Populism, pointless work and panicked youth: an interview with David Graeber of LSE
An interesting thesis to be sure. I’d bookmarked his book to read a while ago. Certainly looks more intriguing now.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Has the Time Arrived for Hosted Lifebits? | Reclaim Hosting
I’m a big fan of Kin Lane‘s for many reasons: he’s west coast cool, he’s passionate about what he believes in, he’s a technical wizard, and he wraps that all up with some intense creativity and vision. What one might call the complete package. He’s ramping up his Reclaim efforts currently, and we got to spend some time together at the Emory Domain Incubator to start imagining what that might look like more broadly.
👓 ‘Hard Day’s Night’: A Mathematical Mystery Tour | NPR
The jangly opening chord of The Beatles' hit "A Hard Day's Night" is one of the most recognizable in pop music. Maybe it sounds like nothing more than a guitarist telling his bandmates, "Hey, we're doing a song here, so listen up." But for decades, guitarists have puzzled over exactly how that chord was played.
👓 A Songwriting Mystery Solved: Math Proves John Lennon Wrote ‘In My Life’ | NPR
Over the years, Lennon and McCartney have revealed who really wrote what, but some songs are still up for debate. The two even debate between themselves — their memories seem to differ when it comes to who wrote the music for 1965's "In My Life."
Mathematics professor Jason Brown spent 10 years working with statistics to solve the magical mystery. Brown's the findings were presented on Aug. 1 at the Joint Statistical Meeting in a presentation called "Assessing Authorship of Beatles Songs from Musical Content: Bayesian Classification Modeling from Bags-Of-Words Representations."
👓 A Provocation for the Open Pedagogy Community | Hapgood
Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)Dave Winer has a great post today on the closing of blogs.harvard.edu. These are sites run by Berkman, some dating back to 2003, which are being shut down. My galaxy brain goes towards the idea of …
An interesting take on self-hosting and DoOO ideas with regard to archiving and maintaing web presences. I’ll try to write a bit more on this myself shortly as it’s an important area that needs to be expanded for all on the open web.
👓 Hackers Face New Scrutiny For Pointing Out Voting Equipment Flaws | BuzzFeed News
Veteran hackers have tried for years to get the world to notice flaws in voting machines. Now that they’ve got it, they have to wrestle with scaring people away from voting.
👓 The case for quarantining extremist ideas | Joan Donovan and Dana Boyd | The Guardian
When confronted with white supremacists, newspaper editors should consider ‘strategic silence’
👓 Twitter is wrong: facts are not enough to combat Alex Jones | The Verge
Jack Dorsey thinks unfettered speech will save the world, but all the evidence says it won’t
👓 What makes a weblog a weblog? | Harvard Weblogs
At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying "I know it when I see it" I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven. I draw from my experience developing and using weblog software (Manila, Radio UserLand) and using competitive products such as Blogger and Movable Type. This piece is being published along with my keynotes at OSCOM and the Jupiter weblogs conference. And a disclaimer: This is a work in progress. There may be subsequent versions as the art and market for weblog software develops. Dave Winer, June 2003, Cambridge MA.
The unedited voice of a person
A real piece of internet history here, written by the first blogger.
👓 Upcoming Changes in the Blogs. | Harvard Blogging Platform
7/13/2018 In 2003, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (now the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society) began an unusual experiment: we launched a blogging platform. That seems q…
👓 Friday, August 10, 2018 | Scripting News
I got an email in the middle of the night asking if I had seen an announcement from Berkman Center at Harvard that they will stop hosting blogs.harvard.edu. It's not clear what will happen to the archives. Let's have a discussion about this. That was the first academic blog hosting system anywhere. It was where we planned and reported on our Berkman Thursday meetups, and BloggerCon. It's where the first podcasts were hosted. When we tried to figure out what makes a weblog a weblog, that's where the result was posted. There's a lot of history there. I can understand turning off the creation of new posts, making the old blogs read-only, but as a university it seems to me that Harvard should have a strong interest in maintaining the archive, in case anyone in the future wants to study the role we played in starting up these (as it turns out) important human activities.
This is some earthshaking news. Large research institutions like this should be maintaining archives of these types of things in a defacto manner. Will have to think about some implications for others in the DoOO and IndieWeb spaces.
👓 Micro.blog Help | Micro.blog community guidelines
At Micro.blog, we believe there needs to be a line between the social network and the content at your own site. Your web site is your own, where you have the freedom to write about whatever you want, but a service like Micro.blog has a responsibility to build a safe community for its users.
👓 A Guide to Micro.blog For People Who Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Twitter | Jean MacDonald
Jean MacDonald (micro.welltempered.net)TL;DR You don’t have to choose between the platforms, but here are some of the ways that they are different. You don’t have to leave Twitter, but there is a good chance Twitter will leave you …without your favorite Twitter client, that is. You may also be exasperated by Twitter’s refusal to ...
👓 WordPress spam statistics: comments, pingbacks, trackbacks | Ryan Barrett
Comment spam is one of the most common forms of WordPress spam, if not the most common. Here are some anecdotal statistics for this site. During the month of November 2014, snarfed.org received 796…
Revealing the chip-makers and cookie factories in disguise