Items of some interest:

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

  • A Way To Think About Online Courses (By Apple, For Exam­ple) | Eas­ily Distracted

    “One thing that struck me dur­ing the meet­ing, though, was that if you cre­ated a really rich body of mate­ri­als that looked some­what like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was craft­ing a com­pletely novel form of pub­li­ca­tion. Imag­ine a work of his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship that included video of the author giv­ing an explana­tory lec­ture at the begin­ning of a sec­tion of the read­ing; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pic­tures, audio record­ings, maps, and other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als; that exten­sively linked to rel­e­vant (or com­pet­ing) analy­ses avail­able in dig­i­tal col­lec­tions like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take ques­tions from stu­dents read­ing the book in a class.”

    media academic-​​culture ped­a­gogy pub­lish­ing a-​​new-​​tent-​​and-​​a-​​new-​​camel
  • Evo­lu­tion of increased com­plex­ity in a mol­e­c­u­lar machine : Nature : Nature Pub­lish­ing Group

    “Many cel­lu­lar processes are car­ried out by mol­e­c­u­lar ‘machines’—assemblies of mul­ti­ple dif­fer­en­ti­ated pro­teins that phys­i­cally inter­act to exe­cute bio­log­i­cal functions1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Despite much spec­u­la­tion, strong evi­dence of the mech­a­nisms by which these assem­blies evolved is lack­ing. Here we use ances­tral gene resurrection9, 10, 11 and manip­u­la­tive genetic exper­i­ments to deter­mine how the com­plex­ity of an essen­tial mol­e­c­u­lar machine—the hexa­m­eric trans­mem­brane ring of the eukary­otic V-​​ATPase pro­ton pump—increased hun­dreds of mil­lions of years ago. We show that the ring of Fungi, which is com­posed of three par­al­o­gous pro­teins, evolved from a more ancient two-​​paralogue com­plex because of a gene dupli­ca­tion that was fol­lowed by loss in each daugh­ter copy of spe­cific inter­faces by which it inter­acts with other ring pro­teins. These losses were com­ple­men­tary, so both copies became oblig­ate com­po­nents with restricted spa­tial roles in the com­plex. Rein­tro­duc­ing a sin­gle his­tor­i­cal muta­tion from each par­alogue lin­eage into the res­ur­rected ances­tral pro­teins is suf­fi­cient to reca­pit­u­late their asym­met­ric degen­er­a­tion and trig­ger the require­ment for the more elab­o­rate three-​​component ring. Our exper­i­ments show that increased com­plex­ity in an essen­tial mol­e­c­u­lar machine evolved because of sim­ple, high-​​probability evo­lu­tion­ary processes, with­out the appar­ent evo­lu­tion of novel func­tions. They point to a plau­si­ble mech­a­nism for the evo­lu­tion of com­plex­ity in other multi-​​paralogue pro­tein complexes.”

    via:cshalizi evo­lu­tion structural-​​biology par­si­mony dangers-​​of-​​premature-​​optimization lesson-​​for-​​genetic-​​programming

  • geom­e­try sim­u­la­tor nudge-​​targets

Items of some interest…

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

Items of some interest…

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

  • Free Ride: Dig­i­tal Par­a­sites and the Fight for the Busi­ness of Cul­ture | Brain Pickings

    “For my part, I started Brain Pick­ings more than six years ago as what’s com­monly referred to as a “pas­sion project” (though I don’t like the fleet­ing non­com­mit­tal rela­tion­ship this phras­ing sug­gests) and didn’t have a busi­ness model — but I did have a crystal-​​clear edi­to­r­ial model, which remains the same today: get peo­ple inter­ested in mean­ing­ful cross-​​disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were inter­ested in, and in the process empower their net­worked knowl­edge and com­bi­na­to­r­ial cre­ativ­ity; break out of the fil­ter bub­ble, if you will, though con­ceived long before we had the very vocab­u­lary to artic­u­late it. So when an aggre­ga­tor like the Huff­in­g­ton Post, a business-​​model wolf wear­ing an editorial-​​authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-​​free) con­tent and regur­gi­tates it on its (ad-​​plastered) site, it lives up to the term “par­a­site” at the heart of Levine’s argu­ment, derived from the Greek par­a­sitos and used to describe “some­one who ate at some­one else’s table with­out pro­vid­ing any­thing in return.””

    pub­lish­ing dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion rein­ter­me­di­a­tion intellectual-​​property cre­ativ­ity col­lab­o­ra­tion network-​​culture

Items of some interest…

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