As children across the U.S. begin a new school year, parents continue to be much more satisfied with the quality of the education their child is receiving than with K-12 education in the U.S. overall. Seven in 10 parents with school-aged children are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the quality of their oldest child’s education, while 48% say the same about the quality of K-12 education in the U.S. Since 1999, when Gallup first started asking these two questions every August, there has been a consistent, sizable gap between parents’ satisfaction with their child’s education and their views of U.S.…
Author: Loknath Das
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Melissa Benn (How do we end the class divide?, Long read, 24 September) makes a strong case for getting rid of private schools and developing an integrated education system but fails to recognise that if we are to make serious progress on addressing the class divide we need to paint with a much broader brush. In 1977 Sir Douglas Black, then chief scientist at the Department of Health and Social Security, was asked to look at inequalities in health. The report, published in 1980, reached the commonsense conclusion that inequalities in income, education, housing and work were the causes of health inequalities. As the report…
The New York man who spent nearly 3-1/2 years as a fugitive after being charged with trying to defraud Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg out of half of the social media company has been arrested in Ecuador and may be extradited, US prosecutors said on Thursday. Paul Ceglia, 45, a wood pellet salesman from Wellsville in upstate New York, had been missing since March 2015, when he removed his electronic ankle bracelet and disappeared with his wife, two children and a dog. Ceglia fled less than two months before his scheduled trial in Manhattan federal court on mail fraud and wire fraud charges, over his alleged…
Twitter’s chief executive will testify before a US House of Representatives committee on September 5, the panel said on Friday, after some Republicans raised concerns about social media companies removing content from conservatives. The House Energy and Commerce Committee “intends to ask tough questions about how Twitter monitors and polices content,” Republican Representative Greg Walden, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement. “We look forward to Mr Dorsey being forthright and transparent regarding the complex processes behind the company’s algorithms and content judgment calls,” Walden said. On Friday, President Donald Trump accused social media companies of silencing “millions of people” in an…
WhatsApp has turned down the Indian government’s demand to provide it with a solution to track origin of messages on its platform. The Facebook-owned WhatsAppsays creating a software to trace the origin of messages will go against the idea of user privacy and end-to-end encryption. Sources in the IT Ministry had told PTI that the government has asked the instant messaging app to continue looking for ways to continue exploring solutions to track the original sender of provocative and nefarious messages that result in violence and crime. WhatsApp has also been asked to set up a local corporate entity that is…
Twitter has rolled out a new filtering tool for Direct Messages on its platform. The social media giant has introduced a new feature where users will be able to filter out unwanted messages. Twitter will now show two sections – Inbox and Requests. While the Inbox tab will be filled with messages from users you follow, the Requests tab will contain messages from people you don’t. Twitter says that the requests can be filtered to make it easier for users to see only useful messages. As announced via a post on Twitter, the social media platform will now be segregating messages to help…
WhatsApp has rejected India’s demand for a solution to track the origin of messages on its platform, saying building traceability will undermine end-to-end encryption and affect privacy protection for users. Emphasising that people use its platform for all kinds of “sensitive conversations”, the Facebook-owned company said the focus is on educating people about misinformation. The government has been pushing WhatsApp to find a technology solution to trace the origin of messages, a move it believes can help curb horrific crimes like mob-lynching emanating from fake news. “Building traceability would undermine end-to-end encryption and the private nature of WhatsApp, creating the potential for…
Once, Facebook allowed academic researchers access to its data. We know how that story ends: with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now LinkedIn, the professional social networking site owned by Microsoft, says it will open its vast trove of data to academic researchers. But the company, whose chief data officer, Igor Perisic, made the announcement in a blog post Monday, said it’s putting controls in place to protect user privacy. The data will be restricted to only those whose academic proposals have been approved. The researchers will only have access to aggregate, anonymised data and will only be able to use it within a secure…
Instagram has started testing placing recommended posts in user feeds. Unlike recommended posts in the Explore tab that have been a part of the photo sharing platform for a long time, recommended posts in the Instagram Feed will reach select users over the next few days. The recommended posts will be visible to you at the end of your Feed – just below the “You’re All Caught Up” message that was introduced early last month. This is notably not the first time when Instagram is testing recommended posts in the Feed. The Facebook-owned company was spotted showing recommended posts in the Feed back…
Facebook will pull Onavo Protect virtual private network application from the App Store after getting word that it violates Apple’s data collection rules, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The free application creates an encrypted VPN connection that routes internet activity through computer servers managed and secured by Facebook. The app also alerts users when sites they visit might be malicious. Facebook is able to gather information about how people use smartphones outside of the leading social network’s services, potentially gleaning insights about rivals or internet trends. “We’ve always been clear when people download Onavo about the information that is collected and how it is used,”…