Defense against the dark arts in the Sydney Morning Herald

by | Tuesday, January 29, 2019

I was in Sydney recently to present a keynote at the MITE conference. I spoke there about some issues that have been concerning me for a while—what I like to call the “dark arts” of digital technologies. After the conference I had a wide-ranging interview with Jordan Baker of the Sydney Morning Herald. An article based on the interview was just published. Though we covered a lot of ground in the interview only some of what we discussed ended up in the article—which is par for the course. For the record here is a link to the article: STEM focus leaves kids vulnerable to ‘dark arts’ of fake news: expert

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Going cuckoo!

Three different news-stories/articles came to my notice today all connected by the infamous brood parasite the cuckoo. The first is a part of Olivia Judson's blog (on the NYTimes) on biology and life (read Cuckoo! Cuckoo! here), the second is is about how scientists...

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...

The Innocent

I first read Ian McEwan many years ago (in the 80's I think) when he wrote grim and macabre novels and short stories, full of strange dark humor. I found him somewhat interesting but not enough to seek out his books. And then, years later, this past fall I read...

Bangalore symposium, now on YouTube

This past August I was in India for a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity. The meeting was organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and was "designed to bring together education and...

Education in a pandemic: A crisis & opportunity

Education in a pandemic: A crisis & opportunity

Last year I was in Israel to present at the Meital Conference. When I was there I was interviewed by Lior Detal, the education correspondent for TheMarker - which led to an article in the magazine. Earlier this year, once the COVID crisis was in full swing, I was...

Happy New Year, from the College of Education, MSU

The college of Education at Michigan State University just came out with a video titled Year in Review. You can see the video below. I would like to point out that a couple of projects I am involved with made it into the video. They include the project with the Azim...

Sita sings the blues

I have been following Nina Paley's career for a while now. I first found out about her through the now defunct Desi website, badmash.com and have tracked her website off and on. Nina is an amazing animator and her best work is devoted to the Indian epic The Ramayana...

Many Voices, One Song: Orchestrating Polyphonic Learning

Many Voices, One Song: Orchestrating Polyphonic Learning

In music, polyphony describes a texture where multiple independent melodic voices interweave to create something greater than the sum of its parts. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin expanded this idea to human discourse, seeing it as a way for multiple voices and...

Beauty in science

An evocative image from today's NYTimes about our improved understanding of the beautiful phenomena known as the northern lights. You can read the story here, but I would like to quote from the end of the article: The next time you see the northern lights, you’ll be...

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