By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ten Years on the Twitter
James Clay, e-Learning Stuff, 2017/03/29
I joined Twitter as @Downes in July, 2007. Since then I've accumulated 7,217 tweets and 8902 followers. I have a second account, @OLDaily, for these posts. 7,590 tweets and 5,413 followers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The AI Misinformation Epidemic
Zachary C. Lipton, Approximately Correct, 2017/03/29
This ios the first of what promises to be a series of posts on what the author calls the 'misinformation epidemic' in AI. Here are the major sorts of misinformation:

• lists of the AI Influencers populated mostly by people with no discernible contribution (or even expertise) in AI.
• With startling regularity, if I tell an educated person what I do, a question quickly follows in reference to the Singularity
• Despite the increasing familiarity of machine learning in the media, the quality of journalism hasn’t improved appreciably. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rebuilding a national university after decades of war
Ramadhan Rajab, University World News, 2017/03/20
For more than a decade Somalia was a lesson in how a country functions without a government. In a word: poorly. I take it as the definitive refutation of libertarianism. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Artificial Intelligence and Law : 
A Six Part Primer
Daniel Martin Katz, Computational Legal Studies, 2017/03/20
The 271 slides in this presentation might make you balk, but there are blank slides, and the rest of them move along at a brisk pace. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unpaywall
Heather Piwowar, Impactstory, 2017/03/20
Are you or your students trying to get work done but get stuck at a paywall? I know it happens to me often enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. YaCy: The P2P Search Engine
Archive.org, 2017/03/20

The YaCy search engine actually exists and actually works, and I can even find myself on it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teacher wins $1M global prize for work in northern Quebec
Benjamin Shingler, CBC, 2017/03/20
Salluit is an an Inuit community of abut 1450 people in northern Quebec accessible only by boat (in summer) or by air. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teach schoolchildren how to spot fake news, says OECD
A boy using a computer A boy using a computer. The OECD plans to test the ‘global competencies’ of 15-year-olds around , The Guardian, 2017/03/20
I know we would all love to do this, but I don't think you can simply 'teach children to spot fake news'. That's a bit like trying to 'teach children to spot mathematical errors'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Foundation, 2017/03/13
Tim Berners-Lee champions a vision of the web as "an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries." But this vision, he writes, is challenged on three major fronts (quoted):

• companies (and) governments are also increasingly watching our every move online, and passing extreme laws that trample on our rights to privacy
• through the use of data science and armies of bots, those with bad intentions can game the system to spread misinformation
• political advertising online has rapidly become a sophisticated industry... political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Collision Course — Why Are Funders Straying from Their Lane?
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2017/03/13

The pro-publisher website The Scholarly Kitchen is noting with alarm the shift in funding away from publishers and toward initiatives that compete with publishers. More...