New Study Finds Citizen Scientists Can Be Very Accurate | Mental Floss A new analysis of the work of these citizen scientists shows that trusting untrained strangers with scientific data isn’t a terrible idea. As the study in Conservation Biology notes, overall, volunteers classified 98 percent of the images accurately, based on a comparison with […]
Category: Weekly
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-05-15
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist — Medium This is far more than “technology” . . . The “most empowering” menu is different than the menu that has the most choices. But when we blindly surrender to the menus we’re given, it’s easy to lose track of the […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-05-08
Encouraging the Impulse to Annotate – Todd’s Brain Glossing with social media involves the creation of conversational “layers” which adhere to the original text and produce a richer cultural artifact so that the original text is not obscured, but enhanced. Gloss suggests the multiple veneers that adolescents create to make texts their own. Glossing also denotes the […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-05-01
BBC – Future – Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard The numbers of the dead on Facebook are growing fast. By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died. That number has only gone up since. Some estimates claim more than 8,000 users die […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-04-24
The Lost Wanderers — Anthropology and Algorithms — Medium Neurath condemns the third wanderer for his “pseudo-rationalist” pretensions: in the interest of appearing rational, he has forced a conclusion out of insufficient evidence “on the basis of inadequate premises of whose deficiencies he is unaware.” Even worse, because he thinks he has decided rationally, he […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-04-17
The powerful hacker culture ~ Stephen Downes If you want progress, Lemire argues, “you need people who thrive when they solve hard practical problems.” Hackers thrive by getting something done. “And once it is done, academics will take the credit.” – h/t Downes Harvard. I Mean, Really. | HESA The largest ever university capital campaign […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-04-10
How minimalism brought me freedom and joy / Boing Boing I have 238,795 unread emails in my inbox. Emails are a suggestion but not an obligation. Body-hackers: the people who turn themselves into cyborgs | Art and design | The Guardian Ophthalmologists strongly advise against trying this at home: they say a single application of […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-04-03
9 Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should “Unsettle” Us — Modern Learning — Medium We know that most of our students will forget most of the content that they “learn” in school. As Matthew Lieberman from UCLA notes, “For more than 75 years, studies have consistently found that only a small fraction of what is […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-03-27
MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS* — MIT MEDIA LAB — Medium Kind of insane that there was ever a need for ‘permission’ to release their own work. This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free. – The Washington Post “There are many ways to argue that copyright infringement […]
Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-03-20
Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism | Motherboard Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally […]