Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent
Sonia Paul, Backchannel, 2017/03/23

I have mixed feelings about the importance of voice commands. Yes, we will need voice - we frequently need to communicate with a computer when we are otherwise occupied, as for example when we are driving. And a computer can be a participant in a conversation, as for example on Star Trek. But voice commands can be appropriate in crowds and public spaces, or for activities where privacy is important. Also, voice, like a lot of things, depends on artificial intelligence (AI), and as this story suggests, bias can be built into AI. Hence Alexa's inability to understand an accented voice. This will eventually become a security feature, as voice learns to train on specific voices, accent and all. But for now it's a problem.

[Link] [Comment]

This Article Won’t Change Your Mind
Julie Beck, The Atlantic, 2017/03/23

Some time about 20 years ago I decided that i would stop arguing, and start explaining. It was no longer about convincing others, it was about making my own reasoning clear. Why? because after almost two decades in philosophy I concluded that nobody is convinced by argumentation. Yes, I have relapses, because I'm temperamentally argumentative, but these are exclamations, not exhortations. "Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point..." This, in a nutshell, is the history of philosophy. What will change minds? Personal experience, interactions with friends, and cognitive dissonance. That's why to teach really is 'to model and demonstrate'. Anyhow. Good article. Won't change your mind, but is worth reading in any case.

[Link] [Comment]

Brace Yourself For The Bitcoin Hard Fork
Rob Blasetti, Decentralize Today, 2017/03/23

There's a lot of history behind this one, but essentially the split is between the original developers, who want to keep the size of a block limited, and Bitcoin miners (ie., the people who actually encrypt the blocks), who want the size of the block to grow. This can happen in distributed systems. It's not necessarily a bug; think of it as being like mitosis, where a simple network begins to develop into a complex network. But the short term message is risk. Lots of it, because this sort of thing hasn't happened a lot yet (though it has happened to Ethereum).

[Link] [Comment]

Thoughts on the UMUC IT Spin Off
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/03/23

This article offers reflections on a recent University of Maryland University College (UMUC) initiative to spin off its IT department into a for-profit company.  Joshua Kim writes, "The new company, to be called AccelerEd, will be made up of the 100 or so professionals who work for UMUC’s Office of Information Technology. This moves follows the previous spin off of UMUC analytics unit into a for-profit company called HelioCampus." What about online learning, though? "In online learning, there is not a place where teaching ends and technology starts. How do you separate the two?" I don't see this experiment working out well.

[Link] [Comment]