With schools across the country closed during the coronavirus outbreak, Skillshare is opening up its extensive list of unique class offerings for students to access for free.
The online learning community announced the free programming offer in a tweet on Wednesday, March 18. High school and college students ages 16 and over with a .edu or .k12 email will have two months of free access to thousands of classes, which range from creativity to business and technology to lifestyle.
We recognize that the unique circumstances around COVID-19 are having rippling effects on artists, freelancers, and our community at large. Today, we are announcing new initiatives to support our community. Read more: https://t.co/P17rz2U3L6 pic.twitter.com/9fMruAONr0
— Skillshare (@skillshare) March 18, 2020
“We hope that our classes, content, and community workshops can help us all feel a little more connected to ourselves and each other — and make it easy to learn skills in the comfort of our homes,” Skillshare said in its announcement.
Skillshare specializes in learning skills and creativity, with classes like creative writing, photo editing, digital illustration, graphic design, web development, and more. So while students may not be learning social studies or algebra while off from school, they can use Skillshare’s classes to explore their specific interests and keep their brain engaged.
Scholastic has also launched a free “Learn at Home” program for younger students out of school during the coronavirus outbreak. The program has daily courses for pre-K and kindergarten, as well as students in grades one through six.
There are plenty of other sites and apps offering virtual field trips, interactive tools, and even remote trips to space to keep kids learning despite being home from school. Most U.S. schools are closed until the end of this month due to the coronavirus outbreak that has rapidly spread in recent weeks.
Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, a pandemic. In total, there have been more than 205,450 confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and 8,248 confirmed deaths, according to an online dashboard that tracks cases. The virus is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, but there have been confirmed cases in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and dozens of other countries around the globe.
In addition to school closures, events have been canceled, travel is limited, and much of the American workforce has resorted to working from home.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.