What is behind the reversal?
I’m just hoping our institutions aren’t so heavily weakened that there’s no turning back for us.
Links
👓 Node.JS comes to Reclaim Hosting | Tim Owens
I'm very excited to announce that starting today it is now possible to build and run Node.JS applications on Reclaim Hosting. Similar to the Python and Ruby features that make running Django and Jekyll possible, Node.JS is a third party plugin integrated into the Software area of cPanel.
🔖 Complexity: An interdisciplinary forum for complexity research | PLOS
Most of today’s global challenges, from online misinformation spreading to Ebola outbreaks, involve such a vast number of interacting players that reductionism delivers little insight. Systems are often non-linear, exhibiting complexity in temporal and spatial domains over large scales, which is a challenge to predictability and comprehension. Strategies must be found to look at the problem as a whole, in all its complexity. Representing the associated data as a complex network, in which nodes and connections between them form complicated patterns, is one such strategy. Network science provides novel tools for analyzing, visualizing and modeling this data thanks to the cross-fertilization of fields as diverse as statistical physics, algebraic topology and machine learning, among the others.
This Channel brings together all aspects of complexity research and includes interdisciplinary topics from network theory to applications in neuroscience and the social sciences.
hat tip:
Announcing the launch of the @PLOS #Complexity Channel https://t.co/RRvsk3O4ok , a home for complexity research and interdisciplinary topics from network theory to applications in neuroscience and the social sciences, feat content from @PLOSONE @PLOSCompBiol @arxiv and more pic.twitter.com/sTRTbRCRu0
— PLOS Channels (@PLOSChannels) June 15, 2018
👓 Francis Su’s Favorite Theorem | Scientific American Blog Network | Roots of Unity
The Harvey Mudd College mathematician tells us why he loves playing with Brouwer's fixed-point theorem
I need to remember to subscribe to this podcast…
🔖 WonderCMS – one of the smallest flat file CMS
👓 Trump Appointee Compiles Loyalty List of U.S. Employees at U.N., State | Foreign Policy
Mari Stull’s arrival at the State Department’s International Organization Bureau is triggering an exodus of top career staffers.
It’s just this type of insidious institution destruction that is heavily eroding our government and our society. Regardless of which administration takes over next, it just means a whole lot more work and effort to rebuild.
👓 Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy | The Atlantic
Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.
Just because you’ve got the desire to be a social media influencer doesn’t mean you don’t need to treat it like a serious business.
Social platforms have such huge scale now, I’m surprised they don’t crack down on bots and fake accounts so that it’s more transparent what kind of true value accounts actually bring to the table. They could even leave them in the system so they can show to investors that they’re getting the traffic and “engagement”, but they’re throwing away a lot of actual value by not disclosing actual accounts and real engagement by real people (aka potential customers). Bots are second class citizens because other than the veneer of value, they’re really not adding much to the conversation other than a weak form of tummeling.
This makes me wonder if anyone in the social networking space is doing research on bots as tummelers?
👓 How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook | The Verge
Pocket CEO Nate Weiner on how local data processing is the future of personalized recommendations.
Nice to see people and companies iterating on new feed reader functionality–particularly ethical ones.
👓 The Artwork Was Rejected. Then Banksy Put His Name to It. | The New York Times
The Royal Academy in London turned down a work by “Bryan S. Gaakman” for an exhibition, then asked Banksy — who had made it — if he had a submission.
This reminds me a bit of episode one of Revisionist History, though the way it is presented is much more cutsey with a soupcon of aw-shucks. They really should do more blind screening of artwork the way that orchestras in the US are typically doing blind auditions these days.
🔖 Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?
Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.
And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.
Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.
The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.
👓 Dear Marketing by Email “Experts” I’m Serious About Messing With You | CogDogBlog
Hi, Hello. I was wondering whether you’d be interested in selling advertising space on Does the phrase “No, not even after hell freezes over” mean anything to you? The advertiseme…
This is pretty hilarious. I definitely need something like this for my site.
👓 Rebooting XML-RPC | Dave Winer
It's a reboot of XML-RPC and the site that documents it.
The XML-RPC protocol was designed in 1998, by four people. Don Box, Mohsen Agsen, Bob Atkinson and myself. The first three guys worked at Microsoft. I was at UserLand. It became popular because it was so simple, and early. There were implementations in every major language and environment. For example, it was built into Python and the Macintosh OS. The main blogging APIs were done in XML-RPC. There is an O'Reilly book on XML-RPC.
It's been 20 years! We can do another new version in 2038, Murphy-willing, if we're still here, etc. This may eventually become the XML-RPC home page. It's not as beautiful as the original, but the links will be current.
👓 Our big loop | Scripting News
I want people to be able to put up their own web servers. Not companies. Not people with Computer Science degrees. People. Anyone. Everyone. #
I think every journalist should learn how to set up and run a web server. I think any student, no matter how young, should learn, if they want to. The doors to publishing should be open to everyone. It's never been easier, and it could be getting easier all the time. That should be one of the overarching goals of our profession, to make what we do easier and easier, all the time. To make what we did ten years ago something anyone can do. It's the nature of software, that once we know what we can do that we make it easy for everyone to do it.
I think every journalist should learn how to set up and run a web server.
I agree with this certainly…
🔖 Pressbooks | Create Books. Print & Ebooks.
Pressbooks makes it easy to create professionally designed books & ebooks. Discover how our user friendly epublishing software can help you publish today!
This looks like an interesting platform. Saw it as a subdomain on someone’s personal website, so perhaps it’s self-hostable?
👓 Telling the Story of My Domain | Aaron Davis
Alan Levine recently put out a request for stories about domains as a part of the Ontario Extend project What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name? In part, my domain name comes from my interest in the notion of marginalia, the stuff that we write, ...
I saw Alan’s call for submissions the other day and need to get around to posting my own.