Australian high school allows students to study from home one day a week

19 September 2024

Chevalier College, an Australian high-school near the NSW town of Bowral, about a ninety-minute drive south of Sydney, will allow some senior students to study from home one day a week. The decision follows a year-long trial of the scheme.

The school argues the traditional five-day face-to-face learning model fails to adequately prepare students for the future. It said: “The world has changed, and education needs to move with it. This requires a more flexible, adaptable and personalised approach to education”.

It’s a smart move, given students may eventually find themselves working from home once they leave school. It’s also a great primer for university, where much study is self-directed, and the learning environment is structured a little differently. I wonder if other schools will follow suit, or are perhaps already doing something like this.

And bonus points for choosing Monday as the study from day (though that is of course the day most public/bank holidays fall).

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education, trends

Google no longer archives cache versions of webpages

18 September 2024

Thomas Germain, writing for Gizmodo:

Nostalgia for a button that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of might seem absurd, but Google’s cache function was a foundational solution to one of the web’s earliest problems. As the web transformed into a more stable infrastructure, cache was mostly abandoned by regular consumers, but it was still a useful tool. SEO workers used it to watch changes made by competitors. Journalists and researchers checked caches to keep an eye on the historical record. Some savvy internet users knew cache was a way to get around paywalls, or as a poor man’s VPN to load websites that were blocked in particular regions.

I’ve not been able to access this feature for some time, which used to accompany search results, and was beginning to wonder what had happened. Google cache, as many referred to it, was also a good way to look at posts or articles that were intended to be online only for short periods of time.

Checking Google cache was always a quick and easy way to look at these sorts of documents after they had been deleted.

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history, technology, trends

Meta Teen Accounts limit Instagram use for teenagers under sixteen

18 September 2024

Instagram (IG) owner Meta is moving to make the social media platform safer for users under the age of sixteen, and introducing a host of new parental controls:

Today, we’re introducing Instagram Teen Accounts, a new experience for teens, guided by parents. Teen Accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact them and the content they see, and also provide new ways for teens to explore their interests. We’ll automatically place teens into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict.

Among a raft of measures, teen accounts will be set to private by default (meaning only followers can view the account owner’s content), direct messages can only be sent by followers of a user, and content deemed sensitive will be blocked by default. Parents will have the facility to adjust numerous settings, and also place limits on how many hours a day their children can access IG. All teen accounts will be subject to a sleep-mode for eight hours overnight.

In addition, teen account holders will be required to verify their age. Meta says tools that can help identify incorrectly entered date of birth information will be rolled out in 2025. Where it is determined a user under the age of sixteen has supplied an “adult birthday”, their account will automatically be converted to a teen account.

Meta’s initiative is in response to growing concerns about the amount of time people under the age of sixteen are spending on social media, and the nature of their interactions and activities while using such platforms. Last week, the federal government announced it was considering banning social media access to Australians under the age of sixteen.

Apollo 13: Survival, a Netflix documentary

18 September 2024

Apollo 13: Survival, a Netflix produced documentary, trailer, recounts the story of what was meant to be the third Apollo crewed landing on the Moon, in 1970. An exploding oxygen tank in the body of the command module craft, on-route to the Moon, however spelt the end of the landing attempt.

Instead the flight became a desperate race against time to return the Apollo astronauts to Earth before they ran out of oxygen and fuel.

The Apollo 13 flight transcript is well worth listening to. Note how calmly Jack Swigert, followed a few seconds later by Jim Lovell speak, when informing mission controllers on Earth of the situation. “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Sounds more like someone saying they’ve missed the bus and will be ten minutes late for work.

American filmmaker Ron Howard’s 1995 docudrama, Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon, is also an excellent recounting of the story.

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documentary, film, history

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood on 2024 Booker Prize shortlist

18 September 2024

Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood has gone through to the shortlist of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel Stone Yard Devotional, which was announced on Monday 16 September 2024. If Wood were to win the Booker Prize this year, she would become the first Australian author to do so since Richard Flanagan in 2014, with his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The 2024 winner will be named on Tuesday 12 November 2024.

2024 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards winners

17 September 2024

Anam, by Melbourne based Australian author André Dao, has been named winner in the Fiction category of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Anam was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin this year, and the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award in 2023.

Winners in other categories were Close to the Subject: Selected Works by Daniel Browning, in Non-Fiction, and We Could Be Something by Will Kostakis, in Young Adult.

Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country, co-authored by Violet Wadrill, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Felicity Meakins, Briony Barr, and Gregory Crocetti, took out Children’s Literature. The Cyprian by Amy Crutchfield, and Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country by Ryan Cropp, won in Poetry and Australian History respectively.

The 2024 winners were announced in the Australian capital, Canberra, last week, on Thursday 12 September, with recipients each being awarded eighty-thousand dollars (Australian).

Should the Australian government ban social media access to young Australians?

16 September 2024

Last week the Australian federal government announced its intention to restrict access to social media platforms to younger Australians. For now details remain scant. The government is yet to specify an exact age at which young Australians would be able to begin using social media. The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, however has indicated somewhere between ages fourteen to sixteen was being considered.

Also unclear is how an age threshold would be enforced. Would this be the responsibility of a child’s parents or guardians? Would it be up to the social media companies? Would the so-called gatekeepers, companies including Apple and Google, who distribute social media apps through their app stores, also have a part to play? Should there even be any sort of ban in the first place?

This is a convoluted issue to say the least.

There are plenty of reasons to restrict social media access to younger Australians. Social media channels are rife with bullying, harassment, and all manner of what can be called inappropriate content. There are also concerns about the amount of time children spend looking at the screens of smartphones and other devices.

Yet parents have been providing their children with mobile/smartphones for decades, for safety and security reasons. Would any ban mean parents are required to take back their children’s smartphones, and replace them with so-called “dumbphones”, capable only of calls and messaging?

Would a ban, were one introduced, be phased in? That is, would young Australians, who have been using social media, and the smartphones they use for access, be told they can no longer do so, because they have suddenly become the wrong age? Imposing an age restriction on the use of social media is truly a significant step.

Gaining access to social media would become a rite of passage for young Australians. Akin to holding a drivers license, being able to vote, or buy alcoholic beverages. But are we looking at the matter the right way? A ban is a quick, easy, fix. If there’s a problem with over exposure to social media, imposing a ban is no better than sweeping the issue under the carpet. Besides, people find ways to circumvent bans and restrictions. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who was once a teenager.

Like it or not, smartphones and social media are deeply enmeshed in our way of life. They’re not toys and petty distractions. Despite the high noise to signal ratio, they’re tools we use to interact and engage with the world around us. Some Australians make their living solely through social media. Restricting access to younger Australians may be detrimental to their education and even well-being.

Australian Greens party senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, describes the proposed ban as a “knee-jerk” reaction, and says it is the social media companies who should be subject to regulation, not young Australians. Hanson-Young also points out some social media channels are vital for some teenagers:

“We don’t ban kids from going to the beach — we teach them how to swim and make sure they swim between the flags. There are safety measures put in place to keep them safe — flags, lifeguards, adult supervision and swimming lessons. We need to teach children how to use social media and understand there are many positive benefits, particularly for marginalised kids, to being online.”

Given the number of adults in Australia who devote, as if addicted, unhealthy amount of times to phones and social media, some sort of minimum age access seems reasonable. After all, do we really want kids who haven’t even started high-school, spending their days gazing at smartphone screens?

The South Australian state government may be treading a somewhat sensible middle-ground. And middle-ground is what needs to be found here. They propose banning access to social media to children aged under fourteen. Those aged between fourteen and fifteen would require approval from parents or guardians to access social media. Is there merit in this proposal, or not?

It is obvious there is no one, straightforward solution, that will please everyone. As Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, says:

We know that it’s not simple and it’s not easy. Otherwise, governments would have responded before.

Gravitational waves may reveal presence of warp drive starships

13 September 2024

Gravitational waves have been helping scientists and astronomers answer some of the big questions of the universe. But gravitational waves may be able to do something else: detect the presence of vessels with Star Trek like warp drive engines, as they move through the cosmos.

One problem with the warp drive space-time is that it doesn’t naturally give gravitational waves unless it starts or stops. Our idea was to study what would happen when a warp drive stopped, particularly in the case of something going wrong. Suppose the warp drive containment field collapsed (a staple storyline in sci-fi); presumably there would be an explosive release of both the exotic matter and gravitational waves. This is something we can, and did, simulate using numerical relativity.

I imagine a cloaking device wouldn’t be much help, if a vessel was trying to move about unnoticed. The gravitational waves generated by the ship’s warp drive would pretty much render it visible.

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science, science fiction

Coffee drinkers ditch coffee as price rises continue to bite

13 September 2024

Australian food critic Terry Durack, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald:

Coffee’s changing. The cost of beans continues to rise, and everyone is on the lookout for alternatives. Old-fashioned espresso coffee is in danger of being shouldered aside, just as cow’s milk is making way for oat, almond and soy.

With coffee prices rising, people are apparently looking for alternatives to coffee-based brews, and maybe I don’t blame them.

A month or so ago, I bought a small cappuccino after stopping by a place in Redfern — one of the inner suburbs of Sydney — for five dollars. That’s about what I usually pay, for a large drink, but this was a small serve. A super small serve. The cup must’ve been two-thirds the size of the usual sized small/regular takeaway coffee cups. The alternatives to cow’s milk I get. But now I see why some people are keen to try alternatives to their once daily caffeine fix.

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coffee, economics, trends

Facebook has been scraping the pages of Australians since 2007

12 September 2024

Jake Evans, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent.

For sure, Facebook operates a little differently in Australia. According to information provided by Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s global privacy director, who was speaking at an Australian parliamentary inquiry into AI adoption, the social network has been collecting user data since 2007.

Only Facebook members who set their profiles to private, were spared. Australians, unlike residents of the European Union who are protected by strong privacy laws, also do not have the option to opt-out of having their data collected, if they elect to make their Facebook page publicly visible.

One can only wonder what sense Meta’s AI technologies made of the content posted by Australians to their Facebook pages, and what conclusions they drew about us.

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