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Submission + - I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can't do middle school math (sfstandard.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters(opens in new tab) urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

Submission + - Small Hidden Chip Could Let Someone Manipulate Boeing 737â(TM)s Flight Comp (studyfinds.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Researchers built a tiny device that fits inside an existing maintenance port in the belly of a Boeing 737 and demonstrated, on a genuine Boeing 737 test setup, that it could alter the flight management computerâ(TM)s route and performance data, the inputs that tell the autopilot where to fly, while hiding those changes from pilots in that test environment.

Submission + - Microsoft Japan's 4-day work week boosted productivity by 40 percent (mashable.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Microsoft Japan has announced the results of its 4-day work week trial, and it will shock no-one to know the experiment was hugely popular with the company's employees. What may surprise people is that the shortened week increased productivity by almost 40 percent — thanks in part to shorter, more efficient meetings.

This August, Microsoft Japan trialed a 4-day work week for its entire workforce, calling the project the "Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019". Approximately 2300 employees were given 5 Fridays off, with no reduction in salary and no days taken out of their annual leave.

Further, The Mainichi reported that Microsoft Japan also planned to subsidise employees' family vacations or further education by up to ¥100,000.

"Work a short time, rest well and learn a lot. It's necessary to have an environment that allows you to feel your purpose in life and make a greater impact at work," said Microsoft Japan president and CEO Takuya Hirano. "I want employees to think about and experience how they can achieve the same results with 20 percent less working time."

Comment Re:How would you "break up progressive groupthink" (Score 0) 214

by AIXadmin (#66206990) Attached to: Wikipedia Cofounder Larry Sanger Banned From Site for 'Canvassing'

To the insiders, the 72-hour ban-unban-ban sequence was just the organic, self-correcting machine cleaning up an external threat. To anyone looking from the outside, it’s definitive proof of broken governance, an anarchic mob rule where volume of availability has completely replaced the validity of consensus.

Comment Wikipedia functions as a tyranny of the dedicated (Score 5, Interesting) 214

by AIXadmin (#66206984) Attached to: Wikipedia Cofounder Larry Sanger Banned From Site for 'Canvassing'

Wikipedia’s governance is fundamentally broken, operating less like an open meritocracy and more as a tyranny of the dedicated. The platform purports to represent a massive global community of editors, yet its most critical systemic policies are routinely captured by a fraction of a percent of that pool. A stark case in point is the ratification of the English Wikipedia's binding AI content guideline (WP:LLM), which was enacted following a Request for Comment that closed with just 44 votes in favor out of tens of thousands of active contributors. This structural failure stems from an intense "time tax": navigating dense internal bureaucracies and litigating talk pages requires a massive, asymmetric availability of free time. Domain experts and casual contributors are systematically filtered out, leaving policy-making to a self-selecting oligarchy of hyper-active insiders. Ultimately, the system fails because it treats sheer endurance as a proxy for consensus, allowing the rules of the web's primary reference engine to be dictated by whoever has the bandwidth to outlast everyone else.
Businesses

Why Google and Amazon Are Hypocrites (om.blog) 245

Posted by msmash from the calling-them-out dept.
Amazon earlier this month responded to Google's decision to remove YouTube from all Fire TV products and the Echo Show. Google says it's taking this extreme step because of Amazon's recent delisting of new Nest products (like Nest Secure and the E Thermostat) and the company's long-running refusal to sell Chromecast or support Google Cast in any capacity. Veteran journalist Om Malik writes: This smacks of so much hypocrisy that I don't even know where to start. The two public proponents of network neutrality and anything but neutral about each other's services on each other's platforms. They can complain about the cable companies from blocking their content and charging for fast lanes. The irony isn't lost on me even a wee bit. They are locked in a battle to collect as much data about us -- what we shop, what we see, what we do online and they do so under the guise of offering us services that are amazing and wonderful. They don't talk about what they won't do with our data, instead, they bicker and distract. So to think that these purveyors of hyper-capitalism will fight for interests of consumers is not only childish, it is foolish. We as end customers need to figure out who is speaking on our behalf when it comes to the rules of the Internet.
Encryption

Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto (arstechnica.com) 521

Posted by timothy from the don't-you-love-children? dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica, citing a Yahoo News interview, that National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers has explicitly blamed the terrorist attacks which struck Paris last November on communications backed by strong crypto. From the article: Because of encrypted communications, he said, "we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened." Rogers did not explicitly re-launch the campaign waged by FBI director James Comey to force technology companies to provide a "golden key" to encrypted communications. Rogers called encryption "foundational to our future" and added that arguing over encryption backdoors was "a waste of time." But he did say that encryption was making the job of the NSA and law enforcement more difficult. The interview comes shortly after the FBI won an order requiring Apple to provide technical means to bypass the security measures preventing them from unlocking the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook, along with his wife, are responsible for the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, California."

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