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Selling Data to Amazon
I read the article thinking it would be just another bit of tech news, and yet for some reason my thoughts kept coming back to it. The story of the article is simple: Amazon is willing to pay people $10 to get access to their browsing histories. After giving the basic facts, the article then explores the idea of “buying” and “selling” data and the eventual implications of the seemingly simple offer by Amazon. What I found striking was how little we learned in the end about the details of the offer and how the article moved into a general discussion of digital surveillance as if to compensate; and amidst all this I felt the author struggling with language to express what is happening, with common words such as “buying”, “selling” and “owning” appearing repeatedly in quotation marks.
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The Era of Mathematics
Two weeks ago the report ‘The Era of Mathematics’ was presented in the House of Lords by Professor Philipp Bond. The report examines the wider impact of mathematics on the economy and makes recommendations how to expand and facilitate knowledge exchange between mathematicians and the industry.
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LMS Education Day
This Tuesday I attended the LMS Education Day, a yearly event focussing on how we teach mathematics to our undergraduates. The topic this year was curriculum development: are our curricula ready for the 21st century?
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Science as Sport
What is science as sport? In sports we measure achievement by winning and so for science it means measuring success in research using metrics that measure esteem: How many citations do I have? What is my H-index? How prestigious are the journals in which I publish? How many grants have I obtained? How soon have I been promoted?
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Machine Learning – My First MOOC
I have been engaged with higher education for the past 15 years, starting first as an undergraduate and now as lecturer teaching undergraduates myself. The rise of MOOCs, from 2012 onwards happened after I had finished my graduate studies and from then on I learned new material mostly by reading textbooks, research papers and spoke directly to colleagues. Although I was aware of their popularity, MOOCs never seemed important enough to warrant a closer look. Until now that is.