OLDaily

The Make to Learn Electric Motor Design Sequence
Glen Bull, Joe Garofalo, Michael Littman, Matthew Hoffman, Register Login International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2018/06/18

I like this idea."The goal of the project is for students to gain fluency in the process of invention and to understand related science concepts embodied in the inventions." They do this by having students make not just one but a sequence of progressively more advanced electric motors. "Kits have been developed for three types of motors in the electric motor sequence: (a) the Davenport Rotary motor, (b) the Charles Page Solenoid motor, and (c) a contemporary linear motor based on a 20th-century design." I never got to do anything like this when I was in school. I wish I had. 13 page PDF. From the just released current edition of International Journal of Designs for Learning.

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Predator and Prey
Mike Bostock, Observable, 2018/06/18

Nicely described in O'Reilly thusly: "a really nice demo of the "what if we didn't publish static text and images, but instead you could interact with the explanation?" You can continue on and look at other examples of Explorables, though note that they get complex quickly. De Casteljau’s Algorithm, for example, is a mind-bender. But the benefit of something like Explorables is that you can see what the equations are describing. And you can see how practical some algorithms are, as in for example this bit of centerline labeling on a map of California. Here's the Observable platform, where you can make stuff like this.

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https://github.com/o1lab/xmysql
GitHub, 2018/06/18

I'd rather have a jmysql - a one line JSON api. But still, this is a pretty cool concept. "Generating REST APIs for a MySql database which does not follow conventions of frameworks such as rails, django, laravel etc is a small adventure that one like to avoid .. Hence this." Use with caution, though. Related: AWS SAM CLI -- a CLI tool for local development and testing of serverless applications.

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https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f
Kate Starbird, Medium, 2018/06/18

This is a detailed and compelling look at the alternative media ecosystem. Educators should pay close attention because there is a parallel underground effort to create an alternative education ecosystem. The core purpose is to prmote an anti-gglobalist and pro-nationalist agenda ("e.g. anti-immigration, anti-Western imperialism, anti-corporation, anti-media") and the tactic is to use botnets and alternative news sites to spread disinformation and sow confusion. Elements of mainstram thought are co-opted as needed (the way the term 'fake news' was adopted and turned around against traditional news media). It doesn't help that our institutions - government, corporations, media, universities - are such easy targets. People need to pay attention to what's happening, and to look at these institutions, fix them, and create a credible alternative to the disinformation being spread today. Because "a society who learns it cannot trust information can be easily controlled."

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Dank Learning: Generating Memes Using Deep Neural Network
Abel L. Peirson V, E. Meltem Tolunay, arXiv, 2018/06/18

I have a longstanding interest in memes as alternative forms of communication, and this paper demonstrating AI generated memes takes the conversation forward another step. The researchers fed the AI a series of images and associated captions, and the AI generated new captions. They are hard to distinguish from the original. Memes follow a set of implicit rules, and the AI learned the rules without explicitly representing them. So what's next? The AI will be about to generate memes at a rate far greater than humans can, and the AI could be tweaked to tilt the memes in a certain political direction just as social media has been tweaked in the last few years. Students will need to learn to read memes just as they read social media, and to be able to detect bias in both.

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