Win or lose you WILL learn the IPA version of Australian history * Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published * Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints Continue reading...

Recognition for Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton marks moment when important ingredients came together It was more than even the most ardent advocates expected. After all the demonstrations of superhuman prowess, and the debates over whether the technology was humanity’s best invention yet or its surest route to self-destruction, artificial intelligence landed a Nobel prize this week. And then it landed another. First came the physics prize. The American John Hopfield and the British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won for foundational work on artificial neural networks, the computational architecture that underpins modern AI such as ChatGPT. Then came the chemistry prize, with half handed to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at Google DeepMind. Their AlphaFold program solved a decades-long scientific challenge by predicting the structure of all life’s proteins. Continue reading...

TechScape’s new writer, why a $60k-a-year middle school banned tech for a week, and how to opt out of AI training • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, the technology news editor at Guardian US. I’m taking over TechScape from Alex Hern, and I’d like to introduce myself and my ideas for this newsletter. Continue reading...

Signatories to online pledge say it offers support in family reckonings over phone usage Classroom peer pressure is a problem for any parent considering a smartphone ban for their child. So when the Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) movement launched an online pledge to withhold the devices from children until they are at least 14, thousands of parents saw an opportunity to gather moral support for looming arguments. Continue reading...

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At Tenbury High academy the students play tag and football in free time rather than stare at a screen and on the Isle of Wight another school is planning a similar ban Academy chain with 35,000 pupils to be first in England to go phone-free Vicki Dean, the principal of Tenbury High academy, says visitors to her secondary school in the Worcestershire countryside think its pupils appear less mature than others their age because they are running about and playing rather than sitting huddled over their phones. “When I worked at my previous school, I still remember social time was like this,” Dean said, mimicking holding a phone screen in front of her face. But Tenbury is different, with one of the toughest phone-free policies of any mainstream state secondary school in England, and Dean says that has influenced how her pupils act. Continue reading...

Calvijn College was one of the first schools in the Netherlands to ban mobile phones. Four years on, officials report its culture has been transformed Six years ago, as officials at the Netherlands’ Calvijn College began considering whether to ban phones from their schools, the idea left some students aghast. “We were asked whether we thought we were living in the 1800s,” said Jan Bakker, the chair of the college, whose students range in age from 12 to 18 years. Continue reading...

With adjustments to the way we teach students to think about writing, we can shift the emphasis from product to process It’s getting close to the beginning of term. Parents are starting to fret about lunch packs, school uniforms and schoolbooks. School leavers who have university places are wondering what freshers’ week will be like. And some university professors, especially in the humanities, will be apprehensively pondering how to deal with students who are already more adept users of large language models (LLMs) than they are. They’re right to be concerned. As Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media and computer science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it: “If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI cheating and detection arms race plays out in the background.” Continue reading...

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Paul Givan says details of 407 people mistakenly sent out included names, addresses and personal comments The education minister in Northern Ireland has “unreservedly” apologised after the personal details of more than 400 people who had offered to contribute to a review of special education needs were breached. The embarrassing data breach came to light on Thursday after the education department said it had mistakenly sent to 174 people a spreadsheet attachment that contained the names, email address and titles of 407 individuals who had expressed an interest in attending the end-to-end review of special education needs (SEN) events across Northern Ireland. Continue reading...