Yahoo Has a Tool that Can Catch Online Abuse Surprisingly Well
Will Knight, MIT Technology review, 2016/07/29

Interestingly, the term 'surprisingly well' in the headline still means 'far from perfect'. The Yahoo tool uses keywords and word phrases to catch abusive emails, but finds it difficult to go deeper. “The language of abuse is amorphous—changing frequently and often used in ways that do not connote abuse, such as when racially or sexually charged terms are appropriated by the groups they once denigrated. Given 10 tweets, a group of humans will rarely all agree on which ones should be classed as abusive, so you can imagine how difficult it would be for a computer.”

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Open Content Initiative Call for Proposals
eCampus Ontario, 2016/07/29

eCampus Ontario (which is welcoming David Porter as its new CEO) is launching an open content initiative. The call for proposals (27 page PDF) is available for download. "Funded Open Content projects are intended to incent uptake of these resources across the province, encourage buy-in from faculty members across Ontario institutions, and support the early adopters at a grass-roots level."

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