Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. As Compton students ace tests, educators are baffled by Rep. Maxine Waters' snub of school bond Students walk on campus at Dominguez High School in Compton. A bond measure would provide millions of dollars to rebuild the school. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

The Enrollment Cliff Is Here. Which Schools Will Survive It? As the number of new high-school graduates drops, colleges will close, some will merge, and others may change beyond recognition. This series on the future of higher education started with a simple question: Should I still be contributing to my children's college funds? My first attempt to answer that question centered on the growing disillusionment with higher education in general.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. The gift will rename USC's School of Advanced Computing as the USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . USC receives a $200-million gift from venture capitalist Mark Stevens to establish artificial intelligence research and expertise across campus.

How the data center boom plunged one small Pennsylvania town into chaos. Valley View Estates is set to be surrounded by data centers. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. "I don't like to see anyone upset," said Nick Farris of Provident Real Estate Advisors. He was sitting in the front of a crowd of roughly 150 inside Valley View High School's auditorium in Archbald, a town of about 7,500, huddled between two mountain ranges in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna Valley. Farris was there to represent the developer for Project Scott, one of many data center campuses coming to town. "I think that this is the best data center site in this area of the country, by far." The audience had been fairly quiet, bundled in thick coats against the late January cold. But as Farris spoke about data centers as a boon for communities, they began to laugh, drawing a rebuke from town officials. "What about the children?" someone shouted from the crowd. The children were watching from the walls; long banners of Valley View Performing Arts students hanging around the auditorium like championship pennants. Project Scott and four other data facilities will sit just a few thousand feet from the middle and high schools. He was referring to Lockheed Martin's 350,000-square-foot Missiles and Fire Control facility directly next to the high school, parts of which are highly contaminated . "That sucks too!" another attendee yelled back.

Users Meta's A.I. Smart Glasses Are Wreaking Havoc in Schools Across the Country. It's Only Going to Get Worse. As the discreet wearable cameras become more popular, students are saying they feel constantly watched and harassed--and professors are reshaping their classrooms in response. Joziah was tabling on campus for his peer mentor job at the end of last semester at Florida State University when he noticed something strange happening across the quad: A trio of men, wearing Meta AI glasses, were stopping every young woman who passed by and asking them for their social media contacts. "I recognized them from TikTok, because they're kind of big, especially in Miami," the 19-year-old told me.

As the Institute's first VP for energy and climate, Evelyn Wang '00 is marshaling MIT's expertise to meet the greatest challenge of our age. Professor Evelyn Wang '00 sits beside a compact, portable water-harvesting device that she developed in collaboration with Professor Rohit Karnik of MIT and Krista Walton, then a professor at Georgia Tech. It's designed for portable and emergency use. Water shortages in Southern California made an indelible impression on Evelyn Wang '00 when she was growing up in Los Angeles. "I was quite young, perhaps in first grade," she says. "But I remember we weren't allowed to turn our sprinklers on. And everyone in the neighborhood was given disinfectant tablets for the toilet and encouraged to keep flushing to a minimum. I didn't understand exactly what was happening. But I saw that everyone in the community was affected by the scarcity of this resource."

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Times Investigation: Ex-Trump DOJ lawyers say'fraudulent' UC antisemitism probes led them to quit This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Nine former DOJ attorneys investigating UC antisemitism told The Times they felt pressured to conclude that campuses had violated the civil rights of Jewish students and staff. The attorneys resigned during the course of their UC assignments, some concerned that they were being asked to violate ethical standards. UC says it is open to talks with the Trump administration to protect $17.5 billion in federal funding.

Schools in the US are installing vape-detection tech in bathrooms to thwart student nicotine and cannabis use. A new investigation reveals the impact of using spying to solve a problem. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice. The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. The first drag from a friend's vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape. She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn't turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine. "I would ask my friends who had them, 'I'm going through a lot, can I use it?'" Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. "Or'I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.'"

Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) trained on a given instruction dataset. Curriculum learning as a typical data organization strategy has shown preliminary effectiveness in instruction tuning. However, current curriculum tuning methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, since they rely solely on static heuristic difficulty metrics. These methods fail to adapt to the evolving capabilities of models during training, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory. To address the issue, Competence-Aware Multi-Perspective cUrriculum inStruction tuning framework termed CAMPUS is proposed. CAMPUS offers several advantages: (1) Dynamic selection for sub-curriculum. (2) Competency-aware adjustment to the curriculum schedule. (3) Multiple difficulty-based scheduling. Extensive experiments prove the superior performance of CAMPUS, compared to other state-of-the-art baselines for efficient instruction tuning.

In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school's methods--surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers--to be an education in and of itself. At Alpha School's campus in Brownsville, Texas, a student works on exercises in a learning app. One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her "guide," the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide's reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her. The adult guides in Alpha's classrooms "don't do any teaching," says the current head of the Brownsville school.