Harvard College has joined peers in a major -- albeit temporary -- shift in college admissions: It's dropping the requirement for standardized testing for the class of 2025, as the pandemic has restricted access to the SAT and ACT. From a report: "We understand that the Covid-19 pandemic has created insurmountable challenges in scheduling tests for all students, particularly those from modest economic backgrounds, and we believe this temporary change addresses these challenges," Harvard said in a statement Monday. Ivy League peers Yale University, Columbia University and Dartmouth College are among other U.S. schools that have temporarily dropped the test requirements. A tally of higher-education testing policies shows that more than half of all four-year colleges won't require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores for fall 2021 admission, according research released Monday by FairTest, a nonprofit that has led the "test optional" movement for 30 years.

Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 writes: For several years, Zipline has deployed autonomous, fixed-wing airplane drones for medical supply deliveries in Rwanda. Now they have received permission to test their aircraft in the U.S., ferrying COVID-19 supplies from a depot to a hospital in North Carolina. The practical benefit is small: the cargo is modest amounts of PPE that could have been delivered by truck in about 20 minutes. But this is a big deal, because it required a waiver from the FAA for the planes to operate fully autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight — just launch and forget. It is happening in proximity to an airport no less.
The article notes it's America's "first drone delivery operation to be approved to fly in airspace where all air traffic is actively managed by the FAA."

But meanwhile, another headline this week at the Washington Post tells us that Google-backed drones "will drop library books so kids in Virginia can do their summer reading." Wing, a company owned by Google parent Alphabet, started delivering household goods and meals [and prescriptions] from Walgreens and local restaurants to a limited area of the southwest Virginia town that covers several thousand homes last October. The company has seen a jump in demand during the pandemic as people are increasingly staying home and avoiding crowded spaces like grocery stores, said Keith Heyde, head of Virginia operations for Wing. The company reached a high of 1,000 deliveries globally in a single week this spring, he said.
And they're not the only companies experimenting with drone deliveries, according to Forbes: UPS and CVS have also paired up with a focus on medical products. The two companies are partnering to use drones to deliver prescriptions to residents of The Villages in Florida, one of the country's biggest retirement communities. The deliveries come from a CVS store about a half mile away and mark the first paid residential deliveries by UPS's drone unit Flight Forward. The drones drop the prescriptions to a central location, where a Flight Forward employee will ferry them by golf cart to homes.
Chennai, India, and Surabaya, Indonesia have tried using drones to spray disinfectant in crowded cities. But Forbes reports that around the world, "the biggest use case has been the deployment of drones to enforce social distancing and monitor crowds."

Although at least one Paris prefect complains that there's still one problem with the drones. "Sometimes they are attacked by birds, which mistake them for rivals."

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday announced a $100 million project focused on the systemic barriers to opportunity and dignity faced by the black community, with special emphasis on education, economic equality and criminal justice reform. Details: The effort will begin in the U.S., then expand internationally over time.
It will be led by Lisa Jackson, the former EPA administrator who has led Apple's environmental efforts for the last several years.
Apple is also addressing internal issues, promising to boost its hiring of underrepresented minorities and increase its spending with black-owned suppliers. YouTube announced a multiyear, $100 million fund dedicated to "amplifying and developing the voices of Black creators and artists and their stories," according to CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: "At YouTube, we believe Black lives matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post. "We're committed to doing better as a platform to center and amplify Black voices and perspectives." As an example of content being funded under the new initiative, Wojcicki announced that this Saturday, June 13, YouTube will host livestream fundraising event produced by YouTube Originals, called "Bear Witness, Take Action."

Over the past few months, OpenAI has vacuumed an incredible amount of data into its artificial intelligence language systems. It sucked up Wikipedia, a huge swath of the rest of the internet and tons of books. This mass of text -- trillions of words -- was then analyzed and manipulated by a supercomputer to create what the research group bills as a major AI breakthrough and the heart of its first commercial product, which came out on Thursday. From a report: The product name -- OpenAI calls it "the API" -- might not be magical, but the things it can accomplish do seem to border on wizardry at times. The software can perform a broad set of language tasks, including translating between languages, writing news stories and poems and answering everyday questions. Ask it, for example, if you should keep reading a story, and you might be told, "Definitely. The twists and turns keep coming." OpenAI wants to build the most flexible, general purpose AI language system of all time. Typically, companies and researchers will tune their AI systems to handle one, limited task. The API, by contrast, can crank away at a broad set of jobs and, in many cases, at levels comparable with specialized systems.

While the product is in a limited test phase right now, it will be released broadly as something that other companies can use at the heart of their own offerings such as customer support chat systems, education products or games, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said. [...] The API product builds on years of research in which OpenAI has compiled ever larger text databases with which to feed its AI algorithms and neural networks. At its core, OpenAI API looks over all the examples of language it has seen and then uses those examples to predict, say, what word should come next in a sentence or how best to answer a particular question. "It almost gets to the point where it assimilates all of human knowledge because it has seen everything before," said Eli Chen, CEO of startup Veriph.ai, who tried out an earlier version of OpenAI's product. "Very few other companies would be able to afford what it costs to build this type of huge model."

A new study on kids' app usage and habits indicates a major threat to YouTube's dominance, as kids now split their time between Google's online video platform and other apps, like TikTok, Netflix and mobile games like Roblox. From a report: Kids ages four to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok. The latter app also drove growth in kids' social app use by 100% in 2019 and 200% in 2020, the report found. The data in the annual report by digital safety app maker Qustodio was provided by 60,000 families with children ages four to 14 in the U.S., U.K. and Spain, so its data isn't representative of global trends. The research encompasses children's online habits from February 2019 to April 2020, takes into account the COVID-19 crisis and is specifically focused on four main categories of mobile applications: online video, social media, video games and education. YouTube, not surprisingly, remains one of the most-used apps among children, the study found. Kids are now watching twice as many videos per day as they did just four years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes Wired: When students return to school in New Albany, Ohio, in August, they'll be carefully watched as they wander through red-brick buildings and across well-kept lawns — and not only by teachers. The school district, with five schools and 4,800 students, plans to test a system that would require each student to wear an electronic beacon to track their location to within a few feet throughout the day. It will record where students sit in each classroom, show who they meet and talk to, and reveal how they gather in groups. The hope is such technology could prevent or minimize an outbreak of Covid-19, the deadly respiratory disease at the center of a global pandemic...

Many schools and colleges plan to proceed gradually and carefully, while keeping kids spread out as much as possible. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines for reopening schools recommend staggered schedules that allow for smaller classes, opening windows to provide more air circulation, avoiding sharing books and computers, regular cleaning of buses and classes, and requiring masks and handwashing. Many see some form of distance learning continuing through next year. A handful also are considering deploying technology to help...

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers says she isn't aware of other schools looking to adopt detailed surveillance measures. But the AFT has issued guidelines on reopening schools and colleges that warns about vendors potentially using the crisis to expand data-mining practices. A small but growing surveillance industry has sprung up around Covid already, with firms pitching everything from temperature-tracking infrared cameras and contact tracing apps to wireless beacons and smart cameras to help enforce social distancing at work. "It's been one of the most disturbing parts of this," says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Now, Cahn says, this cottage industry is keen to find a way into classrooms. "One of the things that will be a huge profit driver, potentially, is that younger children would need specially designed devices if they don't have smartphones," he says.
An official at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education also told Wired that some state universities are "exploring" the use of people-tracking Bluetooth beacons.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Self-driving cars, long touted by developers as a way to eliminate road deaths, could likely only prevent a third of all U.S. road crashes, according to a study released on Thursday. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a research group financed by U.S. insurers, found the remaining crashes were caused by mistakes that self-driving systems are not equipped to handle any better than human drivers.

Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, a consortium of self-driving companies and researchers, said in a statement on Thursday the study wrongly assumed that automated cars could only prevent crashes caused by perception errors and incapacitation. Some 72% of crashes were avoidable, based on the study's calculations, if accidents caused by speeding and violation of traffic laws were included, the consortium said...

[N]ot all human mistakes can be eliminated by camera, radar and other sensor-based technology, according to the IIHS analysis of more than 5,000 representative police-reported crashes nationwide. Most crashes were due to more complex errors, such as making wrong assumptions about other road users' actions, driving too fast or too slow for road conditions, or making incorrect evasive maneuvers. Many crashes resulted from multiple mistakes. "Our goal was to show that if you don't deal with those issues, self-driving cars won't deliver massive safety benefits," said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research and a coauthor of the study.

"A newly uncovered form of ransomware is going after Windows and Linux systems," reports ZDNet, "in what appears to be a targeted campaign." Named Tycoon after references in the code, this ransomware has been active since December 2019 and looks to be the work of cyber criminals who are highly selective in their targeting. The malware also uses an uncommon deployment technique that helps stay hidden on compromised networks. The main targets of Tycoon are organisations in the education and software industries.

Tycoon has been uncovered and detailed by researchers at BlackBerry working with security analysts at KPMG. It's an unusual form of ransomware because it's written in Java, deployed as a trojanised Java Runtime Environment and is compiled in a Java image file (Jimage) to hide the malicious intentions... [T]he first stage of Tycoon ransomware attacks is less uncommon, with the initial intrusion coming via insecure internet-facing Remote Desktop Protocol servers. This is a common attack vector for malware campaigns and it often exploits servers with weak or previously compromised passwords. Once inside the network, the attackers maintain persistence by using Image File Execution Options (IFEO) injection settings that more often provide developers with the ability to debug software. The attackers also use privileges to disable anti-malware software using ProcessHacker in order to stop removal of their attack...

After execution, the ransomware encrypts the network with files encrypted by Tycoon given extensions including .redrum, .grinch and .thanos — and the attackers demand a ransom in exchange for the decryption key. The attackers ask for payment in bitcoin and claim the price depends on how quickly the victim gets in touch via email.

The fact the campaign is still ongoing suggests that those behind it are finding success extorting payments from victims.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In 2011, the late film critic Roger Ebert gave tech's movers-and-shakers a PLATO history lesson in his Remaking My Voice TED Talk. "When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback," explained Ebert. "I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called 'PLATO.' The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. This was a computer-assisted instruction system. Which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. The programmers said it could assist students in their learning...."

Ebert probably would have been surprised to see how the COVID-19 pandemic caught U.S. schools flat-footed in 2020. In a never-before-published chapter that didn't make it into his book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, author Brian Dear reveals that Ebert reported on PLATO's potential to deliver online learning to homebound students in a 1962 article he wrote for the News-Gazette while still in high school. Ebert's Jan. 6, 1962 story on PLATO began:

"For no more than the price of a good television set, homebound handicapped children may soon be able to get an education equal to those offered in schools. [...] Other predicted uses for the unique teaching system include [...] an education system which allows the student to set his own pace, instead of forcing him to 'stay with the class.'..."

Dear points out that the PLATO project launched the first week of June 1960, more than sixteen years before Salman Khan was even born.

This year, students may need extra help to make college a reality. From a report: Amid the coronavirus crisis and sky-high unemployment rates, less than half of families feel confident in their ability to meet the costs of higher education, according to education lender Sallie Mae. About 69% of parents and 55% of students entering college in the fall said Covid-19 has impacted their ability to pay for school, according to a separate poll of 6,500-plus high school seniors and their families by NitroCollege.com, a site that helps students and parents navigate college admissions and financial aid. Already, nearly 40% of parents have tapped their child's college fund to help cover expenses due to economic fallout from the pandemic, according to another report by LendingTree. Yet fewer families have applied for financial aid. Only a few more weeks remain until the June 30 deadline for submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the upcoming fall semester. The FAFSA form serves as the gateway to all federal money, including loans, work-study and grants, which are the most desirable kind of assistance. With just about a month to go, the number of applications is down 2.8% from last year, with roughly 55,000 fewer high school seniors applying, according to the National College Attainment Network.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The University of California board of regents voted Thursday to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), reshaping college admissions in one of the largest and most prestigious university systems in the country and dealing a significant blow to the multibillion-dollar college admission testing industry. The unanimous 23-to-0 vote ratified a proposal put forward last month by UC President Janet Napolitano to phase out the exams over the next five years until the sprawling UC system can develop its own test.

The battle against standardized tests has raged for years because minority students score, on average, lower than their white classmates. Advocates argue that the exams are an unfair admission barrier to those students because they often cannot pay for pricey test preparation. [...] Ms. Napolitano's proposal allows four years for the UC system to develop a new exam. If it fails to create or adopt one, then it likely would cease to use any exam, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, which has fought against standardized testing for 30 years. Mr. Schaeffer said he doesn't believe a new exam will be implemented. "It appears very unlikely that they will be able to design an instrument that is more accurate and fairer than relying on applicants' high school records," Mr. Schaeffer said. "And, if a new test somehow meets those goals promoters would face massive adoption barriers, including persuading UC and the rest of the admissions world that a third test is truly needed or useful."

A spokesman for the College Board, which oversees the SAT, said the organization's "mission remains the same: to give all students, and especially low-income and first-generation students, opportunities to show their strength. We must also address the disparities in coursework and classrooms that the evidence shows most drive inequity in California."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Robotaxis have a real public image problem, according to new survey data collected by an industry group. Partners for Automated Vehicle Education surveyed 1,200 Americans earlier this year and found that 48 percent of Americans say they would "never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle that was being driven autonomously." And slightly more Americans -- 20 percent versus 18 percent -- think autonomous vehicles will never be safe compared to those who say they'd put their names down on a waiting list to get a ride in an autonomous vehicle.

PAVE says its data doesn't reflect skepticism or fear based on the killing of a pedestrian by one of Uber's autonomous vehicles, nor the series of drivers killed while using Tesla's Autopilot. In fact, those events don't even register with much of the population. Fifty-one percent said they knew nothing at all about the death of Elaine Herzberg in Arizona, and a further 37 percent only knew a little about the Uber death. Similar numbers said they knew nothing at all (49 percent) or very little (38 percent) about Tesla Autopilot deaths. But those who reported knowing a lot about the deaths were more likely to tell the survey they thought autonomous vehicles were safe now. According to the survey data, getting a ride in a robotaxi might change some of those minds. Three in five said that they'd have more trust in autonomous vehicles if they had a better understanding of how those vehicles worked, and 58 percent said that firsthand experience -- i.e. going for a ride in a self-driving car -- would make them trust the technology more. "Of the 1,200 survey respondents, 678 reported owning an [advanced driver assistance system] ADAS-equipped vehicle, and three-quarters of them said they 'will feel safer on the road when I know that most other vehicles have enhanced safety features,' with the same number saying they are eager to see what new safety features will be on their next vehicle," the report adds.

"Interestingly, drivers who own cars with forward collision warning (FCW), blind spot monitoring (BSM), lane departure warning (LDW), and automatic emergency braking (AEB) were also more likely to believe that safe autonomous vehicles would be available within the next 10 years compared to those without those features."

The New York Times will no longer use 3rd-party data to target ads come 2021, executives tell Axios, and it is building out a proprietary first-party data platform. From a report: Third-party data, which is collected from consumers on other websites, is being phased out of the ad ecosystem because it's not considered privacy-friendly. This has forced several big publications to rely on their own first-party data, or data that they collect directly from their users. Beginning in July, The Times will begin to offer clients 45 new proprietary first-party audience segments to target ads. Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.), business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender, education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.) By the second half of the year, The Times plans to introduce at least 30 more interest segments.

"In 2017, Scott Galloway anticipated Amazon's $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods a month before it was announced," reports New York magazine (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader Faizdog).

Galloway teaches marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, and he's now predicting the pandemic "has greased the wheels for big tech's entree into higher education." The post-pandemic future, he says, will entail partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities. MIT@Google. iStanford. HarvardxFacebook. According to Galloway, these partnerships will allow universities to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees, the affordability and value of which will seismically alter the landscape of higher education.

Galloway, who also founded his own virtual classroom start-up, predicts hundreds, if not thousands, of brick-and-mortar universities will go out of business and those that remain will have student bodies composed primarily of the children of the one percent. At the same time, more people than ever will have access to a solid education, albeit one that is delivered mostly over the internet. The partnerships he envisions will make life easier for hundreds of millions of people while sapping humanity of a face-to face system of learning that has evolved over centuries. Of course, it will also make a handful of people very, very rich....

"I just can't imagine what the enrollments would be if Apple partnered with a school to offer programs in design and creativity. I can't imagine what the enrollments would be if the University of Washington partnered with Microsoft around technology or engineering. These would be huge enrollments. The tech company would be responsible for scale and the online group part. The university would be responsible for the accreditation.... In ten years, it's feasible to think that MIT doesn't welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000.

"What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves."
Galloway argues that right now universities "are still in a period of consensual hallucination with each saying, 'We're going to maintain these prices for what has become, overnight, a dramatically less compelling product offering'... There's this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level..."

"I want to be clear: There is some social good to this," Galloway emphasizes. "You're going to have a lot of good education, dispersed to millions and tens of millions of people who otherwise wouldn't have access to computer science or Yale's class on happiness."

Long-time Slashdot reader jyosim writes: Students want their money back since their classes have moved online. Or they want partial refunds, and their calls have been getting louder. "Petition movements at more than 200 campuses are calling for partial refunds of tuition, typically asking for 50 percent back," reports EdSurge. "And some student protesters are now even filing class-action lawsuits to try to force colleges to return part of the tuition money."

Whether colleges should give back money depends on how you think about what colleges are selling. Is it a straight service like any other, so if students get less they should pay less? Is the most important thing simply getting into college, in which case the degree is the main thing, and students are still getting that? Or are colleges responsible for social mobility and helping students during this time by reducing tuition?

And is online education even worse than, say, sitting in the back of a large lecture hall with 300 students?
"I don't think we know enough about how much students were learning under the face-to-face model to calculate what an alleged loss might be under this new model," EdSurge is told by a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies higher education.

"He adds there has been a 'longstanding reluctance to try to figure out how much people learn,' and therefore 'it's quite difficult, if not impossible, to figure out what sort of drop off there might've been with the introduction of online.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Bob Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has had a front-row seat to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Wachter's job, at least in part, is to keep the department's 3,000 or so faculty, trainees and staff current on developments in research, education and clinical care. But most days he sets aside at least two hours to keep another group informed: his Twitter followers. Dr. Wachter, 62 years old, is part of a growing group of scientists and public-health officials who are increasingly active and drawing large audiences on social media. They say they feel a moral obligation to provide credible information online and steer the conversation away from dubious claims, such as those in "Plandemic," a video espousing Covid-19 conspiracy theories that drew millions of views last week. [...]

Dr. Wachter typically writes his tweets in threads, long strings of posts on a single topic or idea; on Wednesday, he posted about masks. [...] To compose his tweets, Dr. Wachter keeps a document open throughout the day, where he drops in material he believes could be relevant to his followers. He starts writing posts between 4 and 6 p.m.; his wife, a journalist, often proofreads them, he says. His tweets post between 7 and 8 p.m. The doctors feel like they "have an obligation to put out information that is as correct as it can be," says Dr. Wachter. This is important during amidst a pandemic, especially after a new paper in the journal Nature this week found that antivaccination views are drowning out the more mainstream voices online, "partly due to the ways antivaccination advocates interact with some users of social media platforms," reports the WSJ.

"As a result, researchers predict, antivaccination views 'will dominate in a decade.'"

With a large part of the working world doing jobs from home when possible these days, the focus right now is on how best to recreate the atmosphere of an office virtually, and how to replicate online essential work that used to be done in person. Today, LinkedIn announced a couple of big new feature updates that point to how it's trying to play a part in both of these. From a report: It's launching a new Polls feature for users to canvas opinions and get feedback; and it's launching a new "LinkedIn Virtual Events" tool that lets people create and broadcast video events via its platform. Despite now being owned by Microsoft, interestingly it doesn't seem that the Virtual Events service taps into Teams or Skype, Microsoft's two other big video products that it has been pushing hard at a time when use of video streaming for work, education and play is going through the roof. The polls feature -- you can see an example of one in the picture below, or respond to that specific poll here -- is a quick-fire and low-bar way of asking a question and encouraging engagement: LinkedIn says that a poll takes only about 30 seconds to put together, and responding doesn't require thinking of something to write, but gives the respondent more of a 'voice' than he or she would get just by providing a "like" or other reaction.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday warned of serious consequences if governors reopen state economies prematurely, saying he fears spikes in coronavirus infections could morph into further outbreaks of the disease. From a report: Testifying by videoconference before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, ticked through the criteria that the White House said states should meet before reopening. "My concern [is] that if some areas, city, states, or what have you, jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely open up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently, my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks," Fauci said in response to a question from Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

Fauci and two of the other witnesses -- Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Stephen Hahn, the head of the Food and Drug Administration -- are testifying by videoconference Tuesday because they self-quarantining after possible exposure to COVID-19. The fourth witness, Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health and the administration's coronavirus testing coordinator, also testified remotely but is not in self-quarantine. Murray, the top Democrat on the committee, said in her opening statement that the U.S. needs "dramatically more testing," but added that testing "alone won't be enough to reopen our country."

U.S. factories are as productive as ever but they've lost the process knowledge needed to retool quickly in a crisis, writes Dan Wang, a Beijing-based technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, in an opinion piece on Bloomberg. From the story: In China, a vast pool of experienced engineers and a culture of nimble manufacturing have allowed companies to quickly shift production to critically needed goods during this crisis. Manufacturers such as BYD Co.(an automaker) and Foxconn (an electronics assembler) have helped to quadruple China's mask production since the beginning of the pandemic. Taiwanese companies, which make machine tools and can draw on deep pools of manufacturing expertise, were reportedly able to increase mask production tenfold. Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Marc Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.

What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a "commoditized" activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process. The U.S. government has a crucial role to play. Bills winding through in Congress to re-shore some of the medical supply chain should be only the start. For too long, tax laws have encouraged offshoring; it's time for political leaders to remove the excuse for manufacturers not to bring production back home.

The Python Software Foundation and JetBrains collected over 24,000 responses for the third annual Python Developer's Survey. Among its findings: 59% said they used Python for data analysis, "followed by web development at 51%, and machine learning at 40%," reports ZDNet: Other major applications of Python include DevOps and system administration (39%), programming web tools like crawlers (37%), software testing (31%), education (26%), software prototyping (25%), network programming (21%), desktop development (18%), computer graphics (14%), embedded system development (8%), game development (7%) and mobile development (6%).

However, at 28%, web development remains the top purpose when respondents were asked what they used Python for the most. It is followed by data analysis (18%), machine learning (13%), and DevOps, and system administration (9%).

Good news given that the final version of Python 2 was just released, the survey found that 90% are using Python 3, up from 84% in 2018. Of those still on Python 2, 45% are using it for web development, and 41% are using it for DevOps and system administration. PSF speculates that web development's dominance in Python 2 is because of legacy code...

Some 68% of Python developers are building on Linux, followed by Windows at 48%, while macOS has a 29% share...

The PyCharm integrated development environment (IDE) from JetBrains is once again the top IDE with a 33% share, followed by Microsoft's open-source cross-platform editor VS Code with a 24% share.

Python adoption is often attributed to its moderate learning curve. The survey found that 44% of users have just two years' experience and 30% had three to five years' experience.