Searching for "iot"

autocrats and Soviet children’s literature

To understand modern autocrats, read Soviet children’s literature

https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/02/23/to-understand-modern-autocrats-read-soviet-childrens-literature

The dragons are back, from Ankara to Moscow, hoodwinking their peoples while claiming to protect them from non-existent threats. Some of their subjects tolerate them; many cheer them on. Shvarts captures it all: the lies which tyrants spread to mask their depredations as patriotism, their cynical insistence that resistance is futile and their need to murder those who speak the truth.

microcredentials and faculty

Why faculty need to talk about microcredentials

There is reason to believe that shorter, competency-based programs will play an important role in the university landscape in the coming years.

 Australian commentator Stephen Matchett expands: “MCs are the wild west of post-compulsory education and training, with neither law on what they actually are or order as to how they interact with formal providers. … Until (or if) this is sorted by regulators there needs to be a sheriff providing workable rules that stop the cowboys running riot.”

The lack of standards is also an issue in Canada. While  degree standards have been agreed upon – the Canadian Degree Qualification framework, contained in the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)’s 2007 Ministerial Statement on Quality Assurance of Degree Education in Canada, outlines expectations for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – the CMEC has yet to issue a pan-Canadian framework for microcredentials.

In the absence of a pan-Canadian model or definition, for the purposes of this column I will use the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s definition, put forward in its May 2021 report, Making Sense of Microcredentials:

“A microcredential is a representation of learning, awarded for completion of a short program that is focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes), and is sometimes related to other credentials.

Developing and running effective microcredential programs is not simply a matter of bundling a group of existing classes into a new sub-degree level program (although there will certainly be some who try that approach). Effective microcredential programming needs to be an institution-wide effort, with appropriate resourcing and guidelines, along with effective recruiting and student support.

department chairs and other unit leaders to lead collegial discussions about the following questions:

  • Gaps: who is not being served by our current degree offerings? Is there potential demand for our disciplinary knowledge and skills from people who don’t want a full degree program? Are there ways people could upgrade their skills by taking certain types of our courses? Can we identify potential short programs to meet new, distinct learning outcomes?
  • Student diversity: are there opportunities to develop short programs that could introduce a new demographic of students to our discipline? How might microcredentials be developed that meet the needs and interests of Indigenous students, first-generation students, or international students?
  • Connection: how might we create partnerships with external organizations to inform our understanding of skill-training needs? Can these partnerships be leveraged to create new career pathways for students, and/or new research opportunities for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students?
  • Impact: in what ways do our discipline’s insights relate to Canada’s current and future public needs? How might our disciplinary knowledge be combined with knowledge from other disciplines to train students to help address particular challenges? In what ways could our discipline contribute to student competency development that we consider meaningful and impactful?

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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential

What is AI

What is AI? Here’s everything you need to know about artificial intelligence

An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.

https://www-zdnet-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/what-is-ai-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-artificial-intelligence/

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

It depends who you ask.

What are the uses for AI?

What are the different types of AI?

Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today — intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.

General AI

General AI is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience.

What can Narrow AI do?

There are a vast number of emerging applications for narrow AI:

  • Interpreting video feeds from drones carrying out visual inspections of infrastructure such as oil pipelines.
  • Organizing personal and business calendars.
  • Responding to simple customer-service queries.
  • Coordinating with other intelligent systems to carry out tasks like booking a hotel at a suitable time and location.
  • Helping radiologists to spot potential tumors in X-rays.
  • Flagging inappropriate content online, detecting wear and tear in elevators from data gathered by IoT devices.
  • Generating a 3D model of the world from satellite imagery… the list goes on and on.

What can General AI do?

A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C Müller and philosopher Nick Bostrom reported a 50% chance that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90% by 2075.

What is machine learning?

What are neural networks?

What are other types of AI?

Another area of AI research is evolutionary computation.

What is fueling the resurgence in AI?

What are the elements of machine learning?

As mentioned, machine learning is a subset of AI and is generally split into two main categories: supervised and unsupervised learning.

Supervised learning

Unsupervised learning

ai-ml-gartner-hype-cycle.jpg

Which are the leading firms in AI?

Which AI services are available?

All of the major cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform — provide access to GPU arrays for training and running machine-learning models, with Google also gearing up to let users use its Tensor Processing Units — custom chips whose design is optimized for training and running machine-learning models.

Which countries are leading the way in AI?

It’d be a big mistake to think the US tech giants have the field of AI sewn up. Chinese firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Lenovo, invest heavily in AI in fields ranging from e-commerce to autonomous driving. As a country, China is pursuing a three-step plan to turn AI into a core industry for the country, one that will be worth 150 billion yuan ($22bn) by the end of 2020 to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030.

How can I get started with AI?

While you could buy a moderately powerful Nvidia GPU for your PC — somewhere around the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or faster — and start training a machine-learning model, probably the easiest way to experiment with AI-related services is via the cloud.

How will AI change the world?

Robots and driverless cars

Fake news

Facial recognition and surveillance

Healthcare

Reinforcing discrimination and bias 

AI and global warming (climate change)

Will AI kill us all?

 

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more on AI in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence+education

Internet of Thing Security Problem

The Internet of Things’ Persistent Security Problem

  • The threat of ransomware
  • IoT’s special vulnerabilities
  • Potential solutions

In what is currently a fragmented regulatory and standards landscape internationally, the EU has taken strongest interest in IoT, but from a competition perspective. The EU Commission is investigating competition questions related especially to the three dominant voice-assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri), a node for issues of data privacy and interoperability. Its recently released report hardly mentions security.

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more on IoT in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=internet+of+things

Rumble.com

https://rumble.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(website)
Researchers studying conspiracy theories and misinformation about COVID-19 note that several content creators have gained a receptive audience on Rumble after their productions have been pulled from Youtube or Facebook. They include Del BigtreeSherri Tenpenny, and Simone Gold.[9][10]

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rumble/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2019/02/21/these-are-the-real-fake-news-sites/

computer games and storytelling

Computerspiele und Literatur Auswahlbibliografie 16.09. – 23.10.2014 Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek

https://www.zlb.de/fileadmin/user_upload/recherche/Bibliographien/2014_09_16_Bibliographie-Computer-Einzelseiten.pdf

Was haben Computerspiele mit Literatur zu tun?

Was haben Computerspiele mit Literatur zu tun?

Narrative Computerspiele als Gegenstände literarischen Lernens

https://www.stiftunglesen.de/download.php?type=documentpdf&id=1381

 

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more on computer games in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=%22computer+games%22+

more on digital storytelling in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=%22digital+storytelling%22

Parler new web host

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/15/968116346/after-weeks-of-being-off-line-parler-finds-a-new-web-host

SkySilk, a Web infrastructure company based outside of Los Angeles, is now hosting Parler, SkySilk’s chief executive, Kevin Matossian, confirmed to NPR in an interview.

Matossian refused to comment on the terms of the arrangement, or under what conditions SkySilk will do business with Parler, which was heavily used by the rioters in connection with the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

In new content guidelines released by Parler on Monday, the company says it will deploy a “privacy-preserving process” using an algorithm and human moderators to police content that threatens or incites violence.

Additionally, Parler says there will be a “trolling filter” in which content that attacks someone based on race, sex, sexual orientation or religion will be covered up. Yet those who want to view the content will be allowed by clicking through the filter.

Mark Meckler, one of the early creators of the Tea Party movement and now Parler’s interim CEO, said the platform has been rebuilt on independent technology and is “not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations.”

Indeed, Parler has turned to Web infrastructure companies that have welcomed extremist and hate-filled websites, including Epik, a firm based outside of Seattle that supports Parler’s domain, as well as sites including InfoWars, BitChute and Patriots.win, previously known as The Donald.

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more on Parler in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=parler

Hamlet on the HoloDeck

Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. Free Press.
https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/qoo6di/alma990011592830104318
Since 1992 I have been teaching a course on how to write electronics section. My students include freshman, writing majors, and media lab graduate students.
As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellspring Safari time, causing the in animate circuits to sync with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here in about we mean to one another.
p. 12 A New Medium of Storytelling
p. 18 Aldous Huxley Brave New World
(more on it here https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huxley)
Set 600 years from now, describes a society that science has dehumanized by eliminating love, parenthood, and the family in favor of generating engineering, test tube delivery, and state indoctrination. Books are banned, and science has come up with a substitute form of storytelling to delete the masses.
p. 20 Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
p. 22 this accounts of a digital dystopia but eroticize and demonize the computer. Cyberpunks surfers are like Cowboys on the new frontier motorcycle hoodlums with a joystick in their hand instead of a motorcycle between their legs. They are outlaw pirates on an endless voyage of exploration throughout the virtual world riding and plundering among the invisible data hoards of the world in many states by the stronger pirate parents who reach in and reprogram their minds.
p. 22 William Gibson Neurmancer
p. 28 The Harbinger on the the Holodeck
The technical in economic cultivation of this freestyle new medium of communication has led to several new varieties of narrative entertainment. This new storytelling formats very from the shoot them up video game in the virtual dungeons of Internet role-playing games to the post modern literary hypertext. This wide range of narrative art holds the promise of a new medium of expression that is S varied SD printed book or the movie picture.
Books printed before 1501 or cold incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that this books are the work of a technology still in its infancy.
The garish video games in tangled websites of the current digital environment or part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.
p. 29 now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer. We can see how 20th century novels, films, and please have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling. We therefore have to start our survey of the harbingers of the holiday back with a look at multiform stories, that is, linear narrative straining against the boundary of pre-digital media like a two dimensional picture trying to burst of its frame.
p. 30 The multiform story
Frank Capra’s It’s a wonderful life
p. 34 Robert Zemeskis Back to the Future
p. 35 Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day
Multi forms stories often reflect different points of view of the same event.  p. 37 Kurosawa Rashomon, the same crime is narrated by four different people: a rape victim; her husband, who is murdered; the bandit who attacked them; and a bystander.
p. 37 Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars
p. 37 Multi form narrative attempts to give a simultaneous form to this possibilities, to allow us to hold in our minds at the same time multiple contradictory alternatives.
p. 38  active audience
When the writer expands the story to include multiple possibilities, the reader assumes a more active role.
p. 40 although television viewers have long been accused of being less active engaged in readers or theatergoers, research on thin culture provides considerable evidence that viewers actively appropriate the stories of their favorite series. In addition to sharing critical commentary and gossip, fans create their own stories by taking characters and situations from the series and developing them in ways closer to their own concerns.
p. 42 role playing games or theatrical in a non-traditional but thrilling way. Players are both actors and audience for one another, and events the purple tree often have the media seat of personal experience.
p. 43 Live theater has been incorporating the same qualities of spontaneity and audience involvement for some time.
p. 43 MUDs have allowed distant players on the Internet to share a common virtual space in which they can chat with one another in real time. A the social psychologist Sherry Turkle has persuasively demonstrated, mods are intensely “evocative” environments for fantasy play that allow people to create and sustain elaborate fictional personas.
p. 44 movies three dimensions
p. 51 dramatic storytelling in electronic games
p. 55 story webs
p. 59 computer scientist as storytellers
p. 65 Chapter 3 From Additive to Expressive Form
beyond multimedia
Sept 28, 1895 Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station
p. 66 photoplays
p. 67 one of the lessons we can learn from the history of film is that additive formulations like photo play or the contemporary catshall ‘multimedia” or a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and it is still depending on the format derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power. Today the derivative mindset is apparent in the conception of cyber space is the place to view “pages” of print or “clips” of moving video end of cedar rooms is offering “extended books.”
p. 60 ELIZA, 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum
p. 71 the four essential properties of digital environments
Digital environments are procedural
Digital environments are participatory
Digital environments are spacial
Digital environments are encyclopedic
p. 90 Digital structures of complexity
p. 95 part to the aesthetics of the medium
chapter 4 immersion
definition
The experience of being transported to an elaborate please simulator please it’s pleasurable in itself regarding of the fantasy contact. we Refer to this experience as immersion. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different is water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.
p/ 99 entering the enchanted place
my note: ghost in the machine
The computer itself, even without any fantasy content, is an enchanted object. Sometimes it can act like an autonomous, animate being, sensing it’s environment in carrying out internally generated processes, yet it can also seem like an extension of our own consciousness, capturing our words through the keyboard in displaying them on the screen as fast as we can thank them.
p. 110 the active creation of belief
In digital environments we have new opportunities to practice this active creation of belief. For instance, in an interactive video program set in Paris that may research group designed in the 1980s for language learners, we included a working telephone, represented by a photograph of a phone who’s keypad could be clicked on .
p. 112 structuring participation with a mask .
p. 119 regulating arousal According to Winnicott, “the pleasurable element in playing Carris whit eight employee Kasian that the instructional a razzle is not excessive”; that is, the object of the imaginary world should not be too enticing, scary, or real let the immersive trance be broken. This is true in any medium. If a horror movie is too frightening, we cover our eyes or turn away from the screen.
p. 126 chapter Agency
Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double click on a file and seat open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. However, we do not usually expect to experience agency within a narrative environment.
p. 129 the pleasures of navigation
One form of agency not dependent on the game structure yet characteristic of digital environment is spatial navigation. The ability to move through virtual landscapes can be pleasurable in itself, independent of the content of the spaces.
p. 130 the story of the maze
the adventure maze embodies a classic fair-tale narrative of danger and salvation. as a format for electronic narrative, the maze is a more active version of the immersive visit (chapter 4).
p. 134 Giving Shape to Anxiety
p. 137 The Journey Story and the Pleasure of Problem Solving
p. 140 Games into Stories
p. 142 Games as Symbolic Dramas

The Huawei war

https://mondediplo.com/2020/11/10huawei

Ren, a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army who went into consumer electronics, played the patriotic card, cautioning Jiang that ‘switching equipment technology was related to national security, and that a nation that did not have its own switching equipment was like one that lacked its own military’ (1). A quarter of a century later, other countries, led by the US, have belatedly grasped the wisdom of Ren’s remarks; the technology in question today is 5G

The company operates networks in 170 countries and employs more than 194,000 people.

This summer it overtook Samsung as the world’s biggest seller of smartphones… boast some of the most advanced artificial intelligence capabilities on the market.

spending more than 10% of its annual profits on research and development. In 2019 it spent over $15bn — more than Apple and Microsoft — and the budget for 2020 is $20bn. (For comparison, the R&D spend of the entire German car industry in 2018 was roughly $30bn.)

Huawei and 5G are only a small part of a much larger geoeconomic and geopolitical struggle in which China is trying to gain the upper hand over the US.

Washington’s campaign against Chinese tech includes firms such as the state-owned ZTE, another important player in the 5G field, WeChat and TikTok and many other lesser-known companies. But Huawei is its main target.

Washington sees Huawei as an arch-example of China’s rogue behaviour (widely mistaken for meritocratic market success) — stealing intellectual property, bullying partners and undercutting competitors

The EU has failed to agree a common policy on 5G.

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more on Huawei in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huawei

hybrid in the fall of 2020

the HyFlex model for the fall… reflects a rift between administrators and professors, who are raising alarms over the health risks of teaching in person, and about the logistical, technical, and pedagogical complications of the model itself. Search HyFlex on Facebook and Twitter and you’ll come across comments like this one: “Whoever the hell thought of this is a bean counter, not an educator, and an idiot.”

Teaching experts and others familiar with hybrid teaching say that HyFlex can work, but it requires effective technology, careful planning, instructional support, and creative course design.

“If HyFlex is part of the plan, it has to be done with will faculty participation,” says Brian Beatty, an associate professor of instructional technologies at San Francisco State, who created the model. “Otherwise, if it’s top down and the administration is saying, We’re doing this, then the faculty are saying, But why are we doing this?”

Much of what bothers professors about the push for HyFlex is that so many details about its mechanics remain ill defined. And assumptions about its value seem rooted in a particular idea of teaching, one where the professor stands at the front of a classroom and lectures.

We are the ones holding the bag if this does not work, or if it’s chaos,” says Michelle Miller, a psychology professor at Northern Arizona University and author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively With Technology.

Miller is a fan of the original HyFlex model from San Francisco State, but says that colleges need to be mindful that the conditions under which it’s now being adapted — quickly, at scale, and without giving students much choice — will limit its effectiveness.

To work effectively, she says, hybrid teaching requires a lot of support, such as having teaching assistants help manage the complexities of working simultaneously with two different audiences. Otherwise it risks becoming a “lecture-centric, passive consumption view of learning.” That goes against years of hard work faculty members have been doing to make their classrooms more inclusive, active, and engaged.

To help think through pedagogical challenges, faculty groups are testing out teaching strategies, some departments meet weekly to discuss course design, and a student-leadership team is providing feedback and creating online tools to help their peers learn effectively online. Even so, the process has been challenging and frustrating at times for faculty members. Professors are both looking for templates and wanting to maintain control over their courses, which inevitably creates tension with the administration.

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more on hyflex in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=hyflex

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