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Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

When digital nomads come to town
Stephen Witt, Rest of World, 2023/05/23

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Their numbers are far less than the populations of cities they visit, so the impacts of digital nomads on places like Medellin, Bangkok and Mexico City are far less than depicted in this article. Still, the availability of remote work and the possibility of seeing the world create a tantalizing combination, and I'm sure (all else being equal) that this is a phenomenon that will only grow in the future. I do understand the concerns about higher wages changing prices in (small sections of) those cities, but I have to say, on balance, it's better to have higher wage-earners in cities where wages are depressed. Because nobody wants wages to stay depressed, right? I also note that the existing crop of digital nomads is (according to the article) mostly white and western, but again, I don't see that persisting for long, as remote work creates opportunities for everybody, not just those who happen to be living in the right place.

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Your marketing, multiplied by Google AI - Think with Google
Jerry Dischler, Think With Google, 2023/05/23

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Readers familiar with my work kjnow how much I hate advertsing. It's the only form of content the sole intent of which is to misrepresent, and to make people buy things they would otherwise not want to buy. And it works; it has convinced people to buy everything from Edsels to pet rocks to Brexit to MAGA. So it is with some unhappiness that I present here Google's plan for AI: to embed advertising into everything online. "AI transforms how businesses meet consumers, as the number of formats and surfaces consumers engage with dramatically increases. Google AI is helping advertisers easily create assets that work across formats." I'm not worried about AI. I am worried about my mind being turned into pablum as a result of incessant advertising.

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Book Review: “Quantum Supremacy” by Michio Kaku (tl;dr DO NOT BUY)
Scott Aaronson, Shtetl-Optimized, 2023/05/23

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I love a good bad review, and this one is in that list. First, though, let me say this: I've had the chance to look at some of the work being done on quantum algorithms by my colleagues, and I've learned two major things: there is something there; quantum computing is a real thing and will be important in the future; and it would take quite a bit of work before I felt qualified to write a short description of it, let alone a book. Michio Kaku appears not to have let lack of knowledge stop him. "Kaku appears to have had zero prior engagement with quantum computing, and also to have consulted zero relevant experts who could've fixed his misconceptions." This review tears apart his work with example after example (and even I can see how Kaku is wrong in these examples, that's how basic the errors are). But "the errors aren't the worst of it. The majority of the book is not even worth hunting for errors in, because fundamentally, it's filler." The sad part is that the book is being widely promoted and has become a bestseller. "Kaku's slapdash 'book,' and the publicity campaign around it, represents a noxious step backwards."

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Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?
Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Sanmi Koyejo, 2023/05/23

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'Emergence' is when something seems to appear out the background; when you see a face on a video screen made up of unrelated pixels, that's emergence. Emergence exists not just for pictures, but for anything we humans perceive, including sounds and music, patterns and trends, or - in the present case - skills and abilities. When we see, say, an AI demonstrate a skill like 'answering a question', this is an emergent behaviour. The important part of this fairly technical paper (16 page PDF) is the first paragraph in the Discussion section: "for a fixed task and a fixed model family, the researcher can choose a metric to create an emergent ability or choose a metric to ablate an emergent ability. Ergo, emergent abilities may be creations of the researcher's choices, not a fundamental property of the model family on the specific task." So if the 'skill' is not in the AI, where is it? As I have argued before, emergence requires recognition. We are looking at what the AI does and 'recognizing' it as 'answering a question'. There's nothing wrong with that; we do it all the time for other things. The picture is not 'in' the pixels; we look at the pixels and 'recognize' (or 'interpret') it as a face. So it's not surprising we would do it with AI as well. Via Graham Attwell.

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Let's Hear It for OER: Creating an Audiobook
Brian Barrick, YouTube, 2023/05/23

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Presented as video, this is an audio talk with slides describing the process of creating an audio book. It would also be useful for aspiring podcasters, though viewers would have to find their own information about uploading and syndication. Brian Barrick covers topics like audio recording equipment (budget and dream setup), finding funding, and how to make editing a lot easier. There are questions but for most of it the questioner's audio was really low. Via Rachel Becker.

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How Arguments Work - A Guide to Writing and Analyzing Texts in College
Anna Mills, LibreTexts, 2023/05/23

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I spent too much time with this book this morning. "How Arguments Work takes students through the techniques they will need to respond to readings and make sophisticated arguments in any college class.  This is a practical guide to argumentation with strategies and templates for the kinds of assignments students will commonly encounter. It covers rhetorical concepts in everyday language and explores how arguments can build trust and move readers." It's a very practical guide for students, well-written and accessible, with lots of examples and patterns. Though I have quibbles here and there, it's quite good, and would make a huge difference to students, especially those in the social sciences and humanities. It's all open access, downloadable, and accessible with an audio version. Via Shagun Kaur.

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Supreme Court rules against Warhol foundation in copyright fight over Prince images
Lawrence Hurley, NBC News, 2023/05/23

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This story is all over right now. I'm going to surprise people, I think, when I say the Supreme Court decision is correct. A photographer created an original photo of Prince. The photo was licensed by a magazine to serve as the basis for an artistic interpretation which would then be published once in the magazine, crediting the photographer. And Warhol did the art, the photo was published, and that was it for 30 years. But unknown to the photographer, Warhol didn't stop at one interpretation; he created a whole series of them. The magazine then licensed on of these from the Warhol estate and published it, this time without crediting the artist. Now my reasoning is simple here: if it needed a license the first time, according to all concerned, then it needed a license the second time. Otherwise, it's like paying for the first Beatles song you record but deciding that all others should be free. But one final comment here: the only person not being compensated is Prince (or his estate). If it's not for the fact of Prince being Prince, nobody cares about any of this. But that's what commercial art is, whether it's by the magazine, the artist or the photographer: the extraction of from the community of something somebody else created in order to charge money for it. See also: Creative Commons.

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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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