140 characters, just like mom’s.
The sunset was pretty
in Cambridge. The ember
of Sun cast the city
in hues to remember.
Noted game designer Chief Wakamakamu writes:
So, guys. I’m pretty sure that, whenever you played Phoenix Wright, you thought to yourself “Man, this game would be so much better if it was about moral philosophy instead of high-stake courtroom arguments.”
Well, I have come to make all your dreams come true. I’m currently looking for play-testers for Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher, so that we can make it as awesome as it could possibly be before we unleash it on … a starved market.
Sate your hunger. Interrogate antiquity’s moral philosophers for yourself.
Wikipedia has gotten more elaborate and complex to use. Adding a reference, marking something for review, uploading a file or creating a new article now take many steps — and failing to follow them can lead to starting all over. The curators of the core projects are concerned with uniformly high quality, and impatient with contributors who don’t have the expertise and wiki-experience to create something according to policy. Good stubs or photos are deleted for failing to comply with one of a dozen policies, or for inadequate cites or license templates; even when they are in fact derived from reliable sources and freely licensed.
The Article Creation Wizard has a five-step process for drafting an article, after which it is submitted for review by a team of experienced editors, and finally moved to the article namespace. 7 steps for approval is too much overhead for many. And the current notability guidelines on big Wikipedias excludes most local and specialist knowledge.
We need a simpler scratch-space to develop new material:
Since this will be a new sort of compendium or comprehensive cyclopedia, covering all topics, it should have a new name. Something simple, say Newpedia. Scripts can be written to help editors work through the most polished Newpedia items and push them to Wikipedia and Wikisource and Commons. We could invite editors to start doing their rough work on Newpedia, to avoid the conflict and fast reversion on the larger wiki references that make it hard to use for quick new work.
Update: Mako discussed Newpedia (or double-plus-newpedia) in his panel about “Wikipedia in 2022“, and Erik Moeller talked about how the current focus on notability is keeping all of our projects from growing, in his “Ghosts of Wikipedia Future“. I look forward to the video and transcripts.
What do you think? I started a mailing list for people who are interested in developing such a knowledge-project. I look forward to your thoughts, both serious and otherwise 😉
Via Vimeo: on national style, the role of architecture in society, and the future of architecture education in Chile.
This is what I always assumed the best political minds in our country would spend their time doing, solving difficult problems at the highest level of social- and legal-norm creation. Thank you, Mark Takano.
El presidente siguiente (2013-2015)… será mi hermano. Felicitaciones, Sebastian!
The coruscating James Grimmelmann recently published a crisp, clean exorcism of “future conduct” releases in class action suits, in the North Carolina Law Review. Using a number of recent class actions as motivation, including the Google Books case, he patiently and eloquently dissects the ideas behind such carte blanche releases, and the rare cases in which they might be called for.
This is a gem of a monograph – worth reading even if you are not a copyright geek.
From the opening salvo (emphasis mine):
This Article identifies a new and previously unrecognized trend in class-action settlements: releases for the defendant’s future conduct. Such releases, which hold the defendant harmless for wrongs it will commit in the future, are unusually dangerous to class members and to the public… [F]uture-conduct releases pose severe informational problems for class members and for courts… create moral hazard for the defendant, give it concentrated power, and thrust courts into a prospective planning role they are ill-equipped to handle.
Courts should guard against the dangers of future-conduct releases with a standard and a rule. The standard is heightened scrutiny for all settlements containing such releases; the Article describes the warning signs courts must be alert to and the safeguards courts should insist on. The rule is parity of preclusion: a class-action settlement may release future-conduct claims if and only if they could have been lost in litigation. […] The Article concludes by applying its recommendations to seven actual future-conduct settlements, in each case yielding a better result or clearer explanation than the court was able to provide.
If you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to savor all 90 pages of finely referenced background and analysis, a handy comparative timeline is on p.410, the standard and rule start on p.431, and the 7 brief case studies start on p.458.
via the Laboratorium.
Wikidata, the newest Wikimedia Project, is now in very active development, and being used on all of the Wikipedias. Here for instance is the item record for Pope Francis:
From the “too good to be true (but it is)” dept: OneWeirdKernelTrick.com
↬ YanZhu
Read the Big Data and the Topologist series, from the “low-dimensional topology” blog, written by 5+ budding topologicians.
They maintain a handy list of open problems they have discussed.
↬Michael Stone.
From a recent discussion about Web 3.0 and the far future, on the AIR-L list:
In fact, the Web is currently developing Web <30, to be rolled out
with Chrome 25, Firefox 20, Opera 15, and IE 10 later this winter.If you are interested in cutting-edge research and convolving
observation with participation, you can take part in the design of Web
<30 yourself. It is being developed through a massively
multistakeholder open online crowd-refined platform generation
(MMOOCRPG) design.
Building on the exponential success of past
efforts, the development mailing list includes a periodic
distributed auto-immolating critique of its own work, where the future
web is continuously redefined as its own dual.
Jorn Barger, Mortimer Adler, Patrick Gunkel, Vince, Misha Herscu, Popova: what do all of these people have in common? Exploring the densely textured space of possible ideas, the mereology of existence, learning to see implied, hidden, missing, combinatorial spaces.
Ideonomy is a dream of structuring that work; embraced by Gunkel in lists and charts and drawings, never fully realized. Modern tools and languages bring us closer to being able to explore such spaces computationally and comprehensively, to come up with questions about idea space and experiments that can resolve their answer: not in the naively space-filling method of the Library of Babel, but in the equivalent populated entirely by meaningful and informative works.
If you liked Google Reader, you’ll love TheOldReader.com – a site that perfectly replicates the funcionality of the original Google Reader, adding the joy of being part of a reclaimed tool.
Update: Mako points out that newsblur may be even better, and is free software. Huzzah!
Every day for the past two weeks someone different has mentioned in my presence how much they miss Google Reader, and I or someone else has pointed them to this site, to great joy. TOR supports importing of your old GR feed. Most of my G-R-maven friends have switched over by now, so there are at least a few amazing people to share with there.
try and grok science
try and make a gun
explain like I’m five
This just went out by email, from MIT President Reif, who was inaugurated president in September:
To the members of the MIT community:
Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community, took his own life. With this tragedy, his family and his friends suffered an inexpressible loss, and we offer our most profound condolences. Even for those of us who did not know Aaron, the trail of his brief life shines with his brilliant creativity and idealism.
Although Aaron had no formal affiliation with MIT, I am writing to you now because he was beloved by many members of our community and because MIT played a role in the legal struggles that began for him in 2011.
I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.
I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.
I hope we will all reach out to those members of our community we know who may have been affected by Aaron’s death. As always, MIT Medical is available to provide expert counseling, but there is no substitute for personal understanding and support.
With sorrow and deep sympathy,
L. Rafael Reif
Now I want to hear more… but I’m bullish on it.
