All posts tagged: programming

Survey and Community Conversation about APA Online Programming

Survey and Community Conversation about APA Online Programming

Published by Jenni Sidey

Inside the APA As announced earlier this year, the APA’s three divisions collectively decided to suspend the  2+1 experiment, returning to hosting only in-person divisional meetings beginning in 2027. In making this difficult decision, the divisional executive committees recognized the importance of values underlying the 2+1 experiment, especially accessibility, inclusion, and sustainability. We are now organizing a community conversation about actions the APA can take to honor these values through other forms of online programming. Before turning to that conversation, we would like to share with our members some of the data that contributed to the decision the end the experiment: Fewer paper submissions. For the online meetings, there were more than 30–40% fewer papers submitted than for recent in-person meetings. Lower registration. For the Central Division, the online meeting registration was 14% lower than the 10-year average. For the Pacific Division, the online meeting registration was 28% lower than the 10-year average. Declines in APA membership due to lower participation. Many people join the APA or renew their membership to submit papers or get …

intermediaries and research use in civics programming – Evidence & Policy Blog

intermediaries and research use in civics programming – Evidence & Policy Blog

Published by skeptic

Mariah Kornbluh This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Politics of neutrality: intermediaries and research use in civics programming‘, part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: Research (Mis)use and Mis/Disinformation in and around Education. Public education has become a political environment fraught with misinformation in the United States.  Book bans, educational gag orders and outright educator censorship influence (sometimes heavily) local school district policy. International efforts have highlighted that civics education offers a unique avenue in educating for a ‘just’ democracy. However, global trends and mounting national pressure highlights the curriculum’s vulnerability to being censored, constricted and outright distorted. The problem: ‘neutrality’ perpetuating research misuse within civics education Engaging in discourse on social issues and events that are relevant to students’ lives is an incredibly valuable method for them to gain needed civics skills. Yet, educators operate in an oppressive policy context that dissuades such practices and politicises historic events. Civics education has historically promoted neutrality as a pedagogical good which often manifests in a ‘both-sideism’ framework. This framework prioritises …

Ex-Staffers Say Holocaust Museum Canceled Programming to Appease Trump

Ex-Staffers Say Holocaust Museum Canceled Programming to Appease Trump

Published by José Betancourt

Two former employees say the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., altered content on its website and canceled long-planned programming preemptively to avoid angering the Trump administration. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one ex-staffer told Politico that museum administrators appeared to be “trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change.” The changes come amid a broader effort by President Donald Trump and his administration to control museums through executive orders, singling out institutions within the federally funded Smithsonian Institution, which he accuses of indulging in “anti-American ideology.” In a social media post last August, he said museums nationwide are “essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” USHMM is an independent museum with no connection to the Smithsonian. Related Articles A USHMM web page titled “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” was removed at some time after August 29, 2025, the last time it was saved on the Internet Archive, Politico reports. The page included lesson plans and resources drawing connections between legalized racism in the US …

COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

Published by skeptic

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey made an unusual admission: He’d run out of COBOL developers. The state’s unemployment insurance systems were written in the 60-year-old programming language and needed to be updated to handle the hundreds of thousands of claims. Trouble was, few of the state’s employees knew how to do that. And the crisis went beyond New Jersey, just one of many states that depended on these unwieldy systems. By one rough calculation, COBOL’s inefficiencies cost the US GDP $105 billion in 2020. You might think New Jersey would have replaced its system after this—and that Covid was COBOL’s last gasp. Not quite. The state’s new unemployment system came with a number of quality-of-life improvements, but on the backend, it was still made possible by a mainframe running the ancient language. COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It’s …

NBC faces more programming shake ups as Access Hollywood becomes latest cancellation

NBC faces more programming shake ups as Access Hollywood becomes latest cancellation

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter NBC has pulled the plug on its longtime entertainment news program Access Hollywood after 30 years. The show’s cancellation comes as a direct result of the network cutting its original production of first-run syndication programming. Other shows that are coming to an end include daytime talk shows Access Hollywood Live, Karamo and The Steve Wilkos Show. “NBCUniversal is making changes to our first-run syndication division to better align with the programming preferences of local stations,” said Frances Berwick, Chairman of Bravo & Peacock unscripted for NBCUniversal, in a statement, per The Hollywood Reporter. “The company will remain active in the distribution of our existing program library and other off-network titles, while winding down production of our first-run shows. These shows have provided audiences with great talk and entertainment content for many years and we’re very proud of the teams behind them.” …

Anthropic says Claude Code transformed programming. Now Claude Cowork is coming for the rest of the enterprise.

Anthropic says Claude Code transformed programming. Now Claude Cowork is coming for the rest of the enterprise.

Published by skeptic

Anthropic opened its virtual “Briefing: Enterprise Agents” event on Tuesday with a provocation. Kate Jensen, the company’s head of Americas, told viewers that the hype around enterprise AI agents in 2025 “turned out to be mostly premature,” with many pilots failing to reach production. “It wasn’t a failure of effort, it was a failure of approach, and it’s something we heard directly from our customers,” Jensen said. The implicit promise: Anthropic has figured out the right approach, and it starts with the playbook that made Claude Code one of the most consequential developer tools of the past year. “In 2025 Claude transformed how developers work, and in 2026 it will do the same for knowledge work,” Jensen said. “The magic behind Claude Code is simple. When you can delegate hard challenges, you can focus on the work that actually matters. Cowork brings that same power to knowledge workers.” That framing is central to understanding what Anthropic announced on Tuesday. The company rolled out a sweeping set of enterprise capabilities for Claude Cowork, the AI productivity …

How PBS Kids is trying to save children’s programming from Trump cuts

How PBS Kids is trying to save children’s programming from Trump cuts

Published by Daniella Wilson

In May 1969, Fred McFeeley Rogers, host of the nationally syndicated series Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, appeared in front of the U.S. Senate on behalf of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In a six-minute speech, he impressed upon the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media the necessity for children’s content that captured “the inner drama of childhood,” by speaking “to it constructively.” By the end of his speech, Rogers had secured the support of Chairman John Pastore and $20 million in funding, which the Nixon administration had sought to cut in half.  If only such tactics could work now. After decades of fending off defunding attempts, the CPB saw its board formally vote to dissolve last month after Congress’ rescission of all federal funding last year. But its beneficiary PBS Kids remains. Public TV’s educational media brand for children 2-8  has long carried Mr. Rogers spiritual successors Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Donkey, alongside Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Arthur, into 95% of U.S. households. The brand continues to maintain its commitment to viewer access, with new ASL episodes and industry-leading research on child development, literacy and even AI.  “The bulk of …

The great programming transformation: How AI and Rust are quietly dethroning C in Linux – and Windows

The great programming transformation: How AI and Rust are quietly dethroning C in Linux – and Windows

Published by skeptic

Andriy Onufriyenko/Moment/Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Microsoft and Linux are adding AI and Rust to their pipelines. Microsoft is leaning much harder into AI development than Linux. Both are expanding Rust, but neither OS will be fully Rust soon. Recently, Galen Hunt, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, wrote: “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases” and to “evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsoft’s largest C and C++ systems to Rust.”  Also: Linux will be unstoppable in 2026 – but one open-source legend may not survive If that sounds to you like Microsoft is going to rewrite Windows using AI from C to Rust, you’re not alone. Hunt has since backed away from that interpretation, writing, “Windows is not being rewritten in Rust with AI.” Still, one cannot help but wonder. After all, Hunt continued, “We are building tech to make migration from language …