Posts Tagged ‘China’
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/facial-recognition-technology-breaches-gdpr-says-vestager/
Margrethe Vestager, EU’s tech chief Margrethe Vestager said on Thursday that facial recognition technologies breach the need to give consent, which is stipulated in Europe’s data protection rules (GDPR).
“China might have data and the US might have money, but Europe has purpose,” the Commission’s VP for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age said.
The use of facial recognition technology remains highly controversial due to fears of China-type surveillance regimes and human rights violations, with Ursula von der Leyen, EC President pledging to distance Europe from these practices and to announcing new AI ethical and human-centred rules in the first 100 days of her mandate.
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more on facial recognition in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facial+recognition
China’s Fiber Broadband Internet Approaches Nationwide Coverage; United States Lags Severely Behind from r/technology
China’s Fiber Broadband Internet Approaches Nationwide Coverage; United States Lags Severely Behind
In 2013, 17 percent of consumers in both China and the U.S. had access to a fiber internet connection. Fast forward to 2019, China’s penetration has jumped to 86 percent while the U.S. is only at 25 percent.
Despite the constant posturing and discussion about the importance of fiber, the U.S. has not been effective at deploying a nationwide fiber optical network. Why is this?
LACK OF PRIVATE COMPETITION
INADEQUATE BROADBAND MAPPING
INEFFICIENT NATIONAL FUNDING PROGRAMS
ABSENCE OF COMMON SENSE STATE-LEVEL INFRASTRUCTURE POLICIES
Unlike America, virtually all of the access points that make up the internet “backbone” in China are state-owned, with private providers only able to lease out bandwidth from the government. The communist government’s plans extend beyond its own borders as well; the Belt and Road Initiative includes plans for direct investment in infrastructure spanning nearly 70 different countries, potentially giving China a vice grip on internet innovation if left unchecked by the West.
CHINA LEADS IN 5G DEPLOYMENT AS WELL
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more on broadband in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=broadband
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/17/chinas-education-system-produces-stellar-test-scores-so-why-do-students-head-abroad-each-year-study/
Education scholars have already critiqued PISA as a valid global measure of education quality — but analysts also are skeptical about the selective participation of Chinese students from wealthier schools.
Second, Chinese students, on average, study 55 hours a week — also No. 1 among PISA-participating countries. This was about 20 hours more than students in Finland, the country that PISA declared to have the highest learning efficiency, or reading-test-score points per hour spent studying.
But PISA analysis also revealed that Chinese students are among the least satisfied with their lives.
Students look overseas for a more well-rounded education
Their top destination of choice, by far, is the United States. The 1.1 million or so foreign students in the United States in 2018 included 369,500 Chinese college students
hostility in U.S.-China relations could dampen the appeal of a U.S. education. Britain, in fact, recorded a 30 percent surge in Chinese applicants in 2019, challenging the U.S. global dominance in higher education.
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https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/03/us-students-gain-ground-against-global-peers.html
Immigrant students, who made up 23 percent of all U.S. students taking PISA, performed significantly better compared to their native-born peers in the United States than they did on average throughout the OECD countries.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/news/pisa-rankings-2019-four-chinese-regions-top-international-student-survey/ar-BBXGCZU
The survey found that 15-year-old students from Beijing, Shanghai, and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang ranked top for all three core subjects, achieving the highest level 4 rating.
Students from the United States were ranked level 3 for reading and science, and level 2 for math, while teens from Britain scored a level 3 ranking in all three categories.
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Looking for Post-PISA Answers? Here’s What Our Obsession With Test Scores Overlooks
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-12-03-looking-for-post-pisa-answers-here-s-what-our-obsession-with-test-scores-overlooks
Andreas Schelicher, director of education and skills at the OECD—the Paris-based organization behind PISA wrote that “students who disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much’ scored 32 points higher in reading than students who agreed or strongly agreed.”
Those results are similar to recent findings published by Carol Dweck, a Stanford education professor who is often credited with making growth mindset a mainstream concept.
“Growth mindset is a very important thing that makes us active learners, and makes us invest in our personal education,” Schleicher states. “If learning isn’t based on effort and intelligence is predetermined, why would anyone bother?”
It’s “absolutely fascinating” to see the relationship between teachers’ enthusiasm, students’ social-emotional wellbeing and their learning outcomes, Schleicher notes. As one example, he noted in his summary report that “in most countries and economies, students scored higher in reading when they perceived their teachers as more enthusiastic, especially when they said their teachers were interested in the subject.”
In other words, happy teachers lead to better results. That’s hardly a surprising revelation, says Scheleicher. But professional development support is one thing that can sometimes be overlooked by policymakers when so much of the focus is on test scores.
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https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
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more on Estonia in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=estonia
TikTok says it doesn’t censor content, but a user was just locked out after a viral post criticizing China
TikTok says it doesn’t censor content, but a user was just locked out after a viral post criticizing China
by intechnology
Families of missing Uighurs use Tiktok video app to publicise China detentions
/https://uighurtimes.com/index.php/families-of-missing-uighurs-use-tiktok-video-app-to-publicise-china-detentions/
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Nov. 28, 2019
TikTok sorry for blocking teenager who disguised Xinjiang video as make-up tutorial
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/28/tiktok-says-sorry-to-us-teenager-blocked-after-sharing-xinjiang-videos
A spokesman for the platform on Thursday blamed a “human moderation error” for the removal of a video by 17-year-old Feroza Aziz disguised as a makeup tutorial to avoid being censored.
Owned by the Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, TikTok is one of few Chinese apps that have gained popularity outside of China. TikTok has said that it does not apply Chinese censorship rules on the international version of its app.
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more on tik tok in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=tik+tokhttps://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=tik+tok
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-23-how-much-artificial-intelligence-should-there-be-in-the-classroom
a two-day conference about artificial intelligence in education organized by a company called Squirrel AI.
he believes that having AI-driven tutors or instructors will help them each get the individual approach they need.
the Chinese government has declared a national goal of surpassing the U.S. in AI technology by the year 2030, so there is almost a Sputnik-like push for the tech going on right now in China.
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more on AI in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Artificial+Intelligence+and+education
Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet
24 December 2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50902496
“Increasingly, authoritarian countries which want to control what citizens see are looking at what Iran and China have already done.
“It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble.”
a “sovereign Runet”?
In Iran, the National Information Network allows access to web services while policing all content on the network and limiting external information. It is run by the state-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran.
One of the benefits of effectively turning all internet access into a government-controlled walled garden, is that virtual private networks (VPNs), often used to circumvent blocks, would not work.
Another example of this is the so-called Great Firewall of China. It blocks access to many foreign internet services, which in turn has helped several domestic tech giants establish themselves.
Russia already tech champions of its own, such as Yandex and Mail.Ru, but other local firms might also benefit.
The country plans to create its own Wikipedia and politicians have passed a bill that bans the sale of smartphones that do not have Russian software pre-installed.
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Russia Is Considering An Experiment To Disconnect From The Internet
February 11, 20194:50 PM ET SASHA INGBER
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/11/693538900/russia-is-considering-an-experiment-to-disconnect-from-the-internet
Russia is considering a plan to temporarily disconnect from the Internet as a way to gauge how the country’s cyberdefenses would fare in the face of foreign aggression, according to Russian media.
It was introduced after the White House published its 2018 National Security Strategy, which attributed cyberattacks on the United States to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Russia’s Communications Ministry also simulated a switching-off exercise of global Internet services in 2014, according to Russian outlet RT.
Russia’s State Duma will meet Tuesday to consider the bill, according to RIA Novosti.
Roskomnadzor has also exerted pressure on Google to remove certain sites on Russian searches.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress last month that Russia, as well as other foreign actors, will increasingly use cyber operations to “threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.”
My note: In the past, the US actions prompted other countries to consider the same:
Germanty – https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/07/01/privacy-and-surveillance-obama-advisor-john-podesta-every-country-has-a-history-of-going-over-the-line/
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more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
more on surveillance in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=surveillance
How Much Artificial Intelligence Should There Be in the Classroom?
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-23-how-much-artificial-intelligence-should-there-be-in-the-classroom
We can build robot teachers, or even robot teaching assistants. But should we?
the Chinese government has declared a national goal of surpassing the U.S. in AI technology by the year 2030, so there is almost a Sputnik-like push for the tech going on right now in China. At the same time, China is also facing a shortage of qualified teachers in many rural areas, and there’s a huge demand for high-quality language teachers and tutors throughout the country.
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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
Chinese Facial Recognition Will Take over the World in 2019
Michael K. Spencer Jan 14, 2018
https://medium.com/futuresin/chinese-facial-recognition-will-take-over-the-world-in-2019-520754a7f966
The best facial recognition startups are in China, by a long-shot. As their software is less biased, global adoption is occurring via their software. This is evidenced in 2019 by the New York Police department in NYC for example, according to the South China Morning Post.
The mass surveillance state of data harvesting in real-time is coming. Facebook already rates and profiles us.
The Tech Wars come down to an AI-War
Whether the NYC police angle is true or not (it’s being hotly disputed), Facebook and Google are thinking along lines that follow the whims of the Chinese Government.
SenseTime and Megvii won’t just be worth $5 Billion, they will be worth many times that in the future. This is because a facial recognition data-harvesting of everything is the future of consumerism and capitalism, and in some places, the central tenet of social order (think Asia).
China has already ‘won’ the trade-war, because its winning the race to innovation. America doesn’t regulate Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Facebook properly, that stunts innovation and ethics in technology where the West is now forced to copy China just to keep up.
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more about facial recognition in schools
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/02/facial-recognition-technology-in-schools/
China Restores Public Access To Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine
January 24, 20195:31 AM ET MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ VANESSA ROMO
Microsoft President and Chief Legal Counsel Brad Smith explained that it’s not the first time the search engine has been blocked. “It happens periodically,” he said in an interview with Fox Business News from Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.
“You know, we operate in China pursuant to some global principles that’s called the Global Network Initiative in terms of how we manage censorship demands and the like,” he said.
Although Bing enjoyed only about 2 percent of China’s search engine market, its banishment was significant in a country known for controlling electronic access to information. With Bing blocked, China’s citizens had even fewer options for finding information on the Internet.