The tyranny of the mob is enabled by those who refuse to recognize the threat, who rationalize the mob’s aims, or who – like the elites of the 1830s – avoid discussion of the racial enmity at its core. That same deep denial is occurring today, over 180 years later. We have a moral obligation to oppose it and document it, as others have in dangerous eras, in the hopes of negating threats to the most vulnerable.

Petition the Electoral College to reject Donald Trump. There is a similar petition asking them to select Hillary Clinton. This one requests the more likely possibility of casting their votes for a different Republican. Includes contact information for many members of the Electoral College.

The Electoral College can reject Donald Trump. That's exactly what it was designed to do.

Petition the Electoral College to reject Donald Trump. It is their Constitutional duty to reject an unfit candidate.

But law enforcement officials said that their investigations found no direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government in the hacking of the Democrats’ computers. They also found no conclusive evidence of financial connections between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian financial institutions.

Still, some advisers to Mr. Trump have had contact with the Russian government. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a retired intelligence officer and an adviser to Trump on security issues, was seated next to Mr. Putin during an anniversary dinner in Moscow for the English-language satellite television network, RT, in December 2015. And Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, had previously been a paid consultant to former President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, a Kremlin ally before he was ousted in a civic uprising.

Gloria Steinem responds to the election of Donald Trump.

I’m being realistic, not negative. Almost every issue of equality now has majority support in public opinion polls, ideas of race and gender are changing, activism and iPhones are exposing the racial violence that has always been there, sexual assault from the campus to the military is no longer hidden, and Trump’s very public misogyny has unified women, educated men and inspired activism. It’s the Anita Hill effect, but deepened and multiplied. Trump has helped to expose desperation among those jobless and working poor who support him only because they oppose Washington.

Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.

-- Harry Belafonte

Donald Trump has 75 ongoing legal battles, including:

• 3 lawsuits against Trump University for misrepresentation
• a NY investigation of misuse of Trump Foundation funds
• a claim by a former employee that she was fired after reporting sexual harassment
• suits and countersuits with two restaurant owners who pulled out of his D.C. hotel after his comments about Mexican immigrants

The Complaint for Rape of a minor against Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein filed 30 Sep 2016. (This suit is apparently being dropped. The Daily Mail stated the charges were baseless, and other journalists had been hesitant to cover it due to lack of credibility.)

Google "election results" after the polls close. Google will be displaying detailed results, updated every 30 seconds.

The forces that propelled Mr. Trump’s rise need to be confronted and defeated. It won’t be easy, given that tens of millions of Americans will vote for him and believe deeply in him. But if these forces are not defeated, what happened this year will be replicated in one form or another, and the Republican Party will continue to inflict great harm on our republic.

• Anti-intellectualism [Actually, outright insanity. Complete disregard for reality. Trump and his followers "believe" whatever they want to "believe". The Republican party has become a party of frauds and liars.]
• Political recklessness [Playing bullshit games instead of doing the duties they were elected to do. The refusal to vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee is one example.]
• Appealing to nativism and xenophobia [No shit. This article is otherwise forthright. He should have said fascism and white supremacy.]

Aside from the sins of the Republican Party:

• Major media failed us by giving this asshole all kinds of free publicity.
• Responsible journalists did their jobs. We need to support them, and we need more of them.
• Entertainers pretending to be serious political commentators and fake news sites have become a danger to democracy.
• Trump supporters: shameless racists, or just astonishingly stupid? [No, moron, Hillary Clinton is not just as bad as Trump.] Can we please improve education at least enough to counterbalance the ineducable?

the greater sin of the Republican Party wasn’t that Mr. Trump won the nomination by carrying a plurality of votes in a large field. It was that people who surely knew better rallied to Mr. Trump once he became the nominee. Some advised him, others defended him and excused him, and still others tried to ignore him.

And we should never forget who those people were, Paul Ryan.

Donald Trump's scandals and business failures.

Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.

This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.

GOP States Keep Ignoring Court Orders to Restore Voting Rights -- Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, and North Caroline won't stop suppressing the vote.

Though the idea of a “digital stamp” had been bandied about before, there was never any one person appointed to make it happen. For that, they’d need the skills of one Digital Service member in the Rosslyn room: Stephanie Grosser, self-proclaimed “bureaucracy ninja.”

Grosser isn’t a coder, but in this case, the actual coding wasn’t the primary obstacle: It was getting the bureaucratic green light that—legally, security-wise, privacy-wise—each manual mark an officer makes in a file that’s at least 17 pages long could have a digital equivalent.

This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures.

Today, all possible outcomes can be posted to any website that allows accounts to be set to private, or that isn't likely to be noticed. After the fact, the incorrect results can be deleted before making the account public.

This post points out that this trick could be used to "predict" election results, making it appear that they were fixed ahead of time. So it's potentially very dangerous.

An instance of a police department and DA blatantly robbing a citizen and his family. Business and personal assets seized, without even a charge of a crime.

The business complied with state law, registered with the City of San Diego, had a website and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal taxes every year.

Without warning, everything changed in January 2016, when San Diego police and agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency raided Med-West and shut the business down. The officers refused to recognize Med-West’s legal status and—without charging anyone with a crime—they seized everything from the business, including $324,000 in business proceeds.

But the legal nightmare was only beginning for James and his family.

A few days after the raid, the San Diego County District Attorney used civil forfeiture to seize every penny in James’ personal bank accounts, his wife Annette’s accounts, and accounts belonging to their teenage daughters,

But the thing is, this doesn’t make me different than Trump supporters; it makes me exactly the same as Trump supporters.

While our very real fears may manifest themselves in different ways, and while those fears may look and sound dissimilar, they are really the same fears: The fears of being left behind, left out, and being turned against.

But on issues of racism, race-baiting, religious intolerance, misogyny, sexual assault, white supremacy and demagoguery — there can be no gray area, Peter. These are disqualifying issues and you are completely wrong to support Donald Trump.

AT&T shouldn't be allowed to merge with Time-Warner. A merger only increases their monopoly. It would do nothing to increase quality or competition in the high-speed Internet market, It will motivate them to give unfair advantages to entertainment from Time-Warner. It will give them too much control of news sources.

My favorite summary of this election year, so far.

Senate Republicans have refused to give President Obama's Supreme Court nominee a hearing, under the pretense that it is too close to an election, and "the American people should have their say on this issue".

Now, they're talking about refusing to consider anyone that Hillary Clinton nominates.

The people already spoke twice when they elected Barack Obama. The people are about to speak again.

23 suggested improvements for Twitter, mostly related to dealing with harassment. (13 Feb 2016)

The motivations of Trump supporters.

Sunil Singh asks us to stop promoting mathematics based on its current applications in business and science. Math is an art that should be enjoyed for its own sake.

This reminded me of A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. This is a 25-page essay which was later worked into a 140-page book. (And Sunil Singh has read at least one of them. He credits Lockhart in one of the replies.)

It also reminds me of this article on the history of Gaussian elimination and the birth of matrix algebra. Newton's algebra text included instructions for solving systems of equations -- but it didn't have much practical use until later. (Silly word problems are as old as mathematics.)

We should let people learn at their own pace. We should neither rush them, nor hold them back. If they show a talent, then encouraging them to push themselves is fine.

Math isn't for everyone, and that's fine. The same is true of any other subject. We should help people learn what they are interested in learning.

I worry that the industry has no idea how much research already goes on, or how vital it is to fund.

Maybe my fears are unfounded, but the stakes are high. Startups are the very tip of the iceberg, floating by virtue of work that was done by other people long ago. If people forget we need to fund research now, we’re going to feel it decades later and not know why. Imagine where we’d be without the government-funded research of the 60s!

-- Vi Hart

eleVR is a research team that experiments with immersive media, particularly virtual and augmented reality.

They are NOT a startup.

Jon Udell and Mike Caulfield discuss web annotation and personal wikis as tools for fact-checking on the Internet.

Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude users based on race.

The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people.

When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

Recent changes in the U.S. patent system have made it easier for companies with deep pockets to combat claims. Shipping & Transit has turned its sights on scores of small online retailers and logistics startups. It typically demands licensing fees of $25,000 to $45,000, amounts just small enough to discourage a legal battle, yet painful for businesses with only a few employees.

...

Despite hundreds of lawsuits filed by Shipping & Transit and its predecessor, a court has never ruled on the merits of its patent claims, according to Lex Machina. CD Universe, of Wallingford, Ct., settled last month on confidential terms. “To fight it would have cost more than settling,” Mr. Nastri said.

A large database of blood donors' personal information from the AU Red Cross was posted on a web server with directory browsing enabled, and discovered by someone scanning randomly. It is unknown whether anyone else downloaded the file before it was removed.

Susan Crawford on Interent of Things issues. Security flaws are not the only concerns. Cities are starting to make deals with IoT firms eager to set up systems that will make money by collecting data.

On May 9, after a question-and-answer session following a public lecture by US diplomat Dennis Ross at the Plaza branch of the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library (KCPL), city police arrested and detained an attendee and the library’s director of programming and marketing. The attendee, social activist Jeremy Rothe-Kushel of Lawrence, Kansas, was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest after he asked the speaker a question, and the librarian, Steven Woolfolk, was charged with interfering with the arrest.

Sounds as though off-duty police officers overreacted, and the prosecutors and judges haven't been any wiser.

Several experts give nice advice on choosing personal projects as you learn Web development.

Trump is Bad for Business. Letter opposing Donald Trump, drafted by 12 business leaders and signed by hundreds.

The International Energy Agency said today that it was significantly increasing its five-year growth forecast for renewables thanks to strong policy support in key countries and sharp cost reductions. Renewables have surpassed coal last year to become the largest source of installed power capacity in the world.

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

...

Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction.”

Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News Format are different proprietary formats that de-democratize the Web.

unless you're comfortable with fairly advanced web coding, or can pay someone who is, your online publication is likely to become a second-class citizen on each of these new platforms, if it has a presence there at all.

Conservative Media's Influence on the Republican Party<br> Jackie Calmes, 27 July 2015

laws nationwide are mixed on whether voters are allowed to take pictures of themselves in the act or of their ballots — "ballot selfies".

Federal judges have struck down bans on selfies in New Hampshire and Indiana, and rules have been changed in places like California and Rhode Island, but in many states it's still a violation that carries potential fines or jail terms.

There are laws against sharing any photo of your ballot in 18 states, while six other states bar photography in polling places but do allow photos of mail-in ballots

Twenty five hundred years ago the pressure of trade forced the minting of the first coins. Eleven hundred years ago the weight of all those coins forced the printing of paper money. Seven hundred years ago the challenges of international trade forced the development of bills of exchange. And fifty years ago the mainframes gave birth to the credit revolution.

Right now we’re on the cusp of a similar revolution. Because our smartphones want our money. They don’t want to have to talk to a bank for an authorisation. They just want to hand over the cash. But they can’t, because we haven’t got money that fits into a smartphone. Yet.

Sometime in the next few years, one of these big central banks is going to introduce its own blockchain-based money — blockchain money issued by a government. It’s been nicknamed ‘fedcoin’.

21 Oct 2016 - DDoS attacks on DynDNS have been affecting the availability of some major websites, particularly for those on the northeast and west coasts.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/21/us-investigating-friday-s-internet-blackout-as-criminal-act/

https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/21/mirai-botnet-hacked-cameras-routers-internet-outage/

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/45098.html

Some writers have faced constant harassment and threats from supporters of Donald Trump.

21 October 2016. Russian warships bound for Syria sailed through the English channel.

"Germany proves tuition-free college is not a silver bullet for America's education woes"

A race condition bug that has existed in most versions of the Linux kernel for nine years can be exploited for privilege elevation.

The FBI arrested three men in Kansas for plotting to bomb an apartment complex and mosque in Garden City.

"Fuck You Startup World"

An open letter from students at Liberty University.

Because our president has led the world to believe that Liberty University supports Donald Trump, we students must take it upon ourselves to make clear that Donald Trump is absolutely opposed to what we believe, and does not have our support.

Khan Academy announces their goal to offer internationally-recognized diplomas.

our long-term goal is to develop internationally-recognized diplomas that provide direct access to economic and educational opportunities.

...

We will develop the diplomas in close partnership with educational institutions and employers to ensure relevance. In addition to academic skills, we will recognize metacognitive skills, like perseverance, not measured by traditional degrees. Unlike other offerings, we will track job placement and performance to measure the efficacy of the diplomas and continuously improve them.

The Conservative Case Against Donald Trump

Why conservatives shouldn't vote for Donald Trump.

The Republican Party nominated an ignorant, bigoted, authoritarian candidate to be president of the United States. The best message that the country can send with the popular vote is that if you try to win the presidency by stoking race hatred and promising to degrade the Constitution, you will lose and lose badly—that a fascist does not have an even-odds chance of becoming the most powerful person in the world.

Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.

...

Before we get too carried away, it's still very early days. So far, Lam has only tested her star-shaped polymers on six strains of drug-resistant bacteria in the lab, and on one superbug in live mice.

http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016162

“Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

...

“I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”

“Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”

The malware, dubbed "Mirai," spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords."

Phone numbers can be hijacked.

On Being a Senior Engineer. Traits of a mature programmer. By John Allspaw, CTO at Etsy.

https://twitter.com/allspaw

Patrick G. Eddington of the Cato Institute says a report from the DoJ shows that Edward Snowden's actions were in the public interest, and President Obama should pardon him, or at least dismiss the charges.

Proposed changes to "Rule 41" will make it too easy for government agents to get permission to hack remote computers. Petition Congress to prevent this.

A recent Hewlett-Packard printer software update changed the printers so they would not work with third-party ink cartridges. Worse, the change was made as part of a security update.

https://act.eff.org/action/tell-hp-say-no-to-drm Petition HP to fix this wrongdoing, and promise not to repeat it. They are also being asked to promise not to invoke the DMCA against security researchers who find vulnerabilities in their products.

U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials

...

The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election

Palmer Luckey is funding "Nimble America," an organization that supports Donald Trump by mocking and badmouthing Hillary Clinton. Luckey sold virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014

In theory the editorial writers speak for the publisher. In practice the publisher does not routinely tell them what to say or even see their copy in advance. In this case I have on good authority that neither the publisher, Fred Ryan, nor the owner, Jeff Bezos, had any idea that this editorial was coming. I would be very surprised to learn that either of them agrees with the proposition that our principal stories on the NSA should not have been published. For sure I can tell you that this is not the position of the newsroom’s leadership or any reporter I know. Marty Baron, the executive editor, has said again and again how proud he is of the paper’s coverage of Ed Snowden and the NSA.

-- Barton Gellman

The Washington Post Editorial Board says Edward Snowden should stand trial. So apparently they should too.

First — and this cannot be said enough — Clinton and Trump are not equally bad candidates. One is a conventional politician who has a long record of public service full of pros and cons. The other is a demagogic bigot with a puddle-deep understanding of national and international issues, who openly courts white nationalism

...

Second, a vote isn’t just about the past — although comparing these two candidates on their pasts still leaves one as the clear choice — but about the present and the future.

There is a simple truth here: Either Clinton or Trump will be the next president of the United States. Not Jill Stein. Not Gary Johnson. Clinton or Trump

Donald Trump's illegal uses of Trump Foundation funds.

I’ve found Canvas to be less draconian than I’d been led to expect. More broadly, the LMS ecosystem that’s emerged — based on a standard called Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), now supported by all the LMS systems — led me to an insight about how the same approach could help unify the emerging ecosystem of annotation systems. Even more broadly, all this has prompted me to reflect on how the modern web platform is both more standardized and more balkanized than ever before.

...

The app I’ve written is a thin layer of glue between two components: Canvas and Hypothes.is. LTI defines how they interact, and I’d be lying if I said it was easy to figure out to get our app to launch inside Canvas and respond back to it. But I didn’t need to be an HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or Python wizard to get the job done.

It's 2016. Dad says that he and Ma will leave the country if Hillary is elected. They are big Republicans. What conservative country should they move to?

Pakistan. This may seem surprising at first, but Pakistan is the clear choice for the disgruntled American conservative when you look at it logically.

Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman calls the HPSCI summary of its inquiry on Edward Snowden aggressively dishonest, contemptuous of fact, and trifling.

A local company named AeroFarms has built what it says is the world's largest indoor vertical farm, without the use of soil or sunlight.

Its ambitious goal is to grow high-yielding crops via economical methods to provide locally sourced food to the community, protect the environment and ultimately even combat hunger worldwide.

"We use about 95 percent less water to grow the plants, about 50 percent less fertilizer as nutrients and zero pesticides, herbicide, fungicides," said David Rosenberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of AeroFarms.

http://aerofarms.com/

Gov. Robert Bentley issued an executive order Thursday declaring a state of emergency in Alabama over concerns about fuel shortages in the wake of a gasoline pipeline spill that released about 250,000 gallons of gasoline south of Birmingham and shut down a major pipeline connecting refineries in Houston with the rest of the country.

...

U.S. EPA personnel at the site of the spill in Shelby County say local residents are not in danger, and the spilled gasoline appears to be contained at the site and unlikely to enter the nearby Cahaba River, which is home to a number of endangered species and other sensitive wildlife.

"Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett", a short film by Andrew Filippone Jr. (Funny. But I think Charlie Rose would interrupt himself more often.)

Media firms issue DMCA takedown notices with stupid carelessness. There should be penalties for false claims.

Coursera announces Coursera for Business, shifting toward corporate learning. Udacity has already followed the same path.

Coursera mission statement from early 2012: "We are committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it." 2016: "Meh."

Hillary Clinton's technology policy.

• Generally progressive, favoring innovation.
• Internet access is a high priority.
• Favors international regulation of Internet, in order to help prevent national governments from restricting the rights of individuals.

"Observatory is a fast and easy way for website operators to get direct feedback on whether their sites are following best practices in web security."

https://observatory.mozilla.org/

An entertaining history of the rise and fall of the Gopher protocol.

Stephen Downes on why he's quitting Facebook.

Facebook has me going both ways. They make me pay money in order to allow people to read my content, and then they throw advertising at the people who are trying to read that content. And now they're tightening the screws.

And even as it clamps down on content, Facebook favours the wrong people, siding once again with the bottom-dwellers of the internet.

APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) espionage malware: Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu, Regin, Equation, Careto, ProjectSauron

Fifty of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials, many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” to be president and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Clay Shirky explains that voting for a third-party presidential candidate is wasting your vote.

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.

The Harvard Republican club explains why they won't endorse Donald Trump.

Time management tips from Quincy Larson.

• Keep a simple to-do list.
• If you can do something in a few minutes, do it now. Otherwise, add it to your to-do list.
• Avoid unnecessary meetings, and even video chat. Prefer email or other asynchronous channels.
• Listen to podcasts and audiobooks while you exercise.

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new Web protocol that uses UDP instead of TCP.

"We demonstrate that well-known compression-based attacks such as CRIME or BREACH (but also lesser-known ones) can be executed by merely running JavaScript code in the victim’s browser. This is possible because HEIST allows us to determine the length of a response, without having to observe traffic at the network level."

HEIST attacks can be blocked by disabling 3rd-party cookies.

https://twitter.com/vanhoefm<br> https://twitter.com/tomvangoethem

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."

"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."

Republican Caroline McCain explains why she'll be voting for Hillary Clinton.

https://twitter.com/ccmccain

"In December, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge."

Neil Fraser says Vietnam is doing well with computer science education.

"If grade 5 students in Vietnam are performing at least on par with their grade 11 peers in the USA, what does grade 11 in Vietnam look like? I walked into a high school CS class, again without any advance notice. The class was working on the assignment below (partially translated by their teacher for my benefit afterwards). Given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls, count the number of enclosed areas, and measure the size of the largest one."

DNC email hack, and possible Russian involvement.

Q&A session with Alan Kay, June 2016.

"Election polls won’t predict election results, but coverage of them, and the use of them by politicians, may be shifting voter perceptions of what is normal and tolerable—and popular. There is strength in numbers, especially if you would like to voice bigoted (or, as Trump likes to say, un-politically correct) opinions. America is a diverse nation, and Trump has a large base of genuine support. But part of the way he gains that support is by indicating it is okay for people to publicly join him, no matter how ugly or intolerant his ideas might be."

"The new report shows that unauthorized access to copyrighted media is on a steady decline, with only 5% of Internet users getting all of their online media through rogue methods, and only 15% of users consuming any infringing content. Similar studies in the US have shown a steady decline in unauthorized downloads here too. The numbers show that if Hollywood really wants to curb infringing media consumption, the best thing it can do is improve its official offerings."

"If given the opportunity all teachers would stop grading their students. You’ll never find a teacher who loves grading papers, projects or tests. In 20 years as a classroom teacher, I heard more complaints about grading than anything else."

"So, if they hate it so much, why don’t teachers stop grading? Because parents, administrators, and bureaucrats won’t let them."

Mark Barnes

"Real gifted education (not gifted programs) involves seeing every student as an individual, finding out what they need, what they want to learn, and what they care about, and then adapting the instructional environment and curriculum to those needs, wants, and passions."

"There’s no reason we can’t do this for everyone, letting gifted students soar without the downsides of selective gifted programs."

Gerald Aungst

"Physical Web" - Broadcast an https url by Bluetooth, which will notify nearby mobile devices of your site or service.

https://google.github.io/physical-web/

Amazon.com has started allowing Chinese suppliers to sell direct on the site. This has created a problem with counterfeit products, which can be dangerous.

This post suggests that counterfeit physical products are one result of failure to protect intellectual property rights on the Internet. (It looks like a good site for arguments supporting intellectual property rights. It has a podcast.)

"The Art of the Deal" author Tony Schwartz expresses remorse for helping create Donald Trump's celebrity status.

hyperuniform distribution - Appears random at smaller scales, but more predictable at larger scales.

How to spot assholes and reduce the damage they do to your organization.

"The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since."

"In 1983, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to harness the Domesday philosophy to modern Britain. With the large user base of microcomputers in British schools (helped by a government subsidy) it was feasible to ask schools around the UK to survey their areas to produce a database of how Britain looked to the British in 1986."

"...the original Domesday book is still readable after (at the time) 925 years while our 15 year old one is not ... unless you have the original computer/videodisc system and it still works of course."

"The first visible manifestation of a reappearance of the BBC Domesday Project was achieved in a project called CAMiLEON, which was a research project that investigated emulation as a digital preservation strategy and was based at the Universities of Michigan and Leeds. [CAMiLEON web site ... with supreme irony this is now only available via the internet archive]"

Decentralized Web Summit (June 8-9, 2016) Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow

Mike Caulfield envisions OER production and utility being enhanced by "choral explanations" via websites similar to StackExchange or Quora.

SocArXiv - an upcoming open archive of papers in the social sciences modeled on arxiv.org.

https://twitter.com/socarxiv

Donald Trump and members of his staff have disturbingly close ties to Russia.