OLDaily

In Open Access’s Long Shadow – A view from the Humanities
Enrico Natale, Journal for Library Culture, 2019/08/22

This is an intelligent and very well informed discussion of the history of open access (dating to the 1800s, when 'open acess' referred to the freedom to browse the stacks in a library) and some of the points of discussion pro and con, especially from the perspective of the humanities. Though the author doesn't take a point of view, this article offers probably the best argument against open access I've seen: "the reason why open access is being pushed forward is primarily to serve the interests of the economy, and not for the benefit of the public good... this is problematic because this process takes place in a context of commercial enclosure. Scientific literature and data ought to be given out for free, while knowledge produced under patents, or subject to commercial exploitation, is exempt from the requirements of open science... that open access is undermining the value of intellectual labour and dispossessing academics of their work."

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GitHub Adds LMS Integration for More Efficient Workflows
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/08/22

Keeping in mind that GitHub is now owned by Microsoft... "GitHub Education helps students, teachers, and schools access the tools and events they need to shape the next generation of software development." To that end, as this story reports, "GitHub announced integrations between GitHub Classroom and popular learning management systems Google Classroom, Instructure Canvas, D2L Brightspace and Moodle, enabling the automatic syncing of students from the LMS platform to GitHub Classroom." There's more in this GitHub blog post from last week.

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A critique of pure learning and what artificial neural networks can learn from animal brains
Anthony M. Zador, Nature, 2019/08/22

There's a lot to like in this article. It looks at animal learning (including human learning from the perspective of a computer scientist, and then tries to apply the lessons learned back to artificial neural network (ANN) theory. Where the article gets interesting is where it looks deeply at just what constitutes learning, the role of experience in learning, and how (interestingly) experience shapes even innate knowledge through the long-term learning mechanism of evolution and natural selection. What are the lessons to be drawn? Pay more attention to network architecture, and look for underlying processes or skills that can be applied in multiple cognitive domains.

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Over 50% of Google searches result in no clicks, data shows
Mix, The Next Web, 2019/08/22

I passed on this article at first, but then this week I was searching for flights and found Google providing its own travel agent service allowing you to book flights with Google ("Google will securely pass your traveller and payment details to the airline"). It was nice - Google had all my information and had pre-filled all the forms except my destination and flight selection. But should Google be able to insert its services between yourself and your search target? What would we say if, say, 'Google University' offered to book courses with selected partners to people searching 'learn philosophy'? What about job search firms? See also ZDNet, Digital Information World, Search Engine Land, SparkToro.

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