While it's true most early MOOC courses are a bit limited in interaction, pedagogy, assessment, etc, they have already had an interesting effect on universities.

I've been working on smart teaching tech on and off for nearly 10 years, including on an older project by some of the people behind edX at MIT. More recently I've been looking to bring online into the lecture theatre. For most of the time I've worked on teaching technology, I've often heard the reaction that's all well and good but no-one really cares about teaching because academics are promoted on their research and teaching is just something we do to bring in the cash. (There's always been some academics and centres who are very interested in teaching innovation, but it's seemed to me like they've not had as much attention from the rest of academia as they should have.) In the last year or so that seems to have changed. There's a lot more attention been drawn to the idea that yes now is the time to make some changes to how teaching is viewed and done in universities.

I've been working on the tech for that for a while. (Plus in-class interactivity to incentivise using it.)

And I've just reached the point where I'm looking for some other teachers to help try it out. (Forgiving early-adopters to begin with, of course) Get in touch if you're interested!

The browser itself is a barrier to webapps. In an in-browser app, as soon as you need to include third party content (which might be as simple as you're writing a twitter client and want to show the content of a tweeted URL), you have to deal with pages the browser refuses to load because of X-Frame-Options, REST API calls to, say, Dropbox, where that the browser refuses to return the data for the POST request to fetch the deltas because Dropbox hasn't set the CORS headers, etc. Security measures that are their to protect your app from others too, but it won't take you long to realise that if you instead have a native app with a WebKit pane for the third party content, a lot of the headaches the browser introduces go away.

(And of course as browsers auto-update a dozen or more times per year, and there are a few to support, a webapp is aiming at several uncontrolled moving targets)

They do not believe in a completely ordered and repeatable existence. That is, they do not make the (actually inherently risky) assumption that just because we've seen lots of things behave as if they are ordered and repeatable, all things must always be so.

Consider a man in a room who asks his colleague (outside) to bring in any cats he finds that are black so he can count them. If a cat isn't black, don't bring it in -- maybe it'll be black later or maybe it's black in some way I can't see yet, so we'll reserve judgment on it and not include it as any form of evidence either way. Naturally, the man in the room can only see an endless stream of black cats, and might (wrongly) be tempted to think that is ever-increasing evidence that all cats are black. Unfortunately, that is the position of a man who believes that because we've found more and more orderliness and repeatability in the universe, existence must all be orderly and repeatable.

Those who believe in any form of divine action (including but not limited to creationists) are actually rather more rational in their conclusion in this regard: "Wow, there's a lot of black cats, and we can probably find lots more, but I'm not going to insist they all must be". Separate sources of evidence then give them reason to believe that God is an example of something that is real but not mechanistically repeatable.

Interestingly, a lot of the early impetus for science -- the notion that the universe would be orderly at all -- came from the religiously-derived belief that it would be ordered because it would obey laws laid down by God for it. That derivation, of course, does not exclude divine action nor does it have your slightly obsessive "all or nothing -- either it's completely ordered always or otherwise it's a totally irrational model" mantra.

Funny anecode/aside, but "F=ma except when god says otherwise" is not only a rational model but is precisely what is modelled in almost every simulation -- almost every simulation I have seen or written has allowed its author to pause it, change a variable, and then set it going again.

Personally I'd argue that skeuomorphic designs are almost certainly worse for usability, but that might be outweighed in marketing by their attractiveness / emotional connections with the product.

In UI design, it seems to me that one of the things you're trying to do is communicate relationships between the various controls, the things they manipulate, etc. And you have a two-dimensional non-tangible interface with which to communicate those relationships. (Even with touch, you're not actually "pressing a button" you're tapping on a coloured region of glass.) The trade-offs that optimise communication are almost certainly different than if you have a tangible three dimensional interface (eg, a physical tape recorder, instead of an audio memo app). In a skeuomorphic app, you do not have the physical haptic pliability of the button to your thumb, just a slightly wobbling brown graphic. In a skeuomorphic app, you do not naturally see the item in three dimensions as you pick it up and its orientation to your eye changes on the journey to a comfortable manipulation distance. You just have a flat graphic of a pretend item from a preset angle. The affordances are different, so the optimum design to help the user achieve their goals is probably different.

The example I'd use is Windows -- over a decade or two it has steadily moved away from previously being skeuomorphic (eg, panels looking like they're in little bevels, buttons looking like square raised things) to something much cleaner. Those bevels etc introduced lines that distracted ("why is my eye drawn to a bevel that does nothing again?") and made an element feel divided from the surrounding controls that they probably wanted to communicated were relevant to it not separated from it.

The exception however is marketing and the attempt to get a purchaser to emotionally engage with an item (rather than find it easy to use). A picture of a beautiful old tape player is probably more appealing at first glance in the Apple Store than a white background with clearly distinct controls. Likewise a slightly harder to use item might feel as if it can do more even if it can't.

You do realise that the "Law of Parsimony" says precisely nothing about reality itself? That there is no actual law of nature that demands the universe to be uncomplicated, or entirely predictable, or repeatable? That the "Law of Parsimony" is a convention to aid the progress of academic models? (It's easier to deal with small incremental additions and alterations to models in experimentation and review than large changes, and if an aspect of the universe isn't predictable or reliably repeatable then science and experimentation are buggered so far as it's concerned). If you believe, however, that just because we want our academic models to be parsimonious that the universe itself must also be, then you are, frankly, a bit silly. Science does not (so far as we know) alter the nature of reality, and reality is at liberty to be as complex, unrepeatable, or mystical as it happens (or happens not) to be, and there ain't a darn thing we can do about it.

Likewise, if you believe your personal model should be parsimoniously limited to the academic model of the day, you are equally silly -- the rules governing types of evidence, parsimony, etc, are not there to optimise your model, but to optimise academic processes and potential future academic models some hundreds of years hence (science never ends) and make them more manageable. If God turns up and punches you on the nose, it will still not be science but you would be well advised to pay attention.

gweihir's post you replied to was not "asking" and was itself a reply to the statement "That doesn't mean we fully understand it, or that we ever will, but consciousness very obviously arises solely out of the brain.". It appears you decided to silently ignore the topic of conversation! And if you read it again in the context of the thread, you should see your post appears to (apparently accidentally) read as if it is claiming there is experimental data for precisely what you now say is unknowable.

That's actually precisely my point. A claim "there is experimental data (about X)" is meaningless if (i) the experiments were about something else, and (ii) X cannot be sufficiently well defined to conduct any experiments on it. As I've had to point out elsewhere on this topic, "consciousness" is necessarily defined first person ("I am" not "you are" nor "my neurons happen to fire in a particular way") which is precisely why we can never have experimental data on it -- because it is by definition only accessible first person and our experiments are by definition only reportable third person. Foolish attempts to duck the issue by "let's just call something else 'consciousness' and pretend we've answered the same question" are just that.

Ironically, the recent advances in "AI" were largely through stopping thinking about AI as building an artificial version of human cognition, and instead doing something with far fewer philosophical claims: statistically mining the heck out of big data.

The word of the day, "consciousness," appears markedly absent from your description of the experimental data -- you are making a false connection between consciousness and personality. Or to put it more humorously: plenty of observers around me can tell you my intelligence and personality are different before and after my first cup of coffee in the morning, but I can assure you I'm still the same consciousness...

No, it's not. It is something that may occur in multi-agent systems, but it is not "what information processing is".

(Snipped the remainder of your post as it's essentially irrelevant posturing.)

No, "emergent property" is a term co-opted from complex systems research that if you have enough agents with fairly simple rules (say, termites laying down pheromones) you can get some astonishingly complex macroscopic behaviours (say, termite nests). It gets co-opted and used in some hand-waving to try to explain away consciousness as an "emergent property" (and abstraction) of there being lots of neurons in the brain.

Unfortunately, it also entirely misses the point -- consciousness is not an abstraction, it is atomic (as you sit staring out of your eyes -- which by definition is the only way you have of knowing that you have a consciousness -- you experience only the consciousness and not the neurons).

Your rhetorical bluster merely suggests you don't understand of how science works. There is no such thing as "unqualified for any kind of discussion" -- when you submit a paper for review you will never be asked your qualifications or whether you agree with a prescribed set of opinions. Certainly I am yet to contact the author of any paper I have ever reviewed to say "Before I read your paper, I just want to check you're fundamentally opposed to dualism..."

Moreover the way we choose to define science (necessarily third party observational) makes this question inaccessible as it is necessarily first party observational. The philosophical question has always been "I am" not "my neurons fire in a particular way", nor even "you are" or "he is".

You are aware of what the "A" stands for in AI, aren't you?

Nope, we've found out since the '60s that things work remarkably differently than a computer, and AI is no longer slavishly attempting to replicate theories of human cognition in algorithmic form.

"Well you're just wrong about that. Chewbacca is a wookie." (I didn't say the thing you claim I'm "wrong about" either)

There is a mistake going on in the debate -- when someone tries to turn it into a scientific argument, which sounds very noble, what they are also doing is suggesting that the scientific conclusion should be the policy conclusion as a matter of course. If it's the best theory at the time, that's what we should go with. Unfortunately that is often a seriously bad idea as science and policy have very different risk profiles. If you try your scientific theory out and it is wrong, you revise the theory and move on. If you try your scientific theory out in a safety-critical environment, it is wrong, and everyone dies, you don't. This is why, for instance, pharmaceuticals have to jump through many hoops to prove their safety long after they have proved their efficacy (ie, long after they have become the best available scientific theory of their effect) and long after they have been shown to be theoretically safe. What we certainly do not want is policy being coerced by arguments that "there is no empirical evidence that it would cause (plausible catastrophic problem X)" which sounds rhetorically like it means "we've experimentally determined it wouldn't" but actually just means "nobody ran a decent enough experiment to find out it would".

Sorry to use you as a data point, but half the issue is in public policy debates (which are the very definition of politics), "science" becomes a very slippery term. When someone wants to argue for something, the goalposts widen and almost anything is science (usually together with rallying cries of how great science is -- "science gave us the toaster, television, put a man on the moon. ..." -- quietly drafting the engineers, product designers, anything vaguely technical as being "science"). But when someone wants to argue against something, the goalposts narrow and we insist on journal publications, and which journal ("of course not the Journal of Field I Think is Flawed").

Fundamentally, these debates put the cart before the horse. Slashdotters and others like to insist that "if it's science, policy should follow it" -- ie that science has a right to have more impact. In academia (currently the home of science) however, impact is a metric not a right. Whether your science has impact is a measure of its value and you have no automatic right to people listening to you whatsoever, regardless of where you are published.