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Stephen's Web ~ Link
OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Mar 13, 2017
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
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Between meetings with notaries today I was wondering to
myself whether work had been done on using one neural
network to train another neural network. I didn't find the
answer (if you know, send me a note!) but I did find this
nice guide to neural networks and deep learning
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Nielsen Linkexplains these a bit
differently than I've seen before, but in such a way as to
make some things clearer to me, so I felt it was certainly
worth passing along. There are also examples you can work
though.
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The Coded Language of For-Profit Colleges
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"For-profit colleges," writes Tressie McMillan Cottom,
"target and thrive off of inequality." She calls these
examples of "lower ed" - in contrast with higher ed, which
is where the more economically successful go. "Flexible
solutions, on-demand education, open-access career
retraining, reskilling, and upskilling—these are
terms that talk about inequality without taking inequality
seriously."
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An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing
Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy
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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. The audience is not for sale to anyone. It
functions as a check on power. It acts against the flack
machine and restores the conversation. And it rejects the
dialogue of demonization.
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Collision Course — Why Are Funders Straying from Their
Lane?
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The pro-publisher website The Scholarly Kitchen is noting
with alarm the shift in funding away from publishers and
toward initiatives that compete with publishers. "What has
led to this lane-changing behavior from funders and
philanthropies with regard to researchers, technology, and
publishers?" asks Kent Anderson. "Why are they moving into
the publishing world with competitive attitudes? Why are
they seeking to define publication choices for their funded
researchers?" The responses range from antagonism to
opportunism, he writes, with a dose of short-sightedness:
"funders may not realize that there may be one or
two Jenga blocks that, if pulled out, could bring major
functions of the industry down in a tumble." Actually,
I think they do realize this, which is why they're scouting
for a replacement.
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Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor
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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
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that trample on our rights to privacy
through the use of data science and armies of bots, those
with bad intentions
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can game the system
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to spread misinformation
political advertising online has rapidly become
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a sophisticated industry... political campaigns are now
building individual adverts targeted directly at
users.
These are significant issues, and as Berners-Lee says, they
are complex issues. And they are the result of people and
companies working directly against the idea of the web as
an open and decentralized medium build by, and for the
benefit, of everyone.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
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