Month: February 2019

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With five measles outbreaks ongoing in the US, lawmakers are questioning both health officials and tech giants on their efforts to combat the noxious anti-vaccine misinformation fueling the spread of disease.

Last week, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate health committee, along with ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health and Human Services. The lawmakers asked what health officials were doing to fight misinformation and help states dealing with outbreaks. “Many factors contribute to vaccine hesitancy, all of which demand attention from CDC and [HHS’ National Vaccine Program Office],” the lawmakers wrote. On Thursday, February 14, the committee announced that it will hold a hearing on the subject on March 5.

Also Thursday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) sent letters to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In them, Schiff expressed concern over the outbreaks as well as the tech companies’ role in enabling the dissemination of medically inaccurate information.

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“You just have to believe!” is the kind of trite line you’d expect in a kids’ movie about a magic talking dog. But it seems the phrase doubles as important advice for college professors. That’s the upshot of a huge study at Indiana University, led by Elizabeth Canning, where researchers measured the attitudes of instructors and the grades their students earned in classes.

Mind the gap

One of the disappointing problems in higher education is the frequent existence of an “achievement gap” between underrepresented minorities and other students. It seems to be the result of various obstacles that students face along the way, from stereotypes about which groups are naturally skilled in which fields, to cultural differences that make some students hesitant to seek help in a class, to a lack of advantages in primary and secondary education. A lot of things can get in the way.

So these scenarios don’t have to take the ugly form of a racist teacher outright telling a student they aren’t welcome. Many issues are unintentional and subtle. If a student has the perception, for any reason, that they aren’t expected to succeed, that can drain enough motivation to ensure that they don’t.

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Facebook may have to pay a multi-billion dollar fine for violating its users' privacy—or face a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC has been investigating Facebook and is negotiating with the company "over a multi-billion dollar fine that would settle the agency's investigation," The Washington Post reported yesterday, citing "people familiar with the probe." New York Times sources also confirmed that the current negotiations "could amount to a record, multibillion-dollar fine."

The investigation focuses on whether Facebook violated the terms of a 2011 settlement with the FTC. In the 2011 case, the FTC said that Facebook "deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public."

Enlarge / The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft is seen in this false-color infrared image as it launched with Expedition 57 Flight Engineer Nick Hague of NASA and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, on Thursday, October 11, 2018. (credit: NASA)

While NASA's commercial crew program continues to demonstrate progress—the first test flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon may occur as soon as March 2—there are no guarantees the vehicles will be ready for operational flights to the International Space Station by early 2020.

NASA's last contracted flight with Russia is for a mission set to launch in July. The Soyuz MS-13 vehicle will carry cosmonaut Aleksandr Skvortsov, NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan, and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano for a six- or seven-month stay on the International Space Station. After this, NASA would be at risk of having no more of its people on the orbiting laboratory.

The agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warned the agency last year that due to potential delays in the commercial crew program, NASA should look into buying more Soyuz seats from Russia. "Senior NASA leadership should work with the Administration and the Congress to guarantee continuing access to ISS for US crew members until such time that US capability to deliver crew to ISS is established," the safety panel recommended.

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Customers using Windows Update for Business will lose some ability to delay the deployment of each new Windows feature release once version 1903 goes live.

When Microsoft first started delivering Windows 10 "as a Service" with a regular flow of feature updates, the company planned to have two release tracks: a "Current Branch" (CB) that was consumer-oriented and "Current Branch for Business" (CBB) aimed at enterprises. The CBB track would trail the CB one by a few months, with consumers acting as guinea pigs to iron out bugs before the quality of each release was deemed good enough for corporate customers.

That naming, though not the underlying concept, was changed in 2017 when Microsoft formalized the Windows 10 release schedule and settled on two feature updates per year, one in April and the other in October. The CB track became the "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)" (SAC-T), and when this was proven in the real world, it would be pushed to the "Semi-Annual Channel" (SAC), the replacement for CBB. Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows could be set to follow one track or the other, depending on how aggressively an organization wanted to adopt the feature updates. Machines that were set to SAC would automatically wait a few months after each SAC-T release, waiting for the SAC-T version to be blessed as SAC. Typically the gap has been about three months, even for the troubled version 1809 release.