Malkia Cyril Contributor Share on Twitter Malkia Cyril is founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network. More posts by this contributor The benefits of police body cams are a myth In the wake of revelations that the person…
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👓 Jared Kushner’s $1.2 billion miracle | Think Progress
Someone is doing Jared Kushner a huge favor. But we don't know who.
👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design
There was a time in the early days of social media that I signed up for every service that came out. The username @spigot is mine across most services you can find. By the time Instagram started, I’d started to grow weary and standoffish to new services. I’m sure you know what I mean. So I held ...
👓 What’s a Sysadmin to Do? — Avoiding Digital Detritus on a Blogging Platform Older than All of My Kids | DTLT
We have a lot of blogs.
I don’t just mean those of us in DTLT — we do have a lot of blogs. I mean the University of Mary Washington. UMW currently has over 2500 active domains in our Domain of One’s Own program (and almost 3500 domains all-time), and that’s to say nothing about how many blogs and websites are on those domains and their subdomains.
But before there was Domain of One’s Own there was (and still is) UMW Blogs. After three years of DTLT staff and a few UMW faculty experimenting with blogs in and out of class, UMW Blogs launched in 2007 — a WordPress installation that allowed any student, faculty, or staff member to get their own subdomain (like mygreatblog.umwblogs.org) and WordPress site, administered by DTLT. Since then, the 600 blogs of 2007 grew to over 11,000 blogs and 13,000 users in 2018!
👓 April 2018: Newsroom job | Richard MacManus
This week I started a cool new job at Newsroom, one of New Zealand’s premier independent media companies. I’ll be their Chief Product Officer for a few days a week, and also writing my weekly technology column for the site. As I noted in my LinkedIn profile, I’ll be responsible for building the Newsroom technology platform and further developing Newsroom Pro – the company’s subscription service.
👓 Six ‘X-Rated’ Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty | Huffington Post
Cox-Zucker machine. What sounds like a high-tech device for oral sex is actually an algorithm used in the study of certain curves, including those that arise in cryptography. The story goes that David A. Cox co-authored a paper with fellow mathematician Steven Zucker, just so that the dirty-sounding term would enter the lexicon.
👓 Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson | POLITICO
The <i>Atlantic</i> climbed out on a limb by adding Williamson to its staff. Then they proceeded to saw off the branch.
👓 Apps of a Feather
Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.
After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.
- Push notifications will no longer arrive
- Timelines won’t refresh automatically
We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.
If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.
If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.
👓 Facebook deleted Mark Zuckerberg’s Messenger texts without telling anyone | The Verge
Facebook has been secretly deleting messages sent on Messenger by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook claims it did nothing wrong, but it demonstrates a double-standard with regard to how the company see privacy.
👓 Trump finally spoke about Stormy Daniels — and he made things much worse | Think Progress
Ignorance is not always bliss.
👓 The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete | The Atlantic
The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
👓 Librarian tweetstorm by @green_grainger
So there was a MYSTERY at the library today.
A wee old women came in and said "I've a question. Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd."
"What?" I say, thinking she might be a bit off her rocker. She showed me, and they did.
I asked if she was doing it, she said she wasnt and showed me the new book she was getting out that she hadnt even had yet. It also had the 7 underlined! "I don't know, maybe someone really likes page 7?" I said, assuming of course that there is a serial killer in the library.
I checked some other books. Most didn't have it, but a lot in this genre did - they're "wee old women" books (romances set in wartime Britain etc). Lots of underlined 7s. The woman who pointed it out shrugged and went on her way, "just thought you should know".
My manager came back from doing arts and crafts with some of the kids and I decide to tell her about the serial killer in the library.
And that’s how I found out that a lot of our elderly clientele have secret codes to mark which books they’ve read before.
Our computers do it automatically but many have been doing it since before that was possible, so Esther might underline page 7, while Anne might draw a little star on the last page, and Fred might put an “f” on the title page. Then when they pick it up, they can check!
It’s quite clever really but now I’m dying to just underline page 7 of every new wee old women book we get in.
So, good news: there’s not a serial killer in the library whose MO include the number 7 and wartime romances. Bad news: people are defacing books rather than just asking us to scan them (smiling face with smiling eyes)
I'm now concerned that the amount of people enjoying this thread means there's going to be a new spate of readers using secret codes - apologies to librarians everywhere!
(although, in truth, I find it hard to be annoyed about it - better than torn pages and felt pen graffiti!)
(Also, I am new to the library job, hence why I hadn't seen it before! The library and our customers are great though (smiling face with smiling eyes))
Just had another victim of the page 7 vandal returned!!!
(Now checking every book that looks like it might be their taste...)
👓 Steven Bochco Dead: ‘NYPD Blue’ Creator, Dies at 74 | Variety
👓 Dear Facebook user 752461218193242 | Vicki Boykis
h/t to @vboykis
Dear Mark,
Thank you for writing me that letter in the New York Times recently. I wrote you one, too.Sincerely,
(mostly former) Facebook User 752461218193242https://t.co/P0JbAXXn43— Vicki Boykis (@vboykis) March 30, 2018