This year Instapaper celebrated its tenth birthday and, now that we are an independent company, we’ve been thinking a lot about the next ten years of Instapaper and...
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Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 UC terminates subscriptions with world’s largest scientific publisher in push for open access to publicly funded research | University of California | Office of the President
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.
This is some crazy bad-ass news. Almost everyone I know in higher education tweeted this article out today.
Now if only we could get them to all go IndieWeb using a Domain of Their Own and practice academic samizdat…
👓 The ineffectiveness of lonely icons | Matt Wilcox
Matt Wilcox (Web Developer & Tinkerer)If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience.
Hat tip Brad Frost
👓 Write on your own website | Brad Frost
Brad Frost (Brad Frost)The single best thing I ever did for my career was start a blog on my own website.
— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) January 18, 2019Writing on your own website associates your thoughts and ideas with you as a person. Having a distinct website design helps strengthen that association. Writing for another publication you get a little circular avatar at the beginning of the post and a brief bio at the end of the post, and that’s about it. People will remember the publication, but probably not your name.
Amen sir!
Another great reason for Why to IndieWeb.
👓 Seashells Transform Suburban Bathroom Into Tropical Hideaway | The Onion
WOODMERE, OH—-A wicker basket filled with seashells and placed on top of a toilet tank has magically transformed Dale and Paula Watson's suburban bathroom into a serene tropical oasis, sources reported Thursday.
I’d have had more respect for the article if they’d mentioned how much additional tropicalness the half inch of dust added to the display six months later.
👓 Heather Harrington awarded the Adams Prize | Mathematical Institute
Oxford Mathematics' Heather Harrington is the joint winner of the 2019 Adams Prize. The prize is one of the University of Cambridge's oldest and most prestigious prizes. Named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and endowed by members of St John's College, it commemorates Adams's role in the discovery of the planet Neptune. Previous prize-winners include James Clerk Maxwell, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking.
This year's Prize has been awarded for achievements in the field of The Mathematics of Networks. Heather's work uses mathematical and statistical techniques including numerical algebraic geometry, Bayesian statistics, network science and optimisation, in order to solve interdisciplinary problems. She is the Co-Director of the recently established Centre for Topological Data Analysis.
👓 Amy Collier on Wakefulness, Agency, Ownership, and Trust | Lauren Brumfield
I now have the pleasure of introducing our fifth and final presenter, Amy Collier, Associate Provost for Digital Learning at Middlebury College, who will take on the pedagogical piece of the future of technology as it relates to Surveillance, Ownership, and Accessibility in the classroom. Collier leads Middlebury’s strategic vision for digital learning and oversees a group (DLINQ) that works with faculty, staff, and students to explore and question the roles digital technologies play in education. Her work surrounding Digital Detox and After Surveillance is inspiring, and we’re excited to see what she’ll bring to the table in June. Here’s an abstract for her upcoming talk,Wakefulness, Agency, Ownership, and Trust:
What does teaching and learning look like when we take seriously our students’ privacy and agency? This is a question we wrestle with in my group at Middlebury, Digital Learning and Inquiry, and I imagine this will feel like a familiar or even front-and-center concern for others at Domains. Surveillance and other troubling practices enter our teaching in seemingly benign ways, with mostly good intentions. This presentation will ask us to reconsider those practices and explore how pedagogy is transformed when we center the ideas of wakefulness, agency, ownership, and trust (ooh and freedom, and possibility, and love, and…and…and…). There will be a lot of expertise in the room and I hope to draw that expertise out with opportunities for us to move between examples of work that is currently happening and speculative futures for education.
Stay tuned for more announcements about Domains 19 (the schedule is coming next!) and go ahead and get to registering! Those early bird prices won’t last forever!
👓 CiteULike News | CiteULike
After nearly 15 years operating CiteULike, we’ve made the difficult decision to close the site. Unfortunately, the costs associated with providing it and the fact that none of us really has any time to put into the maintenance and development of the site mean that we have to call it a day.
We know there are still a number of you out there who use the site regularly and we’re sure you’ll be disappointed but hope you’ll understand.
You will be able to download your library until 30th March 2019 but after that it is likely that CiteULike will no longer be accessible. We will be refunding any Gold subscriptions pro rata that extend beyond that date.
We wish you all success in your research and happiness in your life.
The CiteULike team.
I’m glad I’ve been owning my bookmarks and references on my own site for years, knowing that sooner or later just this day would come.
CiteULike was an interesting service and had a useful bookmarklet and some social features, but had quite a janky looking UI. For those looking for alternates, I recommend not looking at other siloed services, but making an attempt to own your own bookmark posts on your own website. I’m happy to help if you have questions or need pointers.
👓 asciinema for recording command-line terminal sessions | Rayna M. Harris
Live coding screencasts are way more awesome when the text can be copied. asciinema makes this possible.
The ability to copy and paste from video like this is tremendously awesome! Because it’s text-based, it also looks like I can annotate it with Hypothes.is too. Example: https://hyp.is/-Ay6wD7nEemnq3uyMRrhrA/asciinema.org/a/3uHCusbqQd6KAYNZ15NSv21bQ
This could be an awesome teaching tool, particularly for programming.
👓 Launching #IndieWeb Textpattern | Chris McLeod
Chris McLeod (Mr.Kapowski)I noted the other day that Textpattern might be a good fit for some people trying to build their own websites, but that there wasn’t much in the way of resources to get them plugged into the IndieWeb. Well, I went and started to do something about that. #IndieWeb TextPattern is a site where I will...
This is awesome news. I’ve started a stub page on the IndieWeb wiki that hopefully folks will be able to add to in the future.
Perhaps the quickest start for getting Webmention working is to use Webmention.io and have people add the appropriate headers. Then you can build or set up methods to either show that data directly or build a full endpoint.
Good luck!
👓 9 Drambuie Cocktails | Culinary Lore
Rusty Nail, Royal Rob Roy, and Other Cocktails Featuring Drambuie Have some Drambuie but don't know what to do with it? Well, you can drink it straight on the rocks, but it may be too sweet for you. So, here are cocktails perfect for everyone's favorite Scottish liqueur, the most famous of which is
Some interesting variations listed here for using Drambuie.
👓 The world’s first code-free sparkline typeface | After the flood
Displaying charts in text without having to use code
Data can be hard to grasp however visualising it can make comprehension faster. Sparklines (tiny charts in text, like this: 123{10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100}789) are a useful tool, but creating them for the web has always required code and using them in word documents was previously impossible.
Sparks, now in its second release, is a family of 15 fonts (three variants in five weights each) that allows for the easy combination of text and visual data by removing the need for any technical know-how. By installing the Spark font you can use them immediately without the need for custom code.
👓 Week 8, puzzle fiction | Robin Sloane
Robin Sloan (Week 8, puzzle fiction)This week,
- Writing.
- I didn’t quite finish that lab reorganization, and not for lack of effort. I'll show you my ahem progress down at the end of the email.
- I received permission from an author’s estate to do a live reading (streamed over the internet) of a novella that I love. This week, I’ll figure out when to do that. It is a really, REALLY good book; in fact I think it’s close to perfect. My rough notion is that I’ll do a different live reading once a season, to complement and balance my annual reading, around Christmastime, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
- Olive oil bottling!
👓 About | juliaangwin.com
Julia Angwin (Julia Angwin)Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of a startup nonprofit newsroom that will investigate the impacts of …
I kind of wish Julia was still publishing to her own website… come to think of it, how is she not?
👓 WebApp: Readtrack
Readtrack is an experimental tool built during the 2012 NYT TimesOpen Hack Day. It gives music recommendations based on the content you’re looking at by doing semantic analysis of the current…
This is a killer start for a fun little app.