Aspiring international students seeking admission to universities in the US face various financial challenges, especially when it comes to paying for tuition, room and board, and other expenses. Federal student loans, which are available to US citizens and permanent residents, are not accessible to international students. Private loans are an option, but they require a US citizen or permanent resident co-signer and a social security number.
International students can also explore education loans from banks in their home countries, but the loan amounts are usually limited. Need-blind universities, which offer financial aid to all students regardless of their nationality and residency, are a viable option. However, these universities are scarce and highly competitive. Need-aware universities, which consider financial need when making admissions decisions, may also offer financial aid to exceptional students, but it is not guaranteed and may not cover the full amount needed.
Top universities that are need-blind for international students are:
Harvard University
Yale University
Princeton University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amherst College
Dartmouth College
To apply for financial aid, international students must create a College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile on The College Board website, which collects income and asset information and provides it to the universities where the student has requested aid. It is essential to be prepared to share all financial details when applying for financial aid through the CSS Profile.
In conclusion, international students seeking admission to universities in the US must research and understand the financial aid policies of the institutions they are interested in and explore all available options. The best option is to get into a need-blind university, but if that does not happen, affordable community colleges or personal loans may be considered. However, it is important to note that the financial burden can be significant, and students must be prepared to make difficult decisions.
Recently, OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public and tech giants Google and Baidu quickly followed with their own AI-powered chatbots. However, Amazon has now raised the bar with their latest language models which have outperformed GPT-3.5 by 16% on the ScienceQA benchmark.
The ScienceQA benchmark is a large set of science-based multiple-choice questions that test a language model’s ability to reason and make inferences. Amazon’s models achieved this high accuracy through their Multimodal-CoT approach, which combines visual and language data to create a more effective rationale.
Multimodal-CoT works by breaking down reasoning into two stages: generating a reason and figuring out the answer. The model is fed both visual and language data in the rationale generation stage and the resulting rationale is added to the language input in the answer inference stage. This results in a more convincing argument and more accurate answers.
The Amazon researchers concluded that their method, which outperforms GPT-3.5 on the ScienceQA benchmark, has potential for further improvement in future studies. They plan to leverage more effective visual features, infuse common sense information, and apply filtering processes to enhance their CoT reasoning.
According to a source, Sony is reportedly preparing to unveil a new console, the PS5 Pro, which is said to have a new design and may be released in the near future.
According to an anonymous source cited by Abhishek Yadav, a known insider, Sony may be planning to release a new PS5 Pro model as early as April 2023, approximately 2.5 years after the launch of the current model. The source claims that this will be a Pro version rather than a Slim variant, and that it may feature improved performance and a new chip from AMD. However, at this time, it is unclear what level of power the new console will have.
According to the source, the primary innovation of the PS5 Pro version would be in the cooling system, in addition to improved performance. The current PS5 uses a fan and liquid metal compound for cooling which has been causing some issues. The new version is rumored to use liquid cooling, similar to that found in gaming PCs, which could improve heat management and prevent the console from overheating if the chip is more powerful. However, it’s not clear if this change in cooling will also result in a design change.
UAE doctors recommend that children in the UAE should begin regular physical activity and exercise starting at age of three to promote growth and development. However, doctors noted that many children are not meeting the minimum daily exercise guidelines.
According to the Gulf Health Council children that are 3-4 years old should have daily physical activity for three hours while those in the age group of 5-14 years should get at least one hour of moderate to high-intensity activity, such as riding a bike, playing football, or running, as well as jogging and swimming.
A survey conducted in 2019 found that nearly 84 per cent of the children in the UAE don’t reach the minimum goal required per day for exercise or physical activity.
However, the UAE has physical education programmes throughout school life that encourages children to join sports teams. It is mandatory for children to attend physical education classes at least once a week and this promotes a healthier lifestyle in most adolescents. If the same was continued outside schools, and physical activity or exercise regimes at home are encouraged, it would have many positive outcomes including better grades at school and a healthier state of mind and body.
Dr Osama Elsayed Rezk Elassy, clinical assistant professor, consultant and head of the division, Centre for Paediatrics and Neonatology, Thumbay University Hospital, recommends kids start engaging in routine physical activity starting from three years of age as it helps in their growth and development – both mentally and physically.
Health risks
Dr Hesham Farouk Gomaa, specialist paediatrics, Aster Clinic, Arabian Ranches and Al Barsha, said regular participation in physical activity helps reduce the health risk of childhood obesity and the associated chronic diseases.
“Increased participation in physical activity influences cognitive functions in children, including executive functioning e.g., working memory and cognitive flexibility and brain health,” he said.
Dr Hesham added that most children in the UAE don’t even get the bare minimum of physical activity.
“One reason for the low activity level is the UAE’s hot climate. People go outside less so there are more indoor activities and more screen time, which is the opposite of what we want.”
Dr Osama of Thumbay University Hospital added that kids in UAE usually don’t exercise except for the ones who have easy access to a pool in their home or outdoors.
“Children that lack physical activity in their daily routines are usually susceptible to long-term impacts such as obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and cardiovascular problems as they grow older.
“One of the many benefits of regular exercise and physical activity is that there is an outlet for stress, especially in adolescents. Lack, thereof, may lead to stress, mood swings, insomnia due to the pent-up stress, reduced performance in school and overall reduced quality of physical, mental and emotional health,” he added.
Activities for children as per their age:
(Courtesy: Dr Hesham Farouk Gomaa, Specialist Paediatrics, Aster Clinic)
Ages 3 to 5: Preschoolers can play team sports, like soccer, basketball, swimming, or T-ball, as long as their expectations are realistic. Any sport at this age should be about play, not competition.
Ages 6 to 8: Children have developed enough by age 6 that they can hit a pitched baseball and pass a soccer ball or basketball. They can also do gymnastics routines and pedal and steer a two-wheeled bike.
Ages 9 to 11: Children are usually able to hit and accurately throw a baseball and make solid contact with a golf or tennis ball. If children are interested in participating in events such as short triathlons or distance running races, these are safe as long as they have trained for the event and maintain healthy hydration.
Ages 12 to 14: Kids may lose interest in the structured environment of organised sports as they reach adolescence. They may wish to focus instead on strength- or muscle-building exercises. But unless the child has entered puberty, discourage lifting heavy weights. Encourage healthier options, such as stretchy tubes and bands, as well as body-weight exercises like squats and pushups.
Age 15 and older: Once the teen has gone through puberty and is ready to lift weights, urge them to take a weight-training class or a few sessions with an expert. If a high schooler expresses interest in endurance events like triathlons or marathons, there’s no reason to say no, although many races have minimum age requirements.
The Dubai Foundation for Women and Children (DFWC) launched an initiative entitled “watch your words”, targeting children, adolescents, and adults, to combat bullying.
The primary role of the initiative is to provide the necessary assistance to victims and perpetrators of bullying in a way that guarantees social harmony for both parties,” she said
Sheikha Saeed Al Mansouri added the campaign focuses on social, psychological, and legal repercussions of bullying behaviour.
The launch of this initiative is consistent with the Foundation’s strategies and objectives to develop and consolidate child-friendly practices and standards, by raising awareness among the target groups – in addition to strengthening the Emirati leadership in caring for children and guaranteeing their full rights.
A Ten year old Digital books is more fragile and threatened compared to a 100 year old Physical book.
For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.
And, to serve users with print disabilities, we have to keep up with the ever-improving tools they use.
Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles.
Also, the digital media they reside on changes, too—from Digital Linear Tape to PATA hard drives to SATA hard drives to SSDs. If we do not actively tend our digital books they become unreadable very quickly.
Then there is cataloging and metadata. If we do not keep up with the ever-changing expectations of digital learners, then our books will not be found. This is ongoing and expensive.
Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.
Also, how we use books and periodicals, in the decades after they are published, change from how they were originally intended. We are seeing researchers use books and periodicals in machine learning investigations to find trends that were never easy in a one-by-one world, or in the silos of the publisher databases. Preparing these books for this type of analysis is time consuming and now threatened by publisher’s lawsuits.
If we want future access to our digital heritage we need to make some structural changes: changes to institution and publisher behaviors as well as supportive funding, laws, and enforcement.
The first step is to recognize preservation and access to our digital heritage is a big job and one worth doing. Then, find ways that institutions– educational, government, non-profit, and philanthropic– could make preservation a part of our daily responsibility.
A reading literacy assessment that will be held three times per year has been officially mandated by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) for all students in the 6-15 age.
All schools in Dubai will participate in the digital Reading Literacy assessment for Grades 1 to 12, and the Arabic Benchmark Test, from Grades 1 to 9 with effect from the academic year 2023-24.
Peter Bonner, Assistant Principal Primary – Curriculum, Progress and Assessment, GEMS World Academy – Dubai says, “As per new KHDA guidelines, all students in the 6-15 age range are required to sit a standardised reading literacy assessment three times per year.
The guidelines state that tests must assess reading skills across a range of domains, with appropriate age-related emphases, including, but not limited to:
phonemic awareness
word recognition and phonics
reading comprehension
fluency
vocabulary
interpretive and comparative analysis of passages
application of understanding and critique of text
comprehension of different genres, including poetry.”
Bonner adds, “Schools have the flexibility to select a reading assessment platform and provider that is appropriate for them and their context, as long as these meet the above requirements.”
Assessments, he said, must be “computer-adaptive, and results should show each student’s reading age in comparison to grade/age expectations, and also a Standard Age Score (SAS) to facilitate comparison of data.
They should allow a detailed analysis of results, which is then used to support identification of individual student needs and how these drive interventions with all students.”
Headteachers explain this is part of the UAE’s commitment to maintaining high standards of education, and institutions are piloting these assessments in a few grades and sections based on random selection.
This is expected to help schools establish a baseline of students’ cognitive potential and achievements over time, and to facilitate necessary modifications to their learning.
One of the internet’s largest pirated e-book databases, which are also called “shadow libraries,” Z-Library offered more than 10 million e-books and 86 million articles at its peak, with a limited number of monthly downloads accessible to millions of users free of charge, and more available for a small fee. It was seized by the FBI after the shadow library fell under investigation by the US Trade Representative.
Though it’s beloved by students and book fanatics, the site isn’t popular among authors, whose work regularly gets uploaded to Z-Library without compensation.
Beloved by students, who seldom have the funds to dump on expensive textbooks or pricey academic journal subscriptions, ZLibrary eventually gained a devoted following on TikTok – much to the dismay of the Authors Guild, a writers’ trade group. The Guild blames digital piracy for an average decline of 42% in writers’ incomes over the last decade.
After the Guild wrote to the US Trade Representative earlier this month referencing TikTok in its plea to have ZLibrary classified as a “notorious market” for promoting piracy, the platform blocked the #ZLibrary hashtag.
Some 200 domains associated with ZLibrary were ordered blocked in France in September following a lawsuit by the National Publishing Union, and multiple Indian ISPs were previously ordered to block access following a complaint by the Taxmann publishing company.
According to Bleeping Computer, however, “little is known about the platform’s operators and commercial status,” meaning ZLibrary may simply switch domains and rise again.
Some of the domains have been redirected to Njalla, an anonymous hosting provider founded by the creator of the Pirate Bay, though it’s not clear how ZLibrary’s operators could have regained control of their domains following the seizure.
Taiwan Professor Benson Yeh has cautioned Parents not to let Childrean treat home electronics products as monsters, because that attitude is going to prevent Taiwan from producing the next generation of creatives and innovators.
At a seminar, the electrical engineering specialist described parents as the biggest potential obstacles to the development of new electronics talent in Taiwan. He said the students who most often dropped out at NTU were those who had not been allowed to use computers, smartphones or tablets before they started their university studies.
Parents needed to abandon the attitude that phones amounted to games, and had to see them as instruments instead, Yeh said. He insisted that if Taiwanese wanted to work at the next generation of innovative enterprises in Taiwan, they needed to acquire the capabilities of working in a digital society and of cooperating across borders.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many teachers, students, and parents did not have the required digital literacy to conduct virtual classes, according to Yeh, who created a Facebook group where 140,000 teachers help each other become familiar with the necessary technology.
Harry Potter fans are facing some harsh realities on re-reading their favorite years later after their first release.
Despite the failures of the Fantastic Beasts series, Harry Potter fans are eager to see more screen installments. Whether this includes Newt Scamander and his friends or tells a whole new story established from J.K. Rowling’s books, they are far from done with tales of the wizarding world.
In the meantime, fans can satisfy their need by returning to the Harry Potter books, perhaps even for the first time since they finished Deathly Hallows when it was released in 2007. If they do, however, they should expect to find a new world between the pages, resulting from the changed perspective that time has created in them. From the problematic nature of elements like the enslavement of house-eves to the disappointing reminder that the movies can never quite add up, rereading Harry’s story is sure to come with several harsh realizations.
Harry, Ron, And Hermione Are So Young
Many long-time Harry Potter fans first read the books when they were about the same age as the characters. However, it can be a surprise for returning readers to see Harry, Ron, and Hermione from their adult perspectives.
It’s often easy for child audiences to accept the burdens placed on their favorite child heroes, but these dangerous events can be a little alarming for adults. Harry’s mistreatment, Hermione’s burdensome intelligence, and Ron’s constant fear of being overlooked are much more sympathetic to older readers.
The Adults In Harry Potter Are Terribly Irresponsible
Just like the children characters are far more tragic to newly adult audiences, the adults in Harry Potter, such as the parents and teachers, suddenly appear all the more clueless. They seem never to have any idea what their children are up to, and when they are needed, they brush the young characters away.
It’s no surprise that Harry and his friends rarely went to the adults for help. This might have felt normal when reading in the past, but as adults, it’s harder for readers to feel sympathy for these clueless characters.
House-Elves Are Extremely Problematic
From the time Dobby was introduced in Chamber of Secrets, he was easy to love. The movies cut out many of his subsequent appearances, but the books had much more to say about not only everyone’s favorite free elf but all house-elves of the wizarding world.
In Goblet of Fire, Harry, and co. meet dozens of house-elves in the kitchens, and they are first confronted with the information that most house-elves don’t want to be freed. While this was only charming detail when the book was released, years later, it seems to encourage some problematic topics.
The Harry Potter Movies Leave Out A Painful Amount
It is much easier to repeatedly binge the Harry Potter movies than reread the books, so even the most die-hard fans can start to forget just how much the movies leave out. This means that when they come back to the books, they can find themselves surprised again by some subtle details.
This is especially prevalent from Prisoner of Azkaban onward and becomes worse with each movie. In a sense, rereading the books can almost ruin the films since the reminder that the best or funniest book scenes in Harry Potter were cut just brings back all the disappointment.
Severus Snape Is Much Worse In The Books
Alan Rickman’s legendary portrayal of Severus Snape is not easy to forget. He fit the book description of the character to a tee, and even those who read Philosopher’s Stone before watching the film quickly adjusted their mental image to fit the actor.
However, Rickman’s Snape was much calmer and more pitiable than his book counterpart. This means that reading about Snape screaming and throwing a fit in rage like he does in the Prisoner of Azkaban book can feel jarring in comparison. He acts purely like a scorned child, which doesn’t fit with how audiences have come to know Snape.
