Academics have found that the U.S. mortality declines during recessions, with "reductions in air pollution... a quantitatively important mechanism." Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We leverage spatial variation in the severity of the Great Recession across the United States to examine its impact on mortality and to explore implications for the welfare consequences of recessions. We estimate that an increase in the unemployment rate of the magnitude of the Great Recession reduces the average, annual age-adjusted mortality rate by 2.3 percent, with effects persisting for at least 10 years. Mortality reductions appear across causes of death and are concentrated in the half of the population with a high school degree or less. We estimate similar percentage reductions in mortality at all ages, with declines in elderly mortality thus responsible for about three-quarters of the total mortality reduction. Recession-induced mortality declines are driven primarily by external effects of reduced aggregate economic activity on mortality, and recession-induced reductions in air pollution appear to be a quantitatively important mechanism. Incorporating our estimates of pro-cyclical mortality into a standard macroeconomics framework substantially reduces the welfare costs of recessions, particularly for people with less education, and at older ages where they may even be welfare-improving.

"We're currently witnessing a rapid expansion in the abuse of these new AI tools by bad actors," writes Microsoft VP Brad Smith, "including through deepfakes based on AI-generated video, audio, and images.

"This trend poses new threats for elections, financial fraud, harassment through nonconsensual pornography, and the next generation of cyber bullying." Microsoft found its own tools being used in a recently-publicized episode, and the VP writes that "We need to act with urgency to combat all these problems."

Microsoft's blog post says they're "committed as a company to a robust and comprehensive approach," citing six different areas of focus:

• A strong safety architecture. This includes "ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system... based on strong and broad-based data analysis."

• Durable media provenance and watermarking. ("Last year at our Build 2023 conference, we announced media provenance capabilities that use cryptographic methods to mark and sign AI-generated content with metadata about its source and history.")

• Safeguarding our services from abusive content and conduct. ("We are committed to identifying and removing deceptive and abusive content" hosted on services including LinkedIn and Microsoft's Gaming network.)

• Robust collaboration across industry and with governments and civil society. This includes "others in the tech sector" and "proactive efforts" with both civil society groups and "appropriate collaboration with governments."

• Modernized legislation to protect people from the abuse of technology. "We look forward to contributing ideas and supporting new initiatives by governments around the world."

• Public awareness and education. "We need to help people learn how to spot the differences between legitimate and fake content, including with watermarking. This will require new public education tools and programs, including in close collaboration with civil society and leaders across society."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article

After a 6-1 vote by the district board, San Francisco middle schools will teach Algebra I again this fall. Axios reports: Roughly a third of SFUSD middle schools this fall will begin offering the course to eighth graders at about a third of its 13 middle schools as well as six of its K-8 schools, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Students at other campuses will have access to the course via online classes or summer school while their schools take three years to make the transition. Those eighth graders will otherwise have to wait until high school to take the course.

District officials plan to evaluate the best way to enroll students throughout the district in a pilot at the first schools this fall. The first approach would be to enroll all eighth graders. The second would prioritize students' interest or readiness. The third would give students the option of taking Algebra I on top of current eighth-grade math curricula.

The 6-1 vote by the San Francisco Unified School District board Tuesday followed a decadelong battle over eighth graders' access to higher-level math courses and a larger debate over academic opportunity and equity in math performance. SFUSD previously taught eighth-grade algebra. But in 2014, the board voted to wait until high school to try to address racial gaps that had emerged as some students moved quicker to advanced math classes. Studies have shown that inequities including socioeconomic status, language differences and implicit bias often impede Black and Latino students' educational pursuits and result in lower rates of enrollment in higher-level classes. Yes, but: Stanford researchers found last year that large racial and ethnic gaps in advanced math enrollment persisted even after the policy change.

New York City's public schools chancellor said the city did not pass Tuesday's remote learning "test" due to technical issues. From a report: "As I said, this was a test. I don't think that we passed this test," David Banks said during a news briefing, adding that he felt "disappointed, frustrated and angry" as a result of the technical issues. NYC Public Schools did a lot of work to prepare for the remote learning day, Banks said, but shortly before 8 a.m. they were notified that parents and students were having difficulty signing onto remote learning.

This is the first time NYC Public Schools has implemented remote learning on a snow day since introducing the no snow day policy in 2022. The district serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools. Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city's remote learning program. "IBM was not ready for primetime," Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded their capacity and a total of 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. "We'll work harder to do better next time," he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong.

Researchers have made significant progress toward developing a blood test that can predict the risk of dementia up to 15 years before clinical diagnosis. The Guardian reports: Hopes for the test were raised after scientists discovered biological markers for the condition in blood samples collected from more than 50,000 healthy volunteers enrolled in the UK Biobank project. Analysis of the blood identified patterns of four proteins that predicted the onset of dementia in general, and Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia specifically, in older age. When combined with more conventional risk factors such as age, sex, education and genetic susceptibility, the protein profiles allowed researchers to predict dementia with an estimated 90% accuracy nearly 15 years before people received clinical confirmation of the disease.

For the latest study, blood samples from 52,645 UK adults without dementia were collected and frozen between 2006 and 2010 and analyzed 10 to 15 years later. More than 1,400 participants went on to develop dementia. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers looked for connections between nearly 1,500 blood proteins and developing dementia years later. Writing in Nature Aging, they describe how four proteins, Gfap, Nefl, Gdf15 and Ltbp2, were present in unusual levels among those who developed all-cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia. Higher levels of the proteins were warning signs of disease. Inflammation in the brain can trigger cells called astrocytes to over-produce Gfap, a known biomarker for Alzheimer's. People with raised Gfap were more than twice as likely to develop dementia than those with lower levels.

Another blood protein, Nefl, is linked to nerve fibre damage, while higher than normal Gdf15 can occur after damage to the brain's blood vessels. Rising levels of Gfap and Ltbp2 was highly specific for dementia rather than other brain diseases, the scientists found, with changes occurring at least 10 years before people received a dementia diagnosis. The researchers are speaking to companies to develop the test but said the cost, currently at several hundred pounds, would need to come down to make it viable.

Abstract of a paper [PDF] the on pre-print server Arxiv: Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of about 1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. We survey faculty at highly-ranked universities, and confirm that Google Scholar is widely used when evaluating scientists. Intrigued by a citationboosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations. These findings provide conclusive evidence that citations can be bought in bulk, and highlight the need to look beyond citation counts.

At a press conference last week, a California Assemblymember joined the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in announcing a bill that, if passed, would require every public high school to teach computer science. (And establish CS as a high school graduation requirement by the 2030-31 school year.)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says he noticed posters with CS-education advocacy charts and stats "copied verbatim" from the tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org. (And "a California Dept. of Education news release also echoed Code.org K-12 CS advocacy factoids.") The announcement came less than two weeks after Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi — whose goal is to make CS a HS graduation requirement in all 50 states by 2030 — was a keynote speaker at the Association of California School Administrators Superintendents' Symposium. Even back in an October 20 Facebook post, [California state assemblyman] Berman noted he'd partnered with Code.org on legislation in the past and hinted that something big was in the works on the K-12 CS education front for California. "I had the chance to attend Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration and chat with their founder, Hadi Partovi, as well as CS advocate Aloe Blacc. They've done amazing work expanding access to computer science education... and I've been proud to partner with them on legislation to do that in CA. More to come!"

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Our goal," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained in a Feb. 2021 Instagram post announcing the location of a second tuition-free @BezosAcademy preschool in Tacoma, WA, "is to unlock the potential in kids to become creative leaders, original thinkers, and lifelong learners -- regardless of their zip code."

Three years later, a new Amazon SEC filing reveals how much zip codes can matter, even to Bezos, the third richest person in the world. GeekWire reports: "A new Amazon [SEC] filing, detailing Jeff Bezos' plan to sell a slice of his stake in the company, sheds fresh light on his move from Seattle to Miami -- and his ability to avoid Washington state's capital gains tax [ironically, earmarked to be funneled into early-childhood education programs and school construction] in the process. The filing reveals that the Amazon founder and executive chairman adopted a trading plan Nov. 8 to sell up to 50 million Amazon shares during a period ending in January 2025. It would be the first time he has sold Amazon stock since 2021. The plan was adopted less than a week after Bezos announced on Instagram, on Nov. 2, that he was leaving his longtime home of Seattle for sunnier skies in Miami. In his Instagram post, Bezos said he wanted to be closer to his parents and Blue Origin space venture in Florida. He did not mention taxes."

"Given Bezos' recent move out of Washington -- where he founded and built Amazon into a global behemoth -- he will also be saving around $600 million in tax expense if he ends up selling the maximum of 50 million shares under the plan, based on the company's current stock price. That's around $600 million in what would have otherwise been tax revenue for his former home state, as The Center Square reported Monday. The capital gains tax, passed in 2021, imposes a 7% tax on any gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, with some exceptions. It was challenged in court but ultimately ruled constitutional by the state Supreme Court last year. The tax brought in nearly $900 million in its first year of collection. Revenue goes toward early education and childcare programs, as well as school construction projects."

It's of course no secret that Bezos is no fan of taxes -- he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation near San Francisco to avoid taxes, ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax aimed at improving WA state public education (joined in the fight by Microsoft and Steve Ballmer), characterized as unconstitutional attempts to make Amazon collect and pay sales taxes, and came under fire by ProPublica for paying no income tax in some years.

Longtime Slashdot reader ardmhacha writes: After making the submission of SAT/ACT results optional (along with most other colleges in the U.S.) for admissions because of the disruptions due to COVID-19, Dartmouth announced that they will reinstate the standardized test requirement for applications to the Class of 2029 (admission in Fall 2025) and beyond. "Informed by new research, Dartmouth will reactivate the standardized testing requirement for undergraduate admission beginning with applicants to the Class of 2029," reads an update to the college's testing policy page.

A study conducted (PDF) by the college found that "SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of academic performance at Dartmouth" and that "certain non-test score inputs in the admissions process, such as guidance counselor recommendations, do not predict college performance even though they do advantage more-advantaged applicants at IvyPlus institutions, increasing their admissions chances." MIT had previously reinstated the SAT/ACT requirement.

Craig Newmark posted an announcement last week on LinkedIn. "Okay, my deal is that I'm contributing another $10 million so that the City University of New York journalism grad school can go tuition-free for half the student body next year...

"Tuition-free means more seriously good journalism education for students from all income backgrounds..."

More details from the Observer: The New York City-based institution today announced plans to grow its endowment to $60 million by 2026 to cover the tuition of its full student body in perpetuity.

Founded in 2006, the Newmark Journalism School has long offered a public alternative to private, elite journalism programs across the nation, according to its dean Graciela Mochkofsky. "After the pandemic, we realized that even though we were one of the most affordable schools in the country, we were seeing an increasing need from our students," Mochkofsky told Observer. "We started thinking about how to get to tuition-free...."

"One-time grants to schools and newsrooms are an important piece of the puzzle," Newmark told Observer. "But if we're serious about the future of trustworthy journalism as democracy's immune system, we've got to create ways to make the pipeline and product more resilient to economics and shifting moods. Endowments help do that...."

The Newmark Journalism School has been gradually inching towards free tuition for some time. Tuition was covered for 20 percent of students in the class of 2023, 25 percent of the program's current class and 35 percent of the new class being enrolled. If the school's goal of raising $30 million in the next two years is achieved, this figure will reach 100 percent by its 20th anniversary in 2026...

It is additionally fundraising for other initiatives related to research, faculty, facilities and new programs. Curriculums that reflect the emergence of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the technology's effect on journalism are of particular interest.

The VC fund Neo "identifies awesome young engineers, includes them in a community of tech veterans, and invests in companies they start or join," TechCrunch explained in 2018.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes that Neo is also benefiting from the education non-profit Code.org: Eleven years ago, Neo Founder and CEO Ali Partovi together with twin brother Hadi (Code.org CEO and a Neo investor) publicly launched the nonprofit Code.org (backed and advised by big tech companies). With the support of prominent tech giant leaders and their companies, Code.org pushed coding into K-12 classrooms (NYT, alt.) and now boasts that "591,636 teachers have signed up to teach our intro courses on Code Studio and 19,177,297 students are enrolled," helping to build a pipeline of "college students who excel at CS". Neo taps into this pipeline, and it looks like others also betting on their success include Neo investors tied to Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Uber — including Code.org boosters Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Wilke, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt.

"I love meeting more and more @Neo founders and Neo scholar candidates who learned to code on Code.org," Neo CEO Ali Partovi tweeted last summer.
in November Partovi welcomed "32 exceptional CS students" chosen from over 1,000 applicants to be Neo Scholars, "a year-long program of events, trips, and mentorship, as well as long-term membership in our community."

Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: Even massive Sega fans would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the Sega AI Computer. After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware. Thankfully, the folks at the self-described "Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism" site SMS Power have been able to go a little deeper. The site's recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME. [...]

While the general existence of the Sega AI Computer has been known in certain circles for a while, detailed information about its workings and software was extremely hard to come by, especially in the English-speaking world. That began to change in 2014 when a rare Yahoo Auctions listing offered a boxed AI Computer along with 15 pieces of software. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid on that auction (which reportedly ran the equivalent of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and more software from the winner of a 2022 auction. SMS Power notes that the majority of the software it has uncovered "had zero information about them on the Internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software." Now, the site's community has taken the trouble to preserve all those ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for "partial emulation" of the system (which doesn't yet include a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation support).

That dumped software is all "educational and mostly aimed at kids," SMS Power notes, and is laden with Japanese text that will make it hard for many foreigners to even tinker with. That means this long-lost emulation release probably won't set the MAME world on fire as 2022's surprise dump of Marble Madness II did. Still, it's notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history. SMS Power's write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site's massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.

theodp writes: Visual Studio Magazine reports on new research on the effect of AI-powered GitHub Copilot on software development which sought to investigate the quality and maintainability of AI-assisted code compared to what would have been written by a human. Countering the positively-glowing findings of some other studies, the Coding on Copilot whitepaper from GitClear cites some adverse results.

"We find disconcerting trends for maintainability," explains the paper's abstract. "Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited." The paper concludes, "How will Copilot transform what it means to be a developer? There's no question that, as AI has surged in popularity, we have entered an era where code lines are being added faster than ever before. The better question for 2024: who's on the hook to clean up the mess afterward?" Further complicating matters, Computing Education in the Era of Generative AI (Feb. 2024 CACM) notes that "generating and inserting large blocks of code may be counterproductive for users at all levels. This requires users to read through code they did not write, sometimes at a more sophisticated level than they are familiar with."

Interestingly, the AI-generated code maintenance worries are reminiscent of concerns cited in the past for 'Google programmers', Stack Overflow copy-and-pasters, and stitchers of not-quite-compatible libraries, as well as earlier iterations of code generators, including C++ and other 'Next-Next-Finish' code wizards of the 90's and COBOL and PL/I applications generators (PDF) of the 80's. Everything old is new again, including code maintenance challenges.

Bank of America is cracking down on employees who aren't following its return-to-office mandate, sending "letters of education" warnings of disciplinary action to employees who have been staying home. The Guardian: Some employees at the bank received letters that said they had failed to meet the company's "workplace excellence guidelines" despite "requests and reminders to do so," according to the Financial Times. The letter warned employees that failure to follow return-to-office expectations could lead to "further disciplinary action."

Loughborough University will use holographic tech to beam in guest lecturers from around the globe, allowing students to interact with top international experts without leaving campus. The university, the first in Europe to explore this, plans lectures from MIT scientists and tests where management students tackle tricky situations under the guidance of industry leaders. Students have welcomed the lifelike holograms as more engaging than Zoom, The Guardian reports. Following a pilot scheme in 2024, the technology will likely become part of the formal curriculum in 2025. The box-based units are sold by California's Proto, whose clients include BT and IBM for corporate meetings. Proto's founder says the technology could even revive some of history's greatest thinkers to lecture students.

Microsoft today made Reading Coach, its AI-powered tool that provides learners with personalized reading practice, available at no cost to anyone with a Microsoft account. From a report: As of this morning, Reading Coach is accessible on the web in preview -- a Windows app is forthcoming. And soon (in late spring), Reading Coach will integrate with learning management systems such as Canva, Microsoft says. Reading Coach builds on Reading Progress, a plug-in for the education-focused version of Microsoft Teams, Teams for Education, designed to help teachers foster reading fluency in their students. Inspired by the success of Reading Progress (evidently), Microsoft launched Reading Coach in 2022 as a part of Teams for Education and Immersive Reader, the company's cross-platform assistive service for language and reading comprehension.

OpenAI on Thursday announced its first partnership with a higher education institution. Starting in February, Arizona State University will have full access to ChatGPT Enterprise and plans to use it for coursework, tutoring, research and more. From a report: The partnership has been in the works for at least six months, when ASU chief information officer Lev Gonick first visited OpenAI's HQ, which was preceded by the university faculty and staff's earlier use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools, Gonick told CNBC in an interview. ChatGPT Enterprise, which debuted in August, is ChatGPT's business tier and includes access to GPT-4 with no usage caps, performance that's up to two times faster than previous versions and API credits.

With the OpenAI partnership, ASU plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, not only for certain courses but also for study topics. STEM subjects are a focus and are "the make-or-break subjects for a lot of higher education," Gonick said. The university will also use the tool in ASU's largest course, Freshman Composition, to offer students writing help. ASU also plans to use ChatGPT Enterprise to develop AI avatars as a "creative buddy" for studying certain subjects, like bots that can sing or write poetry about biology, for instance.

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, American journalist and author John R. MacArthur discusses the alarming decline in reading skills among American youth, highlighted by a Department of Education survey showing significant drops in text comprehension since 2019-2020, with the situation worsening since 2012. While remote learning during the pandemic and other factors like screen-based reading are blamed, a new study by Columbia University suggests that reading on paper is more effective for comprehension than reading on screens, a finding not yet widely adopted in digital-focused educational approaches. From the report: What if the principal culprit behind the fall of middle-school literacy is neither a virus, nor a union leader, nor "remote learning"? Until recently there has been no scientific answer to this urgent question, but a soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University's Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for "deeper reading" there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where "shallow reading was observed." [...] [Dr Karen Froud] and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: "We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices ... in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print."

I would go even further than Froud in delineating what's at stake. For more than a decade, social scientists, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. As Froud's team says in its article: "Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning" across the full range of social scientific literature. But the work of Mangen and others hasn't influenced local school boards, such as Houston's, which keep throwing out printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the "digital revolution," school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment when rigorous scientific research is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.

Indeed, for the tech boosters, Covid really wasn't all bad for public-school education: "As much as the pandemic was an awful time period," says Todd Winch, the Levittown, Long Island, school superintendent, "one silver lining was it pushed us forward to quickly add tech supports." Newsday enthusiastically reports: "Island schools are going all-in on high tech, with teachers saying they are using computer programs such as Google Classroom, I-Ready, and Canvas to deliver tests and assignments and to grade papers." Terrific, especially for Google, which was slated to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and which since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.

If only Winch and his colleagues had attended the Teachers College symposium that presented the Froud study last September. The star panelist was the nation's leading expert on reading and the brain, John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: "I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues," he told the New York audience. "How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? ... It's like people just say, "Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we'll make a bunch of money.' And that's OK; that's our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students ... It's all been product and not purpose." I'll only take issue with the notion that it's "OK" to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales -- before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.

samleecole writes: A food delivery robot company instructed a public university to promote its service on campus with photographs and video featuring only students who "have a healthy-looking BMI," [body mass index] according to emails and documents I obtained via a public records request. The emails also discuss how ordering delivery via robot should become a "habit" for a "captured" customer base of students on campus.

These highly specific instructions show how universities around the country are going to extreme lengths to create a welcoming environment on campus for food delivery robots that sometimes have trouble crossing the street and need traffic infrastructure redesigned for them in order to navigate campus, a relatively absurd cache of public records obtained by 404 Media reveals.

"Sal Kahn, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy predicted last year that AI tutoring bots would soon revolutionize education," writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: theodp writes: His vision of tutoring bots tapped into a decades-old Silicon Valley dream: automated teaching platforms that instantly customize lessons for each student. Proponents argue that developing such systems would help close achievement gaps in schools by delivering relevant, individualized instruction to children faster and more efficiently than human teachers ever could. But some education researchers say schools should be wary of the hype around AI-assisted instruction, warning that generative AI tools may turn out to have harmful or "degenerative" effects on student learning.
A ChatGPT-powered tutoring bot was tested last spring at the Khan Academy — and Bill Gates is enthusiastic about that bot and AI education in general (as well as the Khan Academy and AI-related school curriculums). From the original submission: Explaining his AI vision in November, Bill Gates wrote, "If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes [Microsoft] Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor's lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today's text-based tutors."

The New York Times article notes that similar enthusiasm greeted automated teaching tools in the 1960s, but predictions that that the mechanical and electronic "teaching machines' — which were programmed to ask students questions on topics like spelling or math — would revolutionize education didn't pan out.

So, is this time different?