OLDaily

Presentation
Topics in Distributed Ledger Technology
Stephen Downes, Aug 30, 2018, In-house Workshop, Ottawa, Ontario

This is an in-house presentation presentation looks at key underlying concepts of blockchain and related technologies - distributed, ledgers, hash functions, consensus. It discusses applications, some of the major coin projects, platforms and services, and some issues with this approach. Audio requires editing before it can be posted.

[Link] [Slides]

A manifesto for reproducible science
Marcus Munafò, Wonkhe, 2018/08/30

This article summarizes the points made by a longer article of the same title published in Nature. It alludes to the previously discovered 'reproducibility crisis' in science, and calls for a series of measures to ensure scientific and (especially) statistical rigour and respectability. Educators will be familiar with the two-pronged solution they proposed: first, training (and especially 'rigorous' training in research methods), and second, rewards (including 'badges'). Why they thought these were the things that would solve the problem escapes me. From where I sit, the problems are the result of social and structural issues, not the individual failings of researchers.

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Google Titan Security Key Review: Two Great Keys For The Price Of One
Cameron Summerson, ReviewGeek, 2018/08/30

Everyone will have security keys of one sort or another shortly. I've written before about the Yubi key. This post reviews Google's answer to (and some would say rip-off of) the Yubi. "When you sign into an account that’s protected by a security key, you’ll have to insert it into your device (or pair over Bluetooth) and press the button. So this requires physically access to the key. This is basically means it’s virtually impossible to fake, and thus the current strongest form of security against phishing and other account hijacking attempts." It will still take some time before everybody is foing this, but not that much time.

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The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it.
Wil Wheaton, Wil Wheaton dot Net, 2018/08/30

Wil Wheaton has quit the tire-fire we call Twitter and now, because of an abusive reception, he has quite Mastodon as well and has sworn of social media altogether. Leo Laporte of TWiT has also signed off Twitter. I think Wheaton sums up the problem nicely. "I watched, in real time, as the site I loved turned into a right wing talk radio shouting match that made YouTube comments and CSPAN call-ins seem scholarly. We tried for a couple of years to fight back, to encourage Twitter to take a stand against bad actors. Twitter doesn’t care about how its users are affected by themselves, though."

I used to write about the concepts of 'push' and 'pull' a lot more than I do today. The idea is that the web (or anything else) could work one of two ways: either you you pull the stuff you want, or you let others push you content (and you filter the stuff you fdon't want, if you can). RSS is an example of pull; so is podcasting, so is the web itself. Email, radio, TV, social network feeds and telephones are examples of push. I have always been a proponent of pull. Push can be (and inevitably will be) abused by people. They will say we need suggestions, that there's too much choice, that we don't know what we want, that some messages are too important to be left to change, that there must be a common social fabric - whatever. But in the end it Always. Gets. Abused.

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The Sixth “R” of Open Educational Resources
Chris Aldrich, Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist, 2018/08/30

You have to read to the bottom of the article to find out that the sixth R is "Request update." Chris Aldrich writes, "OER is an incredibly powerful concept already, but could be even more so with the ability to push new updates or at least notifications of them back to the original." It's worth noting that systems like Wikipedia and GitHub have both enabled this feature, and it makes them more valuable. As it stands, however, "keeping them updated with potential changes can potentially be a difficult proposition. It may not always be the case that resources are maintained on a single platform." That said, there may be "a means of leveraging the W3C recommended specification for Webmention as a means of keeping a tally of changes to resources online."

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Offering a more progressive definition of freedom
Jason Kottke, kottke.org, 2018/08/30

A little off-topic but I like this. "Clean drinking water is freedom. Good public education is freedom. Universal healthcare is freedom. Fair wages are freedom. Policing by consent is freedom. Gun control is freedom. Fighting climate change is freedom. A non-punitive criminal justice system is freedom. Affirmative action is freedom. Decriminalizing poverty is freedom. Easy & secure voting is freedom. This is an idea of freedom I can get behind." Yeah.

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