🔖 Where WordPress Meets Higher Education | WPCampus

Bookmarked WPCampus 2019 Call for Proposals: Save the Date! (WPCampus: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education)
Hello WPCampus friends! We’re excited to announce that our Call for Proposals for this year’s conference will be opening soon! We’re looking forward to another year of wonderful ideas, demonstrations, brainstorming, and benchmarking. Session Topics As in past years, we’re looking for a variety of topics on anything that might bring value to our community. …
Bookmarked Sapien (sapien.network)
Sapien is a Web 3.0 social news platform that gives users control of their data, rewards content creators, and fights fake news.
I am a bit concerned that this network heavily features “democracy” on its front page the way it does and includes gab.ai in the page’s meta data. I’m not sure what to expect to find here.

Bookmarking as the result of a mention in an episode of Human Current.

🔖 Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care | African American Review | Project MUSE

Bookmarked Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care by Koritha Mitchell (African American Review | Project MUSE, Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2018, pp. 253-262)

This article offers a primer on identifying what the author calls “know-your-place aggression” as well as the violence of white mediocrity being treated as merit. The author argues that gaining clarity about these hostile tendencies is a form of self-care. Examples include experiences with racism, (hetero)sexism, trans antagonism, ableism, and Islamophobia. Understanding know-your-place aggression and white mediocrity can prevent marginalized communities from wasting energy by worrying about the opinions of people who use objective standards to judge everyone but themselves. The author encourages this form of self-care because she believes it can empower members of marginalized groups to save their energy for what matters most, the quality of their lives and their contributions to research.

10.1353/afa.2018.0045

👓 Schedule | WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley

Bookmarked Schedule (WordCamp Santa Clarita)
We’re thrilled to debut the first-annual WordCamp Santa Clarita will be held at the Dr. Dianne G. Van Hook University Center University Center on the campus of College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California. Friday, April 5, Beginner’s Day Time Vásquez Rocks Vásquez Rocks were named after...

🔖 The appeal of newsletters: ownership and intimacy | onemanandhisblog.com

Bookmarked The appeal of newsletters: ownership and intimacy (One Man & His Blog)
A couple of interesting thoughts from Craig Mod about the underlying reasons behind the shift to newsletters.

🔖 Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL | Piers Cawley

Bookmarked Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL by Piers CawleyPiers Cawley (bofh.org.uk)
Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single job change that’s ever made me as happy as this one.

🔖 Schedule | Domains 2019

Bookmarked Schedule – Domains 2019 | June 10-11 in Durham, NC (domains.reclaimhosting.com)

Domains 2019 is a two-day conference on 2019-06-10 - 2019-06-11 geared toward Indieweb for Education, A Domain of One's Own, and EdTech spaces. Sessions will focus on learning tools, data ownership, IndieWeb, containers and the cloud, privacy and surveillance, accessibility, and art. It will be held at 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, North Carolina, USA

Please visit https://domains.reclaimhosting.com/register/ to register for the conference.

Notice the indie web sessions at this conference geared toward the education crowd.
Bookmarked Leaving Neverland (HBO Documentaries)
Filmmaker Dan Reed’s two-part documentary film Leaving Neverland explores the separate but parallel experiences of two young boys, James “Jimmy” Safechuck, at age 10, and Wade Robson, at age 7, who were both befriended by the star. They and their families were invited into his singular and wondrous world, entranced by the singer’s fairy-tale existence as his career reached its peak.

🔖 Virtually Connecting March 18-20 at Digital Pedagogy Lab Toronto!

Bookmarked Virtually Connecting March 18-20 at Digital Pedagogy Lab Toronto! by greeneterry (Virtually Connecting)
The Digital Pedagogy Lab – Toronto event is on March 18-20, 2019. We are virtually connecting to you from the Gladstone Hotel in Queen West Village with two (maybe three!) opportunities to connect to this wonderful event from afar. Join us at a distance for a hangout with #DigPed keynotes, track...

🔖 Hemingway Editor

Bookmarked Hemingway Editor (hemingwayapp.com)

Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.

The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.

You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over them for hints.

I could see some serious value in this if I could use it as a web app with Micropub support, which would allow it to almost any CMS or platform. It’s a bit reminiscent of Quill, though that doesn’t have the grammar and writing help.

There’s a $20 desktop version that can publish to WordPress and Medium.

Possibly missing for a full editor experience: the ability to add images.

As a sample, I tried putting in some prior writing. Apparently I overuse adverbs. It said I was writing at grade 13 and I should aim for grade 9! (It was something I had already attempted to “dumb down”.)

🔖 Humm | Simple self-publishing: a distributed platform for free creative expression

Bookmarked Humm | Simple self-publishing: a distributed platform for free creative expression (Humm)
Simple self-publishing: a distributed platform for free creative expression on Humm…
Looks like an interesting author platform meant that could be used for journalism as well. Has a very IndieWeb flavor.
Bookmarked From bit to it: How a complex metabolic network transforms information into living matter by Andreas Wagner (BMC Systems Biology)

Background

Organisms live and die by the amount of information they acquire about their environment. The systems analysis of complex metabolic networks allows us to ask how such information translates into fitness. A metabolic network transforms nutrients into biomass. The better it uses information on available nutrient availability, the faster it will allow a cell to divide.

Results

I here use metabolic flux balance analysis to show that the accuracy I (in bits) with which a yeast cell can sense a limiting nutrient's availability relates logarithmically to fitness as indicated by biomass yield and cell division rate. For microbes like yeast, natural selection can resolve fitness differences of genetic variants smaller than 10-6, meaning that cells would need to estimate nutrient concentrations to very high accuracy (greater than 22 bits) to ensure optimal growth. I argue that such accuracies are not achievable in practice. Natural selection may thus face fundamental limitations in maximizing the information processing capacity of cells.

Conclusion

The analysis of metabolic networks opens a door to understanding cellular biology from a quantitative, information-theoretic perspective.

https://doi.org/10.1186/1752-0509-1-33

Received: 01 March 2007 Accepted: 30 July 2007 Published: 30 July 2007

Hat tip to Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine
Bookmarked Statistical Physics of Self-Replication by Jeremy L. England (J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923 (2013); )
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4818538
Syndicated copy also available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1179

Hat tip to Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine