By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mathematics for Machine Learning
Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal, Cheng Soon Ong, Cambridge University Press, 2019/03/25
There are many many reasons why I would recommend this book (421 page PDF). But what makes me link to it here is the simple introductory paragraph on page 12: "The goal of machine learning is to design general-purpose  methodologies  to  extract  valuable  patterns  from  data... To achieve this goal, we design that are typically related to the process that generates data... Learning can be understood as a way to automatically find patterns and structure in data by optimizing the parameters of the model." Another 409 pages explaining this concept follow. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Story time with e-books 'not as helpful' as print books
BBC News, 2019/03/27
On CBC as I type this they're interviewing Geoffrey Hinton, who is talking about real science. Meanwhile, this ridiculous article describes the results of "studying 37 pairs of parents and toddlers." The study "found that with e-books parents ended up focusing more on the technology, including, for example, telling children not to push buttons or change the volume... electronic book enhancements were likely to be 'interfering with parents' ability to engage in parent-guided conversation' during reading. More...