👓 Fed up with Facebook, activists find new ways to defend their movements | Tech Crunch

Read Fed up with Facebook, activists find new ways to defend their movements (TechCrunch)
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…

👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design

Read All my Instagrams are MINE by Bryan Hoffman (Spigot 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

Read What’s a Sysadmin to Do? — Avoiding Digital Detritus on a Blogging Platform Older than All of My Kids by Kris Shaffer (umwdtlt.com (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!

Some interesting thoughts on maintaining a large Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) installation.

👓 April 2018: Newsroom job | Richard MacManus

Read April 2018: Newsroom job by Richard MacManus (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.
Congratulations ricmac!

👓 Six ‘X-Rated’ Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty | Huffington Post

Read Six 'X-Rated' Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty by Macrina Cooper-White and David Freeman (HuffPost)
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.
I always thought he was cool before (many of his students didn’t “get” him), but I’m now even more proud to have had Steven Zucker as my first math professor in college.

Steven Zucker explaining the concept of tangent to a surface.

👓 Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson | POLITICO

Read Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson. by Jack Shafer (POLITICO Magazine)
The <i>Atlantic</i> climbed out on a limb by adding Williamson to its staff. Then they proceeded to saw off the branch.
I noted the hire of Williamson with curiosity when it happened, but I expected it might last a tad longer than this. At least he managed longer than Quinn Norton did at the New York Times, but both seemingly gone for relatively similar reasons.

👓 Apps of a Feather

Read Apps of a Feather …Stick Together (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:
  1. Push notifications will no longer arrive
  2. Timelines won’t refresh automatically
If you use an app like TalonTweetbotTweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

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.
Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.

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

Read Facebook deleted Mark Zuckerberg’s Messenger texts without telling anyone by Tom Warren (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.
It’s very telling that they have certain privacy policies for themselves and different ones for everyone else.

👓 Trump finally spoke about Stormy Daniels — and he made things much worse | Think Progress

Read Trump finally spoke about Stormy Daniels — and he made things much worse by Judd Legum (thinkprogress.org)
Ignorance is not always bliss.
It really worries me that the depth of his thinking is so tremendously shallow.

👓 The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete | The Atlantic

Read The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete by James Somers (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.
Not quite the cutting edge stuff I would have liked, but generally an interesting overview of relatively new technology and UI set ups like Mathematica and Jupyter.

👓 Librarian tweetstorm by @green_grainger

Read Librarian tweetstorm by Georgia | Saoirse (Twitter)
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...)
This is such an interesting little story including some cultural anthropology.

👓 Steven Bochco Dead: ‘NYPD Blue’ Creator, Dies at 74 | Variety

Bochco was a television genius. I really enjoyed the depth and breadth of so much of his work over the years. This is a real loss to the narrative thread of all of our lives.

👓 Dear Facebook user 752461218193242 | Vicki Boykis

One of the best takes on the Facebook “Issue” I’ve read in the past two weeks–and I’ve read almost all of them at this point.

h/t to @vboykis