OLDaily

Third-order nanocircuit elements for neuromorphic engineering
Suhas Kumar, R. Stanley Williams, Ziwen Wang, Nature, 2020/10/06

One thing that distinguishes human neurons from those in artificial neural networks is that human neurons are complex. All sorts of things happen in them - "not just simple spikes, as some other devices can manage, but the whole array of neural activity - bursts of spikes, self-sustained oscillations, and more."  Sure, you can emulate them with a computer, but it's not the same. This article describes "simple transistorless networks of third-order elements that perform Boolean operations and find analogue solutions to a computationally hard graph-partitioning problem" - that is, an electronic device that can act like a neuron all on its own. The term that describes this is Neuromorphic Analogue Computing (NAC) - 'Neuromorphic' as in 'like a neuron' and 'Analogue' as in non-digital. Via (and summarized nicely in) IEEE Spectrum.

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Adapting Rigorous Work to Remote Learning
Barbara R. Blackburn, Abbigail Armstrong, Melissa Miles, Middleweb, 2020/10/06

I found the definitions and taxonomies a bit light ('rigorous' means 'high levels', and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DoK) is a simplified form of Bloom's) but I did appreciate the examples of rigorous remote learning in four disciplines. They include assignments where students practise critiques, applying linear equations, identifying a research question, and creative scripts involving historical characters (I remember in the early days of mailing lists I and a group of strangers would pretend to be historical characters and interact - I played Richard Francis Burton, an English explorer and author. Fun.

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Zoom and beyond - new variations for online meetings and conferences
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2020/10/06

Alastair Creelman surveys three applications that extend Zoom in interesting ways: Class for Zoom, which we've mentioned here previously; QiqoChat, which combines Zoom with Google Drive and other tools for working groups that collaborate on reports, documents and proposals; and InSpace, which offers a simpler and more intuitive interface. He also mentions Shindig, a non-Zoom platform that forces you into smaller chat groups.

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The Abyss of Ignorable: A Route into Chaos Testing from Starling Bank
Greg Hawkins, InfoQ, 2020/10/06

This article is about maintaining cloud servers but contains an important lesson for educators as well, because educators often approach teaching as though they are in some way 'programming' their students. What happens when things randomly change? "We rightly dismiss the absurd and handle the mundane. However, human judgement fails quite badly when it comes to unlikely events.... Developers have generally been poor error handlers since development began." What you need to do is build in the likelihood of random failure from the outset. That's what Starling Bank did - they wrote a script that would randomly crash one of their cloud servers. The result was that developers, knowing that this would happen, had to build resilience into their systems. For educators, this is like building scenarios into their teaching such that whatever the student has learned will fail. How do they then respond? That's where real teaching begins.

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Pedagogy and Technology from a Postdigital Perspective
Tim Fawns, Teaching Matters blog, 2020/10/06

Like Tim Fawns, I have heard a lot of people say that pedagogy should drive technology. And like him, I agree that "One cannot first choose a pedagogy and then a technology." The two go together; each informs the other. And as Fawns observes, the iussue "is not so much to do with people first choosing a technology and then thinking about what to do with it," but rather, choosing a method (e.g. lecture, tutorial, simulation, essay, exam) before "thinking enough about the purpose of their teaching." As a result, "we may reinforce teaching practices that are unsuitable in online contexts." Like, say, four hours of Zoom lectures in an afternoon. That's why "context and purpose should be the primary considerations when thinking about how technology is used in your teaching." Via Aaron Davis.

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Seven HCI Grand Challenges
Constantine Stephanidis, Gavriel Salvendy, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2020/10/06

I am attached to the human-computer interaction (HCI) team at NRC, and ever since that placement I have railed against this characterization of my work, and especially against interpretations that reduce it to things like user testing and interface design. This paper takes a much broader approach. The seven grand challenges are as follows:

1. Human-technology symbiosis
2. Human-environment interactions
3. Ethics, privacy and security
4. Well-being, health and eudaimonia
5. Accessibility and universal access
6. Learning and creativity
7. Social organization and democracy

While I have been critical of our definitions of HCI in the past, this list (in addition to being research-supportive) looks inclusive enough to take in the interests of our group as a whole, and also has the advantage of setting out the challenges we're interested in. For myself,  I am quite interested in items 3,5,6 and 7 (and also eudaimona as discussed by Umair Haque). it would be interesting to see these mapped against NRC strategic goals, and against the different programs.

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Bootstrap 5 Templates
ThemeWagon, 2020/10/06

While it's possible to write your web interface directly in Bootstrap, it's not really recommended, because even without Jquery there are still other dependencies (such as Font Awesome for your icon set). So I went looking to see whether there are any Bootstrap 5 templates available (Bootstrap has its own list but they're expensive) and found this list (here's another list, and another, which I also used). Of these, I spent some time on Voler (here's the open source on GitHub) and a lot of time on Volt (GitHub). Now one problem with thrse themes is that the open source version only goes so far, and the pro version has overly restrictive licensing terms. Still, they're worth exploring - and as I was learning to install Volt I learned how to use Gulp and Webpack to bundle all the components for deployment. I also did a quick study of Sass, one of those components, to generate CSS.

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Bootstrap 5 Alpha 2
The Bootstrap Blog, 2020/10/06

Over the weekend I spent some time looking at modernizing the gRSShopper web interface. It currently runs on a combination of Bootstrap and Jquery. Over the last few weeks, however, a new version of Bootstrap has been released (in alpha) that does not require Jquery. That creates the possibility of a lighter and more responsive interface - but it also set me off on a bunch of side-projects that I'll cover over this week. One of these is the developer roadmap that I've also linked to today.

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Neutrino
Neutrinojs, 2020/10/06

This post continues discussion of the developer's roadmap we've been looking at. It's not actually on the Roadmap. I began by looking at Gulp and Webpack, and was led here. What Gulp and Webpack do is assemble the assets (ie., the various scripts, CSS declarations, pages and images) into single files for deployment. Neutrino automates the use of these and other supporter applications. I practiced a bit trying to create projects; this is what led me to explore React more, since React was a preset and there wasn't enough on the Neutrino site to tell me what was going on. Here's the GitHub.

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The Narrative Paradigm of Walter Fisher
Keith Hamon, Learning Complexity, 2020/10/06

This post examines Walter Fisher's narrative theory, the idea that "people are essentially storytellers... individuals approach their social world in a narrative mode and make decisions and act within this narrative framework." This is contrasted with what he says is the "prevailing paradigm in rhetoric, communications, and social theories: the rational paradigm inherited from Plato and Aristotle." I think there are other (better) options though. One would be the broadly constructivist approach taken by George Lakoff in this theory of frames. And another would be my own perspective, which is that people are basically pattern recognizers. When we examine human discourse we can find elements of each. But I really do think that the rational and narrative paradigms are the weakest of the lot.

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