At the ninth annual Reagan Institute Summit on Education (RISE) in Washington, D.C., policymakers, business leaders and education advocates from across the political spectrum gathered to address a single question: What is the purpose of education in America?

Discussions ranged from rising college costs and “cognitive surrender” fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) to the broader goal of fostering an educated citizenry. During the panel, “Beyond Achievement: Knowledge, Skills, and Human Flourishing,” Maria Flynn, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, zeroed in on the importance of aligning what students learn in school with what the workforce will require in the next five, 10 and 15 years.

EdSurge caught up with Flynn after her session to discuss school-to-workforce connections, career awareness over prescriptive readiness and what it really looks like to prepare students for an uncertain future.

EdSurge: A new Gallup poll shows that while 51% of parents trust K-12 schools to prepare students for new technology, far fewer parents feel confident in schools’ ability to prepare them for the current world of work (27%), critical thinking and problem solving (29%), or effective AI use (34%). Is this a warning sign that our priorities are misaligned?

Maria Flynn: Yes, I do think we are not doing enough to get students ready for an unpredictable future. That gap has existed for a while, but with the rapid acceleration of AI and changing business practices, it’s becoming even more apparent. It’s interesting that parents are picking up on this, and it raises a critical question: How do we address this systemic problem at scale?

Regarding that low confidence in AI preparation, parents are learning at the same pace — or even slower — than students, so educating parents needs to happen in parallel as all of this continues to roll out.

At the same time, that AI finding doesn’t surprise me. My sense, from what I’m hearing anecdotally, is that schools are lagging behind. Systems across K-12 and higher education are scrambling to support teachers, while states and districts are trying to chart the right path forward.

It’s a telling sign that this conversation has moved from a policy debate straight to the kitchen table.

What understanding of AI should every high school graduate possess before entering college or the workforce?

By graduation, every student should have basic AI literacy — much like learning to type used to be a class we all took. Whether that is in the form of a credential or built into the classroom experience over time, employers increasingly expect these foundational skills. Beyond checking a box, the real goal is building fluency so students can apply AI to day-to-day tasks.

Where are you seeing promising models of AI education?

We see a lot of pockets of progress across different sectors, especially in higher education. For example, Ohio State is intentionally embedding AI horizontally across its majors. Miami Dade College is doing groundbreaking work in applied AI education through NSF-funded initiatives. In K-12, groups like InnovateEDU are pioneering creative approaches. There are a lot of good things happening; the priority now is being really clear on the roles of states, districts and communities in putting these practices together.

When we talk about preparing students for the future, where are the biggest misalignments between current school practices and what employers demand?

The skills of the future will continue to evolve quickly, so we shouldn’t be teaching young people about a specific job with a specific employer. The baseline needs to be strong core academics paired with durable, human skills — adaptability, resilience and the capacity to learn and relearn.

Where a misalignment exists is in how early and how broadly we expose students to different career possibilities. Maybe high schools are too focused on college admissions. If we introduce career exploration earlier — embedding it in middle school — students can make far more informed choices by 11th grade.

How can we better equip K-12 schools to help students connect their interests and passions to career pathways?

It comes down to providing better structural tools and resources. For example, expanding summer teacher externships can give educators access to real-world work experiences that then inform classroom learning.

We also need to give school counselors the resources to showcase opportunities beyond the traditional four-year degree. Free exploration tools designed specifically for teenagers — like Brightbound’s GoZig platform, developed in partnership with JFF — help students match their interests to varied pathways, including community college programs and apprenticeships.

Beyond education, how are employers adjusting to these shifts?

There is a lot shifting on the early rungs of the labor market that we need to pay attention to. With headlines of AI altering entry-level roles and recent graduates facing underemployment, we have to start getting ahead of these changes so we’re not eliminating that first rung of the ladder. 

Employers are beginning to reevaluate entry-level requirements. Initiatives like Opportunity@Work’s “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign have encouraged companies to remove unnecessary degree requirements for jobs that don’t really need them. At the same time, young people are increasingly seeking “earn-and-learn” models like structured apprenticeships, where they don’t have to choose between working and going to school.

Progress has been made. I think it comes down, again, to helping young people understand their options.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

iFixit, the company known for completely tearing apart just about every product and device it can, has fully disassembled a brand new iPhone 18 Pro. The goal is to understand how all the parts fit together and find ways to fix anything that might break.

In the company’s post and teardown video, iFixit showed off how it took apart the latest iPhone, and what people who may someday need to fix theirs should look out for.

It gave the iPhone 18 Pro a repair rating of 7/10, citing easy-to-remove camera and battery assemblies. This matches the rating it gave the iPhone 17 Pro in 2025. That doesn’t mean the iPhone repair process is simple.

The Achilles heel of the iPhone 18 Pro may be a new feature: a variable aperture lens in the phone’s main 48-megapixel camera. It is the first variable aperture in an iPhone (though not the first in a smartphone). It uses six rotating aperture blades the width of a human hair to allow for different apertures for photo and video.

Courtesy of iFixit

The problem with the aperture is that Apple is introducing moving parts—therefore more parts that might need repair. Given the size and intricacy of how the blades are positioned, iFixit called trying to fix the individual blades an almost-impossible task. That means if the camera does break, you’d probably have to replace the full camera assembly. That will undoubtedly be pricier than paying for individual pieces. Luckily, the assembly itself proved easy enough to remove.

A stickier situation is repairing the iPhone 18 Pro’s battery, which requires prying open the glued-on screen. Once that is removed, though, the battery isn’t glued down but secured by screws, so it’s simpler to extract.

All in all, the iPhone 18 Pro is about as straightforward to repair as it has been for a few years—not a totally easy fix, but one with some tangible improvements. This comes after Apple’s long, contentious relationship with repair advocates, which made it a target of European Union legislation to make its products easier to fix.

Apple introduced a self-repair program in 2021. It got off to a bumpy start as the company withheld or made it difficult to access certain tools. After pressure from US state lawmakers, Apple made it slightly easier to repair its phones and eventually introduced a repair assistant to help guide users through the repair process. Still, just this year, the ownership advocacy group PIRG gave the iPhone 17 a D- rating for its repairability.

China is taking a firm stance on AI companions, proposing rules that would prevent platforms from offering virtual intimacy services to anyone under 18. According to a SCMP report, the proposal could set a precedent for governments drawing boundaries around AI relationships.

What would the new rules change?

China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China, would ban “virtual relatives or companions” for minors. It would also prohibit services that encourage addiction or seriously affect their health. Social networking with strangers would also be banned, except for users over 16 who rely on their own wages.

Games, social platforms, and AI services that could affect cognition for users under 16 would need minors’ mode activated. Additionally, platforms would need better systems for identifying minors, and algorithms cannot encourage emotional dependence, addiction, or excessive spending. AI services found in violation could face a fine up to 10 times the platform’s income when it exceeds 1 million yuan, or about $149,000, and authorities can confiscate it.

Why this matters for AI companies worldwide?

Users aged six to 19 made up 18% of China’s internet users, totaling 112.5 million people, at the end of 2025. Lawyer He Qianggao says regulators will examine whether services simulate family or partner relationships through character settings and emotional guidance. However, ordinary AI chats and functional role-playing would generally fall outside the rules, but dependence-fostering services could face scrutiny.

The challenge is deciding what identified minors can access, which could increase product, infrastructure, and compliance costs. The proposal comes two months after China’s first dedicated humanlike AI rules took effect in July. Those rules target systems that encourage dependence and damage real-world relationships.

The debate is already spreading beyond China, from probes into the risks posed by popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to children to restrictions on AI use in schools. The concerns are not limited to regulators, as parents are increasingly worried about children becoming too dependent on AI.

These rules are still proposals, with public comments open until October 17. China is clearly treating emotional dependence on artificial intelligence as a youth safety issue. If these rules are adopted, it would set a precedent for how governments around the world regulate AI companions.

After first unveiling its new AI-powered laptop, dubbed Googlebook, in May, Google on Monday said the new device is now available for pre-order for $899.

Meant to offer a step up from traditional Chromebooks, Googlebooks run on Android OS with a desktop version of the Chrome browser and other familiar ChromeOS elements. However, the real pull for the new devices is that they’ll prominently feature Gemini’s latest capabilities in a new format: the laptop.

Google is trying to offer a laptop with unique features like an AI-powered cursor, vibe-coded widgets, and support for AI-enhanced dictation. The latter is a feature called Rambler, which cleans up messy, rambling brain dumps into readable text.

The move is a bet that AI, specifically Google’s Gemini, could be enough of a draw to get people to buy a new laptop that bakes in AI instead of running them via desktop apps you install or access through the browser. In addition, the devices could eventually replace Chromebooks, bringing millions of former Chromebook customers to Gemini AI.

On the Googlebook, Google is trying to reinvent the “point-and-click” experience of desktop computing to now include an AI element: the cursor serves as a conduit to Gemini. The company suggests various ways this could be used, like highlighting content on a webpage for Gemini to work with, asking Gemini to see if an email you’ve hovered your cursor over is suspicious, or selecting images and then asking Gemini to visualize them together.

In practice, this feature isn’t very different from Android’s “Circle to Search,” which allows smartphone owners to use gestures like circling, highlighting, or tapping to connect with Google Search, which of course, also includes AI. While it’s a clever way to take advantage of the ways people use their phones, Circle to Search on its own didn’t inspire a mass exodus to Android.

Similarly, Magic Cursor, as the AI pointer is called, won’t likely be a main selling point for the Googlebook, especially now that we have AI agents that can take over your computer and browser to do tasks for you.

Google’s Rambler, however, may be one of the best of the AI features in this upgrade, as it meets a surprisingly useful need. However, this, too, isn’t enough reason to buy a new device, as it feels more like a feature that’s nice to have than a necessity.

Vibe-coding widgets are a minor addition, as well. Other Googlebook features, like Gemini Spark and Gemini Live, also don’t require special, new hardware.

What’s more interesting about the Googlebook is how it’s seemingly part of Google’s longer-term plan to capture a large part of the K-12 market that currently relies on Chromebooks, and push them towards the company’s Gemini AI. There are somewhere around 50 million Chromebooks in schools, used by students and educators, Google has said.

In May, the company told TechCrunch that its current Chromebooks would continue to be supported, though many would become eligible to transition to the new Googlebook experience in the future.

The $899 device will include 12 months of Google AI Pro, which gives you 5TB of cloud storage, Gemini Advanced tools, and 3 months of YouTube Premium, Adobe Photoshop and more. The devices will receive regular updates for up to 10 years, Google said.

Googlebook pre-orders are open now on the Google Store, Best Buy, and other retailers. Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S., and October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia.

Flagship devices in the new range are being built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo, with materials like aluminum, magnesium alloy and carbon fiber. They feature up to 2.8K OLED displays, haptic glass trackpads, and backlit keyboards. Under the hood, they’ll run on processors from Intel and Qualcomm paired with dedicated NPUs. Google says the device will offer up to 14 hours of battery life.

from the dysfunction-junction dept

I’ve written a lot about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they’d already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly claim to loathe subsidies and corporate welfare.

The short version: the billionaires convinced Republicans to retool the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program (created by the 2021 infrastructure bill) in a way that weakened oversight standards, eliminated enforcement of stuff like broadband affordability, speed, and equitable deployment, and shoveled taxpayers toward more expensive, slower, less reliable satellite service.

After doing billionaires a giant favor, Republicans proudly claimed they’d “saved taxpayers around $21 billion” in “non-deployment funds.” The problem: Congress specifically earmarked this money for broadband deployment, so states were understandably annoyed at the missed opportunity.

For much of the last year, states and scattered lawmakers have been begging the Trump NTIA to offer guidance on what is going to happen to this $21 billion. Initially I think they hoped they could just pocket or repurpose that money. When they realized they couldn’t get away with it, they announced last week they’d vaguely be opening additional BEAD funding rounds to try and put the money to work.

Former FCC official Gigi Sohn, illustrated how stupid this all is over at a post at LinkedIn:

“After proudly cutting back on BEAD-eligible locations in its “Benefit of the Bargain” and “Best and Final” bidding rounds, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has now decided that part of the money it allegedly “saved” will go back to deploy broadband in the places that it nixed previously.”

But there’s still no meaningful guidance on what any of this means (which is required by law). And the BEAD standards have been so altered and twisted, there’s nothing saying this doesn’t just result in billions more money being funneled to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for substandard LEO satellite service that’s expensive and increasingly congested (because it wasn’t designed to be a mainstream option).

The bipartisan infrastructure law that created BEAD says that any extra BEAD money left over after physically connecting people must be used to improve broadband maps (which telecoms hate because it highlights market failure), install low-cost connectivity in multiple dwelling units like low income apartment complexes, or support broadband adoption programs. All of which the Trump administration claim are “woke.”

Sohn notes that under the law the Trump NTIA needs to provide clear guidance for the funds. Just ambiguously stating that money can still be maybe used for broadband doesn’t cut it:

“NTIA Administrator Roth promised a Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that she would issue non-deployment guidance this summer. This partial guidance should not serve as a promise kept. The last day of summer is September 22. Tick Tock.”

The annoyance at the Trump NTIA is increasingly bipartisan, as politicians in states like Texas realize this whole program was mired with all sorts of billionaire favoritism, delays, and weird new bureaucratic obstacles that significantly eroded what could have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand affordable, fast broadband.

I think this hasn’t been a bigger scandal (yet) in part because states don’t want to speak out and risk not getting billions in funds. So a lot of folks I see in telecom policy are privately furious or disgusted, but publicly pretending that any of this still makes any coherent sense.

It’s important to remember that Republicans spent all last election season complaining that this BEAD program was a bureaucratic hellscape they were going to immediately fix once in office.

Instead the Trump admin redirected billions to billionaires, eliminated any provisions requiring the broadband be equitably deployed and affordable, hijacked $21. billion for what they clearly hoped would be their own personal use, and created years of additional delays due to corruption and bureaucracy.

Folks like Ezra Klein, who helped Republicans parrot BEAD concerns in 2024, have been nowhere to be found since. In fact none of the “abundance” folks have made a single solitary peep about how badly the opportunity to build much-needed affordable broadband infrastructure has been bungled by Trump Incorporated.

Filed Under: bead, broadband, corruption, digital divide, elon musk, fiber, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, satellite

Europe’s data centers are to be graded on how much energy and water they use, under a rating scheme proposed on Monday by the European Commission.

Any individual site drawing more than 500 kW is covered. What the rating measures is not only consumption but what a data center puts back: heat recovered and reused, clean generation it adds, and how far it can flex its own demand when the grid is under strain.

The argument for taking the time to recover the heat is based on one figure: if about half of the heat that Europe’s data centers currently waste were recovered, it would meet the heating needs of four million households.

“Tripling our data center capacity cannot mean tripling the pressure on our grids, our water and our energy bills,” said Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition.

Tripling is not merely hypothetical; it is the stated plan: the EU aims to have three times its current capacity within five to seven years, a goal it frames as a matter of technological independence rather than as part of an energy policy.

In 2024, European data centers used about 68 terawatt-hours of electricity, and the International Energy Agency forecasts this to rise to 114 TWh by 2030 due to AI, at which point the sector will account for more than 3% of all electricity consumed in the region.

It is a delegated regulation and determines what takes place afterward; Parliament and the Council now have two months in which to examine it, and although they can object to the entire regulation, they cannot alter a single line of it.

If it survives that stage, the individual data centers will have their labels applied in 2027, and a review of whether any of it is working will be completed by the end of 2028.

The fact is that having a rating does not mean that requirements are being imposed, since the Commission has separately put forward minimum performance standards for consultation, and it is precisely from that process that a real floor would arise; the deadline for this is 14 December.

The Commission is also carrying out work on a tripartite agreement with the operators, the grid operators and the energy suppliers later this year, after the declaration of intent made in June.

At the moment, the proposal makes data centers visible rather than smaller.

“Digital sovereignty must go hand in hand with energy responsibility,” said energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen.

Dr Semiconductor already had working DRAM cells from a class 100 cleanroom built inside a home backyard shed. Packaging those silicon chips onto a circuit board was the next problem, because silicon is opaque and lining up pads by eye is a guessing game. Gallium nitride grown on sapphire is transparent, already contains the layers that make blue light, and happens to be the same material used in commercial LEDs. A two-inch epiwafer costs about $160 and lasts a long time once you dice it.

An LED epiwafer is essentially a thin layer of crystal on a sapphire disk. Underneath is an n-type gallium nitride layer that emits electrons, a thin indium gallium nitride ‘quantum well’ in the middle is where the magic happens, and a p-type gallium nitride layer on top delivers positive charges. When those two combine in the well, you get blue light, which is a really simple process.

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To get to the buried n-layer, however, you must cut through the top two layers without damaging the rest. You can’t simply use a chlorine plasma etcher like the big boys do in actual fabs since they’re way too expensive and unsafe for a home setup. The problem is that gallium nitride absorbs 355 nanometer UV radiation whereas sapphire does not, therefore you need a controlled means to ablate the coating. A refurbished glass-engraving laser from eBay does the work. Getting the right settings can take some trial and error on scrap parts, but once you’ve figured it out, the laser can cut nice little boxes down to the n-layer. To ensure that the wafer still works before any fancy lithography begins, simply apply a smear of soft indium metal to the etched spot and another to the unaltered p-surface, then connect a 9-volt battery between the two, which will glow blue in no time.

This process can leave behind some ugly metallic gallium and rough sidewalls, which a warm potassium hydroxide bath can remove by peeling the damaged material away like an onion and leaving the top surface clean and smooth. Then it’s just a matter of following the more common flow from there: spin on the usual lift-off resist and photoresist, bake and expose through a microscope stepper (which can print a YouTube logo or simple contact pads), and after a few developments, sputter on some nickel and then silver for the p-contact in a vacuum chamber. A 400 to 450 degree air anneal converts the nickel into a good semiconductor contact and allows the silver to do its job. Following a second alignment and lift-off in DMSO, the titanium and silver create the n-contact.

When a voltage is applied to the p-side positive and the n-side negative, the dies light up a stunning blue-purple, and the turn-on voltage is an ideal 2.5 volts for this material. One major problem is sawing sapphire at home, which is a hassle to get through, but the same 355 nm laser can do the trick if you aim it so it is absorbed inside the transparent crystal, allowing you to cut the wafer into individual chips over several passes. The edges may become scatter-damaged throughout the procedure, so leave some additional space around each die.

To make the LEDs more practical, you’ll need some custom boards with plated vias, which can then be electroplated with indium bumps. Mask off the regions that must remain clean using Kapton tape and rosins, then apply a little amount of flux to prevent the indium from oxidizing. A micromanipulator aligns the tiny die over the bumps, heat melts the metal, and you have a bonded chip. If you run current through the board vias, the packaged LED will light up just like a factory part. Blue LEDs on their own can appear frigid and uninviting, but when mixed with cerium-doped YAG phosphor powder and hardware-store silicone, the majority of the blue turns yellow. The eye views the combination as white since the more powder you add, the warmer the color becomes, and a small amount of silicon dries rapidly but appears rough, but it still works.