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

Google’s AI 'learning companion' takes chatbot answers a step further
Umar Shakir, The Verge, 2024/11/13

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Google has launched a new application called Learn About (available only in the U.S.; I used Mozilla VPN to test it). It works pretty well but not perfectly. What's fun is that after you ask a question it will suggest related topics to explorer, creating new questions which it then answers. I like that it gave pronunciations of key concepts. I asked it for maps, which it sourced from YouTube, and images, which it sourced from Amazon and Bridgeman. Unfortunately, it also gave me an image when I asked for an example of a Javascript application. Part way through testing it stopped functioning and when I tried a different browser it asked me to join a waitlist. Via Donald Clark.

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"Eating the Future" in Action
Alex Usher, HESA, 2024/11/13

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Sometimes the economist comes out in Alex Usher and it's not pretty to see. I have spent my entire adult life advocating for increated funding for education, but one thing I have never done is to advocate paying for it by cutting old age security (OAS). Now Usher tries to justify the move by saying benefits for the elderly are a type of "consumption" in contrast to spendings on education, which are "real investments that pay dividends down the line." He doesn't include the Canada Pension Plan  (CPP) because it is "paid out of contributions rather than government funding." Well. I don't collect OAS because I don't need it (yet) but I will point out that I started paying into 'government funding' at the age of 14, which is (calculates...) 51 years ago. Fifty years of taxes, and Usher suggests that we didn't contribute? Ugly. Just ugly. Fund education, yes. Let's start with the billions in useless subsidies to oil and gas. Let's consider the corporate tax rate, which is half what it was when I started paying tax. Let's address the suppression of wages, which directly lowers tax income. Let's tax capital gains at the same rate as income tax. There are many ways to fund education that do not involve lowering payments to elderly people so poor they qualify for OAS.

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Watch: Ambitious robot learns to clean bathroom sink by watching
Michael Franco, New Atlas, 2024/11/13

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The depth and detail in this paper (8 page PDF) are daunting, but the gist, as summarized in this post, is straightforward: provided only with observations of a human cleaning (" using a so-called instrumented tool, which is a standard tool equipped with additional sensors") the front of an ordinary sink, a robot arm learn to clean entire sinks with varying surface topology. "The model implicitly learned the correct
tool orientation and position w.r.t. the freeform 3D surface." Michael Franco speculates, "a fleet of robots could learn the basic moves from each other through what's known as 'federated learning' and then they could apply those moves to their individual, specified tasks."

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Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks
Adam Fourney, et al., Microsoft Research, 2024/11/13

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Microsoft proposes a "generalist agentic system designed to solve such tasks. Magentic-One employs a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, directs four other agents to solve.... complete complex, multi-step tasks across a wide range of scenarios people encounter in their daily lives." Examples of such tasks: find and edit missing citations in a paper; oprder a shawarma sandwich; describe trends in the S&P 500; and count the number of members of MSR-HAX. What's interesting is the use of WebArena to test the tool; this is a service that emulates interactive websites like GitHub, Reddit, and others. And here you see the current real implementations of such systems: automating reviews and comparing prices on vendor websites and autoposting to Reddit forums. Or, you know, maximizing prices.

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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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