Born and raised near Chicago, Dr Holly Krieger completed the undergraduate mathematics honors program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She went on to a master's degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, with initial research interests during graduate school were primarily in arithmetic and Diophantine geometry. Under the guidance of Laura DeMarco and Ramin Takloo-Bighash, her thesis work focused on the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics, which studies the relationship between dynamics of one complex variable and the arithmetic geometry of abelian varieties.
Links
👓 ‘ER’ Actress Vanessa Marquez Shot, Killed By L.A. Authorities | Hollywood Reporter
Police responded to her residence on a welfare check before the shooting took place.
👓 University issues statement on textbook pricing | Louisiana.edu
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette issued the following statement regarding the pricing of textbook and software materials needed for Accounting 201 and 202. It can be attributed to Dr. Jaimie Hebert, the University’s provost. “We want to make it very clear to our students and the public that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette makes every effort to ensure that the materials required for courses are affordable. “We welcome the opportunity to clarify some confusion that resulted from the pricing of materials for Accounting 201 and 202.
👓 Lego built a drivable Bugatti Chiron with over 1 million pieces | The Verge
5.3 horsepower and a "theoretical" top speed of 18 miles per hour
👓 Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking | Future Releases | Mozilla
Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.
👓 Electracy | Wikipedia
Electracy is a theory by Gregory Ulmer that describes the kind of skills and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds. According to Ulmer, electracy "is to digital media what literacy is to print." It encompasses the broader cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition from a culture of print literacy to a culture saturated with electronic media. "Electracy" is the term he gives to what is resulting from this major transition that our society is undergoing. The term is a portmanteau word, combining "electrical" with "literacy", to allude to one of the fundamental terms used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to name the relational spacing that enables and delimits any signification in any medium.
Following John Eckman
John Eckman blogs here about Open Source, the Next Generation Internet, the Assembled Web, and Web Application Strategy, Design, and Development. He also works at Optaros.
I’m the CEO of 10up, a digital agency focused on designing and building compelling, content-centric experiences on open source platforms, especially WordPress.
Why is this blog called Open Parenthesis?
It’s meant to bring together two key concepts that have dominated my professional career – writing and coding:
1. Parentheses in writing are often used to insert explanatory text not directly related to the main point (see the wikipedia entry). (I did a PhD in literature & culture, and spent years teaching in a university English environment).
2. Parentheses in software development are used for a variety of reasons in different languages, but often they’re used to pass parameters to functions (or to indicate the parameters a function receives). (I’ve spent the last decade working in software development, specifically on the web).
The site’s called “Open Parenthesis” (the singular of parentheses) because the idea is that the conversation is open ended.
It starts an explanatory insertion (like this one), but it can’t yet be closed.
It resembles a function taking parameters, but we can’t yet close the parentheses because we don’t know yet what the possibilities are.
Finally, there’s also the notion of “Open” because I’m focused on open source software, as well as open-ness and transparency of conversation in general.
👓 Notes on Imagined Communities and the Open Web | Open Parenthesis
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp for Publishers in Chicago. I tried to link together Benedict Anderson's take on nationalism from Imagined Communities to a number of concepts about what might make an "Open Web."
👓 Distributor publicly released with Gutenberg support and Enterprise service offering | 10up
Jake Goldman (10up)We are proud to announce that Distributor has exited beta and is now openly available. Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across your websites—whether in a single multisite network or across the web with the REST API. With Distributor, content creators can "push" or "pull" content [...]
👓 University’s $999 online textbook creates confusion and outrage | Inside Higher Ed
An online textbook priced at almost $1,000 has infuriated students trying to navigate an already confusing textbook marketplace, but Louisiana-Lafayette officials insist they had "good intentions."
This reporting doesn’t drill in far enough. Surely there are a few dozen textbooks that cover all of the same material that are roughly equivalent. What are those textbook prices? What about OER textbooks and their relative prices? Why is the department or even the professors doing anything but recommending textbooks? Why aren’t the students given the freedom to choose their own textbooks?
👓 National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All. | New York Times
Donald Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, devised a plan to buy all the stories on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected, according to Mr. Trump’s associates.
👓 Rick Scott’s financial trail leads to tax haven in Caymans | Miami Herald
Gov. Rick Scott’s 125-page U.S. Senate financial disclosure statement reveals he and his wife, Ann Scott, hold investments in two dozen hedge funds registered in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven.
👓 Faculty champions of accessibility shed doubts about investing time, money | Inside Higher Ed
Faculty members often worry that making digital courses accessible to all students will be too time-consuming or expensive -- but some of their colleagues want to convince them otherwise.
👓 It’s time to reconsider low-dairy diets, new study suggests | NBC
Cheese and yogurt were found to protect against death from any cause, and also against death from cerebrovascular causes, like stroke.
Reply to Rethinking My Social Media Use | Chris Wiegman
Chris Wiegman (Chris Wiegman)Most of you who know me know that I’ve struggled for a while now with how social media currently fits into my life and how I would prefer it to fit into my life. Ten years ago it was nothing for me to sign up for every service and post to them like there was no tomorrow. Heck, during my days at SIU doing so was actually part of my job as I managed all the social media for the Aviation departments. It was fun, I guess. Today I’m not so sure if that was the right approach, or, for that matter, what the “right” approach even means. Over the last few months I’ve scrubbed or deleted most of my online accounts and worked to severely limit the time I’ve spent on the rest (often with even more limited success). I’ve done this not because I want to but, in many ways, because I feel like I have to for a number of reasons.
Chris, many of us have been having the same thoughts for quite a while. Since you’re rethinking things, and you’ve already got your own website/blog, why not just switch over to that and let the internet be your social network? Many of us in the IndieWeb movement have been working on helping others do just that for several years now.
We’ve been working on W3C specs like Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub to recreate some of the infrastructure offered by social media sites, but that allows website owners more control and ownership over their content–something I suspect you’re behind in using WordPress as your CMS of choice. In the very near future we’ll even have first class feed readers either on our own sites or that allow us to interact with others’ sites using our own.
If you still need to interact with sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et al. You can still do that if you like by posting to your own site and syndicating out while still allowing comments and interactions from many of these sites back to your own using backfeed via the Webmention protocol with tools like Brid.gy. Slowly over the past several years more and more CMSes are adding these bits of functionality to let peoples’ personal sites become first class social media sites that they can own and control.
I suspect that given your skills and how you’re already using your site, you could be supporting a lot of these technologies with a few simple plugins and without a lot of additional work to give you most of what you’re looking for. A group of us are happy to help if you’ve got questions about implementation.