Author: Chris Aldrich
🎧 NaNoWriMo Superhero on Medium: Ben Werdmuller | National Novel Writing Month – Medium
Welcome to the second episode of NaNoWriMo Superheroes and Superheroines on Medium. Throughout the month of November we’ll interview people with different backgrounds, day jobs, and involvement with this annual writing event. All of our superheroes and superheroines have one thing in common — they accepted the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel first draft in the month of November.
Every single one of those buttons is a distraction button.
https://soundcloud.com/julie-russell-325257244/nanowrimo-superhero-on-medium-ben-werdmuller
📺 Are University Admissions Biased? | Simpson’s Paradox Part 2 | YouTube
Simpson's Paradox Part 2. This video is about how to tell whether or not university admissions are biased using statistics: aka, it's about Simpson's Paradox again!
REFERENCES:
Original Berkeley Grad Admissions Paper
Interactive Simpson’s Paradox Explainer
No Lawsuit, But Yes, Berkeley Study on Gender Bias
Statistics on college majors by gender:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2016menu\_tables.asp
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/28/359419934/who-studies-what-men-women-and-college-majors
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/
Earnings by college major
Wall Street Journal Article on Simpson’s Paradox
Then I realized that it was probably just a one day Halloween thing.
Alas… Happy Halloween IndieWebbers! 🎃
One of my first childhood toys and constant companions: Biffy Beans
Checkin Vons
📖 Read pages 90-171 of Origin by Dan Brown
I was just shy of that first “punch” when I quit reading the other day. It came and we’re now off to the races. This somehow feels a bit “fluffier” than the typical Langdon novel though. It feels like there’s a lot of discussion for those who don’t understand the religion, science, and technology, but at least he does it in a way that doesn’t feel too on-the-nose. I still feel a bit disconnected from the characters here compared to his prior efforts.
The answer for what to do with that leftover lime from your guacamole
👓 Content, bloat, privacy, archives | Peter Molnar
I spent a lot of time trying centralising my online activities, including adding bookmarks and imports from social networks. Lately my site looked bloated and unmaintainable. I started questioning what data is my data, what data should or could I own - it was time to rethink some ideas.
Somewhat like him, I’m bookmarking things I’d like to read privately on the back end of my site, and then only selectively posting them as read posts when I’ve done that. Archiving them to the Internet Archive has been useful for cutting down on the data I’m keeping, but saving them does allow me to browse through my commonplace book frequently when I need to find something and couldn’t find it otherwise.
Some of this reminds me of the way I use the “star” functionality on Twitter (I still think of it as a star and not a heart). I don’t typically use it to mean anything in particular on Twitter itself. Instead I’m using that functionality in conjunction with an IFTTT recipe to bookmark things I’d like to read later. So in a larger sense, I’m using Twitter as a headline feed reader and marking all the things I’d like to come back and read at a later time.
Once in a blue moon, during a chat with others on Twitter, I may use the heart as an indicator to the other party that I’ve seen/read their post, particularly when I don’t intend to reply to the last in a chain of conversation. This type of ephemera or digital exhaust generally isn’t something I find useful for keeping in the long term, so like Peter I typically don’t keep/archive them on my site.
For those who haven’t read them yet, Sebastiaan Andewe has a recent article covering similar ground: Thinking about bookmarks and likes on the IndieWeb.
I find these discussions useful for thinking through what I’m doing on my own site and refining how I use it as well.
🔖 Adjoint School, ACT 2018 (Applied Category Theory)
The Workshop on Applied Category Theory 2018 takes place in May 2018. A principal goal of this workshop is to bring early career researchers into the applied category theory community. Towards this goal, we are organising the Adjoint School. The Adjoint School will run from January to April 2018.
h/t John Carlos Baez
📖 Read pages 59-89 of Origin by Dan Brown
He’s pretty good at building up suspense, particularly with the short scenes/chapters. I’m kind of wishing we’d get to an opening punch though…
The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web by Dr. Amy Guy
Many people express themselves online through social media, blogs, personal websites, and the like. Using these technologies affects our day-to-day lives, and sense of self. These technologies also change and develop in response to how people use them. Many of the tools we use come with constraints, and people often find ways to work around these constraints to suit their needs. This thesis explores the different ways in which people express their identities using contemporary Web technologies. We conduct several studies, and show that there are many interdependent factors at play when it comes to online self-presentation, and that it is rare that all of these are considered when studying or designing social systems. We present a conceptual framework which will enable cohesive further research in this area, as well as guidance for future system designs. In the second part, we discuss how these technologies are changing. We make contributions to an emerging alternative means of engaging with social media and similar technologies, and examine the implications of these new technologies on self-presentation.
There may possibly be some other much older IndieWeb related doctoral theses out there, but I suspect this may be the first in the new era…
If nothing else, you’ve got to love a thesis that’s got it’s own custom short link-style domain: dr.amy.gy
Read Write Collect | Aaron Davis
Makes me think I’m going to have to finish up a new OPML file for folks I’m following who are aware of or using IndieWeb principles in the education space. Aaron, I’m adding you to the list.
One of the interesting parts was that it featured a comment about Twitter pulling the rug out from underneath developers–an event that foreshadowed even more of the same in the coming years as well as a conversation about the gamification of follower accounts, something which has gotten us into a sad state of affairs today nearly a decade later. Apparently while they tried to cap follower accounts, their early efforts just didn’t go far enough to help the civility of the platform.
👻 ☠️ 🎃 Halloween flavored names on Twitter
Some of my favorites:
@JordanUhl is now jordan ghoul 👻 ☠️ 🎃
@rachsyme is now🎃 rachel slime 🎃
@VictoriaAveyard is Victoria Graveyard 🎃
@BrendonHope is 🎃 Abandon Hope 🎃
@spicer is Christian Spider 🕷 🎃
@Juliet_Shen is 🎃 Ghouliet Shen 🎃
Despite the fact that Halloween is my favorite holiday, and since retailers are already jumping the gun on Christmas, I thought I’d do the same. I’m changing my Twitter name to something like:
🎄Christmas🎄 🎅Aldrich 🎁