Schools for children of military members achieve results rarely seen in public education. From a report: Amy Dilmar, a middle-school principal in Georgia, is well aware of the many crises threatening American education. The lost learning that piled up during the coronavirus pandemic. The gaping inequalities by race and family income that have only gotten worse. A widening achievement gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students. But she sees little of that at her school in Fort Moore, Ga. The students who solve algebra equations and hone essays at Faith Middle School attend one of the highest-performing school systems in the country. It is run not by a local school board or charter network, but by the Defense Department. With about 66,000 students -- more than the public school enrollment in Boston or Seattle -- the Pentagon's schools for children of military members and civilian employees quietly achieve results most educators can only dream of.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam that is considered the gold standard for comparing states and large districts, the Defense Department's schools outscored every jurisdiction in math and reading last year and managed to avoid widespread pandemic losses. Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students. Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school -- suggesting lower family incomes, on average -- performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates. The schools reopened relatively quickly during the pandemic, but last year's results were no fluke. While the achievement of U.S. students overall has stagnated over the last decade, the military's schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country's lowest-performing students -- in the bottom 25th percentile -- have slipped further behind, the Defense Department's lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.

China aims to grow the country's computing power by more than a third in less than three years, a move set to benefit local suppliers and boost technology self-reliance as US sanctions pressure domestic industry. From a report: The world's second-largest economy is targeting more than 300 exaflops of computing capacity across its tech sector by 2025 from 220 this year, according to a joint statement from several agencies including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The goal marks Beijing's latest attempt to construct digital infrastructure to spur a sluggish economy. China also plans to build an additional 20 smart computing centers in two years. Bigger optical networks and more advanced data storage will be installed in the years until 2025, the regulators said. The additional computational power will support manufacturing, education, finance, transportation, healthcare and energy, they added.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "42 states to go!" exclaimed Code.org to its 1+ million Twitter followers as it celebrated victorious efforts to pass legislation making North Carolina the 8th state to pass a high school computer science graduation requirement, bringing the tech-backed nonprofit a step closer to its goal of making CS a requirement for a HS diploma in all 50 states. But as states make good on pledges made to tech CEOs to make their schoolchildren CS savvy, Education Week cautions that K-12 CS has a big certified teacher shortage problem.
From the article: When trying to ensure all students get access to the knowledge they need for college and careers, sometimes policy can get ahead of teacher capacity. Computer science is a case in point. As of 2022, every state in the nation has passed at least one law or policy intended to promote K-12 computer science education, and 53 percent of high schools offered basic computer science courses that year, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Code.org."

"'There's big money behind making [course offerings] go up higher and faster,' thanks to federal and state grants as well as private foundations, said Paul Bruno, an assistant professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "But then that raises the question, well, who are we getting to teach these courses...?"

Bruno's work in states such as California and North Carolina suggests that few of those new computer science classes are staffed with teachers who are certified in that subject."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Within the past year, there have been approximately five times more school shooting hoaxes called in to police than actual school shootings reported in 2023. Where data from Everytown showed "at least 103 incidents of gunfire on school grounds" in 2023, The Washington Post recently uncovered what seems to be a coordinated campaign of active shooter hoaxes causing "swattings" -- where police respond with extreme force to fake crimes -- at more than 500 schools nationwide over the past year. In just one day in February, "more than 30 schools were targeted," The Post reported.

The Post "examined police reports, emergency call recordings, body-camera footage, or call logs in connection with incidents in 24 states," which seemed to reveal a "distinct pattern" potentially linking swatting hoaxes nationwide. A man who "speaks with a heavy accent" -- and possibly uses a device or app to alter his voice in real time -- relies on a virtual private network (VPN) to mask his IP address, then places the hoax calls on non-emergency lines using free Internet-calling services. He frequently pretends to be a teacher hiding from the fake shooter on campus and sometimes falsely reports student shootings. To some law enforcement officials, the voice sounds too similar from call to call to be chalked up to coincidence. The Post stitched together audio that shows why many authorities believe these hoax calls might be coming from the same caller, whose motivations are currently unknown. It's possible the hoax calls are being orchestrated by one person with a hostile compulsion or by one or several perpetrators advertising swatting services available for hire online. [...]

According to The Post, the FBI has been investigating this string of school shooting hoaxes, but it's unclear how far that investigation has gotten -- mostly because tracing the hoax calls has perplexed many law enforcement agencies nationwide. Tracing calls is difficult partly because many VPN providers outside the US don't always cooperate with law enforcement, and some of the most popular free Internet-calling services only require an email address to sign up. However, The Post reported that it has increasingly become clear to law enforcement that one particular Internet-calling service appears to be the most popular choice for hoax callers reporting school shootings: TextNow. One police captain in Lousiana, Shannon Mack -- who is described as specializing in "cases involving Internet-based phone services -- told The Post that "nine times out of 10," hoax calls she has investigated have come from a TextNow number.

theodp writes: With Microsoft President Satya Nadella testifying in the Google antitrust trial that the tech titans are engaged in a Generative AI Gold Rush, it's no surprise to learn that tech giant-backed and advised nonprofit Code.org has chosen "Creativity with AI" as the theme for this December's Hour of Code, the annual global event that aims to whet K-12 schoolchildren's appetite for rigorous computer science.

"We're taking Hour of Code to new heights with 'Hour of Code: Creativity with AI'," explained Code.org. "Whether it's coding new apps and algorithms, generating unique art, or crafting choreography to get us dancing, AI is opening up fresh opportunities for digital expression that expand our understanding of creativity. What's new? Did you catch that reference to 'dancing'? That's right: Code.org's Dance Party [a 'CS lesson' developed in partnership with the 'childhood to career' Amazon Future Engineer program] will be better than ever this year! Coming soon, this Hour of Code activity will use generative AI to help students add awesome backgrounds and visuals to the dance parties they build with code."

Major fossil fuel companies have committed tens of millions of pounds in funding to UK universities since 2022, it can be revealed, despite many of these institutions having actively pledged to divest from oil and gas. From a report: According to freedom of information requests submitted by the climate journalism site DeSmog, more than $50m in research agreements, tuition fees, scholarships, grants and consultancy fees have been pledged to 44 UK universities by 32 oil, coal and gas companies since 2022. The largest contributors were Shell, the Malaysian state-owned oil company Petronas, and BP. These three companies account for more than 76% of the total figure awarded, having given $25.5m, $6.30m and $5.94m respectively.

A further 10 companies made up nearly 21% of the remaining contributions during this period: Sinopec, Equinor, BHP Group, Total Energies, Eni SPA, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Scottish Power, Kellas Midstream and Ithaca Energy. Previous reporting from openDemocracy and the Guardian found that between 2017 and December 2021, $108.1m in funding was given to UK universities by some of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies. These partnerships have shown no sign of abating, and DeSmog's research shows an additional $50m has been pledged since 2022, even after 102 higher education institutions promised to stop taking funding from the fossil fuel industry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: New York state banned the use of facial recognition technology in schools Wednesday, following a report that concluded the risks to student privacy and civil rights outweigh potential security benefits. Education Commissioner Betty Rosa's order leaves decisions on digital fingerprinting and other biometric technology up to local districts. The state has had a moratorium on facial recognition since parents filed a court challenge to its adoption by an upstate district.

[A]n analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools."

Biotechnology would not stop a student from entering a school "unless an administrator or staff member first noticed that the student was in crisis, had made some sort of threat, or indicated in some other way that they could be a threat to school security," the report said. The state report found that the use of digital fingerprinting was less risky and could be beneficial for school lunch payments and accessing electronic tablets and other devices. Schools may use that technology after seeking parental input, Rosa said. "Schools should be safe places to learn and grow, not spaces where they are constantly scanned and monitored, with their most sensitive information at risk," said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the NYCLU's Education Policy Center.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Today, there are over 110 million Farsi speakers worldwide," explained tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in Tuesday's announcement of its new multi-year 'Code.org in Farsi' initiative. "While the majority of native speakers live in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, there are millions living as immigrants, migrants, and refugees around the world. With the Code.org in Farsi initiative, Farsi-speaking students will have the same access to our curricula that is already available to students in all other major languages of the world."

The announcement closes with a statement regarding Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliance considerations: "As a U.S. nonprofit, Code.org is subject to laws regarding sanctions with Iran. After consulting with U.S. legal counsel experienced in the Iranian Sanctions and Translations Regulations (ITSR), Code.org believes that it may fund, prepare, and distribute the Farsi Translations of CS Curriculum in the United States and elsewhere around the world, including within Iran. The ITSR provides an exemption for "information and informational materials" (the IIM Exemption) and Code.org believes that this exemption will fully shield its funding, preparation, and distribution of the Farsi Translations and thus enable its Farsi Translations effort to proceed in full compliance with U.S. economic sanctions requirements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Burkey Belser, a graphic designer who created the ubiquitous nutrition facts label -- a stark rectangle listing calories, fat, sodium and other content information -- that adorns the packaging of nearly every digestible product in grocery stores, died Sept. 25 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 76. The cause was bladder cancer, said his wife Donna Greenfield, with whom he founded the Washington, D.C., design firm Greenfield/Belser.

Mr. Belser's nutrition facts label -- rendered in bold and light Helvetica type -- was celebrated as a triumph of public health and graphic design when it debuted in 1994 following passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. Although some products had previously included nutritional information, there was no set standard, and the information was of little public health value in helping consumers make better food choices. The new law, drafted as obesity and other diet-related illnesses were surging, required mandatory food labels with nutrients presented in the context of a healthy 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.

Writing in a journal published by the Professional Association for Design, Massimo Vignelli, the renowned Italian designer, called Mr. Belser's creation a "clean testimonial of civilization, a statement of social responsibility, and a masterpiece of graphic design." The Food and Drug Administration chose Mr. Belser to design the nutrition label following his success creating the black and yellow energy guide label for appliances. Once dubbed the "Steve Jobs of information design," Mr. Belser's fondness for exceedingly simple design perfectly suited him for a job that required stripping down nutritional facts to the bare essentials. The report proceeds to tell the tale of how Mr. Belser worked pro bono with his team to labor through three dozen iterations of the label, ultimately settling on "simplicity in itself."

"There's a harmony about it, and the presentation has no extraneous components to it," Belser told The Washington Post. "The words are left and right justified, which gave it a kind of balance. There was no grammatical punctuation like commas or periods or parentheses that would slow the reader down."

He compared the finished product -- which he later adapted to over-the-counter drugs -- to the Apple iPod. "The detail is so important that you wouldn't even notice it and if you didn't notice it's a sign that it succeeded," he said. "I don't know if anybody's heart beats faster when they see nutrition facts, but they sense a pleasure that they get the information they need."

First the Washington Post summarizes what scientists believed in the 1970s. Chlorofluorocarbons, or (CFCs, "could float up into the stratosphere and break down a protective layer of ozone, allowing more ultraviolet light to enter the atmosphere and harm humans, crops, and entire ecosystems. In fact, this had already happened: There was a hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole." Experts view the subsequent treaty to cut down on the use of CFCs — the 1987 Montreal Protocol — as a landmark environmental achievement. Scientists estimate that the pact has prevented millions of cases of skin cancer. Today, the ozone hole is recovering well. But a provocative scientific paper published Friday in the journal AGU Advances suggests that the link between the ozone layer and human health is more complicated than it seems. Under certain circumstances, the researchers write, small decreases in the ozone layer could now save lives...

The researchers initially were examining something else: what would happen to the chemistry of the atmosphere if humans injected sulfates into the stratosphere, a controversial strategy to cool the planet. But in the process, they found that the chemicals would alter the atmosphere's ozone content — with consequences for human health. Sulfate chemicals are known to deplete ozone high in the atmosphere, but, the paper shows, they could also decrease ground-level air pollution. Ozone, or O3, occurs in two forms in the atmosphere: what scientists call "good ozone" in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that sits 6 to 31 miles above the surface, and "bad ozone" in the troposphere, the atmospheric layer that reaches to the ground... an air pollutant in the troposphere that comes from power plants, cars, and industrial sites. It can be deadly, exacerbating respiratory diseases. According to one study, over 400,000 people died from long-term exposure to ozone in 2019 alone.

The new paper shows that "good ozone" and "bad ozone" can interact in unexpected ways. When good ozone is depleted, more UV light reaches the troposphere, which increases the rate of skin cancer. But UV light also catalyzes chemical reactions in the troposphere, including one in which hydroxide, or OH — which some scientists call the "Pac-Man of the atmosphere" — swallows up pollutants. The more UV light, the more OH eats up dangerous pollutants. This decrease in ground-level air pollution, according to the study, could actually outweigh the rise in skin cancer. A small decrease in stratospheric ozone, according to their study, could save between 33,000 and 86,000 lives every year.

Only a few papers have made this connection, including one in 2018 that similarly found that a small decrease in the ozone layer could save lives from air pollution... One way to read the study is as another warning of how dangerous ground-level air pollution is and how far the world still needs to go to clean it up. (Outdoor air pollution writ large is associated with an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths every year.)

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners." As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

U.S. News & World Report's 2024 college rankings features many of the usual prestigious institutions at the top of the list, but also vaults some schools much higher after the publisher revised its grading system to reward different criteria. From a report: U.S News' ranking algorithm now based more than 50% of an institution's score on what it describes as "success in enrolling and graduating students from all backgrounds with manageable debt and post-graduate success." The system also places greater emphasis on "social mobility," which generally refers to an individual making gains in education, income and other markers of socioeconomic status. Overall, more than a dozen public universities shot up 50 spots on the annual list of the U.S.' best colleges, while several elite private schools largely held their ground, the new report shows.

"The significant changes in this year's methodology are part of the ongoing evolution to make sure our rankings capture what is most important for students as they compare colleges and select the school that is right for them," U.S. News CEO Eric Gertler said in a statement. The change comes after a chorus of critics complained that the publication's rankings reinforce elitism and do little to help students find schools that suit their academic needs and financial circumstances. A growing number of schools, including elite institutions such as Columbia University and the Harvard and Yale law schools, also have stopped participating in the ranking and publicly criticized U.S. News' methodology.

A group of publishers in the U.S. have filed a lawsuit against the "notorious" online database Library Genesis (Libgen), a website known for providing free access to scientific papers and books. The lawsuit accuses Libgen of facilitating the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted academic materials. The Register reports: The suit, filed in a New York federal court [PDF], asks for a legal order "requiring the transfer of the Libgen domain names to plaintiffs or, at plaintiffs' election, canceling or deleting the Libgen domain names," with the idea of frustrating visitors -- mostly students -- believed to number in their millions. The filing said that according to similarweb.com, the sites collectively were visited by 9 million people from the U.S. each month from March to May 2023. The suit alleges that several of the Libgen websites solicit "donations" from users. "These solicitations are in English and seek payments only in Bitcoin or [Monero]." It adds: "one Libgen Site reports that it has raised $182,540 from donations since January 1, 2023."

The publishers also claim the people who run LibGen -- named in the suit as Does 1-50 and whom it says "are believed to reside outside of the United States at unknown foreign locations" -- derive "revenue from interstate or international commerce, including through advertisements." It goes on to add: "Defendants compete directly with Plaintiffs by distributing infringing copies of their works for free, displacing legitimate sales. When a consumer obtains Plaintiffs' works from the Libgen Sites instead of through legitimate channels, no remuneration is provided to Plaintiffs or their authors for the substantial investments they have made to create and publish the works."

The textbook publishers claim that "through social media and from their peers, students are bombarded with messages to use the Libgen Sites instead of paying for legal copies of textbooks" -- thus depriving the publishers and the authors they represent of their income. The suit also asks for damages without detailing an amount, although it asks for "an accounting and disgorgement of Defendants' profits, gains, and advantages realized from their unlawful conduct." The complaint claims the ads are in English and for various "U.S. products, such as browser extensions and online games". The suit adds that some "also appear to be phishing attempts, which can result in users downloading a virus or other malicious program onto their computers."

The lawsuit also calls out Google and "other intermediaries," U.S. companies it claims help LibGen "conduct their unlawful operations" -- "NameCheap for domain registration services, Cloudflare for proxy services, and Google for search engine services." It goes on to include a screenshot of Google's "knowledge panel," which it says "describes Libgen as a site [that] enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere."

Elad Gil, writing in a blog post: In most industries, regulation prevents competition. This famous chart of prices over time reflects how highly regulated industries (healthcare, education, energy) have their costs driven up over time, while less regulated industries (clothing, software, toys) drop costs dramatically over time. (Please note I do not believe these are inflation adjusted - so 60-70% may be "break even" pricing inflation adjusted.)

Regulation favors incumbents in two ways. First, it increase the cost of entering a market, in some cases dramatically. The high cost of clinical trials and the extra hurdles put in place to launch a drug are good examples of this. A must-watch video is this one with Paul Janssen, one of the giants of pharma, in which he states that the vast majority of drug development budgets are wasted on tests imposed by regulators which "has little to do with actual research or actual development." This is a partial explanation for why (outside of Moderna, an accident of COVID), no $40B+ market cap new biopharma company has been launched in almost 40 years (despite healthcare being 20% of US GDP).

Secondly, regulation favors incumbents via something known as "regulatory capture." In regulatory capture, the regulators become beholden to a specific industry lobby or group -- for example by receiving jobs in the industry after working as a regulator, or via specific forms of lobbying. There becomes a strong incentive to "play nice" with the incumbents by regulators and to bias regulations their way, in order to get favors later in life. Additional resource: All-In Summit: Bill Gurley Presents 2,851 Miles.

Google is working to push back the expiration date of Chromebooks, addressing concerns held by school administrators that the laptops are too short-lived to be cost effective. From a report: The Alphabet-owned company -- which develops the Chrome operating system running on computers made mostly by others -- said Thursday it plans to provide software updates for Chromebooks for up to a decade. The new policy, which starts next year, ensures that no existing Chromebook will expire within the next two years. The disclosure of this policy change comes after an August column in The Wall Street Journal detailing schools' struggles with expiring Chromebooks. Chromebooks are ubiquitous in classrooms around the country, but some education software doesn't work after what Google calls the Auto Update Expiration date. Unsupported Chromebooks can't be used for mandatory state testing, even if the hardware still appears functional.

When the laptops expire, school districts recycle them, sometimes at a cost, and spend millions of dollars on replacements. Google currently sets expiration dates based on the release date of specific models. Newer models have eight years of support, while older Chromebooks have five. Starting in 2024, Google will support a given laptop "platform" -- a certain combination of hardware components -- for 10 years after the first device in the platform hits store shelves. These so-called platforms aren't unique to specific brands or manufacturers and can be found in a variety of distinct models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills. The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country's hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills. Swedish Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology. "Sweden's students need more textbooks," Edholm said in March. "Physical books are important for student learning."

The minister announced last month in a statement that the government wants to reverse the decision by the National Agency for Education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press. [...] "There's clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning," Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement last month on the country's national digitalization strategy in education. "We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy," said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research. To counter Sweden's decline in 4th grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth 685 million kronor (60 million euros or $64.7 million) in book purchases for the country's schools this year. Another 500 million kronor will be spent annually in 2024 and 2025 to speed up the return of textbooks to schools. "The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that's because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology," said Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education."

Business Insider reports on "a soaring number of Gen Zers who has decided to skip college altogether.

"Four million fewer teenagers enrolled at a college in 2022 than in 2012." For many, the price tag has simply grown too exorbitant to justify the cost. From 2010 to 2022, college tuition rose an average of 12% a year, while overall inflation only increased an average of 2.6% each year. Today it costs at least $104,108 on average to attend four years of public university — and $223,360 for a private university.

At the same time, the salaries students can expect to earn after graduation haven't kept up with the cost of college. A 2019 report from the Pew Research Center found that earnings for young college-educated workers had remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Factor in the average student debt of $33,500 that college graduates owe after they leave school, and many graduates will spend years catching up with their degree-less counterparts. This student-debt-driven financial hole is leaving more young graduates with a lower net worth than previous generations.

The widening gap between the value and the cost of college has started to shift Gen Z's attitude toward higher education. A 2022 survey by Morning Consult found that 41% of Gen Zers said they "tend to trust US colleges and universities," the lowest percentage of any generation. It's a significant shift from when millennials were in their shoes a decade ago: A 2014 Pew Research survey found that 63% of millennials valued a college education or planned to get one. And of those who graduated, 41% of that cohort considered their schooling "very useful" in readying them to enter the workforce — that's compared to 45% of Gen Xers and 47% of boomers who felt the same...

The focus now, especially in the midst of so much uncertainty in the economy, is on using college to prepare for a single, overriding goal: getting a good job.
The article argues this is transforming which classes get emphasized by both students and colleges. For example, in 2014 computer programming was only the 7th most popular major at U.C. Berkeley — but now it's #1. And the data science degree Berkeley created five years ago is now already its third most popular.

And meanwhile, "last year only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities — down from 20% a decade earlier and almost 30% in the 1970s."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader yusing for sharing the article.

A United Nations report "says that overreliance on remote learning technology during the pandemic led to 'staggering' education inequality around the world," reports the New York Times. The 655-page report from the United Nations' education/culture agency UNESCO asks if we've just experienced a worldwide "ed-tech tragedy."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Some of the main findings of the report include:

1. The promise of education technology was overstated
2. Remote online learning worsened education disparities
3. Learning was hindered and altered
4. Regulation and guardrails are needed.
Remember that the report covers countries around the world, with different levels of economic development. One section of the report is actually titled, "Most learners were left behind," citing estimates that "at least half of all students expected to access remote learning systems to continue their education were unable to do so due to technology gaps... In many parts of the world, accessing education via a technology portal was so uncommon and so unrealistic that many families did not even know that the option existed when schools closed." This should not have come as a particular surprise. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the specialized agency of the United Nations for ICT, estimated that approximately 3.7 billion people — roughly half of the world's population — lacked a functional internet connection in 2020... Countries around the world invested heavily in internet-connected solutions for education, even though these solutions commonly reached only a minority of students, resulting in a bifurcation of educational opportunity.
The report begins with a warning from the agency's assistant director-general for education. "Ultimately, we should heed this publication's recommendation to exercise greater humility and caution when considering the educational promise of the latest technological marvels."

On August 30th the University of Michigan announced it had finally restored its internet connectivity and Wi-Fi network, according to the Ann Arbor News, "after several days of outages caused by a 'significant security concern,' officials said." The outage coincided with the first days of the new school year, although "classes continued through the outage." The internet was shut down on 1:45 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 27, after the Information Assurance team at the university identified a security concern, according to previous reporting. The Information Assurance team fights cybersecurity threats and malicious actors... The investigation into the security issue is ongoing and no other information will be released, said Santa Ono, president of University of Michigan.
But a local CBS station heard some theories from cybersecurity experts: "The fact that they took their systems down, like proactively took their systems down, is the indication that it is a cybersecurity incident," said co-founder and CTO of SensCy Dave Kelly. "The reason why you do that is that you don't want it to spread further."

"They probably didn't know to what extent they'd been compromised," senior penetration tester and ethical hacker at NetWorks Group Chris Neuwirth said. "They probably didn't know how many accounts were compromised or the initial entry point that the threat actor used to gain access into the network." Sources close to the investigation told CBS News Detroit that U-M detected malware on its Wi-Fi network and decided to shut it down in response.

So, did the school avoid a disaster? Neuwirth thinks it very well could have. "They likely had very robust backups and data recover, plans, procedures in place that helped them make the decision very confidently and rapidly," he said. "Four days in that they're already bringing up their systems tells me that it's likely that a lot of what they had been preparing for worked."

Kelly said these types of incidents are on the rise. "There's been a large increase in cybersecurity incidents," he said. It's been trending up, quite frankly, for the last several years. It used to be that these threat actors were targeting the government and Fortune 500 companies, but they've started to, more and more over the years, look at universities."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader regoli for sharing the news.

Apple is developing a low-cost MacBook series to compete with Chromebook models in the education sector that could be launched as early as the second half of 2024, claims a new report out of Taiwan. From a report: According to DigiTimes' industry sources, Apple will likely launch the new product line to differentiate it from the company's existing MacBook Air and Pro lines. The outer appearance will still use a metal casing but will be made of "different materials" and the cost of the mechanical components will be lower, claims the report. The launch timeframe for the alleged new MacBook series appears to be based on a lack of related activity at major Apple suppliers like Quanta Computer and Foxconn, making a launch in the first half of next year unlikely.