OLDaily

Book review: Open Minds explores how academic freedom and the public university are at risk
Peter Tregear, Academic Matters, 2021/04/12

The thing that has always puzzled me most about academic freedom is why it should apply to academics and nobody else. True, we all have certain rights to free speech, but for the rest of us, this can come at the cost of losing our jobs. Now to be clear, academic freedom isn't "an untrammelled right to say what they like on any issue." There is an expectation that the right comes with "an underlying obligation to justify their public utterances through the application of disciplinary expertise and values." But again, why shouldn't that be the case for everyone? I think that, with some notable exceptions, we can generally expect this sort of freedom. The focus, both in academia and elsewhere, seems to be on the flip side, where the speakers in question are promoting conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated rumour. What are the limits of our tolerance for such speech, and how do we decide whether something is credible and evidence-based or not credible and speculative?

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More Looking at a Domain of One’s Own – cPanel
Tom Woodward, Bionic Teaching, 2021/04/12

If you ever want to feel humble as a specialist in learning technology, look at long lists of applications. Behind each is a team, a vision, a niche, a market, a community, and a perspective. Open up Domain of One's Own (or any web hosting provider) and you'll see a huge list offered via one-click installs with cPanel. I've watched many of these grow from an idea to a full application. Others seem to have come out of nowhere. It makes me wonder - as Tom Woodward does in this post - which applications are essential to support one's own learning, which are nice to have, and which are distractions? What features unite them, and what features really stand out?

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The EdTech Awards - 2021 Finalists & Winners
Ed Tech Digest, 2021/04/12

I'm linking to this because it's quite a large list of products and services, along with a few speakers and consultants, in the ed tech space. Awards, of course, are primarily a marketing tool, both for the award provider and those receiving awards (the CBC's Terry O'Reilly has a good recent podcast episode on the business of awards shows; the transcript is only a small part of the overall script) and often awards and rankings are used to promote specific values or perspectives on their respective fields. Usually companies and individuals nominate themselves, typically pay an entry fee, and often campaign for the award. The Ed Tech Awards provides winners and nominees with a full press kit. Noice.

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How to use Microsoft Word and Teams as a teleprompter for presentations
Jeremy Chapman, YouTube, 2021/04/12

This video was mentioned on Windows Weekly and I thought it was worth sharing. In only six minutes Jeremy Chapman describes how to set up a Word document to function as a teleprompter and how to arrange the teleprompter using a second screen (a mobile phone, say) right beside your webcam. It all looks easier than it actually is (I've played around with similar techniques) but with practice is effective and automatic.

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A brief history of organoids
Claudia Corrò, Laura Novellasdemunt, Vivian S.W. Li, American Journal of Physiology-Cell Physiology, 2021/04/12

We usually think of growing cell cultures on a flat surface like a Petri dish. An organoid by contrast, is a three-dimensional growth in a drop of liquid hanging from a plate. This article describes various types of organoids, but we're most interested in neural cell organoids. While cycling Saturday I listened to an interview with Steve Potter describing work he and his colleagues have done creating neural networks in organoids and comparing the result with artificial neural networks. There's a lot of good in that interview, and I'll highlight two of the many points raised:

• artificial neural networks used only one type of neuron while in human brains there are many types of neuron ("it's like they're working with a factory composed entirely of lathes)
• there are different forms of neuoplasticity, including especially (for this discussion) glial cell plasticity ("Glia is an all-encompassing term referring to anything in the brain that is not a neuron")

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School custodian refuses to download phone app that monitors location, says it got her fired
Erica Johnson, CBC News, 2021/04/12

"The app, called Blip, generates a geofence — a virtual boundary, created by the employer using GPS — that detects when an employee enters or leaves... Companies that make similar apps — such as ActivTrak, Teramind and Hubstaff — have told CBC News they've seen a spike in customer inquiries." I think it's telling that the school chose use the system on the lowest paid and least powerful employees. I wonder what the result would be if there were a law that technology like this had to be disseminated from the top down - used first on CEOs, managers and directors. Ah, but they wouldn't tolerate it, would they?

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Quantum Boltzmann Machine
Mohammad H. Amin, Evgeny Andriyash, Jason Rolfe, Bohdan Kulchytskyy, Roger Melko, Physical Review X, 2021/04/12

A Boltzmann machine is a type of neural network that learns through the use of equations based on thermodynamics (basically, it 'agitates' the set of connections, then settles into a more stable state, a process of 'annealing'). This paper came up last week in an internal NRC series on quantum algorithms. In a nutshell, "propose a new machine-learning approach based on quantum Boltzmann distribution of a quantum Hamiltonian" ("the Hamiltonian of a system is an operator corresponding to the total energy of that system").

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