OLDaily

W3C The Responsible Use of Spatial Data
Joseph Abhayaratna, Ed Parsons, W3C, 2021/01/06

This is a W3C editors draft for comment. Its purpose is to "raise awareness of the ethical responsibilities of both providers and users of spatial data on the web." This is especially important, the authors write, because "spatial data may be seen as a fingerprint: For an individual every combination of their location in space, time, and theme is unique." So it should be used responsibility - but what exactly do we mean by 'responsibly'? One example: "great care has to be taken when trying to assign properties averaged over a region to individuals, a problem known as the ecological fallacy." The document looks at existing legal and ethical frameworks, and considers the issue from the developer, user and regulator perspectives. I wouldn't exactly call it advanced thinking on the issue, but it's a start. Image: UN, Spatial Data Infrastructure. Via Ton Zijlstra.

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DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
OpenAI, 2021/01/06

Here's the headline: "We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language." Oh, but do look at the article; it is chock-full of examples of images created for different types of phrases and expressions. "It has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images." The MIT Technology Review article loved the example of the avocado-shaped chair (and frankly, so do I, but I also like the snail with the texture of a harp and the baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog). The name is a portmanteau of the artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s WALL·E. Personally, I'm waiting for BALL-E, an AI that creates and sends vacation pictures to your social media accounts.

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A Distributed Systems Reading List
Dan Creswell, GitHub, 2021/01/06

This is a really good reading list devoted to distributed systems. If you're just learning about them, start here. You'll find accessible accounts of some of the key considerations (with odd-sounding names like Paxos consensus, Byzantime Generals, consistency models, and gossip protocols. None of this is easy sledding, and there's a lot to learn about actual implementation after, but this list frames the target people are working toward. See more on Dan Creswell's GitHub page. If you don't like this reading list, here's another. Image: Stanislav Kozlovski, who offers a nice introduction to all of it.

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Building decentralized social media
Ben Werdmüller, 2021/01/06

Here's Ben Werdmuller on the recent trend toward decentralized networks: "One might propose a decentralized alternative to Facebook that has all of Facebook's features, for example, and assume that people will flock to it because it's not owned by a corporation. You care about privacy and ownership, after all - if others don't, surely it's just a matter of educating them?" But "People, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future." I think this is really key. It needs to be easy to use and it needs to do what people want to do. Image: 101 Blockchains.

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Design Theory For Our Futures
Dinant Roode, trenducation, 2021/01/06

There's an interesting transition in this article, from its hoimage to Paulo Friere, who said " ‘there is no such thing as a neutral education process" and advocated learning that helps us to "discover how to participate in the transformation of their world", to Herbert Simon, who brought us the concept of 'learning engineering' and who reminded us that "to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." In the middle we have personal empowerment. "The control people have over what they create makes the experience more memorable, more lasting and more valuable." But we also have all the contradictions this creates.

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Who are the thought leaders?
Philip J. Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2021/01/06

You won't find the answer to the question in the title; the one list, referenced only in passing, is highly suspect, and includes at least one person no longer among the living. What you will find is a fun take-down of the concept of thought leadership, including especially an analysis of the BETT 2021 poster and quip from the NY Times that a thought leader is "a sort of wannabe highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler." At the same time, Philip Kerr writes that "we don’t have enough thought leaders in ELT" and also that "for more specifically ELT thought leaders, perhaps we should let them stay anonymous."

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