Author: Loknath Das

Dame Maggie Smith and other actors from Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter films will be giving voice to characters in the new “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery” role-playing game, which is officially slated to launch April 25. In the game, players create a personalized student avatar to experience life as a student at the famed Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It’s set in the 1980s, before Harry Potter’s birth. Smith, who played Prof. McGonagall in WB’s big-screen adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling books, said, “If I could attend Hogwarts as a student, I would be most excited to attend the potions class taught by…

The history: Over the past decade, 150 researchers from the US and around the world painstakingly analyzed DNA, RNA, and proteins from tumor samples of more than 11,000 patients with 33 different types of cancer. The findings: From that data, scientists have identified about 300 genes that drive tumor growth. They also found that just over half the tumors samples analyzed carry genetic mutations that could be targeted by therapies that are already on the market. These findings and others appear in 29 different papers today in the journal Cell. Why it matters: Researchers say the insights gleaned can be used to tailor more personalized treatments for cancer…

Like many of her peers, 17-year-old Julie Abramson is rarely without her phone. “I try not to look during class, but sometimes I do,” admitted the senior at West Bloomfield High School. “I check it a good amount so I can keep up with what is going on. I want to be in loop. It’s nice to feel updated and not left behind, and you will be if you’re not checking social media.” Abramson is hardly alone. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 92 percent of teens report going online daily — including 20 percent who…

To the Editor: Re “Its Ideals Tainted, Can Social Media Shine Again?,” by Kevin Roose (The Shift column, Business Day, March 29): The appropriate frustration and disappointment resulting from the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica disclosures are making it easy to forget the personal and economic benefits of social media. For example, let’s not forget that we choose to integrate these services into our daily lives because they allow us to deepen social connections and enable us to exercise our individual agency in a fashion that was impossible before their emergence. Or that these services have created millions of jobs,…

Climate change and disaster risk management are issues of high priority to the Solomon Islands Government, given the current and future impacts expected, and the associated risks posed to natural ecosystems such as coastal and marine environments, fisheries, agriculture, water resources, health, biodiversity, infrastructure and industry. Solomon Islands, as a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) and Least Developed Country (LDC), requires up-scaled and targeted financial resources to be able to effectively respond to the adverse effects of climate change and disasters. In recognition of this, the Solomon Islands Government requested for this Climate Change and Disaster Risk Finance Assessment to…

News stories on international large-scale education assessments (ILSAs) tend to highlight the performance of the media outlet’s home country in comparison with the highest-scoring nations (in recent years, typically located in East Asia). Low (or declining) rankings can be so alarming that policy-makers leap to remedies—often ill-founded—on the basis of what they conclude is the “secret sauce” behind the top performers’ scores. As statisticians studying the methods and policy uses of ILSAs (1), we believe the obsession with rankings—and the inevitable attempts to mimic specific features of the top performing systems—not only misleads, it diverts attention from more constructive uses…

This report brings data from the newly-released 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) to the robust policy and research debate over the extent to which differences in aggregate special education participation rates over racial and ethnic groups represent differences in underlying needs for special education. The NSCH allows me to compare not only how student characteristics are related to participation in special education, but also how they relate to children’s access to speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy—services that may be delivered as part of a child’s special education plan. Like the existing literature, these analyses cannot control…

We often look at competition through the lens of winners and losers, but sometimes, in competition, even the winners lose. Consider boxing, a sport where the greatest champions are almost guaranteed a life of cognitive decline, the necessary price of those championships. Something similar is proving true in football. Of course in sports, we recognize that this kind of sacrifice may be necessary to achieve or even attempt greatness. We don’t wish for the competitors to be harmed, but we understand and even honor those sacrifices. But our reverence for competition as a method for fostering achievement has limits, and…

From someone impersonating Hulk Hogan and trying to get players into pseudo wrestling matches to the assassination of the character of one of the game’s core creators, the story of Ultima Online is full of things that had a huge impact on so many aspects of the the way we make and play games today. So many of the ideas implemented into Ultima Online have spread throughout the industry 20 years later. Some of the original developers gathered to take a look back at the development process during a talk at this years Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. “We kept debating about whether…

The irritating thing about Sea of Thieves living just on the Windows Store—aside from the process of using the store itself—is that you’re bound by the game’s price on there. You can’t buy Rare’s co-op pirate game through Steam or other third-party retailers. In the UK, that means the PC version is a relatively steep £50, more than most major publisher games are priced on Steam. This led to a recent conversation among the PC Gamer staff: how much are you willing to spend on a game? How much have you spent on games in the past? We had wildly…