An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Korea returned to first place in the latest Bloomberg Innovation Index, while the U.S. dropped out of a top 10 that features a cluster of European countries. Korea regained the crown from Germany, which dropped to fourth place. The Asian nation has now topped the index for seven of the nine years that it's been published. Singapore and Switzerland each moved up one spot to rank second and third. The Bloomberg index analyzes dozens of criteria using seven equally weighted metrics, including research and development spending, manufacturing capability and concentration of high-tech public companies.

Korea's return to the top spot is mainly due to an increase in patent activity, where it ranks top, alongside a strong performance in R&D and manufacturing. Second-placed Singapore, which has been allocating budget funds to help workers and companies transition to a digital economy, also scores high for manufacturing -- and its globally competitive universities put it top of the tertiary education gauge. Switzerland, a leader in financial and biological technology, ranks near the top in both of the index's research categories. Germany's loss of the crown follows a warning two years ago by Juergen Michels, chief economist of Bayerische Landesbank, who said the country lacked skilled workers and a proper strategy for next-generation technology. As the two biggest economies, the U.S. and China account for much of the world's innovation. But both saw their rankings decline this year.

The U.S., which topped the first Bloomberg Innovation Index in 2013, dropped two places to 11th. The country scores badly in higher education, even though U.S. universities are world-famous. That underperformance was likely made worse by obstacles to foreign students, who are usually prominent in science and technology classes -- first due to the Trump administration's visa policies, and later to the pandemic. China, which fell one place to 16th in the 2021 index, is locked in a battle with the U.S. over key aspects of innovation policy. Other gainers in this year's index include India, which climbed back into the top 50 for the first time since 2016, and Uruguay, which qualified for the first time. Algeria and Argentina were among the countries that fell furthest.

Facebook is testing a notification that notifies Apple iOS users about ways the tech giant uses their data to target personalized ads to them. Axios reports: The test is happening in light of upcoming changes to Apple's privacy settings that will make it harder for Facebook and others to collect data on Apple users for ad targeting. Facebook warned investors last week that changes to Apple's "Identifier for Advertisers" (IDFA) user tracking feature will likely impact its business. The feature asks Apple iOS users to opt-in to having their data collected, instead of asking them to opt-out. Developers forecast that only around 10-30% of users will actually opt-in to having their data collected, making it much harder for advertisers to target potential Apple customers without as much access to their data.

Details: In an updated blog post, Facebook says it will be showing their prompt "to ensure stability for the businesses and people who use our services." The prompt, which provides information about how Facebook uses personalized ads, will be shown to users globally on Facebook and Instagram. In the post, Facebook says that if users accept the prompts for Facebook and Instagram, the ads you see on those apps won't change. "If you decline, you will still see ads, but they will be less relevant to you." The tech giant notes that Apple has said that providing education about its new privacy changes is allowed.

Was Nextdoor's impact on the world exemplified by a crucial funding referendum for the Christina School District of Newark, Delaware? Medium's tech site OneZero reports: As the 2019 referendum approached, I saw Nextdoor posts claiming that the district was squandering money, that its administrators were corrupt, and that it already spent more money per student than certain other districts with higher test scores. The last of those was true — but left out the context that Christina hosts both the state's school for the deaf and its largest autism program. District advocates told me later that they had wanted to post counterarguments to the platform, but were hindered by Nextdoor's decentralized structure. Some district officers, for instance, couldn't even access the posts and discussions happening in the city of Newark, because they were only visible to other Newark residents, and they lived outside the city's borders. (The district's headquarters are actually in nearby Wilmington.) After the referendum failed, some pointed to misinformation on Nextdoor as a factor in its defeat....

A month after the failed Christina School District referendum in 2019 the school board voted 4-3 to eliminate 63 jobs, with the alternative being bankruptcy and a bid for a state bailout. Some parents gave up hope; a neighbor of mine who had been among the district's staunch supporters abruptly sold her house and moved her family to suburban Pennsylvania, where public schools are better-funded. Others who could afford it moved their children to private schools, furthering one of the trends that had put the district in tough shape to begin with. The district and its backers started planning another referendum campaign for 2020, with the stakes now desperate...

This time, their strategy included arming supporters with facts and counter-arguments to post whenever they encountered criticism on their respective Nextdoor networks around the district... On election day, June 9, polling places had lines out the door — a rarity for a single-issue local election. Turnout was unprecedented, nearly doubling that of 2019. And the result was a landslide: Some 70% of voters approved all four funding requests, with more people voting "yes" than the total number who had voted the year before. Suddenly, the district's future looked hopeful again.

Exactly what role Nextdoor played in that dramatic turnaround is hard to disentangle. The option to vote by mail due to Covid-19 may have helped; the sense of urgency for the district certainly did. Claire O'Neal [a parent who won appointment to the school board later that year], believes the informal Nextdoor information campaign made a difference. "I do think it was a factor in its passing," she told me. The lesson for the district, and other public agencies, she believes, is that they can no longer win the battle of public opinion on their own. They have to actively enlist advocates in the community to wage it on their behalf on Nextdoor and other hyperlocal online networks.
"It just requires more of individual citizens," the schoolboard member added. "It's a lot more work because there's just so much information out there, and it's up to you to decide what's right and what's wrong.

"There's a part of that that's beautiful, and there's a part of that that's really scary."

"The same legalese that can ban Donald Trump from Twitter can bar users from joining class-action lawsuits," warns the official Editorial Board of the New York Times, urging "It's time to fix the fine print." [Alternate URL here] [M]ost people have no idea what is signed away when they click "agree" to binding terms of service contracts — again and again on phones, laptops, tablets, watches, e-readers and televisions. Agreeing often means allowing personal data to be resold or waiving the right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit... Because corporations and their lawyers know most consumers don't have the time or wherewithal to study their new terms, which can stretch to 20,000 words — about the length of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" — they stuff them with opaque provisions and lengthy legalistic explanations meant to confuse or obfuscate. Understanding a typical company's terms, according to one study, requires 14 years of education, which is beyond the level most Americans attain. A 2012 Carnegie Mellon study found that the average American would have to devote 76 work days just to read over tech companies' policies. That number would probably be much higher today.

At its core, the arrangement is unbalanced, putting the burden on consumers to read through voluminous, nonnegotiable documents, written to benefit corporations in exchange for access to their services. It's hard to imagine, by contrast, being asked to sign a 60-page printed contract before entering a bowling alley or a florist shop... Though courts have held terms of service contracts to be binding, there is generally no legal requirement that companies make them comprehensible. It is understandable, then, that companies may feel emboldened to insert terms that advantage them at their customers' expense.

That includes provisions that most consumers wouldn't knowingly agree to: an inability to delete one's own account, granting companies the right to claim credit for or alter their creative work, letting companies retain content even after a user deletes it, letting them gain access to a user's full browsing history and giving them blanket indemnity. More often than not, there is a clause (including for The New York Times's website) that the terms can be updated at any time without prior notice. Some terms approach the absurd. Food and ride-share companies, like DoorDash and Lyft, ask users to agree that the companies are not delivery or transportation businesses, a sleight of hand designed to give the companies license to treat their contract drivers as employees while also sheltering the companies from liability for whatever may happen on a ride or delivery. Handy, an on-demand housecleaning service, once sought in its terms of service to put customers on the hook for future tax liabilities should their contract workers' job classification be changed to employee...

"This is one of the tools used by corporations to assert themselves over their customers and whittle away their rights," said Nancy Kim, a California Western School of Law professor who studies online contracts. "With their constant updates to terms and conditions, it amounts to a massive bait-and-switch...."

"We have become so beaten down by this that we just accept it," said Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University law professor. "The idea that anyone should be expected to read these terms of service is preposterous — they are written to discourage people from reading them...."
The Board urges the U.S. Congress to consider requiring greater transparency about terms and their changes — as well as simpler explanations. "If a company's online service is open to 13-year-olds, as many are, then the terms of use need to be written so an eighth grader can understand them."

Teenagers' mental health is being damaged by heavy social media use, a report has found. From a report: Research from the Education Policy Institute and The Prince's Trust said wellbeing and self-esteem were similar in all children of primary school age. Boys and girls' wellbeing is affected at the age of 14, but girls' mental health drops more after that, it found. A lack of exercise is another contributing factor - exacerbated by the pandemic, the study said. According to the research: One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school. The number of young people with probable mental illness has risen to one in six, up from one in nine in 2017. Boys in the bottom set at primary school had lower self-esteem at 14 than their peers. The wellbeing of both genders fell during adolescence, with girls experiencing a greater decline, the report said.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday said the company will make its office facilities available for COVID-19 vaccination clinics, as tech giants aim to speed up distribution efforts in the US. From a report: The company said it's partnering with the health care provider One Medical for the clinics, which will be opened "as needed" at Google buildings, parking lots and open spaces. For now, Google is targeting its campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the company is headquartered; Los Angeles; New York City; and Kirkland, Washington, outside of Seattle. [...] The company also said it will use artificial intelligence from its Google Cloud division to help health care providers and pharmacies with the logistics of vaccine distribution. That includes detecting changes in the temperature of vaccine doses, which must be stored in cool conditions. Google also said it's committing more than $150 million in free ads and other investments to public health agencies and nonprofits promoting vaccine education.

"Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared," reports WIRED, saying the site raises clear privacy concerns: The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple, open source machine-learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know, or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone... "It's entirely possible that a lot of people who were on this website now will face real-life consequences for their actions...."

A recent upgrade to the site adds hyperlinks from faces to the video source, so that visitors can click on any face and see what the person was filmed doing on Parler. The Faces of the Riot creator, who says he's a college student in the "greater DC area," intends that added feature to help contextualize every face's inclusion on the site and differentiate between bystanders, peaceful protesters, and violent insurrectionists. He concedes that he and a co-creator are still working to scrub "non-rioter" faces, including those of police and press who were present. A message at the top of the site also warns against vigilante investigations, instead suggesting users report those they recognize to the FBI, with a link to an FBI tip page....

McDonald has previously both criticized the power of facial recognition technology and himself implemented facial recognition projects like ICEspy, a tool he launched in 2018 for identifying agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency... He sees Faces of the Riot as "playing it really safe" compared even to his own facial recognition experiments, given that it doesn't seek to link faces with named identities. "And I think it's a good call because I don't think that we need to legitimize this technology any more than it already is and has been falsely legitimized," McDonald says.

But McDonald also points out that Faces of the Riot demonstrates just how accessible facial recognition technologies have become. "It shows how this tool that has been restricted only to people who have the most education, the most power, the most privilege is now in this more democratized state," McDonald says.

David Leonhardt won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011. This week in a New York Times newsletter, he argues that early in the pandemic experts around the world mistakenly discouraged mask use because of "a concern that people would rush to buy high-grade medical masks, leaving too few for doctors and nurses. The experts were also [at the time] unsure how much ordinary masks would help."

But are they now spreading a similarly misguided pessimism about vaccines? Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They're not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn't change their behavior once they get their shots...

"It's going to save your life — that's where the emphasis has to be right now," Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine said. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are "essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease," Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said. "It's ridiculously encouraging."

Here's my best attempt at summarizing what we know:

- The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses. That's on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. And a vaccine doesn't even need to be so effective to reduce cases sharply and crush a pandemic.

- If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.

Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did.
The article suggests less-positive messages are being conveyed in part because "As academic researchers, they are instinctively cautious, prone to emphasizing any uncertainty."

But the article ultimately concludes that in fact, "the evidence so far suggests that the vaccines are akin to a cure."

jyosim writes: Professors at the University of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 professors there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Professors feel the app is akin to a "police state." "The university spokesperson said that administrators had heard that some professors 'would simply refuse to teach an in person class if that's what they were supposed to be doing,' so they added the feature, which rolled out this week as spring classes began," reports EdSurge. An email was sent to all students on Monday that encouraged them to use the app if they saw any 'inconsistencies' in course delivery."

In response, Daniel A. Smith, chair of the university's political-science department, wrote in a letter: "Emulation of police states is not a good look for a university devoted to the education of democratic citizens. What sort of message does this send to our students?" On Twitter, professor Lisa S. Scott said she was "more than a little disturbed" by the move, adding, "@UF do better. We've been working our asses off for you through all of this."

Just ahead of its launch for commercial PC-like devices, an install image of Windows 10X for single screens has leaked, giving us an early peek at Microsoft's new OS. And yes, it's just like Chrome OS. From a report: Let's just get that out of the way. Microsoft has been working for years on a Chromebook competitor, but it has been largely unsuccessful. Windows 10 S, which was originally called Windows 10 Cloud, was Terry Myerson's approach, and that, of course, crashed and burned, in part because it looked identical to Windows 10 but couldn't run downloaded Windows 10 desktop applications. And now we have Windows 10X. Microsoft tried to hide its true intent with this product by pretending last year that it was aimed at a new generation of dual-display PCs, but the software giant really created 10X to compete with Chrome OS on inexpensive single-display PCs. So after failing to get its container-based Windows desktop application compatibility solution to work, Microsoft scaled back and repositioned Windows 10X as was originally intended: It will now ship only on new traditional PCs aimed at education and other commercial markets.

The Linux Foundation has new courses to help you manage open-source projects and technical staff within your organization. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Previously, if you want to know how to run open-source well in your company, you had to work with OASIS Open or the TODO Group. Both are non-profit organizations supporting best open source and open standards practices. But, to work with either group, effectively, you already had to know a lot about open source. [...] This 7-module course series is designed to help executives, managers, software developers, and engineers understand the basic concepts for building effective open-source practices. It's also helpful to those in the C suite who want to set up effective open-source program management, including how to create an Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

The program builds on the accumulated wisdom of many previous training modules on open-source best practices while adding fresh and updated content to explain all of the critical elements of working effectively with open source in enterprises. The courses are designed to be self-paced, and reasonably high-level, but with enough detail to get new open-source practitioners up and running quickly. Guy Martin, OASIS Open's executive director, developed these courses. Martin knows his way around open source. He has a unique blend of over 25 years' experience both as a software engineer and open-source strategist. Marin has helped build open-source programs at Red Hat, Samsung, and Autodesk. He was also instrumental in founding the Academy Software Foundation, the Open Connectivity Foundation, and has contributed to TODO Group's best practices and learning guides. The "Open Source Management & Strategy program" costs $499 and is available to begin immediately. A certificate is awarded upon completion.

Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle shares an article from IEEE Spectrum: Many associate XPrize with a $10-million award offered in 1996 to motivate a breakthrough in private space flight. But the organization has since held other competitions related to exploration, ecology, and education. And in November, they launched the Pandemic Response Challenge, which will culminate in a $500,000 award to be split between two teams that not only best predict the continuing global spread of COVID-19, but also prescribe policies to curtail it...

For Phase 1, teams had to submit prediction models by 22 December... Up to 50 teams will make it to Phase 2, where they must submit a prescription model... The top two teams will split half a million dollars. The competition may not end there. Amir Banifatemi, XPrize's chief innovation and growth officer, says a third phase might test models on vaccine deployment prescriptions. And beyond the contest, some cities or countries might put some of the Phase 2 or 3 models into practice, if Banifatemi can find adventurous takers.

The organizers expect a wide variety of solutions. Banifatemi says the field includes teams from AI strongholds such as Stanford, Microsoft, MIT, Oxford, and Quebec's Mila, but one team consists of three women in Tunisia. In all, 104 teams from 28 countries have registered. "We're hoping that this competition can be a springboard for developing solutions for other really big problems as well," Miikkulainen says. Those problems include pandemics, global warming, and challenges in business, education, and healthcare. In this scenario, "humans are still in charge," he emphasizes. "They still decide what they want, and AI gives them the best alternatives from which the decision-makers choose."

But Miikkulainen hopes that data science can help humanity find its way. "Maybe in the future, it's considered irresponsible not to use AI for making these policies," he says.
For the Covid-19 competition, Banifatemi emphasized that one goal was "to make the resulting insights available freely to everyone, in an open-source manner — especially for all those communities that may not have access to data and epidemiology divisions, statisticians, or data scientists."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Waymo swears it's not out to pick nits and give us all an exercise in linguistics. The fact it will no longer use the term "self-driving" when describing its technology is about education and safety, Alphabet Inc.'s division devoted to the technology said Wednesday. Going forward, Waymo will call its technology "fully autonomous" to create, what it believes, is an important distinction. The company's argument rests entirely on how the public perceives "self-driving" as a term. Waymo points out, without naming names, that some automakers -- Tesla comes to mind -- toss the phrase around even though its technology doesn't fully drive a car on its own. Worse, Waymo said the proliferation of "self-driving" can lead to drivers taking their hands off the wheel when it's unsafe to do so.

By moving to the term "fully autonomous," Waymo hopes to lay the groundwork for standard industry terminology and help the public understand that "fully autonomous" means the car makes every decision, well, autonomously on its own accord. It also puts some space between Waymo's technology and companies that continue to brand their own systems as "self-driving." In the end, it's a bit of a branding exercise, but I think Waymo's heart is in the right place.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Torrent Freak: On December 21, 2020, Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society, filed a lawsuit hoping to have the court compel Indian ISPs to block both Sci-Hub and Libgen. Accusing the platforms of blatantly infringing their rights on a massive scale, the publishers said that due to the defiant nature of the platforms, ISP blocking is the only effective solution to hand. The massive complaint, which runs to 2,169 pages, was received by Sci-Hub with little time to review its contents. This not-insignificant issue was quickly pointed out to the Court, with counsel for Sci-Hub asking for an extension. After Sci-Hub assured the Court (pdf) that "no new articles or publications, in which the plaintiffs have copyright" would be uploaded to the site in advance of the next hearing, more time was granted to respond.

The case is set for a hearing tomorrow but in advance of that, interested parties are attempting to put the government under pressure to intervene by preventing a blockade that, according to them, would cause damage to education and society in India. Speaking on behalf of thousands of scientists, academics, teachers and students, the Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) is expressing dismay at the publishers' efforts to prevent the "free flow of information" between those who produce it and those who seek it. [...] Instead of demonizing Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, the group describes her work as an effective solution to make research papers available to all for the benefit of humanity. As a result, the Breakthrough Science Society says it actually supports the work of Sci-Hub and Libgen, arguing that their work is not illegal and should continue unhindered.

In an effort to pressure the Indian government to intervene on behalf of the people, the Breakthrough Science Society has launched a petition, calling on everyone from scientists and academics to teachers and students, to declare that knowledge should be accessible to all, not just those who can afford to pay the publishers' rates. Dr. Ashwani Mahajan, an Associate Professor at the University of Delhi, who among other things describes himself as a policy interventionist, says that if the ISPs are compelled to block Sci-Hub and Libgen, Indian researchers' access to information will be seriously undermined. While acknowledging that the government spends large sums of money to subscribe to journals, Mahajan says that researchers and students are heavily reliant on Sci-Hub and Libgen for information that the publishing industry itself does not pay for.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In India, parents are being aggressively sold the idea that their children must start coding at 4 or 5 or be future failures, prompting Neelesh Misra [a writer, audio storyteller, and founder of a media and organic products company] to ask Do Children Really Need to Learn to Code? [Alternate URL here] In a New York Times Opinion piece that's sparked 1,000+ comments, Misra writes that "Aggressive campaigns pushing Indian parents and schools to embrace coding might help meet corporate targets, but they are creating a fear that a generation of children will lose out if their parents don't sign them up for these coding programs. Parents struggle to resist these shrewdly framed campaigns."
From the writer/storyteller/founder's piece: WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families... Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent's deepest fear: Will my child be left behind...?

Relentless advertising campaigns are telling Indian parents that coding is critical because making children code will develop their cognitive skills. Storytelling does all that too. And singing songs. And asking questions or being offered choices or visiting interesting places...

I realize that our world is about to change unrecognizably. Robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality shall soon be concepts and a way of living that will be second nature to our children. The future should excite us, not make our children feel afraid and ill equipped. The future should — and I am sure will — have a place for dreamers and doers, and not just those hunched forever over a computer.

theodp writes: According to an Amazon job listing for a contract position, the e-tailer is seeking a lead for a new Amazon Future Engineer program in India that's set to launch in 2021. "The initial research for Amazon Future Engineer in India," Amazon explains, "is currently underway and we look to the chosen candidate to dive deep into operationalizing the program to what is relevant for India and the student needs. The role involves working with local non-profits and government officials to deeply understand the needs of the students. They will utilize this research and feedback to build trust and implement a unique program addressing needs for different aged students, childhood to career. They will quickly diagnose any structural barriers with CS education policy/adoption by region, while also exercising a bias for action to get programs launched in 2021. This role will require strategic planning, ability to manage a budget and implement programs at a large scale."

In its press release celebrating record-breaking holiday sales in 2020, Amazon on Monday pointed out that its Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) program more than doubled its reach in the U.S. during the pandemic and is now serving more than 5,000 schools and 550,000 students in need with computer science coursework, largely by providing access to online courses from Edhesive.

Launched in 2018 with the goal of inspiring 10+ million kids each year to explore CS, Amazon explained that AFE is part of a $50 million commitment it made to CS and STEM education in 2017. Microsoft President Brad Smith later revealed in his 2019 book Tools and Weapons that the $50 million investments in CS+STEM education that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce each committed to in 2017 were part of a $300 million private sector pledge that Smith indicated was needed to get Ivanka Trump to persuade her father to fund K-12 CS; the President ultimately issued an Executive Order requiring the U.S. Dept. of Education to spend $1 billion on K-12 CS+STEM education.

Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown "complacent" and "entitled" about the state's world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley's high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there's nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglomerations is exceedingly hard, as much art as science. Low taxes, modest regulation, sound infrastructure and good education systems all help, but aren't always sufficient. Once squandered, moreover, such dynamism can't easily be revived. With competition rising across the U.S., the area's policy makers need to recognize the dangers ahead.

In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance -- widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime -- it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias -- a major tech-industry perk -- on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an "Office of Emerging Technology" that will only grant permission to test new products if they're deemed, in a city bureaucrat's view, to provide a "net common good." Whatever the merits of such meddling, it's hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.

These two traits -- poor governance and animosity toward business -- have collided calamitously with respect to the city's housing market. Even as officials offered tax breaks for tech companies to headquarter themselves downtown, they mostly refused to lift residential height limits, modify zoning rules or allow significant new construction to accommodate the influx of new workers. They then expressed shock that rents and home prices were soaring -- and blamed the tech companies. California's legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state's biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum. A new privacy law has imposed immense compliance burdens -- amounting to as much as 1.8% of state output in 2018 -- while conferring almost no consumer benefits. An 8.8% state corporate tax rate and 13.3% top income-tax rate (the nation's highest) haven't helped.

Apple this month announced a new Launch@Apple mentorship program that's designed for first-generation college students, with the program set to launch in early 2021. From a report: According to a PDF describing Launch@Apple, it is aimed at first-generation college freshmen and sophomores who are majoring in finance, mathematics, economics, business, data analytics, and accounting. It matches college students one-on-one with Apple mentors who are able to provide resources for learning and opportunities for professional growth, with the possibility of job shadowing, paid externships, and paid internships. Apple has not publicly announced Launch@Apple, and it's not entirely clear how the word is being spread. MyHealthyApple shared details this morning, and last week, a LinkedIn post highlighted the program. Ahead of when Launch begins in early 2021, Apple is accepting applications from students with a wide range of GPAs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, more than 1,000 educators and students at City University of New York institutions petitioned their board of trustees to not renew its contract with the anti-plagiarism software company Turnitin. The board ultimately voted unanimously, with the student senate representative abstaining, to renew Turnitin's five-year contract for nearly $2 million. Five months earlier, CUNY had laid off nearly 3,000 adjunct faculty and part-time employees as a result of budget shortfalls. (The college system's chancellor has pushed back against that characterization). The protest against Turnitin is the latest high-profile effort in what has become a nationwide backlash in higher education against educational technology vendors. As schools moved online during the pandemic and confronted slimming budgets, they increasingly turned to a wide array of software companies for solutions. The ed tech industry has boomed, and the school experience has been transformed in ways that are sure to outlive the pandemic -- not necessarily for the better, many experts say.

The California Bar released data last week confirming that during its use of ExamSoft for the October Bar exam, over one-third of the nearly nine-thousand online examinees were flagged by the software. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is concerned that the exam proctoring software is incorrectly flagging students for cheating "due either to the software's technical failures or to its requirements that students have relatively new computers and access to near-broadband speeds." From the report: This is outrageous. It goes without saying that of the 3,190 applicants flagged by the software, the vast majority were not cheating. Far more likely is that, as EFF and others have said before, remote proctoring software is surveillance snake oil -- you simply can't replicate a classroom environment online, and attempting to do so via algorithms and video monitoring only causes harm. In this case, the harm is not only to the students who are rightfully upset about the implications and the lack of proper channels for redress, but to the institution of the Bar itself. While examinees have been searching for help from other examinees as well as hiring legal counsel in their attempt to defend themselves from potentially baseless claims of cheating, the California Committee of Bar Examiners has said "everything is going well" and called these results "a good thing to see" (13:30 into the video of the Committee meeting).

That is not how we see it. These flags have triggered concern for hundreds, if not thousands, of test takers, most of whom had no idea that they were flagged until recently. Many only learned about the flag after receiving an official "Chapter 6 Notice" from the Bar, which is sent when an applicant is observed (supposedly) violating exam conduct rules or seen or heard with prohibited items, like a cell phone, during the exam. In a depressingly ironic introduction to the legal system, the Bar has requested that students respond to the notices within 10 days, but it would appear that none of them have been given enough information to do so, as Chapter 6 Notices contain only a short summary of the violation. These summaries are decidedly vague: "Facial view of your eyes was not within view of the camera for a prolonged period of time"; "No audible sound was detected"; "Leaving the view of the webcam outside of scheduled breaks during a remote-proctored exam." Examinees do not currently have access to the flagged videos themselves, and are not expected to receive access to them, or any other evidence against them, before they are required to submit a response. The report goes on to say that some of these flags are technical issues with ExamSoft. For example, Lenovo laptops appear to have been flagged en masse for an issue with the software's inability to access the internal microphone.

Other flags are likely due to the inability of the software to correctly recognize the variability of examinees' demeanors and expressions. "We implore the California Bar to rethink its plans for remotely-proctored future exams, and to work carefully to offer clearer paths for examinees who have been flagged by these inadequate surveillance tools," the EFF says in closing. "Until then, the Bar must provide examinees who have been flagged with a fair appeals process, including sharing the videos and any other information necessary for them to defend themselves before requiring a written response."