OLDaily

Sifting the Signal from the Noise
Daniel A. Herrmann, Jacob VanDrunen, 2022/05/16

Suppose you are observing a person doing things - dancing around, waving a flag, moving about, building a structure. How could you tell whether that person is signaling you. On some models of language acquisition, you already know what will count as a signal - the dance, say - and can learn from that. But what if you don't know? That's what this paper (15 page PDF) studies. The authors develop an 'attention model' to show "simple reinforcement learning agents can still learn to coordinate in contexts in which (i) the agents do not already know what the signal is and (ii) the other features in the agents' environment are uncorrelated with the signal." So you don't need to already know the elements of a language in order to learn the language.

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Search Behavior: does context make difference?
Alaa A.AlDahdouh, 2022/05/16

This article summarizes a paper responding to the suggestion that people search differently when they're in less privileged contexts and argues, with data, that they actually do use a common method that "can be summarized into four interrelated phases: (a) locating information, (b) information use, (c) remix & repurpose and, (d) knowledge sharing." Where there is a difference is in the degree of copy-paste, or plagiarism. Alaa Aldahdouh raises the question of meta-search behaviours. "From this perspective, one does not need to teach learners digital competences (which are renewable); one needs to change their representations about the Internet." (Note: I was able to access the full paper last week, but when I went back today the Elsevier site threw up a paywall - very frustrating).

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Can social networks be saved?
Nat Rubio-Licht, Protocol, 2022/05/16

Today's issue of Protocol introduces us to HalloApp, which refines the social network experience by limiting interaction to only those people in your friends network. Now it's not one I'd use: it's only available on Android and Apple, and you register using your phone number. I would want to have multiple identities so I can belong to more than one friends network. HalloApp is also subscription based. This means there's no algorithm and no advertisements, but it costs money. The Protocol column makes the point that this is a good time for small social networks in general, given the problems facing the huge multi-million member networks.

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BBC digital director: 'Social media platforms are often working against us'
Andrew Kersley, PressGazette, 2022/05/16

As is so often the case, what is being said here of media organizations like the BBC can also be said of educational institutions. The usual complaints are made, describing "social media platforms as a 'pure Wild West' full of 'bullying, violence, racism [and] hate crimes'." But some relevant points are also made. First, we "are actually not competing with each other any more...  most of the time, we are either growing the pie of time people spend on journalism, or we're shrinking it." And second, "People aren't following pages anymore, they're following personalities. There are studies that prove that. People will more likely have a reporter from a news organization pop up on their feed than the organisation itself."

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Here come Canada’s crypto-conservatives
Paris Marx, The Breach, 2022/05/16

This article is advocacy journalism, so read it very sceptically and ignore the partisan political points being made. The bulk of the rest is a fairly mainstream criticism of digital currencies, pointing out the obvious flaws (the scammers, the hucksterism, etc). The salient point here is made more tacitly: cryptocurrency is the privatization of money. That's why we see the lawlessness: there's no central government oversight (or any oversight, really) ensuring money flows are legal. And one clear danger alluded to here is that money of questionable (and often foreign) origin can be used to fund further privatization. If this were all decentralized, with some sort of genuine equity built in, then that wouldn't be a problem. But that, for the most part, is a service the government provides. Without government, wealth is concentrated, and we get rule by the oligarchs.

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Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly
Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History, 2022/05/16

I think this is an interesting example of how a methodology produces a result. Adam Mastroianni argues - with good data - that "in every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market." The data is obtained by looking at 'top 30' lists or their equivalent, measuring views, or revenues, or some other indicator. Each of these lists, however, is a mechanism for rewarding traditional content producers. I think the data would look very different if measured against different (non-US and non-oligopoly) media sources, say, original streaming media, YouTube and Tiktok videos, blogs and social media, independent music, and non-commercial video games.

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Assessment in the age of artificial intelligence
ZachariSwiecki, et al., 2022/05/16

This is a good article, well-structured and clear, about the use of AI in assessment. The authors identify five key issues with the standard assessment paradigm (SAP): assessment design is onerous, they only provide a discrete snapshop, they uniformly assign the same tasks to everyone regardless of prior knowledge, they are inauthentic, and they are antiquated, evaluating skills that are obsolete. The authros then offer an account of how AI-based assessment address easch of these issues in turn, creating (I think) a compelling value proposition for them. They then outline some concerns to be addressed: the sidelining of expertise and opacity of accountability, limitation of the pedagogical role of assessment, the use of surveillance technology (especially for 'stealth assessment'), and assessing only for a set of traditional male-centered western values.

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