By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Arguing With AI
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/03/15
The only link in this article is to the Harvard Debate Council Diversity Project, and not even to the IBM Project Debater web page that is the subject of the story, which in the light of recent admissions scandals strikes me as somewhat suspicious. There's a nod to "worries that access to the technology might only be available to students at the wealthiest institutions" in the very last paragraph, but otherwise the article is more concerned about whether the AI "really Understands" and how it's not able (yet?) to capture the nuance of an academic debate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed
Nathaniel Popper, Mike Isaac, New York Times, 2019/03/15
This meshes with the idea that Facebook wants to follow the path set out by WeChat in China, which is widely used for financial transactions (people just pull out their phone and pay  I saw it a lot when I was in Beijing). Combining payments with a digital currency (Facebook acquired Chainspace in February) would address the pervasive problem (and cost) of currency conversion in the west. But it would have to be a 'proof of authority' currency because alternative models are too slow. Such an approach would also require what Facebook provides - a unique and knowable identity. We'll know we've passed the threshold from technology company to nation state when we are required to provide our Facebook ID for driver's licenses, credit card applications, passports, school records, etc. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do Neural Networks Show Gestalt Phenomena? An Exploration of the Law of Closure
Been Kim, Emily Reif, Martin Wattenberg, Samy Bengio, arXiv, 2019/03/15
This paper posted to arXiv by some Google researchers shows that neural networks can be studied from the perspective of Gestalt psychology. In particular, the authors show that neural networks demonstrate the law of closure, that is, how "the human visual perception system has a tendency to 'close the gap' in order to perceive whole objects when only fragments are visible." It's based on the old connectionist principle of pattern recognition (see p. 48 of this excellent outline of connectionism). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Introducing the Coursera Global Skills Index
Coursera Blog, 2019/03/14
Coursera has introduced something called the Coursera Global Skills Index (GSI), "an in-depth look at skill trends and performance around the world, made possible by the millions of learners who come to Coursera to learn and grow." Not surprisingly, it says people are falling behind in critical skills. Overall, people in developing countries are lagging most, while Europe is the skills leader. The most surprising result is that Argentina ranks first in technology (Europe takes the next fourteen positions). Canada ranks as 'cutting edge' in business and data science, but only 'competitive' in technology. The United States ranks as 'competitive' in all three categories. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meet Tengai, the job interview robot who won't judge you
Maddy Savage, BBC News, 2019/03/14
I guess it's not a large leap from using artificial intelligence to grade college essays to having an AI in a robot conduct your job interview. And the motivation is equally benign: "The goal is to offer candidates job interviews that are free from any of the unconscious biases that managers and recruiters can often bring to the hiring process, while still making the experience 'seem human'." But we need to avoid getting carried away; as one Reddit author says, "The current state of media coverage of AI is fixated on constructing a compelling narrative to readers, and often personifies models well beyond their capabilities". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. IBM didn’t inform people when it used their Flickr photos for facial recognition training
Shannon Liao, The Verge, 2019/03/14
In a story that broke a couple of days ago it was revealed that IBM used about a million open-access photos on Flickr to train their facial recognition software. The first response was in the form of complaints that they didn't inform anybody. Of course, this sort of use occurs all the time, and it's not just faces, and it's not just IBM. Here's a report from IEEE Spectrum about a database of a million video clips of hundreds of common actions called Moments in Time. Facebook is using datasets that include billions of images. And as the Verge notes, the photos IBM usedwere part of "a larger collection of 99.2 million photos, known as the YFCC100M, which former Flickr owner Yahoo originally put together to conduct research." In a statement yesterday, Creative Commons points out that "copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online." Right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning to solve for pattern
Jim McGee, McGee's Musings, 2019/03/14
When I was first introduced to the concept of learning design, which is built around scripts and roles, my first reaction was, "what about impov?" This article takes on that question directly. "Navigating this environment requires a shift in perspective and a set of operating practices and techniques that can be most easily described as improv adapted to organizational settings. The shift in perspective moves from a world of connecting the dots to a world of “solving for pattern”. I borrowed the phrase from essayist Wendell Berry". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Persistent identifiers: the building blocks of the research information infrastructure
Alice Meadows, Laurel L. Haak, Josh Brown, UKSG Insights, 2019/03/14
Though this article addresses the research infrastructure it could be addressing the wider world of knowledge and learning. The authors argue " Persistent identifiers (PIDs) – for people (researchers), places (their organizations) and things (their research outputs and other contributions) – are foundational elements in the overall research information infrastructure." These, they suggest, should conform to FAIR principles - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Additionally, the authors write, we need to be able to identify the source of the metadata - who entered it, and what authority they had to do so. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What are critical thinking skills?
Steven Forth, TeamFit, 2019/03/14
What caught my attention first was Steven Forth's skills profile. It's a very detailed listing of skills, 324 in all, with expertise in them ranging from newbie to guru. Presenting them as a graph makes more sense than using that many badges, and the categorization of the skills helps a lot. But it stuck me that the identification and naming of the skills is very important. Which takes us to the article. Here we have an account of what constitutes 'critical thinking' as a skill. And, frankly, it's a mess. Properly speaking, critical thinking is really a collection of skills. But not the skills identified here, but a completely different set of skills. That takes me back to Steven Forth's skills, which lists many business skills, and had me wondering how many ways there were to say 'management' or 'analysis'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Japan’s Most Interesting Newspaper Is for Recluses, by Recluses
Rohini Chaki, Atlas Obscura, 2019/03/13
This article is a little off-topic for this newsletter, but the existence of the hikikomori (a name for self-imposed recluses in Japan) speaks to an undercurrent of online culture (I have no doubt a similar phenomenon exists in other countries as well). The focus of the article is on a hikikomori newspaper. More...