Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Playing games with statistics will kill you! (Score 1) 78

by shanen (#66221706) Attached to: US Life Expectancy On Track To Reach Record High

If you have to feed the trolls/sock-puppets can't you at least resist propagating vacuous Subjects? May I even suggest going for Funny, though my Subject is only an example for extra unfunny values of funny.

But the actual problem with the clickbait headline was still the scope of the statistic. It's a local American record, not the world stage. I actually think that cost should be considered, so the joke is that in spite of spending so much more than Cuba, it is doubtful that this will push the American average above the Cuban average. Priority of healthcare in some countries is not on maximizing the profits of the insurance companies while paying the nurses as little as inhumanly possible.

Submission + - AP CS Exam Participation Fell in 2026 as AP Statistics Continued to Grow

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a series of Twitter/X posts, the College Board provided a high-level look at this year's AP exam participation and test scores by the nation's high school students. Both AP CS courses saw declines this year in participation to below their 2023 levels, with the Java-based AP Computer Science A exam taken by ~81,500 students in 2026 (with a 66% pass rate) — down from a peak of 98,136 in 2024 — and the 'more approachable', language-agnostic AP Computer Science Principles exam taken by 163,000 students (with a 63% pass rate) — down from a peak of 175,261 in 2024. Meanwhile, the 2026 AP Statistics exam saw an increase in test takers to a record 281,000 students (with a 62% pass rate), up from 266,791 in 2025 and 242,929 in 2023.

One wonders if some of the AP CS participation decline may represent a reaction to AI-driven job displacement fears and visible tech-sector layoffs, factors which have been blamed for depressed college-level CS enrollment. The College Board is already reacting to how AI is changing the K-12 CS narrative, announcing an AI-focused AP CS Principles Course 'modernization' effort in June, just days after tech-backed nonprofit Code.org — a College Board-endorsed AP CSP curriculum provider that bills itself as "the leading provider of K-12 AI and CS education curriculum across the globe" — announced it was rebranding itself as CodeAI, a pivot hailed by The College Board. It's probably worth mentioning that AP exam participation can be lower than AP course enrollment, since students can and do opt out of testing (e.g., students unable to pay for exams or who don't want to pay for exams they think they will fail); The College Board does not publish data on AP course-to-exam gaps.

Interestingly, the College Board identified certain exam questions that AP CS A students struggled to use Java to answer, ironically some of which a non-CS student equipped with Excel could likely easily solve. One of the Free-Response Questions (FRQ) the College Board noted students wrestled with in particular was the following: "Given a username that may contain hyphens [...] return a version with each hyphen and the character immediately preceding it removed, so that 'Amy-Marie-Lin' becomes 'AmMariLin'." Students receiving AP CS A exam scores of 1, the College Board explained, were 'typically unable' to earn any points for their attempts to solve this problem with Java (sample FRQ solutions). Meanwhile, a student who skipped AP CS A could open Excel and use a simple formula — REGEXREPLACE(A1,".-","") — to solve the problem that vexed their Java coding peers after a year-long college level CS course. Perhaps this helps explain why the UK is moving back towards a model that promotes digital literacy for all students and away from the narrow 'rigorous' CS path that the tech giants convinced the UK to adopt more than a decade ago.

Comment You can't short the shares (Score 1) 34

by rsilvergun (#66221666) Attached to: Amazon Has Enough Satellites To Launch Its Starlink Competitor
They got a special agreement that anyone who bought it could not sell the shares for the first 120 days. You cannot short a share that you can't trade or buy.

After 120 days SpaceX gets dumped into the NASDAQ index funds by force whether you want to have it or not. This will pump up the value of the stock making shorting it basically impossible until right before the collapse. Unless you have insider information then you will not be able to catch that and deal with it. You will just lose your money.

You need to wake up. All of the systems designed to protect you and to give you even a ghost of a chance in the market have been dismantled and you are in the process of being stripped for parts. Unless something drastic changes you are going to lose all your property.

Submission + - Video Game History Foundation Says Piracy Remains the Only Preservation Method (techspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies' refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivists to build legal repositories. Sony's announcement that all PlayStation games will be digital-only from 2028 onward has sparked concern that titles will become harder to preserve and more easily vanish, since the company's servers will become the sole point of distribution. In an official statement, Cifaldi noted that the end of physical PlayStation games has surprisingly little impact on the Foundation's efforts because the majority of games from the last two decades are already digital-only.

According to the Foundation, most games nowadays are not released for consoles, let alone on physical discs. Furthermore, many discs for major titles require downloading updates before they are playable, although the DoesItPlay database reveals that, even today, most are playable offline out of the box. Cifaldi claimed that the true reason piracy remains the best option for preservation is that the Entertainment Software Association, which lobbies for game publishers, has closed off other routes. For example, in 2018, the Association opposed efforts to grant copyright exemptions for museums, libraries, and archives to retain copies of abandoned online games for research.

This is the same organization that recently helped defeat a proposed California bill to preserve premium-priced online-only games by falsely claiming that community servers are illegal. The Foundation accused the ESA of repeatedly blocking attempts by cultural heritage institutions to reform DRM legislation. Cifaldi also described the Library of Congress' outdated software preservation process, which currently only requires tiny snippets of source code. For example, Capcom once asked the Foundation to provide the LoC with "the first and last ten pages of code" for a Mega Man game. Unable to discern where digital records began and ended, the group simply chose random segments. Platform holders' habit of closing online storefronts and removing media from users' accounts is also unhelpful.

Slashdot Top Deals

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work. -- John G. Pollard

Close