Group items tagged

"Students on online courses report insufficient interaction and familiarity with their instructors and a lack of motivation. Feedback in one study included: "I want a real teacher", "I prefer a course taught by a human" and "There is no instructor personality interjected into the course". So, how do instructors overcome this perception and ensure students view them as "present" in online courses? "

"Rutgers University's new program also uses a "behavior observation tool," which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity."

"But with the Snowden revelations and the widespread understanding of ubiquitous Internet surveillance (something that a minority was always aware of, of course), sociologists have observed a marked chilling effect on political and social discourse, as people who disagree with the majority fear that their searches and discussions will be observed, correlated, logged and use to ascribe guilt to them. "

"Therefore, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page. Of course, while waiting for that consent from a visitor, the site could refuse to show anything, but then the publisher will scare off all readers, even the ones who turn out to be not running anti-ad plugins. If the page is viewable while waiting for the consent, then blocking ad-blockers is pointless."

"If students want a verified certificate for their online course, they can pay a fee of $30-90 (approximately £17-54) for the Signature Track service. They will be asked to submit a webcam photo and identification card to check their identity. "

"First, the drones engage in aerial mapping to create detailed three-dimensional terrain models. They then begin "precision planting" by shooting seed pods that have been "pregerminated and covered in a nutritious hydrogel" into the soil. Finally, drones monitor tree growth over the course of a number of "planting audits," designed to track the reforrestation progress. "

"Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory. Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten."

""Could teaching be trumped by a learning machine? Are we beginning to glimpse the possibility of machines that teach themselves to teach? They learn what works, what doesn't and deliver ever better performance. We see the embryonic evidence for this in adaptive learning systems, that are truly algorithmic, and do use machine learning, to improve as they deliver. The more students they teach, the better they get. They even tech themselves. This is not science fiction. This is real AI, in real software, delivering real courses, in real institutions." - Donald Clark"

"And, of course, there's the law-enforcement angle. Instead of relying on sketch artists and police lineups, a real-life version of a Recaller could tap into a witness's memory and reconstruct what they saw. Forget security-camera footage - cops just need your thoughts."

"The county is plotting the course to replace an enterprise resource planning system that has been in place since the 1980s."

"As Zuckerberg surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won't make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more. This, of course, will produce more data for Facebook to mine to its own financial advantage."

"If that data is collected, does the child have a right to get it back? If that data is collected from very early childhood and does not belong to the child, does it make the child extra vulnerable because his or her choices and patterns of behaviour could be known to anyone who purchases the data, for example, companies or political campaigns. Depending on the privacy laws of the state in which the toys are being used, if the data is collected and kept, it breaches Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child - the right to privacy. (Though, of course, arguably this is something parents routinely do by posting pictures of their children on Facebook). "

"That's interesting work suggesting that Russian troll activity was significantly more ambitious on an international scale than previously thought. It also suggests a way of spotting this kind of meddling as it is happening by looking for the kind of forensic fingerprint the team identified. Of course, finding trolls is a cat-and-mouse game. For the organizations responsible for Russian troll activity, it ought to be a straightforward matter to change the pattern of activity in a way that does not create the same signature."

"But maybe I'm wrong. Because, if we believe tech gurus at least, the Trolley Problem is about to become of huge real-world importance. Human beings might not find themselves in all that many Trolley Problem-style scenarios over the course of their lives, but soon we're going to start seeing self-driving cars on our streets, and they're going to have to make these judgments all the time."

"I tried to start Adobe Acrobat today, part of the Creative Cloud suite, and it wouldn't start unless I agreed to new Terms of Use. But to read the Terms of Use, I had to agree to the Terms of Use first. This video shows me haplessly clicking the "Terms of Use" link only to be prevented from reading them because, of course, I had not agreed to the Terms of Use"

"What if this isn't just a one-off case of a popular professor dying. With so many classes online, why wouldn't universities just lay off any professor with a body of recorded lectures? We already know that tenure is harder to achieve every year, and schools are relying more and more on adjunct professors who teach a couple of classes on yearly contracts with no benefits. This scheme could save schools even more money! Of course, tuition will remain the same. One prof in the Twitter thread saw this possibility already."

"Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies. The social media company said the group, dubbed "Tortoiseshell" by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust - sometimes over the course of several months - and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware."

"Creating an algorithm that discriminates or shows bias isn't as hard as it might seem, however. As a first-year graduate student, my advisor asked me to create a machine-learning algorithm to analyze a survey sent to United States physics instructors about teaching computer programming in their courses."

"As explained above, filling in the forms in the fake HTML pages above will send off your password to websites controlled by the criminals. Of course, email passwords are amongst the most valuable credentials for crooks to acquire, simply because many people use their email account for password resets on a multitude of other accounts."

"This is the dystopian nightmare that Russell fears if his discipline continues on its current path and succeeds in creating super-intelligent machines. It's the scenario implicit in the philosopher Nick Bostrom's "paperclip apocalypse" thought-experiment and entertainingly simulated in the Universal Paperclips computer game. It is also, of course, heartily derided as implausible and alarmist by both the tech industry and AI researchers. One expert in the field famously joked that he worried about super-intelligent machines in the same way that he fretted about overpopulation on Mars."