February 2012
19 posts
Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic →
Brian Lam:
I also stopped reading twitter and facebook regularly, because most of my online acquaintances are nice, but I like to think about these experiences as shallow and yes, also I don’t give a shit about 99% of people I interact with online. I’ve met some great friends online, but once I find them I would prefer to spend that time and energy with the few I would do anything...
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Software piracy is vital to preservation →
January 2012
78 posts
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On (Not) Learning to Code →
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Why Eating Fat Doesn't Make You Fat: Sources →
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Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA →
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Pac-Man Proved NP-Hard By Computational Complexity... →
Technology Review:
In the last few years, a few dedicated mathematicians have begun to study the computational complexity of video games. Their goal is to determine the inherent difficulty of the games and how they might be related to each other and other problems. Today, Giovanni Viglietta at the University if Pisa in Italy reveals a body of Herculean work in this area in which he classifies...
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Hollywood Still Hates You →
Matt Drance:
iTunes changed the music industry because it was more convenient than stealing. Most people made the value judgment that ten bucks for a clean, legal digital album was worth the alternative of fishing around for files that may or may not be damaged or infected. Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson.
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Selected Reading on Research Works Act – Why You... →
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Coding for success →
Andy Young:
We need to teach our kids to code. All of them. This should be compulsory education, a core pillar of modern schooling. Many people are worried about a shortage of trained programmers, but this misses a wider issue – one of the biggest modern threats to our individual and collective success. They will thank us for it, and curse us if we don’t. Stick with me, because I want to show...
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Do humanists get their ideas from anything at all? →
Ted Underwood:
The basic mistake that Fish is making is this: he pretends that humanists have no discovery process at all. For Fish, the interpretive act is always fully contained in an encounter with a single piece of evidence. How your “interpretive proposition” got framed in the first place is a matter of no consequence: some readers are just fortunate to have propositions that turn out to...
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Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons... →
Laura McKenna:
This morning, I searched for an article about autism on JSTOR, the online database of academic journals. I have a child on the autistic spectrum, and I like to be aware of the latest research on the topic. I could not access any of the first 200 articles that contained the word “autism.” That’s because, for the most part, only individuals with a college ID card...
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Dim Sum Thinking →
Daniel Steinberg:
I’ve been told by a publisher that they want a second edition of one of my books. Their conditions on me are that I drop this series of ebooks I’m working on because it might compete with the title. When I said no they responded that that’s ok they’ll just get someone else to revise my book.
My book.
It’s not really mine. Even though the copyright is in my name,...
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Mobilizing the Public Against Censorship, 1765 and... →
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The Brilliant "Don't Be Evil" Bookmarklet →
parislemon:
There has been a lot of back and forth in recent weeks over Google’s new Search+ functionality — about how “fair” it is, and whether or not it should lead to antitrust inquiries. But the bottom line is this:
Search+ makes Google worse. It replaces relevancy with Google’s own agenda to pump up Google+.
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Udacity and the future of online universities →
After 160,000 students enroll in Prof. Sebastian Thrun’s online Artificial Intelligence class, he’s leaving Stanford to start an online university.
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The Public Practice of History in and for a... →
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Blogs vs. Term Papers →
New York Times:
Of all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format — meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales...
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SOPA Is Inevitable →
Marco Arment:
We can’t protest every similar bill with the same force. Eventually, our audiences will tire of calling their senators for whatever we’re asking them to protest this time. Eventually, we will lose. Such ridiculous, destructive bills should never even pass committee review, but we’re not addressing the real problem: the MPAA’s buying power in Congress. This is a campaign finance...
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Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Facebook or Google... →
Beta Beat:
Just don’t forget: Facebook’s only against this piracy bill because it could affect them in a not-nice way, not because of how it might effect you. If that were the case, they’d be advocating for your rights while policing their own biggest problem, privacy.
The same is true for Google, Wikipedia, and Tumblr.
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The Other Problem with SOPA and PIPA: They Won’t... →
Popular Mechanics:
The failure of the entertainment industry—and, consequently, the legislators who are trying to help them out—to understand their problem is because of an even more fundamental misunderstanding about the products they are selling. They believe they are selling music and movies, discrete pieces of entertainment. But since the advent of the compact disc and DVD, the...
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Issa Statement on #SOPA & #PIPA Website Blackouts →
The Protect IP Act and SOPA are threats to the openness, freedom, and innovation of the Internet. I applaud the Internet community, including the thousands of blogs and websites that have decided to go dark today, for participating in our democracy and opening up the debate on legislation to the public. This unprecedented effort has turned the tide against a backroom lobbying effort by...
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Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright... →
Wired:
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. In a 6-2 ruling, the court ruled that just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.”
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Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad... →
Great TED talk by Clay Shirky on the problem with SOPA and PIPA.
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Teenagers Sharing Passwords as Show of Affection -... →
New York Times:
Young couples have long signaled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or an exchange of class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations. The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to e-mail,...
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SOPA blackout leads co-sponsors to defect →
Politico:
An Internet blackout Wednesday by Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla and thousands of other sites against two anti-piracy bills in Congress has started to have its desired effect: Co-sponsors of the legislation have changed sides and other lawmakers have called for more debate before any vote. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — who was a co-sponsor of the PROTECT IP Act — became the latest lawmaker...
Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending your... →
minimalmac:
Besides internet blackouts, beyond the death of SOPA and PIPA, is supporting the organizations that have been out there fighting for our online rights for years.
Turn off your site and call your representatives. But support these folks with your cash.
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“Apple will still face some serious non-technological hurdles before it can make...”
– ‘What’s Wrong With Education Cannot Be Fixed with Technology’ — The Other Steve Jobs | Epicenter | Wired.com
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As demand for e-books soars, libraries struggle to... →
Washington Post:
Kindles, Nooks and iPads can do many amazing things, but they can’t bump you ahead in line at the Reston Regional Library. In fact, if you want to borrow a book, it may be quicker to put down your sleek new device and head into the stacks. Checking out e-books without having to leave home — just as you would buy a title online: click and boom, there it is — might be the...
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Before Solving a Problem, Make Sure You've Got the... →
Tim O’Reilly:
In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?
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JSTOR Opens Limited Free Access Option... →
Inside Higher Ed:
Now JSTOR is getting ready to go one step further, by cutting a small window in its paywall for visitors who are not affiliated with any subscribing institution. The new program, called Register & Read, will soon let anybody read articles in the JSTOR archives at no cost.
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"Highly Tweeted Articles Were 11 Times More Likely... →
The Atlantic:
Articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about. Its implications are even more interesting. It generally takes months and years for papers to be cited by other scientific publications. Thus, on the day an article comes out, it would seem to be difficult to tell whether it will have a real impact on a...
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UNL professors work to create digital Walt Whitman... →
Daily Nebraskan:
Walt Whitman, one of America’s most influential and significant poets, isn’t an easy author to parse through.
His writing is complex, dense and requires careful study of fragmented manuscripts to fully appreciate or even understand. Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman’s notebooks,...
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Smaller Magnetic Materials Push Boundaries of... →
New York Times:
Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.
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WatchBundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors (by Ben Mendelsohn)
Interesting documentary on Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street, one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet traffic.
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Stanford Offers A Peek Into Its Extensive Apple... →
Wired:
What we wouldn’t give to watch a “Blue Busters,” a company video made by Apple employees — yes, including Steve Jobs — posing as IBM-fighting Ghost Busters. Such a video does exist, and it’s currently housed at Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives as part of a collection donated by Apple and its employees.
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Call to Action: Oppose H.R. 3699, a new bill to... →
Right to Research:
This bill would erase years of progress from the NIH policy – which makes 90,000 papers per year freely available through PubMed Central – and prohibit students and taxpayers from having guaranteed access to research they paid for in the first place.
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Congressman who wrote SOPA is a copyright violator →
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Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to... →
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Facebook Deletes University's History Project for... →
Nick DeSantis:
The two students brought back to life on Facebook by a University of Nevada at Reno librarian have been returned to the history books for violating the social network’s terms of service… . Before the accounts were taken offline, Ms. Curtis used the couple’s profiles to give students a glimpse of university life in the early 20th century. When Ms. Curtis logged in to update...
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Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of... →
Great piece on open access.
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The Digital Humanities surrounds you →
I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away. Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.
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The Restart Page - Free unlimited rebooting... →
Awesome.
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Pannapacker at the MLA, 4: Twitter Is Scholarship →