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Replied to a post by Davey Moloney (daveymoloney.com)

Interestingly, this article (https://www.edutopia.org/article/science-drawing-and-memory) highlights recent studies where “researchers found drawing information to be a powerful way to boost memory, increasing recall by nearly double” #​OpenBlog19

Syndicated to: Twitter

I’m glad that there’s some more modern research around this general idea. Of course the reliance of humans on the power of visual memory goes back to ancient Greece with the method of loci and from the Renaissance (or earlier) with the mnemonic major system.

I know both systems intimately well since the age of about 11, though I haven’t written much about them on my site. (I should fix this, though there are some related tangents within my memory category.) I did notice a large overlap with the major system and Gregg shorthand a while back, which leads me to believe that they’ve got an even richer back history than most may presume.

I’ve always been confounded that these systems aren’t better known in modern culture, though some sources have indicated that religious influences tamped down their proliferation in the 1500’s.

 

Read If I had a mannequin foot... by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
I almost xeroxed my socks yesterday, but then I thought that was going too far putting my foot on the copier. Perhaps I need a mannequin foot. If i had a mannequin foot… I would walk around with three feet. I’d make up new games of soccer where I can play sitting on the ground. …
That’s what I miss about working in a larger office: carefully watching out for colleagues when I’m trying to Xerox my foot. 😉
Read IndieAuth: One Year Later by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
It's already been a year since IndieAuth was published as a W3C Note! A lot has happened in that time! There's been several new plugins and services launch support for IndieAuth, and it's even made appearances at several events around the world! Micro.blog added native support for IndieAuth, so your...

📺 "House of Cards" Chapter 54 | Netflix

Watched "House of Cards" Chapter 54 from Netflix
Directed by Daniel Minahan. With Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Paul Sparks. Frank and his team work to leverage support in key states by any means necessary. Claire learns some upsetting news about one of Frank's friends.

Reply to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Nautilus

Replied to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic by Amanda GefterAmanda Gefter (Nautilus)
McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence.
Quick note of a factual and temporal error: the article indicates:

After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.

In fact, it was Claude E. Shannon, one of Wiener’s colleagues, who wrote the influential A Mathematical Theory of Communication published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, almost 5 years after the 1943 part of the timeline the article is indicating. Not only did Wiener not write the paper, but it wouldn’t have existed yet to have been a factor in Pitts deciding to choose a school or adviser at the time. While Wiener may have been a tremendous polymath, I suspect that his mathematical area of expertise during those years would have been closer to analysis and not probability theory.

To put Pitts & McCulloch’s work into additional context, Claude Shannon’s stunning MIT master’s thesis A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits in 1940 applied Boolean algebra to electronic circuits for the first time and as a result largely allowed the digital age to blossom. It would be nice to know if Pitts & McCulloch were aware of it when they published their work three years later.

Read Opinion | How Professors Help Rip Off Students by Tim Wu (New York Times)
Textbooks are too expensive.
OER is a nice way to go, but I’ve also mentioned before how to restructure the textbook business so the economic balance is righted.

tl;dr: Professors aren’t doing the learning, so at most they should recommend one or more textbooks, but never require them. The students should choose their own textbooks or otherwise fend for themselves (many are already doing this anyway, so why disadvantage them further with the economic burdens) and direct market forces will very quickly fix the problem of run-away book prices.

Professors should not be middle-people in the purchase decisions of textbooks.

🎧 The Daily: Part 3: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (the Mueller Report) | New York Times

Listened to The Daily: Part 3: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (the Mueller Report) from New York Times

A conversation with Representative Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, about how Congress is preparing for the results of the special counsel investigation.

It was kind of refreshing to hear the general calmness, demeanor, and complete logic coming from Nadler on this topic. I wish the Republicans could talk about issues in such a straightforward manner without bending over backwards to weaponize their speech and pushing rhetoric over general principles.

Republicans should be acting in a manner as if they actually believed in the Golden Rule as they’re soon going to be wishing they had done the same while they were in power.

Inquire in the Margine

If the Page satisfie not, inquire in the Margine:

John Selden (1584-1654), English jurist and a scholar
in Illustrations (1612), a commentary on Poly-Olbion, a poem by Michael Drayton
in the margin next to ‘A table to the chiefest passages, in the Illustrations, which, worthiest of observation, are not directed unto by the course of the volume.’

 

Photo courtesy of Sjoerd Levelt
Photo courtesy of Sjoerd Levelt

 

🔖 Networks by Mark Newman

Bookmarked Networks by Mark Newman (Oxford University Press; 2 edition)

The study of networks, including computer networks, social networks, and biological networks, has attracted enormous interest in the last few years. The rise of the Internet and the wide availability of inexpensive computers have made it possible to gather and analyze network data on an unprecedented scale, and the development of new theoretical tools has allowed us to extract knowledge from networks of many different kinds. The study of networks is broadly interdisciplinary and central developments have occurred in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer and information sciences, biology, and the social sciences. This book brings together the most important breakthroughs in each of these fields and presents them in a coherent fashion, highlighting the strong interconnections between work in different areas.

Topics covered include the measurement of networks; methods for analyzing network data, including methods developed in physics, statistics, and sociology; fundamentals of graph theory; computer algorithms; mathematical models of networks, including random graph models and generative models; and theories of dynamical processes taking place on networks.

book cover of Networks by Mark Newman

Tweets from RENDER(); Tools For Thinking Conference

Chris Aldrich:

I’ve got an online note collection similar to @JerryMichalski, but mine is more textual and less visual than his: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich (9:19AM)
If there are folks that want to do collaborative note taking today, here’s a shared etherpad you can use for either raw text or generic wiki markdown if you like: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/ToolsForThinking (09:26AM)
How can companies like @readwise leverage some sort of standardization of text, images, data in the space to more easily provide their services to more platforms? (09:49AM)

(((Howard Rheingold))):

Recommends the book The Extended Mind by @AnnieMurphyPaul (11:54AM)

Chris Aldrich:

Linus Lee’s demo looks a bit like Robin Sloan’s AI Writing experiments https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/ (12:50PM)

John Borthwick:

“There’s also drinks (alcohol) over there, so another good tool for thinking!” (02:55PM)

How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages | The New York Times

Read How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages (nytimes.com)
The U.S.C./Los Angeles Times poll has consistently been an outlier, showing Donald Trump in the lead or near the lead.

Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters. He can improve Mr. Trump’s margin by 1 point in the survey, even though he is one of around 3,000 panelists.

He is also the reason Mrs. Clinton took the lead in the U.S.C./LAT poll for the first time in a month on Wednesday. The poll includes only the last seven days of respondents, and he hasn’t taken the poll since Oct. 4. Mrs. Clinton surged once he was out of the sample for the first time in several weeks.

Continue reading How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages | The New York Times

👓 Trump’s Power to Fire Federal Workers Curtailed by Judge | New York Times

Read Trump’s Power to Fire Federal Workers Curtailed by Judge (nytimes.com)
The ruling, which the administration will almost certainly appeal, is a blow to Republican efforts to rein in public-sector labor unions.