Blog Tips
Simply click on the URL (http:// ...) link in each article to visit the article's page
To search this blog, try the Search Box on the right, or click on the Labels following each post entry
To search this blog, try the Search Box on the right, or click on the Labels following each post entry
03 April, 2019
Yang is running a rather methodical, data-driven, science-happy campaign. He’s applying that approach to more standard-issue problems like labor, climate change, and the economy but giving them a decidedly tech-forward approach: how (and why) we should define robots, what use might geoengineering have in saving the planet, and whether the government should embrace universal basic income and give every American a $1,000 check.
27 March, 2019
The sixth ŠKODA Student Concept Car will be a spectacular pickup version of the ŠKODA KODIAQ. That is the goal of 35 vocational students, among them six young women, who in 2019 will for the first time be using the ŠKODA KODIAQ as the starting point for their Student Car. With expert support from experienced ŠKODA engineers and staff from the Technical Development, Design and Production departments, they are transforming the Czech car manufacturer’s largest SUV into a dynamic, two-door pickup.
21 March, 2019
20 March, 2019
Aston Martin boss Andy Palmer says a push for semi-autonomous driving systems is “reckless”. Palmer says the brand won’t follow Tesla, Audi and Mercedes down the path of “level three” autonomous driving features, which allow people to hand over control to the car in some circumstances but put the responsibility back on the driver if something goes wrong.
13 March, 2019
05 March, 2019
04 March, 2019
Why technologists are limiting their families' screen time Fears over the side effects of digital devices and social media are prompting tech experts to limit the time they and their children spend online. Simmons allows her children to use computers but would prefer them to pull the machines apart or learn the code that powers them, rather than stare mindlessly at screens. "They need to be creators, rather than users," she says.
Microsoft hasn't lost site of the consumer market entirely with HoloLens. It had Tim Sweeney — CEO of Fortnite maker Epic Games — onstage gushing about the potential of HoloLens and what it could do for gaming as a medium in the future and announced that Unreal Engine 4 support was coming. While HoloLens 2 might be for businesses, HoloLens 3 could potentially be for everyone.
Labels:
3D,
Education,
ICT Capability,
research
18 February, 2019
The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous. Why should we pay attention to the particular words used to describe, and justify, the regularly scheduled “disruptions” of late capitalism? Published last week by Haymarket Books, Leary’s Keywords explores the regime of late-capitalist language: a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that he argues promulgate values friendly to corporations (hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies) over those friendly to human beings (democracy, solidarity, and scrutiny of new technologies’ impact on people and the planet).
12 February, 2019
04 February, 2019
The latest statistics from the Digital Australia Report 2018 show 67 per cent of Australians play video games; aside from passing the time, gamers also play to de-stress. And game developers have picked up on this. Farming Simulator 19 is the latest game to offer a "Mindful Gaming" experience, explaining the slower pace of the game and immersive detail as a way for people to relax.
ducation International is targeting "educorporations" including Pearson and Bridge International Academies, a company listed in Delaware, US, that operates in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, India and Liberia. The World Bank and Pearson are supporters of Bridge International. Gavrielatos said Bridge International provides educators with scripted lessons developed in the US loaded onto a tablet. He says the introduction of technology platforms compensates for not having qualified teachers "who literally read word for word from a tablet".
China tests opening up social credit scores with debt map. Nicknamed the Deadbeat Map, the applet is an add-on to Chinese social media platform WeChat. It allows users to pinpoint the location of those within a 500-metre radius who have failed to pay their debts.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical
Land Rover’s plan to fix the huge problem with driverless cars. The new tech would project the autonomous vehicle’s direction of travel onto the road ahead, giving surrounding pedestrians and other road users an indication of what the vehicle will do next.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Cybersafety,
research,
Robotics
20 December, 2018
30 November, 2018
Newington College has joined a growing number of schools banning mobile phones, saying they lead to lower concentration, higher stress and "warped views on reality". The inner west school told students to keep phones in their lockers from the beginning of term four after an attempt to encourage boys to use them responsibly failed. But bans remain divisive, with both the NSW P&C and teachers union telling a NSW government review into smartphones in schools that they were useful for learning and educators should help students use them constructively.
27 November, 2018
People think my 99-plus ATAR qualifies me to be a bona fide genius, but I assure them that the longer they get to know me, the more they’ll realise this: in the HSC, I just played the system. I don’t think I’m necessarily any smarter than anyone else; I just did exactly what the markers wanted. This approach works for me at university, too. I’m about to graduate with a science degree that I don’t feel I deserve, because I can recall barely any of the content I’ve studied in the past four years.
Global Teacher Prize: Eddie Woo on reducing students’ maths anxiety. ‘Sometimes it will take me a whole month of working with students and actually telling them it’s okay to be slow with mathematics. The most important thing in mathematics is not speed, it’s the ability to slow down and ask the right questions. It’s okay to make mistakes. Actually, mistakes are so wonderful because you make a mistake, you learn from it and that’s the most important thing
16 November, 2018
A trial conducted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the Data61 unit of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has proven that blockchain-powered smart money possesses immense social and economic benefits for Australia’s insurance scheme for persons living with disabilities. By attaching conditions, the 'smart money' knows what it can be spent on, who it can be spent by and when it can be spent.
Labels:
Blockchain,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
15 November, 2018
Roughly 60 percent of the top free mobile VPN apps returned by Google Play Store and Apple Play Store searches are from developers based in China or with Chinese ownership, raising serious concerns about data privacy, a study published today has revealed.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
Console video games are becoming more diverse as old barriers like needing to produce games on plastic discs continue to fall away, says Microsoft's Chris Charla, director of the self-publishing program ID@Xbox. The program, which assists independent developers big and small in getting their games onto the digital storefront on the Xbox One console, last month reached a total of 1000 games. Xbox also says the program has brought in $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) in revenue for developers, and currently comprises more than 3000 studios making games across 67 countries.
Labels:
Game,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career
Drone delivery service to fly to Canberra's northern suburbs. Plans for the permanent delivery service - which Wing is spruiking as a world first - come after the ACT Assembly last week agreed to launch an inquiry into the Bonython trial, which has been plagued by community angst over noise, privacy concerns and a perceived lack of government and regulatory oversight.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/act/drone-delivery-service-to-fly-to-canberra-s-northern-suburbs-20181108-p50erl.html
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Robotics
12 November, 2018
26 October, 2018
Google Is Teaching Children How to Act Online. Is It the Best Role Model? The tech giant is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship at a moment when the company’s data-handling practices are under growing scrutiny.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Education,
Ethical,
ICT Capability
Apple and Samsung are being fined €10m and €5m respectively in Italy for the “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones. An investigation launched in January by the nation’s competition authority found that certain smartphone software updates had a negative effect on the performance of the devices.
Labels:
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
23 October, 2018
14 October, 2018
A new font released by RMIT could help people remember more of what they read as thousands of students begin to study for exams. It was developed in a collaboration between typographic design specialist and psychologists, combining psychological theory and design principles to improve retention of written information.
Economist Paul Romer, a co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, is many things. He is one of most important theorists on the drivers of economic growth. He is an ex-World Bank chief economist. He is a supporter of clear academic writing. He is the chief evangelist for charter cities—small jurisdictions within a country that operate autonomously of the national government—as a way to encourage better governance. But perhaps most notably for a 62-year-old economist of his distinction, he is a user of the programming language Python.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Numeracy,
research
12 October, 2018
27 September, 2018
21 September, 2018
Google’s Chinese Search Engine Reportedly Links Results to Phone Numbers. “This is very problematic from a privacy point of view, because it would allow far more detailed tracking and profiling of people’s behavior,” said Cynthia Wong, senior internet researcher with Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China.”
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Ethical,
Privacy
19 September, 2018
17 September, 2018
14 September, 2018
Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms. Last week Victor Stinner, a Python developer who works for Red Hat, published four pull requests seeking to change "master" and "slave" in Python documentation and code to terms like "parent," "worker," or something similarly anodyne.
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical,
History
13 September, 2018
11 September, 2018
A new front in the education wars is set to break out over whether schools should focus on skills such as problem solving over teaching facts and figures as the state government begins the biggest overhaul of the curriculum in a generation. Advocates of so-called soft skills such as critical thinking argue they are more relevant in an age when facts can be easily found on the internet, but opponents say hard knowledge is an essential foundation of higher-order thinking.
30 August, 2018
28 August, 2018
NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes has scrapped the state's most controversial education policy and will no longer force year 9 students to score three band 8s in NAPLAN to qualify for the HSC. Under the changes, HSC students will still have to meet a minimum standard through short online tests in reading, writing and numeracy.
27 August, 2018
The HSC will go online for the first time next year in a move that has been described as "keeping up with the times". The NSW Education Standards Authority has decided a computer exam is the best way to conduct the final assessment for the new, high-level science extension course, in which students will answer questions about their research project.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
research
23 August, 2018
21 August, 2018
13 August, 2018
Three potential suppliers of equipment to Australia’s next generation 5G network have connections to China’s Communist Party. While the Turnbull Government has been strongly lobbied by federal MPs and security officials to ban Chinese-owned Huawei from involvement in the 5G network, there has been little focus on the Chinese-connections of two other likely 5G participants, Nokia and Ericsson.
07 August, 2018
01 August, 2018
Parents are rushing to enrol their children in a revolutionary new state school that will scrap year levels, school bells and the word 'classroom'. Lindfield Learning Village won't be the kind of school most adults recognise. Teaching will happen around 'waterholes' or 'campfires'. Students will take responsibility for their own learning. And high schoolers will mentor kindy kids.
That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
21 July, 2018
04 July, 2018
03 July, 2018
How LG avoided consumer guarantees, and didn't break the law. Under Australian Consumer Law and irrespective of any manufacturer warranty, consumers are entitled to a repair, replacement or refund if goods or services are considered faulty and it is "reasonable" that the products should still be in a functioning quality considering their typical lifespan. Say you have a one-year manufacturer's warranty on a TV, for instance, the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) still applies after that lapses, and it is still likely you would be entitled to a repair, replacement or refund if: 1) you ask for your case to be looked at under Australian Consumer Law; 2) it is deemed to be a manufacturing fault that caused the television to malfunction, and; 3) the length of time for which it is "reasonable" for the product to be used remains in place.
schools should move away from “an overemphasis on teaching,” Abbott says, and instead view teachers as imaginative, knowledgeable guides. “Any kid can read a textbook — they don’t need a teacher standing over them telling them to do so,” he points out. “They need teachers to inspire them to think about things in a much bigger way than they’ve done before.” It should be based on the biological system of weaning — i.e., gradually reducing children’s dependence on teachers.
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/34658/to-advance-education-we-must-first-reimagine-society
Labels:
Education,
Personal / Social Capability
26 June, 2018
OpenAI is announcing today (June 25) that its newest AI bots can hold their own as a team of five against human gamers at Dota 2, a multiplayer game popular in e-sports for its complexity and necessity for teamwork. The AI research lab is looking to take the bots to Dota 2 championship matches in August to compete against the pros.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Ethical,
Game,
research
25 June, 2018
n late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to break the “unbreakable” Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II. Using AI processes across 2,000 DigitalOcean servers, engineers at Enigma Pattern accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do—and at a cost of just $7. I have long been fascinated by the Enigma machine and its impact on World War II. Aside from being a huge history geek, my father-in-law went over to Normandy on D+3 (three days after the Omaha beachhead was established). He served in an advance corps, finding ways for the army to move across the country, and as such, they were the first to come across one of the concentration camps and liberate it. None of that would have been possible without Enigma.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
History,
ICT Capability
WHO classifies 'gaming disorder' as mental health condition. there are three major diagnostic features or characteristics of gaming disorder. "One is that the gaming behavior takes precedence over other activities to the extent that other activities are taken to the periphery," he said. The second feature is "impaired control of these behaviors," Poznyak said. "Even when the negative consequences occur, this behavior continues or escalates." A diagnosis of gaming disorder, then, means that a "persistent or recurrent" behavior pattern of "sufficient severity" has emerged, according to the ICD. A third feature is that the condition leads to significant distress and impairment in personal, family, social, educational or occupational functioning,
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Game,
Personal / Social Capability,
Sustainability
20 June, 2018
BitTorrent, an early mover (and currently the largest player) in decentralised computing architecture to distribute and store data, is being sold for $140 million in cash to Justin Sun and his blockchain media startup Tron, TechCrunch has learned. one shareholder we spoke to says there are two plans. First, it will be used to “legitimise” Tron’s business, which has met with some controversy: it has been accused of plagiarising FileCoin and Ethereum in the development of its technology. And second, as a potential network to help mine coins, using BitTorrent’s P2P architecture and wide network of users.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Blockchain,
Social
Apple Australia fined $9 million for misleading customers in ‘Error 53’ lawsuit by ACCC. The unprecedented action against the multibillion-dollar US company and its Australian arm could also have further ramifications too, after the Court found Australians were legally allowed to get third-party repairs without voiding warranties, and could request brand new replacement devices rather than refurbished models.
Labels:
Ethical,
Sustainability
19 June, 2018
THE END OF DYSLEXIA Innovations in brain research and AI-fueled assistive technologies could level the playing field for those with language-based learning disabilities. Grammarly, a free cloud-based software extension that you add onto a web browser. The plug-in is billed as a "writing assistant," but I mostly used it as a spell-checker, a task at which it proved nearly omniscient. Grammarly could help me spell even the words that regularly flummoxed MS Word and Google.
14 June, 2018
12 June, 2018
French school students will be banned from using mobile phones anywhere on school grounds from September, after the lower house of parliament passed what it called a “detox” law for a younger generation increasingly addicted to screens. The centrist president Emmanuel Macron had promised during his election campaign that he would outlaw children’s phones in nursery, primary and middle-schools, until around the age of 15.
an iPad app for basketball coaches called HomeCourt. You don’t have to be a pro; using the app is as easy as pointing an iPad’s camera at action on the court. Then the tricky stuff happens automatically. HomeCourt uses the support for machine learning added to Apple’s mobile operating system last year to analyze the video. The app tracks each time a player shoots, scores, or misses, and logs the shooter’s location on the court. Each event is indexed so a particular play can later be viewed with a single tap. HomeCourt is built on tools announced by Federighi last summer, when he launched Apple’s bid to become a preferred playground for AI-curious developers. Known as Core ML, those tools help developers who’ve trained machine learning algorithms deploy them on Apple’s mobile devices and PCs.
Parents are losing their sons to Fortnite, the hottest game in the world. Described by the New York Times as a cross “between Minecraft and The Hunger Games’’, Mr Adair says boys were becoming addicted and suffered genuine withdrawal symptoms including “mood swings, urges, and headaches’’. Others were also refusing to go to school because they couldn’t cope with not playing Fortnite.
Labels:
3D,
Cybersafety,
Game
07 June, 2018
05 June, 2018
On stage at Apple’s annual developer conference on Monday, executive Craig Federighi showcased ARKit 2 capabilities, including a mode called Persistence that lets users drop a virtual object in an environment and then return to it later in that specific place. Another feature, Shared Experiences, allows multiple users to play a single augmented-reality game together. In a demonstration, the company showed a Lego game and displayed how two iPhone users could play at the same time from different locations.
Labels:
3D,
Game,
ICT Capability
28 May, 2018
Uber's self-driving Volvo SUV, which observed Herzberg six seconds before the crash, didn't know "what" she was at first. The software originally classified her as an unknown object, then a vehicle, then a bicycle, the report said. At 1.3 seconds before the crash, the self-driving system realized emergency braking was needed to prevent a crash. But Uber had disabled the feature to reduce the potential for unwanted braking, such as for a plastic bag in the road. Some self-driving car companies use teams of two in their test vehicles. A person behind the wheel monitors the road, and someone in the passenger seat takes notes on a laptop.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Ethical,
research,
Robotics
24 May, 2018
Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code Of Conduct. "Don't be evil" has been part of the company's corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, "do the right thing."
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical,
History
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)