By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blind people do math in the ‘visual’ cortex
Jill Rosen-Johns Hopkins, Futurity, 2016/09/23

What I like about this item is that it speaks against the idea that there is a special area for discrete functions in the brain. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2016/09/23
"The YouTube system is built on top of Google Brain, or as we now know it, TensorFlow. To give an idea of scale, the models learn approximately one billion parameters and are trained on hundreds of billions of examples. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New York cracks down on toymakers tracking children online
Michael Virtanen, Christian Science Monitor, 2016/09/14
The challenge of private investment in education is that companies see children primarily as potential markets and they seek to maximize that even if it's against the law. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Discover the APIs
Microsoft Cognitive Services, 2016/09/14

This is just one of several services available form various companies around the web, but I'm linking to it because it's illustrative. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google’s creepy Allo assistant and our rocky relationship so far
Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog, 2016/09/26
I actually admire Google's efforts to make Allo work. Allo has a greater range than Siri, even if it does listen in to your conversations and act like a friend that's trying too hard to be liked. Eventually we'll all use an assistant like this, but they'll have to work out some of the glitches and get past the 'creepiness' factor. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lights out for shomi symptomatic of streaming video’s larger profitability problem
Terry Dawes, CanTech Letter, 2016/09/27
Shomi foundered on the same shoal that afflicted Netflix - the demands for unsustainable revenues from content producers. There's no incentive for providers to offer Shomi a good rate when they'll ultimately roll out their own service and try to grab all the profits. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational Software Patents: A Call to Vendors
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2016/09/28

As described here September 1, Elsevier won a patent for an online peer review system, something the open source Online Journal Systems has been doing for decades. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Mostly Complete Chart of Neural Networks
Randy Krum, Cool Infographics, 2016/09/22

It's just an infographic and won't give you a need knowledge of neural network configurations. But it's still useful. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Google And Others Are Plotting The Revenge Of The Web App
Jared Newman, Fast Company, 2016/09/12

I've messed around with web apps in the past and I've never really been interested in developing for the mobile app ecosystem. So I'm hopeful something comes of this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?
Henry W. Lin, Max Tegmark, arXiv, 2016/09/12

There's a good Technology Review summary of this article. In a nutshell: why do deep learning algorithms, which simulate neural networks, work so well? Mathematically, they should be much less effective, because they are attempting to select the best answer from an enormous number of possible outcomes. More...