Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Here’s what they had to say.
The acronym SPLOT was coined by Brian Lamb (Levine, 2014) when working with Alan Levine to create tools that solved a number of issues seen in the LMS and ad-based web tools. While it’s (intentionally) difficult to pin down an exact definition (Splot.ca, 2019), the focus is on simple tools that protect student privacy while providing powerful opportunities for students to create and share media that directly align with learning objectives. SPLOTs support and value open education while making it as easy as possible to post media in an appealing and accessible way.
SPLOT building collections of audio and video media
This is an experiment of using the SPLOTbox theme as a podcast collection platform. So record your story and share it with us (be sure to use the category for this episode, that’s how they get in the show). It will join the others in the collection (and listed below). See as well an example of a Podcast made from audio at external URLs, all were added to the site via the Studio Form.
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) West is a two-day conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing, and the west-coast successor to !!Con! We’re looking forward to seeing you in Santa Cruz, California, on the campus of UC Santa Cruz, on February 29th and March 1st, 2020!
“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.
Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist.
In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way.
There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.
Kicks Condor (Kicks Condor)A new (but old-school) forum that’s my current hangout with other web directory nerds.
What is history anyway? Most people would say it’s what happened in the past, but how far back does the past extend? To the first written sources? To what other forms of evidence reveal about pre-literate civilizations? What does that term mean—an empire, a nation, a city, a village, a family, a lonely hermit somewhere? Why stop with people: shouldn’t history also comprise the environment in which they exist, and if so on what scale and how far back? And as long as we’re headed in that direction, why stop with the earth and the solar system? Why not go all the way back to the Big Bang itself? There’s obviously no consensus on how to answer these questions, but even asking them raises another set of questions about history: who should be doing it? Traditionally trained historians, for whom archives are the only significant source? Historians willing to go beyond archives, who must therefore rely on, and to some extent themselves become, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, archeologists? But if they’re also going to take environments into account, don’t they also have to know something about climatology, biology, paleontology, geology, and even astronomy? And how can they do that without knowing some basic physics, chemistry, and mathematics? This inaugural volume of the SFI Press (the new publishing arm of the Santa Fe Institute) attempts to address these questions via thoughtful essays on history written by distinguished scholars—including Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann—from across a wide range of fields.
The first comprehensive general resource on state-of-the-art protocell research, describing current approaches to making new forms of life from scratch in the laboratory.
Protocells offers a comprehensive resource on current attempts to create simple forms of life from scratch in the laboratory. These minimal versions of cells, known as protocells, are entities with lifelike properties created from nonliving materials, and the book provides in-depth investigations of processes at the interface between nonliving and living matter. Chapters by experts in the field put this state-of-the-art research in the context of theory, laboratory work, and computer simulations on the components and properties of protocells. The book also provides perspectives on research in related areas and such broader societal issues as commercial applications and ethical considerations. The book covers all major scientific approaches to creating minimal life, both in the laboratory and in simulation. It emphasizes the bottom-up view of physicists, chemists, and material scientists but also includes the molecular biologists' top-down approach and the origin-of-life perspective. The capacity to engineer living technology could have an enormous socioeconomic impact and could bring both good and ill. Protocells promises to be the essential reference for research on bottom-up assembly of life and living technology for years to come. It is written to be both resource and inspiration for scientists working in this exciting and important field and a definitive text for the interested layman.
SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered -- each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.
In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together.
These wonderfully imagined tales -- at once funny, wistful, and unsettling -- are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.
Serena (sleepyowl.ink)So over a year ago I listed out all my subscribed podcasts. It’s been over a year, and there has been some changes. In case anyone is looking for new shows to listen to… Too New to Judge 7am – I want to try getting into some daily local news podcast (not tech news). However, I have yet to list...
monitoring when journalists request permission to broadcast videos from twitter
John Evdemon (Loosely Coupled Thinking)I love Known - it's an elegant blogging tool that supports most Indieweb standards right out of the box. The biggest challenge I've had with Known is getting it upgraded. I host my blog with Reclaim - a great little hosting service with excellent customer support.
