To identify bots, the Center used a tool known as “Botometer,” developed by researchers at the University of Southern California and Indiana University.
It is important to note that bot accounts do not always clearly identify themselves as such in their profiles, and any bot classification system inevitably carries some risk of error. The Botometer system has been documented and validated in an array of academicpublications, and researchers from the Center conducted a number of independent validation measures of its results.8
A new study indicates that people who meditated over an eight-week period had a striking change in the expression of 172 genes that regulate inflammation, circadian rhythms and glucose metabolism. And that, in turn, was linked to a meaningful decrease in their blood pressure.
“This is a major step to overcome the innate bias that has developed in medicine over the last hundred years or so,” says Dr. Herbert Benson, who started promoting what he called “the relaxation response” more than four decades ago. “Going back to penicillin in the 1920s, we have been inexorably dependent on medication, surgery and procedures.”
His goal is to establish the relaxation response and other techniques that calm the brain — yoga, t’ai chi, breathing exercises, repetitive prayer and other meditative practices — as a “third leg” of medical treatment, along with medication and surgical procedures.
Last fall, the American Psychological Association declared the nation has reached a new high point in the nation’s stress quotient. the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association expanded the definition of high blood pressure, raising the number of people considered hypertensive from 72 million to 103 million — nearly half of all adults.
Previous studies of other diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis, have suggested improvement after meditation. But, “this is the first study where we have a nice, clean, clinical read-out,” says Towia Libermann,
What: Overview of new D2L Brightspace features
When: Monday, April 9 at 10:00 AM
Please join us to learn about the new features that will be available in D2L Brightspace as of June 2, 2018. The session will be recorded.
D2L cloud is the big news. stcloudstate.learn.minnstate.edu will be the link to log into the cloud.
Quiz/Question Library – The ability to search the text of quiz questions. See video (7:00)
Quizzes – Add a quiz due date, in addition to a start and end date.
Quiz Taking – Students start and submit a quiz with fewer clicks.
Manage Dates Tool – ‘Due Dates’ are now included.
Additional features will be rolled out to the QA cloud on April 10 (version 10.8.0) and May 7 (version 10.8.1)
ePortfolio -“A digital showcase for the learning journey. It helps you document the experience, reflect on it, and share ideas and achievements as they happen.” D2L has provided an overview video and a video to help you navigate this new tool for Minnesota State campuses. Look for an invitation to an overview session on April 18.
IP restriction, which is supposed to alleviate proctoring issues. But this will work only for oncampus quizzes. not for online classes.
The Quiz library being moved to the cloud. Does this mean that the Quiz Library can be shared across institutions? E.g. if faculty from one university is teaching biology and has developed a quiz library content, it can be shared with the content of a faculty from another university? All bells and whistles so far are only secondary to the fact that content generation remains most important for faculty and if faculty can share their test banks, I see this as the most advantageous of moving to a cloud.
eportfolio – new D2L tool. April 18 overview scheduled. so, isn’t in collision with TK20? I, personally, think that LInkedIn is the way to go. I will not mention eFolio MN, since it is a losing bet. So, how we reconcile the existence of several platforms for eportofolio?
SSO. single sign on. Adobe Connect, Mediaspace and service desk are already on SSO. signing in one application allows to move to D2L without having to sign on again.
A whopping 60 percent of parents are worried about the VR’s health effects, according to a new study from Common Sense Media, while others hope the emerging technology will have profound educational benefits because of its highly-engaging nature.
Jim Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media https://www.commonsense.org/education/
Stanford researchers partnered with Common Sense Media, which has done extensive research on children’s media use, to examine the impact of VR on children. Their report includes a national survey of 12,148 adults, 3,613 of whom were parents.
the study notes that 21 percent of households with children already have a VR device and 13 percent are planning to get one, Common Sense found that many parents are scared of exposing their children to such intense experiences.
Bailenson, founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, acknowledged the long term effects of VR on developing brains remain unknown. But short term impacts can include dizziness, headache and eye strain. https://vhil.stanford.edu/projects/
While 62 percent of parents surveyed believe that VR can provide educational experiences, only 22 percent reported their child actually used VR for learning. The vast majority play games.
VR also has the potential to encourage empathy among small children, experts say, because it builds bonds with virtual characters and settings, though parents surveyed by Common Sense remain skeptical.
In 2014 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, proposed an online ‘Magna Carta’ to protect the Internet, as a neutral system, from government and corporate manipulation. He was responding after revelations that British and US spy agencies were carrying out mass surveillance programmes; the Cambridge Analytica scandal makes his proposal as relevant as ever.
Luciano Floridi, professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute, explains that grey power is not ordinary socio-political or military power. It is not the ability to directly influence others, but rather the power to influence those who influence power. To see grey power, you need only look at the hundreds of high-level instances of revolving-door staffing patterns between Google and European governmentsand the U.S. Department of State.
And then there is ‘surveillance capitalism’. Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, proposes that surveillance capitalism is ‘a new logic of accumulation’. The incredible evolution of computer processing power, complex algorithms and leaps in data storage capabilities combine to make surveillance capitalism possible. It is the process of accumulation by dispossession of the data that people produce.
The respected security technologist Bruce Schneier recently applied the insights of surveillance capitalism to the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook crisis.
For Schneier, ‘regulation is the only answer.’ He cites the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect next month, which stipulates that users must consent to what personal data can be saved and how it is used.
Teachers can bring VR stories into the classroom in many different ways for meaningful learning experiences. Imagine a scavenger hunt where students narrate a story based on what they find. Or consider using objects they see to identify vocabulary words or recognize letters. Students should have purpose in their viewing and it should directly connect to standards.
Similar to the new movie, Ready Player One, they provide an intense experience where the viewer feels like they are in the center of the story.
Using a mobile device or tablet, the student can start the story and look around the scene based on their interest, rather than the cameras focus. New apps such as Baobab VR have continued to appear with more interactions and engagement.
A creative way to have your students create their own virtual stories is using the app Roundme. Upload your 360 image and add directional sound, links and content. Upload portals to walk the viewer into multiple scenes and then easily share the stories by link to the story.
Newer augmented reality apps that work with ARKit have taken another approach to storytelling. Augmented Stories and My Hungry Caterpillar.Qurious, a company that is working on a release blending gaming, making and storytelling in one app.
Storyfab, turns our students into the directors of the show
A new AR book, SpyQuest, has moved the immersive experience a big step forward as it helps define the story by bringing the images to life. Through the camera lens on a device, the stories make students the agents in an adventure into the world of espionage. The augmented reality experiences on the images use the accompanying app to scan the scene and provide further insight into the story.
Apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Viber
Felix Krause described in 2017 that when a user grants an app access to their camera and microphone, the app could do the following:
Access both the front and the back camera.
Record you at any time the app is in the foreground.
Take pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately.
Run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.
Livestream the camera on to the internet.
Detect if the user is on their phone alone, or watching together with a second person.
Upload random frames of the video stream to your web service and run a proper face recognition software which can find existing photos of you on the internet and create a 3D model based on your face.
For instance, here’s a Find my Phone application which a documentary maker installed on a phone, then let someone steal it. After the person stole it, the original owner spied on every moment of the thief’s life through the phone’s camera and microphone.
The government
Edward Snowden revealed an NSA program called Optic Nerves. The operation was a bulk surveillance program under which they captured webcam images every five minutes from Yahoo users’ video chats and then stored them for future use. It is estimated that between 3% and 11% of the images captured contained “undesirable nudity”.
Hackers can also gain access to your device with extraordinary ease via apps, PDF files, multimedia messages and even emojis.
An application called Metasploit on the ethical hacking platform Kali uses an Adobe Reader 9 (which over 60% of users still use) exploit to open a listener (rootkit) on the user’s computer. You alter the PDF with the program, send the user the malicious file, they open it, and hey presto – you have total control over their device remotely.
Once a user opens this PDF file, the hacker can then:
Install whatever software/app they like on the user’s device.
Use a keylogger to grab all of their passwords.
Steal all documents from the device.
Take pictures and stream videos from their camera.
Capture past or live audio from the microphone.
Upload incriminating images/documents to their PC, and notify the police.
And, if it’s not enough that your phone is tracking you – surveillance cameras in shops and streets are tracking you, too
You might even be on this website, InSeCam, which allows ordinary people online to watch surveillance cameras free of charge. It even allows you to search cameras by location, city, time zone, device manufacturer, and specify whether you want to see a kitchen, bar, restaurant or bedroom.