Is blockchain poised to be “the next big thing” in education?
This has become a question I hear with increasing frequency about a technology that, up until quite recently, was primarily associated with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The subtext to the question, I suppose: do educators need to pay attention to the blockchain? What, if anything, should they know about it?
A facile introduction with some interesting directions that education could take with it. Still, none seem so strong as to be worthwhile/valuable.
We launched this blog less than three months ago to explore the latest in Open Web technologies. Things like the IndieWeb movement, blockchain apps, API platforms, Open AI, and more. AltPlatform has always been an experiment, as I made clear in our introductory post. However, from a publishing point of view the experiment hasn’t worked out as we had hoped. To put it plainly, the page views haven’t eventuated – at least in a sustained way. So it’s time to try something new. We’re going to pivot into something a bit different…soon.
I’m a bit saddened by this, but it’s always fun to try out new things. Can’t wait to see what comes next.
I love ricmac’s conceptualization of blogging and hope it comes back the way he–and I–envision it.
An open source, MIT licensed project that I’ve been personally spending a lot of time on, for almost a year.
– In a nutshell, Phở Networks lets you create independent social media outlets.
– Phở Networks is singularist; because it allows you to create any form of social media, with a simple language that many sysadmins have already familiarized themselves with in the UNIX world; ACL — access-control lists. You may use Phở Networks as your blogging engine, but you can also create a whole new Facebook. Need proof? Just visit the pho-recipes Github repo.
– Phở Networks is lightning fast and massively scalable, because it takes an unorthodox approach as to how it handles data. With Phở, data is stored and served warm right off the RAM, as it is built on top of Redis. With this unconventional RAM-first design choice (in contrast to caching, which most high-scale web sites have opted into), Phở Networks won’t be cheap (for now), but it will be blazing-fast and super low-maintenance by avoiding the limitations of sharding and hard-drive friction.
I’d heard of this a while back, but never spent much time on it. Perhaps it’s time to delve in a bit to play around?
In a statement, the White House said "White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best."
My mom loves me. But she also “likes” me—a lot. And apparently, when she does so on Facebook, it’s hurting my chances of becoming the next viral sensation.
On his blog, engineer Chris Aldrich explains what he calls The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem. When you post something on Facebook, and your mom is the first to like it (and how can she not? she’s your mom!), Facebook thinks it’s a family-related piece of content and sets the audience accordingly.
Facebook’s process for determining what goes into your News Feed is frustratingly opaque. However,…
Here’s Aldrich’s dilemma:
I write my content on my own personal site. I automatically syndicate it to Facebook. My mom, who seems to be on Facebook 24/7, immediately clicks “like” on the post. The Facebook algorithm immediately thinks that because my mom liked it, it must be a family related piece of content–even if it’s obviously about theoretical math, a subject in which my mom has no interest or knowledge. (My mom has about 180 friends on Facebook; 45 of them overlap with mine and the vast majority of those are close family members).
The algorithm narrows the presentation of the content down to very close family. Then my mom’s sister sees it and clicks “like” moments later. Now Facebook’s algorithm has created a self-fulfilling prophesy and further narrows the audience of my post. As a result, my post gets no further exposure on Facebook other than perhaps five people–the circle of family that overlaps in all three of our social graphs.
I, too, have a like-happy mom. Two seconds after I post a story I’ve written—say, a 3,000-word piece on state-imposed no-fishing zones—my mom will like it. She hasn’t read it, and probably never will, but she likes seeing her daughter’s face on her computer, and really, who can protest the unconditional support? But because of her eager click, Facebook lumps the content in with my photos of Baby’s First Avocado, and shows it only to a small group of family members.
Until Facebook stops penalizing mom auto-likes, Aldrich writes that you can sidestep the problem with a little extra effort. Here’s how to make sure your Facebook posts reach an audience beyond Mom, Aunt Susie and Uncle Ken in Kansas.
1) Set the privacy settings of your post to either “Friends except mom” or “Public except mom.”
I know what you’re thinking. How awful! How can you do that to your own mother? Did you know that birthing you took 38 hours? Millennials!
Wait, wait, wait, everyone. There’s a step two.
2) At the end of the day, or as soon as it seems as though the post reached its maximum audience, change the audience settings to “friends” or “public.” Aldrich has been doing this, and has been seeing more impressions on his posts. “I’m happy to report that generally the intended audience which I wanted to see the post actually sees it,” he writes. “Mom just gets to see it a bit later.”
Is a statue of Robert E. Lee lurking in your neighborhood? Statues, memorials and even schools are named in honor of the General who fought and failed to win independence in the US Civil War. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are more than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces across America, Lee included.
Another shift happened a few years ago, when I decided it was okay to develop just for myself, with no intention of ever releasing the stuff I was working on. That led to a new style of product, and a happier developer. I was always doing it for myself, and fooling myself into believing it was for other people. I'm no less a narcissist than anyone else. Once you own that, you get a lot more powerful, I have found.
As of October 30, 2016, I’ve slowly but surely begun posting what I’m actively reading online to my blog.
I’ve refined the process a bit in the last couple of weeks, and am becoming relatively happy with the overall output. For those interested, below is the general process/workflow I’m usi...
SO YOU WANT to change your Twitter handle.
When you got it two years ago, @PlankingGuy was funny, but today you get quizzical looks. @SexxyFoxxyMama was okay in college, but not on your new business cards. Or you realized @ERMAHGERD520 was a bit too hard for people to spell after all. You could just get a new account, but reacquiring your Following would be a pain, and you’d lose all your tweets.
Luckily, it’s very easy to update your handle. From your page, find the gear icon at the top right, click Settings, and it’ll be the first text box you encounter, labeled “Username.” If your new name is available, you can change it, and instantly you will be @NewName, without losing a single follower.
In my post “The Kolmogorov Option,” I tried to step back from current controversies, and use history to reflect on the broader question of how nerds should behave when their penchant for speaking unpopular truths collides head-on with their desire to be kind and decent and charitable, and to be judged as such by their culture. I was gratified to get positive feedback about this approach from men and women all over the ideological spectrum.
However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of “dogwhistling.” They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn’t just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst—even though, of course, my friends themselves knew better.
So in this post, I’ll come out and say what I think. But first, I’ll do something even better: I’ll hand the podium over to two friends, Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery, both of whom were kind enough to email me detailed thoughts in response to my Kolmogorov post.
Michelle Woo
Chris Aldrich