Watched "The West Wing" The Mommy Problem from Netflix
Directed by Alex Graves. Despite vigorous campaigning, the Santos campaign still struggles to articulate its message and keep the focus on domestic issues rather than gossip and trivia. Although Santos served decades in the military and remains in the reserves, Vinick still appears the stronger candidate on national security issues due to stereotypes about Republicans and Democrats. The White House's decision to halt ...
Watched Getting Started With the Open Science Framework from YouTube

Have you heard about the Open Science Framework? Do you want to organize your research with this free research management tool? This video will teach you the basics of navigating the OSF and creating your first projects.

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free research management software that is created by the Center for Open Science (COS).

Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/
Center for Open Science: https://cos.io

👓 Rod Rosenstein Expected to Leave Justice Dept. Once Attorney General Is Confirmed | The New York Times

Read Rod Rosenstein Expected to Leave Justice Dept. Once Attorney General Is Confirmed (New York Times)
The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, has been a central figure in the Russia investigation by appointing the special counsel and overseeing the inquiry.
As long as he’s leaving of his own accord…
Bookmarked At the Interface of Algebra and Statistics by Tai-Danae Bradley (arXiv.org)
This thesis takes inspiration from quantum physics to investigate mathematical structure that lies at the interface of algebra and statistics. The starting point is a passage from classical probability theory to quantum probability theory. The quantum version of a probability distribution is a density operator, the quantum version of marginalizing is an operation called the partial trace, and the quantum version of a marginal probability distribution is a reduced density operator. Every joint probability distribution on a finite set can be modeled as a rank one density operator. By applying the partial trace, we obtain reduced density operators whose diagonals recover classical marginal probabilities. In general, these reduced densities will have rank higher than one, and their eigenvalues and eigenvectors will contain extra information that encodes subsystem interactions governed by statistics. We decode this information, and show it is akin to conditional probability, and then investigate the extent to which the eigenvectors capture "concepts" inherent in the original joint distribution. The theory is then illustrated with an experiment that exploits these ideas. Turning to a more theoretical application, we also discuss a preliminary framework for modeling entailment and concept hierarchy in natural language, namely, by representing expressions in the language as densities. Finally, initial inspiration for this thesis comes from formal concept analysis, which finds many striking parallels with the linear algebra. The parallels are not coincidental, and a common blueprint is found in category theory. We close with an exposition on free (co)completions and how the free-forgetful adjunctions in which they arise strongly suggest that in certain categorical contexts, the "fixed points" of a morphism with its adjoint encode interesting information.

Chris Aldrich is reading “Let’s replace Twitter with something much better.”

Read Let's replace Twitter with something much better. by Charl BothaCharl Botha (cpbotha.net)
I love that by following certain people, my timeline has become a stream of interesting and entertaining information. I love that sometimes I am able to fit my little publication just so into the 140 characters given to me.

👓 Blogging As An Act Of Defiance In An Age Of Social Media Manipulation | Steve Lawson

Read Blogging As An Act Of Defiance In An Age Of Social Media Manipulation by Steve Lawson (stevelawson.net)
So this website finally had an 11 year overdue overhaul. Total redesign and optimisation. If you need yours sorting out, talk to Thatch, who did this one – he did such a great job. Have a rummage around to behold the goodness and read all of the words. There’s a bit of me that feels like announc...
Followed Norman Walsh (so.nwalsh.com)

Norman Walsh headshot Structured markup geek. Programmer. Photographer. Author. XML. DocBook. XProc. XSLT. XQuery.
I am currently an employee of MarkLogic Corporation where I’m an engineer. I work out of my home in Austin, TX. Previously, I was employed by Sun Microsystems, Arbortext, and O’Reilly Media (then O’Reilly & Associates).

Reply to The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.”

Replied to The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.” by Todd Allen (The Beat)
The creative community is still waiting on Patreon to officially address the new policy of passing transaction fees on to the patrons (backers), but it appears that co-founder and figurehead Jack Conte has been calling some of creators to discuss the situation with them. Jeph Jacques, the cartoonist behind Questionable Content (over 5,300 patrons as of this typing. though the number of patrons as been… fluid… for many Patreon creators in the last few days) tweeted about his conversation with Conte
Perhaps coincidentally, there was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin yesterday (12/09/17) entitled Payments, Pledges, and Donations, Oh My!. The link includes the video of the session via YouTube as well as notes.

The premise is that many creators already have their own websites/platforms for promoting or featuring their work. In some sense Patreon is only bringing a payment gateway (and apparently not a great one) as their sole feature. The conversation within the session was geared toward attempting to make it easier and simpler for creators to not only host their own work, but to accept payments and recurring payments directly. Some of the discussion was geared at making the payments systems seamless so that one could move them from one platform to another without losing hard won supporters and needing to start over again.

While we’re still in the very early days for improving the technology for this, hopefully some of the demos coming out of the camp later today will move the ball forward. Those should be posted on the IndieWeb YouTube channel later today as well.

For those looking for alternates (and particularly when they’ve already got their own websites), I suspect it’ll definitely be worth a look. Alternate platforms and methods were certainly discussed. The means of control for creators to inexpensively keep all of their workflow in-house is very near.