OLDaily

Could an Idea for Fighting Poverty Be Worth a Billion Dollars?
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019/04/16

This is in the Chronicle of Higher Education, so I guess I can cover it, but it's a bit weird. Here was the challenge: ideas that would "drive $10,000 in annual wage increases for at least 100,000 low- and middle-income US workers by 2021." Here were the winners: "EMPath, which teaches clients how to keep from being overwhelmed by health or financial stresses," and "Cell-Ed Works, which provides low-tech training via cellphones in three-minute bites." I doubt either will create the desired effect. My solution would address the cause directly: low wages (amid record corporate profits). But I don't think the organizers were looking for things that would help low-income workers form unions and exercise political and economic power. But Friere was right: "To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity."

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HyperDocs: Evolution, Purpose & Intention
Greg Kulowiec, EdTechTeacher, 2019/04/16

This is part Google rolling a great new service and part Google taking one more step to destroy the open web. The concept of 'HyperDocs' emerges from the tools GSuite provides enabling teachers and students to create using Google Docs. Greg Kulowiec doesn't define 'HyperDocs' directly but instead talks about the ways student and teachers can interact using Google Docs. What would be really great would be an open web designed with that capacity - much the way Tim Berners-Lee intended it in the first place. Maybe something like that is coming. In the meantime, we can use Google Docs.

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We Built a (Legal) Facial Recognition Machine for $60
Sahil Chinoy, New York Times, 2019/04/16

On the theme of what people can do with today's technology, here's a facial recognition machine. It uses input from publicly accessible web cameras showing people walking on the street, and compared the faces to images of people on nearby corporate websites. The facial recognition software is a service (on theoreti.ca Geoffrey Rockwell suggests it might be Amazon’s Rekognition). The Times article has a lot of background about privacy regulation, but I'm more interested in the implications of widely available AI services for the masses.

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Glide - Make Your Own App by Just Making a Spreadsheet
Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, 2019/04/16

The product is exactly as advertised in the title. In this post, Richard Byrne introduces us to Glide. It works like this: put data into a Google Sheets database. Then go to the Glide website and tell it how to access the database. And your app has been created. They're not world-changing apps - mostly, they're just nice ways to look at the data in the database. But if that's all you need, this is perfect. And at the very least, it illustrates the sorts of things people can build these days. Here's a sample app.

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