Stephen Downes

Interesting article about behavioral time scale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), which is contrasted with typical Hebbian neural plasticity (which can be summarizes as: 'what wires together fires together') in that it characterizes a type of learning that can happen suddenly, rather than gradually over time. How? That's more of a complex question. "The biggest difference between the dendrites' activity and Hebbian plasticity: time... (their activity potentials) persist for tens to hundreds of milliseconds (sometimes approaching one second), and through BTSP they can strengthen synapses active six to eight seconds before." Before people get too excited at the possibility of one-shot learning: "it has been observed in limited circumstances (and) only in the hippocampus."

Bryan Alexander offers a reasonable and even nuanced description and response to that Chronicle of Higher Education article recommending that campus teaching and learning centers be closed and their staff fired (yeah, it was that extreme). The Chronicle article is behind a paywall, so Alexander's summary is useful (and, as I read the full article on archive.ph I can attest that the summary is accurate). While I consider the article to be a classic instance of the Chronicle's blinkered and cranky coverage of, well, everything, Alexander finds that the post resonates with (some) actual professors. "They saw centers as tools of oppressive administrations, integrated attacks on the abilities, nature, and identities of professors."

Ethan Mollick reviews CHAT GOT 5.5: "I can get a near PhD-quality paper from four prompts or a playable roleplaying game, illustrated and "playtested," from one. But the fiction is still flat and the hypotheses are sometimes uninteresting even when the statistics are sound. But still. A year ago, none of this was close."

The Linked Web Storage Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts for the Linked Web Storage (LWS) 1.0 Authentication Suite, including authentication for OpenID Connect, SAML 2.0, Self-signed Identity using Controlled Identifiers, and Self-signed Identity using did:key." This gives an indication of what sort of authentication technologies to be looking at in the future. Image: Wikipedia.

There has been a lot of fuss about the many software vulnerabilities discovered by Anthropic's new Claude Mythos model. But the flip side of that is the potential for software developers to fix them. "Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively," exaults Mozilla in this post describing how it responded with fixes for 271 vulnerabilities. "Encouragingly, we also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher... Software like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness. It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex. The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all."

This is a long and muddled article arguing, in essence, that the mechanisms supporting course or credit equivalency between institutions (aka 'The Transfer Industrial Complex') is not worth the cost. How such an article could be written without even a mention of the Bologna process is a mystery. But I digress. My main objection is Hollis Robbins's supposition (supported via a  paywalled Chronicle article) that no two disciplines (and, by extension, I guess, courses) are the same. "No one thinks there's such a thing as 'playing sports' generically. There's just playing football, gymnastics, golf, wrestling, and shotput, each with standards of excellence particular to it. This is why we don't establish generic-sports coaching centers staffed by noncoaching staff..." This is a ridiculous proposition. There is considerable cross-over between sports, especially in the areas of fitness and conditioning. There are courses devoted to teaching people how to be fitness coaches. When I was in high school, the very same guy taught me football, gymnastics, golf, wrestling, and shotput (I was bad at all of them, but it wasn't his fault). Denying that skills transfer - in any discipline - is folly, and so obviously so, that I suspect ulterior motives behind such arguments.