Author Archive
This Is Your Brain On Games
http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/this-is-your-brain-on-games/
“Action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, and vision,” says brain scientist Daphne Bavelier in her TED Talk on the subject.
In February, Italian researchers found that playing fast-paced video games can improve the reading skills of children with dyslexia.
In 2012, scientists at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that high school gamers who played video games two hours a day were better at performing virtual surgery than non-gaming medical residents.
http://mashable.com/2015/01/19/super-mario-artificial-intelligence/
A team of German researchers has used artificial intelligence to create a “self-aware” version of Super Mario who can respond to verbal commands and automatically play his own game.
Artificial Intelligence helps Mario play his own game
Students at the University of Tubingen have used Mario as part of their efforts to find out how the human brain works.
The cognitive modelling unit claim their project has generated “a fully functional program” and “an alive and somewhat intelligent artificial agent”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/30879456
Can Super Mario Save Artificial Intelligence?
The most popular approaches today focus on Big Data, or mimicking humansthat already know how to do some task. But sheer mimicry breaks down when one gives a machine new tasks, and, as I explained a few weeks ago, Big Data approaches tend to excel at finding correlations without necessarily being able to induce the rules of the game. If Big Data alone is not a powerful enough tool to induce a strategy in a complex but well-defined game like chess, then that’s a problem, since the real world is vastly more open-ended, and considerably more complicated.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/can-super-mario-save-artificial-intelligence
http://www.productchart.com/laptops/
Excellent interactive chart available from Global Network Discovery
Here is a wonderful interactive chart from Global Network Discovery that you can use to compare the affordances of different laptops. The chart compares a wide variety of laptops on criteria that include things such as : memory, storage capacity, screen size, and weight. You can also use the search functionality accompanied with the chart to refine your search by CPU, brand or model. Hovering your cursor over any laptop icon will display a small box with details pertaining to that product. These details include, besides the specs and features of that laptop, an updated version of its price.
Keep this interactive chart handy to use next time you want to buy a laptop. If you are looking for the best laptops for teachers, you can check this list instead. You can also use the “more” option in the chart to search for other comparison charts on smartphones, flash drives and SSD drives.
http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2015/01/a-handy-interactive-chart-comparing.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/story-big-deal-even-digital-age-touseef-mirza
Digital storytelling—baby steps. Communicating through the digital medium, ie, through websites, social media, mobile apps, is a fairly new venture. It’s only been around for 15-20 years at the most (since the dawn of the Internet). So all things considered, we are still in the early stages of exploring and understanding how to communicate effectively in the digital medium.
More on digital and traditional storytelling in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=storytelling
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/7-powerful-stats-thatll-make-you-better-content-marketing-0
1. 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing
2. 70% of consumers want to get to know a company through articles, rather than ads
3. Content costs 62% less than traditional marketing, and generates 3x as many leads
4. Visual content generates 94% more views than text based posts
5. By 2017, 87% of internet device sales will be smartphones and tablets
6. 69% of marketers cite a lack of time as the biggest challenge when creating content
7. An incredible 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day
is there a connection between the findings regarding social networks and the communities built through social media?
Iñiguez, G. )., Dunbar, R. )., Kaski, K. )., Barrio, R. )., & Govezensky, T. ). (2014). Effects of deception in social networks. Proceedings Of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1790), doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.1195
http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dedselc%26AN%3dedselc.2-52.0-84904634537%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.0673.pdf
prosocial lies (“white” lies) and antisocial lying (i.e. deception for personal gain), with the former being considered much less destructive than the latter.
Antisocial dishonesty thus places strong constraints on the size and cohesion of social communities, providing a major hurdle that organisms have to overcome (e.g. by evolving counter-deception strategies) in order to evolve large, socially cohesive communities. In contrast, “white” lies can prove to be beneficial in smoothing the flow of interactions and facilitating a larger, more integrated network.
https://global.gotowebinar.com/join/561128425722875393/722195006
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Open Archives Initiative, OAI http://www.openarchives.org/
DSpace http://www.dspace.org/
XSLT http://wiht.link/XSLT-intro
Heather Gilbert and Tyler Mobley from the South Carolina Digital Library
http://scmemory.org
Metadata schema and elements: required, recommended, optional.
required: e.g., contributing institution, date digital, digitization
one central hub as aggregate and 3 other hubs to collect, scan etc.
use ofTab-separated values TSV, http://www.json.org/ JavaScript Object Notation JSON, OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications ODF
Tyson Mobley:
OCLC multi-site server, aggragated Blacklight catalog –
Project Blacklight :: Blacklight (open source)
Apache Solr – java based search index. highly scalable
complications: multiple metadata formats, but variations of Dublin core.
Solr is not a relational dbase, so management of separate partners’ records in a single Solr index was issue to make it relational.
Gretchen Gueguen
Data Services Coordinator from DPLA
metadata mapping
aggregates data from libraries, archives, museums etc
Content hubs and services hubs (so LRS at SCSU)
For q/s:
http://tiny.cc/ncdpla
https://github.com/ncdhc/dpla-submission-precheck
https://github.com/ncdhc/dpla-sample-repox-xslt
https://goo.gl/ujzZHS
Metadata is basis of the work of DPLA. We rely on a growing network of hubs that aggregate metadata from partners, then we, in turn, aggregate the hubs’ metadata into the DPLA datastore. As we continue to grow our hub network, we have found the practical matter of how to aggregate partner metadata and deal with quality control over the resulting aggregated set becomes our biggest challenge. If your organization is interested in becoming a part of the DPLA network, or if you are interested in how the DPLA works with metadata, we will be hosting a webinar on January 22nd, at 2pm Eastern, about our workflows, and our future development in this area. The webinar will examine the aggregation best practices at two of our DPLA Service Hubs, as the basis of a conversation about metadata aggregation practices among our Hubs. In addition, DPLA has been working on some new tools for metadata aggregation and quality control that we’d like to share. We’ll preview some of our plans and hope to get feedback on future directions. Speakers: Lisa Gregory and Stephanie Williams of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center Heather Gilbert and Tyler Mobley of the South Carolina Digital Library Gretchen Gueguen of DPLA
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-deep-mind-of-demis-hassabis-156112890d8a
the only path to developing really powerful AI would be to use this unstructured information. It’s also called unsupervised learning— you just give it data and it learns by itself what to do with it, what the structure is, what the insights are.
One of the people you work with at Google is Geoff Hinton, a pioneer of neural networks. Has his work been crucial to yours?
Sure. He had this big paper in 2006 that rejuvenated this whole area. And he introduced this idea of deep neural networks—Deep Learning. The other big thing that we have here is reinforcement learning, which we think is equally important. A lot of what Deep Mind has done so far is combining those two promising areas of research together in a really fundamental way. And that’s resulted in the Atari game player, which really is the first demonstration of an agent that goes from pixels to action, as we call it.
http://www.wimp.com/failseducation/
Use social media sites for audio with learning goals in mind? No problem, contribute to this blog entry…
http://forum.holyculture.net/showthread.php?63700-NOISETRADE-vs-BANDCAMP-vs-SOUNDCLOUD-vs-Whoever
http://doughnutmag.com/tutorials/music-promotion/bandcamp-vs-reverbnation-vs-soundcloud-part-three/
http://readwrite.com/2012/01/03/lessons-learned-from-noisetrad
When it comes to downloading digital music, there is free and then there is legal, but seldom can you have both from the same site, and make money too.