The South Carolina Republican was once a vehement Trump critic. Now, he’s one of the president’s most ardent supporters.
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
🎧 PressED WordPress and Education twitter conference | Radio #EDUtalk 27-02-19 | EduTalk
Pat Lockley talking about PressEd the conference about WordPress run completely on twitter. PressEd uncovers many aspects of the use of WordPress in all areas of education.
We discussed some of the aspects and features of running a conference on twitter the previous and upcoming conferences. Pat invites anyone who uses WordPress in any area of education to submit a proposal to the conference.
- Pat Lockley on twitter Pgogy WebStuff (@Pgogy)
- Pat’s Website: Pgogy Webstuff – Pedagogic and Techological Outfitters – WordPress / Drupal / Moodle / Digital Humanities
- PressED Website: 2019 PressED conference – A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter
- PressED PressED Conf – A tweeting WordPress conference (@pressedconf) on twitter.
While listening to John Johnston on this topic, I couldn’t help but think how cool it would be if PressEd, an education related conference that is held online via Twitter, could actually be held on WordPress itself. There was a quick mention by Pat Lockley about their consideration of using the P2 theme to effect this, but they’re right in that P2 has been left behind on the side of the road.
I think that such a conference could be held online and actually use WordPress; it would require more of the participants to be using IndieWeb philosophies and technology/plugins like Webmention and perhaps one of the more modern feed readers that are using Microsub.
Alternately, I could see a place where a platform like IndieWeb.xyz could be leveraged as a location to which all the participants could syndicate their content to a particular sub there (it has the ability to force Webmentions for people who can’t send/receive them yet) and then act as the reader in which the conference was taking place. In this sense IndieWeb.xyz would act a bit like an impromptu planet to aggregate all the conversation. I haven’t looked, but if IndieWeb.xyz also had RSS or other feeds coming back out of individual subs, then it would be a bit more like a traditional planet and people could subscribe in their feed reader of choice, and with WebSub or an occasional manual refresh, a conference like this could be done directly from WordPress (or honestly any IndieWeb friendly platform/website) and have much the same impact. In fact, perhaps a bit more impact since all the presenters and participants would and could have archival copies of the conference on their own websites at the end of the day and the ephemeral nature of such an online conference could tend to disappear.
Incidentally, I could almost hear the gears turning in John’s head as I’m sure he was thinking much the same thing. He carefully restrained himself and managed to keep the conversation on track though.
Now I’ll have to brainstorm an IndieWeb for Education using WordPress proposal for this year’s pending PressEd Conference if there’s time left.
I loved the short snippet at the end of the episode where Pat Lockley gave a brief bio on his Twitter handle and domain name. It reminds me a bit of the podcast My URL Is, which I hope comes back with more episodes soon.
🎧 The Daily: The Democrats and Israel | New York Times
The Democratic Party has a long history of staunchly supporting Israel, but some new lawmakers are raising questions about the future of this stance.
👓 Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information | FastCompany
You’ve probably never heard of many of the data firms registered under a new law, but they’ve heard a lot about you. A list, and tips for opting out.
👓 Luminary. A better way to podcast
Luminary is a podcast streaming platform that gives you access to 500k+ shows, when and where you want. Sign up today and be the first to try @luminary!
Look ma! Another stand alone app-cum silo billing itself as a podcast solution. What do you want to bet there’s no RSS and it won’t work with any other podcatcher?
👓 Podcasts startup Luminary launches with $100m of funding | Music Ally
Another day, another podcasts startup attracting significant investment, amid the wider excitement around the spoken-word format. This time it’s a Los Angeles-based startup called Luminary, which is launching a slate of more than 40 podcasts including the likes of Lena Dunham, Malcolm Gladwell, Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien as hosts. What’s more, the New York Times reports that Luminary has already secured nearly $100m of funding.
Its CEO Matt Sacks certainly has all the right lines when it comes to signifying ambitions, too. “We want to become synonymous with podcasting in the same way Netflix has become synonymous with streaming,” he said. “I know how ambitious that sounds. We think it can be done, and some of the top creators in the space agree.”
The way Luminary has gone after some of the most prominent podcasters to create their next shows for its company mirrors what Spotify is doing – there’s something of a land-grab going on for anyone who’s proven their ability to engage listeners with this format. Luminary isn’t just a producer though: it’s launching its own app, which will offer an $8 monthly subscription for ad-free access to its entire lineup. The app will also have an ad-supported free section.
👓 Luminary Media Sets Podcast Launch Lineup With Lena Dunham, Trevor Noah And More Than 40 Others | Deadline
Once the company officially launches (sometime in the first half of 2019, it says), its streaming app will be available as an $8-a-month, ad-free subscription version and free version with ads. Some of its shows will be existing podcasts moving over to Luminary as their new exclusive home, and others will be Luminary originals.
Podcasting, of course, has its own roster of A-list talent best-known to people who wear earbuds a good portion of the day. Three such figures are making their next shows for Luminary: Guy Raz, known for How I Built This and the TED Radio Hour; Leon Neyfakh, the creator and host of Slow Burn; and Adam Davidson, the creator of Planet Money.
While it is not yet a billion-dollar business, podcasting pulled in $514 million in revenue in 2018, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Spotify has recently moved aggressively into the sector, buying Gimlet Media for $230 million.
This sounds like yet another standalone app that is going to turn podcasting into a silo so they can monetize the content. Why not just build a payment system on top of what is already there? They could build less and capture/help out a much larger portion of the ecosystem.
I suspect that RSS will not be involved in this process and one will have to use their app instead of just any app.
👓 Luke Perry, ‘90210’ and ‘Riverdale’ Star, Dies at 52 | Variety
Actor Luke Perry, known for roles in “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Riverdale,” died on Monday after suffering a massive stroke on Wednesday. He was 52. “[Perry] was surrounded by his children Jack and Sophie, fiancé Wendy Madison Bauer, ex-wife Minnie Sharp, mother Ann Bennett, step-father Steve Bennett, brother Tom Perry, sister Amy Coder, and other close family and friends,” his rep said in a statement. “The family appreciates the outpouring of support and prayers that have been extended to Luke from around the world, and respectfully request privacy in this time of great mourning. No further details will be released at this time.”
👓 Celebrating the Work and Life of Claude Elwood Shannon | IEEE Foundation
In 2014 IEEE Information Theory Society President, Michelle Effros, knew that something had to be done. The man who coined the very phrase, Information Theory, had largely been forgotten. Given his importance, and the growing impact that his work was having on society at large, she led the IEEE Information Theory Society on a quest to use the Centennial of Claude Shannon’s birth to right this injustice.
A series of activities were planned, including a dual IEEE Milestone dedicated at both Nokia Bell Labs and MIT. Such was his stature that both institutions were intent on honoring the work he accomplished on their respective sites. His work, after all, foresaw and paved the way for the Information Revolution that we are experiencing, making possible everything from cell phones to GPS to Bitcoin.
By the time of the Nokia Bell Labs event, the keystone project – a documentary on Shannon’s life was in the formative stages. IEEE Information Theory Society leadership had secured the services of Mark Levinson, of Particle Fever acclaim. The script was being written and preliminary plans were underway.
To make the film a reality, a coalition of individuals, foundations and corporations came together with the common objective to bring the story of Shannon to as wide an audience as possible. An effective partnership was forged with the IEEE Foundation which was undertaking its own unique project - its first ever major fundraising campaign. The combination proved to be a winning entry, and the Shannon Centennial quickly became exemplary of the impact that can occur when the power of volunteers is bolstered by effective staff support.
19 June was the World Premiere of the finished product. The Bit Player was screened to a full house on the big screen at the IEEE Information Theory Society’s meeting in Vail, CO, US. The film was met with enthusiastic acclaim. Following the screening attendees were treated to a Q&A with the film’s director and star.
Among the techniques used to tell Shannon’s story was the testimony of current luminaries in the fields he inspired. All spoke of his importance and the need for his impact to be recognized. As one contributor, Andrea Goldsmith, Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering, Stanford University, put it, “Today everyone carries Shannon around in their pocket”.
Based on this article the Claude Shannon movie The Bit Player has already had its premiere. I updated the IMDb entry, but I still have to wonder if it is ever going to get any distribution so that the rest of us might ever see it?
👓 Deep text: a catastrophic threat to the bullshit economy? | Abject
I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor. — Kenneth Goldsmith It’s a striking headline, and the Guardian…
👓 Frans de Waal Embraces Animal Emotions in ‘Mama’s Last Hug’ | New York Times
In his new book, the renowned ethnologist argues that emotions are key to understanding both human and animal behavior.
👓 The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Issue 21: Information – Nautilus
Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker,…
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
McCulloch was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m. ❧
Now that is a business card title!
March 03, 2019 at 06:01PM
McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence. ❧
tl;dr
March 03, 2019 at 06:06PM
Gottfried Leibniz. The 17th-century philosopher had attempted to create an alphabet of human thought, each letter of which represented a concept and could be combined and manipulated according to a set of logical rules to compute all knowledge—a vision that promised to transform the imperfect outside world into the rational sanctuary of a library. ❧
I don’t think I’ve ever heard this quirky story…
March 03, 2019 at 06:08PM
Which got McCulloch thinking about neurons. He knew that each of the brain’s nerve cells only fires after a minimum threshold has been reached: Enough of its neighboring nerve cells must send signals across the neuron’s synapses before it will fire off its own electrical spike. It occurred to McCulloch that this set-up was binary—either the neuron fires or it doesn’t. A neuron’s signal, he realized, is a proposition, and neurons seemed to work like logic gates, taking in multiple inputs and producing a single output. By varying a neuron’s firing threshold, it could be made to perform “and,” “or,” and “not” functions. ❧
I’m curious what year this was, particularly in relation to Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis in which he applied Boolean algebra to electronics.
Based on their meeting date, it would have to be after 1940.And they published in 1943: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
Based on their meeting date, it would have to be after 1940.And they published in 1943: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
March 03, 2019 at 06:14PM
McCulloch and Pitts alone would pour the whiskey, hunker down, and attempt to build a computational brain from the neuron up. ❧
A nice way to pass the time to be sure. Naturally mathematicians would have been turning “coffee into theorems” instead of whiskey.
March 03, 2019 at 06:15PM
“an idea wrenched out of time.” In other words, a memory. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:17PM
McCulloch and Pitts wrote up their findings in a now-seminal paper, “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. ❧
reference at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
March 03, 2019 at 06:21PM
I really like this picture here. Perhaps for a business card?
❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:23PM
it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content. ❧
Oops, I think this article is confusing Wiener with Claude Shannon?
March 03, 2019 at 06:34PM
By the fall of 1943, Pitts had moved into a Cambridge apartment, was enrolled as a special student at MIT, and was studying under one of the most influential scientists in the world. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:32PM
Thus formed the beginnings of the group who would become known as the cyberneticians, with Wiener, Pitts, McCulloch, Lettvin, and von Neumann its core. ❧
Wiener always did like cyberneticians for it’s parallelism with mathematicians….
March 03, 2019 at 06:38PM
In the entire report, he cited only a single paper: “A Logical Calculus” by McCulloch and Pitts. ❧
First Draft of a Report on EDVAC by jon von Neumann
March 03, 2019 at 06:43PM
Oliver Selfridge, an MIT student who would become “the father of machine perception”; Hyman Minsky, the future economist; and Lettvin. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:44PM
at the Second Cybernetic Conference, Pitts announced that he was writing his doctoral dissertation on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:44PM
In June 1954, Fortune magazine ran an article featuring the 20 most talented scientists under 40; Pitts was featured, next to Claude Shannon and James Watson. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:46PM
Lettvin, along with the young neuroscientist Patrick Wall, joined McCulloch and Pitts at their new headquarters in Building 20 on Vassar Street. They posted a sign on the door: Experimental Epistemology. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:47PM
“The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted,” they reported in the now-seminal paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” published in 1959. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:50PM
There was a catch, though: This symbolic abstraction made the world transparent but the brain opaque. Once everything had been reduced to information governed by logic, the actual mechanics ceased to matter—the tradeoff for universal computation was ontology. Von Neumann was the first to see the problem. He expressed his concern to Wiener in a letter that anticipated the coming split between artificial intelligence on one side and neuroscience on the other. “After the great positive contribution of Turing-cum-Pitts-and-McCulloch is assimilated,” he wrote, “the situation is rather worse than better than before. Indeed these authors have demonstrated in absolute and hopeless generality that anything and everything … can be done by an appropriate mechanism, and specifically by a neural mechanism—and that even one, definite mechanism can be ‘universal.’ Inverting the argument: Nothing that we may know or learn about the functioning of the organism can give, without ‘microscopic,’ cytological work any clues regarding the further details of the neural mechanism.” ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:54PM
Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a choice Pitts likely could not comprehend. He had no way of knowing that while his ideas about the biological brain were not panning out, they were setting in motion the age of digital computing, the neural network approach to machine learning, and the so-called connectionist philosophy of mind. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:55PM
by stringing them together exactly as Pitts and McCulloch had discovered, you could carry out any computation. ❧
I feel like this is something more akin to what may have been already known from Boolean algebra and Whitehead/Russell by this time. Certainly Shannon would have known of it?
March 03, 2019 at 06:58PM
👓 Henry Quastler | Wikipedia
Henry Quastler (November 11, 1908 – July 4, 1963) was an Austrian physician and radiologist who became a pioneer in the field of information theory applied to biology after emigrating to America. His work with Sidney Dancoff led to the publication of what is now commonly called Dancoff's Law.
Spent a moment to make a few additions to the page as well…
👓 Dr. Hubert Yockey of Bel Air, Director of APG Reactor; Manhattan Project Nuclear Physicist, Dies at 99 | The Dagger
Hubert Palmer Yockey, 99, died peacefully under hospice care at his home in Bel Air, MD, on January 31, 2016, with his daughter, Cynthia Yockey, at his side. Born in Alexandria, Minnesota, he was t…