The public beta of macOS Big Sur, the next major release of Apple’s Mac operating system, is now available. From a report: The new update brings a big visual overhaul to macOS while also adding a number of brand-new enhancements. If you’re thinking about installing the macOS Big Sur public beta, be warned that it’s still, well, a beta. That means…
Tag: secondary
GOP Congressman Turns Antitrust Hearing Into Personal Tech Support Session
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: We all have trouble with our email sometimes. We don’t typically get to harangue the CEO of Google about why, say, Dad’s Gmail is acting up, though. You have to be a member of Congress to pull that. Rep. Greg Steube, Republican from Florida, went there during Wednesday’s high-profile congressional hearing about…
Gamma-ray telescopes measure diameters of distant stars
By reviving a technique capable of combining specialized gamma-ray telescopes to one giant virtual instrument, scientists have measured the diameters of individual stars hundreds of light-years away. The team used the four VERITAS telescopes (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) in the US as one combined instrument to determine the size of Beta Canis Majoris—a blue giant star located 500…
Announcing the Coursera 2020 Global Skills Index
By Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO, Coursera In a few short months, COVID-19 has profoundly reshaped our world. The economic devastation has been staggering, affecting the lives of more than 555 million workers and 200 million higher education students. As we begin to revive jobs and economies, it will be important to understand the impact of the […]
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Twitter Engineers Replacing Racially Loaded Tech Terms Like ‘Master,’ ‘Slave’
For Regynald Augustin, a Black programmer at Twitter, the impetus for change arrived in an email last year with the phrase “automatic slave rekick.” The words were just part of an engineering discussion about restarting a secondary process, but they prompted Augustin to start trying to change Twitter’s use of words with racist connections. Augustin was used to seeing the term…
How Should High Schools Teach Computer Science?
A high school computer science teacher claims there’s an “unacknowledged failure” of America’s computer science (CS) classes at the high school and junior high school level. “Visit classrooms and you’ll find students working with robotic sensors, writing games and animations in Scratch, interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers, constructing websites, and building apps with MIT App Inventor… “Look underneath the celebratory and self-congratulatory…
Super Secretive Russian Disinfo Operation Discovered Dating Back To 2014
Social media research group Graphika published today a 120-page report unmasking a new Russian information operation of which very little has been known so far. ZDNet reports: Codenamed Secondary Infektion, the group is different from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Sankt Petersburg company (troll farm) that has interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Graphika says this new and separate…
Proxima Centauri b confirmed as nearest exoworld
Researchers at the University of Geneva have confirmed the existence of an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/exoplanet-proxima-centauri-b-confirmed…
This isn’t a triple rainbow
It’s what’s called a reflection rainbow, which can be caused sunlight beaming upwards after reflecting from wet sand or calm water, in this case the water of Puget Sound. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/photo-this-isnt-a-triple-rainbow…
Lunar Flashlight to seek ice on the moon
Future astronauts on the moon will need to have water, and now NASA has designed a new CubeSat spacecraft to search for ice in lunar craters using laser beams. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/lunar-flashlight-moon-ice-infrared-laser-beams…