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Mobile Ban In Schools Not Improving Grades or Behavior, Study Suggests

3 months 1 week ago
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Banning phones in schools is not linked to pupils getting higher grades or having better mental wellbeing, the first study of its kind suggests. Students' sleep, classroom behavior, exercise or how long they spend on their phones overall also seems to be no different for schools with phone bans and schools without, the academics found. But they did find that spending longer on smartphones and social media in general was linked with worse results for all of those measures. The first study in the world to look at school phone rules alongside measures of pupil health and education feeds into a fierce debate that has played out in homes and schools in recent years. [...] The University of Birmingham's findings, peer-reviewed and published by the Lancet's journal for European health policy, compared 1,227 students and the rules their 30 different secondary schools had for smartphone use at break and lunchtimes. The schools were chosen from a sample of 1,341 mainstream state schools in England. The paper says schools restricting smartphone use did not seem to be seeing their intended improvements on health, wellbeing and focus in lessons. However, the research did find a link between more time on phones and social media, and worse mental wellbeing and mental health, less physical activity, poorer sleep, lower grades and more disruptive classroom behavior. The study used the internationally recognized Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales to determine participants' wellbeing. It also looked at students' anxiety and depression levels. Dr Victoria Goodyear, the study's lead author, told the BBC the findings were not "against" smartphone bans in schools, but "what we're suggesting is that those bans in isolation are not enough to tackle the negative impacts." She said the "focus" now needed to be on reducing how much time students spent on their phones, adding: "We need to do more than just ban phones in schools."

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Cisco patches two critical Identity Services Engine flaws

3 months 1 week ago
One gives root access, the other lets you steal info and reconfig nodes, in the right (or should that be wrong) circumstances

Cisco has fixed two critical vulnerabilities in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root or access sensitive information, modify configurations, and reload affected devices.…

Jessica Lyons

Robocallers Posing As FCC Staff Blocked After Robocalling Real FCC Staff

3 months 1 week ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. "On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers," the FCC said. The calls used an artificial voice that said, "Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with you. If you are available to speak now please press one. If you prefer to schedule a call back please press two." You may not be surprised to learn that the FCC does not have any "Fraud Prevention Team" like the one mentioned in the robocalls, and especially not one that demands Google gift cards in lieu of jail time. "The FCC's Enforcement Bureau believes the purpose of the calls was to threaten, intimidate, and defraud," the agency said. "One recipient of an imposter call reported that they were ultimately connected to someone who 'demand[ed] that [they] pay the FCC $1,000 in Google gift cards to avoid jail time for [their] crimes against the state.'" The FCC said it does not "publish or otherwise share staff personal phone numbers" and that it "remains unclear how these individuals were targeted." Obviously, robocallers posing as FCC employees probably wouldn't intentionally place scam calls to real FCC employees. But FCC employees are just as likely to get robocalls as anyone else. This set of schemers apparently only made about 1,800 calls before their calling accounts were terminated. The FCC described the scheme yesterday when it announced a proposed fine of $4,492,500 against Telnyx, the voice service provider accused of carrying the robocalls. The FCC alleges that Telnyx violated "Know Your Customer (KYC)" rules by providing access to calling services without verifying the customers' identities. When contacted by Ars today, Telnyx denied the FCC's allegations and said it will contest the proposed fine.

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Who's afraid of DeepSeek's impact on AI hardware sales? Not AMD CEO Lisa Su

3 months 1 week ago
Predicts more efficient ML architectures will drive adoption, see Instinct sales accelerate, shares dive

AMD's chief exec Lisa Su has predicted the chip designer's Instinct accelerators will drive tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue in coming years, despite DeepSeek-inspired speculation that next-gen AI models may not need the same level of compute infrastructure used to produce such tools today.…

Tobias Mann

Workday To Cut Nearly 2,000 Workers on Profitability Focus

3 months 1 week ago
Workday is cutting about 8.5% of its workforce, making it the latest technology company to begin 2025 with headcount reductions. From a report: The cuts will amount to about 1,750 workers, Chief Executive Officer Carl Eschenbach wrote in a note to employees Wednesday. "The environment we're operating in today demands a new approach, particularly given our size and scale," he wrote. Workday intends to hire in strategic areas such as AI, allow faster decision-making, and take on more people overseas, Eschenbach wrote. This will advance the company's "ongoing focus on durable growth," Workday said in a filing Wednesday. Shares of Workday jumped more than 5% on the news.

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