Month: April 2018
👓 PopSugar Stole Influencers’ Instagrams — Along With Their Profits | Racked
The lifestyle website stripped bloggers’ affiliate links from their posts and added the site’s own.
See also notes at stream.boffosocko.com.
🔖 Want to listen: Jenny Lawson is Very Fond of Creepy Smiling Dead Animals and Worries Quite a Bit | The Hilarious World of Depression | APM Podcasts
She’s the author of bestselling books and an incredibly popular blog, but Jenny Lawson showed up to our interview wondering, at least a little, if her appearance on this show and her whole career, really, was part of some delusion. It’s not. She’s the real thing: an incredibly funny and honest writer with a legion of fans, a very old decapitated and stuffed boar’s head named James Garfield, anxiety, depression, and a clear-eyed view of the world.
A show about clinical depression...with laughs? Well, yeah. Depression is an incredibly common and isolating disease experienced by millions, yet often stigmatized by society. The Hilarious World of Depression is a series of frank, moving, and, yes, funny conversations with top comedians who have dealt with this disease, hosted by veteran humorist and public radio host John Moe. Join guests such as Maria Bamford, Paul F. Tompkins, Andy Richter, and Jen Kirkman to learn how they’ve dealt with depression and managed to laugh along the way. If you have not met the disease personally, it’s almost certain that someone you know has, whether it’s a friend, family member, colleague, or neighbor. Depression is a vicious cycle of solitude and stigma that leaves people miserable and sometimes dead. Frankly, we’re not going to put up with that anymore.
The Hilarious World of Depression is not medical treatment and should not be seen as a substitute for therapy or medication. But it is a chance to gain some insight, have a few laughs, and realize that people with depression are not alone and that together, we can all feel a bit better.
The Hilarious World of Depression is made possible by a grant from HealthPartners and its Make It OK campaign, which works to reduce the stigma of mental health. Find out more at www.makeitok.org.
🔖 Want to listen: Episode 0 Welcome to the Datcast
The first episode, where Bret and Jim try making a podcast for the first time, and explain what they want the show to be.
Links:
* https://peer-to-peer-web.com/los-angeles/2018-04-28
* https://twitter.com/mafintosh/status/989214862764118016
New podcast announcement: @uhhyeahbret and I have started a podcast focused on the @dat_project. Listen to our first episode! It’s short, meta & experimental. In the near future, we intend to have guests and we’ll try to summarize news from the community. https://t.co/bTJKhoo77m pic.twitter.com/Cl3oxxgiLA
— Jim Pick (@jimpick) April 27, 2018
👓 What Open Education Taught Me | Open Pedagogy Notebook
A Keene State College undergraduate reflects on her experiences with Open Education:
So…for those of you just joining me on this 16 week journey through Tropical Marine Biology (and our 9 day trip to Turks and Caicos in 2 days), you might be wondering what all these blog posts are about, and why are we doing them? As a junior, and incoming senior studying Biology at Keene State College, several of my teachers have changed their teaching philosophy to open education. Open education is the philosophy and belief that people, even the world should produce, share, and build on knowledge that everyone has access to. It is believed that open education will promote a higher quality education and community that has been so limited by the textbook companies and licenses.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
…it is okay.
YOU choose what YOU want to learn, and how YOU want to do it, and when YOU want to do it.
Don’t take for granted your education, and don’t let an individual, whether a peer, professor, or textbook company, have more control over your education than you do.
👓 With the grain: sociology | Espresso: The Economist
Research has shown that wealthier, urbanised regions tend to harbour more individualistic personalities, while poorer, agrarian areas have more collectivist, community-minded ones. But why? A study from the University of Chicago published this week suggests such differences could be down to a region’s predominant crops—an insight gleaned, improbably, from observing nearly 9,000 customers in Chinese cafes. People in China’s south farm rice, which requires a whole village’s co-operation on irrigation; in the north, they grow wheat, far less demanding of collective effort. The researchers’ first observation was that latte-lovers in wheat-growing regions were far more likely to be alone. Then the team surreptitiously blocked thoroughfares with chairs. Among northerners, 16% shifted the chairs (individualism is marked by actively modifying one’s environment), while only 6% from the rice-cultivating south did so (collectivists tend to work with what they’ve got). It’s an intriguing sociological suggestion, perhaps to be filed under “you are what you eat”.
References this study: Moving chairs in Starbucks.1
References
👓 Twitter Pushing More News Links In The Home Timeline | BuzzFeed
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the new Twitter feature to BuzzFeed News. Twitter's aggressive move into news continues.
🎞 Inside Man (2006) – ★★★★
Directed by Spike Lee. With Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer.
A police detective, a bank robber, and a high-power broker enter high-stakes negotiations after the criminal's brilliant heist spirals into a hostage situation.
Watched on big screen television via Netflix through Chromecast
Rating:
Reply to Bridgy Registration
I also think that it might make a lot of sense to put that piece into the Syndication Links plugin as well since that’s a piece that directly relates to something Brid.gy is looking for to do backfeed. Doing this may also make even more sense if Syndication Links becomes a tool for POSSE as well. It would be nice to have a definitive one-stop-shop for syndication and backfeed related functionality.
As a “throw-away” aside, if you’re looking for a good name for such a thing, perhaps Boomerang? Throw your content out there and all the responses return back to your site?
👓 Deprecating and Replacing Bridgy Publish for WordPress | David Shanske
I’ve decided to take a different direction for the Bridgy plugin for WordPress. I’ve never quite been able to explain to people it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a user interface for the Bridgy service. I’ve decided that the best thing to do is to is to change the approach radically.
👓 How Riots May Help Us Understand School Shooters | NPR
In his new article, The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell uses a well-known theory to contrast early school shooters back in the 1990s with shooters today.
Following Open Pedagogy Notebook
Sharing Practices, Building Community
There are many ways to begin a discussion of “Open Pedagogy.” Although providing a framing definition might be the obvious place to start, we want to resist that for just a moment to ask a set of related questions: What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?
“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. But it is not a site vacant of meaning or political conviction. In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education. We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.
👓 How School Shootings Spread | New Yorker
An increasingly ritualized form of violence is attracting unexpected perpetrators.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.
Knowing a little of what is coming in advance here, I can’t help but thinking: How can this riot theory potentially be used to influence politics and/or political campaigns? It could be particularly effective to get people “riled up” just before a particular election to create a political riot of sorts and thereby influence the outcome. Facebook has done several social experiments with elections in showing that their friends and family voted and thereby affecting other potential voters. When done in a way that targets people of particular political beliefs to increase turn out, one is given a means of drastically influencing elections. In some sense, this is an example of this “Riot Theory”.
“But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.
This might also be the same case with fraternity shenanigans and even more deplorable actions like gang rapes. Usually there’s one or more sociopaths that start the movement, and then others reluctantly join in.
If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.
Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party.
The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic.
Seven though? In such a short time period? These must have known about prior ones or else perhaps the theory doesn’t hold as much water. Similarly suicide could be added as a contagion that fits into this riot model as well.
That’s what Paton and Larkin mean: the effect of Harris and Klebold’s example was to make it possible for people with far higher thresholds—boys who would ordinarily never think of firing a weapon at their classmates—to join in the riot.
He disapproved of Adam Lanza, because he shot kindergartners at Sandy Hook instead of people his own age: “That’s just pathetic. Have some dignity, damn it.”
This model of a dialectic suggests that the narrative can be shaped, both by the individual reader and each actor. Can it also be shaped by the media? If these mass-murderers are portrayed as pathetic or deranged would that dissuade others from joining their ranks?
—gandalf511 on Oct 13, 2015
gandalf511, I like the idea you’ve elaborated here, and it may work to at least some extent. One other hand, some of these kids are already iconoclasts who are marginalized and may not put much value or faith in a mainstream media representation. The tougher needle to thread is how to strike a middle ground that speaks to potential assailants?
📺 Martha Stewart’s Cooking School: Stews of the Arabian Gulf | PBS
Follow the flavor as Martha puts her spin on the stews of the Arabian Gulf. Each dish is layered with stick-to-your-bones satisfaction. Arabian Gulf potpie, braised lamb shanks with okra, curried swordfish stew and red lentil vegetable stew… these slow cooked treasures offer nourishing comfort with ease.
👓 Your behavior in Starbucks may reveal more about you than you think | Science | AAAS
Cultural differences are revealed in coffee shop etiquette, study in China finds