OLDaily

Richard Florida Is Sorry
Sam Wetherell, Jacobin, 2017/08/30

I'm not sure how much of this I agree with, but there is an element of truth to it. "The rise of the creative class in places like New York, London, and San Francisco created economic growth only for the already rich, displacing the poor and working classes.... hen the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich."

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Mike Boyd Videos
Mike Boyd, YouTube, 2017/08/30

This is some fun, but with an interesting point. The Metafilter summary reads as follows: "Mike Boyd is a Scottish lad who challanged himself to learn many specific skills. He documents the actual time it takes to 'master' them (or at least achieve a certain milestones of mastery). So far he uploaded 35 videos." Now it's not mastery in the szensze of 'to master physics'. But it's still an interesting experiment in self-learning.

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Assessing Learning Outcomes: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking and Written Communication Skills
Vera Beletzan, Melissa Gabler, Paula Gouveia, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2017/08/30

When I think about my own intellectual history I can think of several keystone events in which I received explicit guidance in critical thinking (and writing) which advanced my thinking significantly. One was reading Eleanor Maclean's Between the Lines. Another was reading Darrell Huff's How to Lie With Statistics. Another was a close reading and analysis of one of my papers given to me by Jon Bordo, a philosophy professor. Another was verena Huber-Dyson's Philosophy of Mathematics class. Each of these forced me to think about thinking. And that's the point of this report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (50 page PDF). "Students’ critical thinking and written communications skills show the most improvement when they are explicitly taught... the skills need to be taught consistently and over a longer period of time to see significant gains and these types of courses should be positioned strategically throughout each program of study."

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Explained simply: How DeepMind taught AI to play video games
Aman Agarwal, Medium, 2017/08/30

I think the concept here is a good idea - take a complex paper on AI and rewrite it so most people can understand it. And it more-or-less works. We certainly get a sense of the accomplishment: they trained an AI to play different games by using only the game as input - no rules, no hidden data, just game input. But this post uses the phrase "that is self-explanatory" far more frequently than such a post shoud (a dozen times, at least). And most of the time the paragraph that the author thought was self-explanatory wasn't. So while I give the post high marks for idea, I would grade it much lower on execution. And yet - it's still worth a read, especially if you think mmachines can learn how to do complex things all by themselves.

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