Month: August 2019

Bookmarked What’s the Role of the School in Educating Children in a Datafied Society?

During our research, we also found ourselves reflecting on the unique position of the school as an institution tasked not only with educating its students but also with managing their personal data. Couldn’t one then argue that, since the school is a microcosm of the wider society, the school’s own data protection regime could be explained to children as a deliberate pedagogical strategy? Rather than something quietly managed by the GDPR compliance officer and conveyed as a matter of administrative necessity to parents, the school’s approach to data protection could be explained to students so they could learn about the management of data that is important to them (their grades, attendance, special needs, mental health, biometrics).

Sonia Livingstone, Mariya Stoilova and Rishita Nandagiri argue that schools have a place to not only protect students data, but build their knowledge and understanding of the world that they are being protected from. They provide an online toolkit to support this.
Liked The USA is imprisoning people it finds undesirable. Australia has already lived this nightmare | Jason Wilson (the Guardian)

As white settler cultures, Australia and the United States share many things. And one is a long history of confining and concentrating people that the settler population determines to be undesirable. In both countries, genocidal hot wars against native populations petered out into a practice dumping remnant indigenous people into reservations or missions.

Liked For the first time in a long time, we’re setting up a generation to be worse off than the one before it (The Conversation)

Most Australians want to leave the world a better place for those that come after them.

It’s time to make sure we do it.

Lots of older Australians are doing their best, individually, supporting their children via the “Bank of Mum and Dad”, caring for grandchildren, and scrimping through retirement to leave their kids a good inheritance.

These private transfers help a lucky few, but they don’t solve the broader problem. In fact, inheritances exacerbate inequality because they largely go to the already wealthy.

We need policy changes.

Reducing or eliminating tax breaks for “comfortably off” older Australians would be a start.

Liked Google Is Tightening Its Grip on Your Website (Medium)

Using AMP means a stripped-down version of the page that can be difficult to copy a link from or browse the rest of the publisher’s site — let alone avoid being tracked by Google as you’re reading. Nearly five years into AMP, there’s still no way to say that you prefer the full version of sites or that you don’t want to be served AMP pages at all. The only way to avoid them is by not clicking anything with the AMP logo in search.

Listened Episode 166: Bon Iver,Song Exploder | Bon Iver from Song Exploder

Justin Vernon founded the band Bon Iver in 2006. Bon Iver’s released four albums and won two Grammys, including Best New Artist.

The most recent album i,i came out in August 2019, and in this episode, Justin breaks down a song from it called “Holyfields,.” He’s joined by producers Chris Messina and Brad Cook. We spoke to him in July, from his studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where the song started. They finished it at Sonic Ranch studio in Tornillo, Texas, on the border between the US and Mexico.

In this episode, Justin Vernon reflects on his use of electronic instruments and the inspirations to his music. This includes a short discussion of the use of The Messina, a synthesiser developed by Chris Messina.
Bookmarked The Sound Engineer Behind Bon Iver’s (W Magazine)

Chris Messina figured out the perfect combo of software and hardware that lets Justin Vernon sound the way he does. “But here’s the thing,” Messina says. “It’s not a thing.”

Emilia Petrarca discusses the innovation and opportunities provided through the use of The Messina, a mixture of software and hardware, created by Chris Messina. This was inspired by the vocoder and the Prismizer. This sound/technique has not only been used by Bon Iver, but also Banks.

Marginalia

A few days after the Pioneer Works show, Chris Messina was on the phone; he was willing to offer a simplified version of what goes on with his machine. “Onstage, Justin is singing a song, and he’s playing a keyboard that can create harmonies simultaneously,” he said. “Normally, you record something first and then add harmonies later. But Justin wanted to not only harmonize in real time, but also be able to do it with another person and another instrument. The result is one thing sounding like a lot of things. It creates this huge, choral sound.”

When I asked Messina to describe what The Messina looks like, he responded, “Here’s the thing — it’s not a thing. There’s a laptop running software, and then that software is run through a physical piece of hardware, that is then doing another thing,” he explained. “It’s many things working together and none of them are ours, but the product is. Basically, we used things the way they’re not normally intended, and we put them together. That’s how we get the sound.”

Bookmarked The Hopefulness and Hopelessness of 1619 (The Atlantic)

Marking the 400-year African American struggle to survive and to be free of racism

Remembering the 400 year anniversary of the arrival of African slaves in Northern America, Ibram X Kendi traces the stories of Angela and John Pory.

No one knows when Angela was born. But she was probably young. If she was 19 years old in 1619, she’d have been born in 1600, the year John translated into English and published A Geographical Historie of Africa, a book of racist ideas about Angela’s race. First written in 1526, and popular as late as the 19th century, its racist ideas apparently had to be true since they were written by an African Moor, Leo Africanus (who probably sought favor from the Italian court that had freed and converted him). “The Negroes likewise leade a beastly kinde of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexteritie of wit, and of all artes,” Africanus wrote. “Yea they so behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a forrest among wilde beasts.”

For Kendi, this is both hopeful and hopeless in how far we have and have not progressed. The New York Times has also collected a number of pieces reflecting on the legacy. This includes an alternative history of slavery and the intertwined tale of sugar and slavery.

Bookmarked

The TIDE Podcast is collecting contributions from listeners for a memorial episode celebrating the life of Dai Barnes.
Replied to Idiots With Guns (Daily-Ink and Pair-a-dimes un-post-ed)

So let’s be realistic and while tolerating the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mantra of the networks, remove some of the poison being spread by these idiots. Take away their identity and fame… a small price they deserve to pay for taking away people’s lives.

David, this reminds me of Zeynep Tufekci call to stop feeding copycat scenarios.
Replied to Simple Content Restrictor Plugin by Tom Woodward

I had a number of emails from people trying to restrict content in various ways. One person wanted to restrict access because they were editing previously published content. Another person wanted more of a traditional membership-style option with the ability to restrict certain content based on user roles. I looked at some of the plugins out there but felt that building something a little less corporate1 would be pretty easy. It’ll likely evolve as I get some people using it but it’s here now if you want to mess with it.

There always something elegant in your simple designs Tom, even more so in your breakdowns.
Replied to Building in the habit

It has been a year of building new, healthy habits, and I managed to do this during the busiest school year I’ve ever had. For the coming school year, I hope that I can keep the good habits going!

David, I have tried to form a habit of daily reflections. I like your point about it being a ‘pastime’ and a personal ‘script’:

Writing is a pastime that I enjoy. It isn’t work, it is my television… except that I’m the script writer. Reading is a pastime that I love, but my eyes fatigue easily and audio books provide a great opportunity to continue to learn from books.

I have really enjoyed your Daily Ink series and hope you manage to continue it in some way.

Replied to Digitally Literate #210 by an author

Five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less.

The website above gives you a piece of text to place in your email signature to let people know about your goal.

I’ve noticed that my emails are getting longer and longer. As I try to provide more details, the recipient is reading less and less. This year I’m going to try and limit myself to five sentences for each reply. That forces me to be concise, to choose only the essentials of what I want to say, and limits the time I spend replying to email.

Learn more in this post by Leo Babauta.

Thank you Ian for link to the email habits. I have been trying to improve my workflows for a while, but after reading Leo Babauta’s piece, I think the issue is my use of email. This also reminded me of Doug Belshaw’s email tips.