OLDaily

About face
Doc Searls, 2019/10/31

OK. No. I just can't go along with this. From Doc Searls: "The only entities that should be able to recognize people’s faces are other people. And maybe their pets. But not machines." Why can't I go along with this? Because it's basically a call to end artificial intelligence. Let's go back to the beginning: Searls starts off with a compelling account from Polanyi's Personal Knowldge about his oft-cited definition of 'tacit knowledge'. Now two things are true. First, 'tacit' is the opposite of 'explicit', in the sense that the former is ineffible - that is, it can't be put into words. And second, tacit knowledge is like recognizing a person's face. Such knowledge is, in essence, connective knowledge - it's the sort of knowledge a neural network would have, both human and AI. That's why it's so hard to explain how an AI reaches the conclusions it does - the knowledge is tacit, formed by connections, not words. But Searl wants to ban this. Which - to me - makes no sense.

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An OpenEd Conference Update
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2019/10/31

David Wiley announced today he will no longer run the OpenEd conference. "It’s a call to reset and start over. To go back to the drawing board – as a community – and critically examine all of our assumptions about conferences... This reimagining must be owned by the community. It must be driven by the community." Given some of the recent controversies, this is not surprising. I'm sure most of the community both appreciates Wiley's contributions and welcomes the reset.

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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action
Cameron Neylon, Knowledge Exchange, 2019/10/31

This publication (100 page PDF) began as a book sprint in 2018 and has recently been released in revised form. By 'sustained' here they are talking in the economic sense, which is their focus, and much of the discussion relies on market economics. They're also much more interested in the 'meso' level - universities and institutions - than the micro level of individual researchers. " The authors argue that "for change to be sustained it requires both community institutions that support the new status quo (establishing clear definitions of requirements, clarity on the process for selection, and transparency and trust), and communities themselves (eg funders, research performing organisations, and scholarly communities) that support change." I'm not really comfortable with this market-focused approach that defines scholarly activity as commodity. Via JISC.

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Userland
Hisham H. Muhammad, Hisham HM, 2019/10/31

Not to be confused with Frontier Userland, an aggregator  from the 1990s, Userland is "an integrated dataflow environment for user applications." Certainly a great interactive tool for learning. It's hard to explain but easy to see - watch this video for demos. Think of it as a spreadsheet and shell programming combined in a single dynamic interface. Like I said, hard to explain. I'd put it into the category near Jupyter Notebooks. Via O'Reilly.

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indiekit
Paul Robert Lloyd, GitHub, 2019/10/31

A good start: "The immediate goal of this project is to provide a Micropub endpoint that can be hosted on a service like Heroku, configured via files stored on a GitHub repo, and save posts back to that repo for publishing with a static site generator such as Eleventy, Hugo or Jekyll. The software is fully documented and tested." Can't wait to try it out. :)

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