Reflections on leaving the Lab – MIT MEDIA LAB – Medium
What originated as an artistic instinct to express loss and longing became a journey where I tried to study and piece together the principles of synthetic biology. I also asked deeper, more philosophical questions: What constitutes natural or unnatural? How could we engineer other organisms or ourselves for the better? Who gets to make those choices? And, whose version of “better” are we championing when “better” is often plastic and subjective?
Removing the Gravity Forms submit button | wawrzyniak.me
The above methods are fine but the submit button is still there, what if there was a way to actually remove the button, good news, there is. Gravity Forms has many hooks you can use, in this case gform_submit_button is the hook Gravity Forms provides so you can change the submit button, the example in the documentation shows how you can replace the element with a element. But how do you use that hook to remove the submit button, well it's easier than you'd think, WordPress has a couple of readymade functions you can call on, so instead of using a custom function you can call on the WordPress __return_false function, by returning false to gform_submit_button no button will be included with the form.
What Happens When a Science Fiction Genius Starts Blogging? | New Republic
In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K. Le Guin started a blog. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century traditional publishing behind her. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms.
Learning From the Feynman Technique – Taking Note – Medium
You’re not alone. The Feynman technique for teaching and communication is a mental model (a breakdown of his personal thought process) to convey information using concise thoughts and simple language. This technique is derived from Feynman’s studying methods when he was a student at Princeton. At Princeton, Feynman started to record and connect the things he did know with those he did not. In the end, Feynman had a comprehensive notebook of subjects that had been disassembled, translated, and recorded. In James Gleick’s biography of Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, he recalled his subject’s technique. “He opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject,” Gleick wrote. Feynman’s technique is also useful for those who find writing a challenge. Feynman had an interesting relationship with writing. Instead of committing his knowledge to paper like many other scientific figures, he chose to use speech as the foundation for many of his published works. He dictated most of his books and memoirs, and his scientific papers were transcribed from his lectures.
Was Charlottesville a Turning Point for the 'Alt-Right'? - The Atlantic
A longtime observer of its online haunts argues that the hodgepodge of people united by antagonism to PC culture were irrevocably divided by the deadly violence at last month’s rally. A passage in Kill All the Normies argues that “the alt-right has more in common with the 1960s left slogan that it is forbidden to forbid than it does with anything most people recognize as part of any traditionalist right.” That was the story until Charlottesville: The alt-right community had ideological racists in the same Internet subculture as young people alienated by the worst excesses of speech policing on Tumblr, or drawn to the aesthetics of 4chan, or taking a juvenile delight in breaking any taboos around them, much as young people in the 1960s did. Ensconced in that toxic milieu, they moved closer to its ideological racists, acting for reasons even they themselves didn’t fully understand or face. In other words, Charlottesville was clarifying for the less extreme element on the alt-right. “The vast majority of the people who seem to be making up the bulk of this online are not willing to go that far,” Nagle wrote, “not even close. And so it’s made it all very real. All the different groups around the hard core of the alt-right kind of peeled off. They’ve all denounced the alt right, they don’t want to be associated with them.”
Photographer Uses the Golden Ratio to Compose Cinematic Images Full of Drama
As an art student, Jon Sparkman was introduced to the Rule of Thirds, which are guidelines for how to compose an image. Essentially, the picture is divided into a grid, and the intersecting points are where the impactful parts of the picture should take place. Sparkman, however, makes use of its “superior, wiser, and elusive brother,” the Golden Ratio (aka the Fibonacci Spiral) to construct his compositions. The UK-based photographer demonstrates how the Golden Ratio creates a dynamic image that's less static and more engaging than the Rule of Thirds. Its sweeping curve and tight coil is “like a giant subliminal road sign pointing the eyes towards where you want them to go.” To prove his theory, Sparkman has placed the curve over several of his photographs. By doing so, he showcases areas of drama and movement. Even though these aren't action-packed shots, the clever arrangement of the characters and environment makes us feel like we’ve stepped into dramatic and/or emotional moment from a play or film.
Some of our finest products at GIPHY have come out of hours of internal testing, tweaking, and joking around. If a GIF that we serve up makes you laugh, it’s almost certainly made us laugh, too. Our Slack /GIPHY commands are a perfect example of that. So, we wanted to share just a few of the secret commands we get a kick out of. Think of them as our version of the In-n-Out secret menu. And there’s more to come!
“Students as Creators” and the Theology of the Attention Economy | Hapgood
Attention (and knowledge of how to get that attention) is still important, of course. But attention for what? For what purpose? I’ve moved from the question of “How do we express ourselves on the internet?” to “How do we be better people on the internet?” Or maybe most importantly, “How do we use the internet to become better people?” Sometimes that involves creating, of course. But if we wish to do more than reinforce the rhetoric of the attention economy, we have to stop seeing that as some sort of peak activity. These skills aren’t a pyramid you climb, and creation is not a destination. Graduating a few more students who understand that will likely make the world a better place for everyone.
Welcome to my channel where I give awful writing advice and lots of sarcasm. Mostly these videos are just an excuse for me to complain about tropes I don't like and cliches I keep seeing in certain genres. Needless to say, please do NOT follow any of my advice.
(4) BEGINNING A STORY - Terrible Writing Advice - YouTube
Starting a story is easy! Just drown the reader in so much info dumping and exposition that they can’t possibly escape! Once the reader is stuck, then trap them in a web of flashbacks, in medias res, and prologues. They will never escape then and will be forced to read the rest of your story. Don’t forget to use a mirror to describe how the main character looks!
Los Angeles Review of Books Digital Editions – The Digital Revolution: Debating the Promise and Perils of the Internet and Algorithmic Lives in the Last Years of the Obama Administration - Los Angeles Review of Books
PLENTY OF RAPTUROUS CLAIMS have been made about the internet as an agent of democratization and innovation. Many more claims have been made about its Pandora-like perils, and how these herald our individual and collective downfalls, whether by taking away our jobs, exposing our darkest selves, or turning us into mindless automata disappearing into “click-bait rabbit holes.” The internet has allegedly enabled a new kind of populism, as well as political gridlock and the infelicities of the 2016 US presidential election. Clearly, it is the stuff of paradox — and possibly, as historians like Yuval Harari and others suggest, of Faustian bargains. The LARB Science and Technology section has been capturing scholarly and popular views on the digital revolution in a series of essays and reviews that insist on historical perspective — on the longue durée. They were all written in the last years of the Obama administration, before the Trump one; they were first published on the LARB website and are now collected in this volume. They express what experts in their respective fields got right — and what they may have gotten wrong. They examine the stakes. In some cases, our contributors dismantle their colleagues’ arguments, especially when those arguments express a certain knee-jerk zeitgeist (e.g., the digital age is deskilling us or making us stupid). Internet philosopher David Weinberger of Harvard University, for instance, takes on the argument that the net is turning us into passive knowers. On the contrary, he counters, the net is transforming knowledge in ways that reveal the flaws inherent in past ways of knowing. “Networked-knowing” is, in his view, a positive phenomenon — it replaces the manufactured or “curated cohesion” of past knowledge regimes. As for the claim that the net reinforces echo chambers (and false news), he plays the contrarian again, countering that those chambers are now, thanks to the net, shot through with holes that anyone, including a teenager trapped in an otherwise airless cult, can follow just by clicking her finger.
John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin · LRB 17 August 2017
That’s the crucial thing about Facebook, the main thing which isn’t understood about its motivation: it does things because it can. Zuckerberg knows how to do something, and other people don’t, so he does it. Motivation of that type doesn’t work in the Hollywood version of life, so Aaron Sorkin had to give Zuck a motive to do with social aspiration and rejection. But that’s wrong, completely wrong. He isn’t motivated by that kind of garden-variety psychology. He does this because he can, and justifications about ‘connection’ and ‘community’ are ex post facto rationalisations. The drive is simpler and more basic. That’s why the impulse to growth has been so fundamental to the company, which is in many respects more like a virus than it is like a business. Grow and multiply and monetise. Why? There is no why. Because. Automation and artificial intelligence are going to have a big impact in all kinds of worlds. These technologies are new and real and they are coming soon. Facebook is deeply interested in these trends. We don’t know where this is going, we don’t know what the social costs and consequences will be, we don’t know what will be the next area of life to be hollowed out, the next business model to be destroyed, the next company to go the way of Polaroid or the next business to go the way of journalism or the next set of tools and techniques to become available to the people who used Facebook to manipulate the elections of 2016. We just don’t know what’s next, but we know it’s likely to be consequential, and that a big part will be played by the world’s biggest social network. On the evidence of Facebook’s actions so far, it’s impossible to face this prospect without unease.
Open Research is an open textbook based on the award winning course of the same name. The course ran two facilitated iterations during 2014 and 2015 on Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). Open Research was co-authored and delivered by the OER Hub team, leaders in open education research and open research practices.
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP)
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. ELMCIP involves seven European academic research partners and one non-academic partner who are investigating how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment. Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP is intended both to study the formation and interactions of that community and to further electronic literature research and practice in Europe.
Who's ready to stop working for free? Hopefully you are! If you have any doubts, consult this handy chart below. Start in the middle and work your way to your answer!
The Thesis Whisperer | Just like the horse whisperer – but with more pages
The Thesis Whisperer is a blog newspaper dedicated to the topic of doing a thesis and is edited by Dr Inger Mewburn, Director of research training at the Australian National University
The President of Blank Sucking Nullity | The Baffler
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved. There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life.
“Kids these days” laments are nothing new, but the substance of the lament changes. Lately, it has become fashionable to worry that “kids these days” will be unable to write complex, lengthy essays. After all, the logic goes, social media and text messaging reward short, abbreviated expression. Student writing will be similarly staccato, rushed, or even—horror of horrors—filled with LOL abbreviations and emojis. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Students in first-year composition classes are, on average, writing longer essays (from an average of 162 words in 1917, to 422 words in 1986, to 1,038 words in 2006), using more complex rhetorical techniques, and making no more errors than those committed by freshman in 1917. That’s according to a longitudinal study of student writing by Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen J. Lunsford, “Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study.” In 2006, two rhetoric and composition professors, Lunsford and Lunsford, decided, in reaction to government studies worrying that students’ literacy levels were declining, to crunch the numbers and determine if students were making more errors in the digital age.
How to Publish your Podcast on iTunes from WordPress or Blogger
The Digital Inspiration podcast is now available on iTunes. You can also subscribe to the podcast in other podcatcher apps using this RSS feed. The podcast packages content that is already available on my YouTube channel but a big advantage with podcasts is that you can now download the videos and watch them offline.
An effective thesis cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." A thesis is not a topic; nor is it a fact; nor is it an opinion. "Reasons for the fall of communism" is a topic. "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe" is a fact known by educated people. "The fall of communism is the best thing that ever happened in Europe" is an opinion. (Superlatives like "the best" almost always lead to trouble. It's impossible to weigh every "thing" that ever happened in Europe. And what about the fall of Hitler? Couldn't that be "the best thing"?) A good thesis has two parts. It should tell what you plan to argue, and it should "telegraph" how you plan to argue—that is, what particular support for your claim is going where in your essay.
The Great 78 Project – Community Preservation, Research, Discovery of 78rpm Records
The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records. From about 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated 3 million sides (~3 minute recordings) have been made on 78rpm discs. While the commercially viable recordings will have been restored or remastered onto LP’s or CD, there is still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78rpm discs and recordings. Already, over 20 collections have been selected by the Internet Archive for physical and digital preservation and access. Started by many volunteer collectors, these new collections have been selected, digitized and preserved by the Internet Archive, George Blood LP, and the Archive of Contemporary Music.
Democracy is a clash not a consensus: why we need the agora | Aeon Essays
Such depictions are uncontroversial, and capture much of the flavour of the agora in the later classical era (480-323 BCE) where public and private, politics and profit mingled. But whether they explain the beginnings of the agora in the first place seems less clear. For one might ask: why might a young community feel the need to create a space in which to meet? Certainly people need a place to meet – around a water hole, on a street corner; many African villages conduct their meetings under the shade of a tree. But that people need a space for meeting seems less obvious – and wasn’t there plenty of space around anyway? For what is important about the agora is that it is not simply a space, but rather a defined space, a bounded absence. An upright stone marking the edge of the agora from Epidaurus on the Peloponnese is inscribed: ‘boundary of the agora’. But what might this boundary mean?
Flipgrid - Video for student engagement and formative assessment
Flipgrid is a video discussion community for your classroom that supercharges your students’ voices. You add the topics, your students respond with short videos, and everyone engages!
Citationsy · Create citations, reference lists, and bibliographies
Citationsy is a no-nonsense reference collection and bibliography creation tool for people who value simplicity, privacy, and speed. There are no ads, there’s no tracking, and I don’t sell or give your data to anyone. I built the citation management software I wanted to exist in the world.
Often I’d have set those images as background images to deal with different aspect ratios and do a cover. Something like this. I was never a big fan of this method as I don’t like creating inline css and that’s the only way I could think to do it with dynamically created content in php or javascript. If just felt awkward. Enter object-fit and if you already knew of it I don’t know why you didn’t tell me. You can see the difference it makes in the two examples embedded below. Not earth shattering but really handy for stuff I do all the time.
On Writing: Anne Lamott – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education
One of the things that most frequently causes writers to feel stuck or frustrated is trying to write and edit at the same time. These are two very different cognitive activities, and examining your last three sentences for flaws is a sure way to block the creative impulse that might lead to the next sentence.
Workshop: Making Twitter Bots for Digital and Cultural Literacy – Leonardo Flores, PhD
On Saturday, July 29 at 1:15 pm, I will be offering a workshop on creating Twitter bots at the Digital Pedagogy Lab in Vancouver. Here’s a link to a Google document for the workshop that will allow you to read and make comments on the document. Please feel free to use the comment functionality to chime in and ask questions.
%3Aquality(75)%2Fhttps%253A%252F%252Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%252Fuploads%252F20170710281000246_1cea15e974_k-copy.jpg?width=92&height=&ar=&mode=&format=avif&dpr=2)
