Ground the Drones demonstration

Via Drone Wars UK:

Six hundred people came from all around the country to take part in a large demonstration against drones at RAF Waddington, the new home of the UK drone warfare.    The demo, organised by the Drone Campaign Network, Stop the War Coalition, CND and War on Want received huge media coverage in the light of the confirmation by the Ministry of Defence that drone operations had started from RAF Waddington. After the march from Lincoln, a rally was held at Helen John’s peace camp at the perimeter of the base, and speaker after speaker emphasised that this was just the beginning of efforts to stop the drone wars.

Photo essay: Ground the Drones demo « Drone Wars UK

Protesting military use of UAVs.

Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe

Via Boing Boing and The Washington Post:

How federal and local investigators sifted through that ocean of evidence and focused their search on two immigrant brothers is a story of advanced technology and old-fashioned citizen cooperation. It is an object lesson in how hard it is to separate the meaningful from the noise in a world awash with information.

The killing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the capture of his younger brother, Dzhokhar, may seem like an inevitable ending given that their images were repeatedly recorded by store security cameras and bystanders’ smartphones. But for 102 hours last week, nothing seemed certain in the manhunt that paralyzed a major metropolis, captivated the nation and confronted counterterrorism operatives with the troubling and unforgiving world of social media and vigilante detective work.

Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe - The Washington Post

Points:

• “Davis had learned of the central importance of video from a police commander in London after the public transit bombings there in 2005, when the city’s extensive system of surveillance cameras led to identification of four suspects within five days of the attacks, after examination of hundreds of hours of video.”
• “…the social media revolution meant that the FBI and Boston authorities were under intense pressure to move even faster, because thousands of amateur sleuths were mimicking the official investigation, inspecting digital images of the crowd on Boylston Street and making their own often wildly irresponsible conclusions about who might be the bombers.”
• “In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet.”

Disrupting the grading process and thereby disrupting teachers

Via American Interest:

EdX is making this system available for free online to all schools that want it, and four states are already using a similar program in public high schools. Some like the new technology because it can provide students with instant feedback when human grading can take weeks. Others don’t

Domo Arigato, Professor Roboto | Via Meadia

Points:

• “The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical rank. It will also provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer was on topic or not.”
• “One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders.”
• “The technology will probably never be a full substitute for a human teacher, but as a force multiplier, it could be quite useful.”

Ponder:

• Critics need to figure out how to get on board because the technology will not stop, especially in terms of making MOOCs more engaging so more people complete them. Will that eventually turn MOOCs into viable degree-granting sources?
• Will this replace the outsourcing of grading?
• Will this wipe out the non-rock star professors, i.e., robot teachers that have a grading capability?
• Will this make education so affordable the current bubble (rising tuition + rising student debt) will pop?
• If even knowledge/service professions like teaching can become roboticized, what will human careers look like?

'The New York Times' Has Built A Haiku Bot

Via Business Insider:

But why build a haiku bot? “A lot of the projects we work on here are these incredibly big heaves, which are very, very gratifying,” said Mainland. “But you crave these smaller projects, which are just as valuable.” Similarly, projects like the haiku bot may seem silly on the surface, but the underlying code, the use of natural language processing, or other components could be valuable to future projects, Lavallee said.

'The New York Times' Has Built A Haiku Bot - Business Insider

Only a matter of time before AI has taken over text creation for many uses.

MOOCs: Will Online Education Ruin the University Experience? | New Republic

Via New Republic:

In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”

MOOCs: Will Online Education Ruin the University Experience? | New Republic

Points:

• “MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television.”
• “Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities.”
• “True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before.”
• “The dark side of this bright dream [reducing the cost of education] is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble.”
• “We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question.”
• “But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life.”
• “One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value.”
• “MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars.”
• “In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?”