By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How I Let Disney Track My Every Move
Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo, 2017/03/30
The MagicBand is a bracelet Disney hands out to hotel and resort guests. It gives you access to rides, automatically takes photos, and helps them run the park. It may seem creepy, but it’s very convenient. 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. 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. An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy
Josh Jones, Open Culture, 2017/03/13
I read Manufacturing Consent many years ago. Its core claims are lavishly documented (indeed, most of the book consists of the documentation; the argument itself begins and ends in the first chapter). Here is an excerpt of the 'five filters' portion of the video:

• Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”
• Advertising—What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”
• Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity.  If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins.
• Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”
• The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”

I try to make OLDaily the opposite of all that. OLDaily is non-profit. More...