OLDaily

I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month
Sung Won Cho, Dnote, 2018/02/15

What if you wrote down what you learned every time you learned something. It would be a bit like taking classroom notes, but in real life. When I joined NRC people used to use scientific notebooks where they would capture everything. I use this newsletter for the same purpose, partially (but I don't capture all kinds of knowledge, like how to parse OPML files, for example). For me, being able to find the note again was important. But sometimes just the taking of the note can be enough of an intentional act. Anyhow, Sung Won Cho tried this (using Dnote) and found it " allowed me to see through the fuzzy meaning of learning and clearly quantify just how much I was learning... I was not learning as much as I had thought, but also because we seemed to misunderstand the ways of learning."

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Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinking Preprint Badges!
Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/02/15

To date when people have talked about badges they've talked about badges as something people earn. But what about artifacts, like academic articles? It makes sense. Badges would function a bit like awards (the way films are labled with the 'Palm d'Or badge') or a bit like certification (as in the Good Housekeeping 'Seal of Approval'). It makes me think that all along I should have been awarding 'Posted in OLDaily' badges rewarding articles and resources worthy of mention. It's like how I once won the 'Cool Site of the Day' badge. But for professionals and academics. The 'Published by Nature' badge would be worth getting, and Nature could make it work by doing only peer review; leave the bother of publishing and distribution to others. Of course the opinion of the pro-publisher Scholarly Kitchen blog is that preprint services issuing badges are "outlaws" For example, "By incorporating post-publication validation badges into preprints, bioRxiv begins to transform itself into the largest open access megajournal the world has ever seen."

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Facebook spamming users via their 2FA phone numbers
Jack Morse, Mashable, 2018/02/15

This article is a bit off in that its original title appears and then is obscured by the newer title. The original title? "Facebook is so desperate for engagement, it's spamming users via their 2FA numbers." I like it better than the original. '2FA' stands for 'Two Factor Authentication' and here refers to the practice of having people enter their phone numbers so they can verify logins via text messages. Now Facebook is sending marketing through these numbers. It also appears to have struck a deal with Microsoft to have its application automatically installed on Windows 10 machines, hence marketing themselves through the desktop as well (I use Windows 10 but can't report having seen these). These are annoying, to be sure, but also the inevitable result of a business plan based on massive numbers of eyeballs. And as I read recently, "The older generation is afraid of social media doing to their children what television did to them."

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A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consensus Algorithms
Zane Witherspoon, Hacker Noon, 2018/02/15

A 'consensus algorithm' is a mechanism for verifying transactions in a distributed network. A transaction doesn't take place until everyone (or a large enough subset of everyone) agrees that it can take place (ie., it isn't contradicted by some previous transaction). But how do you get to have a say in these consensus networks? That's what the algorithms decide. The first is 'proof of work', such as solving equations to 'mine' bitcoins. Another is 'proof of stake' in which you 'bet' on the validity of transactions. A third is 'delegated' proof of stake, in which you elect a subset of you to become validators. Related is 'proof of authority', where transactions are validated by approved accounts. The 'proof of weight' algorithms award authority to the largest entities. Then the algorithms get messy: there's Byzantine Fault tolerance, spaghetti algorithms, and more.

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What are the priorities for L&D in the modern workplace? Our survey says …
Jane Hart, Modern Workplace Learning, 2018/02/15

The term 'L&D' is being used as a noun in this survey, as in 'the Learning & Development Department'. So we see questions like "Do you think that L&D should manage social learning in the workplace?" The answer to this one, courtesy of 173 responses to Jane Hart's survey, was 'yes' at 33% and 'no' at 57%. I'm not sure how an L&D department would manage social learning. The real surprise, though, was the answer to this one: "Do you think the primary purpose of the L&D department is to design, deliver and manage training/e-learning for the organisation?" Most said 'no', and the number is increasing. So what should these departments do? Respondents wanted to spend their time "helping managers develop their teams, and helping individuals learn from daily work and share their knowledge experience."

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