OLDaily

Signs of a Ceiling in Online Ed Market
2017/05/24

According to this report, "A new survey of online education administrators at 104 colleges and universities released today shows -- as other studies have suggested -- that public and private four-year institutions saw healthy enrollment growth in their fully online programs." The same is not true for colleges, which saw growth rates decline. 

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The Tools of an HTML Email Workflow
Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks, 2017/05/24

As someone who has managed an email list for more than a decade, I appreciate the complexity of email and therefore the utility of this list of tools. Chris Coyier runs the gamut from bare metal tools to CSS formatting for email to email-sending applications. I still do it the old fashioned way, with my own software, but that's only because I'm not willing to pay money to send emails.

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“India is of crucial importance”: An interview with Jimmy Wales
Syed Muzammiluddin, WikiMedia Blog, 2017/05/24

Good interview with the founder of Wikipedia on the place of India in the world of knowledge and culture. India "is as big and diverse as Europe, and yet it is still one nation.  There is a steady rise in access to the Internet in India, but there are obviously still difficult challenges around access and educational attainment," says Wales. "These are difficult times politically... an increase in rhetoric against foreigners or 'others' of all kinds." And we (not just Wikipedia) "can be a powerful force for peace, if we remain a powerful force for facts and free knowledge."

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All That We Share
TV2Danmark, YouTube, 2017/05/24

I've been listening to the recent discussion on white privilege (including a show on CBC as I type). Some of the discussion centers around a worksheet being used in local schools. It makes people uncomfortable, and as has been noted, it's hard to explain white privilege to a broke white person. Race is not of course the only sort of privilege (or lack of privilege) a person can experience. The discussion brings to mind the term the term baizuo (白左), or literally, the ‘white left’, as it is used in China, "is used generally to describe those who 'only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment' and 'have no sense of real problems in the real world'". Me, I am less interested in the putative causes of oppression (because pretty much anything - race, caste, gender, religion - can be used as an excuse) as I am the effects - poverty, homelessness, injustice, violence, inhumanity, hopelessness. I feel we all have an obligation to those people who are oppressed for any reason to help and support their personal empowerment, freedom and opportunity through concrete action.

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College makes sense for the elite, but it might not for the working class
Joan Williams, 2017/05/24

While people in the lower classes are told that attending a  good college is the ticket to success, the reality is far different, according to the author. Getting into an elite college gets you in the door, but access to opportunities depends not on your education but on your social capital. Working class kids "don’t know the unwritten social codes of professional life." Interviews are "about passing a social test—a test of belonging, of holding your own in a corporate boardroom, of making connections with potential future clients." But the solution isn't simply to accept this, as the author seems to imply. It requires broad-based social reform: eliminating preferential access to college (by eliminating tuition and class-based admission policies); eliminating class-based hiring (by imposing strict merit-based hiring policies and an end to patronage); and most importantly, the development of social networks everyone can join. 

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New paint colors invented by neural network
Janelle C. Shane, Postcards from the Frontiers of Science, Tumblr, 2017/05/24

Do two people see the same thing when they see the colour blue? Probably not. And if one of them is a computer, almost certainly not. Computers see colours in RGB values, and humans... something else. That's what makes this story about neural network-generated colour names interesting. Some of them make sense and some of them are odd. But I don't agree that the rejects are uniformly bad. Colours like snowbonk, ronching blue, stoner blue and light of blast seem perfect to me.

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