BBC – Future – The deadly germ warfare island abandoned by the Soviets A year later, the corpses of two missing fishermen were found nearby, drifting in their boat. It’s thought that they had caught the plague. Not long afterwards, locals started landing whole nets of dead fish. No one knows why. Then in May 1988, 50,000 saiga antelope which had been grazing on a nearby steppe dropped dead – in the space of an hour. BardBots — Babble Lab BardBots is a project in which students are introduced to key concepts in computational thinking via an unlikely combination: Shakespeare and robots.  We believe that the distance between the humanities, the arts, and computer science is not as wide as it appears. Poetic Computation: Reader There is something poetic about code itself, the way that syntax works, the way that repetitions work, and the way that instruction becomes execution through abstraction. h/t Jon Becker The Schank Academy: Cyber Attack Academy Is the Cyber Attack Academy right for you? The Self Driving Car Whiz Who Fell from Grace | WIRED In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, […]

Online Learning Student Experience is the New Climbing Wall –This work is going to require new levels of collegiality and shared imagination. It will also require enormous attention to detail. When serendipity works in residential education, one reason it does so is because the student is physically surrounded by people who can help. Students are less likely to fall through the cracks when their dorm mate or classmate or advisor or professor or random student on the quad can show them how to leap over a particular crack. Online, the opposite is often true. Randomness is an enemy more often than a friend because the cues for where to go and what to do have to be consciously created, as must be the environment that encourages the formation of social support networks. VidReader – The very first smart reader for videos.We use smart technologies (NLP + AI) to create well-formatted interactive transcripts for your videos. Now you can read, search, share, and locate a sentence within any videos in seconds. Get started with a YouTube link below! The True Colors of America’s Political Spectrum Are Gray and Green – The New York TimesLike some stuff we might do with colorthief.js and screen captures of various websites h/t Jeff Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work – […]

apache/incubator-superset: Apache Superset (incubating) is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application h/t Downes Plotting the Course Through Charted Waters Heat maps, stacked area plots, mosaic plots, choropleths – oh my! There are so many different ways to visually convey relationships and patterns in data! In this workshop on data visualization literacy, you’ll learn to recognize many popular types of charts and how to glean insights from them. The Appendix contains some examples of data visualization as visual essays and it also includes links to resources for learning how to create your own. About Frankenbook Frankenbook is a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818 text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The project launched in January 2018, as part of Arizona State University’s celebration of the novel’s 200th anniversary. Even two centuries later, Shelley’s modern myth continues to shape the way people imagine science, technology, and their moral consequences. Frankenbook gives readers the opportunity to trace the scientific, technological, political, and ethical dimensions of the novel, and to learn more about its historical context and enduring legacy. Do It Yourself – Futility Closet Society of Mutual Autopsy (Société d’autopsie mutuelle), founded in 1876 “for the purpose of furnishing to the investigations of medicists brains superior to those of the common people.”