🔖 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan

Bookmarked Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan (The MIT Press; Reprint edition)
Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.
I’m sure this has been on my “list” at one time or another, but giving it a bump.

hat tip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc& from EDU522 course.

🔖 Gems And Astonishments of Mathematics: Past and Present | Dr. Mike Miller at UCLA Extension

Bookmarked Gems And Astonishments of Mathematics: Past and Present (UCLA Continuing Education)

Mathematics has evolved over the centuries not only by building on the work of past generations, but also through unforeseen discoveries or conjectures that continue to tantalize, bewilder, and engage academics and the public alike.  This course, the first in a two-quarter sequence, is a survey of about two dozen problems—some dating back 400 years, but all readily stated and understood—that either remain unsolved or have been settled in fairly recent times.  Each of them, aside from presenting its own intrigue, has led to the development of novel mathematical approaches to problem solving.  Topics to be discussed include (Google away!): Conway’s Look and Say Sequences, Kepler’s Conjecture, Szilassi’s Polyhedron, the ABC Conjecture, Benford’s Law, Hadamard’s Conjecture, Parrondo’s Paradox, and the Collatz Conjecture.  The course should appeal to devotees of mathematical reasoning and those wishing to keep abreast of recent and continuing mathematical developments.

Suggested prerequisites: Some exposure to advanced mathematical methods, particularly those pertaining to number theory and matrix theory.

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Tuesday 7:00PM - 10:00PM
Location: UCLA
Instructor: Michael Miller
MATH X 451.44 | 362773
Fee: $453.00
I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see what Dr. Miller would be offering in the evenings at UCLA Extension this Fall and Winter quarters. The wait is over, though it’ll be a few days before we can register.

If you’re interested in math at all, I hope you’ll come join the 20+ other students who follow everything that Mike teaches. Once you’ve taken one course from him, you’ll be addicted.

🔖 Data Transfer Project https://datatransferproject.dev

Bookmarked Data Transfer Project (datatransferproject.dev)

The Data Transfer Project was formed in 2017 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.

The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation. Making it easier for individuals to choose among services facilitates competition, empowers individuals to try new services and enables them to choose the offering that best suits their needs.

Current contributors include: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter

🔖 The Data Transfer Project google/data-transfer-project

Bookmarked google/data-transfer-project (GitHub)
The Data Transfer Project makes it easy for people to transfer their data between online service providers. We are establishing a common framework, including data models and protocols, to enable direct transfer of data both into and out of participating online service providers. http://datatransferproject.dev
cross reference: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/22/data-transfer-project/

🔖 Proceedings for ALIFE 2018: The 2018 Conference on Artificial Life

Bookmarked Proceedings ALIFE 2018: The 2018 Conference on Artificial Life by Takashi Ikegami, Nathaniel Virgo, Olaf Witkowski, Mizuki Oka, Reiji Suzuki, Hiroyuki Iizuka (eds.) (MIT Press Journals)
This volume presents the proceedings of ALIFE 2018, the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life, held July 23rd-27th. It took place in Tokyo, Japan (http://2018.alife.org). The ALIFE and ECAL conferences have been the major meeting of the artificial life (ALife) research community since 1987 and 1991, respectively. As a Hybrid of the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) and the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE), the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2018) will take place outside both Europe and the US, in Tokyo, Japan.

🔖 Timelinely

Bookmarked Timelinely (Timelinely)

Create interactive video stories on Timelinely. Timelinely empowers people to go beyond just video.

Highlight interesting parts of a video on a timeline with interactive comments, pictures, links, maps, other videos, and more.

This tool reminds me of a somewhat more commercialized version of Jon Udell’s Clipping tools for HTML5 audio, HTML5 video, and YouTube. I wonder if this is the sort of UI that Hypothes.is might borrow? I can definitely see it being useful functionality in the classroom.  

🔖 An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry | Nature Human Behaviour

Bookmarked An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry by Carl Öhman, Luciano Floridi (Nature Human Behaviour)
The web is increasingly inhabited by the remains of its departed users, a phenomenon that has given rise to a burgeoning digital afterlife industry. This industry requires a framework for dealing with its ethical implications. The regulatory conventions guiding archaeological exhibitions could provide the basis for such a framework.
Some interesting potential research and references for the IndieWeb longevity page.

🔖 Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Domurat Dreger

Bookmarked Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Domurat Dreger (Penguin)
book cover of Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Domurat Dreger

An impassioned defense of intellectual freedom and a clarion call to intellectual responsibility, Galileo’s Middle Finger is one American’s eye-opening story of life in the trenches of scientific controversy. For two decades, historian Alice Dreger has led a life of extraordinary engagement, combining activist service to victims of unethical medical research with defense of scientists whose work has outraged identity politics activists. With spirit and wit, Dreger offers in Galileo’s Middle Finger an unforgettable vision of the importance of rigorous truth seeking in today’s America, where both the free press and free scholarly inquiry struggle under dire economic and political threats.

This illuminating chronicle begins with Dreger’s own research into the treatment of people born intersex (once called hermaphrodites). Realization of the shocking surgical and ethical abuses conducted in the name of “normalizing” intersex children’s gender identities moved Dreger to become an internationally recognized patient rights’ activist. But even as the intersex rights movement succeeded, Dreger began to realize how some fellow progressive activists were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed uncomfortable truths about humans. In researching one such case, Dreger suddenly became the target of just these kinds of attacks.

Troubled, she decided to try to understand more—to travel the country to ferret out the truth behind various controversies, to obtain a global view of the nature and costs of these battles. Galileo’s Middle Finger describes Dreger’s long and harrowing journeys between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice activists determined to win and researchers determined to put hard truths before comfort. Ultimately what emerges is a lesson about the intertwining of justice and of truth—and a lesson of the importance of responsible scholars and journalists to our fragile democracy.

hat tip: Last Week at Wellesley

🔖 dshanske/wordpress-refback: Refbacks for WordPress (Experimental)

Bookmarked Refbacks for WordPress (Experimental) by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (GitHub)
Refback is a linkback method that works using the standard HTTP Referer header. Like pingbacks, trackbacks, and webmentions, it attempts to present links of other sites that have linked to you. Unlike other methods, the other site requires no additional support. The implementation works exactly as the other linkbacks do in WordPress.

🔖 Supramolecular Chemistry. Concepts and Perspectives. Von J.‐M. Lehn. | Angewandte Chemie – Wiley Online Library

Bookmarked Supramolecular Chemistry. Concepts and Perspectives by Jeremy K. SandersJeremy K. Sanders (Angewandte Chemie)
Von J.‐M. Lehn. VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, Weinheim, 1995. 271 S., geb. 128.00 DM/Broschur 58.00 DM. ‐ ISBN 3‐527‐29312‐4/3‐527‐29311‐6 https://doi.org/10.1002/ange.19951072130

👓 LaTeXiT | chachatelier.fr

Bookmarked LaTeXiT (chachatelier.fr)
Should LaTeXiT be categorized, it would be an equation editor. This is not the plain truth, since LaTeXiT is "simply" a graphical interface above a LaTeX engine. However, its large set of features is a reason to see it as an editor; this is the goal in fact.