My world on the web
Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby – a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.
Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary – they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research.
It’s interesting to see how often teaching in TV and movies is characterized as:
- Easy for outsiders—perhaps even easier for outsiders than for insiders, the people who have studied and practiced teaching for years. (Dangerous Minds, School of Rock, Stand and Deliver, Kindergarten Cop, etc.)
- Individualistic—a profession where you’re successful in spite of rather than because of your colleagues, most of whom are weighted down by their antiquated traditions or their inadequate beliefs in the potential of their students. (The Wire, Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver.)
- Sacrificial, indeed to the extent that successful teaching may require you to forsake your marriage (Freedom Writers) or your health (Stand and Deliver).
- An economic equalizer, where classroom success is the engine of economic mobility, rather than, say, wealth redistribution or a strong social safety net. (Dangerous Minds, Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver.)
- Cultural discipline, a medium for transmitting cultural and social values from the middle class to the lower. (Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, Lean on Me, The Principal, Stand and Deliver, The Substitute, Blackboard Jungle, and on and on.)
I’ve just launched a new side project in the form of a JavaScript guitar pedalboard. It’s a handy crossover of my coding and guitaring hobbies. Try the pedalboard out for yourself!
The original intention for the project was to build a delay pedal, but after a Wednesday evening of hackery, I had …
OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched – GitHub – ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF: OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched
Innovation work should start with narrative. Create a perspective on the world and from there develop a set of research / data / prototypes / experiments that all ladder back to your narrative.
This narrative-first approach to innovation feels designed for a professional world that is increasingly a “space of flows”.
Of course, it’s harder. Because most innovation teams don’t have a perspective on the world. They don’t have a thesis or core insight about how the world is changing or where things are headed. Instead they get obsessed with new shiny things.
Of the books to emerge in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jacques Derrida best captured the paradox of the time, in Specters of Marx.
At the end of the Cold War, Derrida saw the shadow of Hamlet. There could be no good ending. “To be out of joint”, he wrote, “…is the very possibility of evil.”
Derrida coined the word “hauntology”, to describe how the traces of our past — our ghosts — throw shadows on our world.
As Derrida wrote: “What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted by the very chase we are leading?”
To Derrida, “the future, comes back in advance: from the past….”
Derrida looked at the liberal triumphalists and saw those “who puff out their chests with the good conscience of capitalism, liberalism, and the virtues of parliamentary democracy.”
The certainty and triumph he wrote was “obscene in its euphoria.”
In their moment of victory they did not sense the ghosts returning. The past was lying in wait.
Indeed, Derrida wrote, “never, never in history has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated…been as dark, threatening and threatened.”
The end of the Cold War would unleash the forces of neoliberalism that would in time eat at the heart of democracy itself.
In the age of participatory media, a predictable event like Queen Elizabeth’s death has at least three acts. There’s the pre-ordained reactions, the obituaries written years before they needed to run, the reactions from world leaders and luminaries. In the second act, there’s a set of unanticipated reactions to a news event, as people who weren’t booked years in advance take advantage of the event to promote narratives they feel are important, hooking an oped to the news hook, or using the historical moment to remind people of an underexplored chapter of history. And then there’s a third wave, in which we debate whether or not speech in the second wave is acceptable in a democratic society.
Happy Birthday David Bowie!
The big problem with this sort of writing is, of course, that by trying to cover so much ground, they often cover it shallowly. One skips like a stone across the lake of history. (I should point out that while I’m poking fun at the pretensions of this type of book, I arguably tried to write one myself, so consider this also as self-mockery.)
A custom sample mashing app designed by Aphex Twin.
Samplebrain chops samples up into a ‘brain’ of interconnected small
sections called blocks which are connected into a network by
similarity. It processes a target sample, chopping it up into blocks
in the same way, and tries to match each block with one in its brain
to play in realtime.
This allows you to interpret a sound with a different one. As we
worked on it (during 2015 and 2016) we gradually added more and more
tweakable parameters until it became slightly out of control.
These diverse stories don’t just help us better understand ourselves, though. They also help us understand and empathize with people of different backgrounds.
“It is a huge loss for people to not be able to find themselves in books, particularly if they’re a person of color, if they’re queer, if they’re women or trans,” Kendi says. “And it’s a huge loss for people who are not trans and people who are not queer and who are not people of color. It’s a loss because they’re not able to learn about others.”
Planning Tool that corresponds to the Diversity Wheel.
- LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS BY URSULA K. LE GUIN (1969)
- NEUROMANCER BY WILLIAM GIBSON (1984)
- A WRINKLE IN TIME BY MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1962)
- SOLARIS BY STANISŁAW LEM (1961)
- FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS BY MARY SHELLEY (1818)
- PARABLE OF THE SOWER BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (1993)
- HYPERION BY DAN SIMMONS (1989)
- THE THREE BODY PROBLEM BY CIXIN LIU (2008)
- THE MARTIAN BY ANDY WEIR (2011)
- RINGWORLD BY LARRY NIVEN (1970)
- THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY BY DOUGLAS ADAMS (1979-1992)
- DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP BY PHILIP K. DICK (1968)
- FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST BY HIROMU ARAKAWA (2002-2010)
- BINTI BY NNEDI OKORAFOR (2015-2018)
- THE TIME MACHINE BY H.G. WELLS (1895)
- AKIRA BY KATSUHIRO OTOMO (1982-1990)
- GHOST IN THE SHELL BY MASAMUNE SHIROW (1989-1997)DARK MATTER: A CENTURY OF SPECULATIVE FICTION FROM THE AFRICAN DIASPORA EDITED BY SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS (2000)
- THE BROKEN EARTH TRILOGY BY N. K. JEMISIN (2015-2017)
- IRON WIDOW BY XIRAN JAY ZHAO (2021)
Syed Balkhi (wpbeginner.com)WordPress adds its own styles to make it easier for theme development. This is a cheat sheet of default WordPress generated CSS.
What if you can hear your painting? Turn your paint brush into musical
instruments and compose on sensorial canvases!
ResearchBuzz (researchbuzz.me)On the one hand, I hate paywalls. I spend much of my day reading the news and paywalls are the bane of my existence. I want the news, not a login page. […]
