Canada will invest $400 million over three years to provide numerous new additions and advancements to international educational programs for women living in crisis-affected areas. The funding will contribute to a collective $3.8 billion in support from the European Union, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the World Bank, the G7 allies announced Saturday in Quebec. Canada’s $400 million will be in addition to the $180 million in funding provided to the Global Partnership for Education in January 2018. The funding to support women and girls’ education is in coordination with the theme of gender equality and women empowerment, one…
Author: Loknath Das
“See, this is our school. You can see where the girls are.” Sixteen-year-old Mahnoz Aliyar is one of the 14,000 students of Kabul’s Sayedul Shohada school. The road leading up to the school gate is not paved and potholes full of muddy water make it difficult to navigate. Conditions are little better inside the gates. Mahnoz points to a big open field. “You see? We don’t have any classrooms, we don’t have any buildings, and we don’t have enough facilities for the girls.” Some classes are held under makeshift tents; others are held out in the open, with nothing to…
Google is blaming “vandalism” at Wikipedia for search results that incorrectly said the ideology of the California Republican Party included “Nazism.” The results appeared in a Google information box screen-captured by Vice Media on Thursday. Google quickly removed the section on ideology. Wikipedia’s publicly available change log shows that an anonymous user added the term “Nazism” to the entry for the California GOP on May 24. The change was reversed by another editor a week later. A second, similar change on Thursday afternoon was reverted a minute later. The California GOP has formally repudiated US Senate candidate Patrick Little, who has praised Adolf Hitler…
Walmart is starting a new same-day delivery service where customers can place orders using a text message, another step in its effort to scale up its e-commerce offerings and compete with rival Amazon.com. The service, called Jetblack, allows shoppers to order items from Walmart.com and even websites of rival retailers. It is a part of Walmart’s internal start-up incubator, Store No. 8. Jetblack has been launched in parts of New York City, with plans to roll it out to the rest of the United States over time. “The goal is to think about game-changing technologies that will change the way people shop,”…
Social media sites’ responses to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and new European privacy regulations have given users much more control over who can access their data, and for what purposes. To me, as a social media user, these are positive developments: It’s scary to think what these platforms could do with the troves of data available about me. But as a researcher, increased restrictions on data sharing worry me. I am among the many scholars who depend on data from social media to gain insights into people’s actions. In a rush to protect individuals’ privacy, I worry that an unintended casualty could be knowledge about human nature. My…
The next entry in the massively popular Assassin’s Creedfranchise has been revealed by Ubisoft: it’s called Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The announcement was made via the game’s official Twitter account, as part of a five-second clip that ended with the logo and the words: “See you at E3.” The reveal video for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey shows one character kicking someone off the edge of a cliff, which is most likely a reference to the famous scene from Zack Snyder’s historical fantasy war film 300, where the Spartans kicked the Persian messengers into a well when they demanded a token of submission to a new…
India’s central bank is standing firm on a directive to compel global payment firms to store customer data in India, resisting calls from U.S. companies to dilute an order they say would cost them millions of dollars, people familiar with the matter said. The payment companies are worried India’s data onshoring move could set a precedent and nudge other major governments to implement similar rules at a time when there is heightened scrutiny on how companies globally handle their customers’ data. The industry’s tussle with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also comes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi aggressively pushes digital…
Snapchat has rolled out its first Lens that reacts to sound. “It’s a cute animal mask overlay for your face, with ears that pulse and glow, and eyes that move based on the sounds it hears. Snapchat says it’s just the first of many,” Engadget reported late Monday, citing the company. The report says Snapchat is planning to launch more Lenses that will react to sounds over the coming weeks. Snapchat’s Lenses are filters that come in two options, Face Lenses and World Lenses. Face Lenses allows the users to turn into something different along with voice changes. On the other hand, World…
Most social media users know that bot accounts are among us, whether as fake voters with loud opinions or obsessive re-tweeters of a single corporation’s content. When it comes to telling many ‘fake’ accounts from real ones, however—or just knowing how many non-individuals are active online—even savvy users are mostly in the dark. Tallies suggest there are over three billion social media users in the world, many of whom maintain accounts on multiple platforms. The total number of social media accounts may be several times that, making the task of sorting out people (and their braver/sassier/sexier online alter-egos) from commercial, political, and general trolling…
When thinking about developing software, usually the programmers are immediately the people who come to mind. However, it takes more than programmers to get a piece of software to market. In fact, a marketing team is an essential part of the process. However, they’re often either kept in the dark or brought in a little bit too late. There is a way to fix that. It’s important that marketing professionals and programmers work on a project together to ensure success. We asked members of the Forbes Technology Council how to handle two different teams working together on the same project. The advice given offers a few different ways…