One of the more worrying aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US is its effect on undergraduate enrollments. From a report: Over the summer there were indications, through student loan data and Census surveys, that students were either dropping out or not enrolling in previous numbers. For some students, particularly those from low-income and minority families, the financial and logistical challenges posed by the pandemic were too much to overcome. Now we have an early glimpse of actual enrollment figures from 629 US colleges (or about 22%) that reported their data to the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that collects information for universities. The data, which compare the same colleges from 2019 to 2020, go through Sept. 10, and were reported Sept. 24.

Undergraduate enrollments are indeed falling, particularly for two-year associate degrees and certificates, which are often options for students unable to afford four-year institutions. But for graduate programs, enrollments are surging as new graduates delay entering the job market and newly unemployed college graduates seek to burnish their skills and credentials with an advanced degree. The graduate option seeing the most growth is a post-baccalaureate certificate (or "postbac"), a non-degree credential often pursued by students looking to switch disciplines, like a humanities major who wants to apply to medical school. The exception are professional degrees, like in business and law, which have declined slightly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Last month, Las Vegas' largest public school district announced that a hacker compromised some of its files using ransomware and was holding the files hostage while demanding a ransom payment. Now, a hacker has published files containing students' grades and personal information after school district officials refused to pay the ransom.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst with cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, told Business Insider that he discovered leaked documents published to an online hacking forum that purported to include records from Nevada's Clark County School District, including students' names, social security numbers, addresses, and some financial information. Callow's findings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday. "Ransomware attacks happen for one reason, and one reason only: they're profitable," Callow told Business Insider. "The only way way to stop them is to make them unprofitable, and that means organizations must stop paying ransoms."

The Linux Foundation has announced that its free Introduction to Linux training course on edX has surpassed one million enrollments. The course helps students develop a good working knowledge of Linux using both the graphical interface and command line across the major Linux distribution families. No prior knowledge or experience is required, making the course a popular first step for individuals interested in pursuing a career in IT.

Introduction to Linux has helped countless individuals launch their IT careers. Jules Bashizi Irenge for example, completed the course then proceeded to intermediate Essentials of System Administration training and received a Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin (LFCS) certification, and now is a PhD candidate who has contributed over 200 patches to the Linux kernel. Fabian Pichardo also followed the introductory course with Essentials of System Administration and LFCS, and now is employed full time as a software developer.

"To have introduced over a million individuals to Linux is a tremendous milestone," said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "One of our primary goals is to bring more talent into the open source community, and offering free, high quality training that is accessible to anyone who wants it is essential to achieving that goal...."

The Linux Foundation has been an incredible partner of edX for the past six years, bringing dozens of courses in high-tech and in-demand fields to our platform of 34 million learners," said Anant Agarwal, edX Founder and CEO. "Introduction to Linux, their very first offering, has been a true blockbuster - it's one of our top 10 most popular courses of all time. We're thrilled to congratulate Linux Foundation on reaching 1 million enrollments and look forward to bringing accessible high-tech education to countless more learners, together."

Introduction to Linux remains open for new enrollments. There is no cost to complete the course, and verified certificates of completion are available for $99. The Linux Foundation offers two dozen free training courses on open source projects including Linux, Kubernetes, Hyperledger, and more in partnership with edX.

America's dreaded tax-collecting agency is sending "a strong warning to millions of crypto holders who aren't complying with the law that they must file required forms," reports the Wall Street Journal. The front page of this year's tax forms — just below "Name" and "Address" — will ask filers to declare whether they've received or exchanged any virtual currencies.

The Journal calls it "setting a trap for cryptocurrency tax cheats." "This placement is unprecedented and will make it easier for the IRS to win cases against taxpayers who check 'No' when they should check 'Yes, '" says Ed Zollars, a CPA with Kaplan Financial Education who updates tax professionals on legal developments... The change to the crypto question and other recent actions show the IRS is taking cryptocurrencies seriously as a threat to the tax system, whether the noncompliance is by enthusiasts who owe little or by sophisticated international criminals. In two recent nontax criminal cases — one involving theft by North Korea and the other involving the sale of child pornography by a Dutch national — the IRS has provided key assistance because of its growing expertise in cryptocurrencies....

For their part, many crypto users are angry with the IRS's guidance, which treats bitcoin, ether and their kin as property rather than currency. So if a crypto holder uses it to buy something or exchanges one cryptocurrency for another, there's usually a capital gain or loss to report on the tax return. "Buying a sandwich with cryptocurrency shouldn't be a taxable event," says Sean Cover, a New York City cryptocurrency holder who works in finance for a nonprofit group. He says that in 2017 he had more than 500 transactions on several platforms, and it took him 10 hours to prepare his crypto tax forms even though he paid for special software. Like some members of Congress, Mr. Cover supports a $200 threshold before crypto transactions would need to be reported. The IRS says it's up to Congress to change the law....

Meanwhile, the IRS is forging ahead with other crypto compliance measures. Earlier this month, it offered rewards up to $625,000 to code-breakers who can crack so-called privacy coins like Monero that attract illicit activity because they claim to be untraceable... The IRS is also sending a new round of letters to crypto holders who may not have complied with the tax rules, expanding on last year's mailing of about 10,000 letters. Tax specialists say the recipients are often customers of Coinbase, which was ordered by a federal court to turn over information on some accounts to the IRS.

At an event hosted by Slush, the Spotify CEO said: "I will devote 1 billion euro of my personal resources to enable the ecosystem of builders to achieve [the] European dream over the next decade." From a report: "I will do so by funding so-called moonshots focusing on the deep technology necessary to make a significant positive dent, and work with scientists, investors, and governments to do so," he added. The pledge came after Ek explained his desire to see more big European companies, saying "Europe needs to raise its ambition." When questioned on which areas he'll be investing in, Ek highlighted health care, education, machine learning, biotechnology, material sciences and energy. "The types of moonshots that I'm talking about, at least when I talk to the scientists and the entrepreneurs, they often face no [funding] options, because these ideas may be too early to bring in venture capital," he said, "so I definitely think we can do a lot more for those types of opportunities here."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on Tuesday announced he's soon opening the first location of a network of tuition-free "Montessori-inspired" preschools for underserved children. In an Instagram post, Bezos said the first Bezos Academy will open in Des Moines, Wash., on Oct. 19. The network of schools will offer year-round programming, five days a week, for children between the ages of 3 and 5. Admissions will prioritize low-income families, according to the Bezos Day One Fund website.

"This classroom is just the beginning," Bezos wrote in a post featuring a photo of a preschool classroom. "The @bezosacademy opens its doors on Oct. 19th. This one in Des Moines, WA, is the first of many free preschools that we'll be opening for underserved children." The nonprofit organization says it wants to run the schools using the same set of principles that have driven e-commerce giant Amazon. "Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer," the organization said on its website.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If we want all students to learn computer science (CS for All), we have to go to where the students are," writes University of Michigan Grand Valley State University CS Professor Mark Guzdial. "Unfortunately, that's not computer science class. In most US states, less than 5% of high school students take a course in computer science.

"Programming is applicable and useful in many domains today, so one answer is to use programming in science, mathematics, social studies, and other non-CS classes. We take programming to where the students are, and hope to increase their interest and knowledge about CS."

America's National Science Foundation (NSF) was intrigued enough by this idea to fund Creating Adoptable Computing Education Integrated into Social Studies Classes, a three-year project created by Guzdial and Grand Valley State University history professor Tamara Shreiner, a project which "aims to provide more students computing education by integrating programming activities into social studies classes and to use the computing to enhance students' data literacy." Along the same lines, the NSF has also greenlighted Northwestern University's CS professor Marcelo Worsley's Computational Thinking and Physical Computing in Physical Education for this fall, which will bring computer science to K-5 gym classes.

While the tech giants have lobbied for billions in spending on "rigorous" K-12 CS courses, could it be that the best "CS class" for most K-12 students is no CS class?

A new product wants to upgrade the act of taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook — with the resuable "Rocketbook Wave Smart Notebook": You can write on it using any Pilot Frixion pen, marker, or highlighter, and once you're done, you can scan the notes, doodles, and drawings into the Rocketbook app to store them in a cloud. Used up all of its pages? No problem. Make sure you've scanned all your notes, and then throw your notebook into the microwave. Yes, the microwave. Throwing it into the microwave will erase everything you've written from the notebook.

To avoid getting into the science of it, let's just call it magic.

The notebook's pages are designed with grids, so it's perfect for either writing or drawing, and they actually feel like real paper, so you'll still feel the joy of handwriting. That's really a thing. Ask anyone who journals. Inside the app, you can use the smart search to quickly find something in your notes, according to date or a search term.

theodp writes: Amazon on Monday issued a press release noting it will provide Computer Science Education for 550,000+ K-12 students annually across 5,000+ schools nationwide amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "Amazon Future Engineer coursework can be done virtually to help ensure students stay on track and continue to prepare for the jobs of the future," Amazon explained. Amazon Future Engineer also launched the Amazon Cyber Robotics Challenge, a virtual coding competition that teaches students in grade 4+ the basics of CS in the context of a real-life industry challenge -- "code an Amazon Hercules robot to deliver your friend's birthday present on time." Another case of life imitating 'The Simpsons' (screenshots: Amazon vs Simpsons)?

Apple today introduced a redesigned iPad Air that looks more like an iPad Pro, as well as an updated 8th-generation, entry-level iPad. MacRumors reports on the new iPad Air: Apple today introduced a redesigned iPad Air with slimmer bezels, paving the way for an all-screen design similar to recent iPad Pro models. In addition, the new iPad Air is the first Apple device with Touch ID built into the power button. The new iPad Air is powered by the new 5nm-based, six-core A14 Bionic chip for up to 40 percent faster performance and up to 30 percent faster graphics than the previous-generation iPad Air.

The device features a fully laminated 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display with True Tone, P3 wide color support, and an anti-reflective coating. Following in the footsteps of the iPad Pro, the new iPad Air features a USB-C port instead of a Lightning connector. The device also features the same 12-megapixel rear camera used in the iPad Pro for higher-resolution photos and 4K video recording. The new iPad Air will be available starting in October on Apple.com and the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions. Wi-Fi models will start at $599, while cellular models will start at $729, with 64GB and 256GB storage capacities available. There will be five colors to choose from, including silver, space gray, rose gold, green, and sky blue. 9to5Mac reports on the 8th-generation iPad: Apple today announced the 8th-generation iPad, featuring an A12 chip compared to the previous-generation's A10 processor. The design of the new entry-level iPad is largely the same as its predecessor. The jump from A10 to A12 means Apple's cheapest iPad will feature the Neural Engine for the first time. Apple says the A12 chip offers more than twice the performance of the top selling Windows laptop, 6x faster than the top-selling Android tablet and 6x faster than the best-selling Chromebook. The 8th-generation iPad keeps the same price as the 7th-gen: that's $329 for general sale and $299 for education.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Fifty-eight years after Roger Ebert reported on the PLATO system's potential to deliver online learning to homebound students in a 1962 News-Gazette article, Bloomberg Technology's Emily Chang takes a look at the nationwide struggle to shift to remote learning, interviewing McKinsey Education Practice Manager Emma Dorn, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, and former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. For the long-term, all three seem hopeful that EdTech and "anywhere learning" will ultimately help promote mastery-based learning and equity, but expressed fears that remote learning will actually exacerbate achievement gaps in the short-term due to issues stemming from a lack of preparedness, broadband and device access, school resources, and support at home.

"Ninety percent of high-income students are logging into remote learning where only sixty percent of low-income students are," lamented Dorn, who called the current situation a "vast education experiment" and warned that lost learning could lead to an annual GDP loss of $270 billion. Khan also warned that an education catastrophe is not far off: "The reality is in the coming year, middle class children, upper middle class children are probably going to do fine, they're going to be engaged, there might even be some silver linings where their parents are getting more engaged than ever, finding them extra supports. While I would say 20 or 30 percent of the population is going to be a really difficult scenario."

Also concerned about the "COVID Slide" and learning loss for the most vulnerable and marginal was Duncan ("There's a small percent of children who I think will actually learn better in this situation, but there are many, many children who are falling behind"). However, Duncan expressed higher hopes for "anywhere learning" in the long-term.

"The idea of kids just learning, you know, in a bricks and mortar building nine months out of the year, you know, five days a week, six hours a day, that doesn't make sense. Kids have to be able to learn anything they want, anytime, anywhere. Find their passion, find their genius...

"We have to make access to devices and to broadband to the internet as ubiquitous as water and electricity and we have to really empower kids. We have to fund. We should have done this, you know, five years ago or ten years ago, but now we have to do it."

Facebook is getting back to its roots as a college-focused social network. The company announced today the launch of a new social networking platform, Facebook Campus, which offers college students a private place to connect with classmates, join groups, discover upcoming campus events, get updates from their school's administration and chat with other students from their dorm, clubs or any other campus group. From a report: The new platform requires a school email address (@.edu) to join and will live within a dedicated section of the Facebook app. It will be accessible from a tab at the bottom of the screen or from the "More" menu alongside sections like Watch, Dating, Gaming, News, Marketplace and others. "We wanted to create a product where it was easy for classmates to meet each other, foster new relationships and also easily start conversations," explains Facebook Campus Product Manager Charmaine Hung. "And we really think that Campus is more relevant than ever right now. With COVID-19, we see that many students aren't returning to campus in the fall. Now, classes are being held online and students are trying to react to this new normal of what it's like to connect to clubs and organizations that you care about, when you're not together," she added.

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found. From a report: An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which "might imply that a large number ... is yet to vanish," the authors write. The study didn't identify examples of prominent journals or articles that were lost, nor collect data on the journals' impact factors and citation rates to the articles. About half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies; none of the societies are large players in the natural sciences. None of the now-dark journals was produced by a large commercial publisher.

Officials from the city of Hartford, Connecticut, were forced to postpone the first day of the new school calendar year after a ransomware infection impacted the city's IT network. From a report: According to a statement published by Hartford Public Schools, the school district serving the city of Hartford, the ransomware attack impacted several of the school's internal IT systems, causing a prolonged outage. IT staff have been working to restore services, but these were not completed in time for the first day of the new school year, scheduled for today, Sept. 8. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person schooling has been suspended since the spring. In the city of Hartford, today marked not only the first day of the new 2020 school year but also the first day of in-person attendance in months. According to the district's school re-opening plan, today, PreK-Grade 2, Grade 6, and Grade 9 students were supposed to have the first school classes in months.

Dev & Gear created a long list of YouTube channels that offer technical videos to help you learn web development from scratch or just improve your skills. Some of the channels listed include: LearnCode.academy, Dev Ed, Traversy Media, Codecourse, and Wes Bos.

Is your favorite YouTube channel for web development and programming included on the list? If not, let us know what it is in a comment.

New submitter fx4m writes: Historic Lick Observatory in California survived the current massive wildfires, but the nearby, much smaller Hidden Hill Observatory, run my the Tri-Valley Stargazers Astronomy Club, was not so lucky. The building, large amateur-built telescope, accessories, and electronics were all completely destroyed. Much of the assets of the science public outreach and education based non-profit organization went up in smoke. A description of the observatory, its history, and sad pictures of the destruction can be found at the link, with more information at their GoFundMe page.

Monica Chin, reporting for The Verge: On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He'd completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He'd received a 50 out of 100. That wasn't on a practice test -- it was his real grade. "He was like, I'm gonna have to get a 100 on all the rest of this to make up for this," said Simmons in a phone interview with The Verge. "He was totally dejected." At first, Simmons tried to console her son. "I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning," said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he'd received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn't have read his response in that time, Simmons knew -- her son was being graded by an algorithm. Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity's AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students' answers. And she decided to game it.

Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords -- anything that seems relevant to the question. "The questions are things like... 'What was the advantage of Constantinople's location for the power of the Byzantine empire,'" Simmons says. "So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in." "I wanted to game it because I felt like it was an easy way to get a good grade," Lazare told The Verge. He usually digs the keywords out of the article or video the question is based on. Apparently, that "word salad" is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test. Edgenuity didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

Apple on Wednesday highlighted the estimated number of US jobs created by its iOS app ecosystem. It comes as the company battles Fortnite developer Epic over App Store commission rates, which can be as high as 30%. From a report: The iOS app economy has created almost 300,000 new jobs since April 2019 and supports more than 2.1 million US jobs across all 50 states,Apple estimated in a blog post that cited research by Washington DC-based think tank Progressive Policy Institute. Most of these jobs are concentrated in states on the East and West Coasts, as well as Texas, while the Midwest has the fewest. Apps have proven critical for Americans adapting to life during the coronavirus pandemic, Apple said, whether it's ordering food remotely, stay-at-home education or telehealth. As a result, it noted that developers' jobs have remained sustainable even as many Americans lose their jobs.

Beginning today, Animal Crossing: New Horizons players can add official Biden-Harris campaign signs to their island yards. Engadget reports: At the moment, there are four sign designs -- the official Biden-Harris logo, the Team Joe logo, a "Joe" Pride logo and an image of red, white and blue aviators. To add the signs to their yards, players will scan QR codes through the Nintendo Switch Online app. The campaign has also sent the signs to a handful of gaming influencers, who will share them throughout the day tomorrow. Campaign staffer Christian Tom said this is just the beginning. The team is planning more "digital swag," voter education tools and organizing efforts for Animal Crossing and other platforms. That makes sense considering Animal Crossing's popularity -- the game has sold more than 22 million units.

Machine learning "can even bring ancient statues to life, transforming the chipped stone busts of long-dead Roman emperors into photorealistic faces you could imagine walking past on the street," reports the Verge, citing a new project by a film-industry VR specialist.

Slashdot reader shirappu summarizes their report: Daniel Voshart's work on creating life-life images of Roman emperors from their statues started as a quarantine project and quickly got out of hand. His portraits of the emperors (a collection of 54 as of July) are created using generative adversarial networks, which are fed images of the emperors from statues, coins, and paintings. These are then edited and tweaked based on historical descriptions, and reworked in PhotoShop, where Voshart says he can "avoid falling down the path into uncanny valley."

Voshart has written about the process himself here.
The Verge writes: To help, he says he sometimes fed high-res images of celebrities into the GAN to heighten the realism. There's a touch of Daniel Craig in his Augustus, for example, while to create the portrait of Maximinus Thrax he fed in images of the wrestler André the Giant... The process, as he describes it, is almost alchemical, relying on a careful mix of inputs to create the finished product...

What's more, his work is already enticing academics, who have praised the portraits for giving the emperors new depth and realism. .. As a sort of thank you to his advisers, Voshart has even used a picture of one USC assistant professor who looks quite a bit like the emperor Numerian to create the ancient ruler's portrait.