Parents cave in to kids' relentless begging for Apple's wireless white earbuds; schools ban the. From a report: AirPods, once just an adult status symbol, are turning up on the playground. Kids' persistent nagging for the tiny wireless earbuds have parents groaning about the cost, the risk of loss or theft and concerns that they scream "privilege." [...] The desire for the high-end tech may well be due to the fact that even very young children see them all over social media, but it also speaks to the rising popularity of "hearables," which my colleagues predicted will be among the life-changing technologies of 2020. By the end of the year, eMarketer predicts, more than one-third of the U.S. population will be using smart ear-worn devices.

Johnny Sanchez's (anecdote in the story) 10-year-old son was begging for AirPods because his three older siblings all have them. Mr. Sanchez, a technology manager at an entertainment company in Los Angeles, finally gave his youngest child his AirPods when he upgraded his own. "We've talked about how it feels cool to have them but you don't rub it in peoples" faces," said Mr. Sanchez. Mr. Sanchez doesn't have to worry about his son showing off to his classmates because he said his elementary school has banned AirPods. Other schools have banned them and regular earbuds too, arguing they cause students to be distracted and can be used to cheat on tests.

Google will shut down its low-code development platform, App Maker, early next year. From a report: Google today announced it is killing off yet another service: App Maker, G Suite's low-code environment for building custom business apps. Google App Maker will be "turned down" gradually this year and officially shut down on January 19, 2021. Google cited "low usage" as an explanation for the move. If your business was using App Maker or considering moving to App Maker, you'll need to find another tool. Indeed, Google is making today's announcement not even two weeks after acquiring no-code app development platform AppSheet. Google first launched App Maker as part of an Early Adopter Program in November 2016. At the time, we described it as a service that "lets users drag and drop widgets around on a user interface that complies with Google's Material design principles" to create apps that can be "customized further with scripts, as well as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery content." Once apps are live, usage can be monitored through Google Analytics. App Maker hit general availability for all G Suite Business, Enterprise, and Education customers in June 2018. A year and a half later, and it's already headed to the grave.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging Microsoft to open source Windows 7, which is no longer supported by the company. The Register reports: On the face of it, the logic seems pretty simple. On January 14, Windows 7 reached its end of life as Microsoft turned off the free security update taps with a final fix. "Its life doesn't have to end," cried the foundation. "We call on Microsoft to upcycle it instead." Unfortunately, the FSF couldn't resist a final dig, saying the killing of the OS had brought to an end "its updates as well as its 10 years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security."

There is a precedent. Ancient MS-DOS and Word code has been opened up, and the Calculator app found in the current Windows 10 now lurks on GitHub. But an entire, relatively recent OS? We can see some problems, not least the licensed components lurking in Windows 7 that would need to be either excised or open-sourced as well. Then there are the bits and pieces that the company would consider valuable secrets (large chunks of Windows 7 linger on in Windows 10 after all.) And then there is the fact that Windows 7 is not actually unsupported. Three more years of updates are available for those who can pay. And with Windows (as well those parts of it licensed to third parties) still accounting for a sizeable chunk of Microsoft's revenues, we can imagine a very functional and highly compatible free version is not really in the company's best fiscal interests. You can read the FSF's "Upcycle Windows 7" petition here.

The university underemployed more than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in computer science and engineering -- in order to avoid paying union benefits, UAW Local 2865 says. From a report: The University of California at Berkeley owes student workers $5 million in back pay, a third-party arbitrator ruled on Monday, teaching assistants at the university say. More than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science department -- are eligible for compensation, the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865, which represents 19,000 student workers in the University of California system, told Motherboard. In some cases, individual students will receive around $7,500 per term, the union says. "This victory means that the university cannot get away with a transparent erosion of labor rights guaranteed under our contract," Nathan Kenshur, head steward of UAW Local 2865 and a third-year undergraduate math major at Berkeley, told Motherboard.

Thanks to their union contract, students working 10 hours a week or more at Berkeley are entitled to a full waiver of their in-state tuition fees, $150 in campus fees each semester, and childcare benefits. (Graduate students also receive free healthcare.) But in recent years, Berkeley has avoided paying for these benefits, according to UAW Local 2865. Instead, the university has hired hundreds of students as teaching assistants with appointments of less than 10 hours a week. On Monday, an arbitrator agreed upon by the UAW and the university ruled that Berkeley had intentionally avoided paying its student employees' benefits by hiring part-time workers. It ordered the university to pay the full tuition amount for students who worked these appointments between fall 2017 and today, a press release from the union says.

Google said this week that it will begin to phase out traditional Chrome apps starting in June, and winding down slowly over two years' time. Chrome extensions, though, will live on. From a report: Google said Tuesday in a blog post that it would stop accepting new Chrome apps in March. Existing apps could continue to be developed through June, 2022. The important dates start in June of this year, when Google will end support for Chrome Apps on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Education and Enterprise customers on these platforms will get a little more time to get their affairs in order, until December, 2020. Google had actually said four years ago that it would phase out Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux in 2018. The company appears to have waited longer than announced before beginning this process. The other platform that's affected by this, of course, is Google's own Chrome OS and Chromebooks, for which the apps were originally developed.

As Korean firms start using AI to help hire new employees, students are going to school to learn how to beat the bots. Reuters reports: From his basement office in downtown Gangnam, careers consultant Park Seong-jung is among those in a growing business of offering lessons in handling recruitment screening by computers, not people. Video interviews using facial recognition technology to analyze character are key, according to Park. "Don't force a smile with your lips," he told students looking for work in a recent session, one of many he said he has conducted for hundreds of people. "Smile with your eyes."

Classes in dealing with AI in hiring, now being used by major South Korean conglomerates like SK Innovation and Hyundai Engineering & Construction, are still a tiny niche in the country's multi-billion dollar cram school industry. But classes are growing fast, operators like Park's People & People consultancy claim, offering a three-hour package for up to 100,000 won ($86.26). According to Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI), nearly a quarter of the top 131 corporations in the country currently use or plan to use AI in hiring. One AI video system reviewed by Reuters asks candidates to introduce themselves, during which it spots and counts facial expressions including 'fear' and 'joy' and analyses word choices. It then asks questions that can be tough: "You are on a business trip with your boss and you spot him using the company (credit) card to buy himself a gift. What will you say?" AI hiring also uses 'gamification' to gauge a candidate's personality and adaptability by putting them through a sequence of tests.

There's a new book called A World Without Work by economics scholar/former government policy adviser Daniel Susskind. The Guardian succinctly summarizes its prognostications for the future:
It used to be argued that workers who lost their low-skilled jobs should retrain for more challenging roles, but what happens when the robots, or drones, or driverless cars, come for those as well? Predictions vary but up to half of jobs are at least partially vulnerable to AI, from truck-driving, retail and warehouse work to medicine, law and accountancy. That's why the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers confessed in 2013 that he used to think "the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I'm not so completely certain now." That same year, the economist and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: "Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs." Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes, saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven right, then why not the utopians, too...?

The work ethic, [Susskind] says, is a modern religion that purports to be the only source of meaning and purpose. "What do you do for a living?" is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the "hard-working family". Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages "whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else".

That deserves to be more than an afterthought. The challenge of a world without work isn't just economic but political and psychological... [I]s relying on work to provide self-worth and social status an inevitable human truth or the relatively recent product of a puritan work ethic? Keynes regretted that the possibility of an "age of leisure and abundance" was freighted with dread: "For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy." The state, Susskind concedes with ambivalence, will need to smooth the transition. Moving beyond the "Age of Labour" will require something like a universal basic income (he prefers a more selective conditional basic income), funded by taxes on capital to share the proceeds of technological prosperity. The available work will also need to be more evenly distributed. After decades of a 40-hour week, the recent Labour manifesto, influenced by Skidelsky, promised 32 hours by 2030. And that's the relatively easy part.

Moving society's centre of gravity away from waged labour will require visionary "leisure policies" on every level, from urban planning to education, and a revolution in thinking. "We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life," Susskind writes, implying that this is above his pay grade.
The review concludes that "if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can't be postponed indefinitely.

"It may well be utopia or bust."

Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk summarizes the argument of four researchers who are warning about the perils of pure engineer thought: They write, politely: "Engineers enter the workforce with important analysis skills, but may struggle to 'think outside the box' when it comes to creative problem-solving." The academics blame the way engineers are educated.

They explain there are two sorts of thinking -- convergent and divergent. The former is the one with which engineers are most familiar. You make a list of steps to be taken to solve a problem and you take those steps. You expect a definite answer. Divergent thinking, however, requires many different ways of thinking about a problem and leads to many potential solutions. These academics declare emphatically: "Divergent thinking skills are largely ignored in engineering courses, which tend to focus on a linear progression of narrow, discipline-focused technical information."

Ah, that explains a lot, doesn't it? Indeed, these researchers insist that engineering students "become experts at working individually and applying a series of formulas and rules to structured problems with a 'right' answer."

Oddly, I know several people at Google just like that.
Fortunately, the researchers are also proposing this solution:

"While engineers need skills in analysis and judgment, they also need to cultivate an open, curious, and kind attitude, so they don't fixate on one particular approach and are able to consider new data."

An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away. From a report: That's what NYU's Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled "Air Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement" that looks at the surprising consequences of the Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015. The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we're talking about. The school district didn't reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it's consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.

If Gilraine's result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what's probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention -- one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children. And while it's too hasty to draw sweeping conclusions on the basis of one study, it would be incredibly cheap to have a few cities experiment with installing air filters in some of their schools to get more data and draw clearer conclusions about exactly how much of a difference this makes.

The internet's full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the tiny island nation Tuvalu (located halfway between Hawaii and Australia), but its evolution has made Tuvalu's .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. From a report: Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its annual gross national income (GNI) from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu's contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher. [...] Compulsory public education has brought the nation's adult literacy rate up to nearly 99 percent, and the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy, with its territorial fishing rights accounting for the biggest chunk of its GNI at an estimated $19 million in license fees in 2018. But another sizable portion stems directly from its licensing of its .tv URL suffix, thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites. As sites utilizing .tv grow in prominence, Tuvalu's domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.

Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by .tv. The nation's Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite connection with reduced streaming capacity. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible ways than entertainment. "[.tv] has provided a certain, sure income," said Seve Paeniu, Tuvalu's Minister of Finance. "It enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education for the kids, providing medical services to our people, and also in terms of improving the basic economic infrastructure and service delivery to our communities." To monetize .tv, the government of Tuvalu has negotiated a series of agreements allowing foreign companies to market the top-level domain for commercial use. Under the current deal, signed in 2011, Virginia-based network infrastructure firm Verisign pays Tuvalu around $5 million per year for the right to administer .tv. For a nation whose annual domestic revenues tend to hover around $60 million, this is a substantial benefit.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A Microsoft blog post notes the company has lined up K-12 educators to sing the praises of Minecraft Education Edition at the Future of Education Technology Conference, where it'll also be pitching Microsoft Education in general. A 2019 Recap of Minecraft: Education Edition (and an accompanying video) highlight Microsoft's success in getting teachers to use Minecraft to teach subjects across the K-12 curriculum, not just Hour of Code tutorials. Microsoft's ambitions for Minecraft were tipped in a 2015 press release, which included the lofty claim that "Minecraft has the power to transform learning on a global scale...."

There are some teacher walkthrough videos available for review, like the unlisted one for Math Bed Wars! , a Common Core-aligned Minecraft-based lesson that teaches multiplication commutativity ("Students build arrays to show commutative properties of multiplication while constructing defenses as part of a Minecraft mini-game"). The lesson plan for Math Bed Wars! warns that children who fail to get enough hands-on Minecraft play time aren't likely to get much of a math education:

"While there is not much actually doing of math in the section of the lesson plan, it is by far the most important. It is in the game play where they get its meaning, and deeper thinking happens. For example, they will start thinking how to use math to build strategically. However, the most important part is what it does for the students' engagement across math. So please give them at least 30 minutes of game play, even if you have to break up the lesson into two days."

Is it okay for schools to make children play Microsoft Minecraft if the kids want to learn math and other subjects?

Hundreds of thousands of American students are being tracked by their colleges to monitor attendance, analyze behavior and assess their mental health, the Washington Post reported this week. That article has now provoked some responses...

Jay Balan, chief security researcher at Bitdefender, told Gizmodo that the makers of the student-tracking apps should at least offer bug bounties and disclose their source code -- while rattling off easily foreseeable scenarios like the stalking of students. Gizmodo notes one app's privacy policy actually allows them to "collect or infer" students' approximate location -- even when students have turned off location tracking -- and allows third parties to "set and access their own tracking technologies on your devices."

And cypherpunk Lance R. Vick tweeted in response to the article, "If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas..."

Gizmodo took him up on his offer -- and here's a bit of what he said: Students could reverse engineer the app to develop their own app beacon emulators to tell the tracking beacons that all students are present all the time. They could also perhaps deploy their own rogue tracking beacons to publish the anonymised attendance data for all students to show which teachers are the most boring as evidenced by lack of attendance. If one was hypothetically in an area without laws against harmful radio interference (like outside the U.S.) they could use one of many devices on the market to disrupt all Bluetooth communications in a target area so no one gets tracked... If nothing else, you could potentially just find a call in the API that takes a bit longer to come back than the rest. This tells you it takes some amount of processing on their side. What happens if you run that call a thousand times a second? Or only call it partway over and over again? This often brings poorly designed web services to a halt very quickly...

Assuming explorations on the endpoints like the phone app or beacon firmware fail you could still potentially learn useful information exploring the wireless traffic itself using popular SDR tools like a HackRF, Ubertooth, BladeRF. Here you potentially see how often they transmit, what lives in each packet, and how you might convert your own devices, perhaps a Raspberry Pi with a USB Bluetooth dongle, to be a beacon of your own.

Anyone doing this sort of thing should check their local and federal laws and approach it with caution. But these exact sorts of situations can, for some, be the start of a different type of education path -- a path into security research. Bypassing annoying digital restrictions at colleges was a part of how I got my start, so maybe a new generation can do similar. :)
Gizmodo calls his remarks "hypothetical hacking that you (a student with a bright future who doesn't want any trouble) should probably not do because you might be breaking the law."

But then how should students respond to their school's surveillance systems?

Rog Srigley, writer who teaches at Humber College and Laurentian University, offered his students extra credit if they would give him their phones for nine days and write about living without them. "What they wrote was remarkable, and remarkably consistent," he writes. "These university students, given the chance to say what they felt, didn't gracefully submit to the tech industry and its devices." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares what some of them said: "Believe it or not, I had to walk up to a stranger and ask what time it was. It honestly took me a lot of guts and confidence to ask someone," Janet wrote. (Her name, like the others here, is a pseudonym.) She describes the attitude she was up against: "Why do you need to ask me the time? Everyone has a cell phone. You must be weird or something." Emily went even further. Simply walking by strangers "in the hallway or when I passed them on the street" caused almost all of them to take out a phone "right before I could gain eye contact with them."

To these young people, direct, unmediated human contact was experienced as ill-mannered at best and strange at worst. James: "One of the worst and most common things people do nowadays is pull out their cell phone and use it while in a face-to-face conversation. This action is very rude and unacceptable, but yet again, I find myself guilty of this sometimes because it is the norm." Emily noticed that "a lot of people used their cell phones when they felt they were in an awkward situation, for an example [sic] being at a party while no one was speaking to them." The price of this protection from awkward moments is the loss of human relationships, a consequence that almost all the students identified and lamented. Without his phone, James said, he found himself forced to look others in the eye and engage in conversation. Stewart put a moral spin on it. "Being forced to have [real relations with people] obviously made me a better person because each time it happened I learned how to deal with the situation better, other than sticking my face in a phone." Ten of the 12 students said their phones were compromising their ability to have such relationships. Peter: "I have to admit, it was pretty nice without the phone all week. Didn't have to hear the fucking thing ring or vibrate once, and didn't feel bad not answering phone calls because there were none to ignore." "It felt so free without one and it was nice knowing no one could bother me when I didn't want to be bothered," wrote William.

Emily said that she found herself "sleeping more peacefully after the first two nights of attempting to sleep right away when the lights got shut off." Stewart: "Actually I got things done much quicker without the cell because instead of waiting for a response from someone (that you don't even know if they read your message or not) you just called them [from a land line], either got an answer or didn't, and moved on to the next thing."

Colleges are tracking students' location to enforce attendance, analyze their behavior and assess their mental health. One company calculates a student's "risk score" based on factors such as whether she is going to the library enough. Washington Post reports: When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full. "They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change." Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not. "We're adults. Do we really need to be tracked?" said Robby Pfeifer, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the campus' WiFi network. "Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? ... And is it just going to keep progressing until we're micromanaged every second of the day?" This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people's activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize. The Washington Post includes mention of a Slashdot comment from a user who worries whether anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far. "Graduates will be well prepared ... to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems," the Slashdot commenter said. "Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984."

In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko." As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a problem with the pupils themselves. From a report: Ten-year-old Yuta Ito waited until the annual Golden Week holiday last spring to tell his parents how he was feeling -- on a family day out he confessed that he no longer wanted to go to school. For months he had been attending his primary school with great reluctance, often refusing to go at all. He was being bullied and kept fighting with his classmates. His parents then had three choices: get Yuta to attend school counselling in the hope things would improve, home-school him, or send him to a free school. They chose the last option. Now Yuta spends his school days doing whatever he wants -- and he's much happier.

Yuta is one of Japan's many futoko, defined by Japan's education ministry as children who don't go to school for more than 30 days, for reasons unrelated to health or finances. The term has been variously translated as absenteeism, truancy, school phobia or school refusal. Attitudes to futoko have changed over the decades. Until 1992 school refusal -- then called tokokyoshi, meaning resistance -- was considered a type of mental illness. But in 1997 the terminology changed to the more neutral futoko, meaning non-attendance. On 17 October, the government announced that absenteeism among elementary and junior high school students had hit a record high, with 164,528 children absent for 30 days or more during 2018, up from 144,031 in 2017.

theodp writes: The Hour of Code home page captured by the Internet Archive on Dec. 17th boasted that 835,581,513 students had been 'served' an Hour of Code. Three days later, however, the numbers had jumped to 910,905,104 served, presumably due to counter updates that were deferred during this year's event. "It has been a HUGE year -- and decade! -- for computer science education," tweeted tech-backed Code.org. All over the world, more than 910 MILLION students have started an #HourOfCode since we began this journey in 2013. Thank YOU for being part of this global movement....!"

The Hour of Code Leaderboards consistently suggest the city in the world with the greatest Hour of Code participation is tiny Boardman, OR (population 4,490), perhaps because of the Amazon data centers that an AWS Case Study notes power Code.org.

Last year, Finland launched a free online crash course in artificial intelligence with the aim of educating its citizens about the new technology. Now, as a Christmas present to the world, the European nation is making the six week program available for anyone to take. The Verge reports: Strictly speaking, it's a present for the European Union. Finland is relinquishing the EU's rotating presidency at the end of the year, and decided to translate its course into every EU language as a gift to citizens. But there aren't any geographical restrictions as to who can take the course, so really it's to the world's benefit. The course certainly proved itself in Finland, with more than 1 percent of the Nordic nation's 5.5 million citizens signing up. The course, named Elements of AI, is currently available in English, Swedish, Estonian, Finnish, and German.

Dominion Energy, the utility that supplies the Commonwealth of Virginia with most of its electricity, is about to begin an ambitious plan to roll out electric school buses in the state that will store electricity when not ferrying kids to school. "Earlier this week, it was announced that phase one, which begins in 2020, will start with 50 electric school buses built by Thomas Built Buses in partnership with Proterra and Daimler Trucks," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The buses will be Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys, an electric version of one of TBB's existing buses. Each one will carry 220kWh of lithium-ion battery storage for a range of about 134 miles (216km), and they will recharge in about three hours using Proterra's 60kW DC fast charging system.

Dominion Energy says that replacing a single diesel school bus with an EV bus has the same effect as taking more than five gasoline cars off the road, and by 2025 it hopes to have deployed 1,000 EV school buses to the Commonwealth. Should all go well, it wants 50 percent of Virginia's school bus fleet to be battery electric by 2030. The utility is offsetting the costs to school districts, in part because it wants to use the buses for vehicle-to-grid storage when they're not on the school run. In fact, a school district's suitability for V2G is the main determining factor in deciding which districts will be chosen for the first 50 buses.

Schools are increasingly adopting a "one-to-one" policy of giving each child a digital device -- often an iPad -- and most students in the U.S. now use digital learning tools in school. There's near-universal enthusiasm for technology on the part of educators. Unfortunately, the evidence is equivocal at best. Some studies have found positive effects, at least from moderate amounts of computer use, especially in math. But much of the data shows a negative impact. It looks like the most vulnerable students can be harmed the most by a heavy dose of technology -- or, at best, not helped. Why are these devices so unhelpful for learning? Various explanations have been offered. When students read text from a screen, they absorb less information than when they read it on paper, for example. But there are deeper reasons, too. Unless we pay attention to these, we risk embedding a deeper digital divide.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found. Cutting air pollution around the world to the EU's legal limit could prevent millions of people becoming depressed, the research suggests. This assumes that exposure to toxic air is causing these cases of depression. Scientists believe this is likely but is difficult to prove beyond doubt. The particle pollution analyzed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry. The researchers said the new evidence further strengthened calls to tackle what the World Health Organization calls the "silent public health emergency" of dirty air.

The research, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, used strict quality criteria to select and pool research data from 16 countries published up to 2017. This revealed a strong statistical link between toxic air and depression and suicide. [...] The data analyzed in the new research linked depression with air pollution particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (equivalent to 0.0025 millimeters and known as PM2.5). People exposed to an increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m^3) in the level of PM2.5 for a year or more had a 10% higher risk of getting depression. Levels of PM2.5 in cities range from as high as 114ug/m^3 in Delhi, India, to just 6ug/m^3 in Ottawa, Canada. In UK cities in 2017, the average PM2.5 level was 13ug/m^3. The researchers estimated that lowering this to the WHO recommended limit of 10ug/m^3 could reduce depression in city dwellers by about 2.5%. The available data on suicide risk was for particles ranging up to 10 micrometers (PM10). The researchers found a short-term effect, with a 10ug/m^3 increase over three days raising the risk of suicide by 2%. "The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm," the report notes.

"The studies analyzed took account of many factors that might affect mental health, including home location, income, education, smoking, employment and obesity. But they were not able to separate the potential impact of noise, which often occurs alongside air pollution and is known to have psychological effects."