China is considering asking companies that offer tutoring on the school curriculum to go non-profit, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, as part of a sweeping set of constraints that could decimate the country's $100 billion education tech industry. Shares sank. From a report: In rules currently being mulled, the platforms will likely no longer be allowed to raise capital or go public, the people said, asking to not be identified because the information is not public. Listed firms will also probably no longer be allowed to invest in or acquire education firms teaching school subjects while foreign capital will also be barred from the sector, one of the people said. Local regulators will stop approving new after-school education firms seeking to offer tutoring on China's compulsory syllabus and require extra scrutiny of existing online platforms, the people said. Vacation and weekend tutoring on school subjects will also be banned, they said. Changes may still occur as the rules haven't been published.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata] along with those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur decided to focus on developing something that is harder than conventional self-healing material, as reported by The Telegraph India. The researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa, to make needle-shaped crystals that aren't more than 2 mm long or 0.2 mm wide, according to the experimental results which were published in the journal Science. Due to their molecular arrangement in the specially designed crystals, a strong attractive force developed between two surfaces. Every time a fracture occurred, the attractive forces joined the pieces back again, without needing an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would need.

"Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others, and it has a well-ordered internal crystalline structure, that is favored in most electronics and optical applications," lead researcher Professor Chilla Malla Reddy of IISER said. "I can imagine applications for an everyday device," said Bhanu Bhushan Khatua, a member of the team from IIT Kharagpur." Such materials could be used for mobile phone screens that will repair themselves if they fall and develop cracks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China's tech tycoons are discovering their charitable side as they come under mounting regulatory scrutiny from Beijing. In the latest example, Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun handed over $2.2 billion of shares in the smartphone maker to two foundations, according to filings to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. That came after Meituan's Wang Xing and ByteDance's Zhang Yiming gave away parts of their fortune to charitable causes last month. The moves come as a crackdown on technology companies has intensified since November, when Jack Ma's Ant Group was forced to pull its giant initial public offering. It's a new era for the country's billionaires as China tightens regulations in areas from financial services and internet platforms to data security and overseas listings.

At the same time, the Chinese public is becoming increasingly concerned about inequality. In a speech in October, President Xi Jinping said the country's development was "unbalanced" and "common prosperity" should be the ultimate goal. "It's likely much more than coincidence that China's tech billionaires have begun to evince a strong charitable urge," said Brock Silvers, chief investment officer at Hong Kong-based private equity firm Kaiyuan Capital. "It could stem from deep patriotic feelings or Buddhist inclinations, but it appears to be strongly correlated to Beijing's recent regulatory crackdowns."

In June, Meituan founder Wang donated a $2.3 billion stake in the food delivery giant to his own philanthropic foundation. That came after China's antitrust watchdog announced an investigation into the company, and the billionaire posted a classical poem online that some saw as a veiled criticism of Beijing. That same month, ByteDance founder Zhang, China's fourth-richest person with a net worth of $44.5 billion, gave about $77 million of his own wealth to an education fund in his hometown. And in April, Tencent's Pony Ma, the second-richest with $56.7 billion, pledged to set aside $7.7 billion of the company's money toward curing societal ills and lifting China's countryside out of poverty.

Florida's fired Department of Health data manager Rebekah Jones lost access to her 400,000 followers on Twitter last month — which she'd been using to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for downplaying the severity of the state's Covid-19 crisis. Then Jones announced she'd be running for Congress. "This also means, under Desantis' recently signed social media law, I get to fine Twitter $250K per day until my account is restored starting July 1."

Orlando Weekly reports: After a media frenzy, Jones deleted the post. She said she was attempting to point out Gov. Ron DeSantis's "hypocrisy" in writing a law that allowed political candidates to sue media companies that ban them, while still celebrating her Twitter suspension...

The bit became real when she filed to run as an Independent in Florida's 1st congressional district on June 25...

On her campaign website, she lists eight issues on her platform: protecting Florida's environmental systems, promoting government transparency, fighting for media accountability in disinformation, giving access to representatives, ensuring the district's veterans are taken care of, scrutinizing restrictive voting laws, funding science and research, and boosting support for all levels of education. Jones says there's still room for other issues on her platform, after she talks to more residents.
Jones' GoFundMe account ("DefendScience") now directs visitors to her official campaign site if they want to make campaign contributions. (And the GoFundMe page also notes that her campaign has been endorsed by 90-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study on the Vietnam War.)

But the last six weeks have been a wild ride for the data scientist:

• Last month Florida's Inspector General granted official whistleblower status to Jones.
• Six days later Twitter told Slashdot they'd "permanently suspended" Jones' account "for violations of the Twitter Rules on spam and platform manipulation."
• When Jones then created a new Twitter account for her campaign, "it was suspended within a day of its creation," Orlando Weekly reports.
• Jones created a new account on Instagram named "insubordinatescientist". Yet since June 16th Instagram has also marked it as "unavailable," saying the link "may be broken, or the page may have been removed." (Since June 16th Instagram has not responded to Slashdot's request for an explanation.)
• Jones' GoFundMe page now refers visitors to an entirely different Instagram page.

Yesterday the official coronavirus coordinator for the White House reported that one in five of America's Covid-19 cases this week have come from Florida.

David Nield shares the findings of a new study via ScienceAlert: Researchers tasked 42 adult volunteers with learning the Arabic alphabet from scratch: some through writing it out on paper, some through typing it out on a keyboard, and some through watching and responding to video instructions. Those in the handwriting group not only learned the unfamiliar letters more quickly, but they were also better able to apply their new knowledge in other areas -- by using the letters to make new words and to recognize words they hadn't seen before, for example. While writing, typing, and visual learning were effective at teaching participants to recognize Arabic letters -- learners made very few mistakes after six exercise sessions -- on average, the writing group needed fewer sessions to get to a good standard.

Researchers then tested the groups to see how the learning could be generalized. In every follow-up test, using skills they hadn't been trained on, the writing group performed the best: naming letters, writing letters, spelling words, and reading words. The research shows that the benefits of teaching through handwriting go beyond better penmanship: There are also advantages in other areas of language learning. It seems as though the knowledge gets more firmly embedded through writing. The research has been published in Psychological Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: You may have noticed recently that an Uber ride is more expensive than it used to be. As ride-hail companies Uber and Lyft hike prices to record heights during the COVID-19 pandemic, much commentary has settled on explaining this as a consequence of a "labor shortage" largely motivated by a lack of proper financial incentives. Drivers, the story goes, saw the new cash bonuses offered by companies to lure workers back as insufficient. Some, perhaps, decided they were not worth the risk of getting infected with COVID-19 or one of its budding variants, while other analyses suggested drivers were content with living on stimulus funds rather than money from driving. At the same time, the firms began curtailing subsidies that kept prices low enough to attract riders and work towards monopoly. Together, this has left us with a sudden and massive spike in ride-hail prices; Gridwise, a ride-hail driver assistance app, estimated that Uber has increased its prices by 79 percent since the second quarter of 2019.

While Uber and Lyft are reportedly thinking about offering new perks such as education, career, and expense programs, analysts admit these don't strike at core problems with the gig economy that were driving workers away before COVID-19 hit and are making it difficult to attract them now. In conversations with Motherboard, former and current ride-hail drivers pointed to a major factor for not returning: how horrible it is to work for Uber and Lyft. For some workers, this realization came long before the pandemic reared its head, and for others, the crisis hammered it home. Motherboard has changed some drivers' names or granted them anonymity out of their fear of retaliation. "If I kept driving, something was going to break," said Maurice, a former driver in New York who spent four years working for Uber and Lyft before the pandemic. "I already go nights without eating or sleeping. My back hurt, my joints hurt, my neck hurt, I felt like a donkey. Like a slave driving all the time."

"I've been driving for six years. Uber has taken at least 10,000 pounds in commission from me each year! They take 20 percent of my earnings, then offer me 200 pounds," Ramana Prai, a London-based Uber driver, told Motherboard. "I don't understand how they can take 60,000 pounds from me, then offer nothing when I'm in need. How can I provide for my partner and two kids with this? My employer has let me down."

"I woke up every day asking how long I could keep it up, I just didn't feel like a person," Yona, who worked for Lyft in California for the past six years until the pandemic, told Motherboard. "I got two kids, my mother, my sister, I couldn't see them. And I was doing all this for them but I could barely support them, barely supported myself."

"I was making even less than my sister and I was probably less safe too," Yona's sister, Destiny, told Motherboard. "She got out back in the spring, I hopped on and was coming back negative some days. I tried UberEats and DoorDash to see if that was any better, but stopped after a friend was almost robbed on a delivery. Okay, so the options are get covid or get robbed, then guess what: I'm doing none of them."

Motherboard argues that the degrading working conditions, as well as the poor pay, "are structurally necessary for ride-hail companies. They were necessary to attract and retain customers with artificially low prices, to burn through drivers at high rates that frustrate labor organizing, and bolster the narrative of gig work as temporary, transient, and convenient. It's no wonder, then, that drivers aren't coming back."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master's degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year. The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master's degrees that don't provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data. Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master's program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world's most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation's eighth wealthiest private school.

For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid. Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master's students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said the Education Department data in the Journal analysis can't fully assess salary prospects because it covers only earnings and loan repayments two years after graduation. "Nevertheless," he said, "this is not what we want it to be."

At New York University, graduates with a master's degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000 and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after the program, the data on recent borrowers show. At Northwestern University, half of those who earned degrees in speech-language pathology borrowed $148,000 or more, and the graduates had a median income of $60,000 two years later. Graduates of the University of Southern California's marriage and family counseling program borrowed a median $124,000 and half earned $50,000 or less over the same period. "NYU is always focused on affordability, and an important part of that is, of course, to help prospective students make informed decisions," said spokesman John Beckman. Northwestern spokeswoman Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the speech-language pathology program is among the best in the world, leading to a "gratifying career path that is in high demand." USC spokeswoman Lauren Bartlett said providing students financial support and employment opportunities was a priority for the school.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The fintech company Greenlight says that its app and debit card for kids is a financial literacy tool that gives parents "superpowers" to set strict controls on their children's spending. Parents can use the app to pay allowances, choose which stores the connected debit cards work at, set spending limits, and receive instant notifications whenever their child makes a purchase. But there's one thing Greenlight makes it very hard for parents to control: What the company does with the mountains of sensitive data it collects about children. Greenlight reserves the right to share that personal information -- including names, birth dates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles -- with "ad and marketing vendors," "insurance companies," "collection agencies," and the catch-all category of "other service providers," according to its privacy policy. Greenlight's policy also says that it can use the data it collects to deliver "tailored content" advertisements, a kind of marketing that youth privacy and education advocates say is particularly manipulative and damaging for children.

The Atlanta-based company told Motherboard that, despite what parents must agree to when they sign up for the app, Greenlight doesn't "monetize or sell customer data in any way." In an email, a company spokesperson said Greenlight inserted those permissions into its privacy policy "in case we ever decide to offer merchant-funded offers to parents in the future based on aggregated and anonymous information." The permissions listed in the policy do not just apply to aggregated and anonymous information, however. They appear under sections titled "Personal Information We Collect and How," "How we Use Personal Information," and "How We Share Personal Information." They also do not only apply to parents, because by signing up for the service, parents must sign away the data rights of their children as well.

A shortage of drivers in the U.S. is propelling prices for Uber and Lyft rides to record highs and pushing the services to rethink how they attract gig workers. From a report: Uber and Lyft are pouring millions of dollars into incentives for drivers to return, a short-term fix that has helped alleviate the scarcity and tempered fare increases in some areas but that has also raised the companies' costs. The labor crunch isn't projected to end anytime soon. Some analysts expect the problem will persist through the third quarter, pressuring Uber and Lyft to deal with shifting dynamics of gig labor that they acknowledge will require long-term solutions.

Executives say the model they built their businesses on -- luring riders with deep discounts and then incentivizing drivers to provide those rides -- can't be the model that sustains them. "This is a moment of deep introspection and reflection for a company like ours to pause and say, 'How do we make the proposition for drivers more attractive longer term?" said Carrol Chang, Uber's chief of driver operations for the U.S. and Canada. "It is absolutely a reckoning," she said. Ms. Chang's team, tasked with managing the shortage for Uber, is in talks to fund education and career-building programs for drivers. Lyft is exploring a new partnership aimed at reducing drivers' expenses, which could involve sizable discounts on gas or insurance or help with buying vehicles, according to a person familiar with its plans. Both companies recently began emailing drivers more insights into earnings opportunities, previously a black box for them.

A Los Angeles summer camp is offering children as young as 5 "a crash course in all things crypto," reports NBC News: In a sign of the bubbling enthusiasm for digital currencies, the Crypto Kids Camp began Monday in a warehouse in a busy port district. Over five days, the camp combines activities that would be common at any summer camp with a crash course in how to think about, buy and even mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies... The camp is part of a trend toward young adults and even children becoming immersed in cryptocurrency through online trading exchanges, school clubs, social media and other outlets. In Georgia, state lawmakers this year considered a bill to require high school students to take a course on personal finance including cryptocurrency...

Children attend the camp for a one-week session where each day they learn about a different emerging technology. Camp founder Najah Roberts has an acronym, BEASTMODE, to keep track of the breadth of material they cover: Blockchain, Evolution of money, Artificial intelligence, Security (cyber), Technology (virtual reality), Mining and machine learning, Online gaming, Drones and Engineering.

Campers this week included children from as far away as Texas and New Jersey, staying with parents in hotel rooms, she said. There's no minimum age to buy or hold an online token such as bitcoin, just as there isn't a minimum age to hold U.S. dollars and cents. Many cryptocurrency exchanges have a minimum age in their terms of service, often 18 years old, and enforce the requirement through banking-style know-your-customer rules, but not all exchanges do....

Eventually they want to encourage public schools to adopt similar programs, not just in Los Angeles but also nationwide. "We want to get it set up to the point where it's in each city," she said.
One 18-year-old said the camp taught them how to build a mining machine from scratch that helped them make $200.

When MIT and Harvard University started edX nearly a decade ago, it was touted as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online course providers. Today, the universities announced that they are selling edX to one of those for-profit providers for $800 million. From a report: edX had fallen behind rivals like Coursera, a similar platform founded by Stanford University professors, in fundraising and reach, though it still boasts 35 million users and more than 3,000 courses. Leaders of edX cited the pandemic as a factor that led to the sale. "Covid drove an explosion in remote learning, which spurred huge investments into edX's commercial competitors," wrote MIT's president L. Rafael Reif, in an open letter today. "This put edX, as a nonprofit, at a financial disadvantage. This new path recognizes this reality and offers a solution that allows edX to continue to support and maintain the key aspects of its mission."

What happens now is a bit complicated. 2U, a so-called Online Program Management company that helps traditional colleges start and run online degree programs, says it will operate edX as a separate subsidiary that will be structured as a public benefit corporation. That means it will be for profit.

Writing on CNN, an American historian looks at the Supreme Court's recent 8-1 ruling in favor of the free-speech rights of Brandi Levy, who as a 14-year-old cheerleader had posted a photo to Snapchat cursing out her school and its cheerleading program. But the historian also suggests where this ruling came up short: In recent decades the Court has sought to widen public schools' parental and paternalist reach, shrinking the sphere of students' free speech rights... In Levy's case, she was using social media off-campus, outside of school hours, to express a criticism of an extracurricular activity. If her school could control that speech, then there would be very little space left for Levy to express herself.

Yet the Court took too modest an approach to students' rights. The Mahanoy decision was much narrower than the lower court's. The Third Circuit had ruled that the school had no right to interfere with off-campus speech, a decision that would have significantly expanded students' rights. In Mahanoy, the Court ruled that schools may still regulate student speech off-campus, depending on the circumstances (though did not lay out a framework for those circumstances, leaving that to future court decisions)...

[P]ublic schools are more properly (if less creatively) understood as, well, the schools of democracy, where students are taught and guided and given an opportunity to test out the rights of citizenship. Social media have become an integral part of students' public identity — indeed, of many adults' public identity. Students should be taught about the inevitable permanence of ephemeral speech. A Snapchat snap, an Instagram story, a Twitter fleet, all designed to disappear, can easily be made permanent. Levy thought she was making a relatively private, fleeting statement, only to find it memorialized in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

But students should also have more speech protections, be allowed to criticize the institutions in which they spend so much of their time — and be largely free of their school's oversight when they are beyond the schoolhouse gates.

Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, announced his resignation as a trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Wednesday, according to a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they were getting divorced in May of 2021. For many, it was an earth-shattering announcement, one that raises a host of questions about the future of their foundation and its quest to end disease worldwide. This latest announcement adds to the growing number of questions about what's in store for the many enterprises currently being managed by the Gates Foundation. The foundation supplies grants to researchers studying polio, nutrition, agriculture, global education, sanitation, HIV, malaria, tobacco control, vaccines, gender inequality...and we're just getting started.

At the age of 90, Buffet has donated $41 billion worth of Berkshire stock to the five foundations. In today's announcement, he added that he has donated an extra $4.1 billion, but he didn't give a reason for his decision. "Today is a milestone for me," Buffett wrote in a statement. "In 2006, I pledged to distribute all of my Berkshire Hathaway shares -- more than 99% of my net worth -- to philanthropy. With today's $4.1 billion distribution, I'm halfway there."

"For years I have been a trustee -- an inactive trustee at that -- of only one recipient of my funds, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMG). I am now resigning from that post, just as I have done at all corporate boards other than Berkshire's," Buffett said. "The CEO of BMG is Mark Suzman, an outstanding recent selection who has my full support. My goals are 100% in sync with those of the foundation, and my physical participation is in no way needed to achieve these goals."

schwit1 shares a report from CNN: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former high school cheerleader who argued that she could not be punished by her public school for posting a profanity-laced caption on Snapchat when she was off school grounds. The case involving a Pennsylvania teenager was closely watched to see how the court would handle the free speech rights of some 50 million public school children and the concerns of schools over off-campus and online speech that could amount to a disruption of the school's mission or rise to the level of bullying or threats.

The 8-1 majority opinion was penned by Justice Stephen Breyer. "It might be tempting to dismiss (the student's) words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary," Breyer wrote. Breyer said that the court has made clear that students "do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression even 'at the school house gate.'" "But," he said, "we have also made clear that courts must apply the First Amendment in light of the special characteristics of the school environment." "The school itself has an interest in protecting a student's unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus. America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy," the opinion read.

Breyer disagreed with the reasoning of a lower court opinion that held that a school could never regulate speech that takes place off campus, but at the same time he declined to set forth what he called "a broad, highly general First Amendment rules stating just what counts as 'off-campus speech." Instead, he allowed that while the cheerleader's post were "crude" they "did not amount to fighting words." He said that while she used "vulgarity" her speech was not "obscene." In addition, her post appeared "outside of school hours from a location outside of school" and they did not target any member of the school community with "abusive" language. He added that she used her own personal cellphone and her audience consisted of a private circle of Snapchat friends. Breyer said "these features of her speech" diminish the school's interest in punishing her. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. He wrote that students like the former cheerleader "who are active in extracurricular programs have a greater potential, by virtue of their participation, to harm those programs." He added: "For example, a profanity-laced screed delivered on social media or at the mall has a much different effect on a football program when done by a regular student than when done by the captain of the football team. So, too, here."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blender is one of the most important open source projects, as the 3D graphics application suite is used by countless people at home, for business, and in education. The software can be used on many platforms, such as Windows, Mac, and of course, Linux. Today, Ubuntu-maker Canonical announces it will offer paid enterprise support for Blender LTS. Surprisingly, this support will not only be for Ubuntu users. Heck, it isn't even limited to Linux installations. Actually, Canonical will offer this support to Blender LTS users on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob writes: The old RAD/content authoring system, ToolBook, appears to be entering the final phase of its EOL process. Sumtotal/Skillsoft (the current owner, under which meaningful development effectively ceased) 'may' refuse software activations after the end of 2021, and does not provide a format-compatible replacement. Similarly, they are halting their support services, and will not allow contracts to be renewed.

This may have significant ramifications for the education/training sector, and I have reason to believe that the body of the work dependent on this software is significantly larger than one might expect out of a wayward VisualBasic competitor from the 90s.

The software, which was offered for sale until relatively recently (I'm unsure of the date of cutoff), has not received an update since 2014, nor a major version update since 2011. As such, I'd like to increase the visibility of this particular EOL, in the hopes that interested parties will take notice and have an opportunity to begin the process of moving their courseware out of this format...

If one has never encountered this software before, it is "interesting", to say the least, as is the history of Asymetrix (one of Paul Allen's ventures) and later Sumtotal Systems, through 90s and early 2000s. If one does not care to look into it, it can be thought of as some sort of bizarro-world amalgam of features from Visual Basic and HyperCard.

Linus Torvalds was "clearly unamused" by a "humanoid conspiracy theory, and also on its discussion in a Linux kernel topic thread," reports Neowin. They add that Torvalds "weighed in quite heavily with some very strong language, mixed with some biology lessons..."

Here's an excerpt from Torvalds' response (as shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm): Please keep your insane and technically incorrect anti-vax comments to yourself.

You don't know what you are talking about, you don't know what mRNA is, and you're spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you've talked to "experts" or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don't know what they are talking about.

But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.

Vaccines have saved the lives of literally tens of millions of people.

Just for your edification in case you are actually willing to be educated: mRNA doesn't change your genetic sequence in any way. It is the exact same intermediate - and temporary - kind of material that your cells generate internally all the time as part of your normal cell processes, and all that the mRNA vaccines do is to add a dose their own specialized sequence that then makes your normal cell machinery generate that spike protein so that your body learns how to recognize it.

The half-life of mRNA is a few hours. Any injected mRNA will be all gone from your body in a day or two. It doesn't change anything long-term, except for that natural "your body now knows how to recognize and fight off a new foreign protein" (which then tends to fade over time too, but lasts a lot longer than a few days). And yes, while your body learns to fight off that foreign material, you may feel like shit for a while. That's normal, and it's your natural response to your cells spending resources on learning how to deal with the new threat.

And of the vaccines, the mRNA ones are the most modern, and the most targeted - exactly because they do *not* need to have any of the other genetic material that you traditionally have in a vaccine (ie no need for basically the whole - if weakened - bacterial or virus genetic material). So the mRNA vaccines actually have *less* of that foreign material in them than traditional vaccines do. And a *lot* less than the very real and actual COVID-19 virus that is spreading in your neighborhood.

Honestly, anybody who has told you differently, and who has told you that it changes your genetic material, is simply uneducated. You need to stop believing the anti-vax lies, and you need to start protecting your family and the people around you. Get vaccinated...

Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies.

And if you insist on believing in the crazy conspiracy theories, at least SHUT THE HELL UP about it on Linux kernel discussion lists.

Dartmouth's Geisel medical school is dropping its investigation into alleged online cheating, the New York Times reports: In March, Dartmouth charged 17 students with cheating based on a review of certain online-activity data on Canvas — a popular learning-management system where professors post assignments and students submit their work — during remote exams. The school quickly dropped seven of the cases after at least two students argued that administrators had mistaken automated Canvas activity for human cheating. Now Dartmouth is also dropping allegations against the remaining 10 students, some of whom faced expulsion, suspension, course failures and misconduct marks on their academic records that could have derailed their medical careers.

"I have decided to dismiss all the honor code charges," Duane Compton, dean of the medical school, said in an email to the Geisel community Wednesday evening, adding that the students' academic records would not be affected. "I have apologized to the students for what they have been through."

Dartmouth's decision to dismiss the charges followed a software review by The New York Times, which found that students' devices could automatically generate Canvas activity data even when no one was using them. Dartmouth's practices were condemned by some alumni along with some faculty at other medical schools.

A Dartmouth spokesman said the school could not comment further on the dropping of the charges for privacy reasons.
"The moral of the current story is clear," argued the Times reporter on Twitter.

"Colleges that use surveillance tech can end up erroneously accusing some of their best students."

In a blog post this morning, Google announced plans to increase its update cadence for Chromebooks. Like Chrome, its operating system will now also follow a four-week Stable channel before moving to the next major milestone release. Android Police reports: Google will deliver fresh features more rapidly to Chromebooks starting with Chrome OS 96 -- all while keeping it stable, secure, and speedy. To adapt to the rigorous update release schedule, Google will skip Chrome OS 95, which will help it bridge the gap between M94 and Chrome's new four-week rollout strategy. Enterprise and education folks can opt enroll in an Extended Stable option for Chromebooks, which will update every 6 months. In light of the new rollout strategy, Google updated its documentation and pushed an update to its release calendar. The company will share plans about the choices Chrome OS administrators will have for milestone updates "in the coming months."

Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse. NPR reports: "That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen. "Despite all kinds of hopes and expectations that things would get better, they've only gotten worse in the spring," Shapiro says. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education. There will be no easy fixes or quick bounce backs."

Overall enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, and that was true again this spring, which saw a 3.5% decline -- seven times worse than the drop from spring 2019 to spring 2020. The National Student Clearinghouse attributed that decline entirely to undergraduates across all sectors, including for-profit colleges. Community colleges, which often enroll more low-income students and students of color, remained hardest hit by far, making up more than 65% of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring. On average, U.S. community colleges saw an enrollment drop of 9.5%, which translates to 476,000 fewer students. [...] Based on her conversations with students, [Heidi Aldes, dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis College, a community college in Minnesota] attributes the enrollment decline to a number of factors, including being online, the "pandemic paralysis" community members felt when COVID-19 first hit, and the financial situations families found themselves in.