, the district was facing serious challenges. On a per-pupil basis, Boston Public Schools had the highest transportation costs in the country, around $2,000 per student per year, representing 10% of the district's budget. The schools dealt with rising costs each year, despite declining ridership. The on-time performance rate of their buses was also well below that of other large districts. With no clear vendor to turn to with this problem, BPS instead sought out experts, hosting a competition where researchers could experiment with anonymized BPS data sets to create efficient routes and optimal start times for each school.

"To put it simply, we wanted a solution that worked," said Will Eger, the BPS senior strategic projects manager. "There are lots of quirks in this transportation situation, and we wanted something that could address the vast majority of those issues while also being highly efficient, something that could run overnight at least." Those quirks represent millions of decision variables that affect any solution, including varying road widths, differing bus infrastructures (for example, the presence of wheelchair lifts or child safety restraint seats), students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses. It also includes the roughly 5,000 students who have a special need that requires door-to-door pick up and drop off (sometimes to non-BPS schools, as the city provides yellow bus service to students who attend charter and private schools within Boston, and to special education facilities outside the city).

Considering all those possibilities creates a "number of solutions so large that you can't even enumerate it," said Arthur Delarue, a PhD candidate who worked with the team from the MIT Operations Research Center whose algorithm won the competition. The team spent hundreds of hours devising a solution to what Delarue called a "bold and unusual" challenge. Their solution replaced what had before been an incredibly laborious process, one that took ten school system routers thousands of hours to create custom routes for each child and school. Those employees still work with BPS, tracking routes that struggle with on-time performance, and managing route guidance for drivers (Google Maps isn't sufficient since it's built for cars, and 70-passenger buses can't, for example, easily make u-turns). But now, the MIT algorithm routes the entire system at once, providing a base for the human routers to tweak.

A new study published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging found that blood pressure can be measured accurately by taking a quick video selfie. An anonymous reader quotes this announcement from the University of Toronto: Kang Lee, a professor of applied psychology and human development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Canada Research Chair in developmental neuroscience, was the lead author of the study... Using a technology co-discovered by Lee and his postdoctoral researcher Paul Zheng called transdermal optical imaging, researchers measured the blood pressure of 1,328 Canadian and Chinese adults by capturing two-minute videos of their faces on an iPhone. Results were compared to standard devices used to measure blood pressure. The researchers found they were able to measure three types of blood pressure with 95 to 96 per cent accuracy.
Lee co-founded a company to turn their technology into a smartphone app (named Anura) that reports stress-level measurements and resting heart rate from a 30-second video of your face -- with plans to release a new version also returning blood pressure results sometime this fall in China.

The university also notes that the researchers now hope to extend their technology so it can measure blood-gluclose levels and cholesterol.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: MIT Technology Review's Karen Hao reports on China's grand experiment in AI education that could reshape how the world learns. "While academics have puzzled over best practices, China hasn't waited around," Hao writes. "It's the world's biggest experiment on AI in education, and no one can predict the outcome."

Profiled is Squirrel AI ("We Strive to Provide Every Student an AI Super Teacher!"), which has opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students -- equal to New York City's entire public school system... Hao notes that the earliest efforts to "replicate" teachers date back to the 1970s, when computers first started being used in education. So, will AI-powered learning systems like Squirrel's deliver on the promise of PLATO's circa-1975 computer-assisted instruction?
From the article: Squirrel's innovation is in its granularity and scale. For every course it offers, its engineering team works with a group of master teachers to subdivide the subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. Middle school math, for example, is broken into over 10,000 atomic elements, or "knowledge points," such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. The goal is to diagnose a student's gaps in understanding as precisely as possible. By comparison, a textbook might divide the same subject into 3,000 points; ALEKS, an adaptive learning platform developed by US-based McGraw-Hill, which inspired Squirrel's, divides it into roughly 1,000.

Once the knowledge points are set, they are paired with video lectures, notes, worked examples, and practice problems. Their relationships -- how they build on each other and overlap -- are encoded in a "knowledge graph," also based on the master teachers' experience.

According to a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open, living in neighborhoods with leafy trees is linked to higher levels of wellness. The study found that not all green spaces are created equal, as leafy trees promote higher levels of wellness than abundant green space. CityLab reports: [The researchers] describe a large-scale longitudinal study featuring 46,786 mostly older residents of three Australian urban areas. The subjects were initially interviewed between 2006 and 2009; follow-up reports were taken between 2012 and 2015. At both points, participants were asked to rate their overall health, and noted whether they have ever been diagnosed with, or treated for, anxiety or depression. In addition, they completed a 10-item questionnaire designed to measure their risk of psychological distress. Among other items, they noted how often in recent weeks they had felt "hopeless, rigid, or fidgety," "so sad that nothing could cheer you up," or "worthless." Researchers compared the participants' answers to the natural features of the "mesh block" where their home is located (a geographical unit containing 30 to 60 dwellings). Using satellite imagery, the team calculated both the percentage of total green space and "separate green space types, including tree canopy, grass, or other low-lying vegetation."

After taking into account such variables as the participants' age, gender, education, and household income, the researchers were able to confirm the results of previous studies, finding that "total green space appeared to be associated with lower odds of incident psychological distress." More intriguingly, they also found that exposure to low-lying vegetation was not consistently associated with any particular health outcome. Exposure to grass was, surprisingly, associated with higher odds of psychological distress. The wellness-boosting feature, then, appears to be the trees. The researchers report that living in areas where 30 percent or more of the outdoor space is dominated by tree canopy was associated with 31 percent lower odds of psychological distress, compared to people living in areas with 0 to 9 percent tree canopy. "Similar results were found for self-related fair to poor general health," with tree-rich residents reporting better health overall, the researchers write.

Companies around the world are still failing to see the benefits of implementing DMARC, an email security protocol designed to prevent email spoofing, the primary trick used by cybercriminals to deliver phishing emails and BEC scams. From a report: Around 79.7% don't use DMARC, according to a report that surveyed the DMARC policies deployed with 21,075 business and government domains. The survey, carried out by email security and analytics firm 250ok, analyzed domains from sectors such as Fortune 500, US government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial), the China Hot 100, the top 100 law firms, international nonprofits, the SaaS 1000, education, e-commerce, financial services, and travel sectors. The survey looked specifically at DMARC adoption because of the protocol's importance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people.

Until March, Japan explicitly forbid the growth of animal embryos containing human cells beyond 14 days or the transplant of such embryos into a surrogate uterus. That month Japan's education and science ministry issued new guidelines allowing the creation of human-animal embryos that can be transplanted into surrogate animals and brought to term. Nakauchi's experiments are the first to be approved under Japan's new rules, by a committee of experts in the science ministry. Final approval from the ministry is expected next month. Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal's organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

The UK will shortly have a new prime minister after the Conservative Party membership overwhelmingly voted to elect Boris Johnson as their new party leader, passing over his sole rival for the post, Jeremy Hunt. From a report: Johnson received 92,135 votes, a full 45,497 more than Hunt. He replaces Theresa May who announced she would step down in May after failing to achieve backing from parliament for her EU withdrawal deal -- the second PM to be topped by Brexit in just under three years. Whether Johnson can outlast even May's brief tenure very much remains to be seen. [...]

Giving his Conservative leadership acceptance speech this afternoon there was little of policy substance on show from Johnson. In his usual showman style, he preferred to stroke sitting Tory egos with a confection of positive projections and feel-good sentiments -- principally about 'getting brexit done' (though nothing on how he will actually get it done). He also dropped a few enthusiastic words vis-a-vis infrastructure, education and broadband -- going longest on the latter by claiming that "fantastic full fiber broadband" would be "sprouting in every household," before falling back on the safe and fuzzy ground of non-specific cheerleading of party and country. On the surface the fiber broadband pledge looks like a rinse and repeat of an existing government policy -- announced in last year's digital strategy -- to put all UK households in reach of fibre to the premise (FTTP) by 2033.

Rick Zeman (Slashdot reader #15,628) shares "a thought-provoking article on when online English teachers see child abuse at the other end of their cameras."

Of the 24 online teachers interviewed, about two thirds told "harrowing" stories, EdSurge reports, and within the teachers' Facebook groups new reports "surface nearly every week." The teachers post in these private Facebook groups because they aren't sure how to process, much less report, what they saw. They ask one another the same few questions in many different ways: Has this ever happened to you? Is what I'm feeling normal? How should I respond? Will the company do something about it?
One company employs 70,000 online teachers who reach more than 600,000 children in China -- yet one of its teachers complains that the company offered her no guidance for these situations.

After saying they "take these matters very seriously" (with a procedure in place for these "very rare" instances), that company declined repeated requests for further interviews "and would not elaborate on its procedure for referring reports of abuse to local agencies." (Even though in China, as in the U.S., the described behavior is illegal.) One China-born anthropologist says that many parents may not even be aware of a 2015 law which banned domestic abuse against children.

Last month another company advised its teachers that those who do report incidents will not receive any follow-up from the company, for reasons of "student confidentiality" -- though "We assure you that our teams will address any concerns in a prudent manner."