These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Denis Wood’s Dissertation – I Don’t Want To But I Will (PDF) « Making Maps: DIY Cartography
“The front matter, including the dedication (by the Shirelles), the notorious acknowledgements (my unhelpful faculty and the rare humans), credits (as in a movie), and Introduction (opening with Ed’s story, a night watchman on the edge of Castle Hill park, and going on to talk about psychogeography and various kinds of mental maps).”
academic-culture writing what-is-important against-effacement-against-abstraction-against-objectivity for-keeps- “The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.”
sustainability adaptation social-dynamics simple-models illegibility-a-la-scott Moral Hazard: The Implacable Enemy of Agile « Agile Fantasies
“If you adopt economical driving habits, you’ll end up putting less gasoline in your tank. But if you skip past the economical driving habits and just put less gas in your tank, you’ll end up muttering grim imprecations as you trudge down the highway with a gas can.”
agile-practices project-management social-engineering pedagogy managementWhen privatisation doesn’t work | George Irvin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
“In short, arguments favouring private over public provision are not just theoretically flawed, but typically favour the few at the expense of the many. The pendulum has swung too far to the right: it’s time to stand up for public provision.”
public-policy healthcare politics privatization corporatism- “I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.”
academic-culture cultural-assumptions disintermediation-in-action universities social-norms corporatism - “The book was enormously popular, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Brainerd’s diagramming swept through American schools like a refreshing breeze. By the latter half of the 19th century, chalkboards had become increasingly common in classrooms; for students, the impact of watching a sentence take shape on that large surface as a comprehensible, often elegant, and sometimes downright ingenious drawing must have been significant. It’s hard to believe anyone but the most dedicated pedant could have actually enjoyed parsing, but plenty of students — including me — loved diagramming. A century and a half later, diagramming sentences is even more out of date than writing lessons on a piece of slate. When the book I wrote about it was published in 2006, a couple of hundred people sent me e-mails. One writer accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because I wrote so benignly about the nun who brainwashed me into thinking diagramming was fun. Another asked me for a date. Two objected to my political attitudes, as they deduced them between the lines. A dozen or so either faulted some of the diagrams or challenged me with a particularly tricky sentence.”
grammar pedagogy styles-of-thinking sentence-diagrams mathematical-recreations natural-language-processing it-was-fun