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David McGavock

How to hack RSS to Reduce Information Overload - 3 views

gigaom.com/...to-reduce-information-overload

RSS pipes hack collaboration Dawn Foster evaluate resources information_literacy

shared by David McGavock on 07 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume
  • but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you.
  • There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume
  • There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume
  • The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about.
  • at about the blogs where one in five or one in 10 posts are relevant for you?
  • the real magic is in filtering.
  • My favorite filtering tool is Yahoo Pipes
  • which lets me filter an RSS feed using various criteria: URL, author, date, content and more. 
  • and my some blogs filtered for just the best posts using PostRank.
  • The best thing about PostRank is that you can get an RSS feed of just the best posts from a particular publisher, and that feed then includes the PostRank score,
  • you can do even more hacking on the PostRank RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes.
  • Another technique that helps me to consume information more efficiently is to modify the format of many of my RSS feeds
  • By bringing more details into the title, I can avoid spending time clicking to get more information.
  • The final trick is to use Web APIs to gather additional data
  • isten to the audio from my session
  • David McGavock on 07 Apr 11
     
    There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don't care about.
David McGavock

Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker | Co.Design - 2 views

www.fastcodesign.com/...lems-find-ways-to-fail-quicker

design solve problems thinking evaluate critical critical_thinking

shared by David McGavock on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • a British industry magnate by the name of Henry Kremer wondered: Could an airplane fly powered only by the pilot's body? Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to try to turn his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a human-powered plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers set a half-mile apart.
  • A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible.
  • MacCready’s insight was that everyone who was working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without a base of knowledge based on empirical tests. Triumphantly, they would complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes later, a year's worth of work would smash into the ground.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The problem was the problem. MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human-powered flight. That was a red herring. The problem was the process itself.
  • He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months? And he did.
  • MacCready’s Gossamer Condor flew 2,172 meters to win the prize. A little more than a year after that, the Gossamer Albatross flew across the English Channel.
  • So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.
  • David McGavock on 11 Apr 11
     
    "Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker A case study in how an intractable problem -- creating a human-powered airplane -- was solved by reframing the problem. " So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.
David McGavock

Critical Thinking Podcasts - 8 views

www.doesthismakesense.com/index.php

critical thinking podcasts information_literacy evaluate resources

shared by David McGavock on 02 May 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 02 May 11
     
    "These inventive presentations promise to strengthen our human abilities. And, perhaps, to rationally evolve our shared human culture and teach us to wisely manage our world."
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 0 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept.
  • Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but ornamental.
  • Merton proposes an articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of this work.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an unequivocal way.
  • It was in the 1930s that Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • As Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal work – On the Shoulders of Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965.
  • Merton provides interesting statistics to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time, serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000, serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on the World Wide Web in 2001.
  • The Italian version was published in 2002, after Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could welcome the appearance of the original English version.
  •  Now let us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its significance to the sociology of science.
  • The first few chapters elucidate the origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes of Serendip in Venice.
  •  In a letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.”
  • in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with Horace Mann was published.
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  • Serendipity was used in print for the first time by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
  • Edward Solly had the honor
  • Solly defined serendipity as “a particular kind of natural cleverness”
  • he stressed Walpole’s implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait.
  • Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery.
  • The ambiguity was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute and an event or phenomenon
  • the word appeared in all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909 and 1934.
  • authors reveal disparities in definition
  • To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal attribute respectively.
  •  Even if Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use of the concept in his theorizing.
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
  • “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
  • David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
     
    Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.
David McGavock

Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities? - 1 views

mashable.com/...users-products-rushkoff

information_literacy evaluate critical_thinking digitalliteracy programmed markets

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • “The dot com boom failed because people didn’t want to buy shit online. They were just talking to each other,” said Douglas Rushkoff in a recent keynote speech at the WebVisions conference in Portland. “Content was never king. Contact was always king.”
  • We spoke to Rushkoff about the current state of web culture and his crusade to encourage programming literacy.
  • You argue that users are not the true customers of social networks like Facebook. What are the ramifications of this?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • We understand that the job of the person working in the Gap is to sell us clothes.“Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers.”But we don’t apply this same very basic logic to online spaces. The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers.
  • We are more likely to use our Facebook profile as a mirror, chalking up its deficiencies to the technology itself. We don’t consider that the ways in which Facebook screws with the way we see ourselves is its function, rather than some random artifact of social networking.
  • s this different from TV networks selling commercials against popular shows that they deliver over the airwaves for free?
  • But imagine what it would be like if you didn’t know that the evening news was funded primarily by Big Pharma. You would actually believe the stuff that they’re saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.
  • When (if ever) are these free technologies worth trading a bit of privacy for?
  • The only thing standing between you and total surveillance is the fact that they don’t yet have the processing capability to mine their data effectively.
  • In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
  • You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
  • Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO.
  • You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
  • I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy.
  • If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
  • I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?”
  • You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
  • We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources.
  • It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.
  • rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
  • David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
     
    We've finally figured out how to monetize social interaction, and Rushkoff, an award-winning author and media theorist who writes and speaks regularly on these topics, has reservations.
David McGavock

Global Voices · About - 0 views

globalvoicesonline.org/about

thinking evaluate information_literacy resources international world critical thinking

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
     
    Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices."
David McGavock

Our mission - Gapminder.org - 3 views

www.gapminder.org/...our-mission

evaluate resources statistics visualisation data gapminder

shared by David McGavock on 03 Jul 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 03 Jul 11
     
    "About Gapminder Fighting the most devastating myths by building a fact-based world view that everyone understands. Gapminder is a non-profit venture - a modern "museum" on the Internet - promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals."
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