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How Students Lead the Learning Experience at Democratic Schools | MindShift
“The most significant responsibility at the school is that “you are responsible for what you make of your life,” McCaig says. To graduate, students write and defend a thesis that they have “prepared themselves to become effective adults in the larger community.”
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America’s Strange Love Affair With Czars — NYMag
“Executives, in fact, generally dislike, discourage, and avoid the use of czar — although the Government Accountability Office investigated in 2005, apropos of “Drug Czar,” and determined that such use does not “constitute unlawful self-aggrandizement.””
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Everyone In What Looks Like A Group Photo On GOP Governor’s Website Is Photoshopped
She must be a fan of the Gov.
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Why Not Eat Octopus? – The New Yorker
“They can just at will project images on their bodies, and change their shape and turn into different things,” he fawns, calling this morphing “postsymbolic communication.” Cephalopods are on their own from the moment they’re born, he points out: with no concept of parenting, they pass on nothing to future generations. “If cephalopods had childhood,” he goes so far as to suggest, “surely they would be running the Earth.” (One of my colleagues points out that this seems an excellent reason to eat them.)”
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Riding with the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset – Research
We can only barely pretend we know what we’re doing at all.
“The release of this data in this unalloyed format raises several privacy concerns. The most well-documented of these deals with the hash function used to “anonymize” the license and medallion numbers. A bit of lateral thinking from one civic hacker and the data was completely de-anonymized. This data can now be used to calculate, for example, any driver’s annual income. More disquieting, though, in my opinion, is the privacy risk to passengers. With only a small amount of auxiliary knowledge, using this dataset an attacker could identify where an individual went, how much they paid, weekly habits, etc. I will demonstrate how easy this is to do in the following section.”
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On Superiority – Phenomena: The Loom
“And this leads to a prickly question. One of the things that make ecosystems worth saving is the services they provide us with. If a superior species swoops in, it may do a better job at some of those services than native ones. An alien plant might draw more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away in the soil, for example. Maybe we’ll be better off with an invaded ecosystem? I may not be fond of the barberry infiltrating the New England forests, but maybe our decisions about managing the wilderness have to be based on more than aesthetics.
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“And this leads to a prickly question. One of the things that make ecosystems worth saving is the services they provide us with. If a superior species swoops in, it may do a better job at some of those services than native ones. An alien plant mig… -
Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds — The Message — Medium
“That’s when tilde.club sort of teetered off the cliffs of folly and into the ocean of, I don’t know, thingness or projectness. I live pretty far back from the cliffs of folly in a hut of irony and suspicion. It was all pretty new for me.
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Dragons, Memory & Navigating the Globe Using Only Your Wits – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus
“But imagine for a moment that you didn’t have to rely on maps to navigate the unknown—that your memory, instincts, and knowledge of the environment sufficed. This is the art of Polynesian wayfinding.”
The metaphor breaks down but I think it’s close to navigation vs maps . . . skills & understanding vs step by step. One is a path to freedom- the other a kind of shackle masquerading . . .
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MBS — prostheticknowledge: MAP Visibility Estimation…
Interesting to think about using 3D body motion tracking to paint and create animation. It’s a fun mix of real world movement and software.
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Sound and Sorrow – Futility Closet
“Why do we do this to ourselves? Life is already full of pain; why do we design art to exacerbate it? “If we enjoy the sadness that we claim to feel, then it is not plainly sadness that we are talking of, because sadness is not an enjoyable experience,” writes philosopher Stephen Davies. “On the other hand, if the sadness is unpleasant, we would not seek out, as we do, artworks leading us to feel sad.” How is it possible to enjoy sadness?
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Screenshots as POV — The Message — Medium
” Back then, I perceived my experiences on the internet as ephemeral. My screenshot habit picked up when I began thinking of my time online as something archived and traced.”
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““They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’””