The Harvey Mudd College mathematician tells us why he loves playing with Brouwer's fixed-point theorem
I need to remember to subscribe to this podcast…
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
👓 Trump Appointee Compiles Loyalty List of U.S. Employees at U.N., State | Foreign Policy
Mari Stull’s arrival at the State Department’s International Organization Bureau is triggering an exodus of top career staffers.
It’s just this type of insidious institution destruction that is heavily eroding our government and our society. Regardless of which administration takes over next, it just means a whole lot more work and effort to rebuild.
👓 Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy | The Atlantic
Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.
Just because you’ve got the desire to be a social media influencer doesn’t mean you don’t need to treat it like a serious business.
Social platforms have such huge scale now, I’m surprised they don’t crack down on bots and fake accounts so that it’s more transparent what kind of true value accounts actually bring to the table. They could even leave them in the system so they can show to investors that they’re getting the traffic and “engagement”, but they’re throwing away a lot of actual value by not disclosing actual accounts and real engagement by real people (aka potential customers). Bots are second class citizens because other than the veneer of value, they’re really not adding much to the conversation other than a weak form of tummeling.
This makes me wonder if anyone in the social networking space is doing research on bots as tummelers?
👓 How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook | The Verge
Pocket CEO Nate Weiner on how local data processing is the future of personalized recommendations.
Nice to see people and companies iterating on new feed reader functionality–particularly ethical ones.
👓 The Artwork Was Rejected. Then Banksy Put His Name to It. | The New York Times
The Royal Academy in London turned down a work by “Bryan S. Gaakman” for an exhibition, then asked Banksy — who had made it — if he had a submission.
This reminds me a bit of episode one of Revisionist History, though the way it is presented is much more cutsey with a soupcon of aw-shucks. They really should do more blind screening of artwork the way that orchestras in the US are typically doing blind auditions these days.
👓 Dear Marketing by Email “Experts” I’m Serious About Messing With You | CogDogBlog
Hi, Hello. I was wondering whether you’d be interested in selling advertising space on Does the phrase “No, not even after hell freezes over” mean anything to you? The advertiseme…
This is pretty hilarious. I definitely need something like this for my site.
👓 Rebooting XML-RPC | Dave Winer
It's a reboot of XML-RPC and the site that documents it.
The XML-RPC protocol was designed in 1998, by four people. Don Box, Mohsen Agsen, Bob Atkinson and myself. The first three guys worked at Microsoft. I was at UserLand. It became popular because it was so simple, and early. There were implementations in every major language and environment. For example, it was built into Python and the Macintosh OS. The main blogging APIs were done in XML-RPC. There is an O'Reilly book on XML-RPC.
It's been 20 years! We can do another new version in 2038, Murphy-willing, if we're still here, etc. This may eventually become the XML-RPC home page. It's not as beautiful as the original, but the links will be current.
👓 Our big loop | Scripting News
I want people to be able to put up their own web servers. Not companies. Not people with Computer Science degrees. People. Anyone. Everyone. #
I think every journalist should learn how to set up and run a web server. I think any student, no matter how young, should learn, if they want to. The doors to publishing should be open to everyone. It's never been easier, and it could be getting easier all the time. That should be one of the overarching goals of our profession, to make what we do easier and easier, all the time. To make what we did ten years ago something anyone can do. It's the nature of software, that once we know what we can do that we make it easy for everyone to do it.
I think every journalist should learn how to set up and run a web server.
I agree with this certainly…
👓 Telling the Story of My Domain | Aaron Davis
Alan Levine recently put out a request for stories about domains as a part of the Ontario Extend project What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name? In part, my domain name comes from my interest in the notion of marginalia, the stuff that we write, ...
I saw Alan’s call for submissions the other day and need to get around to posting my own.
👓 Annotations are an easy way to Show Your Work | Jon Udell
In A Hypothesis-powered Toolkit for Fact Checkers I described a toolkit that supported the original incarnation of the Digital Polarization Project. More recently I’ve unbundled the key ingredients of that toolkit and made them separately available for reuse. The ingredient I’ll discuss here, HypothesisFootnotes, is illustrated in this short clip from a 10-minute screencast about the original toolkit. Here’s the upshot: Given a web page that contains Hypothesis direct links, you can include a script that pulls the cited material into the page, and connects direct links in the page to citations gathered elsewhere in the page.
Jon is always building something interesting. Here he covers some useful tools for journalism as well as education.
👓 Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff. What Happens When It Gets Called? | Daily Intelligencer | New York Magazine
For almost 25 years, Shane Smith’s plan was that, by the time the suckers caught on, he’d never be stuck owning the company he co-founded.
A fantastic article.
This reminds me a lot of the recent Theranos stories and book. It’s sad how companies don’t do enough due diligence on potential investments like this. When I think about how much basic work and discussion Marcus Lemonis does for $100,000 investments, I’m appalled to hear what people are doing for multi-millions. It’s stunning that a company can get to this size and be worth nearly nothing. Using the relative size (ie number of employees) of business units like human resources and legal within a particular industry could be a reasonable guide for the internal management of a company.
This is also a good example that while investments may give a company a particular valuation, it can rarely be the actual potential present value of the company. As a result, workers who are working for near free plus stock should be paying closer attention to company internals to know that their stock portion is going to be completely worthless.
Worse, I’m always pained to hear that young people (rich or otherwise) are essentially giving away their work and sweat equity away for free to big companies that could easily pay them. Eventually the pendulum is going to swing back the other way and companies are going to need to pay more.
One of my favorite quotes from the piece:
“Shane would always say that young people are the No. 1 bullshit detector, which was annoying once you realized that the thing he mastered is getting young people to buy shit,” says a recently departed senior employee.
👓 Announcing indiebookclub | gRegorLove.com
gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)I’m pleased to announce a new project I have been working on. indiebookclub is an app for keeping track of the books you are reading or want to read. It is primarily intended to help you own your data by posting directly to your own site with Micropub. If your site does not support Micropub yet, y...
This portends some awesome things to come. Can’t wait to get this working and see what pieces come along with it later. This is going to make it much easier to leave silos like GoodReads.com.
👓 Implementing IndieWeb on your personal Drupal site, part 1 | Roy Scholten
This is my version of the steps you need to take to make your site part of the indie web community. Swentel helped me getting it all setup on this here Drupal site using his indieweb module. It’s all a bit complicated still, so this is mostly me trying to retroactively understand what’s going on...
It’s great to see people using swentel‘s Drupal plugin to better own, control, and use their presence online to better communicate with others! I may have to spin up an instance and check it out soon myself.
👓 Possible cultural & technological futures of digital scholarship | W. Ian O’Byrne
I think there is a need to develop a system to track the draft of a manuscript from the beginning to the end of the process. This will open up new possibilities to scaffold new scholars while we onboard them in the process. This will also provide new opportunities for open scholarship and open science. Finally, this will allow researchers to replicate, remix, or reproduce the (research, reflection, writing, revision, publishing) process. The answer may be in indieweb philosophies, but the main impediment may be in the people and systems that make all of this possible. I think we have an opportunity for new technological opportunities in academic publisher, but I’m not sure if culturally we’re ready. Let me explain.
I think there is a need to develop a system to track the draft of a manuscript from the beginning to the end of the process.
If you’re drafting in WordPress you can set the number of revisions of your posts to infinite so that you can keep (archive) all of your prior drafts. see: https://codex.wordpress.org/Revisions
“pre-print” versions of manuscripts
This is just another, albeit specific, form of academic samizdat.
👓 Rare hashtags | Matt Maldre
It’s funny to find hashtags on Instagram that are rarely used. When commenting on a photo, I’ll often combine two words together into a hashtag. And then I click on the hashtag to see if there any other photos. Apparently is the first Instagram photo with the hashtag: #comiccompilations in the comments No photo has ever …
Matt makes an interesting point about the ability to use and search some social silos.