Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning
Kathleen Fisher, DARPA, June 3, 2013

Take the time to give this presentation a good listen (the video is in user-hostile Quicktime, so give it lots of time to load). It outlines requirements for DARPA's latest round of research funding on probabilistic programming and machine learning. What's important is not the funding opportunities (which, believe me, none of us can qualify for) but the description of where (and how) analytics and chaotic data processing is headed. The days where a computer program was just a set of instructions has long since passed. The future is computing based on models, queries and fact sets (there's a really good example predicing outcomes of games of tug of war, which is based on the TrueSkill ranking system used by xBox; anotherexample looks at recommendation systems such as Matchbox's Large-Scale Baysean Recommendations). The impact of this changing paradigm drives deep into what we think are the different skills in learning and design - as illustrated, we have SMEs, who pose questions, problem-language and model-language programming experts, machine learning design experts, and compilers and cloud storage experts. All very different, all vital.

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Propagation of unintentionally shared information and online tracking
Rath Kanha Sar, and , Yeslam Al–Saggaf, First Monday, June 3, 2013

What we all knew, documented: "both the user’s information (e.g., searches) and the browser connection propagate to more than just one level, traversing from first party sites to third party sites, and from those third party sites to other third party sites... within just one browsing session, the first author’s identifiable and non–identifiable information propagated to third party sites, and that thosse sites were able to track her browsing habits and combine those details with her identifiable information." Read more from this month's First Monday, including also this useful paper on access and open science.

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Special Issue - Open Educational Resources: Opening Access to Knowledge
Rory McGreal, Wanjira Kinuthia, Stewart Marshall, International Review of Research in Open, and , Distance Learning (IRRODL), June 3, 2013

Readers may be interested in "a new  IRRODL special issue - Open Educational Resources: Opening Access to Knowledge." Contents are mostly from "authors working in three of the world’s leading open universities, namely the OU UK, Athabasca University, and the Dutch Open University."

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Sakai Project [EdX] launches groundbreaking open source collaboration
Patrick Masson, CIOh-no, June 3, 2013

Too funny. This new statement from 2004 2014 announces the groundbreaking collaboratrion that is Sakai EdX.

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Blogginess
Tim Bray, Ongoing, June 3, 2013

Tim Bray argues, and I agree, that the serious academic conversations today are taking place on blogs. "The quality of conversations about what matters is at an all-time high. No, not in the corridors of power. Nor, unfortunately, in the official channels for academic publishing. It's the blogs." His reasoning?

• Paul Krugman in In Praise of Econowonkery argues that all the macroeconomic debate that matters is happening in blog form.
• The notion of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect -where you forget that the rest of the newspaper is as poorly informed as it is on the subject you know well.

His focus is mostly on politics and economics, but my observation is that in education as well, the more leading edge, nuanced and thoughtful discourse is happening in blogs.

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The MOOC bubble and the attack on public education
Aaron Bady , Academic Matters, June 1, 2013

"MOOCs are a speculative bubble," writes Aaron Bady, "a product being pumped up and overvalued by pro-business government support and a lot of hot air in the media." It's tempting to describe MMOCs as a bubble, but not all things are bubbles. What we're seeing recently is that the term and concept of 'MOOC' has functioned as a market strategy that will leverage longer term investments in educational publishing. But I do agree, MOOCs (as conceived by Silicon Valley investors) are an attack on public education - but that just makes them the caboose in a long train of similar attacks (comprehensing everything from vouchers to charter schoolss to Universitas 21). View more (much more) from the current issue of Academic Matters.

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College for all
André Dua, McKinsey & Company, June 1, 2013

Writing for McKinsey, André Dua argues that it's "important that education not be seen as a free good, because it will always take big investments to attract and retain the talent needed to develop world-class courses and materials." This made me think. What if he's right? He probably is, indeed, he's probably more right than he thinks. Building an educational infrastructure is a huge expense, even if we significantly reduce the cost using such means as online learning. Industry is very reluctant to invest in education, because the returns are far from guaranteed. Most people cannot afford the actual cost of their education. So as I comment here (and post here) the bulk of investment in education will continue to be supported by government, and the question here is - given that they merely increase costs and reduce access - what is the argument for corporate investment in education at all? Via Sui Fai John Mak.

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