OLDaily

Spitball brings the blockchain to decentralise elearning
Alex Hamilton, IBS Express, 2018/08/23

This is very similar to other blokchain applications to create DRM-like capabilities in e-books and other publications. For example, Scenarix is a company that has worked with NRC to build blockchain publishing solutions; it anticipates rolling out its Bookchain application for general use in October of this year. Spitball, meanwhile, is building on its (non-blockchain) 1.0 application that does things like reward small amounts of money for homework answers. The proposed 2.0 application (white paper) would tokenize the interactions, creating what it calls "the world's first decentralized student economy". It will have to be faster than Woolf University to do that.

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Exploring blockchain for better business
National Research Council Canada, 2018/08/23

This is a very nice implementation of blockchain technology - Ethereum, to be specific - to provide public access to data about National Research Council (NRC) Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) grants to companies in different research areas. Coverage in Coindesk. You can see the implementation here. Now as the NRC press release notes, "These are early days, but NRC IRAP's experiments with blockchain are expected to provide constructive insight into the potential for this technology and how it may be used for more open and transparent operations for public programs." You might ask: how is this different from just providing access to a database? On the surface, it isn't different, but because it's on the blockchain, the government can't come along later and revise it or remove it. It's a matter of public record, and there it stays.

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BU, ACC developing virtual reality look at First World War internment camp
Brandon Sun, 2018/08/23

This is a part of our history that has to a large degree been expunged and forgotten, but during the first world war internment camps were set up across Canada to isolate "so-called 'enemy aliens' -  immigrants who’d come to Canada from countries that were fighting against the British Empire." The records of these camps were destroyed in the 1950s. One such camp was located in Brandon, not far from where I used to live, and this project will recreate the camp as an interactive virtual reality (VR) experience. Brandon University has a more detailed press release about the project. It is being co-developed with Assiniboine Community College. Here's more information about the internment camps.

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Fairness without demographics in repeated loss minimization
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2018/08/23

The key to representing minorities fairly is to recognize that there are minorities. But what if information about minorities isn't in the data? A lot of machine learning datasets have this problem, which is why they perform poorly with respect to them. A speech-recognition system might perform poorly with minority accents, for example. The solution is to assume there are minorities and then account for them based on distributionally robust optimization (DRO) . This post describes a paper that describes the process. Interestingly, it's a machine learning system based on the philosophy of John Rawls describing 'justice' as fairness.

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The Pros and Cons of Six Different Competency Models
Kerry Williams, Avilar, 2018/08/23

The headline of this post is a bit misleading. A competency model is "a framework for defining the skill and knowledge requirements of a job. It’s a collection of competencies that jointly define successful job performance." But instead of defining six different types of competency model, this article describes six different ways "how these competencies will be defined, assessed, and rated." This, however, is still a useful list suggesting different options for enterprises seeking to define their own competency model. Via E-Learning Learning.

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