The English digital skills-gap
The main feature of our latest summer edition of Intercity Tech focused on the skills-gap within the tech sector. This week, it has emerged as part of the annual computing education report from the University of Roehampton, that the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is being phased out of the pre-GCSE curriculum. With only half of English schools offering ICT at GCSE level, only 12% of students chose to take the option. Instead, schools are now looking to introducing computer science at GCSE and A-Level. The report states that the typical computer science student is "academically strong, mathematically able, likely to be taking triple science, from a relatively affluent family, and overwhelmingly likely to be male (even if the smaller number of girls taking the subject do better in the exam)". There are concerns that girls, poorer students and ethnic minorities will be the ones left most disadvantaged by missing out on the opportunity to take computing qualifications. Does the introduction of computer science qualifications, replacing ICT options exclude the majority from gaining a qualification to help them enter the tech sector in the future?
Microsoft and its part to play in border control
Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order putting a stop to the separation of immigrant families at the Mexico-United States border. Whilst it’s our responsibility as individuals to challenge decisions made by some of the most powerful people in the world through organised protest, is there a place for politics when it comes to big tech businesses? With Apple’s CEO Tim Cook calling Trump’s inaction ‘inhumane’, Airbnb co-founders calling the measures ‘immoral’, and Microsoft remarking that they’re ‘dismayed’, are words enough? Microsoft faced criticism for supplying the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Azure cloud and other tech services, and was forced to revisit a blog post they had authored in January 2018. Whether it’s an exercise in political PR or more a case of unifying against inherently inhumane treatment of immigrants, the tech world has been incredibly vocal in their challenge to Trump.
Do you want to share a room with Alexa?
With some users being understandably concerned about smart devices recording their conversations and commands, would you want to share your Marriott hotel room with Amazon’s Alexa? The new partnership will allow guests to command Alexa to order room service, make housekeeping requests, and to provide concierge advice. Over 5,000 Marriott-owned hotel suites currently have Alexa installed.
Memes under threat with Article 13
Could your much-loved memes be on the way out? Whether it’s on WhatsApp in your group chats, tags on Facebook, or in your DMs on Instagram, our social media platforms are full of memes capable of eliciting belly-laughs for days. The proposed Article 13 being debated within European Parliament could spell the end of our love-affair with memes. Large social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit would need to monitor content and remove it if they think it infringes on copyright. Is the increasing power of regulation taking the fun out of the Internet, and even worse, could it be a threat to the World Wide Web?
AI helps you open your eyes in Facebook pictures
How many times have you attempted to get that picture-perfect moment at a birthday party or family function only to find that someone’s blinked and ruined it? Facebook is proposing the answer to your photo faux-pas prayers with a new technology for recreating eyes in photos known as ‘exemplar generative adversarial network’ or ExGAN for short. By using the countless other photos you no doubt have stored on your Facebook account, it can recreate eyes from a dataset of other people’s eyes. Creepy. It’s the same technology that allows Facebook to identify people in your photos before you’ve even tagged them. We may be on the cusp of picture perfection, eyes and all.
