OLDaily

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

Space v. Time in the grammar of emojis
Mark Liberman, Language Log, 2024/12/26

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So if emojis can function as a language, what does it look like? "The basic idea is this: putting pictographs in a sequence like words in writing is unnatural compared to making a single picture."  tested this, and that is indeed what they found. So emojis aren't like words. But they can still be a language. "Research has argued that we *already* use visual languages in the natural systems people use to draw."

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Everyday Sociology Blog: Becoming a Group Member
Karen Sternheimer, Everyday Sociology, 2024/12/26

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This is pretty basic but I liked the idea of analyzing the phenomenon of 'becoming a group member' from the perspective of joining a trail running group. Most of us have had similar experiences with other groups. In true social sciences tradition, the author gives us a taxonomy of five stages of membership: learning formal rules, learning informal rules, learning the language, forming connections, and status symbols within the group. Image: The Nature of Group Membership.

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Google Launches Android XR, Its New AI-Powered Extended Reality Platform
Sergio De Simone, InfoQ, 2024/12/26

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We may have forgotten about the metaverse but the metaverse hasn't forgottn about us. "Android XR is Google's new operating system aimed at powering devices like headsets and glasses and making possible new experiences, a.k.a. apps, running on them. Android XR will integrate Gemini, Google's AI assistant, to enable understanding user intent, defining a plan, guiding through tasks, and more." My thinking: this isn't intended to be a product. The hope is probably that enough people will buy them that the data collected can be used to train robots equipped with Android XR to navigate through the world, collecting their own 'experiences', vastly increasing the data that Google AI can use in the future.

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The Parker Solar Probe
Azimuth, 2024/12/26

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Nothing to do with online learning, but it's cool, so it's going into the newsletter. The surface of the Sun is known as the Alfvén surface. "Above this surface, the solar wind becomes supersonic, so no disturbances in its flow can affect the Sun below." The Parker Solar Probe aoared below the Alfvén at a speed of 690,000 kilometers per hour (in other words, from Montreal to Vancouver is a bit less than a second). We've never been thi fast or this close to the Sun before.

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Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space
Loïc Barrault, et al., Meta, 2024/12/26

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In philosophy there is something called the type-token distinction. A token is (say) the actual instance or use of a word, while the type is the abstract concept or idea it represents. This Meta paper offers a version of the distinction, saying that large language models are based on tokens, while human reasoning is based on concepts, ie., types. I think there are issues with this, but it doesn't matter, because what they're actually doing is something different again: "The human brain does not operate at the word level only. We usually have a top-down process to solve a complex task or compose a long document: we first plan at a higher level the overall structure, and then step-by-step, add details at lower levels of abstraction." Breaking things down into parts, though a very useful heuristic (known as the Cartesian method) has nothing to do with types and tokens. But that's OK, because that's not what they're doing either. Looking more closely at the paper (49 page PDF), it appears that they're setting up basic representations like frames or models and looking at a word's role within that. But that's not how humans think at all.

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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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