Python "come with downsides," argues a new article in Communications of the ACM. "Its programs tend to run slowly, and because it is inefficient at running processes in parallel, it is not well suited to some of the latest AI programming."

"Hoping to overcome those difficulties, computer scientist Chris Lattner set out to create a new language, Mojo, which offers the ease of use of Python, but the performance of more complex languages such as C++ or Rust." Lattner tells the site "we don't want to break Python, we want to make Python better," while software architect Doug Meil says Mojo is essentially "Python for AI... and it's going to be way faster in scale across multiple hardware platforms." Lattner teamed up with Tim Davis, whom he had met when they both worked for Google, to form Modular in January 2022. The company, where Lattner is chief executive officer and Davis chief product officer, provides support for companies working on AI and is developing Mojo.

A modern AI programming stack generally has Python on top, Lattner says, but because that is an inefficient language, it has C++ underneath to handle the implementation. The C++ then must communicate with performance accelerators or GPUs, so developers add a platform such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to make efficient use of those GPUs. "Mojo came from the need to unify these three different parts of the stack so that we could build a unified solution that can scale up and down," Lattner says. The result is a language with the same syntax as Python, so people used to programming in Python can adopt it with little difficulty, but which, by some measures, can run up to 35,000 times faster. For AI, Mojo is especially fast at performing the matrix multiplications used in many neural networks because it compiles the multiplication code to run directly on the GPU, bypassing CUDA...

"Increasingly, code is not being written by computer programmers. It's being written by doctors and journalists and chemists and gamers," says Jeremy Howard, an honorary professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a co-founder of fast.ai, a. "All data scientists write code, but very few data scientists would consider themselves professional computer programmers." Mojo attempts to fill that need by being a superset of Python. A program written in Python can be copied into Mojo and will immediately run faster, the company says. The speedup comes from a variety of factors. For instance, Mojo, like other modern languages, enables threads, small tasks that can be run simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Instead of using an interpreter to execute code as Python does, Mojo uses a compiler to turn the code into assembly language.

Mojo also gives developers the option of using static typing, which defines data elements and reduces the number of errors... "Static behavior is good because it leads to performance," Lattner says. "Static behavior is also good because it leads to more correctness and safety guarantees."
Python creator Guido van Rossum "says he is interested to watch how Mojo develops and whether it can hit the lofty goals Lattner is setting for it..." according to the article, " but he emphasizes that the language is in its early stages and, as of July 2023, Mojo had not yet been made available for download."


In June, Lattner did an hour-long interview with the TWIML AI podcast. And in 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Nicola Davis reports via The Guardian: A new study has found people are more likely to think pictures of white faces generated by AI are human than photographs of real individuals. "Remarkably, white AI faces can convincingly pass as more real than human faces -- and people do not realize they are being fooled," the researchers report. The team, which includes researchers from Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, said their findings had important implications in the real world, including in identity theft, with the possibility that people could end up being duped by digital impostors.

However, the team said the results did not hold for images of people of color, possibly because the algorithm used to generate AI faces was largely trained on images of white people. Dr Zak Witkower, a co-author of the research from the University of Amsterdam, said that could have ramifications for areas ranging from online therapy to robots. "It's going to produce more realistic situations for white faces than other race faces," he said. The team caution such a situation could also mean perceptions of race end up being confounded with perceptions of being "human," adding it could also perpetuate social biases, including in finding missing children, given this can depend on AI-generated faces. The findings have been published in the journal Psychological Science.

Australian telecoms provider Optus said on Monday that a massive outage which effectively cut off 40% of the country's population and triggered a political firestorm was caused by "changes to routing information" after a "routine software upgrade." From a report: More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout at the Singapore Telecommunications-owned telco on Nov. 8, triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure.

Optus said in a statement that an initial investigation found the company's network was affected by "changes to routing information from an international peering network" early that morning, "following a routine software upgrade." It added: "These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves." The project to reconnect the routers was so large that "in some cases (it) required Optus to reconnect or reboot routers physically, requiring the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia", it added.

Around 40% of goods entering and leaving Australia are managed by a single ports operator. But from Friday to Monday morning, they were suffering from a cyberattack that had "crippled" their facilities in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, reports the BBC: The outage has not affected the supply of goods to major Australian supermarkets, the BBC understands. DP World Australia, a unit of the Dubai state-owned DP World, said its ports resumed operations at 9am local time "following successful tests of key systems overnight". It added "The company expects that approximately 5,000 containers will move out of the four Australian terminals today...."

DP World said it halted internet connectivity at its ports on Friday to prevent "any ongoing unauthorised access" to its network. Going offline meant trucks had been unable to transport containers in and out of the affected sites. The resumption of service on Monday is the first step towards tackling the attack on its network. DP World said it was still in the process of investigating the disruption and guarding its systems against cyber attacks.

Wednesday nearly half of Australia was left without internet or phone service after the country's second largest telecommunications company experienced a service outage affecting 10 million people.

But that's not Optus's only problem, according to this report from the Guardian: Optus has lost a bid in the federal court to keep secret a report on the cause of the 2022 cyber-attack — which resulted in the personal information of about 10 million customers being exposed — after a judge rejected the telco's legal privilege claim. After the hack, the company announced in October last year that it had recruited consultancy firm Deloitte to conduct a forensic assessment of what had led to the cyber-attack. Since then, the company has also faced an investigation by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, and a class action case in the federal court. As part of the class action case, law firm Slater and Gordon, acting for the applicants, had sought access to the Deloitte report that was never made public...

It came as the embattled CEO faces pressure over the company's handling of a 14-hour outage on Wednesday, that took phone and internet services offline for 10 million customers, delayed trains, disconnected call centres and hospital phone lines. The company has not announced any independent report into the incident, but it is now subject to two government investigations and a Senate inquiry.

Long-time Slashdot reader RobHart writes: During the night, the entire Optus mobile network went down and remains down. This is the second largest mobile network in Australia and it is the first time a network has gone down nationwide. It is affecting the trains in Melbourne and any business across Australia that uses the Optus service for phones or data. "Optus is aware of an issue that may be impacting some of our mobile and internet customers," the company wrote in a statement. "We are currently working to identify the cause and apologize for any inconvenience. In case of an emergency customers can still call triple zero."

Authorities are checking whether the outage is the result of a cyberattack, although they don't believe it is.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Hakan Ayik, an infamous drug trafficker who also popularized the use of certain brands of encrypted phones around the world, was arrested during a series of dramatic raids in Turkey last week. At one point a group of heavily armed Turkish tactical officers in brown and gray camouflage piled outside an apartment and banged on the door repeatedly. They then smashed the door down and moved inside with a riot shield, according to a video tweeted by Turkey's Minister of the Interior. The video then showed a photograph of Ayik, shirtless and on his knees while staring straight ahead, surrounded by multiple officers.

It was a moment that capped off the arrest of Australia's most wanted man, and a sign that Turkey is no longer a safe haven to organized criminals. But it was also something of a closing act on Anom, a brand of encrypted phone that the FBI secretly took over and managed for years after inserting a backdoor into the product, allowing agents to read tens of millions of messages sent across it. Ayik unknowingly helped the FBI gain that piercing insight into organized crime by selling the devices to other criminal associates. Given Ayik's position as a trusted authority on what communications tools drug traffickers should use, one associate even referred to him as the 'encryption king' in an Anom message I've seen. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Ayik will not be extradited to Australia. Instead, Australian police are encouraging Turkish authorities to investigate and prosecute him as a Turkish citizen.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: : A recent social media post by an Aussie received a deluge of replies and comments. His comment? "I'm so f***ing tired of 'tech' being used to solve an 'issue' but only making everything worse and more inconvenient for everybody," they wrote.

His comment was in response to going to a restaurant and having only a QR code to order from — literally a menu at the table with only the QR code on it. The app required to order from it "proceeded to charge a 6.5% venue surcharge, a 2% payment processing fee, and then had the audacity to ask for a tip (10%, 15%, 25%) as the cherry on top".
From Australia's News.com.au: Hundreds of others enthusiastically agreed and many added they also didn't like being asked to enter their personal details. "You're waiting your own table and paying an extra fee for the privilege. It's f***ed," one person responded. "It's also a big stinking FU to anyone old or not tech savvy. All just to hoover up your data," another added.

Some, however, shared they preferred using QR codes to order their food — they removed the need to move to order more and limited engagement with staff. "I actually like the QR ordering because I don't like people, but the surcharges and tipping can f*** off," one said. "I love the QR codes — don't need to leave the table to order another beer," someone else wrote...

Jonathan Holmes-Ross, owner of board game restaurant, The Lost Dice in Adelaide told news.com.au that the use of QR code ordering had let his eatery "reduce costs by around 25%... We no longer have to take orders, work out bills and manually take payments," he said. "This gives our wait staff more time to look after our customers, and the kitchen has excellent order information as the accuracy of the orders is great. We now have very few mistakes saving us time and waste. We can also mark items that have run out instantly on the app by using stock levels, again avoiding the disappointment of (the) customer."

Dan Milmo reports via The Guardian: The Guardian has accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll speculating on the cause of a woman's death next to an article by the news publisher. Microsoft's news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week.

The poll, created by an AI program, asked: "What do you think is the reason behind the woman's death?" Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide. Readers reacted angrily to the poll, which has subsequently been taken down -- although highly critical reader comments on the deleted survey were still online as of Tuesday morning. A reader said one of the Guardian reporters bylined on the adjacent story, who had nothing to do with the poll, should be sacked. Another wrote: "This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I've ever seen."

The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson, outlined her concerns about the AI-generated poll in a letter to Microsoft's president, Brad Smith. She said the incident was potentially distressing for James's family and had caused "significant reputational damage" to the organization as well as damaging the reputation of the journalists who wrote the story. "This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists," she wrote. Bateson added that it had demonstrated "the important role that a strong copyright framework plays in enabling publishers to be able to negotiate the terms on which our journalism is used." A Microsoft spokesperson said: "We have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles and we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future."

Jeff Foust reports via SpaceNews: The governments of Australia and the United States have signed an agreement that could allow American rockets to launch from Australian spaceports, although it is unclear how much demand there is for them. The U.S. State Department announced Oct. 26 that the two countries signed a technology safeguards agreement (TSA) regarding space launches from Australia. The agreement provides the "legal and technical framework" for American launches from Australian facilities while protecting sensitive technologies.

The TSA is required to allow the export of U.S.-built launch vehicles to Australia. Industry officials in Australia said the agreement will allow spaceport projects there to sign long-awaited deals to host launches by American companies. [...] The precise demand for Australian launch sites from American launch companies remains unclear. The ELA statement included an illustration of four small launch vehicles from ABL Space Systems, Astra, Phantom Space and Vaya Space, as well as Rocket Lab's Neutron medium-lift rocket. "We hear regularly from both the U.S. government and industry of their demand for this capability in Australia," said Jeremy Hallett, executive chairman of the Space Industry Association of Australia, in a statement. "This agreement removes the blockage stopping this demand being met by Australian space industry and we look forward to the new business opportunities that will emerge for the industry."

The Five Eyes countries' intelligence chiefs came together on Tuesday to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence for hacking and spying against the nations, in a rare joint statement by the allies. From a report: The officials from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - known as the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network - made the comments following meetings with private companies in the U.S. innovation hub Silicon Valley. U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the "unprecedented" joint call was meant to confront the "unprecedented threat" China poses to innovation across the world.

From quantum technology and robotics to biotechnology and artificial intelligence, China was stealing secrets in various sectors, the officials said. "China has long targeted businesses with a web of techniques all at once: cyber intrusions, human intelligence operations, seemingly innocuous corporate investments and transactions," Wray said. "Every strand of that web had become more brazen, and more dangerous." In response, Chinese government spokesman Liu Pengyu said the country was committed to intellectual property protection.

"Australian design student Alexander Burton has developed a prototype kit for cheaply converting petrol or diesel cars to hybrid electric," reports Dezeen magazine, "winning the country's national James Dyson Award in the process." Titled REVR (Rapid Electric Vehicle Retrofits), the kit is meant to provide a cheaper, easier alternative to current electric car conversion services, which Burton estimates cost AU$50,000 (£26,400) on average and so are often reserved for valuable, classic vehicles.

Usually, the process would involve removing the internal combustion engine and all its associated hardware, like the gearbox and hydraulic brakes, to replace them with batteries and electric motors. With REVR, those components are left untouched. Instead, a flat, compact, power-dense axial flux motor would be mounted between the car's rear wheels and disc brakes, and a battery and controller system placed in the spare wheel well or boot. Some additional off-the-shelf systems — brake and steering boosters, as well as e-heating and air conditioning — would also be added under the hood. By taking this approach, Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640) and make it compatible with virtually any car...

With REVR, people should be able to get several more years of life out of their existing cars. The kit would transform the vehicle into a hybrid rather than a fully electric vehicle, with a small battery giving the car 100 kilometres of electric range before the driver has to switch to the internal combustion engine... Borrowing a trick from existing hybrid vehicles, the kit uses a sensor to detect the position of the accelerator pedal to control both acceleration and braking. That means no changes have to be made to the car's hydraulic braking system, which Burton says "you don't want to have to interrupt".
Thanks to Slashdot reader FrankOVD for sharing the news.

According to The Digital Bits, Best Buy will exit the physical media business as soon as the end of the first quarter of 2024. From a report: Best Buy has been phasing out DVDs from its stores, but The Digital Bits reports that Best Buy would even stop offering it on its site as well, signaling a complete break from physical media. The report noted that some studios have shifted their inventory of Blu-Ray and 4K Steelbook titles toward Amazon.

The move is another hint at the possible end of physical media as consumers gravitate towards streaming services and their extensive libraries, or digital downloads. This comes as one of the largest distributors of DVDs and Blu-Rays, Ingram Entertainment, said it was exiting the business just as Walmart is looking to take over management of Studio Distribution Services (SDS), which handles the distribution of physical media. Disney ceased selling physical media in Australia.

Slashdot reader TranquilVoid writes: To better understand the battles between native and invasive ants, scientists at Australia's national science agency have turned to Microsoft's classic computer game to model ant warfare.

Across Australia, 50 different species of invasive ants have established themselves, including electric ants, fire ants and yellow crazy ants, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent attempting to eradicate them.

"Ants are one of the few groups of animal species in which warfare resembles human warfare, in terms of scale and mortality," researcher Samuel Lymbery said. The research found small armies of strong soldiers did better in complex terrain-based battlefields and large armies of weaker soldiers fared better in simple open battlefields. In the ant world, a simple battlefield would be a footpath or park while a complex battlefield would be bushland with undergrowth and woody debris.

Dr Lymbery said his work could help develop new approaches to habitat management, like adding undergrowth or more environmental complexity back into urbanised environments, to tip the competitive balance back in favour of native ants.

The founder of the data-breach notification site Have I Been Pwned manages "the largest known repository of stolen data on the planet," reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC, including over 6 billion email address. Yet with no employees, Troy Hunt manages all of the technical and operational aspects single-handedly, and "has ended up playing an oddly central role in global cybersecurity." Troy is very careful with how he handles what he finds. He only collects (and encrypts) the mobile numbers, emails and passwords that he finds in the breaches, discarding the victims' names, physical addresses, bank details and other sensitive information. The idea is to let users find out where their data has been leaked from, but without exposing them to further risk. Once he identifies where a data breach has occurred, Troy also contacts the organisation responsible to allow it to inform its users before he does. This, he says, is often the hardest step of the process because he has to convince them it's legitimate and not some kind of scam itself.

He's not required to give organisations this opportunity, much less persist when they ignore his messages or accuse him of trying to shake them down for money. But there's evidence that this approach is working. Despite the legal grey area he has operated in for a decade now, he's avoided being sued by any of the organisations responsible for the 705 breaches that are now searchable on Have I Been Pwned. These days, major tech companies like Mozilla and 1Password use Have I Been Pwned, and Troy likes to point out that dozens of national governments and law enforcement agencies also partner with his service...

"He's not a company that's audited. He's just a dude on the web," says Jane Andrew, an expert on data breaches at the University of Sydney. "I think it's so shocking that this is where we find out information about ourselves. She says governments and law enforcement have, in general, left it to individuals to deal with the fallout from data breaches... Without an effective global regulator, Professor Andrew says, a crucial part of the world's cybersecurity infrastructure is left to rely on the goodwill of this one man on the Gold Coast.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader slincolne for sharing the article.

In 2020 Serbian scientists were gifted China's "Fire-Eye" labs, remembers the Washington Post. The sophisticated portable labs "excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors."

Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...

BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...

Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...

U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article

Hayden Field writes via CNBC: Naba Banerjee is a proud party pooper. As the person in charge of Airbnb's worldwide ban on parties, she's spent more than three years figuring out how to battle party "collusion" by users, flag "repeat party houses" and, most of all, design an anti-party AI system with enough training data to halt high-risk reservations before the offender even gets to the checkout page. It's been a bit like a game of whack-a-mole: Whenever Banerjee's algorithms flag some concerns, new ones pop up.

Airbnb defines a party as a gathering that occurs at an Airbnb listing and "causes significant disruption to neighbors and the surrounding community," according to a company rep. To determine violations, the company considers whether the gathering is an open-invite one, and whether it involves excessive noise, trash, visitors, parking issues for neighbors, and other factors. Banerjee joined the company's trust and safety team in May 2020 and now runs that group. In her short time at the company, she's overseen a ban on high-risk reservations by users under age 25, a pilot program for anti-party AI in Australia, heightened defenses on holiday weekends, a host insurance policy worth millions of dollars, and this summer, a global rollout of Airbnb's reservation screening system.

Some measures have worked better than others, but the company says party reports dropped 55% between August 2020 and August 2022 -- and since the worldwide launch of Banerjee's system in May, more than 320,000 guests have been blocked or redirected from booking attempts on Airbnb. Overall, the company's business is getting stronger as the post-pandemic travel boom starts to fade. Last month, the company reported earnings that beat analysts' expectations on earnings per share and revenue, with the latter growing 18% year over year, despite fewer-than-expected numbers of nights and experiences booked via the platform.

A luxury cruise ship that had been stuck for three days after running aground off the coast of Greenland was pulled free on Thursday morning, the authorities said. From a report: The ship, the Ocean Explorer, had been carrying 206 passenger and crew members and was headed toward Alpefjord, in a remote corner of Greenland. The ship's destination was the Northeast Greenland National Park, the world's northernmost national park, which is home to icebergs, glaciers and high mountains. The Joint Arctic Command, which is part of Denmark's defense forces, and SunStone Maritime Group, the coordinators of the rescue operation, said in statements on Thursday that the ship had been pulled free by a vessel named Tarajoq.

There were no reported injuries on board the ship, and there was no threat to the environment. The ship's operator, Aurora Expeditions, a cruise company based in Australia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The rescue came after an unsuccessful attempt on Wednesday, in which a fishing research vessel owned by the government of Greenland tried and failed to pull free the Ocean Explorer at high tide. Bad weather also slowed the government's rescue operations, officials said. Before the ship was freed, the Joint Arctic Command had said that "the crew and passengers are in a difficult situation, but after the circumstances, the atmosphere on the ship is good and everyone on board is fine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills. The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country's hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills. Swedish Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology. "Sweden's students need more textbooks," Edholm said in March. "Physical books are important for student learning."

The minister announced last month in a statement that the government wants to reverse the decision by the National Agency for Education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press. [...] "There's clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning," Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement last month on the country's national digitalization strategy in education. "We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy," said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research. To counter Sweden's decline in 4th grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth 685 million kronor (60 million euros or $64.7 million) in book purchases for the country's schools this year. Another 500 million kronor will be spent annually in 2024 and 2025 to speed up the return of textbooks to schools. "The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that's because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology," said Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership, research has found. Canada and Russia have the next biggest expansion plans, calculated based on how much carbon dioxide is likely to be produced from new developments, followed by Iran, China and Brazil. The United Arab Emirates, which is to host the annual UN climate summit this year, Cop28 in Dubai in November, is seventh on the list.

The data, in a report from the campaign group Oil Change International, also showed that five "global north countries" -- the US, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK -- will be responsible for just over half of all the planned expansion from new oil and gas fields to 2050. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of the oil and gas expansion that is planned in the next three decades would be more than enough to drive global temperatures well beyond the limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels that countries agreed in 2021 at Cop26 in Glasgow, the report found.