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28 October, 2016
Apple has announced restyled MacBook Pros with a Touch Bar feature that redefines how we interact with notebooks. In an event overnight in Cupertino, it unwrapped new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros that replace the function keys across the top of the keyboard with a totally configurable touch strip that can display keys with variable icons that automatically display context sensitive choices.
When I first learnt coding in the late 1960s it was a long, tedious process. I was at a school which luckily had an “in” with the Victorian Education Department and Monash University to use Minitran, a cutdown version of the widely used Fortran programming language used for general scientific applications.
Labels:
Education,
History,
ICT Capability
27 October, 2016
24 October, 2016
HSC: Maths teachers in revolt over proposed new syllabu. Dr Pender is one of several prominent mathematicians who have signed a letter demanding the board withdraw the draft syllabuses. Another signatory is the principal of SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Jenny Allum. He said the proposed changes to assessment, which would include an increase in the number of take-home projects, would cheapen mathematics in the eyes of most students. "HSC courses with projects already have huge problems with plagiarism, with assignments being traded on the web, and assignments being completed by tutors or parents."
18 October, 2016
Augmented reality, that other revolutionary visual experience, is about to be unleashed in Australia, but it is expensive and oriented more to commercial use. Microsoft’s HoloLens headset comes to Australia late next month. Pre-orders are open: $4369 for the development edition and $7269 for the commercial suite. They can be ordered from the Microsoft Store.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
ICT Capability
Hyper Anna has secured a $1.25 million investment from Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure and AirTree Ventures, to support further development of its natural language-driven data analytics solution. The funds will be used to grow the business and help launch in the US in 2017. Led by co-founders and data scientists Natalie Nguyen, Sam Zheng and Kent Tian, Hyper Anna is working on technology that allows people to interact with any collection of data they wish from any device they choose
17 October, 2016
16 October, 2016
Early this year, analyst Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research predicted that the tech world was going to see big layoffs in 2016—some 330,000 in all at major tech companies. At the time, these numbers seemed way over the top. Then IBM started slashing jobs in March—and continued to wield the ax over and over as the year progressed. Yahoo began layoffs of some 15 percent of its employees in February. Intel announced in April that it would lay off 12,000 this year.
Labels:
ICT Career
14 October, 2016
In 2010, when Google began mulling a withdrawal from China, foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said in a press conference that “China’s internet is open,” adding that the government “welcomes international internet corporations to do business in China in accordance with law.” Via a mixture of algorithms and workers, domestic internet companies collaborate with the government to curb online dissent and censor certain keywords, and they share private user data with authorities when asked. Meanwhile, China’s Great Firewall blocks consumer access to many overseas sites, including Facebook and Google, as they currently don’t censor content at the scope the Chinese government demands.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Ethical,
Intercultural Understanding,
Privacy
Fujitsu’s head of manufacturing, Toshio Hirose, says that the company is working on evolving a new model for manufacturing where people and robots grow together every day. “Fujitsu has production sites that combine expertise in both hardware, such as sensors and cloud systems, and software such as production control solutions and AI. We also have human resources to support the sites and we are using the total capabilities amassed from all of these assets to drive next-generation manufacturing,” says Hirose.
11 October, 2016
Internationally recognised UniSA experts in bilingual, multilingual and intercultural education will play a key role in South Australia’s first Chinese bilingual school. UniSA’s Research Centre for Languages and Cultures is developing the language and content curriculum for William Light R-12 School’s bilingual program, which introduces Mandarin Chinese to students, building up towards the curriculum being offered half in Chinese and half in English.
Labels:
Education,
Intercultural Understanding
10 October, 2016
This slow-building approach is at odds with some aspects of public education. It’s not uncommon for districts to require that each class period address a discrete objective, and teachers are expected to measure whether students learned it at the end of the period. The authors of Common Core math and NGSS don’t see their disciplines fitting into that structure. “One insight we got is that there’s almost no mathematics worth learning that breaks into lesson-size pieces,” Daro said. “You have a three- or four-week sequence and treat it with coherence. It’s about systems and structures, not small facts and small methods. It’s about how it all works together.” Schweingruber agrees. “Some of these ideas in science are hard to get quickly,” she said. “It took humans hundreds of years, so why would kids figure them out quickly?”
09 October, 2016
THEY might be operating drones, trading Bitcoins, designing virtual reality worlds or creating artificial intelligence systems. And by the 2030s, many of today’s high school students will be doing jobs that nobody has even thought of yet. A new program for secondary students will take them into high tech workplaces to explore the skills they will need for jobs likely to be on offer in 15 years’ time. The Australian Science and Mathematics School will combine with employment planning company Workforce BluePrint to pilot the 21st Century Capabilities and Careers program.
It was never going to last: three major streaming services, launched within three months, in a market as tiny as Australia. Last year, small player Ezyflix closed. Then Quickflix went into voluntary administration in April. Now, the streaming wars have produced their first major casualty, with Presto due to shut in January 2017.
Labels:
Sustainability
07 October, 2016
Australia is among more than 40 countries to have issued a declaration laying out principles for the export and use of armed drones, to ensure they don’t cause instability or help terrorism and organised crime. US allies such as Britain, Germany and Australia signed the declaration released by the US State Department. France, Israel, Brazil, Russia and China, among other countries, did not sign the Joint Declaration for the Export and Subsequent Use of Armed or Strike-Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical,
Robotics,
Social
04 October, 2016
03 October, 2016
“[Google’s G Suite] is still much smaller than Microsoft Office, and the Microsoft Office suite is still far more capable overall,” Dawson says. “If you need more advanced functionality, it’s quite likely that the G Suite won’t do the trick for you.” Dawson points out that while coworkers might start off using Google Docs to collaborate on writing, say, a press release, it’s Microsoft that still has the advanced templates and formatting functionalities required when it comes time to actually send it out.
In a paper they released earlier this month titled “Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs,” a team of computer scientists at Cornell Tech, the Swiss institute EPFL in Lausanne, and the University of North Carolina detail how they were able to reverse engineer machine learning-trained AIs based only on sending them queries and analyzing the responses. By training their own AI with the target AI’s output, they found they could produce software that was able to predict with near-100% accuracy the responses of the AI they’d cloned, sometimes after a few thousand or even just hundreds of queries.
30 September, 2016
28 September, 2016
Skype’s first employee, Taavet Hinrikus from the tiny country of Estonia, has shifted from disrupting communications to international money transfers with his billion-dollar start-up TransferWise, and says Australia is the perfect market. TransferWise offers international money transfers five to 10 times cheaper than the banks, and Hinrikus says he came up with the idea during his time at Skype, where he was being paid in euros despite working in Britain. He had to convert the euros every time he was paid.
When it comes to users’ privacy, messaging apps can vary widely — a fact that came to a head when Alphabet’s Google released its new Allo app. The messenger performs novel tricks like suggesting what to say next, but it does it by analysing the contents of users’ messages. Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, called the app “Google Surveillance” in a tweet, and some security experts recommended skipping the download, which was released last week.
27 September, 2016
His misguided political donation could have serious impacts on Oculus and Facebook. On Thursday, it was revealed that Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, had funded the efforts of Nimble America, a pro-Donald Trump nonprofit. Yesterday, Luckey confirmed that he had made a $10,000 donation to the group, while seeming to walk back any support for Trump himself, saying he would be voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Luckey also denied that he was responsible for some Reddit posts attributed to him by the Daily Beast. Meanwhile, several Oculus Rift game developers have said they will distance themselves from the platform because of Luckey’s political involvement
26 September, 2016
The technology that repelled the hackers was a style of software programming known as formal verification. Unlike most computer code, which is written informally and evaluated based mainly on whether it works, formally verified software reads like a mathematical proof: Each statement follows logically from the preceding one. An entire program can be tested with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems.
23 September, 2016
ere’s how to enter Recovery mode on iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus now that Apple has replaced the mechanical Home button with a capacitive one. The introduction of the iPhone 7 along with its capacitive Home / Touch ID button may have gone well down with the average device owner, but it hasn’t exactly settled in well with those who have reason to put their phones into DFU or Recovery mode. After all, the Home button was an integral part of both of those processes. We’ve already showed you how to enter DFU mode on iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, so now, it takes perfect sense to show you the Recovery mode process as well. But first, let us see what’s the difference between DFU mode and Recovery mode.
Labels:
ICT Capability
A teenage hacker has found a way to circumvent the phone’s security and restrictions, jailbreaking a brand new iPhone 7 running iOS 10, effectively taking full control of it and allowing him to install apps not approved by Apple. The 19-year-old hacker, who’s known online as qwertyoruiop but whose real name is Luca Todesco, took advantage of a series of bugs he found and exploited—and all it took him, he said, was just 24 hours.
Today, SolidRun announces an Intel Braswell-based MicroSoM. Unlike the ARM-powered Raspberry Pi, this is x86 compatible, meaning it can run full Windows 10. Plus, if you install a Linux distro, there will be far more packages available, such as Google Chrome, which is not available for Pi. Heck, it can probably serve as a respectable desktop. Even though it costs more than the Raspberry Pi, is it a better deal?
Labels:
ICT Capability
21 September, 2016
Education is not exempt either. Established educational institutions are being rattled by new players like General Assembly and Lynda.com, which are avoiding the looming hold major universities have over potential paying students and instead are thriving by addressing specific needs for new skills or accelerated training. On the flip side, the universities, TAFEs and schools that are embracing more tech-driven ways of teaching and learning are future-proofing themselves against more agile start-ups and are expanding their pool of student candidates to include those learning online or remotely. In each of these industries, we’re seeing innovation stem from a focus on what the customer wants. It’s not rocket science, and it can come from any person or business as long as the right drivers are behind the decision-making and product design.
“Factory floors, supply chain, trucking, everything is becoming a data source and can be analysed.” The end result of this level of connectivity is greater efficiency and, according to Dr Vogels, almost every company is becoming a software and analytics company. That trend implies a greater dependence on the cloud, which is music to the ears of Dr Vogels, the key architect of Amazon Web Services.
Labels:
ICT Capability
16 September, 2016
the Blackbird. The electric car doesn’t look like any ride you’ve seen during a commercial break. Instead of a roof on top, it’s got a pile of spinning lasers and cameras. It’s covered in white triangles. It has just one seat. But it can take on the form of a nearly infinite number of cars. If you see an Audi, various Mercedes, an Aston Martin, a Corvette, a Mustang, even a Chevy Sonic, on TV—you might be looking at the Blackbird, under a digital disguise.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Graphic Design
Hacker George Hotz is gearing up to launch his automotive AI start-up's first official product. In December, the 26-year-old—known for infiltrating Apple's iPhone and Sony's PlayStation 3—moved on to bigger things: turning a 2016 Acura ILX into an autonomous vehicle. According to Bloomberg, Hotz outfitted the car with a laser-based radar (lidar) system, a camera, a 21.5-inch screen, a "tangle of electronics," and a joystick attached to a wooden board.
15 September, 2016
To help meet demand, online educator Udacity is joining Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Chinese ridesharing behemoth Didi, and Otto, the autonomous truck outfit that Uber recently bought. They’re launching a 27-week course that promises to turn anyone with $2,400 and basic coding experience into a deep learning engineer.
14 September, 2016
07 September, 2016
At the heart of the Chinese classroom is the teacher’s unshakeable belief that all children are capable of learning anything if that learning is presented in the right way. The idea works on the basis that understanding is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution, and that difficulty is pleasurable.
05 September, 2016
NBN Co is looking to juice up its copper infrastructure with the company working with technology partner Nokia to trial XG-FAST over the copper network. XG-FAST is the latest iteration of Nokia’s G.fast technology that allows the delivery of multi-gigabit speeds over copper.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
research
FOR THE FIRST time since even before Facebook acquired it in a whopping $19 billion acquisition two years ago, WhatsApp has changed its terms of service. This time, you’ll want to read them very closely. Under the new user agreement, WhatsApp will share the phone numbers of people using the service with Facebook, along with analytics such as what devices and operating systems are being used. Previously, no information passed between the two, a stance more in line with WhatsApp’s original sales pitch as a privacy oasis.
Artificial intelligence used to be something that featured in science fiction films. Now, it's writing the scripts. Following the debut in June of Sunspring, a hilariously disjointed short film written entirely by AI, a feature-length movie has been written by AI – with human input – in an effort to nail the formula for box office success.
Girl Geek Academy has launched what it says is the world’s first hackathon for girls aged 5 to 8, Miss Makes Code. The hackathon, led by Girl Geek Academy CEO Sarah Moran, will see over 70 young girls learn deep algorithmic thinking and creative problem solving through practical hands-on tasks.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Education,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Literacy,
Numeracy,
Social,
Women in IT
27 August, 2016
25 August, 2016
Nowadays, watching other people play videogames is a multi-million-dollar industry called Let’s Plays. They dominate YouTube’s top earner charts and have formed the broad template for streaming live gameplay on the website Twitch, which Amazon acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2014.
Labels:
Game,
Personal / Social Capability,
Social
Code.org’s new login approach to student privacy We recently announced the bulk-deletion of email addresses associated with our Code Studio learning platform student accounts. We are able to do this because we designed our login to allow a student to use their email address to create their account, without ever storing the actual email address.
12 August, 2016
10 August, 2016
09 August, 2016
Census officials desperately hope that Australians complete their forms fully and accurately following an outcry over privacy and security that risks diminishing public trust. The fear is eventual massive identity theft by hackers, with the census also going online for the first time. Central to concern is the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) decision to match census records against that held by government agencies, and to store names and addresses for up to four years.
08 August, 2016
28 July, 2016
23 July, 2016
05 July, 2016
Zuckerberg said in December that he intended to put 99 per cent of his Facebook shares into a new philanthropy project focusing on human potential and equality. Advertisement The creation of the Class C shares would allow Zuckerberg to sell the non-voting stock, but keep the voting Class A and Class B shares that would let him retain control of Facebook.
04 July, 2016
The safest jobs need a human touch The jobs most at risk of computerisation are those that include routine, repeatable tasks or transactions that can be handled online — roles which can be performed by people such as telemarketers, accountants, lawyers, retail sales and real-estate agents. The skills and professions that are safe from automation are those that are highly skilled and creative or require a human touch — roles filled by nurses, baristas, beauticians, physical therapists, dentists, personal trainers and firefighters, among others.
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