Children are more likely to believe robots than themselves

Interesting. Would novice teachers believe feedback from a robot while reviewing a session?

This is pretty cool. Waaaay more high-end than what I’m thinking of, but passively turning a scene/event with multiple participants interacting in complex ways into a point cloud with nothing more than a bunch of cameras? Gold.

via BoingBoing

It's weird. It was only last summer that the whole cancer thing happened, but it feels like so much longer. It went from a simple strange blood test to a confirmed strange blood test to every-single-blood-test-ever to a biopsy and CT scan and full diagnosis within a few weeks last year. I have trouble remembering a time before cancer. And now, it's part of everything I do and think and feel.

I’ve been using the handy YD-Recent-Images plugin for awhile now, to generate the /photos page here on my site. It provides a widget that displays the latest n images uploaded in posts here - and provides a nice photostream view for my photoblogging here as well ¹. The plugin hasn’t been updated for… 7 years!… but it works. I’ve been expecting it to start misbehaving over time, though.

The /photos page here on my site. Self-hosted photostreamy goodness.

As a university, we’ve had two major issues related to the use of the campus learning management system.

1. Sharing of personal information with third party services/companies¹
2. Copyright of materials uploaded to courses, and subsequently downloaded and shared with third parties as per above. Copyright compliance is a pretty big deal at Canadian universities.

We needed a way to provide a reminder of university policies, to provide guidance about what is allowed and not allowed, and to document that people have acknowledged these.

Thanks to Ehud for the link to this video and paper from CHI 2018. This is almost exactly the tech I built in my head to use for my PhD research. Last year, this was completely impossible. Then, kind of possible but kludgey. Now, it’s basically there.

With this, you could volumetrically record a room, and play it back from various spatial and temporal vantage points. Check out the 2:40 point where the viewer and recorded-person separate, and then the recording is played back from a different time…

It’s not a SPLOT per se, because it’s intended for use in face-to-face learning rather than online. SPLF2FT?

At the Taylor Institute, we have a bunch of active learning classrooms - we call them “learning studios”. They’re designed to enable active group collaboration, through the design of the rooms, to the furniture available, and the technology provided. There are 50" touch-enabled “collaboration carts” ¹ that can run almost any web-based tool.

One of the more common uses of the displays involves digital whiteboards. Each display has an actual physical whiteboard beside it, but the digital whiteboard integrates with the AV systems that run the room. Which means we can do things like say “hey - group 1 is doing some cool stuff. check it out!” and push their display to the projector (or even to all other displays in the room) for everyone to see. Much harder to do with traditional whiteboards.

I’ve moved my webstuff back to Reclaim Hosting - I had been a very very happy customer, but decided I needed to move my sites onto canadian-hosted-and-managed servers out of principle. Since then, Reclaim spun up a Canadian-hosted server (but it’s managed by a US company, so there are still… complications). But, I’ve decided to stop caring so rigidly about that. It’s just my webstuff, and it’s far more important to be a part of the Reclaim family than it is to push back in an invisible way against the insanity that is running their country.

I'd picked up a copy of the book When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithy after reading a reference to it in a NYTimes article about John McCain, and Grant gave me the nudge to actually start reading it. It's an amazing read, about a young neurologist/budding neuroscientist, who spends his life learning about the nature of life, and death, by experiencing it.

I'm thankful that the decisions I'm faced with are happening in slow motion compared to his story, but the effects are largely the same. I'm afraid of so many things now - most notably, of leaving J. alone after putting her through the ringer.

Another in a series of really great articles in the Times, about cancer and dying. Fun topics that are kind of relevant.

"The most obvious" response, wrote the neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi in "When Breath Becomes Air," his memoir of a brilliant life cut short, "might be an impulse to frantic activity: to live life to the fullest, to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions." But cancer limits the energy for compacted living, and a longer view takes hold. "Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest; a chasing after wind, indeed."

A study cited in the paper notes publisher websites utilize an average of 13.5 (and up to 70 in some cases) third parties. A visit to one popular U.S. tabloid triggered a user interaction with some 352 other web servers, according to a 2014 U.S. Senate subcommittee study of the issue.

Many of those interactions were benign; however, some of those third parties may have been using cookies or other technology to compile data on consumers without their explicit consent, according to the study. Data mined by the practice can include users' interests, browsing history, location, and past-purchase history.