OLDaily

Docker Container and Vagrant / Virtualbox 101s
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2018/08/09

This is a very useful article if you're just getting started with virtualization. Tony Hirst starts with a very simple example, specifically, a Python application called Flask, which is in essence a very simple web server. He then provides a Dockerfile which describes the server environment Flask needs to run. Simple. Stepping it up a notch, he then demonstrates how to set up an API server where the API is defined in a Jupyter notebook and published using the Jupyter Kernel Gateway to again run on Docker. Oy, not so simple (and doesn't seem to work on Zeit). Finally, he shows how to run the Flask demo using another virtualization application, Vagrant, which (it's worth noting) is a lot more complicated. In any case, these can then be run on cloud provisioners - Digital Ocean seems to be the flavour of the month.

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Bad news: there's no solution to false information online
Ben Werdmuller, 2018/08/09

"It's clearly impossible for the web as a platform to objectively report that a stated fact is true or false," writes Ben Werdmuller. "This would require a central authority of truth - let's call it MiniTrue for short." And there's no easy way to do this in a distributed fashion. Werdmuller (like many others) suggests ways of seeing the 'conversation' around links or ideas, but that's what we have with Twitter, and it is entirely inadequate.

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Why Higher Ed Should Do More with Blockchain Tech
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2018/08/09

I found that this was more a use case for key-based authentication than it was for blockchain, and I also think the article felt a little bit like an endorsement for a start-up called Trusted Key. There's a lot of key-based authentication systems out there; the market leader is probably Yubi, which just completed a successful trial with Google. Token puts it into a (large) ring (which needs to be smaller). They're based on a new web authentication protocol called FIDO2 being developed by W3C with major players in the web space. Here are the basics of FIDO2. Anyhow, the ORU example documented here has the university and the student sign certificates, such that these signatures are recorded in a blockchain.

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The neuroscience of intelligence: Empirical support for the theory of multiple intelligences?
C. Branton Shearer, Jessica M. Karanian, Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 2018/08/09

I ran across this today while looking for something else; it is an uncorrected proof of a paywalled article based on a review of 318 functional neuroimaging based research papers. The results suggest there is a neural basis for multiple intelligences (and hence, learning styles as well) (yes, I know there's a difference between multiple intelligences and learning styles). Now I am not a fan of fMRI at all, but I found the article interesting.

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