Virtual class was a devastating blow to trade school students

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Mark Chaney hates that the pandemic has forced the Buckeye Hills Career Center in Rio Grande, Ohio, where he teaches to still have a schedule with students in school only part time. That may work for English and math classes during the pandemic, he said, but his students are trying to learn physical skills, not just intellectual ones. They need to handle, build, and take apart pipes, ductwork, and breaker boxes every day, not spend half their week doing online work at home. “Nothing against academics at all,” he said. “For an academics high school, I can see (online lessons) could happen. But an actual trade? Where you’re doing hands-on work? They’re missing out.” The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted schools across the country, raising concerns about “learning loss.” For students trying to learn a trade like carpentry, masonry, or welding, that loss is compounded Read More …

How to watch the UEFA Champions League final 2021 live without cable

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Soccer fans around the world will be glued to their TVs this weekend for the 2021 UEFA Champions League final . The highly anticipated match between Manchester City Football Club and Chelsea Football Club—known for their rivalry within England’s Premier League—is a big deal. Although American football remains dominant in the United States, soccer has been growing in popularity for years, and the afternoon time slot for this weekend’s game—coupled with a pent-up demand for high-stakes sporting events—should help garner robust viewership among Americans. The game will take place at the Estádio do Dragão (Dragon Stadium) in Porto, Portugal. The Champions League final is set to begin on Saturday, May 29, at 3 p.m. ET. It will air on CBS and its sister streaming service, Paramount Plus, formerly known as CBS All Access. According to CBS Sports , pregame coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. ET. If you’re a cord-cutter who wants to stream the final live on your computer, phone, or TV, you’ll need access to CBS or Paramount Plus, which is offering a free trial to new subscribers. We’ve rounded up some ways to catch the action: Paramount Plus:  This service, formerly known as CBS All Access, offers CBS.  Find it here . Locast:  This nonprofit streaming service offers access to broadcast networks, including CBS, in 32 markets. Find it here . Hulu With Live TV:  Hulu’s streaming service offers CBS live. Find it here Read More …

How a largely untested AI algorithm crept into hundreds of hospitals

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L ast spring, physicians like us were confused. COVID-19 was just starting its deadly journey around the world, afflicting our patients with severe lung infections, strokes, skin rashes, debilitating fatigue, and numerous other acute and chronic symptoms . Armed with outdated clinical intuitions, we were left disoriented by a disease shrouded in ambiguity. In the midst of the uncertainty, Epic, a private electronic health record giant and a key purveyor of American health data, accelerated the deployment of a clinical prediction tool called the Deterioration Index . Built with a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning and in use at some hospitals prior to the pandemic, the index is designed to help physicians decide when to move a patient into or out of intensive care, and is influenced by factors like breathing rate and blood potassium level. Epic had been tinkering with the index for years but expanded its use during the pandemic. At hundreds of hospitals, including those in which we both work, a Deterioration Index score is prominently displayed on the chart of every patient admitted to the hospital. The Deterioration Index is poised to upend a key cultural practice in medicine: triage. Loosely speaking, triage is an act of determining how sick a patient is at any given moment to prioritize treatment and limited resources. In the past, physicians have performed this task by rapidly interpreting a patient’s vital signs, physical exam findings, test results, and other data points, using heuristics learned through years of on-the-job medical training. Ostensibly, the core assumption of the Deterioration Index is that traditional triage can be augmented, or perhaps replaced entirely, by machine learning and big data Read More …

Google’s plans to bring AI to education make its dominance in classrooms more alarming

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When Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s annual I/O Developers Conference on May 18, 2021, he made two announcements suggesting Google is now the world’s most powerful organization in education. Opening the livestreamed keynote from the Mountain View campus gardens, Pichai celebrated how Google had been able to “help students and teachers continue learning from anywhere” during the pandemic. Minutes later, he announced Google’s new AI language platform, a central part of the company’s long-term AI strategy, with a specific use-case example from education. LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), he claimed, could enable students to ask natural language questions and receive sensible, factual, and interesting conversational responses. “So if a student wanted to discover more about space,” Pichai wrote on the company blog , “the model would give sensible responses, making learning even more fun and engaging. If that student then wanted to switch over to a different topic,” he added, “LaMDA could continue the conversation without any retraining.” The company plan is to embed LaMDA in its Workspace suite of cloud computing tools, software, and products. These proclamations indicate how Google plans to advance its business in education following the disruptions of COVID-19—by consolidating the huge growth of its platforms in schools and integrating AI into teaching and learning. That’s raising fresh concerns among privacy campaigners and researchers because it gives Google access to data about students and schools at international scale. Google’s global classroom With schools reopening worldwide, Google has worked hard to ensure the big market gains it made in 2020 can be sustained and strengthened as students return to physical rather than virtual classrooms Read More …

The 4 best ways to stop phone spam, scams, and robocalls

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We’ve collectively reached the point where most of us don’t want to take calls from people we know , let alone the scammers, hucksters, and ne’er-do-wells who bombard our phone numbers. Here’s a short list of tools and techniques to keep phony calls from interrupting your day. Add yourself to the registry It’s not perfect. Bogus calls still slip through Read More …