In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.

Image made with the help of BibleMunger 2.0

Replied to a post by Chris Aldrich (stream.boffosocko.com)

@amandalicastro Thanks. Purchased. Even if the answer doesn't lie within, @CathyNDavidson may be one of only a few people one could trust with such a book title. Also picked up Now You See it to compare with Annie Murphy Paul's new text The Extended Mind.

I finished it Saturday evening. Sadly the answer doesn’t lay here. There’s a great history of higher education since the late 1800s specific to Charles Eliot’s ideas and the subsequent fallout. Sadly he was reforming Puritan education based on his then-current circumstances. He apparently didn’t delve back further to reverse the Puritan reforms from almost 300 years earlier. 

The book is great and has some excellent solid examples to act as a guide. Thanks for the recommendation.

I still strongly suspect the pattern goes back to the Puritan educational reforms of the late 1500s with Peter Ramus. I’ll have to delve into some of his writings and perhaps the work of Walter Ong to see the outcome. If others have ideas of where to look specifically, I’d love to hear them.

Replied to a tweet by Annie Murphy Paul (Twitter)

Chris, you may be interested in this review of "Now You See It" that I wrote . . . https://t.co/TnnbQ3NHWf

— Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul) September 25, 2021

Thanks for the great cross-reference! It was incredibly prescient writing for 2011. Reminiscent of Audrey Watters work, but from a neuropsychology research angle.
Annotations: /> Can’t wait to delve into your book next. 55797448 https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/17/55797425/ https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/17/55797425/#comments Sun, 17 Oct 2021 07:25:51 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/17/55797425/

Read - Finished Reading: The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux by Cathy N. Davidson (Basic Books)

Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925. It was in those decades that the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, all in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy N. Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy. From the Ivy League to community colleges, she introduces us to innovators who are remaking college for our own time by emphasizing student-centered learning that values creativity in the face of change above all. The New Education ultimately shows how we can teach students not only to survive but to thrive amid the challenges to come.

Read - Reading: The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux by Cathy N. Davidson (Basic Books)

Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925. It was in those decades that the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, all in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy N. Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy. From the Ivy League to community colleges, she introduces us to innovators who are remaking college for our own time by emphasizing student-centered learning that values creativity in the face of change above all. The New Education ultimately shows how we can teach students not only to survive but to thrive amid the challenges to come.

Read the last few chapters. Not as strong or useful to me as the opening chapters.

• 100% 100% done; loc 5471 of 5471

Fellow #roamans and users of #obsidian, #logseq, #remnote, #workflowy etc. Do you know some really obscure and unknown #roam-like apps out there? :) E.g., I have found "Note garden" recently. #tftjourney #tft pic.twitter.com/Xzdm3JAWHa

— CatoMinor (@CatoMinor3) October 14, 2021

A few of us have been keeping lists of some of these tools for thought at so one can test, try, or compare user interfaces for building one’s own custom version. Contributions to this public wiki welcome.

Emotionally expressive music and dance occur together across the world. This may be because features shared across the senses are represented the same way even in different sensory brain areas, putting music and movement in directly comparable terms. These shared representations may arise from a general need to identify environmentally relevant combinations of sensory features, particularly those that communicate emotion. To test the hypothesis that visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure, we created music and animation stimuli with crossmodally matched features expressing a range of emotions. Participants confirmed that each emotion corresponded to a set of features shared across music and movement. A subset of participants viewed both music and animation during brain scanning, revealing that representations in auditory and visual brain areas were similar to one another. This shared representation captured not only simple stimulus features but also combinations of features associated with emotion judgments. The posterior superior temporal cortex represented both music and movement using this same structure, suggesting supramodal abstraction of sensory content. Further exploratory analysis revealed that early visual cortex used this shared representational structure even when stimuli were presented auditorily. We propose that crossmodally shared representations support mutually reinforcing dynamics across auditory and visual brain areas, facilitating crossmodal comparison. These shared representations may help explain why emotions are so readily perceived and why some dynamic emotional expressions can generalize across cultural contexts.

This portends some interesting results with relation to mnemonics and particularly songlines and indigenous peoples’ practices which integrate song, movement, and emotion.

Preprint:

Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together?

We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain.

— Beau Sievers (@beausievers) October 12, 2021

ᔥ Beau Sievers in “New work published today in Current Biology Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception With @ThaliaWheatley @k_v_n_l @parkinsoncm @sergeyfogelson (thread after coffee!) / Twitter (10/12/2021 09:26:10)

I’m interested in aphantasia because I can’t savvy mind and memory without the visual/spatial imagination. How does it work otherwise? https://t.co/Jmz8bawk7W

— Seth Largo (@SethLargo) Oct 11, 2021

Perhaps this post by a well-known mnemonist and writer in the space might be a place to start? ]]> https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/10/55796524/feed/ 4 55796524 https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/10/55796518/ https://boffosocko.com/2021/10/10/55796518/#comments Sun, 10 Oct 2021 20:04:40 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/?p=55796518 I’m curious if anyone has created lists of graduate programs in education that are actively teaching/researching pedagogy described in @CathyNDavidson‘s #TheNewEducation? I’m considering tying some of my interests into a potential new career path.

The Illustrated Woman: Directed by Ken Olin. With Alexa Davalos, Rupert Evans, Luke Kleintank, DJ Qualls. Joe and Juliana must act quickly as a vicious bounty hunter known as The Marshal arrives in Canon City. Tagomi makes plans with Wegener to pass valuable secrets from the Reich, and Frank plots his revenge against the Japanese.

The New World: Directed by David Semel. With Alexa Davalos, Rupert Evans, Luke Kleintank, DJ Qualls. Joe Blake, a resistance fighter, leaves German New York with cargo for neutral Colorado. In Japanese San Francisco, Juliana Crane receives footage of the Allies winning the war and a bus ticket to Colorado from her sister. There, she meets Joe. Joe reveals a dark secret.

Monday on the NewsHour, we look into the deepening standoff between President Joe Biden and Senate Republicans over raising the debt ceiling. Then, a major oil spill off the coast of Southern California threatens wildlife as crews race to contain the damage. And, the Supreme Court takes on abortion, gun rights and more divisive issues as it starts a new term.

The Ambush: Directed by Douglas Mackinnon. With Michael Nardone, David Maybrick, Antonio Magro, Keeley Hawes. A police convoy escorting a civilian under a witness protection scheme is attacked, the witness hospitalized and all the police officers killed, except Inspector Lindsay Denton, who organized the operation at very short notice and who only informed DCC Dryden of the route. Ted Hastings asks Steve and Kate to interview her but Kate pulls out, claiming one of the dead officers, Jayne Akers, was a friend - though she has been having an affair with Jayne's husband Rich. Her place is taken by Georgia Trotman, who is troubled that the men are savage with their interrogation, treating Lindsay as a suspect and delving into her finances. Lindsay herself is moved to a missing persons unit but is shown to have a violent streak, attacking a noisy neighbour. Kate follows her to the retirement home where her mother lives and finds she has rung the hospital from a payphone. Georgia and Steve attend at the hospital where somebody is trying to kill the witness and who kills Georgia.

Tight opening… I’m already bought into the series, but this is a heck of an opener.

The President Kissed Me: Directed by Michael Uppendahl. With Sarah Paulson, Beanie Feldstein, Annaleigh Ashford, Margo Martindale. Monica reveals to Linda that she is having an affair with the most powerful man in the world.

The Punch: Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal. With Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Maggie Siff, Malin Akerman. The pressure from the US Attorney starts to affect Axe. Chuck uses the past to get the upper hand. And the case against Axe Capital gains a powerful weapon when Connerty turns a member of Axe's inner circle into an informant.

The Deal: Directed by James Foley. With Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Maggie Siff, Malin Akerman. Wendy facilitates a deal that hinges on a meeting between Chuck and Axe.

The Good Life: Directed by Neil LaBute. With Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Maggie Siff, Malin Akerman. Axe orders his traders to unload their positions, before he unceremoniously disappears. Wags and Wendy struggle to maintain morale. Meanwhile, Chuck intensifies his investigation and sends the FBI to make a surprising arrest.

Short Squeeze: Directed by James Foley. With Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Maggie Siff, Malin Akerman. Axe must fend off a short squeeze led by Chuck's father. Chuck learns about the inner workings of Axe Capital, but must also take action against his father for stock manipulation. Axe reckons with a betrayal.

YumTime: Directed by Scott Hornbacher. With Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Maggie Siff, Malin Akerman. Chuck discovers that a rival has made inroads in the Axe case and that he needs to get it back. Meanwhile, Axe makes an activist play for a family owned bakery corporation in a move that reverberates back to Chuck.

Directed by Julie Cohen, Betsy West. With Patricia Bell-Scott, Pauli Murray, Dolores Chandler, Brittney Cooper. A look at the life and ideas of Pauli Murray, a non-binary Black lawyer, activist and poet who influenced both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall.

Couldn’t make it to the Women’s march today, but watching this was an incredibly enriching replacement.

Full Disclosure: Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. With Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Joshua Malina, Janel Moloney. Press leaks lead to the revelation that former VP John Hoynes is about to release a tell-all book about the administration.

An Khe: Directed by Alex Graves. With Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Joshua Malina. A Navy Hawkeye AWACS crew is missing in North Korea, a Broadcaster has called CJ a chicken and a proposed tax break for stay at home moms causes Josh stress. Amidst the usual West Wing mêlée, Leo finds himself hearing things about the man who saved his life in Vietnam, that he doesn't believe.

The Warfare of Genghis Khan: Directed by Bill D'Elia. A nuclear device is tested in the Indian Ocean, but none of the known nuclear powers will claim responsibility, leading to the possibility of a terrorist group holding missile tests. Vice President Russell, heretofore dismissed by west wing staff as a joke, a four-term congressman alleged to be securely in the pocket of a large Colorado mining company, recalls a junket he'd taken early in his political career in which a drunken Israeli statesman confessed to secret missile tests. Russell visits the sit. room and puts the military and national security leaders at ease, leading the president and Leo to reassess the man's political gravitas. Bartlet then drags the Israeli p.m. to the White House, where they debate the power of the U.S. to dictate which states should have nuclear capabilities.

One of my favorite episodes, and not just because I make a brief appearance.

I will say that you don’t want to annoy the producers or they’ll snipe at you from their bully pulpit. For those who haven’t seen the episode, CJ unceremoniously blows off my call.

Link to the Zoom video conference will be visible above from 6:45pm (BST) and moderated throughout by the event organizers Calum and Ana.

Bookmarked Gardens and Streams II: Notes and Thoughts by Tracy Durnell (tracydurnell.com)

So glad I could make it to this IndieWeb popup! Interesting to hear other viewpoints and talk things through.

Bookmarked Getting More Women Involved in the IndieWeb by Tracy Durnell (tracydurnell.com)

I was happy to see another woman attending this IndieWeb popup event, but would like to figure out how to bring more women into the IndieWeb sphere.

Buried: Directed by Michelle MacLaren. With Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris. Hank is determined to bring down Walt. Walt scrambles to hide evidence before Hank gets to it, and Skyler tries to stop Hank and Marie from taking away the kids.

Directed by Bryan Cranston. With Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris. Walt is out of the meth business and trying to move on with his life. Jesse tries to get rid of his money. Hank now knows that Walt is the famous Heisenberg.

Directed by Michelle MacLaren. With Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris. Walt expands his business overseas, and the money is pouring in.

Directed by Thomas Schnauz. With Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris. Mike and Jesse are out. Now Walt has to handle things on his own. Hank finally finds a rat in Mike's gang.

You can still see what the first version looked like here:]]> https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/20/55796051/feed/ 20 55796051 https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/18/55795996/ https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/18/55795996/#respond Sun, 19 Sep 2021 06:33:57 +0000 https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/18/55795996/

Fresno State's Jake Haener was able to overcome a crushing hit to his right hip to lead the Bulldogs to an upset victory over No. 13 UCLA.

Read Ebooks Are an Abomination by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic)

If you hate them, it’s not your fault.

Ian Bogost has a nice look at the UI affordances and areas for growth in the e-reading space.

A of annotations
theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

What any individual infers about their hopes and dreams for an e-reader derives from their understanding of reading in the first place. You can’t have books without bookiness. Bookiness. That’s the word Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer and longtime bookmaker, uses to describe the situation. “It’s the essence that makes someone feel like they’re using a book,” he told me. Like pornography or sandwiches, you know bookiness when you see it. Or feel it? Either way, most people can’t identify what it is in the abstract. ❧

definition: bookiness

Does this only come out because there’s something that’s book-tangential or similar and it needs to exist to describe the idea of not-book, book-adjacent, or book-like on some sort of spectrum of bookishness.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:28PM

The ancient Romans sometimes connected wax tablets with leather or cords, suggesting a prototype of binding. Replacing the wax with leaves allowed many pages to be stacked atop one another, then sewn or otherwise bound together. ❧

early book prototypes
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:30PM

In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work. ❧

Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I’m reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I’ve transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:33PM

If you have a high-quality hardbound book nearby, pick it up and look at the top and bottom edges of the binding, near the spine, with the book closed. The little stripey tubes you see are called head and tail bands (one at the top, one at the bottom). They were originally invented to reinforce stitched binding, to prevent the cover from coming apart from the leaves. Today’s mass-produced hardcover books are glued rather than sewn, which makes head and tail bands purely ornamental. And yet for those who might notice, a book feels naked without such details. ❧

It is an odd circumstance that tail bands are still used on modern books that don’t need them. From a manufacturing standpoint, the decrease in cost would dictate they disappear, however they must add some level of bookiness that they’re worth that cost.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:37PM

One site of that erosion, which may help explain ebook reticence, can be found in self-published books. For people predisposed to sneer at the practice, a lack of editing or the absence of publisher endorsement and review might justify self-published works’ second-class status. That matter is debatable. More clear is the consequence of disintermediation: Nobody takes a self-published manuscript and lays it out for printing in a manner that conforms with received standards. And so you often end up with a perfect-bound Word doc instead of a book. That odd feeling of impropriety isn’t necessarily a statement about the trustworthiness of the writer or their ideas, but a sense of dissonance at the book as an object. It’s an eerie gestalt, a foreboding feeling of unbookiness. ❧

Having helped others to self-publish in the past, I definitely do spend a bit of time putting the small sort of bookiness flourishes into their texts.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:41PM

The weird way you tap or push a whole image of a page to the side—it’s the uncanny valley of page turning, not a simulation or replacement of it. ❧

This may be the first time I’ve seen uncanny valley applied to a topic other than recognizing people versus robots or related simulacra.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:44PM

The iPad’s larger screen also scales down PDF pages to fit, making the results smaller than they would be in print. It also displays simulated print margins inside the bezel margin of the device itself, a kind of mise en abyme that still can’t actually be used for the things margins are used for, such as notes or dog-ears. ❧

It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.

I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I’ve noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.

Also, I don’t see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.

In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means “placed into abyss”. It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.

Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:49PM

Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access; that reads for the meaning and force of the words as text first, if not primarily; and that isn’t concerned with the use of books as stores of reader-added information or as memory palaces. ❧

Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.

The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.

I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:53PM

So do all manner of other peculiarities of form, including notations of editions on the verso (the flip side) of the full title page and the running headers all throughout that rename the book you are already reading. ❧

I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation. It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:56PM

Skimming through pages, the foremost feature of the codex, remains impossible in digital books. ❧

This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.

Has anyone built a generalizable text zoom JavaScript library that let’s you progressively summarize an article as you zoom in and out?

(Why yes I am procrastinating my to-do list. You?)

— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) September 17, 2021

Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 01:03PM

“We’ve been thoughtful,” Amazon continued, “about adding only features and experiences that preserve and enhance the reading experience.” The question of whose experience doesn’t seem to come up. ❧

They’re definitely not catering to my reading, annotating, and writing experience.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 01:04PM