OLDaily

The danger of anthropomorphic language in robotic AI systems
Cindy M. Grimm, Brookings, 2021/06/25

This article makes a good point, but in a way that's misleading and wrong. The good point is that using the same words to describe machine actions as we use to describe human actions (that is, 'anthropomorphic terms') may lead people to attributed to a machine a capacity it does not have. But it's wrong, in my view, to say that the machine does things in a fundamentally different way than humans. This (from the article) is an irresponsible way of describing AI: "The actual implementation is a camera that detects red pixels that form a rough circle.... When deployed, the robot mistakes the picture of a hot air balloon on a shirt and tries to drive the gripper through the person in an attempt to pick it up." No, it's not that way at all. In modern AI, the way a human may 'recognize' an apple is very similar to the way a machine may 'recognize' an apple. This is important to recognize, because we can learn a lot about people from AIs, and vice versa, and the use of the same terms makes that easier, even if we have to be careful about how we use them.

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The Social Sector Needs a Meta Movement
Laura Deaton, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2021/06/25

The entire article is an interesting read, but the author really gets to the point only in the last few paragraphs. " The social sector originated as a way to encourage wealthy white people to give alms to the desperate and ignored. It was not built to transfer power—just the opposite," writes Laura Deaton. "We should shed that history and build an engine for making the social sector a primary power center in its own right. It is the only sector that can accept and combine government, corporate, and philanthropic funding, and use that money for public good." The problem comes when you try to form "an advocacy network that connects currently disparate movements and aligns agendas in pursuit of common goals." Now there's a lot to be said for networks in social movements. But when you start 'aligning agendas', the goals of grassroots causes are swept away by the broader priorities of corporations and foundations, and you're back to a structure that entrenches power, and does not transfer it.

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Canadian unis look at capacity as brand Canada remains strong
Viggo Stacey, 2021/06/25

This post summarizes discussion at a webinar hosted by the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE) this week (you can watch the recording for free, but there's a spamwall). I see it as containing mixed messages. Viggo Stacey writes, "Higher education institutions across Canada are considering how to put new modes of learning into practice as they face capacity issues on campuses and challenges around the country’s domestic student demographic forecasts." So even though Canada has a good reputation for prospective international students, this is not a time to be complacent.

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New research reveals Facebook click-through rates for publishers
What's New in Publishing, 2021/06/25

This article cites a report (spamwalled) showing that articles published on Facebook have about a 3 percent clickthrough rate. "Ominously, publishers’ pageviews from Facebook have steadily decreased over the course of the past twelve months, a fact attributed by Echobox to ‘a level of social media fatigue after a year locked down’ although questions remain as other social media platforms continue to make inroads into Facebook’s user base." My own take is that user content (including publishers) is being pushed out by marketing and paid content. And it's not just Facebook - I have 9700 and 6100 followers on @Downes and @OLDaily respectively, yet views - not clicks, views, hover around 450 and 250 for each. LinkedIn is just as bad - for 2400 followers I get 120 views. But yeah, if you want views, you can pay for them - Twitter tells me I could boost this tweet, with its 159 views, to 4K or so for a mere $750. That's why I prefer RSS - if you follow someone, you at least get to see their content.

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Non-Fungible Token (NFT): Overview, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges
Qin Wang, Rujia Li, Qi Wang, Shiping Chen, arXiv, 2021/06/25

If you need for some reason a good authoritative report on non-fungible tokens (NFT) you can cite, this paper (20 page PDF) is for you. It identifies the core technical components of NFTs, then presents their protocols, standards and targeted properties. It then looks at security issues, surveys potential applications, and discusses issues related to NFTs. The bibliography includes an extensive list of NFT projects, also presented as a useful table in Appendix B.

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http://scripting.com/2021/06/23/162312.html?title=theyCantSeeWhatTheyCantSee
Dave Winer, Scripting News, 2021/06/25

Here's Dave Winer: "Journalism, academia, government and the corporate world all hire from the same talent pool. They go to the same universities, get their news from the same sources. Corporate people take government jobs, then go back to the corporations. The people move fluidly in and out of each bucket." I think that's true, and it certainly accords with my own observation. The second part, though, is where the hammer drops: "So you get the same story, the reality they believe in, developed over centuries, that is radically different from the reality most other people experience.... They think the problem is that we don't see what they see, but I think it's the other way. They hold on to a normalcy that is gone. They can't see what they can't see." Over the years I've called this the 'nexus'. Winer's point is that people inside the nexus don't realize their inside the nexus, or that there's a different reality outside the nexus. Via Doc Searls, who (being inside the nexus) misses Winer's point completely.

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The Cookie Monster won’t be coming for the web’s most popular browser for another year-plus
Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab, 2021/06/25

According to this article, the much-anticipated replacement of third-party cookies with things like Googles Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) won;t be coming right away. So for advertisers the 'cookiepocalypse' has been delayed. The issue is that FLoC has not been warmly welcomed by either consumers or advertisers, the former because it's still a violation of privacy, and the latter because it centralizes advertising data management in the browser. This is more than just an idle concern. All three of the major commercial browsers (Chrome, Safari and Edge) gather and use personal information in some way. For example, this week I learned on TWiT that Edge has a feature that watches your browsing behaviour and offers coupons for products you looked at (this is turned on by default, though if you dig deep into the settings you can turn it off).

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Non-formal leadership in higher education: a case study of the transformational leadership of a young female academic in a Nigerian university
Innocent Uche Anazia, Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 2021/06/25

I don't think I've ever seen a research paper discussing one single teacher before, so this article intrigued me, both in terms of the ethics and optics of focusing on a single individual, and also the question of sourcing research data. In this case, the data comes from Facebook comments about the instructor in question, who is unnamed. The research is conducted from the perspective of transformational leadership theory, and specifically leadership as "an approach to leadership that persuades, inspires and motivate followers through the building of a collective vision for followers to pursue." The academic in question is presented against what could only be called a scathing review of Nigerian academics. So what's the point of such a review? "The young academic’s exemplary leadership challenges the current status quo and presents a huge challenge on academics to change the narrative."

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Using Google shared files to facilitate successful online student group collaboration
Vanessa Stafford, Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 2021/06/25

As a publication this content (5 page PDF) would probably have been more suited to a blog post, nonetheless, I'm sure it is useful to many to have an academic reference pointing to the use of Google Docs as a collaboration tool in online learning. Of course I say this as someone who has been working with Google Docs for some time, but I can also think of numerous cases where it has been new to project members I have worked with. Google Docs isn't the only such tool (if you're using Microsoft Teams in-house, for example, you might be able to collaborate on Office documents; you can also use other products such as Zoho).

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https://collect.readwriterespond.com/we-choose-our-cults-every-day/
Aaron Davis, Read Write Collect, 2021/06/25

Aaron Davis references an access-limited article in the Atlantic (again, if you're using Firefox with Ublock Origin, you won't have a problem with this), a review of Cultish by Amanda Montell, that proposes that the language and tactics of cults are widespread, citing cases such as Amazon's leadership principles, the 3HO (Happy, Healthy and Holy) belief system, and the "beloved catchphrases of CrossFit (functional movements, DOMS, EIE)." The point here is that these aren't all bad, but also, that it's important to "be aware of it: identifying language’s powers of coercion, questioning statements that discourage analysis, and being skeptical of loaded language that deliberately engenders a heightened emotional state or stigmatizes outsiders." Davis wonders "how this compares or relates to Stanley Fish’s notion of ‘interpretive communities’", and he has a point, I think. Image: Kirsten Dunst in the brilliant On Becoming a God in Central Florida.

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