All posts tagged: understand

Exclusive: Honor Debuts a New AI Agent That Can Read and Understand Your Screen

Exclusive: Honor Debuts a New AI Agent That Can Read and Understand Your Screen

Published by skeptic

It chose a restaurant, but then couldn’t complete the process as the spot it chose required a credit card to confirm a reservation, at which point the user had to take over. You can be flexible in your query—in another example, asking it to book a “highly rated” restaurant meant it would look at reviews with high scores, though the agent doesn’t do any more research than that. It’s not cross-referencing OpenTable reviews with data from other parts of the web, especially since all of this data is processed on device and isn’t sent to the cloud. This kind of agentic artificial intelligence is the current buzzword in the tech sphere. My colleague Will Knight recently tested an AI assistant that could browse the web and perform tasks online. Google late last year unveiled its Gemini 2 AI model trained to take actions on your behalf. It also renews the idea of a generative user interface for smartphones—at MWC 2024, we saw a few companies working on ways to interact with apps without using apps …

We can’t close a disadvantage gap we don’t understand

We can’t close a disadvantage gap we don’t understand

Published by skeptic

More from this theme Recent articles Reducing the attainment gap has been a priority for several recent governments. Today’s release of new data on secondary school attainment outcomes for 2023/24 should provide a key metric for judging their progress on this priority. Sadly, the measure just isn’t fit for that purpose. Disadvantaged pupils are identified by their eligibility for free school meals (FSM). Any eligible pupil who has claimed FSM at any point in the last six years (known as FSM6) is included in the measurement of the index.   That index was introduced in 2015. But rather than using actual attainment outcomes, it uses a ranked approach calculated as the difference in the average rank of performance in GCSEs of non-disadvantaged pupils and disadvantaged pupils. This makes the data difficult to interpret for any given year. However, we can glean insights from the trend over time. Figure 1 shows that this trend was generally downward between 2010/11 when the disadvantage gap was at its widest and 2019/20, the first year of the Covid pandemic, …

What to do if your partner wants to speak to your baby in a language you don’t understand

What to do if your partner wants to speak to your baby in a language you don’t understand

Published by skeptic

Finding out you and your partner are expecting a baby throws many discussions that might have once been hypothetical into stark relief. This certainly may be the case if your partner speaks another language beyond the one spoken where you live and that the two of you communicate in. “I’d like to bring the baby up to speak my language”, they say, and suddenly what seemed a wonderful idea – a bilingual child – might throw up panicked visions of being left out of private jokes and conversations at the dinner table. But growing up with two or more languages can be hugely beneficial for children, and there’s plenty you can do to help out and get involved. When children acquire a minority language – a language other than the dominant language or languages in the place they live – spoken by one or both parents, they have the key to that culture. It offers the possibility of a deep relationship with extended family and others they might otherwise not be able to talk to …

the terms you need to know to understand news today

the terms you need to know to understand news today

Published by Sam

The way we get our news is changing fast. The latest research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University shows that, around the world, news consumers are turning to Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok rather than television, radio or newspapers. Nearly a quarter of adults under 24 get their news from TikTok. You may have come across terms describing (or deriding) sources as “new media”, “independent media” or “biased”. These words can be opaque and sometimes used to discredit valuable sources. Here are a few key concepts to understand today’s news environment. “New” v “traditional” media The first news websites appeared 30 years ago. But the term “new media” still refers to news providers that primarily deliver content digitally, whether through websites or apps. Publishers have long struggled to make these digital forms of news pay through advertising. However, in the past few years, more digital publishers have instead tried to raise revenues through subscriptions. “Traditional media”, “legacy media”, or, sometimes, the increasingly outdated term “mainstream media” all refer to …

Good sex and relationships education can help teens understand when behaviour is abusive or controlling

Good sex and relationships education can help teens understand when behaviour is abusive or controlling

Published by skeptic

Nearly half of young people aged between 13 and 17 who have been in a relationship in the past year have experienced violent or controlling behaviour, according to a recent survey from charity the Youth Endowment Fund. The finding comes from a survey of 10,000 young people in England and Wales, of which 27% had been in a relationship in the past year. This evidence of abuse in teen relationships comes against a background of sexual harassment and abuse perpetrated by young people against their peers. Over half of the 106,984 child sexual abuse cases in 2022 – the most recent data – in England and Wales involved reported offences by young people aged between ten and 17. This is a rise of 7.6% from 2021. A 2021 survey by schools regulator Ofsted found that sexual harassment is a common aspect of school life for a majority of pupils. The Everyone’s Invited website, an online space for survivors of sexual abuse to anonymously share their stories, has received over 50,000 testimonials of sexual harassment and …

Language Helps You Understand Events You See

Language Helps You Understand Events You See

Published by skeptic

Source: Image generated with AI, December 10, 2024 Suppose you watch someone make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. As you watch, you can probably divide the activities they perform into steps, like taking out two slices of bread or spreading the jelly on one of the slices. As you watch this activity happening, what enables you to break this event up into its component parts? Having seen an event, you can remember it later. This memory may help you to perform the same action later. So, you may learn to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich (in part) by watching someone else do it. What enables you to remember what you’ve seen? One possibility is that your ability to describe events is a core component of your capacity to break it into parts and to remember them. This possibility was explored in a fascinating paper published in 2024 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition by Briony Banks and Louise Connell. To test this possibility, they had people watch someone build simple models with Duplo blocks. …

What I Didn’t Understand About Apple Picking

What I Didn’t Understand About Apple Picking

Published by skeptic

In September 2020, I took my kids apple picking at a small, quiet orchard in Massachusetts called Windy Hill Farm. It was our first weekend away from home since the pandemic had started. The trees dripped with so much fruit, they looked like they were wearing jeweled capes. My son was 10 and my daughter 13, and as they ran and played and picked, the fears I’d been carrying about the virus, the changing world, and the terrible news fell away. At home that night, my daughter made apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast. Four years later, as her college-application deadlines loom, time feels like a gale. Our apple-picking tradition seemed like something we couldn’t miss—but choosing an orchard near our home, outside Philadelphia, was more complicated than we anticipated. One farm we used to love now offers a “Premium Package” admission fee of $31.99 per person, which includes a one-quarter peck picking bag plus a corn maze, a hayride, and goat food. (The apple cannon, which shoots apples at targets, costs …

10 Essential Films to Watch to Understand Surrealist Cinema

10 Essential Films to Watch to Understand Surrealist Cinema

Published by skeptic

  Surrealism is an art movement dating back to the 1920s. It focuses on exploring what is outside of the boundaries of reality. A permutation of Dada and heavily inspired by psychoanalysis theory, Surrealist artists were interested in the subconscious, the irrational, and dreams; they sought to challenge the very structure of rational reality. But what is surrealist cinema really like? Read on to find out.   Surrealist Cinema Movie theater. Source: Unsplash   Cinema, as an artistic language defined by a distortion of perception and fabrication of reality, was a natural attraction for the avant-garde art of the 20th century. Inspired by early Dada experimental films and the feverish works of German Expressionism, film allowed the surrealists to create pure, tangible dreams. Though there aren’t that many de facto surrealist films, surrealism was formative to cinema history when the medium was still quite young. Denying logic, narrative, and even meaning, surrealist cinema opened pathways as to what a movie could be and pushed the audiovisual language to its farther boundaries. We’re going to look …

What Trump doesn’t understand about the military

What Trump doesn’t understand about the military

Published by José

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Donald Trump has disgraced himself in many areas. But his longevity in public life after expressing open contempt for the men and women of the United States military, and especially those who have been wounded or killed in the service of their country, is an appalling achievement unmatched by any of his predecessors. Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg has written several important articles about Trump and his relationship with the military—he broke the story about Trump referring to America’s fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers”—and that reporting has now been gathered into a book for Atlantic Editions titled On Heroism. I talked with Jeff over the holiday weekend about the book, and about how America has become so tolerant of a politician who regularly shows his disdain for the U.S. military. Tom Nichols: When I started reading this, …

Exploring the lived experiences of university-based knowledge brokers and marginalised academics to better understand EDI within academic-policy engagement – Evidence & Policy Blog

Exploring the lived experiences of university-based knowledge brokers and marginalised academics to better understand EDI within academic-policy engagement – Evidence & Policy Blog

Published by skeptic

Laura Bea and Alejandra Recio-Saucedo This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘EDI in academic–policy engagement: lived experience of university based knowledge brokers and marginalised academics’. Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)[1] in the world of Higher Education, public policy and everything in between has received increasing attention over the past few years especially. Within academic-policy engagement specifically, key actors have identified the need to diversify participation and knowledges (Morris et al, 2021; Hopkins et al, 2021; Walker et al, 2019). Additionally, Oliver et al (2022) reported that there is currently a ‘busy but rudderless mass of activity’ within knowledge mobilisation, and called for further practice that is informed by ‘existing evidence and theory’ (694). Notwithstanding the high level of activity, a gap in understanding what EDI in the context of academic-policy engagement really means still exists. Alongside this, there is a gap in understanding and knowing how EDI is understood and experienced by knowledge brokers, how university knowledge brokers drive it, and what strategies are being used to ensure EDI …