I found this nice series of videos on YouTube: “Why do people laugh at creationists?”. Another of my favourites on YouTube about this topic you find here: Robin Ince on Creationism.
Sorry, the quality is a bit low but that was the source material we could get.
Tomorrow is Earthcast09. And here is the awesome trailer. Full info here.
This is a project to track – services based campus wide social networking platform. The presentation is from Thoughfest09.
Neat presentation by Carla Arena and Mary Hillis.
Pontydysgu is organising Thoughtfest09 at Salford University, Manchester on 5 and 6 March. Jenny Hughes will be running a workshop on comics and cartoons at the event. To kick thing soff, she has produced a series of posters around the theme of Thoughtfest.
Great video to start the new year. Fouclaut and Chomsky discuss creativity, the education system, power and much more.
A great new video by AJ Cann on the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK universities.
Continuing on our reporting from Online Educa Berlin, I have to say I was not particularly struck by any great innovation at this year’s conference. Maybe it was the recession which sobered everybody. Great people as always but the tech looked oh so the same. The one thing that did impress me was the growing maturity of projects working with MUVEs and especially in SecondLife. Leicester University from the UK presented a number of SL projects. Here is a YouTube video of their Media Zoo project.
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
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We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.