Hong Kong anti-litter campaign swipes DNA from trash, uses it to create mugshots of suspected litterers – Boing Boing “The agency tapped Parabon NanoLabs to do DNA testing on bits of trash found on the street, such as coffee cups and cigarette butts. The company then used Snapshot DNA phenotyping to produce a sketch of each litterer’s face based on the DNA sample found on the trash.” tags: weekly dna litter ad science Student Course Evaluations Get An ‘F’ : NPR Ed : NPR Not in agreement with the ‘taskmaster’ element but I have similar concerns about teaching evaluations. “Michele Pellizzari, an economics professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has a more serious claim: that course evaluations may in fact measure, and thus motivate, the opposite of good teaching.” “Show me your stuff,” Stark says. “Syllabi, handouts, exams, video recordings of class, samples of students’ work. Let me know how your students do when they graduate. That seems like a much more holistic appraisal than simply asking students what they think.” tags: student evaluations teaching weekly How to pronounce hexadecimal | Bzarg The beautiful madness that is the Internet. h/t Christopher If you know me at all, you will know that I love this very much. http://t.co/wiUax42UPF tags: #fav weekly internet culture hexadecimal language The Las Vegas Strip […]

My Twitter Goodbye Email — Medium “Number of times bringing down the site: 2” tags: twitter beta experiment fail failure weekly The Official Crow Box Kit tags: crow box learning animals training weekly On Surveys — Medium “It is too easy to run a survey. That is why surveys are so dangerous. They are so easy to create and so easy to distribute, and the results are so easy to tally. And our poor human brains are such that information that is easier for us to process and comprehend feels more true. This is our cognitive bias. This ease makes survey results feel true and valid, no matter how false and misleading. And that ease is hard to argue with. “ tags: research surveys brain weekly On meta-design and algorithmic design systems ” Design is how it works and sketching in code is the only natural way to prototype a dynamic system. Building even the simplest of data visualizations means hours of work in languages like R, Julia or Python. When your content is data, poking around in Photoshop simply makes no sense. In some way, it’s the direct opposite of design: prettifying without context. One important aspect of modern design products is their increasing demand for temporal logic, where a linear narrative is replaced by a set of complex […]

Reflections on the MP3 Format: Interview with Jonathan Sterne : Computational Culture ” First, thank you for asking all these great and difficult questions. And to readers, thanks for plowing through what’s about to be a lot of prose. Brevity in print is not one of my strong points.” tags: weekly mp3 questions Fidelity Investments Tries Virtual Reality | MIT Technology Review “Fidelity is not claiming to have solved any actual problems with the app. “ tags: weekly virtual virtualreality oculustrift oculus 3d tweet Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the 7 Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life | Open Culture ” On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India. Politics without principles. Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice.” tags: weekly sins gandhi Electrical brain stimulation beats caffeine – and the effect lasts longer | Science | The Guardian “Experiments on 18- to 42-year old men and women on active duty found that half an hour of electrical brain stimulation improved their performance twice as much as caffeine, and the effect lasted three times as long. “ tags: brain stimulation caffeine weekly What Became of India’s Corpse-Eating Turtles? | Atlas Obscura “Back […]