OLDaily

DiscreetAI
Ashwinee Panda, Product Hunt, 2020/05/22

It's hard to believe that this is only the #2 product of the day on Product Hunt (taking the top spot is a video escape room). Machine learning depends on having enough data to train a neural network model, however, if you don't have enough data (you have, say, only a certain number of bottles in your home) to can send out the application, have people in different places scan their data (the bottles in their homes, say) and collect the results (not all the training data) to create a single output (a bottle-recognizing network, say). Via Reddit.

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The pod exclusion
Wendy M. Grossman, net.wars, 2020/05/22

This is more commentary about Spotify's attack on open podcasting. "it will be much harder for their creators to find audiences and revenues as Spotify becomes the primary gatekeeper. This is what happened with blogs between 2008 and 2015 as social media took over." I'd like to think that there will be a way for the podcasting community to respond, but the key to success isn't just in depending RSS, it is in providing a way for podcasts to show up on podcasting applications like iTunes, TuneIn Radio, Player FM, and the like.

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Calls to end BBC’s lockdown lessons will hit poor hardest
John Dickens, Schools Week, 2020/05/22

We see this from time to time, but it's always worth highlighting because there are still people who pretend it doesn't happen. Specifically, what we have here is yet another instance in which commercial education providers are lobbying against open online learning resources because of "fears they will squeeze commercial curriculum providers out of the market." I would think that the needs of the poor are more important than the needs of commercial publishers. But in Britain, the publishers will probably prevail. I know a lot of people are calling for a social equity reset after the pandemic, but we must always remember that organizations like the British Educational Suppliers Association are there to stand opposed.

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Taking empathy online
Lucy Osler, Inquiry, 2020/05/22

Lucy Osler offers a useful counterpoint to many of the anti-online arguments being offered these days.  "This paper serves not only to show that empathy (a notion at the heart of the phenomenology of sociality) takes place online but opens the door to a rich array of phenomenological investigations in relation to our experiences online." The paper offers a good discussion of the history and theory of empathy, noting that "we can empathetically perceive others ‘at a distance’ from their physical bodies." It then looks at online empathy from the perspective of technologically mediated interactions (eg., a video call) and from the feeling evoked by text. Image: Verywell.

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