OLDaily

AI & Global Governance: Human Rights and AI Ethics – Why Ethics Cannot be Replaced by the UDHR
Cansu Canca, AI & Global Governance Articles & Insights, United Nations University, 2019/07/30

According to this post, "In the increasingly popular quest of trying to make the tech world ethical, a new idea has emerged: just replace 'ethics' with 'human rights'." As an example, the author cites a "blog post and the report that it is based on from Harvard Law School: Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights: Opportunities & Risks wherein it is argued "human rights is the light that we need to follow to get out on the 'right' side." So why isn't this enough? "This argument is based on an overestimation of what the UDHR is capable of, and an underestimation of what ethics is and does." An action isn't wrong only if it violates human rights. It can be wrong for other reasons too. For example, we don't have a right to be told the truth - but it is still ethically wrong to lie to people. Moreover, "when there is conflict between different human rights, we would have to turn to principles of moral and political philosophy to reason further."

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Operating a Large, Distributed System in a Reliable Way: Practices I Learned
Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer, 2019/07/30

This is a long and detailed look at the challenges of running a distributed system told from the perspective of an insider at Uber. As the author notes, "the practices might be an overkill for smaller or less mission-critical systems." But there's no harm in knowing about them, especially given the outside chance that what you're building might suddenly become the next Uber. And there are some pretty good practices here - failover drills, blameless post-mortems, black-box testing systems.

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LiveCode
2019/07/30

I'm not sure whether the world needs more apps, but if this product works as advertised it will certainly get them. "LiveCode is where you can create native applications for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Server & now The Web all from the same code... LiveCode is packed full of ready made widgets and libraries to make light work of common tasks and if you can't find what you are looking for, check out our extensions store or you can even write your own. New in LiveCode 9 you can now access the native feature set on all supported platforms." There are demo apps, including ScreenSteps, a learning app. LiveCode has been around since 2017; here is the most recent weekly update. And yes, it's open source.

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Research: For Crowdsourcing to Work, Everyone Needs an Equal Voice
Edward “Ned” Smith, Joshua Becker, Harvard Business Review, 2019/07/30

Crowdsourcing doesn't work if one voice drowns out all the rest. Then it just becomes a form of transmission, rather than interactivity. "The wisdom of crowds is extremely fragile, especially in two specific circumstances: when people are influenced by the opinions of others (because they lose their independence) and when opinions are distorted by cognitive biases (for example, strong political views held by a group)." Simply being a crowd doesn't create knowledge. Being a crowd properly organized creates knowledge.

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Drink your own champagne?
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2019/07/30

The phrase used to be "eat your own dog food," and it refers to the idea that people should actually use the products they create. I definitely agree with that one. Quinn here is changing the expression to "drink your own champagne," presumably because eating dog food is objectionable. But to many people, so is drinking champagne. Maybe the expression should be changed to "use your own product" in celebration of internationalism and direct language.

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Formal and Informal Learning: What’s the Difference?
Emma O'Neill, LearnUpon, 2019/07/30

This article misses the point in a way that's illustrative. It defines formal learning as "planned and guided by an instructor" and informal learning as "unstructured, often unintended, and it occurs outside of a conventional learning setting." But Emma O'Neill adds, it "has no real objectives, rather it just happens naturally." Not exactly. If you just think of learning as the acquisition of content, then sure, informal learning has "no real objectives". But informal learning isn't just 'reading for fun' or some such thing. It's learning that occurs while you are in the process of trying to get something done, and what defines its success is whether you are able to do what you wanted to do. It's not a learning objective, it's a doing objective, that defines informal learning.

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