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Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense
Jacob Beck, Sam Clarke, Scientific American, 2023/02/23

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I don't really think this is literally true, but as always, it's not what I think that matters, it's what the evidence says. And it's hard, because the experiments reported require quite a bit of interpretation. Still, there's a sense to "the idea that you see numbers is not so different from the idea that you see shapes." I can imagine some sort of 'direct perception' of number - but whether that extends to some sort of perception of 'math' in the way there would be a direct perception of 'geometry' is open for debate.

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What's the Killer App for Web3?
Q McCallum, O'Reilly, 2023/02/23

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This is a realistic assessment of the state of web3 with a good dose of imagination (which I like). For example: "I suspect web3's killer apps will come out of two unlikely fields: fashion and loyalty programs." Why these? "Web2's 'collect personal info to try to identify specific individuals who may be interested and then pummel them with messaging' is incompatible with web3's ethos of 'honor pseudonymity and give people the opportunity to tell you when they're interested.'" So, "Web3 shifts the power of outreach to the buyer... marketers will have to unlearn old habits and embrace this world in which they derive greater benefit yet have less control." Hence: fashion and loyalty programs.

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The Ethics of Competition in Education and Competitive Exams
Eliza Kishan, Maria de los Angeles Delgado Alvarez, Johnathan Allen, PhilSci-Archive, 2023/02/23

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Some things are taken for granted in education, like competitive examples, but it's worth asking not only whether they're effective practice, but whether they're even ethical. This paper looks at the ethics of two specific exams as well, the JEE (or Gaokao) in India and the EVAU in Spain. It argues, "while these exams could not be described as totally unethical, certain practices and environmental
factors surrounding these exams could be described as unethical in the sense of socio-economic equality and mental health." I think more thought on the subject is warranted. 6 page PDF. Related: a case study. a 1997 paper from Tim Verhoeff.

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'Learning Engineering at a Glance' poster awarded best design at iFest 2022 |
2023/02/23

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This is from last summer but it came up at a meeting I was attending today and I thought I'd share. " It's the 'Learning Engineering at a Glance' poster co-authored by Aaron Kessler, Jim Goodell, and Sae Schatz" (these are names in learning technology you should recognize if you're in the field). To my mind, 'learning engineering' is lot of good concepts connected together with a terrible name. The page advertises a book, the 'Learning Engineering Toolkit', but don't pay your hard-earned money until you know it's what you want: here's a video, here are more videos, the Wikipedia page, the IEEE page, some courses (fees apply) from CMU's 'open learning'. and an article.

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A new national purpose - what if government was organised around science and technology?
Debbie McVitty, WonkHe, 2023/02/23

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We get this sentiment expressed in education as well, so it's not surprising to read about it in  the New National Purpose report (64 page PDF) from Tony Blair and William Hague. And you might think I'd be supportive of such a proposal; after all, that's exactly where I work. But not so much, because I see stuff like this every day: "The institutions of the state need not only to catch up with commercial companies in terms of offering a better and more seamless digital user experience, but there also needs to be some meaningful political leadership efforts to organise things so that the benefits of tech are shared more equitably and securely (and the risks mitigated, too)." And this thinking fails because of a key point: science and technology is not a democracy. And, for that matter, neither are business and industry. And so you can't rely on these institutions to address matters that can only be addressed through democratic processes (not the least of which are based around human factors, ethical intent and purpose, social justice, equity and security).

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Are GPT-3 and ChatGPT Truly Intelligent?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2023/02/23

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I have remarked in the past that large language models (LLMs) like BERT, GPT-3 and ChatGPT show us that 'knowledge and thought' are not the same as 'knowing a language'. As linguistic professors Emiliy Bender and Alexander Koller wrote in 2020, "Communicative intents are about something that is outside of language." But if not language, then what? They continue, "When we say Open the window! or When was Malala Yousafzai born?, the communicative intent is grounded in the real world the speaker and listener inhabit together." Or as Irving Wladawsky-Berger adds, it's something like a "communicative intent, model of the world, or model of the reader's state of mind." I don't agree. A 'model' suggests that knowledge and thought are representational (with all the overhead and baggage that entails). What LLMs lack aren't models; they're experiences. We see this when similar systems learn to play chess or go (real or virtual, it doesn't matter). Actually playing games is what allows them to learn how to play the game.

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Ch(e)atGPT? An Anecdotal Approach on the Impact of ChatGPT on Teaching and Learning GIScience
Petra Stutz, et al., EdArXiv, 2023/02/23

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Academic papers on the impact of chatGPT are now making it through the preprint stage. Here's one (6 page PDF) documenting what we've been seeing in the blogs for a couple months now: "The documented use case showed that ChatGPT allowed the apprentice Linner, who had little knowledge in programming, to pass the course 'Basics of Application Development'. This suggests the need of reassessing testing methods and learning objectives in response to the emergence of NLP."

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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