January, 2019 | Chris Aldrich

📑 Collaborative resource curation | Hypothes.is

Replied to Collaborative resource curation by Jon Udell (Hypothesis)

Recently we decided to keep better track of tweets, blog posts, and other web resources that mention and discuss our product. There are two common ways to do that: send links to a list maintainer, or co-edit a shared list of links. Here’s a third way, less common but arguably more powerful and flexible: tag the web resources in situ.

It isn’t rocket science, but as Jon indicates, it’s *incredibly *powerful.

I use my personal website with several levels of taxonomy for tagging and categorizing a variety of things for later search and research.

Much like the example of the Public Radio International producer, I’ve created what I call a “faux-cast” because I tag everything I listen to online and save it to my website including the appropriate <audio> link to the.mp3 file so that anyone who wants to follow the feed of my listens can have a playlist of all the podcast and internet-related audio I’m listening to.

A visual version of my “listened to” tags can be found at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/ with the RSS feed at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/

👓 2019 Book Industry Predictions: The Butterflies Will Flap Their Wings | Smashwords

Read 2019 Book Industry Predictions: The Butterflies Will Flap Their Wings (blog.smashwords.com)

Welcome to my annual publishing predictions. I’ll start by sharing some thoughts on the state of the indie nation and then I’ll jump int...

This post is very anti-Amazon and has an IndieWeb flavor. Sadly, it comes mostly from the perspective of yet-another-silo that is competing with Amazon. A better and more holistic solution would be for them to be supporting authors owning their own platforms for publishing and distribution.

There’s also a useful question brought up here about the idea of discovering new authors and new books. It’s a similar problem faced by websites and other online content in general. Silo’s general nature and the algorithms they can bring to bear have solved some of the discovery question (for their own enrichment). Solving this from an indie perspective isn’t just useful from the website content perspective, but it’s also very important for the book sales perspective.

Acquired Category Theory for the Sciences by David I. Spivak

Acquired Category Theory for the Sciences by David I. Spivak (The MIT Press, 1st Edition)

An introduction to category theory as a rigorous, flexible, and coherent modeling language that can be used across the sciences.

Category theory was invented in the 1940s to unify and synthesize different areas in mathematics, and it has proven remarkably successful in enabling powerful communication between disparate fields and subfields within mathematics. This book shows that category theory can be useful outside of mathematics as a rigorous, flexible, and coherent modeling language throughout the sciences. Information is inherently dynamic; the same ideas can be organized and reorganized in countless ways, and the ability to translate between such organizational structures is becoming increasingly important in the sciences. Category theory offers a unifying framework for information modeling that can facilitate the translation of knowledge between disciplines.

Written in an engaging and straightforward style, and assuming little background in mathematics, the book is rigorous but accessible to non-mathematicians. Using databases as an entry to category theory, it begins with sets and functions, then introduces the reader to notions that are fundamental in mathematics: monoids, groups, orders, and graphs―categories in disguise. After explaining the “big three” concepts of category theory―categories, functors, and natural transformations―the book covers other topics, including limits, colimits, functor categories, sheaves, monads, and operads. The book explains category theory by examples and exercises rather than focusing on theorems and proofs. It includes more than 300 exercises, with solutions.

Category Theory for the Sciences is intended to create a bridge between the vast array of mathematical concepts used by mathematicians and the models and frameworks of such scientific disciplines as computation, neuroscience, and physics.