Edinblurb festival: the AI bot creating new fringe shows every hour

I came across an interesting story in The Guardian about an AI creating new fringe shows at the Edinburgh festival

You can see how it happens. The company has yet to start devising the show, but the deadline for the Edinburgh fringe programme is tomorrow. On a wing and prayer, the administrator writes a 100-word blurb and hopes for the best.

NZ's New Algorithm Charter a world-first!

Hi,
"New Zealand’s government says it is the first in the world to produce a set of standards for how public agencies should use the algorithms that increasingly drive decision-making by officials about every area of public life" says the Guardian newspaper. At the moment these standards have no legal teeth, but baby steps in the right direction. At least public bodies can be held up to account for why they aren't meeting the standards. Next, we need legislation like the European GDPR. Read the NZ Government's press release here.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) global data resource

Do you need more data about Covid-19? This is an excellent source of global data, updated each day, from Our World in Data. You can download the data set and analyse it yourself or use their visualisation tools. All their code is open source.

There is one caveat in that all the data is gathered in different ways in different countries. So, as you've heard politicians say, direct nation to nation comparisons must be treated with some caution.

NZ Covid-19 Tracer App released

The NZ Ministry of Health has released its Covid-19 Tracer app. It's available now to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Download it and tell your whānau, friends and work colleagues.

The story of New Zealand’s Covid-19 lockdown, in graphs

Stuff recently published an excellent article that functions on two levels. First, as its title suggests it provides interesting information on NZ's Covid-19 lockdown. But, secondly, it shows how the good use of graphs can make complex data much easier to understand. Highly recommended

The University of Auckland is ranked No. 1 by Times Higher Education

The THE rankings measure how universities worldwide are performing against the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs came into force in 2016 and set a 15-year agenda for all countries to end poverty, fight inequalities and build peaceful, just and sustainable societies.
Placing first overall for the second year running reaffirms the University of Auckland’s strong commitment to sustainability and making a positive social impact through its partnerships, research, teaching, operations, community engagement and knowledge transfer. Read more about this here.

Remote teaching during the lockdown

Since the University closed we've been forced to teach remotely. Fortunately, we were already using a great online course delivery system, Canvas. We can reuse lecture recordings from previous semesters or make new ones using PowerPoint's audio recording feature. Most importantly Zoom, a video conferencing system, is proving invaluable. It enables us to host group meetings and webinars. We're also using Zoom for school management and research meetings. Various member of staff are experimenting with other online collaborative tools and will report on their pros and cons in due course. It's not entirely business as usual but we're coping.
On a personal note, my friends and I are also using Zoom socially. Sunday afternoon we got together virtually over a few a drinks and had a great catch-up and last evening we held a pub quiz that went very well. You may be in isolation but there's no need to feel isolated.