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ADINET e-News Digest

ADINET e-News Digest No 18 March 2016 issue


ADINET E-News Digest



Source: http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

How tech brings self-reliance to students with disabilities

 

Screen readers, maginifiers and text-to-speech apps have helped reduced the gap in exam results. But there's much more schools can do, say experts

 

Rakshit Malik, 18, has every reason to be pleased with himself. He just scored 96.4% in his Class 12 exam -the third-highest score in CB SE's disabled category . He treats his visual impairment matter-of-factly: “My ability is stronger than my disability“. A humanities student who wants to specialize in history , Malik learns by listening.He hears the material, pauses, and assimilates it. “While we found audio versions of NCERT textbooks in Classes 9 and 10, they are not available for Classes 11 and 12,“ says Malik, who then used his own method. “Mama recorded herself reading out my textbooks“.

This year, there was merely a 12-mark difference between the student who topped the disabled category and the highest scorer in the exam. In many cases, learning outcomes are aligning, and advances in assistive technology have something to do with the trend. While it is still essential to know Braille, the system of reading raised dots by touch is falling out of use in many parts of the world. In the US, fewer than 10% of the visually impaired read Braille. Now, digital screen readers and magnifiers, and text-tospeech apps make sure that a blind student and a sighted one are on the same page. “Tactile diagrams can be used to teach geography , science and other subjects that require visual aids,“ explains Nirmita Narasimhan, accessibility expert and policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society , Bangalore.

As more learning material is put online, students have it much easier than they did a generation ago. They also get study notes from peer-to-peer forums.

According to the 2011 census, 2.21% of the Indian population -around 26.8 million -have some form of disability . On paper, the state is committed to supporting these students, and to providing aids and appliances, access to material, scribes and readers; and easing exam processes.In practice, it is far from smooth, explains Diana Joseph of the Fourth Wave Foundation, a Karnataka NGO that bridges the gap between government and students with the Nanagu Shaale programme.“Each integrated education resource trainer has to oversee 30 schools. So it's often perfunctory . For example, they may supply hearing tools, without explaining that the battery must be replaced.“

Over the last five years, there has been progress in both technology and policy .Copyright restrictions have been lifted for the use of the disabled. Textbooks have been proactively digitized. But ultimately , success depends on the mundane but critical matter of the right standards, explains Dipendra Manocha, who leads the DAISY for All project in India. DAISY, or Digital Accessible Information System, is an international standard for printed material that can be read in Braille, large print, audio, etc on a computer or mobile phone. By contrast, something scanned as an image file can't be read.

In collaboration with IIT, Manocha and his colleagues have converted several state board high-school textbooks into this format, including those of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. They're working on it for Rajasthan, UP and Punjab.“Many organizations are pitching in to do this work, but it would be much easier if a clear accessibility policy was spelt out by the HRD ministry , which would apply to all school systems,“ says Manocha. The font must be Unicode-based, the material must be in ePub format.

Right now, local languages present a challenge to screen-reading software, says Narasimhan. “ A basic text to speech eSpeak engine exists for many Indian languages, but there's a lot of work to be done to effectively deploy it. The non-adherence to Unicode, and the lack of good optical character recognition (OCR) software also hinder the effective use of tech in schools and jobs,“ she explains.

It isn't just about getting the tools to students, training is also vital. “The focus in schools has been on helping students through scribes and so on, rather than letting them manage on their own, as employers will expect from them,“ says Manocha. There is much more a classroom can do, to enable everyone, says Arun Mehta, disability activist and president of the Bidirectional Access Promotion Society . He describes three relatively cheap possible interventions: a blackboard display with LED marquee lights, a lapel mic for the teacher and headphones for students with partial deafness or attention deficit, and a board that vibrates with information from a computer.

Disability is not just a medical affliction, it is also socially constructed -it is your environment that includes or excludes you. Technology can melt many barriers if schools and policymakers can get their act together. Sometimes, that can make the difference between dependence and independence.

Source | Times of India | 29 May 2016

List of Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

https://doaj.org/

Wiley Open Access

http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/view/index.html

ScienceDirect

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/jrnlallbooks/all/open-access

OMICS International

http://www.omicsonline.org/open-access-journals-list.php

Springer Open

https://www.springeropen.com/journals

Biomed Central

https://www.biomedcentral.com/journals

Taylor and Francis Online

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/openaccess/openjournals

4 top tips for keeping your website safe

We can all agree that no one wants their website hacked. Obviously, when you create your website, you won’t be thinking to yourself, “What can I do to make my website even easier to hack?” However, these days, with our lack of precautionary steps when creating and maintaining our websites, we might as well be thinking that outrageous question to ourselves.

According to Symantec, in 2014, roughly three out of five websites that were hacked belong to small and medium sized businesses, and the average cost of data breaches to small businesses totaled US$36 000. Now, that’s not an amount that people should just overlook. Small businesses can’t afford to have employees dedicated to preventing cyberattacks, so they are often targeted by hackers. And to make things worse, a newer phenomenon called “ransomware”, malware that encrypts files on your computer, then demands a ransom to unlock them is growing in popularity in the hacking community. With this increasingly aggressive cyber environment, what can you do to protect your website?

 

What do the tech experts think?

 

Tech experts for years have been telling business owners to take precautions to prevent cyberattacks, but unfortunately, the response from business owners has not been strong. However, now is the time to take control of your website and protect yourself from losing your valuable personal and financial assets. Here are some top tips from industry leaders on how to prevent future hacks on your website.

 

1.      Train your employees to against cyberattacks

 

Sometimes, your employees just do not know that it is not good cyber hygiene to send sensitive customer data via e-mail. Clearly distinguish and teach your employees on what information should be sent via email and what should not. If they need to send that information via e-mail, then make sure that you have a strong data encryption service in your e-mail system.

According to Jayne Friedland Holland, Chief Security Officer and associate general counsel at technology firm NIC Inc., it is also a good idea to educate your employees about any laws that pertain to protecting customer data, as they have a legal obligation to protect sensitive customer personal information.

 

2. Never store customer data

 

News regarding customer data breaches to major corporations, such as Home Depot, Target, T-Mobile, and most recently, the Dow Jones, are common place. Unfortunately, all of these situations could have been prevented if these companies followed industry compliance and did not store customer related private information. According to Forbes, all e-retailers are held to PCI-DSS standards, but honestly, there is no reason why companies themselves should store customers’ account numbers, credit card numbers, or expiration dates for long periods of time.

 

In simpler terms, if you have nothing to steal, you won’t be robbed.

3. Create more complicated passwords for yourself and customers

 

This sounds like web security basics, but it needs to be said. Both employees and customers struggle to create complex passwords and consistently commit to changing them at least every 90 days. According to SecurityScorecard CEO, Aleksander Yampolskiy, “A big portion of the breaches out there is because of weak passwords.” Companies need to be cognizant and place an emphasis on the importance of avoid simple data breaches due to easy to guess passwords.

 

One best practice is installing a program on employees’ computers that force them to change their passwords every 90 days with character requirements. Another great method could be to send recurring reminder e-mails and/or website notifications to customers to request that they change their passwords based on character type and minimum requirements.

4. Make sure you have a website application firewall (WAF) to prevent web attacks

 

If you own an eCommerce site, you may be hosting your storefront with a major retailer (i.e: Etsy, Amazon, etc.) that already provides sufficient protection. However, if you are hosting your own website, you may be defenseless against a cyberattack. If you are relying on your content management system (CMS) or web hosting service for basic protection, it may not be enough. Even the biggest CMS services, such as WordPress, are susceptible to thousands of hackings every day. Depending on your site’s needs, you need to take action on protecting yourself against cyberattacks before it’s too late. This is where WAFs can help!

 

WAFs work to act as a filter between a user and a web server. Essentially, these services are your shield from the outside world. Just as you wouldn’t let any random stranger into the privacy of your home, you wouldn’t want suspicious intruders to gain access to your online information.

These days, most WAF services are cloud-based services. Brad Causey, CEO of the tech consulting firm, Zero Day Consulting, shares that any organisation with technology exposed to the Internet canbenefit from having a WAF. These services work by analyzing and filtering harmful web traffic that could potentially lead to malicious attacks or intrusions. This way, your website is kept safe from attacks such as malware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which can flood your website with bad traffic to, ultimately, shut it down. If your website isn’t functioning properly for long stretches of time, it can be bad for business and could potentially lose long term customers.

 

By using a WAF, you can stop hackers before they can access your website. There are even WAF systems that you can use for free up to a certain level of monthly data traffic. Search for a WAF that best fits your website’s needs and commit to moving all of your domains under WAF protection.

 

Source | http://memeburn.com/

An online platform that makes education more personalized

Vedantu enables students in remote areas to receive tuition from highly qualified teachers

The platform has now completed providing 21,000 hours of live learning to more than 17,000 students through 180 listed teachers.

Bengaluru: Its almost 4 pm on a Tuesday afternoon and Vasavi gets ready to take her daily physics lessons for 9th and 10th graders. An Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras graduate, Vasavi, on maternity leave from her corporate job, dedicates three hours daily to tutoring students from Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai and remote towns such as Rudrapur in Uttarakhand.

In Wani taluk, Yavatmal district in Maharashtra, 9th grader Tanusha M. gets ready for her physics and mathematics class. She takes two classes from highly qualified teachers whose location Tanusha does not know. She only knows them through their qualifications and names.

Vasavi and many others like her are teachers by choice and Tanusha is one of the thousands of students they teach daily via Vedantu, an online tutorial service run by Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd. The journey of Vedantu began almost a decade ago when Vamsi Krishna from IIT Mumbai), Pulkit Jain, Saurabh Saxena and Anand Prakash (from IIT Roorkee) got together in 2005 to start something that their parents did not encourage.

Giving into their parents’ demands, they joined corporate jobs, but lasted for only about six months. On 16 December 2005, Anand resigned. The others followed. With a bit of teaching experience gained during their summer breaks at the IITs, they decided to teach. They wanted to challenge conventional teaching methods.

They started by teaching the children of the workers at Trident Group Ltd’s yarn plant at Barnala, Punjab. “That was the pivotal step,” Vamsi says.

This led to more students and their first venture, Lakshya, a test prep establishment where they helped students crack engineering entrance exams. Among the four, they claim to have taught over 10,000 students from 2006-12 in places such as Patiala and Chandigarh.

At Barnala they swept floors, set up classes and even slept at the same place where tuitions were held. “The energy we used to get from these sessions... we could really see the spark that really motivated us to take up the profession of teaching,” Vamsi says.

In 2012, Mumbai-based education coaching service provider MT Educare Ltd acquired Lakshya Forum for Competition Pvt. Ltd. The model had its limitations. “Being there as teachers ourselves, we felt the challenges with the offline set-up... no matter what, there were challenges of scalability.”

Determined, and now equipped with Lakshya’s experience, they challenged institutionalism and generalisation in education to make it more personalised and democratic. But the disparity in learning would remain, which called for a technological intervention.

In April 2014 they started developing a product and six months later Vedantu was live. Vedantu was the so-called anti-model of its predecessor. It developed WAVE (whiteboard, audio and video environment) technology and the teachers marketplace model. In order to get access to more good teachers, Vedantu started developing technologies like whiteboard and audio and is currently developing facial expression reading algorithms for better engagement and greater efficiency from each session.

“We are coming out with engagement metrics. For every session the algorithm analyses the session and goes back to the teacher,” Vamsi says.

Vedantu says, “Innovation has come to facilitate the why.”

Initiatives like Digital India and fast growing Internet infrastructure provide platforms like Vedantu with tools to connect more students and teachers facilitating effective learning.

Though the motivation was not money, the company did not want to be an NGO. The priority was to make a difference; money would follow. The platform has now completed providing 21,000 hours of live learning to more than 17,000 students through 180 listed teachers.

The platform, which charges around 30% of the teachers’ fees, says average tutor earns around Rs.40,000 (depending on the number of hours) and the top earner raked in Rs.98,000 (August 2015). Vendantu has a mix of professional teachers, corporate entities and college students. Vamsi says the presence of teachers working only on Vedantu (10-15%) is where the real disruption is happening.

Vedantu is aware of its limitations. This venture cannot be run as a mainstream institution due to regulatory requirements. “So we can at least be a parallel education system,” Vamsi says.

Vamsi says that there are around 250 million students in India and around 33% of them go to private schools. This hasn’t deterred its global ambitions. “Global expansion can be tempting,” he says about moving to other markets like in South Korea, Singapore and other East Asia markets.

Accel and Tiger Global led a $5 million funding in Vedantu in May this year. Anand Daniel, an early stage investor with Accel Partners, says Vedantu has huge potential. The tutoring market size in India is around $11 billion (2014). “Very few teams in India have a great sense for the education sector as well as how technology can be used for effective scaling Vedantu is one such team,” he says

Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 14 October 2015