Genex: A generator of excellence The four foundational beliefs lead to a model of creativity with four phases and therefore four categories of tools. I hope this framework (Table 1) aids designers in building genexes that will enable creative individuals in many domains to: - collect information from an existing domain of knowledge, - create innovations using advanced tools, - consult with peers or mentors in the field, and then - disseminate the results widely.

The Inca are most often remembered not for what they had but for what they didn’t have: the wheel, iron, a written language.

Students learning about geology for the first time can also benefit from usinggesture.

it is called the zettelkasten method and this was originally used by nicholas lumen in the 1960s

I also maintain a public Zettelkasten (others use the similar terms digital garden or second brain), in which I keep thoughts about everything under the sun. You can visit it to virtually “pick my brain” about some topic without bothering me, or to explore what I’m currently working on.

Like computers, the human brain also builds up garbage that needs to be recycled, because memory space is finite, not infinite.

Some content from this blog has been copied over to TiddlySpace so I can farm it for ideas and such.

Something about Scrivener elicits a lot of strong feelings from people who have used it, both positive and negative. It has a growing community of writers who swear by it, and a parallel community that is tired of hearing all the Scrivener-heads raving about their magic tool.

I would consider my Read Write Respond site as a ‘blog’, but agree with you that my Collect site is not really a blog. In some respects I would be happy enough to make it private is it is primarily my own secret garden with the gate left open. This is why I curate my monthly newsletter. It is a habit which I find forces me to look back through all the noise. I think this creates a clearer narrative to pick through than my multitude of links.

a novel from 1794-95, titled "Life of Quintus Fixlein, pulled from 15 zettelkasten". German :)

I used to use Roam for lots of things: a daily diary, book notes, keeping track of lists like my todo list, and taking meeting notes.Today, this is my stack:Daily Diary / paper notebookBook Notes / split between Roam and MuseTo-do List / ThingsMeeting Notes / Apple Notes

After some time though, reality started to sink in. ‘I am not really going back through all of these notes as often as I thought I would.’

It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage. 

If I clicked through the labyrinth growing on my computer I could discover grottos and dusty corners I had already forgotten about.

We also know that theaverage length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the lastseveral decades (Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidentialelection in 1968, the average soundbite — that is, any footage of acandidate speaking uninterrupted — was still a little more than 40seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter, 2001). The lastelection has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that meansthat the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causingthe trend is not easy to say.[17]

Reading with a pen in the hand, for example, forces, us to thinkabout what we read and check upon our understanding. It is thesimplest test: We tend to think we understand what we read – untilwe try to rewrite it in our own words. By doing this, we not only get abetter sense of our ability to understand, but also increase our abilityto clearly and concisely express our understanding – which in returnhelps to grasp ideas more quickly. If we try to fool ourselves hereand write down incomprehensible words, we will detect it in the nextstep when we try to turn our literature notes into permanent notesand try to connect them with others.

The third way I interact with my notes is a mechanism I’ve engineered whereby they are slowly presented to me randomly, and on a steady drip, every day.I’ve created a system so random notes appear every time I open a browser tabI like the idea of being presented and re-presented with my notations of things that were interesting to me at some point, but that in many cases I had forgotten about. The effect of surprise creates interesting and productive new connections in my brain.

That ‘taste’ is a very personal thing, and I don’t think I can really explain it. But I’m pretty sure it means that, for me, note-taking is a very long-term, gradual process of finding my way towards something; I just can’t quite articulate what that something is.

Transferring my notes from notebooks into nvALT is a process that I always enjoy. When I fill up a physical notebook, I'll go through it, acting as a sort of loose, first filter for the material I’ve accumulated. I’ll cross out a few things that are obviously garbage, but most of my notes make the cut, and I transcribe them into nvALT.When that’s done, I throw away the notebook.

I describe myself as a ‘media inventor’, which I know sounds like a strange label. To me, it means that a lot of my work – not really my novels, but almost everything else – involves inventing a format or container at the same time that I’m writing or imagining what goes into it.

Hypehouses were a development that made middle-aged people feel even older. The idea of random people living together to make TikTok videos sounds like hell on earth. And it turns out to be pretty much hell on earth.

Now, he promises “the most ambitious journalism experiment in decades.”

Ahren’s book and ideas are not his original creation, but based on the method of Niklas Luhman referred to as the Zettelkasten. I see various references to Luhman’s ideas lately and predict this will become “a thing” in education.

Scientific Notation

In the more recent decades, of course, personal collation of this sort is well supported by digital tools – early blog platforms, Delicious, Tumblr, Pinterest, and so on – and we toyed briefly with the idea of something as a shared digital experience or app.

An access token is expired, revoked, malformed, or invalid for other reasons.

This may be because it is known that no level of authentication is sufficient (for instance because of an IP blacklist), but it may be because the user is already authenticated and does not have authority.

Any interaction with the card index is differently informative not simply because the query is different but also because the variety is recursively reproduced and dependent on the past.

Even finding terms totranslate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ intoindigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining theunderlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.

Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in that sense.However, there was a difference between what we’d considereconomic resources – like land, which was owned by families,worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of bywomen’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here,such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads,manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or othertreasures, which largely existed for political purposes.

Michael Ashcroft@m_ashcroft

Reflecting upon Robert Darnton's comment, perhaps my personal reading and writing style is more representative of the seventeenth century than the twentieth or twenty-first.  Throughout my career in the antiquarian book trade, which began in the 1960s, I found myself moving between subjects in the course of a day as I catalogued various books in stock, read about other books for sale, or discussed the different interests of clients.  With access to the Internet in the 1990s it was, of course, possible to follow-up more efficiently on diverse topics with Internet searches and hyperlinks.  The way that HistoryofInformation.com is written, as a series of reading and research notes connected by links and indexed in a database, may be viewed to a certain extent as analogous to the method of maintaining and indexing commonplace books described by Locke.

Tiny Brain Fans

I go through my old posts every day. I know that much – most? – of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

First and foremost, I do it for me. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.

Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.

DoS a federal agency, then charge for access

Pratt persuaded tribal elders and chiefs that the reason the "Washichu" (Lakota word for white man, loosely translates to Takes the Fat) had been able to take their land was that the Indians were uneducated. He said that the Natives were disadvantaged by being unable to speak and write English and, if they had that knowledge, they might have been able to protect themselves.

In 1657, the fi rst practitioner of nonhierarchical indexing, Joachim Jungius (born 1585), dies in Hamburg after compiling approximately 150,000 slips of papers with accumulated knowledge, bound and sorted according to the most minute details and building blocks and without registers or indexes, let alone reference systems. 3

Dominicus Nanus did in the Polyanthea

I began this site in 2008 in an effort to bring some structure to a long held habit: taking notes about the books I read in a seemingly endless number of notebooks, which then piled up, never to be opened again. I thought a website would make that habit more fruitful and fun, serving as a reference, something the notebooks never did. It did that handily, and more, including making space for me to write and think about adjacent things. More than a dozen years later and this site has become the place where I think, often but not exclusively about books—but then books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. Contributions have waxed and waned over the years as life got busy, but I never stopped reading, and I always come back.

In May, a young reporter, Emily Wilder, was fired from her new job at the Associated Press in Arizona after a series of conservative publications and politicians publicized Facebook posts critical of Israel that she had written while in college. Like so many before her, she was not told precisely why she was fired, or which company rules her old posts had violated.

This spring, Braden Ellis, a student at Cypress College in California, shared a class Zoom recording of his professor’s response when Ellis defended portrayals of police as heroes. Ellis said he did this in order to expose a purported bias against conservative viewpoints on campus. Even though the recording by itself does not prove the existence of long-standing bias, the professor—a Muslim woman who said on the recording that she did not trust the police—became the focus of a Fox News segment, a social-media storm, and death threats. So did other professors at the college. So did administrators. After a few days, the professor was removed from her teaching assignments, pending investigation.

In March, Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was caught on camera speaking to another professor about some underperforming Black students in her class. There is no way to know from the recording alone whether her comments represented racist bias or genuine concern for her students. Not that it mattered to Georgetown—she was fired within days of the recording’s becoming public. Nor could one know what David Batson, the colleague she was talking to on the recording, really thought either. Nevertheless, he was placed on administrative leave because he seemed, vaguely, to be politely agreeing with her. He quickly resigned.

After Alexi McCammond was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, people discovered and recirculated on Instagram old anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she had written a decade earlier, while still a teenager.

Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact thatlaws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates thestrength of that tendency. In 1661 a law was passed in Virginia that “in caseany English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes” he would haveto give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any “white man or woman beingfree who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bondor free.”

Since Penn invested in the PAS, a number of urban universities have replicated the neighborhood school model in their revitalization strate-gies. For instance, Johns Hopkins University is a major contributor to the recently opened Henderson-Hopkins School, a K-8 public school and the centerpiece of EBDI’s efforts to stabilize East Baltimore. The school rep-resents one of the first major investments in the community in decades, providing early childhood education services and community spaces, in addition to the K-8 curriculum. Other universities have established K-12 partnerships, directing fiscal and human capital toward specific schools or public school districts. For example, Syracuse University is one of several partners involved in the “Say Yes to Education Syracuse” initia-tive, an effort that connects local partners to a national nonprofit founda-tion (Say Yes to Education) to provide year-round support to the Syracuse City School District students.

Since 1998, Penn has invested $165 million in University City development proj-ects, including a neighborhood grocery store, movie theater, restaurants, and a hotel; in doing so, the university has leveraged more than $700 million in private capital (Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services, University of Pennsylvania 2012). These projects contribute more than 400,000 square feet of retail space to the neighborhood with occupancy rates consistently outpac-ing Center City rates between 2003 and 2010.

Essentially a scrap book in which to keep ideas, stories, notes, experiments, explanations, random thoughts and jokes.

Mine is a 21st century commonplace book, no more and no less. No other purpose. Just a voice, a collection, a series of letters to whom they may concern. What more do you want? I have started a new blog because I want to recapture that simple purpose.

Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication.

Lauren-tius Normann (Lars Norman), the professor of logic and metaphysics at the University ofUppsala, used a kind of commonplace cabinet a full three decades before Linnaeus matriculatedthere as a student.

C. Linnaeus, Örtabok(1725/1727). This was a student notebook now housed at Växjö. It is available online at http://www.vaxjo.se/ortaboken/.

The Zettelkasten methodology was developed by German Social Scientist Niklas Luhmann.

The idea here is to clear the decks so to speak. Getting all the negative worrisome shit out of your head and onto the page is an easy form of catharsis that can provide sharp relief from all the niggling little issues stopping you from blasting pure awesome out into the universe.

I am also interested in the work and method of Ross Ashby. His card index and notebooks have been put online by the British Commputer Society. I am fascinated by his law of requisite variety and how variety relates to complexity and its unfolding in general and in relation to design.

This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots—for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on. —H. P. LovecraftPresented to R. H. Barlow, Esq., on May 7, 1934—in exchange for an admirably neat typed copy from his skilled hand.

Just this year I made a gmail account, just for me to send myself creative ideas, interesting quotes, and write down moving experiences. I also send myself articles that I like and it’s nice to be able to write my thoughts or key words to go with it. Then the email can be organized into folders for the different themes. It’s a really easy way to bring it all with me and to never feel like I have to wait to record an idea.

Unlike traditional journaling or commonplacing, my pocket notebooks don’t have any set format, and mostly amount to a collection of short lists, reminders, and random stream-of-consciousness jottings. These notebooks essentially serve the same purpose as scratch paper, only I have all of my random musings gathered together in one place as opposed to scattered around my desk on post-its and the backs of old grocery lists.

Papers of John Millington Synge: Literary Papers

But Zettelkasten was a very personal practice of Nicholas Luhmann, its inventor.

Commonplace Book

So after much reflection, I have decided that the way to get there is by planting a new bed in my blog garden.

Use cases: Volumes are most useful when you need more storage space but don’t need the additional processing power or memory that a larger Droplet would provide, like: As the document root or media upload directory for a web server To house database files for a database server As a target location for backups As expanded storage for personal file hosting platforms like ownCloud As components for building more advanced storage solutions, like RAID arrays

I intend to live forever. So far, so good. Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories. I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly. If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny. What's another word for Thesaurus? I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, educators train medical students in slow looking to hone their observational skills, but as West notes, it’s not just about noticing small physical details that might inform a diagnosis.

I am going to rebuild this Web site in public.

In the next Learning Circle, I wrote a US History II textbook, adapted from The American Yawp. This was my first experience "Remixing" an existing CC-licensed OER. I think I took a step to making it my own and shifting its focus from what I considered a slightly consensus-driven and slightly political-correctness agenda to a more direct focus on some of the inequalities and injustices that the political correctness is belatedly trying to address. I think once I've reworked it one or two more times, using it in my courses and altering it gradually over a few semesters, it will probably be ready for publication as a "new" thing, although I'll continue to cite the original authors and point out that I'm in dialog with the previous work they did. I think this is how most textbooks are made, but like everything else, I want it to be very visible.

As a simple example of a basic runtime system, the runtime system of the C language is a particular set of instructions inserted into the executable image by the compiler. Among other things, these instructions manage the process stack, create space for local variables, and copy function-call parameters onto the top of the stack. There are often no clear criteria for deciding which language behavior is considered inside the runtime system versus which behavior is part of the source program. For C, the setup of the stack is part of the runtime system, as opposed to part of the semantics of an individual program, because it maintains a global invariant that holds over all executions. This systematic behavior implements the execution model of the language

Granted it's a toy example using StringIO

Hey, that’s is an imaginary complication of our example - please don’t do this with every condition you have in your app.

limit voter registration drives, require notarized signatures for mailed ballots and forbid voters from actually mailing-in completed ballots.

Examples

It is difficult to come up with content that is not extracted from a real application. Manufacturing scenarios to see if ideas have practical application turned out to be an exhasting and time consuming process.

Uses