By Ted Smillie - Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
We have had recent warnings that AI applications can cause a wide range of harms due to biased algorithms. Now it appears we are more exposed to developer misbehavior than to faulty algorithms. “It’s really sort of hilariously simple. If you’ve got a piece of text that you need to be aligned to the right, […]
By Shirley Jackson, PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology, University of Melbourne - Thursday, June 21st, 2018
While there is little consensus about the “future of work”, one thing is certain – young people are at the coalface. Young workers experience insufficient opportunities for work experience, a mismatch between work and education, a lack of career management skills and scant entry-level jobs, according to a report from the Foundation for Young Australians.
By University of California – Berkeley - Tuesday, June 19th, 2018
When it comes to understanding what makes people tick — and get sick — medical science has long assumed that the bigger the sample of human subjects, the better. But new research suggests this big-data approach may be wildly off the mark.
By Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen , Project Manager, Sustainability Research, Macquarie University Jessica Vovers Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne Melissa Silk PhD Candidate, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney - Monday, June 11th, 2018
Gonski 2.0 urges us to get our children back to basics through the “three Rs” of reading, writing and arithmetic. For educators, there is now a greater need for science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) concepts to integrate with the arts (STEAM) across the wider curriculum.
We know this because business and industry broadcast that future-ready employees need to have multiple areas of expertise or at least appreciate how a range of skills fit together.
By Richard Matthews, PhD Candidate, University of Adelaide - Wednesday, May 30th, 2018
My lounge room is bugged. My phone is broadcasting an ultrasonic signal to my blu-ray player via an acoustic side channel beyond human hearing.
The channel networks the two devices, similar to how a dial-up connection used to get our computers online before the days of the NBN. The same technology is behind Google’s Nearby API through their Eddystone protocol, and is the basis of products sold by the startup Lisnr. It’s also the reason more and more apps are requesting access permissions to your microphone.
By Ted Smillie - Friday, May 25th, 2018
“Our tool turns complex data into intuitive 3-D shapes that can be visually examined and compared. Essentially, we are leveraging the visual system’s amazing ability to find patterns in the world around us to also find patterns in complex scientific data.” This research is from Dartmouth College, reported in a 7 May 2018 ScienceDaily paper, […]
By Ruhr-University Bochum - Monday, May 14th, 2018
A research team has demonstrated that the two most common email encryption standards are vulnerable to attacks. Their attack, referred to as Efail, proved successful in 25 out of 35 tested email programs using the S/MIME encryption standard and in 10 out of 28 tested programs using OpenPGP.
By Frontiers - Thursday, May 10th, 2018
A new study finds a free ‘massive, open, online course’ (MOOC) led to students feeling more positive about math, more engaged during math class, and scoring significantly higher in mathematics assessments. This is the first of its kind to focus on changing students’ mindsets and beliefs about their mathematics potential.
By David Tuffley, Griffith University - Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018
Imagine you live in a smart city that knows your face and follows your every move – the places you go, the people you see, and all of the things you do along the way.
Over time, autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) builds a profile that reports on how likely you are to commit a crime. When that risk is high, the police take pre-emptive action. Welcome to hyper-surveillance and the next generation of predictive policing.
By Ted Smillie - Sunday, April 29th, 2018
Our August 2015 article, New Ways of Teaching Lead to First Year Students Scientific Breakthrough,
was optimistic about improvements in teaching processes, globally and in Australia. However, recent research on teachers and teaching brings a mixture of good and bad news from various sources, especially The Conversation.
