OLDaily

Microsoft shutters Mixer game streaming platform, will partner with Facebook Gaming
Taylor Soper, GeekWire, 2020/06/29

Microsoft is shutting down its streaming game service called Mixer. It's not something I ever used (I game on the Steam platform) so I can't exactly judge the impact, but I can understand how hard it is for the clients and customers when a platform is discontinued (and on a related note, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google's Stadia streaming game platform discontinued as well). Also, people are not happy to see the tech moving to Facebook; "this has angered a large section of the hardcore gaming community, where a general distrust of Facebook is commonplace." The big winner in all this is probably Twitch, which should absorb the majority of the post-Mixer traffic.

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Humeanism about Laws of Nature
Harjit Bhogal, PhilPapers, Philosophy Compass, 2020/06/29

My approach to theory and explanation is what could roughly be called 'humean' (as in, following David Hume). This is the "the idea is that laws of nature reduce to the patterns of occurrent, non-modal, events that occur in the world. The laws of nature are just patterns, or ways of describing patterns, in the mosaic of events." A 'law of nature' is to me not a necessary connection and does not 'govern' relations between entities. This article (23 page PDF) looks at the (many) objections to this view, and concludes with an outline of how to understand the concept of explanation so that it makes sense. Specifically, we ask, what is added to explanation by theory? What does it even mean to say a law of nature 'governs' a regularity? What explanatory force does a 'theoretical lens' offer?

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Groundbreaking research on use of Virtual Reality in school education. Australia leads the way
Erica Southgate, EduResearch Matters, 2020/06/29

I'm not sure the claim about leading the way is accurate (I'm actually sitting in a meeting on developing VR industrial safety training as I type this) but the article does highlight some of the ways VR will be used in education. What's important in this description is this: "to get the best ethical and educational outcomes with emerging technologies we must carefully incubate these in schools (and not just resource-rich ones) in collaboration with willing teachers so that we can document incremental ‘innovation’ through ‘state-of-the-actual’ reporting."

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Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto
Andrea Saltelli, Nature, 2020/06/29

The five ways are (quoted):

• Mind the assumptions... Models are often imported from other applications, ignoring how assumptions that are reasonable in one situation can become nonsensical in another.
• Mind the hubris... The complexity of a model is not always an indicator of how well it captures the important features.
• Mind the framing... Results from models will at least partly reflect the interests, disciplinary orientations and biases of the developers.
• Mind the consequences... Quantification can backfire... Undiscriminating use of statistical tests can substitute for sound judgement.
• Mind the unknowns... Acknowledge ignorance... Failure to acknowledge this can artificially limit the policy options and open the door to undesired surprises.

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John Legend VR
Jeremy Dalton, LinkedIn, 2020/06/29

This is a super-short LinkedIn post but I want to highlight it nonetheless. "Music icon John Legend performed virtually on Thursday with the audience attending through #VirtualReality and via a YouTube live stream." Now the important thing isn't his recording on YouTube (in fact, I just cancelled my YouTube music subscription because the quality was a significant downgrade from Google Music, which is going away). No, the really interesting bit is the "immersive, life-like experience" with "the technology provider behind the concert, Wave". More from VR Scout. Legend also did a VR appearance last month with Melody VR. Now while there are limitations - attendees saw an avatar, not a full VR John Legend, and audio quality remains vital - fully immersive VR is probably the long-term future of sports and entertainment.

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Foam
Jani Eväkallio, GitHub, 2020/06/29

This application takes a bit to try out (my initial test here), but I love the concept and hope I can advance further. Here's the idea: "Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system inspired by Roam Research, built on Visual Studio Code and GitHub. You can use Foam for organising your research, keeping re-discoverable notes, writing long-form content and, optionally, publishing it to the web." What I like about basing it in GitHub and VSCode is that any number of plug-ins can be applied to the content, creating the potential for a powerful personal knowledge management system - or dare I say, a personal learning environment.

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All change? Don’t hold your breath.
Ewan McIntosh, notosh, 2020/06/29

Practice-Based Education (PBE), as discussed in this post, has been around for 20 years or more, and sometimes called Practice-Based Learning or even Practice-Based Professional Learning (PBPL). As Ewan McIntosh describes it, PBE "seeks to replicate real-world conditions to familiarize students with the complexity of large systems" and "tries, as authentically as possible, to replicate the working conditions students will face when they graduate by making them responsible, collaborative and (to) genuinely learn in a transdisciplinary fashion." The approach is similar to Problem-Based Learning (PBL), which has a lot to recommend it, but which "is often constrained by the educational institutions and structures that surround it." It has been argued for decades that online learning makes something like PBE possible. But will we see it emerge as part of the new normal? It would be great, but as McIntosh says, "don't hold your breath". Image: Matt Hagen, Designs for Practice-Based Teacher Education.

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