Last year the Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report that found QAnon’s following had grown considerably in Australia during 2020, with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter driving increased engagement.
The report found Australia was the fourth largest country for QAnon activity, behind the US, UK and Canada. Its presence in Australia is also evident on less mainstream sites. For example as Canadian QAnon research Marc-Andre Argentino has pointed out, there were at least six Australian Q “research boards” on the site 8kun with about 4,000 posts by January last year. That had increased to 11 boards by the start of 2021.
Last year, Guardian Australia revealed QAnon had found a follower in Tim Stewart, a family friend of the prime Scott Morrison. Stewart was behind one of Australia’s largest QAnon-linked accounts, BurnedSpy34.
SkySilk, a Web infrastructure company based outside of Los Angeles, is now hosting Parler, SkySilk’s chief executive, Kevin Matossian, confirmed to NPR in an interview.
Matossian refused to comment on the terms of the arrangement, or under what conditions SkySilk will do business with Parler, which was heavily used by the rioters in connection with the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In new content guidelines released by Parler on Monday, the company says it will deploy a “privacy-preserving process” using an algorithm and human moderators to police content that threatens or incites violence.
Additionally, Parler says there will be a “trolling filter” in which content that attacks someone based on race, sex, sexual orientation or religion will be covered up. Yet those who want to view the content will be allowed by clicking through the filter.
Mark Meckler, one of the early creators of the Tea Party movement and now Parler’s interim CEO, said the platform has been rebuilt on independent technology and is “not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations.”
Indeed, Parler has turned to Web infrastructure companies that have welcomed extremist and hate-filled websites, including Epik, a firm based outside of Seattle that supports Parler’s domain, as well as sites including InfoWars, BitChute and Patriots.win, previously known as The Donald.
Cabada, E., Kurt, E., & Ward, D. (2021). Constructing a campus-wide infrastructure for virtual reality. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1881680
As an interdisciplinary hub, academic libraries are uniquely positioned to serve the full lifecycle of immersive environment needs, from development through archiving of successful projects. As and informal learning environment that or discipline neutral and high traffic, the academic library can serve as a clearinghouse for experimentation and transmission of best practices across colleges.
these foundational questions:
1. What VR infrastructure needs do faculty and researchers have?
2. Where is campus support lagging?
3. What current partnerships exist?
4. What and where is the campus level of interest in VR?
As marketing for workshops and programs can be challenging, particularly for large institutions, data was collected on where workshop participants learned about Step Into VR. The responses show that users learned of the workshops from a variety of ways with email ( 41 % ) as the most cited method (Figure 4). These marketing emails were sent through distributed listservs that reached nearly the entire campus population. Facebook was called out specifically and represented the second largest marketing method at 29% with the library website, friends, instructors, and digital signage representing the remaining marketing channels.
While new needs continue to emerge, the typical categories of consultation support observed include:
• Recommendations on hardware selection, such as choosing the best VR headset for viewing class content
• Guidance on developing VR applications that incorporate domain-specific curricular content
• Support for curricular integration of VR
• Recommendations on 360 capture media and equipment for documenting environments or experiences, such as the GoPro Fusion and Insta360 One X
• Advice on editing workflows, including software for processing and rendering of 360 content
Alex Fogarty
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While many library patrons understand the basic concepts of recording video on a camera, 360 cameras present a large divergence from this process in several primary ways. The first is a 360 camera captures every direction at once, so there is no inherent “focus,” and no side of a scene that is not recorded. This significantly changes how someone might compose a video recording, and also adds complexity to post-production, including how to orient viewers within a scene. The second area of divergence is that many of these devices, especially the high-end versions, are recording each lens to a separate data file or memory card and these ftles need to be combined, or “stitched,” at a later time using software specific to the camera. A final concern is that data ftles for high-resolution 3 D capture can be huge, requiring both large amounts of disk space and high-end processors and graphic cards for detailed editing to occur. For example, the Insta360 Pro 2 has 6 sensors all capable of data recording at 120 Mbps for a grand total of 720 Mbps. This translates into 43.2 gigabytes of data for every minute o
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.
The Chinese government didn’t directly address questions about manipulation of Supermicro servers, issuing a statement that read, in part, “Supply chain safety in cyberspace is an issue of common concern, and China is also a victim.” The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing the CIA and NSA, declined to comment.
Teachers used to be the gatekeepers to information, to knowledge. The successive inventions of writing and reading, print, the library, and then the World Wide Web, mean that we teachers are no longer the gatekeepers.
Schools, universities and teachers to some extent remain the gatekeepers to knowledge, the definers of what comprises valid knowledge. We do this, of course, through holding the ultimate educational power – the power to assess.
But it is not clear how long we teachers will, or should, hold this power. Increasingly, students, and employers, nations, cultures, many groups in our societies, rightly want a say in defining what is valid knowledge, a valid curriculum.
Knowledge isn’t enough
Each year, vast amounts of new knowledge are produced. Also, each year, vast amounts of current knowledge become wrong, or redundant, or both. Knowledge dies. In some subjects, a significant proportion of what was taught in the first year will have died by the time the students who learned it graduate. So, what is education for?
Machines are doing more and more of the work
The bad news is, we are getting squeezed out of work. The good news is, we are getting squeezed up, into ever more interesting work. We will be able to stay ahead for a long time; because there are always still more difficult and important and exciting things for us to do, increasingly with the support of our increasingly capable machines.
Employers want graduates to be job-ready. They also want graduates to be fluent in the five Cs: Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Criticality as well as Competence. Not all university education currently develops the first four Cs. Very little university education currently gives high priority to their development. Rarely are they formally assessed.
Changing outcomes, changing pedagogies
The architecture of a university expresses its views about pedagogy. This remains true with the great leap online. The old pedagogic architecture – of teaching as (mainly) telling, of learning as (mainly) listening and reading, of access in and through the library to specified stored knowledge, and of assessment as (mainly) recalling, repeating back what has been learned, perhaps with some application or interpretation – has for the most part been recreated in digital form, with varying degrees of success