OLDaily

The Identity Challenge: On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2018/08/13

This article summarizes, Better Identity in America  (48 page PDF), "a policy agenda for improving the privacy and security of digital systems and help combat identity fraud." It's a response to the increasingly difficult problem of establishing and verifying identity online. Governments should modernize "legacy paper-based identity systems around a privacy-protecting, consumer-centric digital model." As well, they should stop using social security numbers as a form of authentication. And they should look at projects like the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance, the GSMA’s Mobile Connect, and the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Authn, - whose strong authentication technologies are being embedded in devices, operating systems and browsers.

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Dijkstra's in Disguise
Eric Jang, 2018/08/13

This post wanders very far from the subject of online learning, but I just found it too interesting to pass. It's also astonishing (to me) that it's characterized as "such a humble technique taught in introductory computer science courses." Times have changed since I was taking those courses! Basically, the author explores 'relaxation' mechanisms for finding the lowest-cost path between two nodes in a graph. This technique can be found in a variety of disciplines - "We have 3 very well-known algorithms (currency arbitrage, Q-learning, path tracing) that independently discovered the principle of relaxation used in shortest-path algorithms."

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Causal Models
Christopher Hitchcock, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018/08/13

There's a lot to like in this new article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. One is the examination of the relation between counbterfacturals and causality. Another is the lengthy discussion of probabilistic models of causality (probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in public knowledge today). And finally, the use of graphs (and especially directed acyclic graphs, or DAG) in the context of causality is significant. This is not the easiest read, but assists a deeper understanding of both educational research and of new technologies.

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Blockchain Gains Currency in Higher Ed
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/08/13

This article is mostly about blockchain as a subject for teaching and research in universities, as opposed to its use by universities. For example, there's a new journal, Ledger, and new blockchain reserach centres being launched at Columbia and Stanford. And of course there's a company that offers really expensive blockchain training courses. The gist is that there are opportunities here to expand into this new discipline.

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