Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
A brilliant quote from Emily Dickinson framed by @ltaub as a way to think about the slow fuse to knit together a community through new possibilities! #Domains19 pic.twitter.com/JKA18sa5Ou
— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) June 10, 2019
“The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination.” —Emily Dickinson
Gallager gave a nice concise summary of what he learned from Shannon about how to do good theory work:
- Simplify the problem
- Relate it to other problems
- Restate the problem in as many ways as possible
- Break the problem into pieces
- Avoid getting locked into thinking ruts
- Generalize
As he said, “it’s a process of doing research… each one [step] gives you a little insight.” It’s tempting, as a theorist, to claim that at the end of this process you’ve solved the “fundamental” problem, but Gallager admonished us to remember that the first step is to simplify, often dramatically. As Alfred North Whitehead said, we should “seek simplicity and distrust it.”
I know I’ve read this before, but it deserves a re-read/review every now and then.
There was an eerie and surprisingly large overlap of a lot of what Matt Lumpkin said in his talk this morning and the IndieWeb movement. If you just change the disease from Type 1 Diabetes to Social Media, there are a tremendous number of similarities between the two approaches of problems to be solved in terms of giving people agency, ownership of their data, the silo nature of the big corporations in the space, and the lack of solid inter-operability and standards.
I can’t wait for Chuck Chugumulung and the gang to get the video for this week up on YouTube so I can share it with colleagues.
Based on what I’ve heard, it might not be a completely terrible thing to class what the IndieWeb is working on fixing as a broad public health issue–but in its case a mental health one instead of a pancreas and diet related one.
The Centre for Innovation of Leiden University has always strongly supported social or collaborative learning in online learning: the interaction between learners facilitating learners, whether that is in discussion forums, peer review assignments or in our Facebook groups, contributes to a deeper understanding of subjects, and prepares learners to apply their knowledge.
However, the Centre for Innovation has a responsibility to our teachers, learners and volunteers, under GDPR and our own Privacy Policy. Based on this we conducted a review of different platforms that we made use of for collaborative, social learning and have decided to move away from those that do not allow us to meet our obligations and promises to those in our care.
Therefore we have decided to close all Facebook groups, Whatsapp groups and Instagram accounts currently under control of the Centre for Innovation, per the 29th of March 2019, and have adjusted our courses accordingly.
You can direct any questions or remarks in regards to this policy to MOOC@sea.leidenuniv.nl.
Kind Regards,
On behalf of Centre for Innovation, Leiden University,
Tanja de Bie, Community Manager
At least part of Leiden University is apparently making the moral and ethical call to close all their Facebook related properties. Kudos! They’ve already got a great website, perhaps they’ll move a bit more toward the IndieWeb?
if you’re ever feeling down, just remember that the greatest talents of our time were all once consistently fooled by peek-a-boo ❧
“I’m a skunkologist,” he explained. “My world is the skunk world.”
Directed by Jade Sandberg Wallis. With Marie Kondo.
Quote of the day:
I feel like you’re holding onto that that turkey gravy to be spiteful.
Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood. ❧
I read this quote on Nov 29, 2018 12:04pm through @dswanson's post and it has stuck with me. I thought I’d dig up some additional detail on it. It turns out Swanson’s version was a slight misquote/variation and even at that MLK may have been modifying a quote from somewhere else.
King may have adopted this passage from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Hope of the World [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933], p. 25:
“Any church that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them . . . that kind of church, I think, would hear again the Master’s withering words: ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”’
—annotation in The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project (okra.stanford.edu) “Address at the Religious Leaders Conference on 11 May 1959” on page 200
Learn in six easy steps how to become a master blogger (Caveat the only way is to read and write a lot)
I’m reminded here of my friend and Academy Award nominated screenwriter Millard Kaufman who once told me while standing in front of his immense library, “If you want to be a good writer, then practice writing; if you want to be a great writer, then read everything and then steal from the best.”
...cyberinfrastructure is something more specific thanthe network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular proj-ect, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline. ❧
Quote highlighted in the video from module 1 of EDU522
Looks like an interesting report. I’ll note that Jeremy Dean has annotated a bit of the report in the past, so it may be useful to circle back around and read the entire thing.
President Donald Trump's announcement that he was pardoning far-right commentator Dinesh D'Souza, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to campaign finance fraud, caught many in Trump world by surprise Thursday morning, but they insisted it was not indicative of possible pardons for Trump allies ensnared in the Russia probe.
The former official said he doesn’t think Trump is playing “the sort of three-dimensional chess people ascribe to decisions like this. More often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”
This certainly gets the prize for the quote of the year concerning Donald Trump.
A definition of #Cybernetics:
— Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) May 15, 2018
"Science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing and processing information so as to use it for control." -A. N. Kolmogorov pic.twitter.com/71I6mFRqT0
“Anything big happening?” he asked of the quantum information theorist.
Tal Waterhouse (Twitter)People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
— Tal Waterhouse (@iiTalW) May 3, 2018
Chris Beckstrom (chat.indieweb.org)...holy crap this stuff [IndieWeb] is great. When I started getting webmentions from social media using Bridgy I flipped. It's like we're in the future!!!
I remember the early days of Twitter when people were excited about what it was and what it could do. Even then I don’t think people were as excited as Chris Beckstrom was when he made what is certainly the IndieWeb quote of the week this morning.
