Is Google laying the groundwork for a true challenger to language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise and Babbel? In a blog post on Thursday, the search giant announced that it’s rolling out a new Google Search feature designed to help people improve their English speaking skills. TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers reports: Rolling out over the next few days for Search on Android devices in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela, with more countries and languages to come in the future, the new feature will provide interactive speaking practice for language learners translating to or from English, Google writes in a blog post. “Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners, providing translations, definitions, and other resources to improve vocabulary,” reads the the post, attributed to Google Research director Christian Plagemann and product manager Katya Cox. “Now, learners translating to or from English on their Android phones will find a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback.”

The new experience presents Search users with prompts and asks them to speak the answers using a provided vocabulary word. During each practice session, which last 3 to 5 minutes, Search gives personalized feedback — and the option to sign up for daily reminders to keep practicing and advance to the next stage of difficulty. How personalized is it, exactly? Well, according to Google, the experience gives semantic feedback — indicating whether a response was relevant to a given question and comprehensible to a theoretical conversation partner. It also recommends areas where grammar could be improved, and, to give concrete suggestions for alternative ways to respond, provides a set of example answers at varying levels of language complexity. During practice sessions, learners can tap on any word they don’t understand to see a translation of that word that considers the word in context.

“Designed to be used alongside other learning services and resources, like personal tutoring, mobile apps and classes, the new speaking practice feature on Google Search is another tool to assist learners on their journey,” Plagemann and Cox write. […] “We look forward to expanding to more countries and languages in the future, and to start offering partner practice content soon,” Plagemann and Cox continued. “With these latest updates, which will roll out over the next few days, Google Search has become even more helpful.”

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Source: Slashdot – Google Takes Aim At Duolingo With New English Tutoring Tool

Tereza Pultarova reports via Space.com: Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky. […] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world’s most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue. “Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today,” Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit’s founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. “Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities.”

StealthTransit’s solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope’s camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope’s shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off. The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%. “We can say that the telescope was seeing almost a dark sky at this time,” Pashkovsky said. “The important thing about our technology is that it makes all kinds of lights astronomy-friendly, including outdoor advertising and indoor lighting in apartments, offices and stores.”

The technology could filter out lights from nearby towns and villages as well as those surrounding the observatory itself. It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second. StealthTransit tested the prototype shutter on a 24-inch-wide (60 centimeters) telescope and hopes to make the technology available for larger telescopes. Although StealthTransit’s technology is not yet ready for commercial use, Pashkovsky said, the firm hopes to have a product fit for the world’s best telescopes in five to seven years.

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Source: Slashdot – A Simple Streetlight Hack Could Protect Astronomy From Urban Light Pollution

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle reports via The Register: Japanese electronics giant Casio said miscreants broke into its ClassPad server and stole a database with personal information belonging to customers in 149 countries. ClassPad is Casio’s education web app, and in a Wednesday statement on its website, the firm said an intruder breached a ClassPad server and swiped hundreds of thousands of “items” belonging to individuals and organizations around the globe. As of October 18, the crooks accessed 91,921 items belonging to Japanese customers, including individuals and 1,108 educational institution customers, as well as 35,049 items belonging to customers from 148 other countries. If Casio finds additional customers were compromised, it promises to update this count.

The data included customers’ names, email addresses, country of residence, purchasing info including order details, payment method and license code, and service usage info including log data and nicknames. Casio noted that it doesn’t not retain customers’ credit card information, so presumably people’s banking info wasn’t compromised in the hack. An employee discovered the incident on October 11 while attempting to work in the corporate dev environment and spotted the database failure. “At this time, it has been confirmed that some of the network security settings in the development environment were disabled due to an operational error of the system by the department in charge and insufficient operational management,” the official notice said. “Casio believes these were the causes of the situation that allowed an external party to gain unauthorized access.” The intruder didn’t access the ClassPad.net app, according to Casio, so that is still available for use.

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Source: Slashdot – Casio Keyed Up After Data Loss Hits Customers In 149 Countries

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Canada will legalize medically assisted dying for people who are addicted to drugs next spring, in a move some drug users and activists are calling “eugenics.” The country’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) law, which first came into effect in 2016, will be expanded next March to give access to people whose sole medical condition is mental illness, which can include substance use disorders. Before the changes take place, however, a special parliamentary committee on MAID will regroup to scrutinize the rollout of the new regulations, according to the Toronto Star.

Currently, people are eligible for MAID if they have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition”, such as a serious illness or disability, that has put them in an advanced state of irreversible decline and caused enduring physical or psychological suffering — excluding mental illness. Anyone who receives MAID must also go through two assessments from independent health care providers, among meeting other criteria. […] As Canada prepares to legalize MAID for people with mental disorders, each province will have to develop its own protocol for how to assess people. Dr. Simon Colgan, lead physician for the Community Allied Mobile Palliative Partnership which provides palliative care to homeless people, said MAID requests “must be understood within the context of a person’s lived experience and this takes time and relationship.” He said any MAID protocols for people with substance use disorders should be made with the input of people with lived experiences. “I don’t think it’s fair, and the government doesn’t think it’s fair, to exclude people from eligibility because their medical disorder or their suffering is related to a mental illness,” said Dr. David Martell, physician lead for Addictions Medicine at Nova Scotia Health. “As a subset of that, it’s not fair to exclude people from eligibility purely because their mental disorder might either partly or in full be a substance use disorder. It has to do with treating people equally.”

On the flip side, some drug users and harm reduction advocates say they’re upset drug users are being given access to MAID, as they feel other public health measures are lacking. “I just think that MAID when it has entered the area around mental health and substance use is really rooted in eugenics. And there are people who are really struggling around substance use and people do not actually get the kind of support and help they need,” said Zoe Dodd, a Toronto-based harm reduction advocate.

Karen Ward, a drug user activist in Vancouver, said she considers the expansion of MAID to include people with substance use disorders a “statement in federal law that some people aren’t really human.” “The government has made death accessible while a better life remains impossible,” she said. “Homes for all, guaranteed dignified incomes, access to healthcare, education and employment: these aren’t radical demands.”

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Source: Slashdot – Canada Will Legalize Medically Assisted Dying For People Addicted To Drugs

theodp writes: In July, Seattle-based and tech-backed nonprofit Code.org announced its 10th policy recommendation for all states “to require all students to take computer science (CS) to earn a high school diploma.” In August, Washington State Senator Lisa Wellman phoned-in her plans to introduce a bill to make computer science a Washington high school graduation requirement to the state’s Board of Education, indicating that the ChatGPT-sparked AI craze and Code.org had helped convince her of the need. Wellman, a former teacher who worked as a Programmer/System Analyst in the 80’s before becoming an Apple VP (Publishing) in the ’90s, also indicated that exposure to CS given to students in fifth grade could be sufficient to satisfy a HS CS requirement. In 2019, Wellman sponsored Microsoft-supported SB 5088 (Bill details), which required all Washington state public high schools to offer a CS class. Wellman also sponsored SB 5299 in 2021, which allows high school students to take a computer science elective in place of a third year math or science course (that may be required for college admission) to count towards graduation requirements.

And in October, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi appeared before the Washington State Board of Education, driving home points Senator Wellman made in August with a deck containing slides calling for Washington to “require that all students take computer science to earn a high school diploma” and to “require computer science within all teacher certifications.” Like Wellman, Partovi suggested the CS high school requirement might be satisfied by middle school work (he alternatively suggested one year of foreign language could be dropped to accommodate a HS CS course). Partovi noted that Washington contained some of the biggest promoters of K-12 CS in Microsoft Philanthropies’ TEALS (TEALS founder Kevin Wang is a member of the Washington State Board of Education) and Code.org, as well some of the biggest funders of K-12 CS in Amazon and Microsoft — both which are $3,000,000+ Platinum Supporters of Code.org and have top execs on Code.org’s Board of Directors.

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Source: Slashdot – Code.org Presses Washington To Make Computer Science a High School Graduation Requirement