Fortnightly Mailing

Regulating the Net - @JJN1's report from a talk by Simon Hampton, Google’s Director of Public Policy for Northern Europe

John Naughton provides the kind of really useful informal reportage that we need more of. I'll not try to summarise it, knowing that you will read it right away. One point that Hampton made that John questions was “The larger the haystack, the easier it is to find the needle.” I think that Peter Norvig's 2007 theorising from the data talk sheds light on this apparently counter-intuitive statement. If you've enough data then statistically based algorithms can home in the needles within the data, using other parts of the data to guide them.

Learning Technologies in adult learning: influence how a charitable trust employs >£40m to achieve its mission

Last year, with Dick Moore, Adrian Perry, and Clive Shepherd, I was commissioned to report to the Ufi Charitable Trust (UCT) on "priorities for interventions by the Trust and others through learning technologies in adult learning and employability in the UK".  This followed the Trust's October 2011 announcement of the sale of Ufi Limited. The Trust intends to apply the proceeds of the sale - which exceed £40m - to the mission of achieving "a step change in adult learning and employability for all in the UK, through the adoption of 21st century technologies". This 10 minute survey provides an opportunity to influence the way in which UCT employs its funds to achieve its mission. The closing date for completion is 6 March 2012. 

What is vision for, and how does it work? Aaron Sloman

What is vision for, and how does it work? Some considerations for philosophy of perception [600 kB PDF] is a 12/2/2012 talk by Aaron Sloman from the School of Computer Science, at the University of Birmingham. Unusually for a "slide-based" presentation, you get much more than the gist of the talk from the slides, which read more or less as the script for the talk itself. I'd have really liked to have been at the talk, which tackles amongst many other things "the representational problems arising from complexities in the perception of processes". [Sloman has a terrific, uncompromising web-site.]

Richard O’Dwyer, a student and his computer – an American perspective by Jim Farmer

Photo-credit awaited

So the question being asked around the world in the wake of Obama's online forum is the following: Who is this Richard O'Dwyer, and why is he so important?

International Business Times, 30 January 2012

A query about Richard O'Dwyer, a 23-year-old Sheffield Hallam undergraduate who faces jail if sent for trial and convicted in the US, was the most [2,073] asked of more than 133,000 questions submitted to a live online Google+ "hangout" with the [U.S.] president broadcast on Monday.      

The Guardian, 31 January 2012

Recent actions of the U.S. government have shattered our understanding of copyright. Universities now need to provide new detailed guidance to faculty and students. They will also need to action to protect Internet Domain Names of their affiliates.

On January 13^th a Magistrates' Court in the United Kingdom ruled that Richard O’Dwyer, a student at Sheffield Hallam University, could be extradited to the U.S. on U.S. charges of copyright infringement, even though he has never left England and never had infringing files on this computer.

One week later two helicopters, 76 New Zealand police and 4 U.S. FBI agents raided and searched Kim Dotcom’s home in Auckland arresting Dotcom and four colleagues ¹. The U.S. Department of Justice seized Megaupload.com and fifteen other domain names, all but one of his bank accounts, and his physical assets. Computers were seized for evidence. He is currently in custody. The New Zealand police were careful to say they did not file charges, but rather executed the raid on behalf of the U.S. government.

The strategy used by the U.S. government against O’Dwyer was explained by a U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement [ICE] official who said: “This was like drugs. You want to cut out the middle man.”

Electronics and the Dim Future of the University

John Naughton's Welcome to the desktop degree... today pointed to Electronics and the Dim Future of the University by Eli Noam, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science (Vol. 270, pp 247-249, October 13, 1995), in which Noam (who has been ploughing a deep furrow at Columbia University for over 30 years as a professor of economics and finance) provides a brief, forceful, and exceptionally far-sighted analysis of why the Internet, computing, and the exponential growth in the production of scientific and other knowledge, will change universities.

The article deserves to be read in full.

To whet your appetite here are its concluding three paragraphs.

Montessori schooling

Laura Flores Shaw's interesting piece in today's Huffington Post Montessori - The Missing Voice in the Education Reform Debate reminded me of Donald Clark's 2006 Brin, Page, Bezos and Wales? which pointed out that all four of them and - but NB! the 16 February 2012 comment from David Jennings on Donald's 2006 post - (and Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget and Hilary and Bill Clinton before them) had early Montessori schooling.

Shaw writes:

"Over a century ago, Dr. Maria Montessori discovered through scientific observations of children that they are not empty vessels to be filled -- they are intrinsically motivated doers. She saw that providing a hands-on learning environment that valued choice, concentration, collaboration, community, curiosity, and real-world application produced lifelong learners who viewed "work" as something interesting and fulfilling instead of drudgery to be avoided. Now, research in psychology and neuroscience continually validates Dr. Montessori's conclusions about children and learning, and Montessori schools are flourishing -- not just preschools but, increasingly, elementary, middle and secondary schools."