OLDaily

RSS is undead
Danny Crichton, TechCrunch, 2018/04/10

The gist of this article is that RSS is beyond saving. Even if it appears to have life, the fact that big companies are turning their backs on it means that it has no real future. One failing, writes Danny Crichton, is that it doesn't prioritize content for the user, as illustrated by the futility of subscribing to the Washington Post RSS feed, which has 1200 articles per day. "How exactly do you find good RSS feeds? Once you have found them, how do you group and prune them over time to maximize signal?" But even more significant, he writes, is the lack of analytics on the publisher side. "RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior." Also, "RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively." What RSS enabled, which commercial providers couldn't stand, were things like choice and privacy. There may not be a business model for these - which, of course, is the author's point. But they are what readers want. Which is why RSS refuses to die.

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“You might want to tell your instructors about this:” students as sales reps?
Kaitlyn Vitez, United States Public Interest Research Group, 2018/04/10

According to this article, Cengage is trying to convince student customers to send email messages to their professors urging them to adopt Cengage's 'flat fee for access' to course materials (previously covered here). The author quotes students arguing they don't like being used in this way. “It’s pretty aggressive, I don’t like how they’re using us to get into the professor’s head. The worst part is that professors could totally fall for it.” Though I agree with the criticism, note that this article is from an advocacy group, though most cites are coming from copy on Medium.

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How to Collaborate When You Don’t Have Consensus
Adam Kahane, Strategy+Business, 2018/04/10

I really like this article because it addresses the question of how to work together in real life. In real like, you don't construct shared meaning or agree on values and goals. You might not agree on much at all. This is when traditional calls for 'collaboration' are at their most facile. As the author writes, "teams collaborate: A boss leads everyone to see the problem the same way (probably the way the boss does), and then to agree on a way forward." In any sort of non-hierarchal arrangement, that doesn't work. You have to learn to work differently. As Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá, said, "The most robust agreements are those that different actors support for different reasons.” Do read this article. And when you advocate 'collaboration' as a part of education, or something that should be taught, think of the more complex picture this article evokes.

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The Ethics of Manipulation
Robert Noggle, Robert Noggle, 2018/04/10

This is a new article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and it is as timely as it is provocative. I have always thought of advertising as deeply unethical. In a 1996 article I criticized McDonalds because "advertise heavily and focus their advertisements at innocent children." I also qwuestion the use of manipulative tactics in education; this, it seems to me, changes it from teaching to propaganda. And of course we have all been reading about recent social media manipulation changing the oucomes of referenca and elections. But if it's unethical, why would this be? Is it because it bypasses reason? Is it because it's a type of trickery? Is it because it's a pressure tactic? Is it because it treats people as things? Is it because it bypasses autonomy? Is it, indeed, always wrong? Things to think about. Image: XKCD. I downloaded it, so I thought I'd get some use out of it.

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Securing the bava
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2018/04/10

I went through a similar exercise last week, and for similar reasons, switching from the unencrypted http format to the encrypted https. It was a pain, to say the least. I didn't go into static files and change all the existing http links from 20 years worth of web sites (nor will I, probably). What I did do, though, is set up my server so that any call to http on any of my sites will automatically redirect to an https call. I might still need to do more to make full Google-compliance, but if you're getting stuff from my site, you're getting it encrypted. See also: organizational linkrot.

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DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one
Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review, 2018/04/10

This is another one of those education technologies where we might want to review the ethical implications before launching widespread deployment. According to this report, " we can now read the DNA of a young child and get a notion of how intelligent he or she will be." Allow me to say, "oh my gosh what a bad idea!" We don't even know whether IQ is relevant, now we're trying to predict it using possible specious correlations? Anyhow, the story continues, "Plomin outlined the DNA IQ test scenario in January in a paper titled The New Genetics of Intelligence, making a case that parents will use direct-to-consumer tests to predict kids’ mental abilities and make schooling choices, a concept he calls precision education."

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