OLDaily

Emergent Properties
Timothy O'Connor, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020/08/17

I have referred to 'emergence' numerous times over the years in talks and papers, usually describing the phenomenon by means of some simple examples. This new article (replacing the original 2002 article) is a definitive account of the concept, covering varieties of emergent properties. According to the article, emergence covers a range of properties that aree neither exactly dependent on underlying phenomena, nor completely autonomous from them. "Consider, for example, a tornado. At any moment, a tornado depends for its existence on dust and debris, and ultimately on whatever micro-entities compose it; and its properties and behaviors likewise depend, one way or another, on the properties and interacting behaviors of its fundamental components. Yet the tornado’s identity does not depend on any specific composing micro-entity or configuration, and its features and behaviors appear to differ in kind from those of its most basic constituents." What I would say is that the thoughts, ideas, perceptions and beliefs we have are all like that tornado - not exactly the underlying physical instantiation (there's no specific set of neural states that is 'this idea'), but not autonomous from it either.

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By the Numbers: MOOCs During the Pandemic
Dahwal Shah, Class Central, 2020/08/17

We all know MOOCs have become much more popular during the pandemic; this is the data to support the assertion. "The top three MOOC providers (Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn) registered as many new users in April as in the whole of 2019. Over the years, the providers have become better at monetization, but in terms of new registered users they had hit a growth wall, adding a similar number of users in both 2019 and 2018. The pandemic broke through that wall. Around 25-30% of their total registered users on these platforms came after the pandemic."

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To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab
Ethan Zuckerman, My heart’s in Accra, 2020/08/17

Everything about the Media Lab in one post. "There’s so many beautiful and brilliant people who pass through here – and so many frustrated and broken people too – that it gets hard to keep tabs on everyone." The Media Lab was such a good idea, executed so poorly.

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Open at the Margins
Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, Rajiv Jhangiani, Rebus, 2020/08/17

It's going to take a while to digest everything that's in it, but I want to highlight for now the availability of this eBook (306 page PDF). As Maha Bali writes, the book "centers voices from the margins on open education, a field that until recently was dominated entirely by white, Northern/Western male voices." As one of those privileged white male voices, I would like to wholheartedly welcome the much-needed diversity that this volume brings to the field. It's an accessible collection of blog posts and such that the authors have written over the last few years. That said, many of the authors are very familiar to me, and so I would encourage the editors to redouble their efforts to find the voices not being heard should they contemplate a second volume.

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The auto-suggested life is not worth living
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2020/08/17

I get what Doug Belshaw is saying here but I'm not going to agree with it. I already use the auto-suggestions in my Pixel phone quite a lot (mostly in text messages I exchange with Andrea). Nothing like using one button to day "I'm on my way!" Anyhow, Belshaw suggest that "One way to think about this is as a subtle pressure to conform. It’s an approach rooted in behaviourism, the idea that a particular stimulus always leads to a particular response." Who wants to live a life like that? he asks. Well, I do. When I'm out cycling and text Andrea, I want it to know what I'm going to say (eg., "I'm in Ste-Anne de Prescott") and allow me to confirm with a single button. As long as I'm creating the patterns such a device makes my life easier. The more it frees me from the routine, the more room it leaves me for the original and creative.

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Pixel is a powerful, portal, personal pocketful of AI....
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2020/08/17

What's interesting to me about the Pixel phone - which I've been using for maybe the last year - is that it grows into you. Maybe in the future we'll talking about 'wearing in' or 'breaking in' an AI tool much the way we talk today about good leather. I bought it specifically for the speech recognition, which works reasonably well even without training, but I've appreciated how it adjusts itself to optimize for the apps I use most frequently (which works quite well except for the time it turned off GPS during a lull in my biking). Donald Clark talks about the AI in Google's phone at length in this article, and I think he's quite right to say that "the AI in every modern smartphone will be in all online learning in the future."

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