Students who receive a private education are significantly more likely to graduate from a leading university than their state school peers, regardless of their exam results, new research shows.

Researchers focused on 7,700 people born in the 1970s, looking at their exam results aged 11, 16 and 18, their social background and their parents' educational achievements.

They found that students who attended a private school were two and half times more likely to receive a place at a Russell Group university than state school pupils with the same exam results.

Almost 31 per cent of private school pupils received a degree from an elite university, compared to just 13 per cent from grammar schools and five percent from comprehensives, according to the study by the University of Manchester and Institute of Education.

The report concluded that receiving a private school education was "powerfully predictive of gaining a university degree and especially a degree from an elite institution", according to the Daily Telegraph. 

"Advantaged social origins and private schooling raises the chances of getting a degree, and especially an elite degree, above and beyond test scores and examination attainment," said lead researcher Professor Alice Sullivan from London University's Institute of Education.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/uk-news/61450/private-school-students-get-better-degrees-with-poorer-grades#ixzz3JxMkWtQp

Meanwhile at the coal-face of private education in which the poms call public schools:

Public [Private] schools are the nurseries of vice and immorality...

Henry Fielding (1701-1754)

A Master of Art

is not worth a fart.

Andrew Boorde (1500s)

Of course, some of the private school students — too many of these that all learn the grand art of profound lying — enter politics to make your life a misery while enriching their pockets and those of their friends.

Gus Leonisky (The Age of Deceit — unpublished, 2014)

May be the tin-cans at top might have better morality, unless their programmers made them too humans... or not enough — like Cybermen in Dr Who...

Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.

He told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI.

But others are less gloomy about AI's prospects.

The theoretical physicist, who has the motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is using a new system developed by Intel to speak.

Machine learning experts from the British company Swiftkey were also involved in its creation. Their technology, already employed as a smartphone keyboard app, learns how the professor thinks and suggests the words he might want to use next.

Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.

read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540

BUT FEAR NOT, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL BE NO MATCH:

IDIOCY WILL DEFEAT SUPERIOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE !

Sixty per cent of Australian students are training  for jobs that will not exist in the future or will be transformed by automations, according to a new report by the Foundation for Young Australians.

The not-for-profit group, which works with young Australians to create social change, says he national curriculum is stuck in the past and digital literacy, in particular, needs to be boosted.

Foundation chief executive Jan Owen says young people are not prepared for a working life that could include five career changes and an average of 17 different jobs.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-24/next-generation-chasing-dying-careers/6720528

Robots will become unemployed too... See story at top...

Turns out robots won't be taking over the customer service industry anytime soon, folks.

After spending just a week at Margiotta, a grocery store chain in Scotland, "ShopBot," also known as Fabio the Robot, was handed a pink slip due to "incompetence."

Deployed as part of an experiment operated by Heriot-Watt University for the BBC's "Six Robots & Us" program, Fabio's time at the supermarket was meant to test whether or not the bot could be integrated with human shoppers.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201801231060979684-fabio-the-robot-fired...

Read from top...

A power outage affected 12,000 passengers on May 30. The rail operator has just found the source of the problem on Sunday ...

A SLUG that had entered an electric supply box was blamed by a Japanese rail operator for a power outage that had stopped dozens of trains last month and caused delays for 12,000 passengers.

Electricity was shut down on May 30 on several lines in the south of the archipelago operated by Kyushu Railway Company, also known as JR Kyushu. The company had been forced to cancel 26 trains and others had been affected by delays that had wreaked havoc on a rail network famous for its efficiency and punctuality.

This is not a joke... Read from top.