It may be the weekend here in North America, but for many of us it is much too cold to do our usual weekend things. We certainly hope you and yours are warm and safe. Here are some readings, and a video, for you to peruse as you sit by the fire (virtual or otherwise):
- “The Only Way to Keep Your Resolutions,” by David DeSteno (New York Times): “In choosing to rely on rational analysis and willpower to stick to our goals, we’re disadvantaging ourselves. We’re using tools that aren’t only weak; they’re also potentially harmful. If using willpower to keep your nose to the grindstone feels like a struggle, that’s because it is. Your mind is fighting against itself. It’s trying to convince, cajole and, if that fails, suppress a desire for immediate pleasure. Given self-control’s importance for success, it seems as if evolution should have provided us with a tool for it that was less excruciating to use. I believe it did; we’re just ignoring it.”
- “The College Kids Doing What Twitter Won’t,” by Lauren Smiley (Wired): “The duo launched a Google Chrome browser extension that inserts a button onto every Twitter profile and tweet that reads, snappily, ‘Botcheck.me.’ Click it, and you get a diagnosis of whether the account appears to be run by a person or by some sort of automation, based on the duo’s own machine learning model. Their model is targeted exclusively to hunt propaganda bots about US politics. The duo joins a cadre of outside investigators who, in the absence of more public action from Twitter, are providing their own analyses of the bot epidemic.”
- “Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm,” Brad Evans interviews Erin Manning (Los Angeles Review of Books): “In any classroom I’ve ever taught, I would say at least 50 percent of students don’t work well with the norm. Accommodations are not complicated: facilitating a classroom organization which is not completely frontal and allowing participation to occur in ways that don’t privilege eye-contact, or allowing for and even generating movement in the classroom are two simple techniques. The accommodations are not mine to make but ours to invent, and each class will do it differently depending on the needs of the participants.”
- “The Significance of the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress,” by Dan Cohen (DanCohen.org): “The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have. Due to Twitter’s original terms of service and the public availability of most tweets, which stand in contrast to many other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Snapchat, we are unlikely to preserve anything else like it from our digital age. Undoubtedly many would consider that a good thing, and that the Twitter archive deserves the kind of mockery that flourishes on the platform itself. What can we possibly learn from the unchecked ramblings and ravings of so many, condensed to so few characters? Yet it’s precisely this offhandedness and enforced brevity that makes the Twitter archive intriguing. Researchers have precious few sources for the plain-spoken language and everyday activities and thought of a large swath of society.”
- “The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2017): A Hack Education Project,” by Audrey Waters (HackEducation): “I’m interested in the stories we were told about education technology. What do investors and entrepreneurs and politicians hope will be ‘trends’ based on the stories they tell about ed-tech. (Does this coincide with what is happening in classrooms? Does their storytelling coincide with investments or policies or legislation?) Why are some stories about the future of education so compelling? This project analyzes the steady of drumbeat of marketing throughout the year about the promises of education technology and offers a different interpretation. My hope is that more people learn how to read ed-tech’s powerful storytelling resistantly.”
And your video is “A Glimpse of Oumuamua,” by Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum, and Jason Drakeford (New York Time):
[“East Coast Bomb Cyclone” by NOAASatellites is licensed under CC PDM]