1,282 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2022
    1. Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we? Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.

      How much history is covered here?

      Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

    1. This hierarchical system ensures accuracy, rigour and competencyof information.

      Hierarchical systems of knowledge in Indigenous cultures helps to ensure rigor, competency, and most importantly accuracy of knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

    1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorrect-use-information-theory-rafael-garc%C3%ADa/

      A fascinating little problem. The bigger question is how can one abstract this problem into a more general theory?

      How many questions can one ask? How many groups could things be broken up into? What is the effect on the number of objects?

    1. Improved search engines will help for devoted searchers, but promoting a new contribution in the marketplace of ideas still takes effort. Improved methods to reach the right audiences will begin with email and newsgroups, but should be extended by nov el group formation methods.

      Search and discovery are hard problems in an ever increasing informational overload riddled society.

    2. Learning how to learn is often listed as a goal of education, but acquiring the goal-directed discipline, critical thinking skills, and cognitive self-awareness that support collection of knowledge is difficult. Advanced user interfaces may be able to help users better formulate their information needs, identify what information gaps impede them, and fabricate plans to satisfy their needs. Often as information is acquired, the users's knowledge shifts enough to require a reformulation of their plans. Information visualization interfaces and hypertext environments are a first step in supporting incidental learning, exploratory browsing, and then rapid reformulation of plans. As a refined theory of knowledge acquisition emerges, improved tools will f ollow.
    3. Finding relevant information and understanding it well enough to integrate it into existing knowledge requires intense commitment and concentration.
    1. The report is 33 slides long; yet about 10 slide-equivalents are essentially content-free (compulsive repetitive branding, twiddly hierarchical organization, empty space, assorted title pages, and so on). This PP fluffed-up material here and quite a bit more could easily be placed in a technical report on 4 pages of an 11" by 17" piece of paper (folded in half)
    1. Although hewas very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almostincapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind theparticulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details.

      Solomon Shereshevsky faced an extreme version of the sort of information overload many of can relate to, however in his case, because his memory was so good, he found it difficult to get the gist of something because the minor details drowned out the broader ideas.

  2. Feb 2022
    1. Together: responsive, inline “autocomplete” pow­ered by an RNN trained on a cor­pus of old sci-fi stories.

      I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.

    1. This article is for those who want to keep traveling despite restrictions due to covid. Basically giving tips on how to navigate the multiple governmental restrictions and policies including links to airline or country websites for choosing destinations. Because of this trend in travel advice in covid times, we may see attitudes towards travel shift to travel knowing the risks involved (quarantine, masks requirements, etc.) and hence see tourism rise again. Last minute covid holiday packages. What if the trend for remaining home also stayed the same for next five years and the adventure seekers become the avatars for the folks who want to stay at home.

      The crisis is changing the way how people will enjoy their international holiday, with an extra concern on testing and quarantine expenses and risk taking. That may have an impact on the tourism market, asking the airline companies to provide flexible policies /products and may witness the booming of travel insurance market.

    1. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipatedanyway.

      If the best ideas are the ones we haven't anticipated, how are we defining "best"? Most surprising from an information theoretic perspective? One which creates new frontiers of change? One which subsumes or abstracts prior ideas within it? Others?

    1. R e c o m m a n d at i o n n ° 1 2 La Défenseure des droits recommande aux directeurs académiques, en concertation avec les collèges et lycées, de diffuser à chaque rentrée scolaire, via un support adapté (livret d’accueil, etc.), les informations relatives à la présence au sein de l’établissement, de l’assistante sociale et de l’infirmière scolaire. Une information systématique à destination des parents sur l’accès à la médecine scolaire doit aussi être organisée
  3. Jan 2022
    1. https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-01-14/a-spanish-data-scientists-strategy-to-win-99-of-the-time-at-wordle.html

      Story of a scientist trying to optimize for solutions of Wordle.

      Nothing brilliant here. Depressing that the story creates a mythology around algorithms as the solution rather than delving in a bit into the math and science of information theory to explain why this solution is the correct one.

      Desperately missing from the discussion are second and third order words that would make useful guesses to further reduce the solution space for actual readers.

    2. The letters of “aeros” include the five most frequent letters used in English (as Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in the cryptographic challenge included in his famous short story The Golden Beetle)

      "Orate" and "aeros" are respectively the best words to start with when playing Wordle.

    3. “It makes perfect sense,” says Moro from his home in Boston. “For the game to be a success, it needs to be simple and playable, and picking the most common terms means that in the end, we all get it right in just a few tries.”

      Esteban Moro

      For games to be a success they need to meet a set of Goldilock's conditions, they should be simple enough to learn to play and win, but complex enough to still be challenging.

      How many other things in life need this sort of balance between simplicity and complexity to be successful?

      Is there an information theoretic statement that bounds this mathematically? What would it look like for various games?

    4. Cross-referencing the correct answers from previous Wordles with a body of the most commonly used English terms, Moro confirmed that Wardle chooses frequently used words in English, something the game’s inventor also pointed out in his interview with The New York Times, which mentioned that he avoided rare words.

      Wordle specifically chooses more common words which cuts back drastically on the complexity of the game.

    1. For example, suppose your API returns a 401 Unauthorized status code with an error description like The access token is expired. In this case, it gives information about the token itself to a potential attacker. The same happens when your API responds with a 403 Forbidden status code and reports the missing scope or privilege.
    2. Now, assume your client attempts to access a resource that it MUST NOT access at all, for example, because it belongs to another user. What status code should your API return? Should it return a 403 or a 401 status code?You may be tempted to return a 403 status code anyway. But, actually, you can't suggest any missing permission because that client has no way to access that resource. So, the 403 status code gives no actual helpful information. You may think that returning a 401 status code makes sense in this case. After all, the resource belongs to another user, so the request should come from a different user.However, since that resource shouldn't be reached by the current client, the best option is to hide it.
    1. Special case: Can be used instead of 404 to avoid revealing presence or non-presence of resource

      eh? instead of 404? I would actually say that:

      • 404 is as good or better at avoiding revealing presence or non-presence of resource; probably better because 401 implies that we found the resource but that they needed to be signed in in order to access
      • normally one would use a 404 instead of a 401/403 (usually instead of a 403) to avoid revealing presence or non-presence of resource.

      I think they know which is the correct, as evidenced by how they said about 404 below: "User/agent known but server will not reveal anything about the resource, does as if it does not exist." — I think this must have just been a typo.

    1. 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.

      Example in literature of wampum being described as wealth existing for political purposes.

    1. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. T

      Where did the idea of speed reading being a measure of our intelligence stem?

      Certainly in a world of information overload there is the perception that greater consumption is better, but lack of comprehension and memory are the enemies.

      Comprehension and the ability to remember the books we read should be of the utmost importance.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Tvjf0buc8

      graph thinking

      • intuitive
      • speed, agility
      • adaptability

      ; graph thinking : focuses on relationships to turn data into information and uses patterns to find meaning

      property graph data model

      • relationships (connectors with verbs which can have properties)
      • nodes (have names and can have properties)

      Examples:

      • Purchase recommendations for products in real time
      • Fraud detection

      Use for dependency analysis

    1. Fernandez-Castaneda, A., Lu, P., Geraghty, A. C., Song, E., Lee, M.-H., Wood, J., Yalcin, B., Taylor, K. R., Dutton, S., Acosta-Alvarez, L., Ni, L., Contreras-Esquivel, D., Gehlhausen, J. R., Klein, J., Lucas, C., Mao, T., Silva, J., Pena-Hernandez, M., Tabachnikova, A., … Monje, M. (2022). Mild respiratory SARS-CoV-2 infection can cause multi-lineage cellular dysregulation and myelin loss in the brain (p. 2022.01.07.475453). https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.07.475453

    1. The Business Strategy stems from a detailed strategic planning process. However, the question we want to answer in this article is whether we can execute multiple strategies side by side while they do not interfere with each other. We compare multiple strategies for business, information provision and IT and focus on Strategic planning.

      Business strategy alignment and the secrets of strategic planning https://en.itpedia.nl/2022/01/02/business-strategie-alignment-en-de-geheimen-van-strategische-planning/ The Business Strategy stems from a detailed strategic planning process. However, the question we want to answer in this article is whether we can execute multiple strategies side by side while they do not interfere with each other. We compare multiple strategies for business, information provision and IT and focus on Strategic planning.

  4. Dec 2021
    1. In my gaze it felt that despite the almost omnipresent governmental presence, human networks took a measure of their importance and along the course of confinement we saw the buildup of the lines of many solidarity networks, not only because we benevolently provided necessary goods for each-other, but also because we shared opinions, information, and a lot of imaginations along the modalities of our existing independent infrastructures, trusting each other, across borders.
    1. One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other.

      A reasonably succinct summary of Claude Shannon's 1948 paper The Mathematical Theory of Communication. By 1981 it had firmly ensconced itself into the vernacular, and would have done so for Luhmann as much of systems theory grew out of the prior generation's communication theory.

    1. When we simply guess as to whathumans in other times and places might be up to, we almostinvariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky– in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

      Definitely worth keeping in mind, even for my own work. Providing an evidential structure for claims will be paramount.

      Is there a well-named cognitive bias for the human tendency to see everything as nails when one has a hammer in their hand?

    2. Women’s gambling: women in many indigenous NorthAmerican societies were inveterate gamblers; the women ofadjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a gameplayed with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet theirshell beads or other objects of personal adornment as thestakes. One archaeologist versed in the ethnographic literature,Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and otherexotica discovered in sites halfway across the continent had gotthere by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in inter-villagegames of this sort, over very long periods of time.36
      1. DeBoer 2001

      Warren R DeBoer. 2001. ‘Of dice and women: gambling and exchange in Native North America.’ Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (3): 215–68.

      Might it be possible that these women were actually gambling information relating to their "gathering" or other cultural practices? By playing games with each other and with nearby groups of people, they would have been regularly practicing their knowledge through repetition.

      How might we provide evidence for this? Read the DeBoer reference for potential clues.

    3. Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoplesin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was consideredextremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. ManyEuropean observers marvelled at how Indians would be willingto travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal oreven an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring.Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’spossession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) couldnormally demand it; as a result, such objects would oftengradually travel some way from town to town. On the GreatPlains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare orexotic items could form part of vision quests.34
      1. On ‘dream economies’ among the Iroquois see Graeber 2001: 145–9. David Graeber. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

      These dreams and vision quests sound suspiciously familiar to Australian indigenous peoples' "dreaming" and could be incredibly similar to much larger and longer songlines in North American cultures.

    4. Most contemporaryarchaeologists are well aware of this literature, but tend to getcaught up in debates over the difference between ‘trade’ and‘gift exchange’, while assuming that the ultimate point of both isto enhance somebody’s status, either by profit, or by prestige,or both. Most will also acknowledge that there is somethinginherently valuable, even cosmologically significant, in thephenomenon of travel, the experience of remote places or theacquisition of exotic materials; but in the last resort, much ofthis too seems to come down to questions of status or prestige,as if no other possible motivation might exist for peopleinteracting over long distances; for some further discussion ofthe issues see Wengrow 2010b.

      David Wengrow 2010b. ‘The voyages of Europa: ritual and trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, c.2300–1850 .’ In William A. Parkinson and Michael L. Galaty (eds), Archaic State Interaction: The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, pp. 141–60.

      Read this for potential evidence for the mnemonic devices for information trade theory.

    5. But we often find such regional networks developinglargely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having anexcuse to visit one another from time to time;33 and there are plentyof other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

      There is certainly social lubrication of visiting people from time to time which can help and advance societies, but this regular visiting can also be seen as a means of reinforcing one's oral cultural history through spaced repetition.

      It can be seen as "trade" but in a way that anthropologists have generally ignored for lack of imagination for what may have been actually happening.

    6. The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, BronisławMalinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes howin the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, menwould undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas inoutrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most importantones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to holdit briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from anotherisland. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing

      hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

      Not to negate the underlying mechanism discussed here, but there's also a high likelihood that this "trade" was in information attached to these objects being used as mnemonic devices.

      Read further into the anthropology of these items, their names and histories.

    7. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence ofobjects – very often precious stones, shells or other items ofadornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Oftenthese were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would laterfind being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world.

      Is it also possible that these items may have served the purpose of mnemonic devices as a means of transporting (otherwise invisible) information from one area or culture to another?

      Can we build evidence for this from the archaeological record?

      Relate this to the idea of expanding the traditional "land, labor, capital" theory of economics to include "information" as a basic building block

    1. Seven Sleepers’ den

      It's an allusion to a Christian legend about seven Christian youths who hid in a cave in hopes of avoiding the persecution of Decius in AD 249 in Ephesus. Eventually, they were caught, tortured and were walled up alive in the cave they once hid. However, miraculously, they did not die, slept for 187 years and were awaken in AD 479, a new world where Christianity became the major religion.

      Same imagery with the poem of waking up in a new world.

      Source : https://catholicsaints.info/seven-sleepers-of-ephesus/

    1. Drexel, for instance, held those teach-ers ridiculous who taught students to build up houses and rooms by means of imagination and stock them with images of memorable subjects (imagines agentes).16 According to the German Jesuit, the effort was not only huge but students wasted their time because images escape from these artificial places

      much as prisoners escape from jails without guards.17 16 Drexel, Aurifodina, 258 17 Drexel, Aurifodina, 3–4.

      Jeremias Drexel (1581 – 1638) recommended against the method of loci during the explosion of information in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.


      Add Drexel to the list of reformers against the ars memoria in the early 1600s.)


      While dealing with the information overload, educators may have inadvertently thrown out the baby with the bath water. While information still tends to increase and have increased complexity, some areas also show compression and concatenation and new theories subsume old information into their models. This means that one might know and understand Einstein which means that memorizing Newton's work is no longer needed at some point. Where should one draw the line of memorization for subsuming the knowledge of their culture? Aren't both old and new methods for memory usable? Keep the ars memoria while also using written methods.

    2. Commonplaces were no longer repositories of redundancy, but devices for storing knowledge expansion.

      With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.

    3. Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.

      Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

      Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

    4. Over these two centuries, an in-creasing impatience for the ancient art of memory based on the use of imagi-nation could be detected in the academic milieu.

      Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.

      What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?

    1. All this bears little resemblance to modern literary ideals, in which the author is constructed somewhat heroically as an individual creative source.

      This is broadly true in the early West, but becomes far more prevalent after the time of Konrad Gessner (1516 - 1565) whose work coincided with the explosion of information following the use of moveable type in Europe.

    1. De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization by Vincen-tius Placcius. It offers an overview of contemporary procedures, instruc-tions on regular excerpting, and an extensive history of the subject. Placcius expressly warns against a loose form of indexing as pursued by Jungius. 38
      1. Placcius 1689, p. 72.

      Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge as well as a history of the subject.

      In the book, he warns specifically against the loose form of indexing exhibited by Joachim Jungius. (p72)

    2. “ There are so many books that we lack the time even to read the titles, ” notes the Italian bibliographer Anton Francesco Doni in 1550, already pointing toward the increasing reading of titles and footnotes as a principal reaction to too many texts.
    3. One more thing ought to be explained in advance: why the card index is indeed a paper machine. As we will see, card indexes not only possess all the basic logical elements of the universal discrete machine — they also fi t a strict understanding of theoretical kinematics . The possibility of rear-ranging its elements makes the card index a machine: if changing the position of a slip of paper and subsequently introducing it in another place means shifting other index cards, this process can be described as a chained mechanism. This “ starts moving when force is exerted on one of its movable parts, thus changing its position. What follows is mechanical work taking place under particular conditions. This is what we call a machine . ” 11 The force taking effect is the user ’ s hand. A book lacks this property of free motion, and owing to its rigid form it is not a paper machine.

      The mechanical work of moving an index card from one position to another (and potentially changing or modifying links to it in the process) allows us to call card catalogues paper machines. This property is not shared by information stored in codices or scrolls and thus we do not call books paper machines.

    4. Also excluded is the famous library of Alexandria with its equally famous librarian Callimachus, who affi xed inventories of texts on clay pinakes on the shelves, as well as the Roman laterculi or administrative registers.
    5. list-sorted management on an index card basis is coupled with the organizational discourse of scientifi c management, which discovers the card index as an economic optimization tool and develops it into an instrument of rationalization.
  5. Nov 2021
    1. I agree with everything in this post; I want to listen to more academic work in audio formats but find the process quite unsatisfying.

      Either I find my attention drifting, or I’m switching between apps to try and capture the essence of something I’d like to come back to later.

      I’m hoping that things like Momento help get us closer to the ability to capture information from audio sources, but this would need to be built into ebook readers or the operating system itself, in order to be more broadly useful.

      It’d also need to be more reliable with respect to the quality of the machine learning transcription. At the moment it’s just useable, and requires a bit of interpretation.

    1. 2018wave of ICILS (International Computer and Information Literacy Study)

      2018 wave of ICILS (International Computer and Information Literacy Study)

    2. Guarantee access to internet and availability of computers, laptops, or tablets:access to the internet at a decent speed and to proper ICT tools are basicprerequisites for any online teaching and learning strategy.

      ICT Information and Communication Technology

    1. two one way to explore these questions is to look at how information has changed due to the human mst and one way that it's changed is the 00:46:59 emergence of a fifth level of information dark information which peter talked about before is info that is generated by abiotic computer software and so this information level is only 00:47:13 possible from inscribed language and the technological innovations that that gave rise to that now can generate this kind of information 00:47:24 and there's two key components to dark information one is that it's produced by computer software with no direct human involvement and the second is that from the processes of 00:47:36 input to generated output can't be replicated or feasibly derived by humans so it's inherently dark even if some of the output were able to apply to real world problems 00:47:49 and so this kind of uh information is gaining traction so unsupervised machine learning algorithms are becoming increasingly capable of generating novel algorithms without added human input and 00:48:03 so here are some of the ways that we're currently applying this technology and we it's still in its infancy so we're likely far away from seeing a met where direct information is involved but 00:48:15 this does have the potential for in the future um helping keep humans alive on earth or expanding our niche even further and maybe far down the line seeing something like a 00:48:29 dependence or an inter mutualistic inter-specific mutualism met between biotic life and abiotic technology

      It is unexpected to see abiotic cultural artifacts such as dark information be considered in an evolutionary biology context.

    1. the number of dislikes on a video will only be available to creators in Studio and not visible to the public on the video’s page.

      you're withdrawing one of the few valuable signals we have to judge sentiment. and justifying that massive massive massive dollop of harm, that ignorance, with the cries of a very very few.

      you fucking suck egg you worthless anti-public dingbats.

  6. Oct 2021
    1. We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

      The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

    1. Nettaviser måtte skru av kommentarfeltene. Det er et enormt informasjonsbehov, mange må gi uttrykk for fortvilelse og sinne. Men den kollektive gapestokken er nådeløs. Se for deg å bli navngitt på nettet, anklaget for å være en massedrapsmann.

      Høyt informasjonsbehov sier mye om tilliten generelt i samfunnet idag

  7. Sep 2021
    1. Missing in the product description is...1. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FOR USE BY PEOPLE WHO MUST WEAR GLASSES!2. YOU MUST PURCHASE FILTERS SEPARATELY. THIS PRODUCT DOES NOT INCLUDE FILTERS!
    1. Ces informations doivent être complétées par une note d’information adressée aux familles par voie postale ou par le biais du carnet de correspondance.
    2. Il importe de leur donner une information la plus complète et la plus claire possible quant à l’organisation des élections des représentants de parents d’élèves
  8. www.library.upenn.edu www.library.upenn.edu
    1. How have chance survivals shaped literary and linguistic canons? How might the topography of the field appear differently had certain prized unica not survived? What are the ways in which authors, compilers, scribes, and scholars have dealt with lacunary exemplaria? How do longstanding and emergent methodologies and disciplines—analysis of catalogs of dispersed libraries, reverse engineering of ur-texts and lost prototypes, digital reconstructions of codices dispersi, digital humanities. and cultural heritage preservation, and trauma studies to name a few,—serve to reveal the extent of disappearance? How can ideologically-driven biblioclasm or the destruction wrought by armed conflicts -- sometimes occurring within living memory -- be assessed objectively yet serve as the basis for protection of cultural heritage in the present? In all cases, losses are not solely material: they can be psychological, social, digital, linguistic, spiritual, professional. Is mournful resignation the only response to these gaps, or can such sentiments be harnessed to further knowledge, understanding, and preservation moving forward?
    1. tea

      I love this picture because although it is simple it highlights what Orwell is missing in that tea is meant to be enjoyed, and the method by which it is enjoyed is irrelevant. Well done!

    2. Orwell in this instance is a rather large narcissist

      I think narcissist is the perfect description of Orwell's tone in this text, as he clearly acts as if his method of tea drinking is superior, despite there being other valid methods that could improve taste or realizing that it is all personal preference. There is more than one way to make tea and if he wants people to accept his methods then he has to accept the validity of their's

    1. We may disagree on a lot of things, but the author opened up my mind by showing me there is another way to drink tea.

      I respect your ability to view both your's and the author's perspectives as equals and notice that although you have differing opinions, you both have valid points in that you may be making the taste better but also destroying it's natural flavor

    1. We need more SCOSS-like experimentation. We need initiatives with short iterations of conceptualization and execution, a sort of trial-and-error mentality as we navigate this complex issue. We need research organisations and libraries to create budget lines for open infrastructures. We need funders to start supporting the maintenance of open infrastructures like the eLife Innovation Initiative or the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation.

    1. Knowledge Futures Group is a 501c3 nonprofit building open source technology and collaborating with communities of practice to design and build the public digital infrastructure needed for effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge futures.
    1. “With whistling, it was more like, let’s see what people did naturally to simplify the signal. What did they keep?” she says.
    2. In practice, almost every whistled tonal language chooses to use pitch to encode the tones.

      Why is pitch encoding of tones more prevalent in tonal languages? What is the efficiency and outcome of the speech and the information that can be encoded?

    3. Whistlers of tonal languages thus face a dilemma: Should they whistle the tones, or the vowels and consonants? “In whistling, you can produce only one of the two. They have to choose,” says Meyer.

      Non-tonal speech is easy to transfer into whistling language, but tonal languages have to choose between whistling the tones or the vowels and consonants as one can only produce one of the two with whistling.

      What effect does this tell us about the information content and density of languages, particularly tonal languages and whistling?

    1. what counts as authoritative varies by audience and is layered with historical understanding of truth and trust

      Authority is constructed and contextual.

    1. It would be harder to find better evidence of the maxim that “the medium affects consciousness”.

      I wish I had something cheeky to say. Just testing the tags.

  9. Aug 2021
    1. What the Internet has done to date is expand the potentiality formore widespread, instantaneous awareness of activity and consequences on aglobal scale. This means that verifiability need not be personal—so long asreliable information can be retrieved from information systems. But havingretrieved the information or having it instantaneously available does not meanthat we have the capacity to act upon it.
    2. While it is clear that technologies of communication change societiesand permit different forms of human organization, it is not clear that theychange the basic human thought processes embedded in language. The humanbrain does adapt differently to different technologies (recall the differences inbrain wiring between readers of ideograms and of phonetic alphabets), butthe evidence to date indicates the human brain adapts in order to translateinformation into language, so as to exchange information and permit concertedaction with others with whom we communicate. This concerted action is nolonger, as at the dawn of language, action undertaken by people in close contactbut rather is activity undertaken because of reliance upon expectations storedin individual and social memory.
    1. Normally, thousands of rabbits and guinea pigs are used andkilled, in scientific laboratories, for experiments which yieldgreat and tangible benefits to humanity. This war butcheredmillions of people and ruined the health and lives of tens ofmillions. Is this climax of the pre-war civilization to be passedunnoticed, except for the poetry and the manuring of the battlefields, that the“poppies blow”stronger and better fed? Or is thedeath of ten men on the battle field to be of as much worth inknowledge gained as is the life of one rabbit killed for experi-ment? Is the great sacrifice worth analysing? There can be onlyone answer—yes. But, if truth be desired, the analysis must bescientific.

      Idea: Neural net parameter analysis but with society as the 'neural net' and the 'training examples' things like industrial accidents, etc. How many 'training examples' does it take to 'learn' a lesson, and what can we infer about the rate of learning from these statistics?

    1. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion".

      why does natural language has redundancy?

    2. If your string of symbols constitutes a passage of English text, then you could just count the number of words it contains. But this is silly: it would give the sentence "The Sun will rise tomorrow" the same information value as he sentence "The world will end tomorrow" when the second is clearly much more significant than the first. Whether or not we find a message informative depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us.

      importantly, information depends on the prior knowledge of the receiver. If we have no idea about the relative frequency of sun rise and world ending, then the two sentences has the same amount of information to the receiver.

    3. To treat them all on equal terms, Shannon decided to forget about exactly how each of these methods transmits a message and simply thought of them as ways of producing strings of symbols

      ultimately it boils down to the transmission of a series of encoded message, whether in the form of spoken language, drums, smoke, or Morse code

    1. There is, however, a major flaw: Hartley's measure gives the same value to every symbol. You could well imagine situations, though, in which one symbol carries a lot more significance than another

      Hartley apparently assumes people have no prior knowledge about the symbols & frequency

    2. Hartley thought, the information content should grow in direct proportion to the length of the string. If every symbol has an information content of, say, , then a string of ten symbols should have an information content of And a string of symbols should have an information content of Writing for the information of the string of length , we need  

      first rule: information content should be proportional to the length of the string

    3. Since we have decided that information content hinges on that total number, our measure of information should allocate the same value to two strings produced on the two different machines

      second rule: the use of alphabetic system shouldn't affect the information content

    4. Hartley realised that, as a measure of information, the quantity has a fatal flaw. If we apply it to our coin example, we see that a string of length has information content while a string of length has information content So adding an extra symbol to the string has added amount of information. This means that adding an extra symbol to a string of length adds only amount if information, while adding an extra symbol to a string of length adds amount of information — the information added grows exponentially with the length of the string. But that’s weird: why should an extra symbol carry much more weight when it is added to a long string than when it is added to a short string?

      typo: "if information" should be "of information"; also good point

    5. When there is only one flip, receiving its outcome only rules out one other possibility. But when there are ten, there are a total of possible outcomes (because there are different strings of Hs and Ts of length 10). Receiving the information of which one it actually was rules out possibilities

      The information content seems abundant; however, any of the 1024 possibilities content the same amount of information,

    6. How informative is this piece of information? Well, it's not that informative really, because there were only two possibilities

      this assumes that the receiver has the same prior knowledge as the send of the message.

    1. Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5).

      Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I've seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.

    2. First, what were the economies of attention thatguided his commonplacing techniques? Second, what type of impact did his note-taking skillshave upon the way that he arranged information in texts?

      The two questions addressed in this article.

    3. The foregoing studies suggest two strands of commonplacing circa 1700. The first was thecollection of authoritative knowledge, usually in the form of quotations. The second was thecollection of personal or natural knowledge, with Francis Bacon’s lists, desiderata and apho-risms serving as early examples. While Moss has shown that the first strand was losing popular-ity by the 1680s, recent scholarship has shown that the second retained momentum through theeighteenth century,9especially in scientific dictionaries,10instructional cards,11catalogues,12

      loose-leaf manuscripts,13syllabi14and, most especially, notebooks.15

      There are two strands of commonplacing around 1700: one is the traditional collection of authoritative knowledge while the second was an emergent collection of more personal knowledge and exploration.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammelband

      Sammelband (/ˈzæməlbænt/ ZAM-əl-bant, plural Sammelbände /ˌzæməlˈbɛndə/ ZAM-əl-BEN-də or Sammelbands), or sometimes nonce-volume, is a book comprising a number of separately printed or manuscript works that are subsequently bound together.

      Compare and contrast this publishing scheme with the idea of florilegium and commonplace books.

      Did commonplace keepers ever sammelband their own personal volumes? And perhaps include more comprehensive indices?

      What time periods did this pattern take place? How does this reflect on the idea of reorganizing early modern information management practices? Could these have bled over into the idea of the evolution of the Zettelkasten?

    1. Moss points out the implied analogy between the commonplace-book and "moveable type, capable of both setting a page of text in an apparentiy immutable form and of rearranging all the eléments of that page into other pattems for other meanings" (p. 252); with characteristie prudence, she mentions this analogy only when it finally becomes explicit in one of her later texts, Jean Oudart's Methode des orateurs oí 1668

      The ideas of moveable type and moveable information can be an important idea in the evolution of commonplace books to zettelkasten and thence into digital forms of commonplaces.

    2. At the heart of these is the shift from a manuscript culture to a print culture, which leads first to a rapid increase in the production and use of commonplace-books, and eventuaUy to a kind of implosión, where the wealth of materi-als available in print makes it virtuaUy impossible to devise a comprehen-sive compendium.

      Was the decline of commonplaces in culture due to a sort of defeatist attitude about the ever-increasing amount of information?

      Evidence of this can be found in the expressions of how impressive Niklas Luhmann's 90,000 index card zettelkasten is. For those without the value of keeping and using one, it can seem a lot of work, but to what end?

    1. He mentions Amazon wishlists that pile up and never get used. Similar to the way people pile up bookmarks and never use or revisit them.

      One of the benefits of commonplace books (and tools like Obsidian, et al.) is that one is forced to re-see or re-discover these over time. This restumbling upon these things can be incredibly valuable.

  10. Jul 2021
    1. We do not want to give the impression that facts, leading to increased information, and insights, leading to increased understanding, are always easy to distinguish. And we would admit that sometimes a mere recital of facts can itself lead to greater understanding. The point we want to emphasize here is that this book is about the art of reading for the sake of in­creased understanding. Fortunately, if you learn to do that, reading for information will usually take care of itself.

      This book will focus on and emphasize reading for greater understanding with the benefit that, when accomplished, reading for information should take care of itself without significantly more work.

    2. Here by "learning" is meant understanding more, not remem­bering more information that has the same degree of intelli­gibility as other information you already possess.

      A definition of learning here. Is this the thing that's missing from my note above?

    3. The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intel­ligible to us. Such things may increase our store of informa­tion, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth-that is, if we were both alert and honest.

      Here they're comparing reading for information and reading for understanding.

      How do these two modes relate to Claude Shannon's versions of information (surprise) and semantics (the communication) itself. Are there other pieces which exist which we're not tacitly including here? It feels like there's another piece we're overlooking.

    4. whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

      But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

      Now that I'm thinking about it, I sort of want the ability to more easily capture audio, annotate and save it while I'm listening to radio or even television. Pausing the media and having the ability to reply it (TIVO and some DVRs provide this capability) and do other things with it would be truly fantastic, especially for saving tidbits for later use and consumption.

    1. Facebook AI. (2021, July 16). We’ve built and open-sourced BlenderBot 2.0, the first #chatbot that can store and access long-term memory, search the internet for timely information, and converse intelligently on nearly any topic. It’s a significant advancement in conversational AI. https://t.co/H17Dk6m1Vx https://t.co/0BC5oQMEck [Tweet]. @facebookai. https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1416029884179271684

    1. By making the storage and organization of information everyone’s responsibility and no one’s, the internet and web could grow, unprecedentedly expanding access, while making any and all of it fragile rather than robust in many instances in which we depend on it.
    2. As Jorge Luis Borges pointed out, a library without an index becomes paradoxically less informative as it grows.

      Explore why this is so from an information theoretic perspective. Is it true?

    1. In 1791, France’s revolutionary government issued the world’s first national cataloging code, calling for playing cards to be used for bibliographical records.

      Reference for this as well?

    2. Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. In 1752, while cataloging Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s collection of butterflies with his disciple Daniel Solander, he prepared small, uniform sheets of paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier explained to me. Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the Sloane Collection of the British Museum and then Joseph Banks’s collections, using similar slips, Charmantier said. This became the cataloging system of a national collection.

      Description of the spread of the index card idea.

    1. Linnaeus had to manage a conflict between the need to bring information into a fixed order for purposes of later retrieval, and the need to permanently integrate new information into that order, says Mueller-Wille. “His solution to this dilemma was to keep information on particular subjects on separate sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled,” he says.

      Carl Linnaeus created a method whereby he kept information on separate sheets of paper which could be reshuffled.

      In a commonplace-centric culture, this would have been a fascinating innovation.

      Did the cost of paper (velum) trigger part of the innovation to smaller pieces?

      Did the de-linearization of data imposed by codices (and previously parchment) open up the way people wrote and thought? Being able to lay out and reorder pages made a more 3 dimensional world. Would have potentially made the world more network-like?

      cross-reference McLuhan's idea about our tools shaping us.

    1. This system was invented by Carl Linnaeus,[1] around 1760.

      How is it not so surprising that Carl Linnaeus, the creator of a huge taxonomic system, also came up with the idea for index cards in 1760.

      How does this fit into the history of the commonplace book and information management? Relationship to the idea of a zettelkasten?

    1. These criteria – surprise serendipity, information and inner complexity

      These criteria – surprise serendipity, information and inner complexity – are the criteria any communication has to meet.

      An interesting thesis about communication. Note that Luhmann worked in general systems theory. I'm curious if he was working in cybernetics as well?

    2. Irritation: basically, without surprise or disappointment there’s no information. Both partners have to be surprised in some way to say communication takes place.

      This is a basic tenet of information theory. Interesting to see it appear in a work on writing.

    1. emerging technologies such as deep fakes, facial recognition, and other applications of artificial intelligence

      this sort of language will help make the document become outdated.

  11. Jun 2021
    1. faculty assume that students know how to, for example, take notes

      are note-taking skills taught at all?

    2. reading at the college level can be a real challenge for students from any discipline

      teaching how to read is an ongoing project. Digital reading techniques need to be introduced, reinforced and practiced across courses.

  12. May 2021
    1. If you're already an admin for the zone in question, then the proper way to get that information is to log on to the DNS server or DNS control console and read it right from there. If you're not an admin for the zone, you're not supposed to have that information. Note that the person you are talking to on the phone is almost certainly not a DNS zone admin, so they also should not have that information. If they somehow did have it, they definitely shouldn't give it out over the phone. This is for your protection.
    2. DNS zone information is sensitive. Many years ago it was possible for anyone to query a DNS server and literally get back all the records at once, but that was a security issue. Now you have to be an admin for the zone to get that info.
    3. "Put as much information about the problem itself into the email". This is where you show your ability to know what is important and relevant and establish your technical level. Don't be brief, don't imply, and break it down Barney style so the person receiving it knows to escalate your ticket.
    4. Look for certain questions that have been asked every time, and put those answers into the initial email you send about the new problem. Try to add things that make the potential problem sound local. The more information you give them that you know they will be asking for in their script, the faster you will get someone who can help you. And they will thank you for it.
    5. If you email helpdesk (us specifically), if you use appropriate technical detail you will probably get someone who knows what they're doing, and will greatly appreciate it. If you call, you will get me only. I will ask you lots of questions, with awkward pauses in between while I write my notes, and at the end of it I probably won't be able to help you. Technical detail is still welcome, but there are some questions I will ask you anyway even if they sound useless to you
    6. Put as much information about the problem itself into the email, within reason. No need to write a paragraph, that takes time away from you and from us. Bullet points are perfect (preferred).