Leaked Nintendo documents have revealed a frightening surveillance operation carried out against a hacker who was researching exploits for the 3DS handheld. TorrentFreak reports: During the past 24 hours, various Twitter accounts (1,2) have been posting snippets from documents that were recently leaked from Nintendo. While there are numerous items of interest, the most shocking revelations involve Neimod, a hacker who several years ago developed exploits for the 3DS handheld console. [T]he scale of the operation, which is revealed in detail in the leaked documents, shows just how far the gaming giant was prepared to go to stop his work. For example, the leak reveals personal profiling that dug deeply into Neimod's education status, listed details of his working life, while offering evidence of physical snooping on his daily lifestyle. What time he could be found at home, who came to see him there, and even when he visited places like banks and restaurants are all included. While this kind of surveillance is creepy in its own right, additional documents reveal a detailed plan to use the gathered intelligence to physically confront Neimod in order to pressurize him into complying with the company's demands.

According to Nintendo's planning, the operation would begin around April 15, 2013, with its team meeting at a local hotel to discuss and finalize their plans. Following a review of Neimod's movements of the previous week, the team would then decide where and when contact would be made -- after work or at home, for example. With an undercover investigator monitoring Neimod to discover what time he left work, Neimod was to be approached by a 'contact team,' who were instructed to approach their target "in a friendly, non-threatening, professional, and courteous manner." "Provide a business card," the instructions read. After Neimod had been engaged in conversation, the team was instructed to flatter the hacker by "acknowledging his engineering/programming aptitude." They were also told to reference his stated aim of not "facilitating piracy" with his hacks but point out Nintendo's concerns that a release of his hack could do just that.

Whether Neimod complied or resisted, Nintendo prepared for both eventualities. The following slide, posted to Twitter by Eclipse-TT, shows a flow chart that begins with instructions for the "Knock and Talk Team," details a staging area, rules of engagement, and plans for what should happen when things go to plan -- or otherwise. The Nintendo "Final Enforcement Proposal" document describes a "carrot and stick" approach, with the stick being a laundry list of potential offenses committed by Neimod under Belgian law and the carrot representing a number of sweeteners that might be of interest to the hacker. If cooperation was achieved, Nintendo suggested it could refrain from filing a criminal complaint. It may also enter into a "bounty" contract with Neimod with payments made for finding and documenting exploits. Within certain parameters, his discoveries could still be announced to the public, allowing him to retain "bragging rights." This could help Nintendo's image, the company wrote.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill Tuesday suspending the use of facial recognition and other kinds of biometric technology in schools in New York, also directing a study of whether its use is appropriate in schools. The legislation places a moratorium on schools purchasing and using biometric identifying technology until at least July 1, 2022 or until the report is completed and the state Education Department commissioner authorizes its use. The rule applies to both public and private schools in New York.

In a statement, ACLU said. "This is a victory for student privacy and students of color, who are disproportionately harmed by this flawed and biased technology. New York has led the way, and now other states should follow."

Seventy-three suspected cheaters, one critical mistake. Dozens of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point were caught cheating on a calculus final exam in May after they all made the same errors on the test, according to officials. From a report: Instructors at the Army's premier training ground for officers revealed the academic scandal on Monday, saying it's the worst they've seen since the 1970s. So far, 59 cadets out of a suspected 73 have admitted to taking part in the scam in which the students "shared answers and made the same mistakes," Lt. Col. Chris Ophardt, a West Point spokesman told NPR. The test was administered remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic. Four cadets have resigned and another eight, who say they're innocent of any wrongdoing, will face a full hearing led by seniors at the academy. The cases against two others initially implicated in the scheme have been dismissed for lack of evidence..

After months of deliberation, congressional leaders reached a $900 billion coronavirus relief deal on Sunday, including billions in funding for broadband internet access. From a report: Congress' latest relief measure provides $7 billion in funding for broadband connectivity and infrastructure. That figure includes $3.2 billion for a $50-per-month emergency broadband benefit for people who are laid off or furloughed during the pandemic, according to a press release from Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-OR) office on Sunday. "Broadband connections are essential for Americans seeking to get new jobs, and to access school, health care and other government services," Wyden said in a statement Sunday night. "Ensuring working families can stay online will pay massive dividends for kids' education, helping people find jobs and jump starting the economic recovery next year."

theodp writes: Q. How many AP Computer Science Principles 'exam takers' would you have if you cancelled the AP CSP exam due to the coronavirus? A. More than 116,000!

That's according to the math behind a new College Board press release, which boasts, "In 2020, more than 116,000 students took the AP CSP Exam -- more than double the number of exam takers in the course's first year, and a 21% increase over the previous year. In 2020, 39,570 women took the AP CSP exam, nearly three times the number who tested in 2017." Which is somewhat confusing, since the College Board actually cancelled the 2020 AP CSP Exam last spring, explaining to students, "This year, there will be no end-of-year multiple-choice exam in Computer Science Principles [the exam was to have counted for 60% of students' scores] -- your AP score will be computed from the Create and Explore performance tasks only."

Still, Sunday's Washington Post reported the good PR news, as did tech-bankrolled College Board partner Code.org, which exclaimed, "Young women set records in computer science exams, again!" In 2018, Code.org lamented that many students enrolled in AP CSP wouldn't get college credit for the course "because they don't take the exam", so perhaps an increase in AP CSP scores awarded -- if not AP CSP exams taken -- should be added to the list of silver linings of the pandemic.

This week, Google acquired a company called Neverware that allows users to turn their old PCs and Macs into a Chromebook with its CloudReady software. Now, Google is planning to make CloudReady into an official Chrome OS release. Engadget reports: When that happens, Neverware says its existing users will be able to seamlessly upgrade to the updated software. Moreover, once that transition is complete, Google will support CloudReady in the same way that it currently does Chrome OS. In the immediate future, Neverware says it's business as usual. The Home Edition of CloudReady isn't changing, and the company says it's committed to supporting its existing education and enterprise customers. Moreover, there's no plan to change pricing at the moment, and Google will honor any current multi-year licenses.

Not only does this acquisition make a lot of sense from Google's perspective, but it's hard to see a downside for CloudReady users. The fact the operating system wasn't officially supported by Google was one of the few downsides to the software. It meant you couldn't install Android apps on CloudReady devices, even though it's based on Chromium OS. With this acquisition, support for Android apps becomes much more likely. Direct support from Google will also make the software more appealing to schools and businesses since they can get help directly from the company if they have any technical issues.

The hectic M&A cycle we have seen throughout 2020 continued this weekend when Vista Equity Partners announced it was acquiring Pluralsight for $3.5 billion. From a report: That comes out to $20.26 per share. The company stock closed on Friday at $18.50 per share on a market cap of over $2.7 billion. With Pluralsight, Vista gets an online training company that helps educate IT professionals, including developers, operations, data and security, with a suite of online courses. As the pandemic has taken hold, it has breathed new life into edtech, but even before that, there was a market for upskilling IT Pros online. This trend certainly didn't escape Monti Saroya, co-head of the Vista Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista. "We have seen firsthand that the demand for skilled software engineers continues to outstrip supply, and we expect this trend to persist as we move into a hybrid online-offline world across all industries and interactions, with business leaders recognizing that technological innovation is critical to business success," he said in a statement.

"This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit," tweeted novelist Stephen King, adding later that "The Little Drummer Girl was one of the best novels I've ever read." Margaret Atwood tweeted "His Smiley novels are key to understanding the mid-20th century."

And the Associated Press tells the story of how spy-novel writer John le Carré was "drawn to espionage by an upbringing that was superficially conventional but secretly tumultuous." Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, southwest England on Oct. 19, 1931, he appeared to have a standard upper-middle-class education: the private Sherborne School, a year studying German literature at the University of Bern, compulsory military service in Austria — where he interrogated Eastern Bloc defectors — and a degree in modern languages at Oxford University. But his ostensibly ordinary upbringing was an illusion. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man who was an associate of gangsters and spent time in jail for insurance fraud. His mother left the family when David was 5; he didn't meet her again until he was 21.

It was a childhood of uncertainty and extremes: one minute limousines and champagne, the next eviction from the family's latest accommodation. It bred insecurity, an acute awareness of the gap between surface and reality — and a familiarity with secrecy that would serve him well in his future profession. "These were very early experiences, actually, of clandestine survival," le Carré said in 1996. "The whole world was enemy territory."

After university, which was interrupted by his father's bankruptcy, he taught at the prestigious boarding school Eton before joining the foreign service. Officially a diplomat, he was in fact a "lowly" operative with the domestic intelligence service MI5 — he'd started as a student at Oxford — and then its overseas counterpart MI6, serving in Germany, on the Cold War front line, under the cover of second secretary at the British Embassy. His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym. He remained "le Carré" for his entire career. He said he chose the name — square in French — simply because he liked the vaguely mysterious, European sound of it...

Le Carré said in 1990 that the fall of the Berlin Wall had come as a relief. "For me, it was absolutely wonderful. I was sick of writing about the Cold War."
His 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold "was immediately hailed as a classic and allowed him to quit the intelligence service to become a full-time writer," the AP writes, adding that he ultimately won a critical respect that "eluded" James Bond's creator Ian Fleming.

And they note that le Carré ultimately described himself as a not-particularly-optimistic believer in humanity. "If only we could see it expressed in our institutional forms, we would have hope then," he told the AP. "I think the humanity will always be there. I think it will always be defeated."

cusco shares a blog post from Amazon: As part of our efforts to continue supporting the future workforce, we are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to people from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge, in more than 200 countries and territories. We will provide training opportunities through existing AWS-designed programs, as well as develop new courses to meet a wide variety of schedules and learning goals. The training ranges from self-paced online courses -- designed to help individuals update their technical skills -- to intensive upskilling programs that can lead to new jobs in the technology industry.

In a joint security alert published this week, the US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned about increased cyber-attacks targeting the US K-12 educational sector, often leading to ransomware attacks, the theft of data, and the disruption of distance learning services. From a report: "As of December 2020, the FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC continue to receive reports from K-12 educational institutions about the disruption of distance learning efforts by cyber actors," the alert reads. "Cyber actors likely view schools as targets of opportunity, and these types of attacks are expected to continue through the 2020/2021 academic year," it added.

But of all the attacks plaguing the K-12 sector (kindergarten through twelfth-grade schools), ransomware has been a particularly aggressive threat this year, CISA and the FBI said. "According to MS-ISAC data, the percentage of reported ransomware incidents against K-12 schools increased at the beginning of the 2020 school year," the two agencies said. "In August and September, 57% of ransomware incidents reported to the MS-ISAC involved K-12 schools, compared to 28% of all reported ransomware incidents from January through July," they said.

How people spend their time is similar in many ways across countries: we all sleep, work, eat, and enjoy leisure. But there are also important differences in the freedom people have to spend time on the things they value most. Studying how people across the world spend their time provides an important perspective for understanding living conditions, economic opportunities, and general well-being. A study by Our World in Data: Consider sleeping, for example. From this sample of countries, South Koreans sleep the least -- averaging 7 hours and 51 minutes of sleep every day. In India and the US, at the other end of the spectrum, people sleep an hour more on average. Work is another important activity where we see large differences. Countries are sorted by paid work hours in the chart (check the source link) -- from highest to lowest. In China and Mexico people spend, on an average day, almost twice as much time on paid work as people in Italy and France do. This is a general pattern: People in richer countries can afford to work less. Keep in mind that this chart shows the average for all people in the working age bracket, from 15 to 64 years, whether they are actually employed or not.

Differences in demographics, education and economic prosperity all contribute to these inequalities in work and time use. But what's clear in the chart here (check the source link) is that there are also some differences in time use that are not well explained by economic or demographic differences. In the UK, for example, people spend more time working than in France; but in both countries people report spending a similar amount of time on leisure activities. Cultural differences are likely to play a role here. The French seem to spend much more time eating than the British -- and in this respect the data actually goes in line with stereotypes about food culture. People in France, Greece, Italy and Spain report spending more time eating than people in most other European countries. The country where people spend the least time eating and drinking is the USA (63 minutes).

A reader shares a report from The Verge: Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released shocking footage of the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory's iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.

The videos of the collapse were captured by a camera located in Arecibo's Operations Control Center, as well as from a drone located above the platform at the time of collapse. The operator of the drone was able to adjust the drone camera once the platform started to fall and capture the moment of impact. NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November. The footage highlights the moment when multiple cables snapped, causing the platform to swing outward and hit the side of the dish. The collapse also brought down the tops of the three support towers surrounding Arecibo, where the cables had been connected to keep the platform in the air. Slashdot reader joshgs shares a petition to rebuild the Arecibo Observatory. "On December 1, the platform of the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory suffered a catastrophic collapse," the petition states. "This telescope had many capabilities that cannot be replaced by any existing or planned facility. It had the world's most powerful and most sensitive planetary radar system, providing unparalleled capacity to track and characterize near-Earth asteroids. The telescope was also a source of tourism, education, and pride for the people of Puerto Rico, inspiring many to pursue careers in science and technology."

"We ask Congress to allocate funding to build a new Arecibo radio telescope with greater capabilities than the previous telescope -- to maintain American leadership in planetary defense, astronomy, and ionospheric studies; and to inspire a new generation of scientists."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, Nature journals unveiled their "landmark" open-access option. Nature journals will charge authors, starting in January 2021, up to $11,400 to make research papers free to read, as an alternative to subscription-only publishing. Scientists from around the world received this news with outrage and disappointment on social media. Nature's announcement comes on the heels of their recent "diversity commitment" which pledged "greater representation of currently under-represented groups" in their published content and events, and "faster movement in the direction of equity." How does Nature's diversity commitment square with their own fee options? Do elite, prestige journals actually care about equity and diversity? Is Nature, one of the largest and most profitable publishers, leading in addressing inequities and setting an example to other publishers? And what do scientists in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), people who are rarely consulted, think about Nature's new policy? To address these questions, I consulted 20+ scientists from around the world. Their voices matter, as scientists are the most important stakeholder in the publishing industry. I also sought input from Springer Nature, the publisher, to better understand their fee structure which is thought to be the highest of any journal. The Lancet, another high-impact journal (by Elsevier, the publisher), in comparison, charges $5000 for the open-access option. "The fees are outrageous, an impediment to open access, and a huge hurdle for LMIC researchers," said Mwele Malecela, Director, Neglected Tropical Diseases, World Health Organization.

Remember when Microsoft was criticized for enabling "workplace surveillance" over "productivity scores" in its Microsoft 365 office software which gave managers highly detailed profiles of each individual employee's activity. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score apparently has roots in another Microsoft patent application for Systems, Methods, and Software for Implementing a Behavior Change Management Program, which also lays out plans for as yet unimplemented features to automatically schedule hundreds of employees for months of productivity re-education, including preventing employees from scheduling meetings with others if the service deems it counter-productive. So, could the HAL 9000's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" be considered prior art?
But Microsoft "has even bigger ideas for using technology to monitor workers in the interest of maximizing organizational productivity," reports GeekWire: Newly surfaced Microsoft patent filings describe a system for deriving and predicting "overall quality scores" for meetings using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting. The system uses cameras, sensors, and software tools to determine, for example, "how much a participant contributes to a meeting vs performing other tasks (e.g., texting, checking email, browsing the Internet)."

The "meeting insight computing system" would then predict the likelihood that a group will hold a high-quality meeting. It would flag potential challenges when an organizer is setting the meeting up, and recommend alternative venues, times, or people to include in the meeting, for example... A patent application made public Nov. 12 notes, "many organizations are plagued by overly long, poorly attended, and recurring meetings that could be modified and/or avoided if more information regarding meeting quality was available." The approach would apply to in-person and virtual meetings, and hybrids of the two...

The filings do not detail any potential privacy safeguards. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the patent filings in response to GeekWire's inquiry. To be sure, patents are not products, and there's no sign yet that Microsoft plans to roll out this hypothetical system. Microsoft has established an internal artificial intelligence ethics office and a companywide committee to ensure that its AI products live by its principles of responsible AI, including transparency and privacy. However, the filings are a window into the ideas floating around inside Microsoft, and they're consistent with the direction the company is already heading.

James Somers, in a long essay: I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail: "For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell."

I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate -- and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows "up" from "down"; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; ...; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells. How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn't talk about that? It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo -- DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA -- was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined? [...]

"Education scholars say that math homework as it's currently assigned reinforces class divides in society and needs to change for good," according to Motherboard — citing a new working paper from education scholars: Status-reinforcing processes, or ones that fortify pre-existing divides, are a dime a dozen in education. Standardized testing, creating honors and AP tracks, and grouping students based on perceived ability all serve to disadvantage students who lack the support structures and parental engagement associated with affluence. Looking specifically at math homework, the authors of the new working paper wanted to see if homework was yet another status-reinforcing process. As it turns out, it was, and researchers say that the traditional solutions offered up to fix the homework gap won't work.

"Here, teachers knew that students were getting unequal support with homework," said Jessica Calarco, the first author of the paper and an associate professor of psychology at Indiana University. "And yet, because of these standard, taken-for-granted policies that treated homework as students' individual responsibilities, it erased those unequal contexts of support and led teachers to interpret and respond to homework in these status-reinforcing ways...."

The teachers interviewed for the paper acknowledged the unequal contexts affecting whether students could complete their math homework fully and correctly, Calarco said. However, that did not stop the same teachers from using homework as a way to measure students' abilities. "The most shocking and troubling part to me was hearing teachers write off students because they didn't get their homework done," Calarco said.... Part of the reason why homework can serve as a status-reinforcing process is that formal school policies and grading schemes treat it as a measure of a student's individual effort and responsibility, when many other factors affect completion, Calarco said....

"I'm not sure I want to completely come out and say that we need to ban homework entirely, but I think we need to really seriously reconsider when and how we assign it."

Unity Technologies hopes to groom 80,000 people for game jobs over three years with an education initiative aimed at helping people learn how to program and develop games. From a report: Unity is paying for this program with help from its initial public offering, in which it raised $1.3 billion at a $13.6 billion valuation in September. At the time, it set aside 750,000 shares for the Unity Social Impact fund. That is valued at $83.6 million today, and part of it will be used for the education goal. I think of this as enlightened self-interest. By training people how to use its tools, Unity creates new customers for its game engine, which is the most popular tool for building games. Unity's Jessica Lindl said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company will create learning experiences to help people create a game portfolio, get Unity Certified, and prepare for a new job. "We've formalized a long company philosophy that the world is a better place with more creators in it," Lindl said. "This strategy is around how we are empowering our employees and our creators to foster a more inclusive and sustainable world." The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global recession that has left millions of people around the world out of work. So Unity hopes to address that with an alternative, no-cost path to employment with the launch of "career pathways."

New webcam-based anti-cheating monitoring is so stressful, it's made some students cry, the Washington Post reports: "Online proctoring" companies saw in coronavirus shutdowns a chance to capitalize on a major reshaping of education, selling schools a high-tech blend of webcam-watching workers and eye-tracking software designed to catch students cheating on their exams. They've taken in millions of dollars, some of it public money, from thousands of colleges in recent months. But they've also sparked a nationwide school-surveillance revolt, with students staging protests and adopting creative tactics to push campus administrators to reconsider the deals. Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they'll be branded as cheats...

One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any "abnormal" head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough. If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having "multiple faces detected." If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it's potential "exam collusion." Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.

As an unusually disrupted fall semester churns toward finals, this student rebellion has erupted into online war, with lawsuits, takedowns and viral brawls further shaking the anxiety-inducing backdrop of college exams. Some students have even tried to take the software down from the inside, digging through the code for details on how it monitors millions of high-stakes exams... Some students said the experience of having strangers and algorithms silently judge their movements was deeply unnerving, and many worried that even being accused of cheating could endanger their chances at good grades, scholarships, internships and post-graduation careers. Several students said they had hoped for freeing, friend-filled college years but were now resigned to hours of monitored video exams in their childhood bedrooms, with no clear end in sight....

[T]he systems' technical demands have made just taking the tests almost comically complicated. One student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario shared the instructions for his online Introduction to Linear Algebra midterm: five pages, totaling more than 2,000 words, requiring students to use a special activity-monitoring Web browser and keep their face, hands and desk in view of their camera at all times...

Students who break the rules or face technical difficulties can be investigated for academic misconduct. "The instructions," the student said, "are giving me more anxiety than the test itself."
Company executives "say a semester without proctors would turn online testing into a lawless wasteland" according to the article. But one long-time teacher counters that "the most clear value conveyed to students is 'We don't trust you.'"

Yet the education tech nonprofit Educause reported that 54% of higher education institutions they'd surveyed "are currently using online or remote proctoring services.

"And another 23% are planning or considering using them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Shekinah and Orlandria Lennon were sitting at their kitchen table this fall, taking online classes, when video of their teachers and fellow students suddenly froze on their laptop screens. The wireless antenna on the roof had stopped working, and it could not be fixed. Desperate for a solution, their mother called five broadband companies, trying to get connections for their home in Orrum, N.C., a rural community of fewer than 100 people with no grocery store or traffic lights. All the companies gave the same answer: Service is not available in your area. The response is the same across broad stretches of Robeson County, N.C., a swath of small towns and rural places like Orrum dotted among soybean fields and hog farms on the South Carolina border. About 20,000 of the county's homes, or 43 percent of all households, have no internet connection.

The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives' homes so they can get online for classes the next day. [...] Millions of American students are grappling with the same challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts like the one in Robeson County have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on. "About 15 million K-12 students lived in households without adequate online connectivity in 2018," the report notes, citing a study of federal data by Common Sense Media, an education nonprofit group that tracks children's media use.

"[T]he pandemic turned the lack of internet connectivity into a nationwide emergency: Suddenly, millions of schoolchildren were cut off from digital learning, unable to maintain virtual 'attendance' and marooned socially from their classmates."

theodp writes: What if we could build a better world through code?", begins the just-released teaser video for Microsoft's 2020 Hour of Code: A Minecraft Tale of Two Villages . "Help us bring two villages together through the power of code! [...] You will experience empathy and compassion for your neighbor while embracing the diversity that makes us all uniquely special." Intended for ages 7-and-up, the accompanying Educator Guide suggests opening the 45-minute coding lesson (using Blocks or Python) with a 10-minute discussion of unconscious and conscious bias, including "prejudice based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, physical ability, religion, and body weight." The Guide also suggests how teachers might explain to students the harm biases can cause: "Both conscious and unconscious biases can cause us to behave negatively or discriminate against people. When we stereotype people based on their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or some other characteristic, it can be detrimental to us and our community. On a larger and extreme scale, bias can lead to oppression, genocide, and even slavery." The Guide notes that this year's Hour of Code lesson adheres to five Social Justice Standards. The use of Minecraft, Microsoft Education suggests, will help keep students developing and applying social and emotional skills during the pandemic.