With the 12 year of this blog's existence, I present to future me: stuff that happened in 2018 that 2019 version of me has already forgotten. And yes, content warning: this will be me, me, me!
Month: January 2019
Reply to Chris Beckstrom about sparklines
Congrats! Fantastic stats. How’d you do those cool little graphs?
They’re known as sparklines: https://indieweb.org/sparkline and you’ll find some interesting details and implementations in the see also section in addition to (I’m sure) searching Jeremy’s site for the word “sparkline”.
👓 2018 in numbers | Adactio: Journal | Jeremy Keith
I posted to adactio.com 1,387 times in 2018
An awesome and quite beautiful annual update here. I can’t imagine that I posted as much as Jeremy (or wrote as many longer posts in particular), but I do know that my posting velocity has increased since I began using my own website in preference to all other social media several years ago.
👓 AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat | WIRED
Teachers are being forced to adapt to new tools that execute homework perfectly.
The headline is a bit click-baity, but the article is pretty solid nonetheless.
There is some interesting discussion in here on how digital technology meets pedagogy. We definitely need to think about how we reframe what is happening here. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t look back at the history of the acceptance (or not) of the calculator in math classes from the 60’s onward.
Where it comes to math, some of these tools can be quite useful, but students need to have the correct and incorrect uses of these technologies explained and modeled for them. Rote cheating certainly isn’t going to help them, but if used as a general tutorial of how and why methods work, then it can be invaluable and allow them to jump much further ahead of where they might otherwise be.
I’m reminded of having told many in the past that the general concepts behind the subject of calculus are actually quite simple and relatively easy to master. The typical issue is that students in these classes may be able to do the first step of the problem which is the actual calculus, but get hung up on not having practiced the algebra enough and the 10 steps of algebra after the first step of calculus is where their stumbling block lies in getting the correct answer.
👓 These 1923 Copyrighted Works Enter the Public Domain in 2019 | LifeHacker
For the first time in twenty years, as the Atlantic points out, a whole year’s worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2019. Under the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, works first published in 1923 will enter the public domain, meaning anyone can re-publish them, or chop them up and use them in other projects, without asking permission or paying the old rights holders. You can record new versions of the musical compositions; you can show the movies for a profit; you can even remake them. Amazon can sell you the ebook and keep all the money, and Project Gutenberg can give you the ebook for free. The Atlantic has a short list; we have a longer one below.
👓 A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain | The Atlantic
For the first time in two decades, a huge number of books, films, and other works will escape U.S. copyright law.
👓 #MeToo law restricts use of nondisclosure agreements in sexual misconduct cases | LA Times
Among victims and advocates, an important step in dismantling the pervasive problem of harassment and the system that has kept it under wraps for so long is to void or curb the use of NDAs to settle sexual abuse cases.
The tough part is recreating a better system and predicting the potential future abuses that may continue in such a system. How do we enforce fairness fairly? What unintended consequences might there be?
🔖 Public Domain Day 2019 | Duke University School of Law
January 1, 2019 is (finally) Public Domain Day: Works from 1923 are open to all!
👓 James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race | New York Times
The Nobel-winning biologist has drawn global criticism with unfounded pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. He still thinks he’s right, a new documentary finds.
👓 Opinion | In Search of Lost Screen Time | New York Times
Imagine what we could do with our money, and hours, if we set our phones aside for a year.
A good reminder of all the good we could be accomplishing…
👓 What Happens When You Say No to MS-13 | ProPublica
The friends had liked Gerson Saravia from the start. With his halting English and scrawny arms that stuck out like sticks from the tank tops he wore, he reminded them of themselves when they first came to the U.S., excited but also bewildered and self-conscious.
An interesting, but simple story. Supplemented by lots of photos and an interesting lay out, though at times the text on photos (on mobile at least) doesn’t make it easy to read.
👓 New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out | The New York Times
Works by Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Robert Frost are entering the public domain on Jan. 1. And that’s just the first wave.
🔖 Shephelah | Wikipedia
The Shfela, or Shephelah, lit. "lowlands"[1] (Hebrew: הַשְּפֵלָה, also שְׁפֵלַת יְהוּדָה, Shfelat Yehuda, the "Judaean foothills"), is a transitional region of soft-sloping hills in south-central Israel stretching over 10–15 km between the Judaean Mountains and the Coastal Plain. The different use of the term "Judean Plain", as either defining just the Coastal Plain segment stretching along the Judaean Mountains, or also including, or only referring to, the Shfela, often creates grave confusion.
Today the Shfela is largely rural with many farms.
The Bible assigned land in the Shfela to the tribes of Judah and Dan.
Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself | Nature Communications
Quantum theory provides an extremely accurate description of fundamental processes in physics. It thus seems likely that the theory is applicable beyond the, mostly microscopic, domain in which it has been tested experimentally. Here, we propose a Gedankenexperiment to investigate the question whether quantum theory can, in principle, have universal validity. The idea is that, if the answer was yes, it must be possible to employ quantum theory to model complex systems that include agents who are themselves using quantum theory. Analysing the experiment under this presumption, we find that one agent, upon observing a particular measurement outcome, must conclude that another agent has predicted the opposite outcome with certainty. The agents’ conclusions, although all derived within quantum theory, are thus inconsistent. This indicates that quantum theory cannot be extrapolated to complex systems, at least not in a straightforward manner.
Published version of arXiv paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07422v1
[1604.07422v1] Single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent
According to quantum theory, a measurement may have multiple possible outcomes. Single-world interpretations assert that, nevertheless, only one of them "really" occurs. Here we propose a gedankenexperiment where quantum theory is applied to model an experimenter who herself uses quantum theory. We find that, in such a scenario, no single-world interpretation can be logically consistent. This conclusion extends to deterministic hidden-variable theories, such as Bohmian mechanics, for they impose a single-world interpretation.