October, 2018 | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Doug Beal about WordCamp Los Angeles 2018

Replied to WordCamp Los Angeles 2018 #WCLAX by

I’ve been eyeing WordCamp Seattle. What was the most interesting presentation?

Sorry Doug, somehow you’d gotten buried in my mentions.

I’m probably not the best person to ask since I think most Camps don’t get as technical as I sometimes wish they’d be. These days there are always a session or two on Gutenberg, which is interesting, but I find myself not caring as much about. Otherwise pieces on things like phpunit or unit testing are intriguing, but I’m unlikely to actually use on a regular basis myself. I find that I know too much about the areas of marking and biz dev or social media related talks that have popped up in years past to gain much from them anymore.

For the past several years, the most interesting parts of these camps for me are about the general tenor of the overall web space. I find more value in the “hallway” track chatting with the other folks who are so inclined. Most often, I’ll also check the speakers to catch people who have traveled from distant cities–I find that if they’re developers, they’re usually offering something intriguing. As a result of these strategies I often get more out of camps than just the scheduled talks.

Your mileage may vary.

👓 Rilakkuma | Wikipedia

Read Rilakkuma (Wikipedia)

Rilakkuma (リラックマ Rirakkuma) is a fictional character produced by the Japanese company San-X, created by former employee Aki Kondo. Companies such as Re-Ment have collaborated with San-X to create Rilakkuma merchandise. Rilakkuma appears on items such as stationery, dishware, backpacks, and stuffed animals. A Netflix original series based on this character titled Rilakkuma and Kaoru is slated to premiere globally in Spring 2019.

🔖 Hypothesis User: kael

Bookmarked Hypothesis User: kael (hypothes.is)

Joined: September 9, 2018
Location: Paris
Link: del.icio.us/kael

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone using it this way before, but I’ve coincidentally noticed that Kael seems to be using Hypothes.is in an off-label manner as a bookmarking service with tagging rather than an annotation or highlighting service. Most of their “annotations” are really just basic page notes with one or two “tags” and rarely (if ever) any highlights or annotations.

I’m curious if the Hypothes.is team has considered making such additional functionalities more explicit within their user interface?

Social bookmarking does seem like a useful and worthwhile functionality that would dovetail well with many of their other functionalities as well as their basic audience of users. Perhaps some small visual UI clues and the ability to search for them as a subset would complete the cycle?

🔖 [1810.05095] The Statistical Physics of Real-World Networks | arXiv

Bookmarked [1810.05095] The Statistical Physics of Real-World Networks by Giulio Cimini, Tiziano Squartini, Fabio Saracco, Diego Garlaschelli, Andrea Gabrielli, Guido Caldarelli (arxiv.org)

Statistical physics is the natural framework to model complex networks. In the last twenty years, it has brought novel physical insights on a variety of emergent phenomena, such as self-organisation, scale invariance, mixed distributions and ensemble non-equivalence, which cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the individual constituents. At the same time, thanks to its deep connection with information theory, statistical physics and the principle of maximum entropy have led to the definition of null models reproducing some features of empirical networks, but otherwise as random as possible. We review here the statistical physics approach for complex networks and the null models for the various physical problems, focusing in particular on the analytic frameworks reproducing the local features of the network. We show how these models have been used to detect statistically significant and predictive structural patterns in real-world networks, as well as to reconstruct the network structure in case of incomplete information. We further survey the statistical physics frameworks that reproduce more complex, semi-local network features using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, and the models of generalised network structures such as multiplex networks, interacting networks and simplicial complexes.

Comments: To appear on Nature Reviews Physics. The revised accepted version will be posted 6 months after publication

👓 Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com and made it a forum to help sexual assault survivors | CNN

Read Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com and made it a forum to help sexual assault survivors (CNN)

Don't go to BrettKavanaugh.com looking for information about the nation's new Supreme Court Justice.

I read this article and want to coin the term “domain gilding” as a sub-category of domain squatting. I’m curious if others can think of examples?

Domain gilding: using the method of domain squatting with the intent of helping a potentially corporate or personal branded website accomplish more good in the world than if it were to be used by the person, company, or concept that might otherwise be broadly associated with the name.