Chris Aldrich Blog: BoffoSocko.com

👓 Pioneering scientist Murray Sachs, who led biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins for 16 years, dies at 77 | JHU Hub

Read Pioneering scientist Murray Sachs, who led biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins for 16 years, dies at 77 by Vanessa Wasta (The Hub)

His research on how the brain receives, processes sound paved the way for the development of cochlear implants

👓 What’s An Inclusion Rider? Here’s The Story Behind Frances McDormand’s Closing Words | NPR

Read What's An Inclusion Rider? Here's The Story Behind Frances McDormand's Closing Words by Colin Dwyer (NPR.org)

"I have two words to leave with you tonight," the actress told the audience after winning her Oscar: "inclusion rider." But she didn't define those words onstage — so, here's a helpful primer. Simply put: It's a stipulation that actors and actresses can ask (or demand) to have inserted into their contracts, which would require a certain level of diversity among a film's cast and crew. For instance, an A-list actor negotiating to join a film could use the inclusion rider to insist that "tertiary speaking characters should match the gender distribution of the setting for the film, as long as it's sensible for the plot," Stacy L. Smith explained in a 2014 column that introduced the idea in The Hollywood Reporter.

👓 For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned. | New York Times

Read For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned. by Farhad Manjoo (nytimes.com)

Our tech columnist tried to skip digital news for a while. His old-school experiment led to three main conclusions.

A somewhat link-baity headline, but overall a nice little article with some generally solid advice. I always thought that even the daily paper was at too quick a pace and would much prefer a weekly or monthly magazine that does a solid recap of all the big stories and things one ought to know, that way the stories had had some time to simmer and all the details had time to come out. Kind of like reading longer form non-fiction of periods of history, just done on a somewhat shorter timescale.

🎧 The Daily: Trump vs. the N.R.A. | The New York Times

Listened to Listen to ‘The Daily’: Trump vs. the N.R.A. by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

The president stunned lawmakers with calls for gun control. Also, Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, is to step down.

🎧 This Week in Tech 656 A Camel With Your Name on It | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Tech 656 A Camel With Your Name on It by Leo Laporte, Dwight Silverman, Mike Elgan, Larry Magid from TWiT.tv

Social media and kids, Google fiber fail, 5G dreams, and more. Surprise: young people use social more than the oldsters. Some of them even use Vero. Samsung Galaxy S9 takes top marks for display and camera. Google Fiber didn't go quite as planned. Feds in your iPhone? It's more likely than you think. Amazon buys Ring, can now see and hear everything. US vs Microsoft II: The Revenge of the Irish. GitHub gets gotten by the biggest DDoS EVER.

There’s a great conversation in this episode about open platforms and why they’re important. The basic conversation starts around 12m19s, but really gets going at 16 minutes in and continues through to about 26:30. It includes some great examples of text messaging, social media companies, reservation systems and how they work either for the good or the bad based on how open or closed they are. It becomes a textbook set of cases for why the IndieWeb movement is important.

For those interested in just this short 10 minute section you can listen below on this bookmarked version of the audio:

Another interesting sub-segment is at 17:13 where Dwight Silverman comments that he knows many people who’ve removed social apps from their cell phones, including Leo Laporte. I’ve done this nearly a year ago and recently Dries Buytaert mentioned he’s done it as well. There’s also a recent article by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times that he’s done something similar with solid results. For a list of people who’ve gone further, check out this list of silo-quits.