Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

🎧 <A> | Adactio

Listened to by

Jeremy Keith from adactio.com

The opening keynote from the inaugural HTML Special held before CSS Day 2016 in Amsterdam.

Watch the video.

Download the audio or Huffduff it.

Download the slides.

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else.

— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

I wasn’t able to attend the original presentation, but I think it’s even more valuable to listen to it all alone rather than in what was assuredly a much larger crowd. There is a wonderful presence in this brief history of the internet, made all the more intriguing by Jeremy’s performance as if it were poetry about technology. I find that he’s even managed to give it an interesting structured format, which, in many senses, mirrors the web itself.

I hope that if you’re starting your adventure on the web, that you manage to find this as one of the first links that starts you off on your journey. It’s a great place to start.

👓 Privacy sentences to ponder | Marginal Revolution

Read Privacy sentences to ponder by Tyler Cowen (Marginal REVOLUTION)

The increasing difficulty in managing one’s online personal data leads to individuals feeling a loss of control. Additionally, repeated consumer data breaches have given people a sense of futility, ultimately making them weary of having to think about online privacy. This phenomenon is called “privacy fatigue.” Although privacy fatigue is prevalent and has been discussed by scholars, there is little empirical research on the phenomenon. A new study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior aimed not only to conceptualize privacy fatigue but also to examine its role in online privacy behavior. Based on literature on burnout, we developed measurement items for privacy fatigue, which has two key dimensions —emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Data analyzed from a survey of 324 Internet users showed that privacy fatigue has a stronger impact on privacy behavior than privacy concerns do, although the latter is widely regarded as the dominant factor in explaining online privacy behavior.
Emphasis added by me. That is by Hanbyl Choi, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung, via Michelle Dawson.

Better control of online privacy is certainly something that the IndieWeb can help to remedy.

The past weeks have indicated that we really do need some regulations. It’s not just Facebook, but major, unpunished leaks from data brokers like Experian (which seemingly actually profited from it’s data leak) or even those of companies like Target. Many have been analogizing data as the “new oil”, but people shouldn’t be treated like dying sea birds trapped in oil slicks.

I’m bookmarking this journal article to read: The role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. ¹

References

Choi H, Park J, Jung Y. The role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. Comput Human Behav. 2018;81:42-51. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.12.001

👓 Fox’s Hannity, named as a client of Michael Cohen, spent days attacking FBI raid | Politico

Read Fox’s Hannity, named as a client of Michael Cohen, spent days attacking FBI raid (POLITICO)

The host cited the seizure of Michael Cohen’s documents to blast Mueller’s Russia investigation.

👓 Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom | Times Open (Medium)

Read Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom by Sophia Ciocca (Times Open | Medium)

An inside look at the inner workings of a technology you may take for granted

A topic which is tremendously overlooked in the CMS world, but which can provide a lot of power.

h/t Jorge Spinoza

👓 Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner | Bloomberg

Read Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner by Agnieszka de Sousa and Hayley Warren (Bloomberg.com)

The future of food looks like lots of lobsters, Polish chardonnay and California coffee.

This is a difficult story to tell, though the timelapse imagery here is relatively useful. If one had some extra money lying around, it certainly indicates which crops one could be shorting in the markets over the next few decades.

I can imagine Jeremy Cherfas doing something interesting and more personalizing with this type of story via his fantastic interviews on Eat This Podcast.

h/t Jorge Spinoza

👓 Mathematicians Explore Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds | Quanta Magazine

Read Mathematicians Explore Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds by Kevin Hartnett (Quanta Magazine)

Decades after physicists happened upon a stunning mathematical coincidence, researchers are getting close to understanding the link between two seemingly unrelated geometric universes.

An interesting story in that physicists found the connection first and mathematicians are tying the two areas together after the fact. More often it’s the case that mathematicians come up with the theory and then physicists are applying it to something. I’m not sure I like some of the naming conventions laid out, but it’ll be another decade or two after it’s all settled before things have more logical sounding names. I’m a bit curious if any category theorists are playing around in either of these areas.

After having spent the last couple of months working through some of the “rigidity” (not the best descriptor in the article as it shows some inherent bias in my opinion) of algebraic geometry, now I’m feeling like symplectic geometry could be fun.

🎧 A visit to Hummustown | Eat This Podcast

Listened to A visit to Hummustown: Doing good by eating well by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Refugees selling the food of their homeland to get a start in a new life is, by now, a cliché. Khaled (in the photo) joined their ranks a year ago. But cliché or not, selling food is an important way to give people work to do, wages, and hope. If it’s happening on your doorstep, which it is, and the food is good, which it is, what’s a hungry podcaster to do? Go there, obviously, and report back. Which is why, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself, microphone in hand, waiting patiently in line for a falafel wrap.

Truth be told, there aren’t that many Syrian refugees in Italy. The most recent official statistics put the total at around 5000 with a little over 600 in Rome. Hummustown is helping a few of them.

Notes

The Hummustown website tells more of the story and has a link to the GoFundMe campaign.

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Somewhat different than the usual episode here, but in the best of ways. Still a wonderful look at food, culture, and humanity wrapped up in a fantastic story.