Look no further for exciting lessons to captivate your students’ imaginations, deepen their understanding of the environmental threats our planet faces, and empower them to take action. Use our resources to lead your students through interactive virtual field trips to parks, zoos, aquariums and connect live with experts to learn about climate change, conservation, sustainability, recycling and more.
“Environmental literacy is more important than ever, and with Skype virtual field trips, we have an opportunity to educate kids and raise awareness. After a Skype session, students realize the importance of protecting the forests, the oceans and all the amazing creatures trying to survive on the planet we all live in,” says Manuela Correia, a school teacher from Portugal.
And that’s not all for this month of celebration! Skype in the Classroom partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots program for a broadcast and live chat with Dr. Jane Goodall. There will be two more live broadcasts for classrooms and families to hear from Dr. Jane Goodall on how every individual’s actions can make a big impact on our planet.
The broadcasts will air on April 2nd at 12:30 ET/17:30 UTC and April 9th at 9:00 ET/14:00 UTC and each will be followed by a 30-minute live chat with Dr. Jane Goodall and the Jane Goodall Institute Roots & Shoots team.
To add to the Earth Day fun, Skype launched a collection of emoticons that you can use before, during and after your Skype sessions this month to get students excited while celebrating and learning about our planet.
The Skype team also created a Dr. Jane Goodall emoticon in honor of her Skype in the Classroom broadcasts and all the amazing work she has done to make the world a better place!
So, open your Skype, type (janegoodall) and start sharing this emoticon with your friends!
Additionally, Skype in the Classroom has collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund to launch Our Planet Live—a collection of expert speakers and virtual field trips available via Skype. These free classroom activities are designed to build on the themes of Our Planet, the new ground-breaking nature documentary series voiced by Sir David Attenborough streaming on Netflix from April 5th. Our Planet is the story of the one place we all call home, and this collection of live classroom experiences will teach students about the different biomes and species on Earth through Skype lessons with experts from around the world. Request your session here.
We hope that you join us in celebrating Earth Day 2019 by getting involved with one or more of our activities that will bring the curriculum to life and make learning fun for your students!
And as always, share your favorite moments with our global community on Twitter (@SkypeClassroom) with #Skype2Learn #MicrosoftEDU to inspire others to connect and bring the world to their classrooms.
Ok, I am in! Are there any resources to help me get started?
Explore and register for one of our environmental-related Virtual Field Trips at ms/SITCearthday.
Download our Earth Day activity plan—full of ideas and suggestions on how to organize your Skype sessions—to guide your classroom’s celebration all month long.
How can I expand the Skype learning experiences for my students for Earth Month?
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 03-30-2019, 02:58 AM - Forum: Windows
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Health in your hands: how data and AI are empowering patients
The Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden has a very fitting example of extra attention being paid to patients – a friendly robot is being used to significantly reduce the stress of children suffering from cancer.
The robot itself doesn’t add any medical procedures to the existing treatment, but its friendly demeanour and in-built screen with games designed to inform children of their treatment procedure ahead of time, has proven to be a great help in reducing the fear of these young patients. In addition, the robot also helps reduce the stress of parents, and saves healthcare experts both time and money, by reducing the amount of time and people required per treatment session.
Lisa Karin Bergström, practitioner, nursing manager and project lead states that “We can’t always see cancer coming, or stop it, but we can control the stress children feel, and help them feel happier and more in control.”
Healthcare in your hands Putting patients first should provide them with newer tools to not only make their lives easier, but to also provide a more personalised level of care. Virtual hospitals provide a convenient, easy to use experience which allows patients to track their health and communicate with health professionals remotely, from the comfort of their own homes. This saves patients time, and travel, which is particularly beneficial for the elderly.
In Finland, Helsinki University Hospital’s Virtual Health Village is a prime example of bringing healthcare directly into the hands of its patients. The online cloud service, based on the Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365, provides information and support including medical care for patients, and tools for healthcare professionals. Patients have access to virtual buildings dedicated to different life situations and symptoms, such as pain management, rehabilitation, mental health, and weight management.
Virpi Rauta, PhD, eMBA, Doctor in nephrology who is involved with the kidney-damage section of the Virtual Health Village states that “We have to get rid of old habits when we adopt these new tools. It’s multidisciplinary work – clinicians, IT workers, nurses and patients all worked together to help create our kidney app.”
Empowering patients and putting their own healthcare within their control, is key. The kidney disease app in the Virtual Health Hospital shares real patient experiences and how they are coping with their treatment, to help other patients feel that their disease is manageable. Patients are more likely to listen to people going through the same experiences, and this genuine relatability helps morale, while increasing the chances of them correctly following their treatment plan.
In Scotland, technology is bringing personalised care to patients suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) – a condition which affects 1.2 million people in the UK, and is the second most common cause of emergency hospital admissions. Without treatment, the symptoms (which include breathlessness, chest infections and a persistent cough) get worse, but a new trial brings an easier way to manage the illness to patients, from the comfort of their own homes.
Patients use wearable devices combined with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to remotely monitor their breathing. AI algorithms, based on machine learning, are then used to monitor results, and automatically detect and predict issues, so that healthcare experts can vary their treatment accordingly, based on their individual needs.
This not only saves patients from making regular trips to the hospital, it also means that if their condition gets worse, their healthcare providers will automatically be alerted, allowing timely treatment, and a better quality of life.
Chris Carlin, a Consultant Respiratory Physician involved in the trial, states that “It’s about delivering treatment earlier by using data. If we can empower patients to self-manage their condition, we can significantly reduce hospital admissions. That self-management might be helping them with their breathing, escalating their existing treatment, recommending new treatment or reaching out to the community respiratory team.”
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In another corner of the world, one of the oldest diseases known to mankind – leprosy – is being treated with AI. The Novartis Foundation and Microsoft are developing an AI-enabled digital health tool and a Leprosy Intelligent Image Atlas to help the early detection of leprosy.
Over 200,000 people are diagnosed with leprosy every year, with Brazil, India, and Indonesia accounting for about 80 percent of new cases. The disease is made more complicated by the fact that it can be difficult to diagnose, and if left untreated, can cause other disabilities and spread to others.
Microsoft and the Novartis Foundation are collaborating with local investigators from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil to develop a machine learning algorithm which examines anonymized images before automatically detecting if a patient has leprosy.
To save patients (who are often in remote rural areas) from travelling long distances to hospitals, they are able to instead visit local businesses and have their photos taken there, before the shots are examined by the AI programme. The imagery and AI code are planned to be made publicly accessible at a later stage to empower leprosy researchers to accelerate research excellence in this field, leading to better outcomes.
Dr. Ann Aerts, Head of Novartis Foundation states that “Bundling expertise from the health and tech sectors to pioneer innovative digital health solutions such as this one, can make it possible to reimagine the way we fight leprosy. Early detection and prompt treatment of patients remains the best way to interrupt leprosy transmission. Together with Microsoft we are pioneering an innovative digital tool to accelerate leprosy detection, to make this ancient disease history once and for all.”
It’s nice to see a weekly update packed with a range of genuinely interesting new releases, sales and updates. It’ll set us up well for April as we start getting reviews out – this week has been more news focused as we’re in the limbo period between freelance budgets, but hopefully you’ve appreciated being kept up to date with some of the more notable happenings this week.
We’ve got a couple of features on the horizon that hopefully will start appearing next week, otherwise it’s mainly keeping on top of the review pile.
Headline for this this week is a new entry in the tongue-and-cheek Holy Potatoes! Series, which we reviewed yesterday. This version sees you put in charge of a spy agency, building up your HQ, going on missions and navigating through a central story. For fans of the series it’s more of the same, which is fine although we hope to start seeing more innovation in the future. For newcomers this is a respectable espionage-themed management game that’s refreshingly silly. Hopefully, we’ll see this one cross over to Android.
This War of Mine: Stories – Father’s Promise (iOS & Android)
For some reason PT never covered the original mobile release of This War of Mine, arguably one of the most successful indie titles of this generation. While it’s narrative focus isn’t quite the kind of thing we look at here, the marriage with tense, survival mechanics as you strive to live through the civil war that’s tearing up your city makes for some morbidly compelling gameplay. The Stories spin-off is a stand-alone tale, with a unique story and unique locations, and is a stand-alone release.
Sports releases are few and far between in the mobile world, so we try to highlight newcomers wherever we can, especially across sports other than Soccer/Football. We’ll try and get a full review of this one up and running so true baseball fans can gauge whether or not this is worth their time. The 2019 version of R.B.I. Baseball sports some new features such as a Franchise mode that lets you manage the same team across multiple seasons, and of course the yearly updates to rosters, uniforms etc…
The sequel to Clarus Victoria’s Predynastic Egypt turn-based management/sim game, although this new title is only on iOS for the moment. Released on PC last year, Old Kingdom offers more of the same simulation-like gameplay where you must guide Egyptian society through the “Great Pyramids” era. The mobile version represents starts at ‘2.0’, so it’s had a lot of fixes and improvements since launch on top of the new features brought in.
The developers are offering the main game for free, where you can play through the first 50 odd turns, with the full game being locked behind a £4.99 IAP.
Shattered Plane (iOS & Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!
Last but certainly not least, a new turn-based strategy game has come to turn. Shattered Plane pits four players and/or AI opponents against each other in a fast-paced game of conquest. You have armies that you push around the map, and you can either attack your opponents armies or conquer settlements. It describes itself as ‘tactical’ but there arn’t any actual tactical battles – everything auto-resolves. Planning is paramount, and maps are procedurally generated. There are online rankings, as well as local hotseat multiplayer available.
Ndemic have released the third major update for their insurgency strategy game, Rebel Inc. Free content includes deserting soldiers and luxury hotel construction, while the Tanks & Caves expansion adds a new maps, a new commander, and tanks! You can unlock the expansion for $1.99 or by playing through the whole game on Brutal. There’s a season pass option now as well.
Don’t forget to check out our tips & tricks guide if you’re looking for advice – we’re in the process of updating it with the new content.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (iOS & Android)
One of Bioware’s all-time classics, Knights of the Old Republic, as been a welcome sight on mobile for a while now thanks to Aspyr (the same company that brought Civilization 6 to iPads as well). Being as aged as it is, you don’t often see much support for it these days but the mobile devs have been good at pushing out quick-fixes where they’ve been needed. This week they released a small patch that made some UI & resolution adjustments for iPad and iPhone X devices, as resolving a crash issue on iPad Pro.
In celebration of the release of A Spy Story, above, Daylight have discounted their other Holy Potatoes! games, so if you’re interested in checking out the others now’s a great opportunity to jump on board.
One of our favourite iOS war games is currently half price for the second time since launching… although considering full price is $2, that’s not saying much. WATW’s main thing is through the various scenario DLCs available, which are still their usual price. Still, if you’re looking to speculate, now is a good a time as any.
We’re getting a lot of roguelike/card game combinations coming out at the moment, but back in 2016 Solitairica set a gold standard for this type of game. You can read Tof’s review to find out our full thoughts on this, but if you haven’t tried it yet we’d highly recommend you do so while it’s going cheap. Note that the game is free-to-download on Android, with IAPs for the full game.
Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!
At GDC 2018, Microsoft unveiled DXR, or Direct X 12 Raytracing, an SDK enabling real-time raytracing, followed closely by NVIDIA announcing hardware support. This year at GDC 2019, those technologies have come of age, with major raytracing support coming from 3 major game engine manufacturers. Additionally NVIDIA have announced some potentially game changing news as well. Let’s break down the announcements and demonstrations one by one.
CryTek started the raytracing announcements off with their amazing real time demo Neon Noir. Even more impressive, it was done using an AMD card without real-time raytracing support! Unfortunately, the demo was never released to the public.
Unity showed an impressive demo Reality vs Illusion which intercuts real world footage and real time raytraced BWM footage that is nearly impossible to discern the difference. Unity’s technology is sadly several months from being available in a future HDRP release.
Unreal is the closest with their real time raytracing implementation, in fact it’s available now in Unreal Engine 4.22. They also had a presentation in the form of the short movie Troll.
NVIDIA also had a real time raytracing demonstration in the form of Project Sol, Part 3. Their announcement may have been the most significant however, as they announced that DXR driver support will be shipping in April to older generation NVIDIA GPUs, such as the 1060/1070 and 1080 cards.
Oracle Linux kernel developer Steve Sistare contributes this discussion on kernel scheduler improvements.
Load balancing via scalable task stealing
The Linux task scheduler balances load across a system by pushing waking tasks to idle CPUs, and by pulling tasks from busy CPUs when a CPU becomes idle. Efficient scaling is a challenge on both the push and pull sides on large systems. For pulls, the scheduler searches all CPUs in successively larger domains until an overloaded CPU is found, and pulls a task from the busiest group. This is very expensive, costing 10’s to 100’s of microseconds on large systems, so search time is limited by the average idle time, and some domains are not searched. Balance is not always achieved, and idle CPUs go unused.
I have implemented an alternate mechanism that is invoked after the existing search in idle_balance() limits itself and finds nothing. I maintain a bitmap of overloaded CPUs, where a CPU sets its bit when its runnable CFS task count exceeds 1. The bitmap is sparse, with a limited number of significant bits per cacheline. This reduces cache contention when many threads concurrently set, clear, and visit elements. There is a bitmap per last-level cache. When a CPU becomes idle, it searches the bitmap to find the first overloaded CPU with a migratable task, and steals it. This simple stealing yields a higher CPU utilization than idle_balance() alone, because the search is cheap, costing 1 to 2 microseconds, so it may be called every time the CPU is about to go idle. Stealing does not offload the globally busiest queue, but it is much better than running nothing at all.
Results
Stealing improves utilization with only a modest CPU overhead in scheduler code. In the following experiment, hackbench is run with varying numbers of groups (40 tasks per group), and the delta in /proc/schedstat is shown for each run, averaged per CPU, augmented with these non-standard stats:
%find – percent of time spent in old and new functions that search for idle CPUs and tasks to steal and set the overloaded CPUs bitmap.
steal – number of times a task is stolen from another CPU. Elapsed time improves by 8 to 36%, costing at most 0.4% more find time.
CPU busy utilization is close to 100% for the new kernel, as shown by the green curve in the following graph, versus the orange curve for the baseline kernel:
Stealing improves Oracle database OLTP performance by up to 9% depending on load, and we have seen some nice improvements for mysql, pgsql, gcc, java, and networking. In general, stealing is most helpful for workloads with a high context switch rate.
The code
As of this writing, this work is not yet upstream, but the latest patch series is at https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/6/1253. If your kernel is built with CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y, you can verify that it contains the stealing optimization using
If you try it, note that stealing is disabled for systems with more than 2 NUMA nodes, because hackbench regresses on such systems, as I explain in https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/6/1250 .However, I suspect this effect is specific to hackbench and that stealing will help other workloads on many-node systems. To try it, reboot with kernel parameter sched_steal_node_limit = 8 (or larger).
Future work
After the basic stealing algorithm is pushed upstream, I am considering the following enhancements:
If stealing within the last-level cache does not find a candidate, steal across LLC’s and NUMA nodes.
Maintain a sparse bitmap to identify stealing candidates in the RT scheduling class. Currently pull_rt_task() searches all run queues.
Remove the core and socket levels from idle_balance(), as stealing handles those levels. Remove idle_balance() entirely when stealing across LLC is supported.
Maintain a bitmap to identify idle cores and idle CPUs, for push balancing.
MLB. The Show 19 brings you the best of baseball. Experience the ultimate duel: the 1v1 battle between hitter and pitcher to see who reigns supreme. Whether it be home runs, quick experiences, playing as legends, a full RPG experience or stiff Player vs Player competition; MLBTS 19 provides the perfect combination of authentic baseball experience mixed with video game fun.
Experience an explosive game of cat and mouse set in a vast open world - rendered with the award-winning Apex game engine. Experience an explosive game of cat and mouse set in a vast open world. In this reimagining of 1980?s Sweden, hostile machines have invaded the serene countryside, and you need to fight back while unraveling the mystery of what is really going on. By utilizing battle-tested guerilla tactics, you?ll be able to lure, cripple, or destroy enemies in intense, creative sandbox skirmishes.
Fimbul combines intense Viking battles with a deep story that unfolds through in-game comics to bring the frozen world of the Norse sagas to life. Immerse yourself in the blistering winter preceding Ragnarok ? The Fimbul Winter.
It?s the year 2030, the era of flying vehicles. A one-off championship for wheel based vehicles has been organised, with cutting-edge electric cars boosted by Xenon gas. Drift through cities like Tokyo and Dubai as fast as you can and claim eternal glory.
Former Sony And PlayStation Exec Kaz Hirai Is Retiring
In February it was announced that Kaz Hirai, who led the PlayStation business before being promoted to CEO of Sony, would step down and transition to the role of director, chairman. Now, Sony has announced that Hirai will be retiring from those roles effective June 18. Hirai will serve as senior advisor for the company and "will continue to provide counsel as requested by Sony's management team."
In a statement, Hirai lent his support to Kenichiro Yoshida, who replaced him as CEO of Sony on April 1. "Since passing the baton of CEO to Yoshida-san last April, as Chairman of Sony, I have had the opportunity to both ensure a smooth transition and provide support to Sony's management. I am confident that everyone at Sony is fully aligned under Yoshida-san's strong leadership, and are ready to build an even brighter future for Sony.
"As such, I have decided to depart from Sony, which has been a part of my life for the past 35 years. I would like to extend my warmest gratitude to all our employees and stakeholders who have supported me throughout this journey."
Yoshida added: "Hirai-san and I have been working on management reforms together since December 2013. While he will be retiring from both Chairman and our Board of Directors, we look forward to his continuing high-level support to Sony's management that encompasses a breadth of diverse businesses."
Hirai was instrumental in launching the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, and went on to become CEO and president of Sony. In February, the PlayStation business had a management reshuffle, with Jim Ryan being appointed president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
2019 is set to be quite a different year for the PlayStation division, particularly in the way it communicates and promotes its products to its audience and the wider gaming community. The company has pulled out of E3, where it traditionally debuted and showed off its biggest upcoming games.
Fans are looking to PlayStation Experience to be the tentpole PlayStation event for 2019. Sony opted to skip PlayStation Experience in 2018, so many are hoping to see it return this year. However, as of yet Sony hasn't indicated it has plans to host the show.
Sony has kicked off State of Play, however. This is a series of smaller, streamed showcases in the same vein as Nintendo's Directs. The first one yielded a new Iron Man VR title, as well as information on No Man's Sky VR and Mortal Kombat 11. You can read all the news from Sony's first State of Play to catch up on what happened.
Sony has said State of Play will return throughout the year to deliver updates on key titles. While the first episode wasn't exactly a barnstormer, the company has a number of big games on the way, including Death Stranding, The Last of Us: Part II, and Ghost of Tsushima, so upcoming episodes stand to be much more exciting.
