• Technology

    After six months, tech for Manchester students a work in progress | Education

    The shift to remote learning over a weekend in March meant Manchester had to make sure every student had a computer to use for schoolwork. Six months later, it’s still a work in progress, said Stephen Cross, the school district’s chief information officer. At the beginning of 2020, Manchester was a “two-to-one” district — two students to one computer, he said. Cross had replaced thousands of outdated laptops before the pandemic and has purchased thousands more, but some students are still waiting. “We have 3,100 Chromebooks on order, and we have no idea when we’re going to get those,” he said. Some schools had a surplus of Chromebooks, so Cross…

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  • Technology

    Turing Award winners endorse Biden, say Trump immigration policy will stifle tech research

    Twenty-four winners of the Turing Award are endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election, The New York Times reported, explaining they’re concerned the Trump administration’s immigration policies could be detrimental to both computer research and the technology industry over the long term. “The most brilliant people in the world want to come here and be grad students, but now they are being discouraged from coming here, and many are going elsewhere,” David Patterson, a Google distinguished engineer and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley told the Times. Among the names on the endorsement are Vint Cerf, who co-designed TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of…

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  • Business

    TikTok’s possible ban could have a large impact on tech giants

    Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says the U.S. plans to restrict U.S. access to the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat on Sunday night on national security and data privacy grounds. IMD Business School LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation Howard Yu told Yahoo Finance’s On the Move that there’s a “lack of security experts’ opinions weighing in” on the situation. “There’s no real IT specialist trying to say ‘Are we doing enough? Are we not doing enough?’ when Oracle (ORCL) is becoming this tech partner,” Yu explains. Oracle is reportedly nearing a deal with TikTok to own a roughly 20{09c3c849cf64d23af04bfef51e68a1f749678453f0f72e4bb3c75fcb14e04d49} stake in the company. Walmart will reportedly join in the partnership.…

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  • Technology

    Thousands of Houston-area school children still need at-home tech as online classes ramp up

    As she scrambled to find a computer and internet access for her two elementary-age children last week, Jamesha Adams struck out at every turn. Stores she visited were sold out of affordable laptops, iPads and LeapPads. Some internet providers did not service her downtown Houston neighborhood. Houston ISD did not have take-home devices available for her 6-year-old daughter Kha’lyia and 8-year-old son Rashard, who attend Blackshear Elementary School. “I was really about to lose my mind completely, because I really couldn’t find internet, and it felt like everybody bought up everything that dealt with internet,” Adams said Tuesday as she dropped off her children at a learning center hosted by…

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  • Technology

    Coding academies for Black, Latino kids aim to debug tech diversity gap

    With higher pay, better benefits and more resilience in a challenging economy, jobs in the fast-growing tech sector are highly sought after positions. Yet, Blacks and Latinos make up only a small fraction of this workforce. Now, coding academies for middle and high school students are helping to debug this diversity gap.  Djassi Julien, a 21-year-old Google software engineer, recalls the coding program that first sparked his interest in computer science. It was an intensive, six-week boot camp sponsored by All Star Code, a New York-based non-profit educational organization. “I participated in All Star Code kind of on a whim,” Julien said. “It was a totally foreign concept to me…

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  • Technology

    Elon Musk demonstrates brain-computer tech Neuralink in live pigs

    A pig with a Neuralink implant. Screengrab of live demo Elon Musk’s brain-machine interface company, Neuralink, conducted a live demo of its technology on Friday, showing a coin-sized device without wires. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO brought along three pigs, who had varying levels of interest in cooperating. Eventually, the audience was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs, which Musk named Gertrude. According to Musk, Gertrude has had the implant for about two months.  The start-up, which launched in 2016 and is funded primarily by Musk, said it is designing tiny flexible ‘threads’ that are 10 times thinner than a human hair with the goal of treating…

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