OLDaily

Post-REST
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2018/11/19

REST stands for 'Representational State Transfer' and it was the nice light-weight way we created interfaces between programs running on the web (instead of using the heavy and over-engineered Web Services architecture). But now Tim Bray is looking at what comes after REST. "Mes­sag­ing and Event­ing... is all over, and I mean all over, the cloud in­fras­truc­ture that I work on," he writes. Request workflows are another area of focus. But the big changes are persistent connections and "QUIC (Quick UDP Inter­net Con­nec­tion­s) which aban­dons TCP in fa­vor of UDP, while re­tain­ing HTTP se­man­tic­s."  The idea is to speed up streaming content (such as games, messaging and video) as explained here.

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Are MOOCs Going to Disappear? 4 Challenges to Overcome
Laurie Pickard, Class Central, 2018/11/19

The answer to the question is "no", at least in my view, but for reasons having little to do with the four outstanding issues highlighted in this article. We've seen these issues show up in any number of articles: completion rates, accreditation, accessibility, and sustainability. These, though, are the issues faced by traditional online courses pretending to be MOOCs. In MOOCs as they were originally defined, completion rates are a non-issue, accreditation is in the eyes of the participants, access is to any and all who are interested, and sustainability is based in the community (and the fact that we don't really have budgets to offer these things).

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The relationship between Personality Traits, Learning Styles and Academic Performance of E-Learners
Nabia Luqman Siddiquei, Ruhi Khalid, Open Praxis, 2018/11/19

I like posting titles from academic journals referring to learning styles if only to needle the very loud voices from a certain quarter that there's no such thing as learning styles (and it's funny looking at the proliferation of academic studies on one side and polimics (insisting we look at the evidence) on the other side. Of course, no doubt this study too is fatally flawed as it argues that "personality traits have a facilitative role in learning process of e-learners and it also helps to motivate the e-learners... personality traits and learning styles are correlated to each other ... (and) all four learning styles were correlated with GPA."

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The Case Against Quantum Computing
Mikhail Dyakonov, IEEE Spectrum, 2018/11/19

We've seen a number of breathless predictions for quantum computing in the last couple of years. This article throws a cautionary note into our coverage. Here's the problem: "A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe." This in itself in't a big deal; the computer on which I'm typing this has 64 Gig RAM, which has ((64*8)^2)-1) possible states. The problem is that unlike my computer, in a quantum computer, each bit is in a probabilistic state, not an on-off state. But so what? Why wouldn't 'gating' work? As one commenter says, you can emulate my computer "on a quantum computer with circuit depth 1 by applying e.g. Hadamard gates to each individual qubit." Of course, like everything else, the proof will come in the form of actual working quantputers.

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The OA Interviews: Arul George Scaria
Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?, 2018/11/19

This is an interview with Arul George Scaria, the principle investigator of a landscape survey (175 page PDF) of the current situation in India as concerns open science conducted by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition (CIIPC) in New Delhi. The document itself is significant, and the interview contains a number of key points, including this: "What we are witnessing today is the capture of shared community resources by a handful of cash-rich conglomerates who want to monopolise every aspect of science communication. We as a community need to fight back against the monopolisation of our resources."

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New Framework: Critical Uncertainties in the Future of Work
Ross Dawson, 2018/11/19

After having relaunched his newsletter earlier this year, Ross Dawson has released a new framework on the 'critical uncertancies' in the future of work. These include uncertainties based on the growth of AI, the growth of internet access in developing countries, on-demand work platforms, diversity of the labour force, and rising expectations for quality of life and positive impact.

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