When I started to experiment with different ways of blogging, I realised what I was doing was a bit off. So I decided to redesign the blog.
Reads
👓 Webmention.io integration for Drupal 8 | realize.be
I've had my site for quite some time now, the internet archive goes way back to 2002 even! To be fair, most of the content until 2007 wasn't that interesting (not sure what makes me think it is nowadays though, but okay ... ), but it was mostly the primary source of well .. me :). Apart from that, I also use Twitter, but I want to turn this around and let my site be the primary source. The IndieWeb movement is something I only recently discovered, but somehow, the philosophy was in my mind for the last few weeks, and I am not the only one that is talking about it. So, as a first small step, to figure out who links to my content, I created a simple Drupal 8 module that can receive and store webmentions and pingbacks from Webmention.io. The source is available at https://github.com/swentel/webmention_io. I'll move this drupal.org at some point once it gets into a more polished state, but it also depends on further iterations of getting more interaction feedback to my site. Next up is looking at https://brid.gy/ as the service has integration with social networks to post and retrieve replies from there.
It’s interesting to see some of the great strides forward Drupal has been making in the IndieWeb arena since November .
👓 Education in the (Dis)Information Age | Read Write Collect
Kris Shaffer reflects on the abundance of information on the web. He suggests that the hyperlink maybe ‘our most potent weapon’ against disinformation: The oldest and simplest of internet technologies, the hyperlink and the “new” kind of text it affords — hypertext — is the foundation...
👓 I’m Glad I Got Booed at CPAC | New York Times
I spoke the truth for the sake of every conservative disgusted by what has happened to our movement.
I appreciate more and more of these dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who are sticking to their guns on the message that the emperor has no clothes. It gives me more hope for the future.
👓 SPLOT You’re a Rich Text Field | CogDogBlog
I’m SPLOT tinkering and feel a wave of totally un-necessary but irresistible song plays… How does it feel to be One of the beautiful splots How often have you added video Often enough to know What did you format when you were there Everything that WordPress can Captions you’re a rich ...
👓 Kibbles for My Patreon Bowl? | CogDog
Here is my shameless shameful plug. More than two years ago a colleague I respect emailed and started a back and forth exchange. He strongly urged me to set up a donation campaign so I could be supported to do more tool and resource building. I gave it some thought, but then landed a good long term contract, so shelved it. Recently a few others have asked me why I am not patreon-ing, and my answer was more or less a shrug.
👓 Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities | AP News
One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead. And in what could be a new wrinkle, a service by Uber called Express Pool now is seen as directly competing with mass transit. Uber and Lyft argue that in Boston, for instance, they complement public transit by connecting riders to hubs like Logan Airport and South Station. But they have not released their own specific data about rides, leaving studies up to outside researchers. And the impact of all those cars is becoming clear, said Christo Wilson, a professor of computer science at Boston’s Northeastern University, who has looked at Uber’s practice of surge pricing during heavy volume. “The emerging consensus is that ride-sharing (is) increasing congestion,” Wilson said.
It’s always seemed to me that these companies weren’t quite doing what they said they were from a simple economics standpoint. Particularly with these companies losing money to build market share, they’re essentially subsidizing a portion of their user’s cost. The fact that they’re siphoning off people from public transportation isn’t widely reported. I suspect that outside of major metropolitan areas they’re not doing as much as they are in them. They’re building market share, but primarily by breaking regulations in places with taxi or other related services. I’d certainly love to see more broad based statistics of their ridership compared with statistics from taxi companies and municipal transportation services. I have a feeling the economic piper will eventually come for them when the playing field is leveled.
👓 Sliced And Diced: The Inside Story Of How An Ivy League Food Scientist Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies | Buzzfeed
Brian Wansink won fame, funding, and influence for his science-backed advice on healthy eating. Now, emails show how the Cornell professor and his colleagues have hacked and massaged low-quality data into headline-friendly studies to “go virally big time.”
We really need people to begin publishing their negative results and doing a better job on understanding and practicing statistics. Science is already not “believed” by far too many in the United States, we really don’t need bad actors like this eroding the solid foundations we’ve otherwise built.
👓 Nassim Taleb explains the power of “skin in the game” | The Economist
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. By Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Random House; 304 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £20. IN 2001 Nassim Taleb published “Fooled by Randomness”, an entertaining and provocative book on the misunderstood role of chance.
👓 A Democratic Memo Undercuts Key Republican Complaints About the FBI | The Atlantic
The document, drafted by minority members of the House Intelligence Committee, sought to rebut claims that the bureau abused its power during the election.
👓 Book clinic: why do publishers still issue hardbacks? | The Guardian
The editor of the Bookseller explains why the hardback format will be with us for a while yet
📖 Read One by Kathryn Otoshi
Blue is a quiet color. Red’s a hothead who likes to pick on Blue. Yellow, Orange, Green, and Purple don’t like what they see, but what can they do? When no one speaks up, things get out of hand — until One comes along and shows all the colors how to stand up, stand together, and count. As budding young readers learn about numbers, counting, and primary and secondary colors, they also learn about accepting each other's differences and how it sometimes just takes one voice to make everyone count.
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
👓 What Do Jotted Talking Points Say About Trump’s Empathy? | The New York Times
Consoler in chief has been a role that President Trump has been slow and somewhat reluctant to embrace — especially in contrast to his predecessor.
👓 Analysis | The real reason Congress banned assault weapons in 1994 — and why it worked | Washington Post
The ban's critics say it failed, but they're misinterpreting what it was intended to do to begin with.
👓 Grand jury indicts Missouri governor who admitted affair | AP News
A St. Louis grand jury on Thursday indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015. The Republican governor responded that he made a mistake but committed no crime. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched an investigation in January after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. He was elected governor in November 2016.