Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
-
Man Regrets Jumping Onto Whale Being Eaten By Sharks – Business Insider
“Even the parents of this Perth, Australia, man who jumped onto a whale circled by hungry sharks say their son is an idiot.
“
-
Intoxicating machines – O’Reilly Radar
““Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about,” [Richard] Feynman later explained. “The trouble with computers is you play with them.”
— George Dyson, describing the beginning of the Manhattan Project’s computing effort in Turing’s Cathedral.“
-
“And so it goes. No contest. The infant experience of the easy life can only ridicule the idea that patience and effort used to be fine. But I’ve been trying to examine the problem from a new angle, and I keep coming back to the same truth: Life is better. In some nostalgic, carefree, totally invented Mississippi River of the mind, we were always floating downstream in a vessel of our own making, always happy to have nothing, living high on our wits and our basic decencies. But was it nice? Was life as good as it is now? One is almost programmed, if over the age of 35, to say no to this question. One is supposed to stare into the middle distance and recall the superior days of a life less needy, the rich rewards of having to wait and having to try and having to do without. But the actual truth, my friends, is that my childhood would have been greatly, no, infinitely, improved, if only I’d had a smartphone and a dog walker.
“
-
“That level of caution, I thought at the time, bordered on tinhat-level conspiracy theory. You might as well declare Alex a false flag attack on the American psyche before descending into your bomb shelter. But my editor, unlike ufologists and 9/11 truthers, comes by his paranoia honestly — because there is nothing on the Internet that cannot be manipulated or contrived, no defense against a particularly savvy hoaxer. Sock puppet accounts can be made, and fake followers bought. Screenshots can be Photoshopped. Algorithms can be gamed.
“
-
“The goal of Explorable Explanations is to change people’s relationship with text. People currently think of text as information to be consumed. I want text to be an environment to think in.”
-
“Mother Wishes Son Had Been Killed” — Medium
“The two women were defended by E W M Flock. Both were flashily dressed and stod before the magistrate in a haughty manner. Annie Garfield is better known to the police as Annie Harkness, “the women”, said Crown Attorney McKillop, “who has the reputation of having so many husbands.” The woman made no reply to this remark.
“
-
Nixie wearable brings a personal drone to your wrist – SlashGear
-
How ‘Alex from Target’ became an unwitting Internet superstar – The Washington Post
“Meanwhile, on YouTube and Vevo, fans will compulsively refresh video pages inflate their view counts. One Direction actually coaches fans on the practice: Make sure you’re watching the right video, they advise; share the link “constantly;” and watch for at least 30 seconds before Ctrl+R-ing the page. There’s no denying that the scheme works: “Steal My Girl,” which One Direction just released just over a week ago, has already been viewed almost 20 million times.
“
-
How This Working Man Became Japan’s Most Controversial Marathoner
“In 2013, Kawauchi, a self-coached, 40 hour/week government worker, ran eleven marathons (most top marathoners run two, maybe three, marathons per year). His average time in those eleven outings was faster than the top eleven US marathon times, run by all Americans. Four of Kawauchi’s eleven marathons were sub-2:10 (still the benchmark for elite status, though East Africans are often five minutes faster). In the history of US marathoning, there was only one year in which the entire US produced more,five, sub-2:10 performances. The US is lucky to have three sub-2:10 performances in a given year, usually posted by three different people.”
-
“This was probably for the best, because the bite of a slow loris is no joke. Being the only known venomous primate in the world, its bite can quickly turn deadly.”
Related posts
Online Learning Done Wrong
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward I’ve been talking to people quite a bit about online learning lately because of the new job. A number of conversations go back to my experience getting a master’s degree online through Virginia Tech. I was not a fan of the process. I hated every bit of it and felt completely divorced from the process. In other words, it was a lot like my usual traditional educational experience. In any case, I dealt with it by waiting until the last few days of each semester and did all the work in a few days. Today, I had to find my VT PIN so I could prove I got the master’s degree. In the search I came across the emails represented above. VT was doing their due diligence. As a matter of fact, I bet they were following some framework about “online quality.”Or the grad assistants were anyway. This program was one of the “set and forget” models that keep churning out profit with low investment of time for years. There’s very little change in content and less interaction or leveraging of student knowledge/experience. It […]
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
Podcast: the only way to get evidence-based policy is to embrace ambiguity in science / Boing Boing “The reality is that, in the world of science and research, the “truth” is messy, and evolving. There’s this moment in an interview that every researcher dreads: “Yes, Dr Knowitall, but are you certain?” But researchers say to me: “The problem is Tracey, people with no scientific discipline can say what they like. They can say we need more prisons to reduce crime, the HPV vaccine is causing chronic fatigue or the climate has warmed by more or less than it has. And in response what do we have? Caveats, probabilities and error bars!” So we keep the messy bits to ourselves. We flatten out uncertainties because we’re afraid that scientific uncertainty will be used against us. Co-opted by extremists. Used as fodder for headlines. Or we stay silent while others do. Because in reality researchers work always with uncertainty. It’s the nature of the beast.” tags: weekly truth lies reality Beware of easy work — Medium tags: weekly philosophy art tweet Peeple | Character is Destiny “Looking at everyone in the three ways you could possibly know someone – personally, professionally and romantically – you can provide a rating and review on everyone you come in contact with, while allowing yourself to […]
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
The botmaker who sees through the Internet – Ideas – The Boston Globe “Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back. By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi’s bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they’re more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation—ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free. “ tags: weekly tweet bot twitter algorithms univ200 culture data Zimmer on writing: “Don’t make a ship in a bottle” “To write about anything well, you have to do a lot of research. Even just trying to work out the chronology of a few years of one person’s life can take hours of interviews. If you’re writing about a scientific debate, you may have to […]
Trackbacks and Pingbacks on this post
No trackbacks.
- TrackBack URL
Comments on this post