7,035 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2016
    1. VISITS

      I'm not sure exactly where this would fit in, but some way to reporting total service hours (per week or other time period) would be useful, esp as we start gauging traffic, volume, usage against number of service hours. In our reporting for the Univ of California, we have to report on services hours for all public service points.

      Likewise, it may be helpful to have a standard way to report staffing levels re: coverage of public service points? or in department? or who work on public services?

    1. eighth flood

      When the return-interval describes the expected recurrence frequency for a single site/region, we must expect many more occurrences over a wider area. This is explained by maths and mathematics (the Binomial distribution and probabilities). Then a small change in the probabilities (probability density function) can lead to a large increase in the number of observed events. Furthermore, the definition of climate change is indeed a changing probability density function (climate is weather statistics), which means that a past 500-year event is no longer a 500-year event, but perhaps a 100-year event. In other words, this is not surprising and is in accordance with mathematical reasoning. Actually, it is to be expected, especially since a warming leads to a higher evaporation rate and more moisture in the atmosphere. The fact that the return intervals are estimated for single sites/regions means that we can expect a dramatic increase in similar extreme weather events in the future. We can gauge this development by studying the number of record-breaking events: see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO410002/pdf

    1. This prologue can be summarized best and memorably this way: . Why? Allow me to explain...

    1. Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, full of broken ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it.
    1. WISP (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform), a computer chip powered by existing radio waves, developed by the U. of Washington Sensor Lab and Delft U. of Technology.

  2. Jul 2016
    1. Page 187 On hyper authorship

      "hyper authorship” is an indicator of "collective cognition" in which the specific contributions of individuals no longer can be identified. Physics has among the highest rates of coauthorship in the sciences and the highest rates of self archiving documents via a repository. Whether the relationship between research collaborators (as indicated by the rates of coauthorship) and sharing publications (as reflected in self archiving) holds in other fields is a question worth exploring empirically.

    2. Page 47

      Communication is the essence of scholarship comment as many observers have said in many ways. Scholarship is an inherently social activity, involving a wide range of private and public interactions within the research Community. Publication comment as the public report of research, is part of a continuous cycle of Reading, Writing, disgusting, searching, investigating, presenting, submitting, and reviewing. No scholarly publication stands alone. Each new work in a field his position relative to others through the process of citing relevant literature.

    1. p. 141

      Initially, the digital humanities consisted of the curation and analysis of data that were born digital, and the digitisation and archiving projects that sought to render analogue texts and material objects into digital forms that could be organised and searched and be subjects to basic forms of overarching, automated or guided analysis, such as summary visualisations of content or connections between documents, people or places. Subsequently, its advocates have argued that the field has evolved to provide more sophisticated tools for handling, searching, linking, sharing and analysing data that seek to complement and augment existing humanities methods, and facilitate traditional forms of interpretation and theory building, rather than replacing traditional methods or providing an empiricist or positivistic approach to humanities scholarship.

      summary of history of digital humanities

    1. focus on teaching, not learning

      Heard of SoLT? Or of the “Centre of Learning and Teaching”? Been using that order for a while, but nobody has commented upon that, to this day. There surely are some places where learning precedes learning in name and/or in practice. But the “field” is teaching-focused.

    1. The arrival of quantified self means that it's no longer just what you type that is being weighed and measured, but how you slept last night, and with whom.
    1. Her solution is pedagogical: a shift toward inquiry as social action. Rather than encouraging students merely to write about what interests them or to take a definitive position in a paper or speech (requiring them to decide whether something is good or bad), Rice proposes that educators encourage their students to investigate the complexities of a given topic without a commitment to reaching a conclusion.

      This.

  3. Jun 2016
    1. The War on Stupid People

      Lots of difficult things with this text, including the title. The obsession on measurable “smarts” is an important topic and the possible measures to prevent this obsession from impacting (US) society make sense. But it’s really tricky to discuss intelligence in such ways. Part of the text reads as further essentialisation of measured intelligence. Yet it sounds clear from the possible measures described that this form of intelligence takes at least part of its meaning in a given social context.

      Maybe the deep issue with a text like this is that it’s hard to get people to shift from one consistent mindframe (paradigm, episteme) to another. More specifically, it’s hard to discuss intelligence in a context where the concept has become so loaded.

      Would have lots more to say about this from my parents’ experiences (an occupational therapist who spent a career with people labelled as having “intellectual disabilities” and a psychopedagogue who worked in “special education” with students from a low-income neighbourhood who had “learning disabilities”). Maybe later.

    1. dimension of embedding vectors strongly dependson applications and uses, and is basically determinedbased on the performance and memory space (orcalculation speed) trade-of
    1. «Les professeurs qui publient dans une revue disciplinaire n'ont pas toujours le temps, ni la reconnaissance, pour publier dans d'autres publications sur leurs projets ou leurs innovations pédagogiques, explique Anastassis Kozanitis. S'ils le font, ces publications hors discipline ne sont pas reconnues pour leurs demandes de subvention. C'est un frein majeur à la diffusion des recherches dans le domaine au Canada.»
    1. easily supported by Slack

      Although, honestly, forums also work fairly well for this. Still, it’s cool to appropriate a teamwork-oriented tool for something different.

    1. Before that meeting was held, however, a second letter arrived, written this time by "my" president, informing me that the constitution was in fact already available in the form of the constitution, ready made as it were, of the Milton Society, which also, the letter went on to say, was to provide the model for a banquet, a reception, an after-dinner speaker, an honored scholar, and the publication of a membership booklet, the chief function of which was to be the listing of the publications, recent and forthcoming, of the members. The manner in which work on Spenser is to be recognized and honored will have its source not in a direct confrontation with the poet or his poem but in the apparatus of an organization devoted to another poet. Spenser studies will be imita- tive of Milton studies; the anxiety of influence, it would seem, can work backwards. Moreover, it con- tinues to work. The recent mail has brought me, and some of you, an announcement of a new publication, the Sidney Newsletter, to be organized, we are told, "along the lines of the well-established and highly successful Spenser Newsletter," which was organized along the lines of the well-established and highly successful Milton Newsletter

      Colonisation of Milton by the Spenser society. Anxiety of Influence among scholarly societies.

    2. Here is the real message of the letter and the real rationale of the Spenser Society of America: to multiply the institutional contexts in which writing on Spenser will at once be demanded and published. It so happens that the letter was written before the society's first meeting, but as this sentence shows, the society need never have met at all, since its most impor- tant goal-the creation of a Spenser industry with all its attendant machinery-had already been achieved

      The creation of the Spenser industry: how communities create fields

    3. what the Waddington-Lewis example shows (among other things) is that merit, rather than being a quality that can be identified independently of professional or institutional conditions, is a product of those conditions; and, moreover, since those conditions are not stable but change con- tinually, the shape of what will be recognized as meritorious is always in the process of changing too. So that while it is true that as critics we write with the goal of living up to a standard (of worth, illumi- nation, etc.) it is a standard that had been made not in eternity by God or by Aristotle but in the profes- sion by the men and women who have preceded us; and in the act of trying to live up to it, we are also, and necessarily, refashioning

      merit is fashioned by communal practice

    4. one bothers to define it, except negatively as everything apart from the distractions of rank, affilia- tion, professional status, past achievements, ideological identification, sex, "or anything that might be known about the author"

      People are able to define merit by its absence... like excellence.

  4. screen.oxfordjournals.org screen.oxfordjournals.org
    1. ficially,then, the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to thefounding of any scientific endeavour, but I believe there is a funda-/ mental difference

      How initiators of discursive practices are different from founders of scientific schools or disciplines.

    2. other hand, Marx and Freud, as'initiators of discursive practices', not only made possible a certainnumber of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but,as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of dif-ferences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elementsother than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the fieldof discourse they initiated. In saying that Freud founded psycho-analysis, we do not simply mean that the concept of libido or thetechniques of dream analysis reappear in the writings of KarlAbraham or Melanie Klein, but that he made possible a certainnumber of differences with respect to his books, concepts, andhypotheses, which all arise out of psychoanalytic discourse.

      How Freud and Marx shift the paradigm: "not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences."

      I don't find the "differences" part convincingly expressed, but I think he means that they created domain-boundaries: not just, "here's the id, you can use it" but also "hey, we can analyse dreams."

    3. The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they pro-duced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rulesof formation of other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirelyfrom that of a novelist, for example, who is basically never morethan the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author ofThe Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and its Relation to theUnconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the CommunistManifesto or Capital: they both established the endless possibilityof discourse. Obviously, an easy objection can be made. The authorof a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if heacquires some 'importance' in the literary world, his influence canhave significant ramifications. To take a very simple example, onecould say that Ann Radcliffe did not simply write The Mysteriesof Udolpho and a few other novels, but also made possible theappearance of Gothic Romances at the beginning of the nine-teenth century. To this extent, her function as an author exceedsthe limits of her work. However, this objection can be answeredby the fact that the possibilities disclosed by the initiators of dis-cursive practices (using the examples of Marx and Freud, whomI believe to be the first and the most important) are significantlydifferent from those suggested by novelists. The novels of AnnRadcliffe put into circulation a certain number of resemblances andanalogies patterned on her work - various characteristic signs,figures, relationships, and structures that could be integrated intoother books. In short, to say that Ann Radcliffe created the GothicRomance means that there are certain elements common to herworks and to the nineteenth-century Gothic romance: the heroineruined by her own innocence, the secret fortress that functions as

      Really useful passage to compare to Kuhn. This is basically an argument about paradigm shifters and normal science as applied to literature.

    4. I believe that the nineteenth century in Europe produced asingular type of author who should not be confused with 'great'literary authors, or the authors of canonical religious texts, andthe founders of sciences. Somewhat arbitrarily, we might call them'initiators of discursive practices'.

      Has another category: people like Marx and Freud (and I'd say Darwin) who constructed theories that are productive in other works as well. These are "initiators or discursive practices."

      This ties in well with Kuhn's paradigms.

    5. ccording to Saint Jerome, there are four criteria:the texts that must be eliminated from the list of works attributedto a single author are those inferior to the others (thus, the authoris defined as a standard level of quality); those whose ideas conflictwith the doctrine expressed in the others( here the author is definedas a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); thosewritten in a different style and containing words and phrases notordinarily found in the other works (the author is seen as a stylisticuniformity); and those referring to events of historical figures sub-sequent to the death of the author (the author is thus a definitehistorical figure in which a series of events converge). Alth

      Jerome's criteria that rule out an authorship attribution:

      1. Author as standard of quality (work is less good than you'd expect)
      2. Author is field of conceptual or theoretical coherence (i.e. this work disagrees with some other work by the person)
      3. Stylistic uniformity (written in different style)
      4. Temporal unit (i.e. written before or after the author's known life).
    6. There are, nevertheless, transhistorical constants in therules that govern the construction of an author.

      Argues that there are transhistorical contstraints on construction of author. Transgeneric as well?

    7. In addition, all these operations vary according to the periodand the form of discourse concerned. A 'philosopher' and a 'poet'are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of aneighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modernnovelist.

      Argues that the construction and meaning of "the author" varies by time and genre.

    8. the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed whenscientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positionedwithin an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of estab-lished truths and methods of verification. Authentification no longerrequired reference to the individual who had produced them; therole of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and,where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denot

      Argues that in the 17th and 18th centuries, science was supposed to stand on its own and the author vanished as the "index of truthfulness." Interesting that one of the main arguments in favour of maintaining scientific authorship now is this index of truthfulness

    9. as been under-stood that the task of criticism is not to re-establish the ties betweenan author and his work or to reconstitute an author's thought andexperience through his works and, further, that criticism shouldconcern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms,which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships. Y

      Thinking of new criticism here

    1. "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?

      Interesting that the prompt is gender fluidity.

    2. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR / ROLAND BARTHES

      Barthes, Roland. 1967. “Death of the Author.” Edited by Brian O’Doherty. Translated by Richard Howard. Aspen 5+6 (Fall/Winter): Item 3. http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes.

    1. The cause of the security breach is under investigation by the University of Maryland Police Department, the U.S. Secret Service and federal law enforcement authorities, as well as forensic computer investigators.

      Despite this deposition from two years ago, U. Md. still hasn’t updated this page.

    1. Three different kinds of capital guided the authors through the the analysis, including-human, social and cultural capital.
    1. Results of our analysis show that there has been a consistent growth in the number of articles published over the past decade; from 1.3 million in 2003 to 2.4 million in 2013 (see Figure 1). At the same time, the number of authorships has increased at a far greater rate from 4.6 million in 2003 to 10 million in 2013.

      authorships are growing at a much faster rate than articles (though interestingly, "unique authors" are also growing at a faster rate than authors... though I think what they mean is the number of unique individuals identified as authors, however many times they are identified (= unique authors) vs. "number of names appearing in bylines (=authorships).

    1. day’sbiomedical journal article is the progeny of occasionallymassive collaborations, the individual members of whichmay have minimal involvement in the fashioning of theliterary end-product itself, with the act of writing beingdelegated to a subgroup or designated spokespersons. I

      the division of labour in a typical biomedical journal

    2. Beaver and Rosen (1978) have shown how the differentialrates of scientific institutionalization in France, England,and Germany are mirrored in the relative output of coau-thored papers.

      bibliography tying rate of coauthorship to professionalisation of science

    3. In some domains, path-breaking work is nec-essarily the outcome of collaborative activity rather thanindividualistic scholarship, a fact reflected in the modestproportion of federal research funds which is allocated toindividual investigators rather than teams. Collaborationsare a necessary feature of much, though by no means all,contemporary scientific research.

      in some domains, collaboration is necessary. Hence the preference for team grants

    4. n general terms, the lone authorstereotype ignores the fact that a great deal of the scholarlyliterature is the product of a “socio-technical production andcommunications network” (Kling, McKim, Fortuna, &King, 1999),

      A great deal of scientific production is the product of a "socio-technical production and communications network"

    5. Before the precursors of today’s scholarly journals es-tablished themselves in the second half of the 17th century,scientists communicated via letters.

      original form of scholarly comm was letters

    1. By 1988

      Five years after I started teaching, and a couple of years into our work at University Heights Secondary School where we were inspired with the Coalition of Essential Schools to re-think school from the bottom up -- and in our case for African-American and Latino students in the Bronx.

    2. “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.” The ruling made clear that because this nation was founded on a racial caste system, black children would never become equals as long as they were separated from white children.

      And I know that my giving up on integration basically denies the truth of this. When I say that we need to give the African-American and Latino students the best counter-education we can give them, I am accepting that they will always be separate and unequal. I don't accept that, but what can I do about it? This is inspiring: http://www.integratenyc4me.com/

  5. ou-expo.nicklolordo.com ou-expo.nicklolordo.com
    1. , I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.

      I really enjoy this idea, for some reason, as something so unfathomably sad has happened to Dorian, as if his life were a novel (hmhmhm) and he finds it too amusing to be bothered by. Wilde demonstrates the surreal reality that plagues life and continues somewhat of a commentary on how precious one's life is, and how it must not be wasted on conforming when one does not see fit.

    2. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.

      Wilde uses this dialogue to convey his theory on the meaning of life. "People are afraid of themselves nowadays" is Wilde's call to the oppression of individuals by society. Wilde opens the concept of living as one sees fit - their true identity. This dialogue probably cause issue from early critics of Wilde's work, as it holds a somewhat secular message.

    1. p.70

      "Students' perceptions of a mastery classroom goal structure were associated with a lower level of help avoidance whereas their perceptions of a performance classroom goal structure were associated with a higher level of help avoidance. In classrooms where students perceived that the focus was on understanding, mastery, and the intrinsic value of learning, compared to classrooms where the focus was on competition and proving one's ability, students were less likely to avoid seeking help with their work when they needed it."

  6. serval.unil.ch serval.unil.ch
    1. Grades, a value-laden symbol indicating the rela-tive quality of a performance that is a regular feature of school life(Pope, 2001), are positioned firmly on the evaluative side of thistypology. The value of a grade reflects certain norms, and thegrade attributed reflects the degree to which normatively deter-mined standards have or have not been attained

      Describes grades as "value laden"

    1. Black&Wiliam’s(2000)developingtheoreticalframeworkofformativeassessmentempha-sisestheinteractionsbetweenteachers,pupilsandsubjectswithin‘communitiesofpractice’

      Black and Williams (2000) develop a theory of formative learning within a community of practice.

    1. Given my background as linux sysadmin and tutor, it only makes sense if the revolution looks to me like an open source software stack for schools.
    1. Hartl’s Tenth Rule of Typesetting Any sufficiently complicated typesetting system contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of LATEX.

      Sounds like Norman’s Law.

    1. Most LMS environments are not designed as places where students do work; rather, they cater to the needs of instructors. 

      Discuss.

    2. Students require little in the way of special messaging

      Useful to point out. There’s so much distrust of learners…

    1. You feel like you're engaged in enjoyable play when your thinking has the right level of ambiguity and uncertainty FOR YOU

      Play is haptic. It has a feel. And that feel is very idiosyncratic (and not customizable).

  7. May 2016
    1. p. v. Has an interesting idea that the real contribution of the long eighteenth century to information was the ordering and typology systems.

    2. p. 4 makes a distinction between knowledge and information and seems to understand information as being organisation of knowledge (actually is maybe confused a little about the distinction)

      Information is not the same thing as knowledge, though the two concepts overlap. Knowledge refers to ideas and facts that a human mind has internalizedand understood: how to fix a flat tire, the names of a really good dentist, speaking French. Acquiring knowledge means absorbing a lot of information--for example, how to use French irregular verbs correctly. Often the mind acquires and organizes such information in a spontaneous and even subconscious fashion, the way a child learns to speak or a taxi driver knows her way around town. At other times, the acquisition of knowledge requires studying, a slow and difficult process. The amount of knowledge that a human mind can possess is truly extraordinary, but it is not infinite, nor is the mind reliable. Hence the need for information. As society becomes more complex and its interactions speed up, access to information becomes increasingly important. Education was once focused on learning, that is, on acquiring knowledge; it now stresses research skills. What matters is not knowing the answer, but knowing where to look it up. And that means the information is (one hopes) out there, readily accessible.

    1. The case for print

      Not either/or for sure. Continuing to equate OER with traditional textbooks vastly constrains the power of OER and open education. How about helping students develop the skills and use the tools to work with digital media in much more powerful ways than is possible with paper?

    1. including the use of passwords to gain access to your personal information.

      Why is this noteworthy?

    2. we make it available on our homepage and at every point where we request your personal information

      Why is this noteworthy?

    1. Why do we suddenly pretend that the twenty-first century never happened when a child enters an examination room?
    2. rather than having an education system which has been industrialised around content and testing, why not have one that’s based around solving problems, working together, collaborating?
    1. ndiana Gov. Mike Pence endorsed Ted Cruz on Friday, which may not be enough to help Cruz win Indiana, where he currently trails Donald Trump in polls, let alone the Republican nomination.
  8. Apr 2016
    1. Is War Civilized?

      Along side the Dawn of the Golden Age this is a must read 2wice and annotate work. It begs the question of international law and aggression and the spilling over of armed pretext aggression unto the majority non-fanatical civilian population. I'm Half way through and it can only lead to a critical browsing of contemporary works in history and theory during my life time to catch up with the situation after my stupid drug bum phase is over.

      Very well stated

    1. By historical standards, most Americans are quite wealthy. And that’s part of what bothers us. If we were all poor, we might think that’s just the way things are, but when millions of us are doing quite well while others languish in poverty, it seems that something is just not right.

      I don't understand why people are bothered if people are wealthy. People get rich for many reasons. They work hard in school and get a high paying job, they save money, they have inherited the money which also means someone worked hard to get it at some point and then there are the few times that people win money from lotteries or casinos. I don't think people need to be concerned why people are rich or poor. If you work hard and go to school you should be able to get a job and make money. If you end up poor you most likely didn't spend your life working or trying hard, you didn't go to school or you're just lazy. Sorry people worked hard in their life to get to where they want to be. I think saying something isn't right about people being poor and people being rich is complete b.s. because life isn't fair and nobody is ever going to be as good as someone else so I think people need to start dealing with that. I understand it sucks to be a kid and not be able to help yourself but that's not your fault. Parents need to step it up so they can take care of their kids. The top reasons for people in America to be poor are poor economy, drug and alcohol use, unaffordable housing, no education and medical expenses. I think the welfare system is a good idea but I think people take advantage of it if they don't want to work and thats not right. I think there should be more criteria to be able to receive welfare. I think it would be beneficial for the government to build a few cheap housing developments for the poor to help some families. It would be a good charity project. I just think it sucks that people don't work or do anything to help themselves then are complaining about being poor.

    1. From: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder To: Beth Fremont Sent: Wed, 08/18/1999 9:06 AM Subject: Where are you?

      This novel opens with an unusual form of point of view: an email exchange. Embedded in this first chapter are allusions to the era in which the novel is set. How does the email "POV" and the allusions help contextualize the story?

    1. “fundamentally if we want to realize the potential of human networks to change how we work then we need analytics to transform information into insight otherwise we will be drowning in a sea of content and deafened by a cacophony of voices”

      Marie Wallace's perspective on the potential of bigdata analytics, specifically analysis of human networks, in the context of creating a smarter workplace.

    1. choose to invite Hypothesis annotators by embedding our client.

      And even setting things up so that thoughtful commentary is specifically encouraged. The tool may be part of it but the key difference, in my own personal experience, is about the first few interactions. When @RemiHolden invites annotations to his blogposts about annotations, he does so in the context of a burgeoning community of practice around open annotations for pedagogy. Much closer to the climate science case and, interestingly, quite close to the very memos and Requests for Comments at the origin of the Internet.

    2. Things stayed civil because the system aligned incentives correctly.

      Sounds like there were many other reasons that most Internet-based initiatives stayed civil in their early days. Some of them have to do with human diversity.

    1. one of the roles of philosophy over the past two and half millennia has been to prepare the ground for the birth and eventual intellectual independence of a number of scientific disciplines. But contra what you seem to think, this hasn’t stopped with the Scientific Revolution, or with the advent of quantum mechanics. Physics became independent with Galileo and Newton (so much so that the latter actually inspired David Hume and Immanuel Kant to do something akin to natural philosophizing in ethics and metaphysics); biology awaited Darwin (whose mentor, William Whewell, was a prominent philosopher, and the guy who coined the term “scientist,” in analogy to artist, of all things); psychology spun out of its philosophical cocoon thanks to William James, as recently (by the standards of the history of philosophy) as the late 19th century. Linguistics followed through a few decades later (ask Chomsky); and cognitive science is still deeply entwined with philosophy of mind (see any book by Daniel Dennett). Do you see a pattern of, ahem, progress there? And the story doesn’t end with the newly gained independence of a given field of empirical research. As soon as physics, biology, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science came into their own, philosophers turned to the analysis (and sometimes even criticism) of those same fields seen from the outside: hence the astounding growth during the last century of so called “philosophies of”: of physics (and, more specifically, even of quantum physics), of biology (particularly of evolutionary biology), of psychology, of language, and of mind.

      Massimo Pigliucci skewering Neil deGrasse Tyson for outright dismissal of philosophy.

    1. . I consider that my job, as a philosopher, is to activate the possible, and not to describe the probable, that is, to think situations with and through their unknowns when I can feel them

      The job of a philosopher is to "activate the possible, not describe the probable."

    1. Jeremy DeanPosted on January 27, 2016January 28, 2016Categories Getting Started

      As a side-note (pun intended?), to help beautify your web presence a bit, you might notice that your photo doesn't show up in the author position in your 2016 theme on single posts. To fix this, you can (create and) use your WordPress.com username/password to create an account on their sister site Gravatar.com. Uploading your preferred photo on Gravatar and linking it to an email will help to automatically populate your photo in both your site and other wordpress sites across the web. To make it work on your site, just go to your user profile in your wordpress install and use the same email address in your user profile as your gravatar account and the system will port your picture across automatically. If necessary, you can use multiple photos and multiple linked email addresses in your gravatar account to vary your photos.

    1. In Switzerland, one of my recent ancestors was functionally illiterate. Because of this, she “signed away” most of her wealth. Down the line, I’m one of her very few heirs. So, in a way, I lost part of my inheritance due to illiteracy.

      Explained further in the screencast. My paternal grandfather’s mother came from a well-to-do Schneider family and was a devout Christian, but she “read” the Bible upside-down, according to my paternal grandmother.

    2. Those with the highest degree of functional literacy aren’t necessarily those with the highest social status.

      In precise contrast with school. In some ways, literacy is such a basic part of schooling that it’s nearly impossible to imagine other core skills (from numeracy to empathy) giving pupils and students any kind of social status outside of literacy.

  9. Mar 2016
    1. At the core of the personal API is the radical mission to put control over data (and its access) in the hands of students. This is both a pedagogical act and a creative opportunity, informing students that they can access their own information as well as create interfaces to do with that data what they please. It gives them a seat at the tables where the edtech powers sit, moving them one step closer to a status of equality rather than that of a passive consumer.
    1. Statement of Research Building from empirical specifics of eight case studies from various countries, which will be chosen keeping in mind contextual diversity and institutional maturity, this study will use an analytical framework to address the following questions;RQ1: How do processes of signification, legitimation and domination in ICT-mediated citizen engagement give rise to new governance regimes?RQ2: Under what conditions can ICT mediated citizen engagement support and promote democratic governance?In addition, the study will attempt to develop an index on Transformative Citizen Engagement to evaluate the impact of citizen engagement on democratic governance, testing its efficacy. It will attempt to explain changes to governance systems and develop a layered index (tentatively, Transformative Citizen Engagement Index) that will be tested to evaluate the impact of citizen engagement on democratic governance.

      Ciudad de datos, grafoscopio y el data week están orientados a la pregunta 1:

      RQ1: How do processes of signification, legitimation and domination in ICT- mediated citizen engagement give rise to new governance regimes?

      Mientras que el diálogo entre comunidades de base y gobierno podría ayudar a resolver la pregunta 2:

      RQ2: Under what conditions can ICT mediated citizen engagement support and promote democratic governance?

    1. By now I had become quite hooked on experimenting with the system, and lots of questions along the line of “I wonder what would happen if?…” sprang to mind.

      Sounds like this is a shared experience we have, as we dig deeper into #SonicPi. Even SPi author Sam Aaron described something similar, in an interview (ca. 33:27). Might have to do with the affordances of a system meant for learning. You know, “scaffolding” and all that.

    1. not to provide citizens with jobs. That's the role of the economy.

      Not "provide" but "prepare" citizens for a productive purposeful life that includes a job.

    2. The product of education should be effective citizenship that is enacted out in the open

      agree better citizenship of the world

    1. Steve Ketchel was the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel.

      He was white and beautiful and represents a brighter and more loving side of the hookers, which results in empathy from the bystanders. He is portrayed as a symbol of the hookers more uplifting past.

    2. “Did I know him? Did I know him?

      She never really answers "Yes", so this indicates that she is trying to avoid being specific and giving a straight answer (because she probably did not know him)

    3. as clean and as white and as beautiful

      The use of adjectives such as "clean", "white" and "beautiful", to describe Stanley, says a lot about what qualities she admires in a man.

    4. “It would be impossible for Steve to have said that,” Peroxide declared.

      Implicitely implying something about Steve's character.

    5. Did I know him? Did I know him?

      Needs to convince herself and the others that she knows him and what he stands for

    6. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel
    7. Wasn’t his name Stanley Ketchel?”

      They dont even know his name - this could indicate that the important thing is not what his name is (or Jesus' name) but what he stands for. It could also indicate that she desperately needs to believe in something even though she dont know what that means.

    8. We were married in the eyes of God and I belong to him right now and always will and all of me is his.

      ja yes

    9. “What do you know about Steve? Stanley. He was no Stanley. Steve Ketchel

      The girls do not know his real name which indicates that they probably never really knew him at all. This can be compared to Steve = Jesus, because no one really knows Jesus at all. No one really knew him but everyone claims that they do.

    10. “He was more than any husband could ever be

      ja yes

    11. Peroxide blondes = LIGHT, but fake light.

    12. I loved him like you love God
    13. He was like a god

      JESUS

    14. My soul belongs to Steve Ketchel

      her soul belongs to him

  10. Feb 2016
    1. Technology can help students fill in the vast blank spaces on their mental maps. But it cannot, on its own, create a safe space that encourages kids to ask tough questions.
    1. n Saul Carliner’s LessonsLearned from Museum Exhibit Design, exhibit design is broken into three main stages(2003). The “idea generator,” “exhibit designer, and “idea implementer,”leads each phase respectively (Carliner, 2003). The idea generator determines the main concepts or themes and chooses the content of the exhibit. Then, the exhibit designer takes the concept to prepare physical designs for the new gallery, creating display cases and deciding wall and floor coverings for the overall ambiance. Lastly, the idea implementer brings together everything to create the exhibit. The implementer collects any missing pieces for the gallery, ensures conservation of displayed pieces, and oversees all parts of the assembly(Carliner, 2003)

      Types of museum visitors outlined: idea generators, exhibit designers, idea implementers. Next paragraph introduces that an aspect of exhibit design missing is 'audience targeting' - reaching out to a specific clientele intentionally with an exhibition's design.

    1. Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text, using terms such as chapter, scene, and stanza; describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections.

      A third grade student should be able to refer to different parts of a text by using specific vocabulary such as "chapter" or "stanza" to identify key details in the text.

      Parts of a Story

      A good example of this would be chapters books for third graders such as books from the Junie B. Jones series. These allow students to recall details from the text by referring to specific chapters of sections of the book.

      1. Why do you think that King Affonso let the Portuguese enslave his subjects at first?
      2. I believe that King Alfonso thought it was a good idea to enslave his subjects at first because it could help boost his wealth and the country's wealth without paying the people who actually did the work. He did not want lower-class people in his country because he wanted all the things he wanted in order to live a luxurious life.
      3. In the letter below, why does the king now request regulations?
      4. The King was finally hearing from all of his people that many of the people in Portugal were being taken away for slavery. He set guidelines because he realized many of the people were being enslaved for no reason at all.
    1. The Congo was a key location in the Portuguese slave trade

      The Portuguese relied heavily on Africans in the slave market.

    1. Experienced maintainers have felt the burden. Today, open source looks less like a two-way street, and more like free products that nobody pays for, but that still require serious hours to maintain.This is not so different from what happened to newspapers or music, except that nearly all the world’s software is riding on open source.
  11. Jan 2016
    1. Control over the content. Control over what’s shared. Control — a bit more control, not total — over one’s data.

      You MUST control what you share and know and are. What makes this dictum any different than programmed learning where you must mast this set of content. Just Watters telling us what we must do as opposed to Skinner.

    1. The key here is the crafting of an identity with a purpose, the conscious consideration and creation of one’s professional/academic identity online: a domain of one’s own!

      Original use of phrase?

    1. each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment.

      Nice line.

    2. Here's one idea. Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers — not 1GB folders in the institution's web space but honest-to-goodness virtualized web servers of the kind available for $7.99 a month from a variety of hosting services, with built-in affordances ranging from database maintenance to web analytics.

      Origin of the Domain of One's Own?

    1. In these settings, learning is a side effect of creative production, collaboration, and community organizing, not the explicit purpose of the activity.

      Learning is never a side effect. It is a parallel event, occuring all the time. If we consider learning as a consequent event and an object of some other doing, then we are in danger of committing the same sin as the 'banking' model--x causes y. Dangerous and predictably problematic.

    1. many authors base their practice on proprietary tools and formats that sometimes fall short of even the most basic requirements of scholarly writing.

      So the issue is both with the proprietary nature of the tools (and the concomitant vicissitudes) and the simple pragmatism of the tool for the job.

    1. Set Semantics¶ This tool is used to set semantics in EPUB files. Semantics are simply, links in the OPF file that identify certain locations in the book as having special meaning. You can use them to identify the foreword, dedication, cover, table of contents, etc. Simply choose the type of semantic information you want to specify and then select the location in the book the link should point to. This tool can be accessed via Tools->Set semantics.

      Though it’s described in such a simple way, there might be hidden power in adding these tags, especially when we bring eBooks to the Semantic Web. Though books are the prime example of a “Web of Documents”, they can also contribute to the “Web of Data”, if we enable them. It might take long, but it could happen.

  12. Dec 2015
    1. More than 100 years ago Mr. Sherlock Holmes

      Few people know this but Sherlock was actually born in Russia in 1792 and didn't change his name until much later.

    1. Using “time spent” as the measure of how much a student has learned is absurd.
    2. Teaching two or three sections per semester would leave ample time for prep and office hours. Add in materials and tech fees around $100 and we could offer these courses for $900 per student per course, excluding marketing costs and considering only the cost of product delivery. These courses would be academically equivalent (incredible professor, great materials, office hours2) to any “regular” university course, but delivered online at around 20% of the all-in cost of buying such a course bundled with food, lodging, athletic facilities, Jacuzzis, and rock walls at an elite university.
    1. The Learning Management System (LMS) pervades the EdTech space.
    1. course design is more important than the LMS

      In all the platform news, we can talk about “learning management” in view of instructional and course design. But maybe it even goes further than design into a variety of practices which aren´t through-designed.

    1. Reality Editor is an iOS app for programming and controlling Internet-enabled devices. It was created at MIT with their Open Hybrid platform. http://openhybrid.org/

    1. ‘quality of life’

      (QOL)- general well being of individuals and societies. QOL has a wide range of contexts including fields of international development, healthcare, politics, and employment (Google/Wikipedia)

  13. Nov 2015
    1. a becoming hat

      Atkinson suggests that this hat is a symbol of Laura's coming-of-age, that it will mark Laura as "no longer a child." The term "becoming" here, while ostensibly "beautiful" or "suitable," in this reading resonates with Laura's becoming an adult.

    1. If the space doctor’s ideas were wrong, your phone wouldn’t be able to tell where it was.

      If all of the space boats travel at the same velocity and the same distance from the Earth's surface, the time shift of the on-board clock due to relativity would be the same. The difference between the clocks would be almost the same. How would the trouble appear?

    1. Canada is unique in the world in that it is the only country whose national government has no authority in education;

      Though it may be taken for granted by actors in the sphere of learning in Canada, this factoid can have a large impact in terms of “Canadian Exceptionalism”.

  14. Oct 2015
    1. Moving‘in time’ and ‘out of time’ are opposite sides of the same coin, and theirmutual distinction is not meant to be a binary opposition

      An individual cannot be entirely "in time" or "out of time," it is more of a scale than binary opposites.

    1. I want to point to the way in which domesticity has been organized on military lines through the institution of the suburb and other normalizing spaces to enforce a particular notion of domestic normalcy which at the same time very often leads to everyday violence

      Okay, I get the idea behind the institution of the suburb and how government is "normalizing" spaces to push for a specific idea or vision of well-behaved and orderly citizens.. But how does this lead to everyday violence? Makes me think of "The Purge" movies... Creepy..?

    1. Trayvon Martin

      Travyon Martin as in the recent police victim Travyon Martin?

    2. fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.

      exploitation should be illegal...

    3. And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood.

      They can't be blamed for not doing better economically because they have such limited choices/opportunities.

    1. Although in this case Sally worked on her own, she and others often collabo-rated on short- and long-term projects or simply consulted with peers for explicithelp. For instance, people often knew the experienced members of the commu-nity, and they might have requested their assistance when they stumbled upon anydifficulties. In addition, because individuals had scopes of different magnification,practitioners often knew whose scope was capable of resolving object featuresthat others’ might not have. So participants often traded viewpoints on theirobservations.

      This is a nice example of multiple resources. The CoP was available when Sally needed help and she had access but could engage with them or work alone when she wanted. The group shared material resources as well as ideas about their observations. There was support for learning but Sally was able to choose when and how she wanted that support.

    1. No joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained.

      Sounds logical, in the abstract. But the explanation is often known to “kill the joke”, to decrease the humour potential. In some cases, it transforms the explainee into the butt of a new joke. Something similar has been said about hermeneutics and æsthetics. The explanation itself may be a new form of art, but it runs the risk of first destroying the original creation.

    2. he first asked the great logician Bertrand Russell to write the notes

      Could just imagine how that went. And how it might have gone, had Russell complied.

  15. Sep 2015
  16. www.gutenberg.org www.gutenberg.org
    1
    1. Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire,
    1. The girls hesitate to use such tactics against some men and fall back on feminine displays of weak­ness and helplessness to get them to move.

      Ladies... this is exactly the opposite of "tactics" we want to use to help society understand we deserve gender inequality.. Fight the urge to give in the easy way out

    1. Austin is losing what makes it weird

      I want to write a dissertation on this repeated refrain over the years. No doubt it's partially true, but the same claim is made every year in some op-ed article in some local newspaper or magazine. Austin has been becoming less weird since it first became weird.

    1. But thegenuine advances achieved during Reconstruction, such as improvedaccess to education, exercise of political rights, and the creation of newblack institutions like independent churches, produced a violent reactionby upholders of white supremacy. During the 1870s, the North retreatedfrom its commitment to equality. In 1877, Reconstruction came to an end.Many of the rights guaranteed to the former slaves were violated in theyears that followed.
    2. Although Reconstruction only lasted from 1865 to 1877, the issuesdebated then forecast many of the controversies that would envelopAmerican society in the decades that followed. The definition ofAmerican citizenship, the power of the federal government and itsrelationship to the states, the future of political democracy in a societymarked by increasing economic inequality—all these were Reconstructionissues, and all reverberated in the Gilded Age and Progressive era thatfollowed.
    3. But just as the American Revolution leftto nineteenth-century Americans the problem of slavery, the Civil Warand Reconstruction left to future generations the challenge of bringinggenuine freedom to the descendants of slavery.
    1. Land east of the Tordesillas Meridian, an imaginary line dividing South America, would be given to Portugal, whereas land west of the line was reserved for Spanish conquest.

      so they were separated by their belief and because they both wanted more power.

    1. Keyan Tomaselli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

      As people have pointed out in the comments, author is Editor in Chief of Critical Arts. Relevant for potential conflict of interest given this paragraph:

      Taylor & Francis in particular, via a development strategy with selected South African journals, initially facilitated by the National Research Foundation and Unisa Press, helped to position many of these titles as global, rather than only local. In so doing, they catapulted South African authors into global research networks.

  17. Aug 2015
    1. Acquaintances, as compared to close friends, are more prone to move in different circles than oneself. Those to whom one is closest are likely to have the greatest overlap in contact with those one already knows, so that the information to which they are privy is likely to be much the same as that which one already has

      Love this. Weak ties foster diversity of people and thought in one's network.

  18. Jul 2015
    1. Mr. Obama has already tapped executives in Silicon Valley companies to help with technology problems in his administration.

      Private sector technologists, while important to work with, would not be good choices IMO, especially considering the need to cut down copyright law and especially considering that libraries often work with the poor and disadvantaged. Considering Silicon Valley's egregious income disparity, I don't think there are many in Silicon Valley who would be appropriate for this position.

      Why is it always that the most notable position in a largely FEMALE profession, has been held exclusively by white men?

    2. If the president accepted that recommendation, his choices might include Anthony W. Marx, president of the New York Public Library; David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States; or Sarah Thomas, the librarian at Harvard.

      I like how most of the choices listed in this article are white men. How about someone who actually represents librarianship? Like a woman? Maybe even from a public university, why from Harvard?

    3. Courtney Young

      I think Courtney Young should be the Librarian of Congress

    1. The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities

      Lankes, R. David. The Atlas of New Librarianship. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.

    1. Sec. 15-7. - Injuring or defacing library property. Whoever willfully injures or defaces any book, newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, manuscript, or other property belonging to the city library by writing, marking, tearing, breaking, or otherwise mutilating shall be fined as provided in section 1-8. (Code 1964, amended, § 19.19(A)) Cross reference— Damage to public property, § 17-26. State Law reference— Criminal mischief, V.A.P.C. § 28.03; reckless damage of property, § 28.04.
    1. which was their armor against their world.

      A whole dissertation could be (likely has been) written on this idea of "urban" black style as a kind of "armor against the world."

      It seems incredibly valuable for young people to acknowledge (and be acknowledged for) the cultural power of style.

    2. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.

      This, of course, is flipping Martin Luther King's famous quote about "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It's upsetting to think that Coates is saying that the reality is that the arc bends toward death, not justice.

      See:

      http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/

      and

      http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129609461

  19. Jun 2015
  20. May 2015
    1. Lethe (Leith)

      The River Lethe was one of the rivers of Hades in Greek mythology. Exposure to its waters was held to lead to loss of memory, or, more intriguingly, a state of "unmindfulness" and oblivion. From this origin, it has re-appeared throughout western culture, from Dante to Tony Banks's first solo album (River Lethe in popular culture, Wikipedia).

      By providing the alternative spelling of Leith, Alasdair Roberts 'doubles' this meaning with the Water of Leith, a river that runs through Edinburgh, and co-locates ancient Greek and contemporary Scots mythology.

      The idea of eternal return is bound up with memory, with cultures being compelled to repeat and confront the missteps of the past. So the oblivion of forgetfulness provided by the endless Lethe provides a form of antidote or escape.

    2. my sermons seven

      In interview with Tyler Wilcox in 2009, Alasdair Roberts referred to the

      specifically Jungian references to the "sermons seven" and mandalas... it's like a quest song against conflict and towards individuation. I know a lot of people with strong political or religious convictions whose musical and artistic practice is guided by that – in some ways I envy that kind of certitude, but I suppose my thing is always about flexibility, multiplicity, confusion wanting to reflect the turmoil of reality... always trying to remember that the oar in the ocean is a winnowing fan on dry land.'