OLDaily

MailGun
2022/02/22

No more MailChimp! Last Friday MailChimp lost the ability to read my RSS file I was using to create email newsletters. This was always a dodgy approach at best, but MailChimp has been truly awkward to work with (the fact that it's an advertising platform geared toward 'audiences' and 'campaigns' makes it even more so). So today I learned the MailGun API and wrote a script to send email newsletters directly from gRSShopper. It's a lot easier to work with. I still need to rewrite the subscribe function (unsubscribe is at the bottom of your email and should work, though you can leave the testing to me :) ). If you have any problems with the new version of the email newsletter, please let me know.

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JsonLogic
Jeremy Wadhams, 2022/02/22

JsonLogic applies rules to data. "JsonLogic isn’t a full programming language. It’s a small, safe way to delegate one decision. You could store a rule in a database to decide later. You could send that rule from back-end to front-end so the decision is made immediately from user input. Because the rule is data, you can even build it dynamically from user actions or GUI input." In a case study today I saw it used as a way to help users easily construct queries to a database. Nifty.

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D3
Mike Bostock, 2022/02/22

From the cool tools department: "D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation." I haven't tried it but I've seen it in operation and it looks pretty useful.

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Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies
Carolyn Doi, Shannon Lucky, Joseph E. Rubin, Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, 2022/02/22

This is a pretty good paper based on two case studies at the University of Saskatchewan where OER and class-specific, closed-content videos were designed. The first was for a course in veterinary microbiology and the second in music research methods. In addition to the cases, the authors draw out some recommendations and practical considerations for OER video production. The most interesting part was the table of 'highest priority' open video content: at the top were labs and demos, while the least important (for OER) were course-specific information and FAQs. Which makes sense.

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Iris.ai and CORE cooperate to build AI Chemist
Balviar Notay, JISC, 2022/02/22

I've had a mostly inactive account at iris.ai for a couple of years now (it has recently been warning me it will be deleted if I don't do anything) and used it to access a decentralized data architecture service so I have a sense of the capability the AI company is bringing to this project. The focus of this particular project is 'the AI Chemist', which is a nice hook, but the real story is Iris's access to the CORE library: a metadata dataset (title, author, abstract, publishing year, etc.) for some 210 million articles, and a full text dataset of 29.5 million articles. The AI Chemist, meanwhile, was actually introduced back in June, 2020 (something the Jisc article doesn't mention) when Iris had about 18 million articles. So the big change here is the introduction of all that metadata from the millions of closed-access papers. That doesn;t really seem to me to be a great leap forward.

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