OLDaily

Enterprise Blockchain Doesn’t Work Because It’s About the Real World
Martin Glazier, Coindesk, 2021/04/02

Mini-Heap describes this post under the heading 'the metaphysics of blockchain'. It's a good title. The main idea here is that blockchain for Bitcoin works because the record is the fact. But for something like, say, a birth date, the fact exists independently of the record, and the same sort of transcription errors that can make birth certificates unreliable can also infect the blockchain record. But what about, say, badges, credentials and other educational records? Is an educational record a recording of a real world event, or is the production of the record the event in itself? After all, when the program is complete, nothing actually exists over and above the record.

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Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
Michal Kosinski, Nature, 2021/04/02

Obviously there are implications for education. "Algorithms excel at recognizing patterns in huge datasets that no human could ever process, and are increasingly outperforming us in visual tasks ranging from... face-based judgments of intimate attributes, such as sexual orientation... and—as shown here—political orientation." Now there will be types of pattern recognition that are actually useful - skills needed to excel at a job, for example - but it's hard for me to see ethical applications for an automated political litmus test.

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QuickPoll Results: Assessment and Learning Design
Mark McCormack, EDUCAUSE, 2021/04/02

Has education changed for good, or just changed for now? The answer, it seems, depends a lot on the change. "Respondents expressed confidence that recent increases in faculty engagement with instructional design and technology will continue in future academic years, as will institutions' adoption of hybrid/online education. Respondents are less confident that larger changes in institutional policy and practice will persist." The article also makes suggestions about what has worked and what can be done, though I would like to suggest that the sentence "collaboration is key" be banned from all educational writing in the future as a pointless and ultimately empty recommendation.

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You are a commodity and don’t know it
Harold Jarche, 2021/04/02

I think that many people do know it - at least, readers of this newsletter should know it, and also those who find it odd that they are being called 'human capital'. Still, mist of Harold Jarche's observations in this post are on point. If you ever doubted you were a commodity, your experience during the pandemic probably changed that. "Now that more work is being done online, many people face global competition... Three things will differentiate professionals in such an economy — expertise, relationships, and innovation." After the pandemic, a lot of the in-person services will go back to being in-person. But I don't think people will forget how easily they could be replaced by an online service and how precarious even their secure jobs might be.

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Journalism is a public service. So why doesn’t it represent the public?
Angela Yang, Poynter, 2021/04/02

This article makes the point that "for aspiring journalists from low-income backgrounds, systemic industry barriers compound from the start." The descriptions of student journalists spoke to me, paralleling my own experience. "Editors at my university’s independent newspaper work — voluntarily — anywhere from 40 to 50 hours per week, on top of classes." Except that at the Gauntlet, the University of Calgary paper where I worked, the editors were paid, which meant I could give up my weekend night shifts at 7-Eleven and work full time on campus. Many of the graduates from that newsroom ended up in Canada's professional media, but since I had student loans to pay, I couldn't afford to take an entry-level job in journalism. Still, every time I watch a journalist on TV opine about what is 'normal' or 'common' for people, I reflect that this represents a privileged point of view, and that despite what they say, most people aren't watching their stock portfolios, opening their cottages in the spring, or spending the winter in Florida.

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Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene
Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, 2021/04/02

When I was young the teachers at our small rural high school coordinated a number of activities with the posh private school in Rockliffe Park. We noted that the students there weren't any smarter than we were, but also took note of the significant advantages they enjoyed, ranging from facilities, special activities, a progressive curriculum, and more. Our teachers made a noticeable effort to level this playing field, and to the extent possible for a small rural high school, it worked. This article is about these posh schools and the advantages they afford. I am largely in agreement with the article, except for one thing. At a particular point, the author argues that "if these schools really care about equity, all they need to do is get a chain and a padlock and close up shop." I'm not disagreeing. But there's a lot to recommend about some of the methods such schools employ, where "a lesson plan was not a list of points for the teacher to make; it was a set of questions."

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Lying to the ghost in the machine
Charlie Stross, Charlie's Diary, 2021/04/02

Two things of note here. The first is the author's main argument, which is this: "ready-trained NNs like GPT-3 or CLIP are often tailored as the basis of specific recognizer applications and then may end up deployed in public situations... This is the future of security holes in our internet-connected appliances." Quite right. The second point is a question I would pose readers in general: is it unethical to lie to artificial intelligences? Clearly that could depend on the purpose to which the AI is put, but of course, we seldom know what that purpose will be. It would also depend on our perception of the risk the AI poses to ourselves, but does our perception of risk outweigh the potential harm lying to an AI could cause? Interesting questions, all round.

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How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 2021/04/02

There's a lot of relevant discussion about motivations and misdirected theories of 'fairness' that is well worth reading. But the most telling point has nothing to do with Facebook in particular. It's this: "Misinformation and hate speech constantly evolve. New falsehoods spring up; new people and groups become targets. To catch things before they go viral, content-moderation models must be able to identify new unwanted content with high accuracy. But machine-learning models do not work that way." What we would need is a generalized fake news detection system. This is something even humans find difficult. For machines not trained with general intelligence, it's even more so.

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The state of school education one year into the COVID pandemic
Andreas Schleicher, et.al., OECD, 2021/04/02

This comprehensive report (51 page PDF) looks at how countries adapted their education systems to the Covid pandemic. It's too early to tell how they fared, but this report serves as a baseline that will help researchers in the future map adaptations to post-Covid educational outcomes. It's worth noting - and the report does note this - that countries with the poorest PISA scores were also the countries that fully closed their schools the longest. This wasn't related to infection rates, but rather, was related to economic conditions. I would also look in post-Covid analysis for any correlation between internet availability and success rates, though the study doesn't draw this comparison explicitly.

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