Today, 122 Hopkins faculty, post-docs, and grad students make a call to promote welcoming environments for women at machine learning conferences. In recognition of egregious behavior at recent conf…
As many of you know, there has been an ongoing discussion concerning the name of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. The current acronym NIPS has unintended connotations that some members of the community find offensive.
Following several well-publicized incidents of insensitivity at past conferences, and our acknowledgement of other less-publicized incidents, we conducted community polls requesting alternative names, rating the existing and alternative names, and soliciting additional comments.
After extensive discussions, the NIPS Board has decided not to change the name of the conference for now. The poll itself did not yield a clear consensus on a name change or a well-regarded alternative name.
I worked with Civix, a Canadian non-profit, to do a series of videos showing students basic web techniques for source verification and contextualization. I had boiled it down to four scripts runnin…
On the idea of the “-site:xyz.com” trick, perhaps one could create a browser extension or a bookmarklet that would use javascript to take the URL in the browser bar and massage it to return the requisite string and then execute the appropriate search so that with a simple click of a button, anyone can “remember” how to do it?
Similarly with searching for the root URLs of particular outlets by clipping off the longer paths of URLs one could use a browser bookmarklet to accomplish this with a simple click and save the seconds involved with highlighting and pasting? The more dead simple and quicker it can be, the better off we are. I’ve documented a browser bookmarklet on my site that trims news article URLs down to the base URL: https://boffosocko.com/2017/03/27/to-amp-or-not-to-amp-that-is-the-question/
As an example of this type of functionality, albiet probably with a lot more programming and manual work, Brill’s company NewsGuard has developed a Chrome browser extension that is meant to provide visual indicators on pages and in search for levels of fact checking: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newsguard/hcgajcpgaalgpeholhdooeddllhedegi?hl=en
Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)One of the nice things about running a blog-fueled grassroots semi-funded initiative is the agility. The Digipo project has moved far and fast in the past year. But one of the bad things is all the…
Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)You know what I don’t see in my classes — in a Republican district, where a nontrivial number of students don’t believe in climate change? Any reaction of the sort that you “can’t trust the site because declining sea ice and climate change is a myth.” Not one. It’s not just a Republican thing. We find the same thing with prompts for liberal hot-button issues on GMOs. Students — many of whom are very committed to “natural” products and lifestyles — make accurate assessments of the lack of credibility of sites supporting their opinions. They believe this stuff, maybe, but admit the given site is not a good source.
I’ll be bookmarking some additional sources today/tomorrow from the paper as well as from Mike’s work and various links.
Its name suggests a slower-moving past, when much still depended on the morning thump of fresh-printed broadsheets landing on doorsteps. Its concept presaged a lightning-quick future, when much of what we read is attitude-laced summary of someone else’s work. It was Slate’s first smash-hit feature and, for better or worse, its most influential. “Today’s Papers,” says Michael Kinsley, Slate’s founding editor, “deserves some tiny bit of credit for the ruination of journalism.”
That enterprising writer could read the papers the moment they went online in the wee hours, summarize their lead stories and other juicy pieces, and post this briefing on Slate before the paperboys could toss physical copies onto driveways in Middle America’s cul-de-sacs. ❧
For me, it wasn’t so much the summary, but who was it that had the best coverage. It was the comparison of the coverage. I read most of the particular stories anyway.
October 22, 2018 at 09:28PM
The Today’s Papers job was first offered to Matt Drudge, ❧
October 22, 2018 at 09:29PM
Anyone can open up Twitter and instantly know what the world is gabbing about from minute to minute, all day long, across thousands of electronic sources that are instantly available all over the globe. ❧
But we don’t get the journalistic criticism of the coverage, who’s doing it better, who’s more thorough, etc. We’re still missing that.
October 22, 2018 at 09:32PM
Dan Cohen (Dan Cohen)Over the last year, I was fortunate to help guide a study of the news consumption habits of college students, and coordinate Northeastern University Library’s services for the study, including great work by our data visualization specialist Steven Braun and necessary infrastructure from our digital team, including Sarah Sweeney and Hillary Corbett. “How Students Engage with News,” out today as both a long article and accompanying datasets and media, provides a full snapshot of how college students navigate our complex and high-velocity media environment.
Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past. ❧
This also makes me think back to other entertainments of the historical poor including the use/purpose of stained glass windows in church supposedly as a means of entertaining the illiterate Latin vulgate masses.
October 22, 2018 at 08:07PM
nearly 6,000 students from a wide variety of institutions ❧
Institutions = colleges/universities? Or are we also considering less educated youth as well?
October 22, 2018 at 08:08PM
A more active stance by librarians, journalists, educators, and others who convey truth-seeking habits is essential. ❧
In some sense these people can also be viewed as aggregators and curators of sorts. How can their work be aggregated and be used to compete with the poor algorithms of social media?
October 22, 2018 at 08:11PM
Quit sharing stories without even reading them. Quit tweeting your every outrage. Quit clicking on garbage.
Michael Nielsen (facebook.com)T. E. Lawrence, the English soldier, diplomat and writer, possessed what one of his biographers called a capacity for enablement: he enabled others to make use of abilities they had always possessed but, until their acquaintance with him, had failed to realize. People would come into contact with Lawrence, sometimes for just a few minutes, and their lives would change, often dramatically, as they activated talents they did not know they had.
Most of us have had similar experiences. A wise friend or acquaintance will look deeply into us, and see some latent aspiration, perhaps more clearly than we do ourselves. And they will see that we are capable of taking action to achieve that aspiration, and hold up a mirror showing us that capability in crystalline form. The usual self-doubts are silenced, and we realize with conviction: “yes, I can do this”.
This is an instance of volitional philanthropy: helping expand the range of ways people can act on the world.
I am fascinated by institutions which scale up this act of volitional philanthropy.
Y Combinator is known as a startup incubator. When friends began participating in early batches, I noticed they often came back changed. Even if their company failed, they were more themselves, more confident, more capable of acting on the world. This was a gift of the program to participants [1]. And so I think of Y Combinator as volitional philanthropists.
For a year I worked as a Research Fellow at the Recurse Center. It's a three-month long “writer's retreat for programmers”. It's unstructured: participants are not told what to do. Rather, they must pick projects for themselves, and structure their own path. This is challenging. But the floundering around and difficulty in picking a path is essential for growing one's sense of choice, and of responsibility for choice. And so creating that space is, again, a form of volitional philanthropy.
There are institutions which think they're in the volitional philanthropy game, but which are not. Many educators believe they are. In non-compulsory education that's often true. But compulsory education is built around fundamental denials of volition: the student is denied choice about where they are, what they are doing, and who they are doing it with. With these choices denied, compulsory education shrinks and constrains a student's sense of volition, no matter how progressive it may appear in other ways.
There is something paradoxical in the notion of helping someone develop their volition. By its nature, volition is not something which can be given; it must be taken. Nor do I think “rah-rah” encouragement helps much, since it does nothing to permanently expand the recipient's sense of self. Rather, I suspect the key lies in a kind of listening-for-enablement, as a way of helping people discover what they perhaps do not already know is in themselves. And then explaining honestly and realistically (and with an understanding that one may be in error) what it is one sees. It is interesting to ask both how to develop that ability in ourselves, and in institutions which can scale it up.
[1] It is a median effect. I know people who start companies who become first consumed and then eventually diminished by the role. But most people I've known have been enlarged.
Note, by the way, that I work at Y Combinator Research, which perhaps colours my impression. On the other hand, I've used YC as an example of volitional philanthropy since (I think) 2010, years before I started working for YCR.
Setting out to prove that aging isn't pretty...but it's funny! NBC weatherman and stand-up comedian Fritz Coleman will perform his show “Fritz Coleman Speaks to a Generation” at the Ice House Comedy Club on Sunday, June 22 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $15 and are available at www.icehousecomedy.com or through the Ice House box office at (626) 577-1894. This is a Special Event show.
Tired of hearing people ask which area of maths is your favourite? Get one of these tattooed on your forehead and you’ll never be asked again…
One Protestant group wants the federal government to sponsor discrimination.
We’re deeply saddened to report that our Founder, Todd H. Bol, passed away Thursday, October 18. Todd spent much of the last decade working towards his vision of a world where neighbors know each other by name, and everyone has access to books. He was heartene...
You’ll be missed terribly, but your impact on the world was supremely profound.
The lawyers challenging the university are testing out their arguments to see which ones stick ahead of a potential appeal to the Supreme Court.
One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that what makes it work — competition — is also what capitalists want to get rid of the most. That’s true not only of competition between companies, but also between them and their workers. After all, the more of a threat its rivals are, and the more options its employees have, the less profitable a business will tend to be. Which, as the Financial Times reports, probably goes a long way toward explaining why a $3.4 billion behemoth like Cushman & Wakefield would bother to sue one of its former janitors, accusing her of breaking her noncompete agreement by taking a job in the same building she had been cleaning for the global real estate company but doing it for a different firm.