Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read Humane Ingenuity 14: Adding Dimensions by Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)
In HI12 I mentioned Ben Shneiderman’s talk on automation and agency, and he kindly sent me the full draft of the article he is writing on this topic. New to me was the Sheridan-Verplank Scale of Autonomy, which, come on, sounds like something straight out of Blade Runner:
Read When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage by Jeffrey Bussgang and Jono Bacon (Harvard Business Review)
How businesses shift from selling products to building networks.
The IndieWeb isn’t a business like many of the examples mentioned here, but it’s doing doing a lot of the things mentioned in the article and doing them well. It’s definitely one of my favorite communities of builders and collaborators.
Read Norms is expanding like crazy. How a SoCal institution is staying the same to get ahead (Los Angeles Times)
The company that bought Norms restaurants six years ago is expanding the brand. How the 70-year-old chain plans to stay the same to get ahead.
I was shocked the other day to realize the West LA location had apparently closed. Now that I hear they’ve been bought out and are expanding, I’m wondering what happened at that location?
Read HTML is my API by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
In August 2012, I wrote a quick script to stream front-page Hackernews stories to an IRC channel on Freenode (##hackernews in case you're interested) so that I could quickly glance at popular stories there instead of needing to load Hackernews. Since IRC is my feed reader, I've always tried to pipe as much there as possible.
Very smart and reminiscent of some of the stuff Drew McLellan and Jeremy Keith were doing almost a decade before. There is a lot more power in microformats that most web developers give them credit for. Aaron has a great example and use-case.

My favorite part here:

So in 2.5 years of parsing the HTML, I never had any problems. In 2 days of parsing the JSON API, I hit a glitch where all the stories were empty.
Since more people and programs see the HTML than use the API, the HTML ends up being more reliable.

Read Reducing Friction and Expanding Participation in the Continuous Improvement of OER by David Wiley (iterating toward openness)
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those po...
This reminds me I should write up something about using Webmention in conjunction with OER.
Read 10 Words for People Who Are Bad At What They Do : Plater (merriam-webster.com)
Don't quit your day job
Patzer is such a great word. I’ve only heard it in context in the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher. 

Most of the others I’ve heard as well, though many are rarer. Throttlebottom is a solid one that I wasn’t aware of before, but seems very fitting. I’m half-tempted to change the tagline of my website to Philologaster now.

Read A Special Kind of Hell: Un-Grading is Another Kind of Grading by Karen Cangialosi (karencang.net)
I’ve been teaching for more than 27 years, but it is just in the last five that I stopped grading traditionally, and so I am what some may call an “un-grader”. But the thing is, if you work in an institution where your job is to assign final grades at the end of the semester like I do, then you are still a grader.
Read How to Calculate and Use Purchasing Power Parity – PPP: Why Does a Big Mac Cost a Lot Less in China? (The Balance)
Purchasing power parity is a theory that says prices of goods between countries should equalize over time. Formula, how to use, and examples.

After the war, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel suggested multiplying each currency’s pre-war value by its inflation rate to get the new parity. That formed the basis for today’s PPP. ❧

Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:29PM

Why We Don’t Live in a PPP World
PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same.
That’s not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes. 
A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can’t be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London. 
A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can’t compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers.
A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports. ❧

Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:31PM