As China’s epidemic continues to spread, things may seem scary. Here are 10 simple precautions that can protect you from contracting the coronavirus.
Some simple and easy to carry out precautions for the coming months.
ᔥ Black Swans ()
Month: March 2020
Here are a handful of Glitch apps you can use to jumpstart your new site.
The Message Matters: A bone to pick with Jonah Goldberg about positively framing mathematics
In the opening of The Remannt episode “American Dreams, Populist Screams” (beginning at about 03:08) Jonah Goldberg and his guest go out of their way to talk about the moral and social bad that negative framing can have specifically on children, then expand it to adults, and then finally society at large.
They’re talking broadly about the negative messaging around the idea that the American dream is dead.
“People would understand that that kind of message can have a deleterious impact on someone’s life path. Right? The same principle applies even when you send that message to grownups.”
Then in the next breath, Jonah says:
“We promised our listeners there would be very little to no math on this podcast, but um, uh…”
Here he is essentially telegraphing to his audience, “we’re not going to expose you to the scary math”, “why do math?”, “math is hard”, “you can’t do math”. He is specifically providing a negative framing for mathematics. His audience subtly hears “Math is bad!”–a message which is regularly heard, not just here, but nearly everywhere in our society including in our schools–often while it’s being taught. He does it again at 12:38 into the show and even suggests fast forwarding his own show to skip over the math portion! (A portion which doesn’t really appear by the way.)
So which is it Mr. Goldberg? Positive framing or negative?
Can we be a little less anti-math in the future? Some might suggest that being bad at math can make it immensely harder to take risks, to do the hard work, to have the American Dream. Didn’t the American Dream and associated ideas of American exceptionalism mean we could do anything–including mathematics?!
Otherwise let’s go on telling our children as you say:
“the game is rigged, you should just grab what you can, and […] not worry about being a good person or not worry about being a hard worker, or any of these kinds of things. Take the easy path because you’ll never get ahead.” ❧
Going forward, let’s always frame math in a positive light.
I’d much rather hear regular messages that math is useful, math is productive, math is interesting, math is comprehensible, math is doable, math can be easy, math is fun! Or if you prefer a more nationalist, pro-capitalist positive framing: Math is American. Math will keep us on top. Math will get us there.
Math is good for our children, it’s good for adults, it’s good for society.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are recommending that men shave their beards if they're going to wear masks to guard against coronavirus.
Originally, MDX was mostly built for interactive documentation. It wasn’t until shortly after that we saw it start to see adoption on blogs in order to embed components.
Some of these interactive examples here look pretty cool. I wish he’d done a better job of describing MDX and what it is without having to dig around to find it.
Axel Dürkop (axel-duerkop.de)With Zocurelia you can increase the fun of reading online literature together. The browser tool shows the activity of a reading community directly in the context of the texts being read and discussed. This way learners can be motivated to participate and join the discussion - hopefully hypothetically. In this article I will explain my motivation, ideas and decisions that led to the development of Zocurelia.
For those interested in online reading groups, journal clubs, OER, open education, marginal syllabus, etc., Axel Dürkop has created quite a lovely little tool that mixes Zotero with Hypothes.is.
Using his online version (though the code is open source and it looks like I could pretty quickly host my own), it only took me a few minutes to mock up a collaborative space using an Econ Extra Credit group I’d tried to encourage. This could be quite cool, particularly if they continued the series past the first recommended textbook.
I could easily see folks like Remi Kalir using this as part of their marginal syllabus project and allowing students to recommend texts/articles for class and aggregating discussions around them.
First of all, I wanted to learn more about how to inspire learners to read. And this means for me as an educator to create a technical and social environment that is welcoming and easy to participate in. ❧
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:01PM
I want to have ways to show learners that I chose the texts for them, as I’m convinced that empathy is motivating. ❧
I quite like this idea as a means of pedagogy.
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:03PM
Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds... everything is pretty terrible.
The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct... sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider.
It's time... to talk about time.
As programmers, we’re kind of inherently built to want the ABSOLUTE BEST HIGHEST FIDELITY FORMATS OF ALL TIME. Like dammit, I need the timestamp down to the micromillinanosecond for every cheeseburger that gets added to my bespoke Watch-The-BK-Throne app. If I do not have this exact knowledge to the millisecond of when I consumed this BBQ Bacon WHOPPER® Sandwich From Burger King® I may die. ❧
I totally want this as a Post Kind on my website now!
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 07:28PM
I voted!
Directed by Janet Tobias, Claus Wehlisch. With Yanjaa Wintersoul, Nelson Dellis, Johannes Mallow, Simon Reinhard. Glimpse into the brain's vast potential for memorization through the eyes of four competitive memory athletes as they share techniques and insights.
Great overview of some basic memory techniques, the personalities of several big names in the space, and a bit about the competitions themselves.
Rating: ★★★★
Zero-width characters are invisible, ‘non-printing’ characters that are not displayed by the majority of applications. For example, I’ve inserted 10 zero-width spaces into this sentence, can you tell? (Hint: paste the sentence into Diff Checker to see the locations of the characters!). These characters can be used to ‘fingerprint’ text for certain users.
A cool little trick with text for embedded steganography, security, or other communication purposes.
This could also be used for pseudo-private communication via Webmention even. Just hide your messages inside of public messages.
ᔥ bookmark Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text with Zero-Width Characters (medium.com) ()
Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna)Noting Google's continued support for Microformats as a metadata format.
Chris Matthews, one of America's best-known political talk show hosts, is retiring from MSNBC, effective immediately, after a string of recent controversies on and off the air.
What is your creative dream for the web?
Often the IndieWeb is re-creating functionality from traditional media or the social spaces to our own sites. Who is going to innovate and turn the tide in the other direction?
Where is the avant guarde? Who is going to be the next Stan Brakhage, George Antheil, Luis Buñuel, or Walter Murch of the web?
How can we push corporate social media back onto their heels?
I can’t wait for someone to create the next social media craze because it’s something they’re creatively posting on their own website as a media format that social silos don’t allow.
Who is experimenting with quirky multimedia posts on their websites? Who’s going to have the next meme generator/Tik Tok/SnapChat stories/inventive new functionality first? I’m imagining something in the vein of Marty’s Kapowski, Aaron’s emoji avatars, or Jeremy’s Indy maps, but I’m sure we could go crazier and push the envelope even further.
Bonus points if it’s done in the form of a micropub client! 🙂
