The document, drafted by minority members of the House Intelligence Committee, sought to rebut claims that the bureau abused its power during the election.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 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
An interesting example of “signaling” value in the publishing industry. Curious how this might play out in a longer study of the evolution of books and written material?
📖 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.
What a great simple concept for a book about how to stand up to bullies. I know a lot of adults who could stand to read this book.
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
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.
Interesting that they seemed to actually find someone to indicate that he had a tiny piece of empathy here when all other evidence seems to be to the contrary.
👓 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.
Not as in-depth as I would have liked, but some interesting quick hit statistics. There are things we could do to prevent these occurences, but yet again it appears as if the almighty dollar will somehow win out in the end.
👓 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.
👓 In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3 Billion of Snap’s Market Value | Bloomberg
Snap Inc.’s flagship platform has lost some luster, at least according to one social-media influencer in the Kardashian-Jenner clan.
I’m surprised that platforms like this don’t have their biggest users doing beta testing of their product to prevent things just like this from happening.
It’s also a good example of why having my own site is valuable: no one can force changes on me if I don’t really want them.
👓 Anchor’s new app offers everything you need to podcast | Tech Crunch
Broadcasting app Anchor, which helps anyone record and share audio, is relaunching its app today with a new focus on serving the larger podcaster community... Of course, there is one concern for professional podcasters migrating to Anchor’s platform – and that’s whether it will be around in the long-term. For now, the company isn’t generating revenue – it’s living off its funding. Podcasters who pay for hosting or self-host don’t generally have to worry with whether they’ll one day have to quickly migrate elsewhere because the company is shutting down or being acquired – and that’s always a concern with startups.
I appreciate that they both give and highlight some reasonable caveats about using this Anchor given its start-up nature. Mentions of potential site-deaths should have been de rigueur for the past decade and change.
It also makes me wonder why an app like this, which has some great and useful higher end utility, doesn’t offer its production service as the product? Sure they can offer the hosting and other bits to the general public, but for the professionals who are already out there, why not give them inexpensive access to the root production service and then allow immediate export so that the company could host the end product on their own website? This would amount to a very solid PESOS service. In fact, they could probably offer the production side for free for the big players for the advertising leverage to gain the smaller players in the space.
I’ve noticed some very large publishing concerns, notably The Atlantic Interview recently, who are sadly relying on third party services to host their podcast content. For large companies that actually have a team that manages their presence to at least some extent, there’s really no reason that they should be relying on a third party to be holding the URLs to their content.
I’m curious to try this out now for my own too-often-neglected microcast. Having a simpler and more straight-forward production flow would certainly help lower the bar for making it even despite my already low requirements for making it.
👓 Shriver Hall renovation expands to include more enhancements—and a longer timeline | The Hub
Homewood campus performance space now expected to reopen in early 2019 with improved sound system, seating, and much more. The Shriver Hall renovation project, now slated for completion in early 2019, includes replacing the auditorium’s uncomfortable and often broken seating. Seat removal took place in the fall.
A few years ago they actually took out the awesome sound system because it didn’t “fit in” with the new orchestra shell and handicapped elevator access to the stage that the HSO felt made it too “cramped”. I have no expectation that this will make it a better place for film screenings. I’m also sure the seating capacity will be far less than it was before. Alas…
👓 Winner-Take-All Electoral Practice Faces Voter-Rights Challenge | Bloomberg
Civil rights activists are challenging the legality of four states’ winner-take-all method of allocating U.S. presidential electoral college votes, claiming the practice magnifies some votes at the expense of others and violates voters’ constitutional rights.
This is a very creative way of attacking this problem. We definitely need to restructure our processes and get rid of the Electoral College
👓 Trump’s former bodyguard makes $15,000 a month from a GOP ‘slush fund’ | CNBC
Keith Schiller left the White House in September and immediately started a lucrative consulting job with the Republican Party's 2020 convention.
👓 Ruby character | Wikipedia
Ruby characters (ルビ rubi) are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of Chinese characters when writing languages with logographic characters such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean to show the pronunciation. Typically called just ruby or rubi, such annotations are most commonly used as pronunciation guides for characters that are likely to be unfamiliar to the reader.
👓 Jōyō kanji | Wikipedia
The jōyō kanji (常用漢字, literally "regular-use Chinese characters") is the guide to kanji characters and their readings, announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Current jōyō kanji are those on a list of 2,136 characters issued in 2010. It is a slightly modified version of the tōyō kanji, which was the initial list of secondary school-level kanji standardized after World War II. The list is not a comprehensive list of all characters and readings in regular use; rather, it is intended as a literacy baseline for those who have completed compulsory education, as well as a list of permitted characters and readings for use in official government documents. Due to the requirement that official government documents make use of only jōyō kanji and their readings, several rare characters are also included by dint of being a part of the Constitution of Japan, which was being written at the same time the original 1850-character tōyō kanji list was compiled. The 2,136 kanji in the jōyō kanji consist of: 1,006 kanji taught in primary school (the kyōiku kanji) 1,130 additional kanji taught in secondary school Foreign learners of Japanese also often focus their kanji studies on the jōyō kanji list.
👓 Stroke order | Wikipedia
Stroke order (simplified Chinese: 笔顺; traditional Chinese: 筆順; pinyin: bǐshùn; Yale: bāt seuhn; Japanese: 筆順 hitsujun or 書き順 kaki-jun; Korean: 필순 筆順 pilsun or 획순 劃順 hoeksun; Vietnamese: bút thuận 筆順) refers to the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character (or Chinese derivative character) are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in various forms in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and in Vietnamese. They are known as Hanzi in (Mandarin) Chinese, kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, and Hán tự in Vietnamese. Stroke order is also attested in other logographic scripts, e.g. cuneiform.
The section on general guidelines is particularly useful.
👓 Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts | Wikipedia
Horizontal writing is known in Chinese as hengpai (simplified Chinese: 横排; traditional Chinese: 橫排; pinyin: héngpái; literally: "horizontal alignment"), in Japanese as yokogaki (横書き, "horizontal writing", also yokogumi, 横組み), and in Korean as garosseugi (가로쓰기) or hoengseo (횡서; 橫書). Vertical writing is known respectively as zongpai (simplified Chinese: 纵排; traditional Chinese: 縱排; pinyin: zōngpái; literally: "vertical alignment"), tategaki (縦書き, "vertical writing", also tategumi, 縦組み), or serosseugi (세로쓰기) or jongseo (종서; 縱書).
yokogaki and tategaki