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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Mar 23, 2017
Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent
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I have mixed feelings about the importance of voice
commands. Yes, we will need voice - we frequently need to
communicate with a computer when we are otherwise occupied,
as for example when we are driving. And a computer can be a
participant in a conversation, as for example on Star Trek.
But voice commands can be appropriate in crowds and public
spaces, or for activities where privacy is important. Also,
voice, like a lot of things, depends on artificial
intelligence (AI), and as this story suggests, bias can be
built into AI. Hence Alexa's inability to understand an
accented voice. This will eventually become a security
feature, as voice learns to train on specific voices,
accent and all. But for now it's a problem.
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This Article Won’t Change Your Mind
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Some time about 20 years ago I decided that i would stop
arguing, and start explaining. It was no longer about
convincing others, it was about making my own reasoning
clear. Why? because after almost two decades in philosophy
I concluded that nobody is convinced by argumentation. Yes,
I have relapses, because I'm temperamentally argumentative,
but these are exclamations, not exhortations. "Tell him you
disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and
he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to
see your point..." This, in a nutshell, is the history of
philosophy. What will change minds? Personal experience,
interactions with friends, and cognitive dissonance. That's
why to teach really is 'to model and demonstrate'. Anyhow.
Good article. Won't change your mind, but is worth reading
in any case.
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Brace Yourself For The Bitcoin Hard Fork
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There's a lot of history behind this one, but
essentially the split
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is between the original developers, who want to keep the
size of a block limited, and Bitcoin miners (ie., the
people who actually encrypt the blocks), who want the size
of the block to grow. This can happen in distributed
systems. It's not necessarily a bug; think of it as being
like mitosis, where a simple network begins to develop into
a complex network. But the short term message is risk. Lots
of it, because this sort of thing hasn't happened a lot yet
(though it has happened
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to Ethereum).
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Thoughts on the UMUC IT Spin Off
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This article offers reflections on a recent University of
Maryland University College (UMUC) initiative
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to spin off its IT department into a for-profit
company. Joshua Kim writes, "The new company, to be
called AccelerEd, will be made up of the 100 or so
professionals who work for UMUC’s Office of
Information Technology. This moves follows the previous
spin off of UMUC analytics unit into a for-profit company
called HelioCampus https://www.heliocampus.com/"
target="_blank." What about online learning, though? "In
online learning, there is not a place where teaching ends
and technology starts. How do you separate the two?" I
don't see this experiment working out well.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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