By making the first progress on the “chromatic number of the plane” problem in over 60 years, an anti-aging pundit has achieved mathematical immortality.
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
🎧 Gillmor Gang 05.13.17: Doc Soup | Tech Crunch
Recorded live Saturday, May 13, 2017. The Gang takes nothing off the table as Doc describes a near future of personal APIs and CustomerTech.
Keith outlines an excellent thesis about media moving from “one to many” to increasingly becoming “one to one”. It points out the issue for areas like journalism, which can become so individualized, and democracy which often rely on being able to see the messages that are given out to the masses being consistent. One of the issues with Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica problem is that many people were getting algrorithmic customized messages (true or not) that had the ability to nudge them in certain directions. This creates a lot more control on the part of major corporations which would have been far less likely when broadcasting the exact same message to millions. In the latter case, the message for the masses can be discussed, analyzed, picked apart, and dealt with because it is known. In the former case, no one knows what the message was except for the person who received it and it’s far less likely that they analyzed and discussed it in the same way that it would have been previously.
In the last portion of the show, Doc leads with some discussion about identity and privacy from the buyer’s perspective. Companies selling widgets don’t necessarily need to collect massive amounts of data about us to sell widgets. It’s the seller’s perspective and the over-reliance on advertising which has created the capitalism surveillance state we’re sadly living within now.
In the closing minutes of the show Steve re-iterated that the show was a podcast, but that it’s now all about streaming and as such, there is no longer an audio podcast version of the show. I’ll have something to say about this shortly for those looking for alternatives, because this just drives me crazy…
👓 Rosenstein Tells Trump He’s Not a Target in Mueller, Cohen Probes | Bloomberg
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump last week that he isn’t a target of any part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or the probe into his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, according to several people familiar with the matter.
👓 French researchers pledge to go without Springer journals | Times Higher Education
‘No more direct access to Springer’s latest papers? No problem,’ says petition, signed by nearly 4,000
👓 Pearson Embedded a ‘Social-Psychological’ Experiment in Students’ Educational Software | Gizmodo
Education and publishing giant Pearson is drawing criticism after using its software to experiment on over 9,000 math and computer science students across the country. In a paper presented Wednesday at the American Association of Educational Research, Pearson researchers revealed that they tested the effects of encouraging messages on students that used the MyLab Programming educational software during 2017's spring semester.
👓 Harper’s Editor Insists He Was Fired Over Katie Roiphe Essay | New York Times
The essay stirred controversy on Twitter. It was also the subject of debate at the venerable monthly. Now the editor, James Marcus, is out.
🎧 Song Exploder | The Daily
Wonderly – “The Daily” theme song
The Daily is the New York Times’ daily news podcast, hosted by Michael Barbaro. In this special edition of Song Exploder, composers Jim Brunberg & Ben Landsverk (aka Wonderly) break down how they composed the show’s theme song. You can listen on the New York Times website at nytimes.com/dailysong, or below:
footnotes:
Theme to HBO’s Westworld, by composer Ramin Djawadi (hear his Song Exploder episode on Game of Thrones’ theme song here)
A fantastic little podcast breaking down music. I always wish I knew more about music and structure and have some real appreciation for analysis like this. I’m considering subscribing to the rest of their content. Interestingly this looks like the same host as The West Wing Weekly. I suspect this may be how I came across it originally.
🎧 Former Facebook Insider Says Company Cannot Be Trusted To Regulate Itself | NPR
NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with Sandy Parakilas, who worked as an operations manager on the platform team at Facebook in 2011 and 2012. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Parakilas says Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself.
A bit “I-told-you-so” without any indication of how hard he may have fought for better handling of the data, but there were certainly others outside the company decrying their practices at the time.
🎧 Episode 3: Freedom from Facebook | Clevercast
Jonathan LaCour from cleverca.stThis time on clevercast, I discuss my departure from Facebook, including an overview of how I liberated my data from the social giant, and moved it to my own website.
Here are some of the tools that I mention in today’s episode:
Also check out my On This Day page and my Subscribe page, which includes my daily email syndication of my website activity.
There’s a lot going on here and a lot to unpack for such a short episode. This presents an outline at best of what I’m sure was 10 or more hours of work. One day soon, I hope, we’ll have some better automated tools for exporting data from Facebook and doing something actually useful with it.
🎧 Episode 2: Restoration | Clevercast
Jonathan LaCour from cleverca.stThis time, on clevercast, I reminisce about one of my earliest personal websites. What happened to its content? How did I create it? Is there any chance of restoring it back to greatness?
I’ve still got a ways to go to recover some of my older content, but Jonathan has really done some interesting work in this area.
🎧 Episode 1: Intros and Going Serverless | Clevercast
Jonathan LaCour from cleverca.stThis time, on clevercast, I introduce the show, and then talk about a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: going serverless for my personal website.
A nice new entrant to the microcast field. Subscribing immediately.
🎧 Social Bubble Bath | IRL
How technology can create, and can break, our filter bubbles.
We’ve long heard that the ways the web is tailored for each user—how we search, what we’re shown, who we read and follow— reinforces walls between us. Veronica Belmont investigates how social media can create, and can break, our filter bubbles. Megan Phelps-Roper discusses the Westboro Baptist Church, and the bubbles that form both on and offline. B.J. May talks about the bubbles he encountered every day, in his Twitter feed, and tells us how he broke free. Rasmus Nielsen suggests social media isn’t the filter culprit we think it is. And, within the context of a divided America, DeRay McKesson argues that sometimes bubbles are what hold us together.
Show Notes
Read B.J. May’s How 26 Tweets Broke My Filter Bubble.
Grab a cup of coffee and Say Hi From the Other Side.
An interesting take which takes filter bubbles and places them not necessarily just online, but often starting in the real world first and then extending from there.
h/t Kevin Marks
👓 Why I Love Link Blogging | BirchTree
More often than not, I write articles for this site after reading something someone else wrote. I browse the web for articles and tweets that I find interesting, and the ones that make me think are very often the ones that inspire me to write something myself. This leads to a funny situation as a w...
How many levels deep could the link blogging on these posts go? Is it linkblogging all the way down?
For me, I’ll add it specifically to my linkblog of things I’ve read which is a subsection of my collected linkblog which also collects favorites, likes, bookmarks, and sites I’m following.
Incidentally, this seems to be another post about people who use their websites for thinking and writing, which I seem to be coming across many of lately. I ought to collect them all into a group and write a piece about them and the general phenomenon.
👓 WebAuthn: A Developer’s Guide to What’s on the Horizon | Okta Developer
WebAuthn (the Web Authentication API) allows browsers to make use of hardware authenticators such as the Yubikey or a mobile phone's biometrics like a thumbprint reader or facial recognition.
I’ve been interested to see Aaron’s opinion of this when I saw it come across my radar the other day. Glad to have a simple overview of it’s functionality now, particularly from someone who’s literally written the book on authentication.
👓 Wrapping My Head Around Micro.blog and IndieWeb | Jason Sadler
After the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica catastrophe and recent Twitter news (and retraction) about support for 3rd party clients, I found myself wondering about Micro.blog again, after hearing about it on Kickstarter a little over a year ago. On the surface, it’s an indie Twitter-like app, in th...