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Submission + - PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn't)

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn't), Hack Education's Audrey Watters reviews Brian Dear's epic The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), Watters notes, operated out of the University of Illinois' Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) from 1960 to 1993 and was an incredibly important piece of education technology history. While it represents in some ways a path that education technology (and computing technology more broadly) did not take — Bret Victor called PLATO out in his famous "The Future of Programming" presentation — many of PLATO's innovations (flat-panel plasma touchscreens, time-sharing, discussion boards, instant messaging, a learning management system, and multi-user gaming, to name just a few) were adopted, albeit uncredited. Watters writes, "The Friendly Orange Glow is a history of PLATO — one that has long deserved to be told and that Dear does with meticulous care and detail. (The book was some three decades in the making.) But it's also a history of why, following Sputnik, the US government came to fund educational computing. It's also — in between the lines, if you will — a history of why the locus of computing and educational computing specifically shifted to places like MIT, Xerox PARC, Stanford. The answer is not 'because the technology was better' — not entirely. The answer has to do in part with funding — what changed when these educational computing efforts were no longer backed by federal money and part of Cold War era research but by venture capital. (Spoiler alert: it changes the timeline. It changes the culture. It changes the mission. It changes the technology.) And the answer has everything to do with power and ideology – with dogma."

Submission + - South Korean law bans mobile crapware, anti-adblock and more (boingboing.net)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Last year, Korean rules regulating abusive practices by online services went into effect. Under these rules, online service providers are banned from installing or recommending software that "is not critical to the primary functions of telecom equipment" (that's all the shovelware your phone comes with); from "Imposing unfair terms or limitations on service providers seeking to use another telecom service provider" (no net neutrality violations, no search-rank twiddling); from "Misleading consumers by unfairly commingling advertisements with other information" (native advertising, advertorial, etc); and from "Unfairly limiting the ability to delete certain advertisements" (anti-adblock).

Submission + - SPAM: Amateur discovers long-dead NASA satellite has come back to life

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In his hunt to locate Zuma an amateur astronomer has discovered that a long-dead NASA satellite, designed to study the magnetosphere, has come back to life.

IMAGE went dead in 2005, and though NASA thought it might come back to life after experiencing a total eclipse in 2007 that would force a reboot, no evidence of life was seen then. It now appears that the satellite came to life sometime between then and 2018, and was chattering away at Earth waiting for a response. NASA is now looking at what it must do to take control of the spacecraft and resume science operations.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Scientists Catch a Glimpse of a Four-Dimensional Effect in Two Dimensions (iflscience.com)

Submitted by iRaffael
iRaffael writes: Two independent groups of scientists have been able to reproduce four-dimensional properties of a quantum mechanical effect using a two-dimensional analog.

The two studies were published in Nature and focus on the quantum Hall effect. This effect describes how the conductance (how well something transmits electricity) of a two-dimensional electron system acts at a low temperature and in a strong magnetic field. It has been known for a long time that this effect could also exist in a four-dimensional system, but this has not been possible to prove until now.

Submission + - Montana To FCC: You Can't Stop Us From Protecting Net Neutrality (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Montana governor's office has a message for the Federal Communications Commission and Internet service providers: the state can't be stopped from protecting net neutrality, and ISPs that don't like it don't have to do business with state agencies. Governor Steve Bullock signed an executive order to protect net neutrality on Monday. But with questions raised about whether Bullock is exceeding his authority, the governor's legal office prepared a fact sheet that it's distributing to anyone curious about potential legal challenges to the executive order. ISPs are free to violate net neutrality if they only serve non-government customers—they just can't do so and expect to receive state contracts. "Companies that don't like it don't have to do business with the State—nothing stops ISPs from selling dumpy Internet plans in Montana if they insist," the fact sheet says.

The FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules attempts to preempt states and localities from issuing their own similar rules. But Bullock's executive order doesn't directly require ISPs to follow net neutrality rules. Instead, ISPs that accept contracts to provide Internet service to any state agency must agree to abide by net neutrality principles throughout the state. Bullock's fact sheet is titled, "Why Isn't Montana's Executive Order Preempted?" and it offers numerous answers to that question. "Through the order, the State of Montana acts as a consumer—not a regulator," the fact sheet says. "Because there's no mandate, and no new regulations, there's certainly no federal preemption. Companies that don't like Montana's proposed contract terms don't have to do business with the State."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What kind of societies will the first Mars colonies be?

Submitted by nyri
nyri writes: I'm making a two-part study in what kind of societies humans will build on Mars when we start to colonize the red planet. In first part, I'm trying to approach the question sociologically as rigorously as possible. Sociology being what it is, this also includes informed speculation. So, what does Slashdot think: What sort of colonies will humans for to the red planet? How large are they? How they make decisions and select their leaders? What kind of judicial systems they will use? What happens if a colony population grows larger than they are able to sustain? Will they be religious and if so, how? How their internal and external economy works? And so on...

A second part of the study is a psychometric study to find out what kind of personalities will be probably present in first colonies. I also encourage you to take the survey.

Submission + - DNA origami: Nanobots delivering deadly payloads? (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Dog of the South
Dog of the South writes: UK biosecurity expert and Swiss arms control expert: Time is close when the building blocks of life, through DNA origami, can be fashioned into nanobots that release deadly payloads inside the human body. Delivery is the only tricky part, and that hurdle may soon be scaled. Weaponizing DNA is already illegal—but will militaries find this technology too tempting to leave alone?

Submission + - Washington Bill Makes it Illegal to Sell Gadgets Without Replaceable Batteries

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: A bill that would make it easier to fix your electronics is rapidly hurtling through the Washington state legislature. The bill’s ascent is fueled by Apple’s iPhone-throttling controversy, which has placed a renewed focus on the fact that our electronics have become increasingly difficult to repair.
Starting in 2019, the bill would ban the sale of electronics that are designed “in such a way as to prevent reasonable diagnostic or repair functions by an independent repair provider. Preventing reasonable diagnostic or repair functions includes permanently affixing a battery in a manner that makes it difficult or impossible to remove.”

Comment Interlingua is better (Score 3, Interesting) 225

by The_Dougster (#55909601) Attached to: The Invented Language That Found a Second Life Online

Interlingua is one of Esperanto's competitors. It resembles a simplified modern spoken latin and is very useful for scientific communication. It is said that interlingua can be understood relatively well by most speakers of european languages, although the reverse is not necessarily true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It is a good language to study just to learn the word roots which have high cognates with other modern languages.

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