By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 2018/11/23
According to a new study, it can take seconds for Twitter to spread false news across the internet. But in addition, the study also examined "the critical role played by so-called 'influencers:' celebrities and others with large Twitter followings who can contribute to the spread of bad information via retweets." The bots get the ball rolling, but the influencers finish the job. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Misleading on Fair Dealing
Michael Geist, 2018/11/23
Michael Geist is up to part five in a landmark series on how the publication industry has been misleading lawmakers about the state of educational publishing in this country. He covers:

• the legal effect of the 2012 reforms 
• the wildly exaggerated suggestion of 600 million uncompensated copies each year.
• the significant decline in book copying as part of coursepack materials
• the gradual abandonment of print coursepacks in favour of digital course management systems (CMS)
• the massive education investment in and shift to e-book licensing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The End of Trust
McSweeney, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2018/11/21
This all-nonfiction issue of McSweeney’s "is a collection of essays and interviews focusing on issues related to technology, privacy, and surveillance." It's is available as a free download (344 page PDF). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Forget movie villains—it’s the “good” superheroes that are the most violent
Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 2018/11/21
Watching Infinity War I found myself rooting for Thanos against the superheroes trying to stop him. Sure, he was trying to wipe out half the universe, but this paled against the wanton violence of the superheroes. Statistics back me up. "According to a new study, the 'good guys' are actually significantly more violent than the antagonists they're trying to stop." I'm certainly left wondering about their priorities and their methods when I watch a superhero movie. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Framework: Critical Uncertainties in the Future of Work
Ross Dawson, 2018/11/19
After having relaunched his newsletter earlier this year, Ross Dawson has released a new framework on the 'critical uncertancies' in the future of work. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Case Against Quantum Computing
Mikhail Dyakonov, IEEE Spectrum, 2018/11/19
We've seen a number of breathless predictions for quantum computing in the last couple of years. This article throws a cautionary note into our coverage. Here's the problem: "A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe." This in itself in't a big deal; the computer on which I'm typing this has 64 Gig RAM, which has ((64*8)^2)-1) possible states. The problem is that unlike my computer, in a quantum computer, each bit is in a probabilistic state, not an on-off state. But so what? Why wouldn't 'gating' work? As one commenter says, you can emulate my computer "on a quantum computer with circuit depth 1 by applying e.g. Hadamard gates to each individual qubit." Of course, like everything else, the proof will come in the form of actual working quantputers.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Autograding System Goes Awry, Students Fume
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/11/30
This article describes the failings of an autograding system in use in a computing science class in Berkeley. The use of autograders in computer sciences is a natural development, as programs can be tested by debuggers and efficiency algorithms to determine not only whether they run at all, but also how well they run. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do we really need all of this 'mentoring' malarkey’?
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/11/26
I'm not so quick to call mentoring "malarkey" as Donald Clark, but I share some of his scepticism. Like Clark, I never had a mentor (and would probably have pushed back against one if I had). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
Jeff Barr, AWS News Blog, 2018/11/27
I'm pretty sure that not every school in every country can do this. But this is what the cool kids are doing. " Today, high school and college students design, fabricate, and launch nano-, pico-, and even femto-satellites such as CubeSats, PocketQubes, and SunCubes." This information comes up in the context of a new Amazon web service called 'Ground Station' that will allow you to contact those satellites. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Mastodon is defying the “critical mass”
Peter O'Shaughnessy, Medium, 2018/11/12
Why has Mastodon survived despite the scepticism of early critics? This article makes a good case as to why those sceptics were wrong. Essentially, survival for Mastodon - an a distributed open source federated network supported by users - is very different from survival for a typical start-up, which has to grow fast and raise funding or die. More...