By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Springer Nature publishes its first machine-generated book
Springer Nature, 2019/04/04
It seems reasonable that an AI could author this sort of book. The prototype "provides a compelling machine-generated overview about the latest research on lithium-ion batteries, automatically compiled by an algorithm." Scientific papers have a fairly rigid structure, and so it should be reasonable straightforward to create a literature summary. More tricky would be identifying relevance of individual results and placing them into a wider context. More...
17 février 2020
Springer Nature publishes its first machine-generated book
31 janvier 2020
Spiders and Starfish
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Spiders and Starfish
Summary of a recent book, The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, another book about centralized versus decentralized organizations. The authors talk about a 'sweet spot' half way in between (say) Craigslist and department stores - but when the distributed alternatives work so well, one wonders what's so 'sweet' about breaking that model, even if only a little bit. More...
Clear and to the Point
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Clear and to the Point
Summary of a new book by Stephen Kosslyn, Chair of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, Clear and to the point, which describes "8 psychological principles for compelling PowerPoint presentations." Readers may not know (but should) that Kosslyn's expertise is in the area of mental imagery - I read a lot of Kosslyn (and (totally misplaced) criticisms of him from Fodor and Pylyshyn) while I was studying in grad school. PowerPoint is all about imagery, so I think there's some good overlap here. More...
30 janvier 2020
‘Food Routes’ and the Logistics Behind How We Eat
By Joshua Kim. A great book to build a course around. More...
28 janvier 2020
Mind in Matter
Scott McLemee reviews Daniel Belgrad's The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in '70s America. More...
14 janvier 2020
2019 Nonfiction Reviews
By Joshua Kim. Another year of ill-conceived efforts to read every book through higher ed eyes. More...
Only Books
By Joshua Kim. Placing books, rather than articles or podcasts or social media, at the center of our conversations. More...
13 janvier 2020
Books to Give the Educator in Your Life for the Holidays
By John Warner. Books make great gifts. Some personal recommendations. More...
Is 350 Books Enough?
By Elin Johnson. University of Florida professor reprimanded after heatedly contesting the university library’s book checkout limit. More...
01 décembre 2019
Superstar Theory and Why Higher Education is Different
By . I spent part of this weekend reading Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life, by the late Princeton Economist Alan Krueger (whose work on higher education I highlighted here when he died by suicide earlier this year). More...
