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"I read Fareed Zakaria's work often. He's a great journalist for the Washington Post and a TV news anchor with his own show on CNN. I dug into a piece yesterday he wrote titled "Why America's Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous". Unlike Zakaria's articles on foreign policy, which are insightful, thought-provoking, and in-depth, this article paints an innacurate and overly-simplified picture of what STEM education is and should be. Worse yet, his argument injects dangerously reductive rhetoric into the public debate on education, where we already see heightened emotion and political division. Maybe this type of reaction is what Zakaria is aiming for. He releases a new book today on this same topic called "In Defense of a Liberal Education". "

"The word "deepfakes" refers to using deep learning, a type of machine learning, to add anyone's face and voice to video. It has been mostly found on the internet's dark corners, where some people have used it to insert ex-girlfriends and celebrities into pornography. But BuzzFeed provided a glimpse of a possible future in April when it created a video that supposedly showed Obama mocking Trump, but in reality, Obama's face was superimposed onto footage of Hollywood filmmaker Jordan Peele using deepfake technology. Deepfakes could pose a greater threat than the fake news and Photoshopped memes that littered the 2016 presidential election because they can be hard to spot and because people are -- for now -- inclined to believe that video is real. But it's not just about individual videos that will spread misinformation: it's also the possibility that videos like these will convince people that they simply can't trust anything they read, hear or see unless it supports the opinions they already hold. Experts say fake videos that will be all but impossible to identify as such are as little as 12 months away."

"Companies are starting to flock to Snapchat. McDonald's and Taco Bell are using it to get Snapchatters interested in their products. The NBA and MLS are giving behind-the-scenes footage from their sports worlds. CNN is reporting news content, and The Food Network is providing an extension to its programming. They're providing content that's interesting. They're surprising their audience. And they're having some fun along the way. If companies can do it, teachers and schools can, too … and we can learn some lessons about how to engage students by watching how they engage their customers."

"While the original layout for the app was quite straight-forward, Snapchat has now evolved into a jack of all trades. The app offers direct communication like texting, calling, video messaging, and more with friends and family in a one-on-one messenger style, lets people record and post their videos and photos to their Snapchat Story that last 24-hours while giving people the option to save their Snapchat Stories to their camera roll, and delivers current news and information from credible sources and entertainment sites like IGN, The Economist, Refinery29, Mashable, Harper's Bazaar, VICE, National Geographic, CNN, The New York Times, and so, so much more."

"A new survey commissioned by Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) found that young girls in Europe become interested in so-called STEM subjects around the age of 11 and then quickly lose interest when they're 15. "Conformity to social expectations, gender stereotypes, gender roles and lack of role models continue to channel girls' career choices away from STEM fields," said psychology professor Martin Bauer of the London School of Economics, who helped coordinate the survey of 11,500 girls across 12 European countries. The survey also found that girls' interest in humanities subjects drops around the same age but then rebound sharply. Interest in STEM subjects does not recover. "This means that governments, teachers and parents only have four or five years to nurture girls' passion before they turn their backs on these areas, potentially for good," Microsoft said."

"A medical device right out of science fiction"

"When seeing is no longer believing Inside the Pentagon's race against deepfake videos Advances in artificial intelligence could soon make creating convincing fake audio and video - known as "deepfakes" - relatively easy. Making a person appear to say or do something they did not has the potential to take the war of disinformation to a whole new level. Scroll down for more on deepfakes and what the US government is doing to combat them."