Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
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Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
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Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
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Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
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I’ve just picked up this note about eduspaces shutting down from January 10th. So, according to some figures I have seen, there are now some 17,000 elgg aware educational users looking for a new home.
The Learning Landscape for Schools, http://www.ll4schools.co.uk, is a recently launched elgg installation for schools. Some security measures have been added to the normal installation in order to provide a safe, social networking environment for both staff and students. At LL4S we feel that there is immense teaching and learning potential in social networking and the use of the web2.0 tools built into elgg but that the popular sites (MySpace, Bebo, etc.) do not provide a suitable level of e-safety to be used in the classroom. Also many Local Authorities block these sites which is another disadvantage!
We are supported by E2BN (http://www.e2bn.org) – one of the RBCs responsible for supplying internet services to schools and Local Authorites in the East of England – who obviously take e-safety issues very seriously. LL4S want to provide a safe place for the educational potential of Web2.0 to be explored by staff and students alike. There is much more information on the site about how LL4S works and how to register a school and get accounts.
As the demise of eduspaces has happened so fast LL4S is not really in a position to offer space to all the current account holders – many will probably fall outside the remit of our site. However, if there are now homeless blogging teachers out there that are keen to use elgg with their students we would happy to accept any existing data they have so they can continue their own blogs and bring a safe, global social network into their classroom.
LL4S is not a free service as costs must be recuperated, expansion planned for and subscriptions are our only source of income. But I think we are great value!
So, take a look at the site, read about how we work and how to register. My blog is here (http://www.ll4schools.co.uk/blog/). Please get in touch if you want more information about signing up.
John Hackett
john [dot] hackett [at] ll4schools [dot] co [dot] uk
Joe has said Emerge CAN host Eduspaces.
Needs a quick rescue mission, if anyone is up for it.
George
I’ve also offered to host it in a comment over at eduspaces. But I advance that for Curverider not to hand it over to Elgg is pure crazyness.
Eduspaces is not going to shut down anymore, the whole site will remain intact, hosted by a new group: http://eduspaces.net/mod/vanillaforum/vanilla/comments.php?DiscussionID=53