These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• Accor­dion Mini Books | WHCC

  “Accor­dion Mini Books are the per­fect gift item for your clients to use as mini folios and brag books. Avail­able in a wal­let and a square 3×3 size, order an Accor­dion Mini Book on any of our press printed papers – stan­dard semi-​​gloss, art linen, art water­color, art recy­cled, and pearl. UV coat­ing can also be added. Cover options include fab­rics, leathers, suedes, or a per­son­al­ized cus­tom photo cover in lus­tre or metal­lic with a matte lam­i­nate. The wal­let Accor­dion Mini Books have up to 14 cus­tomiz­able pan­els and the square 3×3 has up to 10 cus­tomiz­able pan­els. This is a great add-​​on item with any order! Accor­dion Mini Books are avail­able through ROES with a min­i­mum order of 3 iden­ti­cal books, order each side as a spread. Frosted Slip Cov­ers are also avail­able for only $1/​book.”

book-​​art project swag-​​making

• The Truth About the Con­fed­er­acy | Corrente

  “One thing I really would like you to take away from this diary is a basic sense of how the United States, as a self-​​governing demo­c­ra­tic repub­lic, can­not long tol­er­ate oli­garchic and aris­to­cratic ideas in its body politic. This is becom­ing an increas­ingly urgent issue for us today, because the Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment today is basi­cally a replica of the slavery-​​defending, anti-​​free labor, government-​​hating, insur­rec­tion minded, treason-​​breathing, vio­lently inclined Con­fed­er­acy. And, I want you to be able to instantly rec­og­nize and rebut the false his­to­ries that neo-​​Confederates have cre­ated. So, the first mate­r­ial I place before you is an excerpt from an impor­tant and emo­tion­ally pow­er­ful 1995 book, What They Fought For, 1861–1865, a mas­ter­ful sur­vey and sum­mary of pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence from Civil War sol­diers and offi­cers, by James M. McPherson.”

Civil-​​War that-​​Santayana-​​quote-​​you-​​know-​​the-​​one con­ser­vatism Bushism his­tory cultural-​​assumptions

• mojombo/​grit — GitHub

  “Grit gives you object ori­ented read/​write access to Git repos­i­to­ries via Ruby. The main goals are sta­bil­ity and per­for­mance. To this end, some of the inter­ac­tions with Git repos­i­to­ries are done by shelling out to the system’s git com­mand, and other inter­ac­tions are done with pure Ruby reim­ple­men­ta­tions of core Git func­tion­al­ity. This choice, how­ever, is trans­par­ent to end users, and you need not know which method is being used.”

version-​​control Ruby git GitHub library pro­gram­ming doc­u­ments

• Economist’s View: Labor Mar­ket Pol­icy in the Great Recession

  “The pos­i­tive les­son for the US is that we have a lot of scope to give employ­ers incen­tives to cut hours rather than jobs, includ­ing improv­ing and expand­ing “work-​​sharing” (part-​​time unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fit) pro­grams as well as imple­ment­ing new direct tax cred­its to firms that expand paid time off (paid sick days, paid fam­ily leave, paid vaca­tions, and other mea­sures). The neg­a­tive les­son is that focus­ing on supply-​​side issues such as train­ing, edu­ca­tion, and improved job-​​matching for the unem­ployed –as much sense as they make in the long run– is not likely to get us very far when the econ­omy is at 9 per­cent unem­ploy­ment. Den­mark does far more than we could ever hope to accom­plish along these lines and the unem­ploy­ment there almost dou­bled between 2007 and 2010.”

unem­ploy­ment public-​​policy economic-​​crisis gov­ern­ment history-​​is-​​a-​​feature-​​not-​​a-​​bug

• The per­ils of filter-​​then-​​publish

  “When I pri­vately asked them why they had used R*-trees, while it was easy to check exper­i­men­tally that they did not help, the answer was “it was the only way to get our paper in a major con­fer­ence”. So my work has been made more com­pli­cated for the sole pur­pose of impress­ing the review­ers: “look, I know about R*-trees too!””

peer-​​review cultural-​​dynamics pub­lish­ing academic-​​culture jour­nals disintermediation-​​in-​​action

• Why Do We Quote? The Cul­ture and His­tory of Quo­ta­tion — Open Book Publishers

  “This is a rich and engag­ing work of out­stand­ing schol­ar­ship. Schol­ars in soci­olin­guis­tics, lit­er­a­ture, and folk­lore will rec­og­nize the impor­tance of the book for their fields. Gen­eral read­ers will find it just plain interesting”

academic-​​culture books want

• They Never Cared About Unem­ploy­ment « Open Economics

  “What’s strik­ing, though, is that even in Jan­u­ary of 2010, when unem­ploy­ment was over 10%, deficits received equal men­tion as unem­ploy­ment. The media is cer­tainly cul­pa­ble here, but I’m guess­ing that their head­lines are dri­ven by the polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion, which since the pas­sage of the stim­u­lus has been entirely warped. Goes to show that our polit­i­cal lead­ers, and the media by exten­sion, will never give unem­ploy­ment the atten­tion it deserves.”

economic-​​crisis financial-​​crisis pol­i­tics unem­ploy­ment bankers-​​should-​​start-​​avoiding-​​lampposts-​​right-​​about-​​now

• Guest Post: Gei­th­ner Says “The Size Of The Shock Was Larger Than What Pre­cip­i­tated The Great Depres­sion” « naked capitalism

  “…(So the shock was even big­ger than the one lead­ing up to the Depres­sion because Gei­th­ner and his bud­dies helped blow the bub­ble and try to cover up wrong­do­ing on Wall Street.) Gei­th­ner has been equally bad as Trea­sury boss. Indeed, there is hardly a sin­gle inde­pen­dent econ­o­mist who thinks he has been respond­ing appro­pri­ately to the eco­nomic cri­sis. Sorry to say, but Gei­th­ner has long been a yes-​​man to the powers-​​that-​​be, who ships pal­lets of money wher­ever he is told with­out ques­tion or any follow-​​up or track­ing what­so­ever. Even worse, Gei­th­ner has been called an idiot by Nas­sim Taleb and a “con man” by Time Mag­a­zine. No won­der we’re going to even­tu­ally have another crash … And because Gei­th­ner (along with Bernanke) have insisted that the big banks be bailed out at Main Street’s expense, that the sta­tus quo be pro­tected instead of reformed, and that the U.S. insure the debts of the too big to fails, the next cri­sis will be even big­ger than the last.”

bankers-​​should-​​start-​​avoiding-​​lampposts-​​right-​​about-​​now financial-​​crisis this-​​will-​​end-​​badly

• Stuff Dig­i­tal Human­ists Like: Defin­ing Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties by its Values

  “Here are five to start us off: Like: Twit­ter /​ Don’t like: Face­book. The first thing we have to men­tion, which we have men­tioned a few times already, is Twit­ter. The rea­sons we like Twit­ter are com­plex and I won’t pre­tend to under­stand them all, but I’ll throw out a few sug­ges­tions. First, its “fol­low” rather than “friend” model is more open, allows for the col­lab­o­ra­tion and non-​​hierarchy that the Inter­net and dig­i­tal human­i­ties val­ues. Sec­ond, and related to this, Twit­ter is the place where content-creators—journalists, writ­ers, artists, web devel­op­ers, etc.—tend to hang out. We over­lap with those com­mu­ni­ties, or at least seek to over­lap with them, in pro­duc­tive ways. They are the dis­tant nodes from which we hope new inno­va­tions will come. Third, Twit­ter, in the way we use it, is mostly about shar­ing ideas whereas Face­book is about shar­ing rela­tion­ships. Schol­ars are good at ideas, maybe less so at rela­tion­ships. Like: Agile devel­op­ment /​ Dis­like: long plan­ning cycles. The sec­ond thing I’ll men­tion is agile devel­op­ment, the phi­los­o­phy of “releas­ing early and often,” which we do not only with software/​code but also with our ideas and writ­ing when we Tweet, blog, and chat. We do this as good neigh­bors but also in the hope that releas­ing our code and ideas will improve with con­tri­bu­tions from end points of our net­works. Like: DIY /​ Dis­like: Out­sourc­ing. Most of the most suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal human­i­ties projects are those done by scholar/​technologists not those imag­ined by schol­ars and imple­mented by tech­nol­o­gists. Like­wise, the most suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal human­ists are schol­ars who know the tech­nol­ogy, often those who are self-​​taught, not ones who seek a client-​​vendor rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­o­gists. We take this insight to heart in our hir­ing at CHNM, look­ing for peo­ple with for­mal train­ing in the human­i­ties and self-​​taught tech skills. Like: PHP /​ Dis­like: C++. Fourth, and fol­low­ing from the last point, we like PHP not C++. This is another way of say­ing we like the trans­par­ent, easy-​​to-​​learn, and sim­ple (if some­times ham-​​handed) tech­nolo­gies of the Web more than the more pow­er­ful, more sophis­ti­cated, more ele­gant, but less approach­able com­piled code of the desk­top. A focus on get­ting the most out of sim­ple, trans­par­ent, ver­nac­u­lar tech­nolo­gies allows us to keep the door to the field open to new entrants. Like: Extra­mural fund­ing /​ Dis­like: Intra­mural fund­ing. In one respect, this may seem obvi­ous: every­body likes grants. In another respect it’s prob­a­bly going a lit­tle too far to say we don’t like intra­mural fund­ing: it is essen­tial to build­ing and main­tain­ing capac­ity for our cen­ters and staff. But it seems to me the most suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal human­i­ties projects are those that result from com­pet­i­tive grant mak­ing processes, espe­cially the fed­eral grant mak­ing process. Why is this? I can point to at least three rea­sons: 1) Attract­ing grant money keeps us inno­vat­ing, which, like it or not, is a pre­mium in our busi­ness. Grants are given for new work, not for more of the same. 2) Writ­ing grants and serv­ing on pan­els keep us in con­ver­sa­tion with the field. We have to keep cur­rent and keep in touch with one another to jus­tify our projects to grant­mak­ers and to rec­om­mend oth­ers’ projects for fund­ing. Increas­ingly, fund­ing guide­lines them­selves require col­lab­o­ra­tion. 3) Unlike much tra­di­tional schol­ar­ship, which often requires one big deliv­er­able (a book) after years of close-​​kept study, research, and writ­ing, grant work requires defin­ing and meet­ing a set of closely timed, con­crete deliv­er­ables, a mode of work which encour­ages the kind of agile devel­op­ment so val­ued by the Inter­net and dig­i­tal human­i­ties community.”

digital-​​humanities cultural-​​norms open-​​access open­ness network-​​culture

• Agilistry Stu­dio — Agile Management

  “Sev­eral stud­ies indi­cate that “old-​​style” man­agers are the biggest obsta­cle in tran­si­tions to Agile soft­ware devel­op­ment. Devel­op­ment man­agers and team lead­ers need to learn what their new role is in Agile soft­ware devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tions. This course will help them.”

man­age­ment agile-​​management project-​​management class Jurgen-​​Appelo

• Embed­ding Col­lab­o­ra­tion from the Start — Jimmy Guter­man — Our Edi­tors — Har­vard Busi­ness Review

  “At Nokia, infor­mal men­tor­ing begins as soon as some­one steps into a new job. Typ­i­cally, within a few days, the employee’s man­ager will sit down and list all the peo­ple in the orga­ni­za­tion, no mat­ter in what loca­tion, it would be use­ful for the employee to meet. This is a deeply ingrained cul­tural norm, which prob­a­bly orig­i­nated when Nokia was a smaller and sim­pler orga­ni­za­tion. The man­ager sits with the new­comer, just as her man­ager sat with her when she joined, and reviews what top­ics the new­comer should dis­cuss with each per­son on the list and why estab­lish­ing a rela­tion­ship with him or her is impor­tant. It is then stan­dard for the new­comer to actively set up meet­ings with the peo­ple on the list, even when it means trav­el­ing to other loca­tions. The gift of time — in the form of hours spent on coach­ing and build­ing net­works — is seen as cru­cial to the col­lab­o­ra­tive cul­ture at Nokia.”

col­lab­o­ra­tion man­age­ment Workantile-​​ideas social-​​norms social-​​networks organizational-​​design

• The Con­ver­sa­tion, the startup Aus­tralian news site, wants to bring aca­d­e­mic exper­tise to break­ing news » Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab » Push­ing to the Future of Journalism

  “First, “every author has to fill out a pro­file, so the reader knows who the per­son is and their edu­ca­tion. And there is the addi­tional require­ment of a dis­clo­sure of any poten­tial con­flicts which might color their judgment.” Second, in response to the polit­i­cal ques­tion — after not­ing that my academics-​​are-​​liberal asser­tion might be a bit loaded — Jas­pan replied that what The Con­ver­sa­tion is ulti­mately doing is putting peo­ple in touch with “aca­d­e­mics who are usu­ally bet­ter informed than the gen­eral pub­lic because of their depth of knowl­edge and their sense of the com­plex­ity of the issue.” Third, and most impor­tant, Jas­pan sees The Con­ver­sa­tion, true to its name, as lead­ing to pub­lic debate. “One of the key things we want to do with a public-​​facing media chan­nel is to make sure we have a range of views on some­thing like the exe­cu­tion of Osama Bin Ladin, and that we have dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of what hap­pened and whether or not the means in which it was done were judi­cial.” The main goal, though: “We want to sur­prise our read­ers. We don’t want to give them the usual expla­na­tions, alter­na­tive insights, and view­points — and that will lead to lively con­ver­sa­tion.” Jaspan’s back­ers come from both the non­profit and for-​​profit realms. The Con­ver­sa­tion is backed by Ernst & Young, among other cor­po­rate supporters. And from acad­e­mia, he has drawn on some of the top Aus­tralian research uni­ver­si­ties, in addi­tion to Australia’s Depart­ment of Education. To find the aca­d­e­mics, Jas­pan and his staff did a “cen­sus” of aca­d­e­mics based on their areas of exper­tise. Then, by word of mouth, they asked par­tic­i­pat­ing aca­d­e­mics to rec­om­mend col­leagues who would make good con­trib­u­tors to the site.”

jour­nal­ism acad­e­mia com­men­tary deepening-​​the-​​news exper­i­ment con­ver­sa­tion

• Cen­sored Genius: The Fight Goes On.

  “A recent post by Seth Godin attempts to define a librar­ian as some­thing lim­ited by for­mat: print books are bad, dig­i­tal bits are good. So librar­i­ans should become dig­i­tal wiz­ards, or some­thing. I think the cur­rent hip term is “data sherpa who directs and engages con­ver­sa­tions,” or some other bull­shit. And a librar­ian is bad if she’s not con­tin­u­ously evolv­ing and grow­ing toes. But a good librar­ian would never exclude a data for­mat from the search results. You ask me for infor­ma­tion on tur­tles and you’re get­ting every­thing I can find, and that includes printed books. But chances are, you’re going to wave your Kin­dle in my face and say, “I want it here.” And regard­less of my reply, my eyes will tell you to go fuck your­self. Sixty per­cent of the world’s peo­ple would kill to have a library filled with books. Some coun­tries won’t even let you into a library with­out proper iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. But Amer­i­cans, on our rapid decent from being a world power toward become the world’s bag boy, have lost sight of what has last­ing value and moved on to what has recur­ring monthly fees. In response to Seth’s Blog, Bobbi New­man says, “One of the many roles of the pub­lic library is to ensure that all peo­ple have access to that infor­ma­tion.“ And that is the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence with every cur­rent view of the library and the real pur­pose of the library: Libraries are for everyone.”

librar­i­ans libraries library2.x cultural-​​assumptions archives cultural-​​banking-​​vs-​​cultural-​​levelling

• Pirate Bay Heads Nor­we­gian Domain Block­ing List | TorrentFreak

  “The spread of anti-​​filesharing mea­sures across the United States and Europe appears to be accel­er­at­ing at a some­what dizzy­ing pace. On an almost daily basis dur­ing the last few months sto­ries about con­tro­ver­sial and some­times dra­con­ian mea­sures to deal with online infringe­ment have hit the head­lines. Say what you like about the big movie and music stu­dios – they cer­tainly know how to coor­di­nate their lob­by­ing to per­fec­tion. Tim­ing like this, with leg­is­la­tion being mulled in many major mar­kets simul­ta­ne­ously, sends a pow­er­ful message.”

rein­ter­me­di­a­tion law glob­al­ism copyright-​​war that-whole-free-assembly-thing-depends-on-what-you’re-up-to