Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Lack of attention was the driving factor behind 51.2% of misinformation sharing among social media users who participated in an experiment conducted by a group of researchers from MIT, the University of Regina in Canada, University of Exeter Business School in the United Kingdom and Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
Ming-Chi Kuo says it will weigh less than 150 grams
A weight of 150 grams would make Apple’s headset lighter than the Oculus Quest 2 (503 grams), Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 (645 grams), and the Valve Index (809 grams). It would be lighter than Google’s Daydream View, a fabric VR headset designed to hold your phone, which weighed 220 grams. The headset could even be lighter than your iPhone, given that the standard iPhone 12 weighs 164 grams.
The headset, codenamed “N301,” may also have 8K displays, eye-tracking technology, and more than a dozen cameras to both track your hand movements and capture footage that can be displayed inside the headsetapp
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https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2021/03/25/tech-cycle-ar-vr/
Are you curious about Starlink and whether Elon Musk’s satellite internet technology is right for you? We answer the most pressing questions about the system that’s currently shaking up the ISP market.
Installing fiber in a city, and bringing Gigabit broadband to million of customers is certainly lucrative, but not so much in a rural area home to only a few hundred people.
The satellite internet system from SpaceX is capable of delivering 150Mbps internet speeds to theoretically any place on the planet. All the customer needs is a clear view of the sky.
Starlink currently costs $99 a month. You’ll also have to pay a one-time $499 fee for the Starlink satellite dish and Wi-Fi router, which the company will ship to your home.
Starlink is currently delivering 80Mbps to 150Mbps in download speeds and about 30Mbps in upload speeds, according to users. Meanwhile, latency comes in at around 30 milliseconds, which is on par with ground-based internet. Later this year, SpaceX plans on bumping up the download speeds to 300Mbps, while bringing down the latency to 20ms.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/19/mozilla-leads-push-for-fcc-to-reinstate-net-neutrality.html
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more on net neutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality
http://www.gamesforchange.org/blog/2021/03/11/g4c-epic/
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more on games in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=education+games
Cathcart: Let me be very clear: We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.
DER SPIEGEL: But you do save data about your users like the device ID, the phone model, the WhatsApp user name, the phone book and thereby also the numbers of all their contacts, right?
DER SPIEGEL: Apple has recently introduced privacy labels that resemble nutritional labels about what kind of data an app collects and what it doesn’t. Why don’t you do something similar?
DER SPIEGEL: A new German law, if passed, would mean that WhatsApp would have to hand over account data to law enforcement. Do you hand over data about your customers to government agencies?
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more on WhatsApp in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=whatsapp
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more on data privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+privacy
Gig economy: Europe tells companies to negotiate with workers or face new laws – Europe’s lawmakers have a message for “gig-economy” companies—get negotiating with unions and other workers’ representatives, or face new EU-wide legislation. from r/Futurology
https://fortune.com/2021/02/24/gig-economy-europe-worker-rights-eu/
Around 11% of the EU’s workforce—so, 24 million people—is estimated to have provided services through digital platforms at least once. Of those, 3 million do so for their primary source of income, 9 million for their secondary source, and nearly 7 million as an occasional income source.
Uber, notably, has already tried to lobby EU legislators on the topic. Early last week, it released a white paper arguing for a similar regulatory approach to that taken in California, where voters last November backed a ballot initiative cementing independent contractor status for Uber’s and Lyft’s drivers.
However, that argument was undermined within days by the U.K.’s Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that Uber’s drivers are in fact workers rather than independent contractors, and therefore deserve the minimum wage and annual paid leave.
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more on gig economy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=%22gig+economy%22
A minimal-data practice will enable several AI-driven industries — including cyber security, which is my own area of focus — to become more efficient, accessible, independent, and disruptive.
1. AI has a compute addiction. The growing fear is that new advancements in experimental AI research, which frequently require formidable datasets supported by an appropriate compute infrastructure, might be stemmed due to compute and memory constraints, not to mention the financial and environmental costs of higher compute needs.
MIT researchers estimated that “three years of algorithmic improvement is equivalent to a 10 times increase in computing power.”
2. Big data can mean more spurious noise.
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more on infodemic in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=infodemic
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/761389994491701/
“What the invention of photography did to painting, this will do to teaching.”
Natural language processing is on the cusp of changing our relationship with machines forever.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-can-write-a-passing-college-paper-in-20-minutes/
The specific AI — GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 — was released in June 2020 by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors.
According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning — the ability to understand what they’re writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a “C” average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment.
Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic.
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more on artificial intelligence in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
more on paper mills in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=paper+mills