"Given that too many schools don't teach calculus, chemistry and physics, CalTech is allowing potential undergraduates to demonstrate their ability in these fields by using Khan Academy," writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423. Los Angeles Times reports: One of Caltech's alternative paths is taking Khan Academy's free, online classes and scoring 90% or higher on a certification test. Sal Khan, academy founder, said Caltech's action is a "huge deal" for equitable access to college. While Caltech is small -- only 2,400 students, about 40% of them undergraduates -- Khan said he hoped its prestigious reputation would encourage other institutions to examine their admission barriers and find creative solutions to ease them. The Pasadena-based institute, with a 3% admission rate last year, boasts 46 Nobel laureates and cutting-edge research in such fields as earthquake engineering, behavioral genetics, geochemistry, quantum information and aerospace. "You have one of the most academically rigorous schools on the planet that has arguably one of the highest bars for admission, saying that an alternative pathway that is free and accessible to anyone is now a means to meeting their requirements," said Khan, whose nonprofit offers free courses, test prep and tutoring to more than 152 million users. [...]

The impetus for the policy change began in February, when Pallie, the admissions director, and two Caltech colleagues attended a workshop on equity hosted by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling. They were particularly struck by one speaker, Melodie Baker of Just Equations, a nonprofit that seeks to widen math opportunities. As Baker pointed out the lack of access to calculus for many students, Pallie and her team began to question Caltech's admission requirement for the course, along with physics and chemistry. Pallie and Jared Leadbetter, a professor of environmental microbiology who heads the faculty admissions committee, began to look into potential course alternatives. Pallie connected with Khan's team, which started a second nonprofit, Schoolhouse.world, during the pandemic in 2020 to offer free tutoring. Peer tutors on the platform certify they are qualified for their jobs by scoring at least 90% on the course exam and videotaping themselves explaining how they solved each problem on it. The video helps ensure that the students actually took the exam themselves and understand the material. That video feature gave Caltech assurances about the integrity of the alternative path.

Under the new process, students would take a calculus, physics or chemistry class offered by Khan Academy and use the Schoolhouse platform to certify their mastery of the content as tutors do with a 90% score or better on the exam and a videotaped explanation of their reasoning. Proof of certification is required within one week of the application deadline, which is in November for early action and January for regular decisions. Pallie and Leadbetter also wanted to test whether the Khan Academy courses are sufficiently rigorous. Several Caltech undergraduates took the courses to assess whether all concepts were covered in enough breadth and depth to pass the campus placement exams in those subjects. Miranda, a rising Caltech junior studying mechanical engineering, took the calculus course and gave it a thumbs-up, although she added that students would probably want to use additional textbooks and other study materials to deepen their preparation for Caltech.

The PC market is expected to return to growth in 2024, according to estimates from IDC analysts. From a report: Still, industry players might want to taper their enthusiasm. PC shipments are forecast to grow 3.7 percent year-on-year to hit 261.4 million units in 2024, putting them above 2018 levels, but not quite on par with 2019 demand. Meanwhile, 2023 is predicted to sink by 13.7 percent to 252 million units. Research manager Jitesh Ubrani called demand "tepid at best" and said 2023 will be the year with the "greatest annual decline in consumer PC shipments since the category's inception."

IDC recognizes the market still faces challenges including "concerns around the consumer market refresh cycle, businesses pushing device purchases forward, and education budgets that are not rebounding in many markets." Market hesitancy, as always, boils down to uncertainty. For one, processors are seeing what IDC called "some of the biggest shifts in commercial PC history" as AMD market share hit 11 percent in 2022 and Apple pulled in just over 5 percent that year. Apple device sales have been on a decline for multiple quarters now. Q1 2023 saw new Macs plummet more than 40 percent year-on-year, compared to an overall 25-30 percent among PC vendors. The quarter before that saw Apple shipments outperform the PC market as a whole, declining a mere 2.1 percent while other manufacturers experienced 37 percent reductions.

The creators of four programming languages will appear together onstage for a historic conversation on September 19th.

- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk
- Guido Van Rossum — Python
- Anders Hejlsberg — Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript
- James Gosling — Java

The announcement describes it as "a conversation about programming language design." The charity event brings together this unique group of computer science pioneers, unlike any event held before. These great minds come together for what will surely be a fantastic night of discussion as the panel delves into the past and future of programming language creation.
It's a fundraiser for two groups. NumFOCUS is a nonprofit charity sponsoring nearly all the major tools in the Python data science stack (including jupyter, numpy, pandas, and matplotlib), and it's also the group behind PyData conferences on open source data tools. And the Last Mile Education Fund offers financial support for low-income underrepresented students. It's being billed as the "inaugural charity event" of PyData Seattle.

This happened once before in 2019, when Puget Sound Programming Python arranged a four-way discussion with Python creator Guido van Rossum, Java creator James Gosling, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript). They held a 90-minute discussion about "language design, the universe, and everything" as a benefit for CSforALL (a group promoting computer science classes at every grade level). During that discussion Gosling shared how Java "started out as kind of 'Do a better C', and it got out of control. The rest of the project really ended up just providing the context." And Anders Hejlsberg told the audience that TypeScript was inspired by massive "write-only" JavaScript code bases.

In their discussion on variable typing and its use in IDEs, Gosling mocked what he called the "real men use vi" mentality, leading to a lively back and forth. Perl's Larry Wall later acknowledged the importance of types and the careful consideration that went into implementing them for Perl 6, but also shared his unique perspective as a long-time designer of programming languages. "I think IDEs make language developers lazy."

At the end of the event, they all agreed that the most rewarding part of language design was the people — the excitement, the gratitude, and to see that community helping others in its community.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: During the U.S. presidential campaign of 1928, a circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be "a chicken in every pot". Times change. When talk turned to education at Wednesday night's 2024 Republican U.S. Presidential Candidate Debate, candidate Asa Hutchinson promised there will be 'CS in every school' if he wins (YouTube).

"Look at Arkansas," the former Arkansas Governor explained. "We have to compete with China. I built computer science education. We led the nation in Computer Science education, going from 1,100 students to 23,000 students taking it. This is how you compete with China. As President of the United States, I will make sure we go from 51% of our schools offering computer science to every school in rural areas and urban areas offering computer science for the benefit of our kids and we can compete with China in terms of technology."

In his last year in office, Hutchinson served as Chair of the National Governors Association (NGA) and rallied the nation's Governors around tech CEOs' demands for more K-12 CS education to culminate his year-long CS evangelism initiative, which the NGA noted enjoyed the support of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Hutchinson's pitch to the Governors included a video challenging them with a question. "Will it be American students who learn to code," Hutchinson asked, "or will industry be required to go overseas to find the talent that we need here in the United States of America?"
Later in the debate former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said entrepreneur/candidate Vivek Ramaswamy "sounds like ChatGPT."

72-year-old Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ (first released in 1985). 38 years later, he gave a short interview for Honeypot.io (which calls itself "Europe's largest tech-focused job platform") offering his own advice for life: Don't overspecialize. Don't be too sure that you know the future. Be flexible, and remember that careers and jobs are a long-term thing. Too many young people think they can optimize something, and then they find they've spent a couple of years or more specializing in something that may not have been the right thing. And in the process they burn out, because they haven't spent enough time building up friendships and having a life outside computing.

I meet a lot of sort of — I don't know what you call them, "junior geeks"? — that just think that the only thing that matters is the speciality of computing — programming or AI or graphics or something like that. And — well, it isn't... And if they do nothing else, well — if you don't communicate your ideas, you can just as well do Sudoku... You have to communicate. And a lot of sort of caricature nerds forget that. They think that if they can just write the best code, they'll change the world. But you have to be able to listen. You have to be able to communicate with your would-be users and learn from them. And you have to be able to communicate your ideas to them.

So you can't just do code. You have to do something about culture and how to express ideas. I mean, I never regretted the time I spent on history and on math. Math sharpens your mind, history gives you some idea of your limitations and what's going on in the world. And so don't be too sure. Take time to have a balanced life.

And be ready for the opportunity. I mean, a broad-based education, a broad-based skill set — which is what you build up when you educate, you're basically building a portfolio of skills — means that you can take advantage of an opportunity when it comes along. You can recognize it sometimes. We have lots of opportunities. But a lot of them, we either can't take advantage of, or we don't notice. It was my fairly broad education — I've done standard computer science, I've done compilers, I've done multiple languages... I think I knew two dozen at the time. And I have done machine architecture, I've done operating systems. And that skill set turned out to be useful.
At the beginning of the video, Stroustrup jokes that it's hard to give advice — and that it's at least as difficult as it is to take advice.

Earlier this year, Bjarne also told the same site the story of how he became a programmer by mistake — misreading a word when choosing what to study afer his high school exams. Stroustrup had thought he was signing up for an applied mathematics course, which instead turned to be a class in computer science...

Ten years ago there was a growing interest in Mandarin, as China's influence and economic heft increased. Now Mandarin-learning is declining in many Western countries. In America, enrolment in university Mandarin courses fell by 21% between 2016 and 2020. An anonymous reader writes, citing an Economist story: That may be because job markets have changed. Translation tools like ChatGPT mean low-level Mandarin skills are not needed anymore. Bilingual Chinese graduates fill most roles that require a higher proficiency. But Western students may also be put off by China's government, which has become more oppressive in the past decade, making living in or working with China seem less appealing.

This shows that China's soft power is weak. But it is also a problem for Western governments, many of which say they need more Mandarin speakers. The CIA, for example, wants to double the number of Mandarin-speakers it employs. As China and its rivals struggle to get along, there is an ever greater need for mutual understanding. Being able to talk to each other might help.

New York City, home to more than a million students in its school system, is the biggest school district in the U.S. -- and now allows any student to enroll virtually in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Time reports: Dubbed Virtual Innovators Academy, there are 17 teachers for about 200 students enrolled in the 2023-2024 school year for sophomore and freshman years. Each year, another grade level will be added, and the school's funding comes from the city and state, just like other public schools. Students meet in-person for required state exams and for monthly social gatherings like arcade games at Dave & Busters or seeing a Broadway show. But many of the most popular extracurriculars are done from home, says Virtual Innovators Academy principal Terri Grey, like esports and flying drones. [...]

And it isn't just in New York: school districts in Utah, Georgia, California, and elsewhere have also launched permanent virtual schools. Concerns remain about the effectiveness of virtual school. Critics worry about the lack of in-person social interaction during crucial developmental years, and about whether teachers can educate as effectively through a screen. But administrators behind the nation's burgeoning virtual schools say they have studied what works and what doesn't from remote-schooling during the pandemic when setting up these communities. Every morning, students at Virtual Innovators Academy meet in small groups with a teacher advisor to talk about how they're doing and give them time to wake up in the morning and connect with other classmates. There's less emphasis on multiple choice tests, which proved harder to administer online, and more emphasis on research projects.

"Too many people judge virtual instruction as if it were the emergency roadside online instruction that happened as a result of the pandemic," says Anthony Godfrey, who helps oversee the K-12 Jordan Virtual Learning Academy in Utah. "This is something very different. This is a carefully thought out, very intentional way of providing a unique and effective means of instruction." [...] But for all the proponents of virtual schooling, there are critics who worry about what's being lost behind the computer screen. [...] Unstructured, spontaneous conversations are often the most memorable parts of school, he argues; students might work side-by-side, help each other with homework, and also socialize in between classes. In virtual school, "How do you create space for bumping into somebody in the hall?" [wonders Nathan Holbert, a researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies virtual learning]. "I don't know that you can."

Professors now fear that ignoring or discouraging the use of AI "will be a disservice to students and leave many behind when entering the workforce," reports CNN: According to a study conducted by higher education research group Intelligent.com, about 30% of college students used ChatGPT for schoolwork this past academic year and it was used most in English classes. Jules White, an associate professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University, believes professors should be explicit in the first few days of school about the course's stance on using AI and that it should be included it in the syllabus. "It cannot be ignored," he said. "I think it's incredibly important for students, faculty and alumni to become experts in AI because it will be so transformative across every industry in demand so we provide the right training."

Vanderbilt is among the early leaders taking a strong stance in support of generative AI by offering university-wide training and workshops to faculty and students. A three-week 18-hour online course taught by White this summer was taken by over 90,000 students, and his paper on "prompt engineering" best practices is routinely cited among academics. "The biggest challenge is with how you frame the instructions, or 'prompts,'" he said. "It has a profound impact on the quality of the response and asking the same thing in various ways can get dramatically different results. We want to make sure our community knows how to effectively leverage this." Prompt engineering jobs, which typically require basic programming experience, can pay up to $300,000.

Although White said concerns around cheating still exist, he believes students who want to plagiarize can still seek out other methods such as Wikipedia or Google searches. Instead, students should be taught that "if they use it in other ways, they will be far more successful...." Some schools are hiring outside experts to teach both faculty and students about how to use AI tools.

According to the National Business Daily, China's fertility rate in 2022 dropped to a record low of 1.09 from 1.15 in 2021. Reuters reports: The state-backed Daily said the figure from China's Population and Development Research Center put it as having the lowest fertility level among countries with a population of more than 100 million. China's fertility rate is already one of the world's lowest alongside South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. China has said it will focus on education, science and technology to improve population quality and strive to maintain a "moderate fertility" level to support economic growth in future.

Hong Kong's Family Planning Association said in a separate release on Tuesday that the number of childless women in the special Chinese administrative region more than doubled from five years ago to 43.2% last year. The percentage of couples with one or two children also tumbled while the average number of children per woman dropped from 1.3 in 2017 to a record low of 0.9 last year, according to its survey.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Stefania Benonisdottir and Augustine Kong at Oxford's Big Data Institute have just demonstrated that we can determine if genetic studies are biased using nothing but the genes of the participants. You may wonder how this was done -- quite reasonably, since we can't very well compare the genes of participants to those of non-participants. The analysis done by Kong and his student relies on the key idea that a genetic sequence that occurs more frequently in participants than in nonparticipants will also occur more frequently in the genetic regions that are shared by two related participants. Put differently, a bit of DNA that is common in the population will show up frequently in the study. But it will still only have a 50/50 chance of showing up in the child of someone who carried a copy. If a bit of DNA makes people more likely to enroll in genetic studies, it will be more common both in the overall data and among closely related family members.

So they checked the genetic sequences shared between first-degree relatives -- either parents and children or siblings (but not twins) -- in the UK Biobank. [...] This analysis used genetic data from about 500,000 people collected between 2006 and 2010. It examined roughly 500,000 genetic regions from around 20,000 pairs of first-degree relatives. They didn't find (or look for) "a gene" that correlates with participation in a study. Rather, they compared all of the shared and not-shared genetic sequences among the pairs of first-degree relatives enrolled in the study and analyzed their relative frequencies according to the above three principles. This analysis allowed them to calculate a polygenic score, a summary of how all of the genetic sequences in aggregate contribute to a trait. They deduced that genetics is positively associated with education level, with being invited to participate in further studies, and with accepting that invitation. Genetics was also associated with low BMI. Education level and BMI are both covariates that are often controlled for when using UK Biobank data. But now, no external information is needed; the ascertainment bias can be determined not from looking at other things about the participants' lives, but from their genes.

Benonisdottir, the first author of the work, explained in an email: "It has previously been reported by others that the UK Biobank is not representative with regard to many traits, including BMI and educational attainment. Thus, the fact that these traits are associated with the participation polygenic score, which does not use any information about EA and BMI but is constructed with weights from analysis using our new method of comparing shared and not-shared alleles of participating first-degree relatives, validates that our method is capturing real information about participation." This validation is essential, since their method is so new. The authors of this study propose that their methodology could be used to look for ascertainment bias using only genetic data and that taking participation data into account could help study outcomes become more accurate. They conclude by noting that "participation" is not thus just a result of someone's characteristics and traits; rather, the propensity to participate is a trait in its own right, and one with a genetic component. Being a joiner is hereditary.

According to the Globe Gazette, the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year. Engadget reports: In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed, Senate File 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the state's education curriculum. Specifically it limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms, requiring titles to be "age appropriateâ and without "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act," per Iowa Code 702.17. But ensuring that every book in the district's archives adhere to these new rules is quickly turning into a mammoth undertaking. "Our classroom and school libraries have vast collections, consisting of texts purchased, donated, and found," Bridgette Exman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Mason City Community School District, said in a statement. "It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements."

As such, the Mason City School District is bringing in AI to parse suspect texts for banned ideas and descriptions since there are simply too many titles for human reviewers to cover on their own. Per the district, a "master list" is first cobbled together from "several sources" based on whether there were previous complaints of sexual content. Books from that list are then scanned by "AI software" -- the district doesn't specify which systems will be employed -- which tells the state censors whether or not there actually is a depiction of sex in the book. So far, the AI has flagged 19 books for removal. [The full list is available here.]

The nation's best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. Then they passed the bill along to students. From a report: The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America's poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis -- even though it's among the most expensive public universities in the U.S.

The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program. The spending is inextricably tied to the nation's $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.

It has long been clear to American families that the cost of college has gone up, even at public schools designed to be affordable for state residents. To get at the root cause, The Wall Street Journal examined financial statements since 2002 from 50 universities known as flagships, typically the oldest public school in each state, and adjusted for inflation. At the median flagship university, spending rose 38% between 2002 and 2022. Only one school in the Journal's analysis -- the University of Idaho -- spent less. The schools paid for it in part by pulling in tuition dollars. The median flagship received more than double the revenue from undergraduate and graduate tuition and fees it did 20 years prior. Even accounting for enrollment gains, that amounted to a 64% price increase for the average student, far outpacing the growth in most big household expenses.

The White House on Tuesday held its first-ever cybersecurity "summit" on the ransomware attacks plaguing U.S. schools, in which criminal hackers have dumped online sensitive student data, including medical records, psychiatric evaluations and even sexual assault reports. PBS reports: At least 48 districts have been hit by ransomware attacks this year -- already three more than in all of 2022, according to the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. All but 10 had data stolen, the firm reported. Typically, Russian-speaking foreign-based gangs steal the data -- sometimes including the Social Security numbers and financial data of district staff -- before activating network-encrypting malware then threaten to dump it online unless paid in cryptocurrency. "Last school year, schools in Arizona, California, Washington, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Michigan were all victims of major cyber attacks," the deputy national security advisor for cyber, Anne Neuberger, told the summit.

An October 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found that more than 1.2 million students were affected in 2020 alone -- with lost learning ranging from three days to three weeks. Nearly one in three U.S. districts had been breached by the end of 2021, according to a survey by the Center for Internet Security, a federally funded nonprofit. "Do not underestimate the ruthlessness of those who would do us harm," said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during the summit, noting that even reports on suicide attempts have been dumped online by criminal extortionists and urging educators to avail themselves of federal resources already available.

Among measures announced at the summit: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will step up tailored security assessments for the K-12 sector while technology providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google and Cloudflare, are offering grants and other support. A pilot proposed by Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel -- yet to be voted on by the agency -- would make $200 million available over three years to strengthen cyber defense in schools and libraries.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Discussion about artificial intelligence is everywhere these days -- even the Vatican. On Tuesday, Pope Francis issued a communique announcing the theme for World Day of Peace 2024 as "Artificial Intelligence and Peace," emphasizing the potential impact of AI on human life and calling for responsible use, ethical reflection, and vigilance to prevent negative consequences. [...] In the communique, Pope Francis' office called for "an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects." Echoing common ethical sentiments related to AI, he said society needs to be vigilant about the technology so that "a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded."

The Pope even glanced at alignment, a popular concept in the AI community that seeks to "align" the outputs of AI with the positive needs of humanity. "The urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law," the statement said. The Vatican issued the communique through the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, which is a department of the Roman Curia, the administrative apparatus of the Holy See and the central governing body through which the Pope conducts the affairs of the global Catholic Church.

Thursday Bill Gates launched a new podcast called "Unconfuse Me." ("What do you do when you can't solve a problem? I like to talk to smart people who can help me understand the subject better...") Join me on my learning journey as I talk to brilliant guests about Alzheimer's, artificial intelligence, the future of education, plant-based meat, the evolution of language, marijuana, and more.
The first words of the first episode are a clip of Seth Rogen saying "Edibles? I don't mess with that. Snoop Dogg doesn't eat edibles. Like, that's how wild the variation on edibles is, and I do not recommend this."

Then Bill Gates' voice says "I love learning, even if a topic's complex, I like to see if I can figure it out..." People reports that the 67-year-old Microsoft co-founder and former CEO also spoke to Rogen and his wife Lauren Miller about the future of Alzheimer's research: With studies showing that "40% of cases" are preventable, according to Rogen, the "five brain healthy habits" in their framework are important: sleep, exercise, nutrition, mental fitness and emotional well-being.

He even confessed that his being a celebrity encourages people to better care for themselves. "I taught this coursework of brain health, and we've also had a neurologist teach the coursework, and we scientifically proved that people retain information better from celebrities than doctors, which is it's a heavy burden," he joked, adding that this information "was published..."

Miller also shared that she goes to a neurologist and the pair are both "open" with their doctors about their habits, and "no one" in the medical world has told them that smoking weed is bad for their brain health. They even believe its benefits of boosting hunger and relieving stress might be good for preventing Alzheimer's. "It's not federally legal, so there isn't money to fund research," Miller said.

Gates later concluded the podcast with his own funny anecdote, laughing about his first time he ever smoked weed — back when it was a "rebellious" thing to do. "In school out of the, say 105 people in my class I think, there were three or four who didn't smoke," he said. "Because it was kind of a, 'Hey, I'm an adult! Hey I can break the rules!' But I will say, sometimes it's like, I guess I'm doing this to be cool. It wasn't so much smoking for pot's sake."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The Electronic Frontier Foundation will award Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the 'pirate' library Sci-Hub, for her efforts to provide access to scientific knowledge. According to EFF, Elbakyan's site is a vital resource for millions of students and researchers. Some medical professionals have even argued that the site helped to save lives. [...] "When I was working on my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not subscribed to anything," Alexandra told TorrentFreak years ago. Today, Sci-Hub continues to tear down academic paywalls but that comes at a cost. Sci-Hub has been sued several times and owes millions in damages to major publishers. In addition, Elbakyan also drew the attention of the FBI. Instead of throwing in the towel, Sci-Hub's founder continues to defend her ideals. They're a thorn in the side of major publishers, but on the other side of the debate, Elbakyan reaps praise.

This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that Sci-Hub's founder will receive an award for her accomplishments in advancing access to scientific knowledge. EFF's awards are presented to people who have taken a leading role in the fight for freedom and innovation online. The previous winners include Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. According to EFF, Elbakyan deserves the award as her life's work enables millions of people to access scientific knowledge that would otherwise exist beyond their financial reach. EFF also highlights that Elbakyan's work helps to challenge the current academic publishing system, where researchers are used as unpaid workhorses. "Sci-Hub is used by millions of students, researchers, medical professionals, journalists, inventors, and curious people all over the world, many of whom provide feedback saying they are grateful for this access to knowledge," said the EFF.

"Some medical professionals have said Sci-Hub helps save human lives; some students have said they wouldn't be able to complete their education without Sci-Hub's help."

Record youth unemployment after Beijing clampdown on private sector, FDI slump. From a report: New graduate Glonee Zhang had high hopes when he landed a job at a lithium battery company in Shenzhen last summer. Now, like more than one in five young people in China, he's out of work. An English major entering a post-COVID working world, Zhang thought "the end of the pandemic would bring a bright future." Six months later, he and half of the firm's intake of 400 new grads were laid off when the company's sales slumped by 10% year-on-year. "Sometimes I feel my soul is being torn apart," said a downbeat Zhang, getting by in the meantime doing odd jobs.

Caught between a long-running regulatory crackdown by Beijing on private enterprise, and a slide in hiring by foreign firms in the country, young people now face a record jobless rate of 21.3%. Since the official number only includes people actively seeking work, some economists say the percentage of young people not in employment, education or training could be significantly higher. While the pandemic may have gone, its departure has unmasked a growing structural problem for President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The world's second-biggest economy is producing twice the number of graduates it did 10 years ago, with nearly 12 million this year - but not the jobs they're qualified to do.

"Over the years, China has expanded universities, but China is still a largely manufacturing [and services] based economy," Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, told Nikkei Asia. "This is structural, because the economy itself is big, it's gradually changing. But it takes time for China to become a more advanced economy like Japan, South Korea and the U.S., which have more professional services dominating job creation." In December 2019, before COVID struck, the youth jobless rate was 12.2%. Graduates like Zhang are now forced to consider continuing in higher education or trying for highly competitive but stable government jobs for which they are overqualified. Studying or working overseas is also an option for some.

Smartphones should be banned from schools to tackle classroom disruption, improve learning and help protect children from cyberbullying, a UN report has recommended. From a report: Unesco, the UN's education, science and culture agency, said there was evidence that excessive mobile phone use was linked to reduced educational performance and that high levels of screen time had a negative effect on children's emotional stability. It said its call for a smartphone ban sent a clear message that digital technology as a whole, including artificial intelligence, should always be subservient to a "human-centred vision" of education, and never supplant face-to-face interaction with teachers.

Unesco warned policymakers against an unthinking embrace of digital technology, arguing that its positive impact on learning outcomes and economic efficiency could be overstated, and new was not always better. "Not all change constitutes progress. Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done," it concluded. With more learning moving online, especially in universities, it urged policymakers not to neglect the "social dimension" of education where students receive face-to-face teaching. "Those urging increasing individualisation may be missing the point of what education is about," it said.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The number one movie in North America is Warner Bros. Discovery's Barbie, which Deadline reports has teamed up with Oppenheimer to fuel a mind-blowing $300M+ box office weekend. ["Oppenheimer Shatters Expectations with $80 Million Debut," read the headline at Variety.]

Now it seems everybody is trying to tap into Barbie buzz, including Microsoft's Xbox [which added Barbie and Ken's cars to Forza Horizon 5] and even Microsoft-backed education nonprofit Code.org. ("Are your students excited about Barbie The Movie? Have them try an HourOfCode [programming game] with Barbie herself!").
The idea is to inspire young students to become coders. But as Code.org shares Instagram images of a software developer Barbie, Slashdot reader theodp remembers when, nine years ago, Code.org's CEO "took to Twitter to blast Barbie and urge for her replacement." They'd joined a viral 2014 Computer Engineer Barbie protest that arose in response to the publication of Barbie F***s It Up Again, a scathing and widely reported-on blog post that prompted Mattel to pull the book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer immediately from Amazon. This may have helped lead to Barbie's loss of her crown as the most popular girls' toy in the ensuing 2014 holiday season to Disney's Frozen princesses Elsa and Anna, and got the Mattel exec who had to apologize for Computer Engineer Barbie called to the White House for a sit down a few months later. (Barbie got a brainy makeover soon thereafter)...

The following year, Disney-owned Lucasfilm and Code.org teamed up on Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code, a signature tutorial for the 2015 Hour of Code. Returning to a Disney princess theme in 2016, Disney and Code.org revealed a new Hour of Code tutorial featuring characters from the animated film Moana just a day ahead of its theatrical release. It was later noted that Moana's screenwriters included Pamela Ribon, who penned the 2014 Barbie-blasting blog post that ended Barbie's short reign as the Hour of Code role model of choice for girls.

Interestingly, Ribon seems to bear no Barbie grudges either, tweeting on the day of the Barbie movie release, "I was like holy s*** can't wait to see it."
To be fair, the movie's trailer promises "If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you," in a deconstruction where Barbie is played by D.C. movies' "Harley Quinn" actress Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey), whose other roles include Tonya Harding and the home-wrecking second wife in The Wolf of Wall Street.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A study published Monday in the Lancet found that the use of hearing aids can reduce the risk of cognitive decline by about half -- 48 percent -- for adults with more risk factors for dementia, such as elevated blood pressure, higher rates of diabetes, lower education and income, and those living alone. The study was presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Amsterdam. [...] Over a three-year period, the randomized controlled trial studied nearly 1,000 older adults, ages 70 to 84, in four sites in the United States. The participants included older adults in an ongoing study of cardiovascular health -- Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) -- and others who were healthier than the ARIC adults; both groups were from the same communities at each site.

When the two groups were combined, use of hearing aids was shown to have no significant effect on slowing cognitive changes. When the group at higher risk of dementia, the ARIC group, was analyzed separately, however, researchers found that hearing intervention -- counseling with an audiologist and use of hearing aids -- had a significant impact on reducing cognitive decline. Those considered at high risk for dementia were older and had lower cognitive scores, among other factors. When the groups were combined, the slower rate of cognitive decline experienced by the healthier participants may have limited any effect of hearing aids, the researchers suggested. Whether hearing treatment reduces the risk of developing dementia in the long term is still unknown. "That's the next big question -- and something we can't answer yet," said Lin, who is also director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He said he and his colleagues are planning a long-term follow-up study to attempt to answer that question.

There have many studies over the past decade to try to determine why people with hearing loss tend to have worse cognition, said Justin S. Golub, an associate professor of otolaryngology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. One theory is that it requires a lot of effort for people with hearing loss to understand what others are saying -- and that necessary brainpower leaves fewer cognitive resources to process the meaning of what was heard, he said. Another theory relates to brain structure. Research has shown that the temporal lobe of people with hearing loss tends to shrink quicker because it is not receiving as much auditory input from the inner ear. The temporal lobe is connected to other parts of the brain, and "that could have cascading influences on brain structure and function," said Golub, who was not part of the Lancet study. A third theory is that people with hearing loss tend to be less social and, as a result, have less cognitive stimulation, he said.