Highlights from JupyterCon in New York 2018
Mac Slocum, O'Reilly, 2018/08/27
I flagged all of these articles for inclusion, but in the end decided to wrap them up in this single link. O'Reilly summarizes a number of talks and presentations for the recent Jupyter Notebooks conference. There's a lot of overlap into ed tech, even though the notebooks are currently tools primarily for computer and data scientists. More...

Not Just What But Who You Know Matters
Julia Freeland Fisher, Education Next, 2018/08/29
The major value proposition offered by top tier universities isn't knowledge. This is available anywhere. Nor is it even top-flight professors. Great teachers and researchers can be found in institutions large and small around the world.No, the value proposition is access to the network of contacts, influencers, and collaborators. More...

Wikipedia’s bot army - shows us the way in governance of AI
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2018/08/29
This was something I didn't know about. " There are nearly 3000 bot tasks identified for use in Wikipedia. So many that there is a Bots Approval Group (BAG) with a Bot Policy that covers all of these, whether fully or partially automated, helping humans with editorial tasks." Donald Clark reviews some of the policies that are in place and the governance system that maintains them. More...

Do you have the cognitive patience to read this?
Angela Chen, The Verge, 2018/08/29
I just skimmed this but maybe you'll have the time to give it a closer look. This article is an interview with Maryanne Wolf, the author of Reader Come Home, which suggests that we are no longer able to read deeply because of digital text. She uses the right words, mostly, but it's hard to decide whether she misunderstands them or whether she's stretching to make the ideas comprehensible to readers. More...

Fragment: From Jupyter Notebooks to Online Interactive Textbooks
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2018/08/29
Yes, this is a fragment, and yes, the best bit is in the headline. It should get you thinking about how we can create workflows from examples of functioning software in Jupyter Notebooks to actual textbooks. Of course, the problem is, if it's in a textbook - or even a flat HTML file - then the code samples don't actually work any more, and you have to go to another environment to run them. More...

The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995
Daniel Oberhaus, Motherboard, 2018/08/31

A blockchain is created by hashing the contents of one body of text and implanting it into the next body of text. In this example, has was stored for all to see in the pages of the New York Tomes. This means that in order to change the contents of the text (which would change the hash) someone would have to crecreate the entire press run of the New York Times. More...

Hard Copy or Electronic Textbooks? Professors Are More Concerned About Keeping Them Affordable
Claire Hansen, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/08/31

I mentioned the story of the $999 textbook the other day. This article with the frankly implausible headline is the Chronicle's take on the story. You see, it was all a misunderstanding. " The university and the publisher worked together to set the sky-high price for the online text in an effort to discourage students from purchasing it, the statement said." They wanted students to purchase the print version (which is still priced at a ridiculous level). More...

Epistemology in the Cloud
Henry Story, University of Southampton, 2018/08/26
This is quite a good paper, and to put it into perspective, when I say "fake news is a consensus problem," this is to a large degree what I mean. This paper is deep conceptually and will take some time. The first two sections take us through a tour of Lewis's and Nozick's work on counterfactuals from the 80s (I was steeped in this during my PhD work, and even had a sit-down and grilling with Lewis on his work). It then shift gears in the third section to talk about the cloud, and then wraps up with a discussion of digital sovereignity. More...