Group items tagged

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

hundreds of people have offered themselves up to be interrogated via Reddit's crowdsourced question-and-answer sessions. They open a new thread on the social network and say, for example, "IamA nanny for a super-rich family in China AMA!"

Then, the assembled Redditors ask whatever they want. Questions are voted up and down, and generally speaking, the most popular ones get answered. These interviews can last for as little as an hour or go on for several days.  googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display("adIn-article3"); }); Politicians tend to play things pretty straight, but the regular people and niche celebrities tend to open up in fascinating ways. 

Over the last several years, the IamA subreddit has gone from interesting curiosity to a juggernaut of a media brand. Its syntax and abbreviations have invaded the public consciousness like Wired's aged Wired/Tired/Expired rubric. It's a common Twitter joke now to say, "I [did something commonplace], ask me anything." 

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business

Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.

Meanwhile, it is hoped that millions of people of "faith and moral belief" from across the world will have signed up to an e-petition, ourvoices.net, which urges the world's political leaders to act boldly on climate change, both in New York and at next year's "make-or-break" session in Paris.

That is certainly an opinion to which she is entitled as a concerned global citizen, but it is not clear how her job as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change entitles her to lobby for the virtual destruction of a sector of the world economy which, whatever its misdeeds, will have a part to play in any rational approach to the planet's future.

Stilll, the good news is that there has apparently been learning on both sides

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale." People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won. Enlarge ImageClose Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang , which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.

using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.

Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.

But history shows that this is wrong.

Bundesinnenminister Thomas de Maizière und sein Vorgänger Otto Schily sind sich einig: Die Zusammenarbeit mit den amerikanischen Geheimdiensten sei trotz der NSA-Affäre geboten, weil sie „Menschenleben schützt“.

„Wir müssen verhindern, dass diese gewaltbereiten, fehlgeleiteten Menschen - inzwischen reden wir von etwa 450 plus Dunkelziffer - in den Dschihad ziehen und am Ende mit Kampferfahrung nach Deutschland zurückkommen“,

„Deshalb sollten wir uns auch zurückhalten, wenn wir z.B. wegen der NSA-Affäre Kritik an den Vereinigten Staaten üben“, sagte Schily. „Diese Zusammenarbeit ist geboten und schützt Leben“

in a self-report questionnaire completed by more than 80,000 American adults, self-control ranked lowest among 24 strengths of character.

three out of four parents said they thought self-control has declined in the past half-century.

Without a time machine that allows us to travel backward and compare Americans from different decades on the same self-control measures, we can’t be sure. Indeed, the scant scientific evidence on the question suggests that if anything, the capacity to delay gratification may be increasing.

On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.

As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.

I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.

In 1945, the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an orphanage that took extra care to make sure its infants were not infected with disease. The children received first-class nutrition and medical care, but they were barely touched, to minimize their contact with germs. The approach was a catastrophe. Thirty-seven percent of the babies died before reaching age 2.

It turns out that empathetic physical contact is essential for life. Intimate touch engages the emotions and wires the fibers of the brain together.

The famous Grant Study investigated a set of men who had gone to Harvard in the 1940s. The men who grew up in loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from loveless ones. They suffered from far less chronic illness and much lower rates of dementia in old age. A loving home was the best predictor of life outcomes.

“Let your winners run” is one of the oldest adages in investing. One of the newest ideas is that the winners may be running away with everything.

Modern capitalism is built on the idea that as companies get big, they become fat and happy, opening themselves up to lean and hungry competitors that can underprice and overtake them. That cycle of creative destruction may be changing in ways that help explain the seemingly unstoppable rise of the stock market.

U.S. companies are moving toward a winner-take-all system in which giants get stronger, not weaker, as they expand.

According to the Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis (also known as linguistic relativity) language does not only reflect our way of thinking, but is also able to shape it. This hypothesis became known in the 1950s. People from different cultures and languages view the world differently and organize their reality differently. The way that they think is influenced by the grammar and vocabulary of their language

? In the Arapaho culture, for example, there is only one word for “father” and for “uncle” (2). Does this now mean that a child of this culture does not differentiate between his/her own father and the uncle? I (personally) do not think so, but this is something that the anthropologists have to answer. As so often, I think that the answer is somewhere in between. There are certainly many concepts that depend very strongly on language

This is how science works, and how it should work. If the theory fails to make the correct predictions, then you have to replace the theory. This is what you call scientific progress. You replace old theories with better ones.

And now to a question that some of you are burning to know the answer of: “Is the falsification principle falsifyable?” I once read, I don’t know if it’s true, that Karl Popper used to kick his students out of the classroom for asking such a question. The falsification principle is that what its name says, it is a principle and not a scientific theory. No, the falsification principle itself is not falsifyable, it is not scientific. It belongs to metascience, or philosophy. Don’t forget: the scientific method – hypothesis, experimentation, observation, conclusion – is also not falsifyable, still it is used by scientists on a daily basis.

It is a powerful illustration on how a visual representation (sense perception!) of numbers in the form of colorful dots greatly helps in understanding statistics. Tables with numbers alone are too difficult to perceive. Rosling’s computer program makes these numbers accessible.

It links the areas of knowledge arts, statistics (math), with the ways of knowing sense perception and emotions

Knowledge questions (KQs) form the heart of the TOK course, and provide us with the opportunity to discuss, explore, and sometimes argue about the way in which we acquire, use, and evaluate our knowledge about the world. Good KQs should be about how we know about the world, rather than what we know about the world (in other words, second-order knowledge, rather than first-order knowledge), which is what distinguishes TOK from the other DP courses. Sometimes the difference between these types of knowledge is difficult to distinguish, but you’ll get better at it with practice, as you progress through the course. The KQs below relate to our fourth Big Question for the human sciences, ‘Perspectives’. Note that many of them link to other themes, areas of knowledge, and BQs, so one of the first things you could consider is how they relate to, and impact on, other aspects of the course.

The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.

Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.

Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age

I stopped getting in fights on the net, and tried to practice gentleness and kindness with people I found here. I didn’t defend myself, rally the troops, or pick sides. Instead, in the ever-growing Mexican stand-off of social media, I decided to put my gun down first.

It was not an easy thing to give up the idea of winning the fights, especially online. I am naturally good with words, and I’ve known it since I was young. I have felt strong winning an argument, slamming people, sometimes watching them log off, in shame. I have slam dunked the response, and crushed egos under well-timed insults. But that strength was always so precarious by comparison to a practice of gentleness — what if they won the fight next time? What if I wasn’t fast enough, and I ended with the onlookers jeering me, telling me I should go kill myself instead of my particular bad guy? Sometimes I fought with people for a show, so that onlookers wouldn’t make the same mistake my opponents did. But in my year of Ahimsa, I found that the performative gentleness was, like the gentle mind, much more powerful.

The internet is made of people. The internet only gets better if we get better.