Category: General

Björk on Working With Men

After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas. I became really good at this and I don’t even notice it myself. I don’t really have an ego. I’m not that bothered. I just want the whole thing to be good. And I’m not saying one bad thing about the guys who were with me in the bands, because they’re all amazing and creative, and they’re doing incredible things now. But I come from a generation where that was the only way to get things done. So I have to play stupid and just do everything with five times the amount of energy, and then it will come through.

From this Pitchfork interview with Björk (via Waxy.org)

A Teenager ≠ All Teenagers

View at Medium.com

This article from Andrew Watts, a 19-year-old student at the University of Austin, contains some interesting insights on teenage usage of social media. He speaks from a particular perspective1 and provides some unique thoughts on the various networks in use.

Did you know the first use of the phrase “teenager” to describe a group of people was in 1944? That’s only 60 years ago.

Shortly after reading Andrew’s post, I noticed that danah boyd wrote a great response to Andrew’s post. Her biggest insight 2 is that we mustn’t forget that Andrew doesn’t speak for all teenagers.

Andrew is very visible about where he stands. He’s very clear about his passion for technology (and his love of blogging on Medium should be a big ole hint to anyone who missed his byline). He’s also a college student and talks about his peers as being obviously on path to college. But as readers, let’s not forget that only about half of US 19-year-olds are in college.

If you work with young people and are interested in understanding the complex nature of how they approach the same tools you may use (like Facebook, Twitter) then read both. Andrew provides insight into one perspective of social media usage and danah reminds us to keep the keel even. Let me know what you think with a comment below.

David Foster Wallace on the Humdrum of Life

learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master

This commencement speech from David Foster Wallace3 is really interesting.  The whole thing is worth a read, with many sections that made me let out an audible, “Ooof”. Especially the part about the boring routine of adult life.

As someone who’s many years from graduation, the whole thing really does ring true and is solid advice for anyone, not just graduates. Although, I assume a younger person would gain more value than those who are older.

I still struggle with the choice of where to put my mind.

(via kottke.org)

Ethan Hawke on Good Sci-Fi

And for that matter, look at the moral conundrums that GATTACA asked – which are right here. To what extent do we really want to homogenize ourselves, when it’s our uniqueness that makes us special – when so many of us, when given the option, would eliminate that? For example – if they can discover dyslexia in the embryo, and get rid of it, many people would choose to do that. And we’d lose Albert Einstein, John Lennon, and my daughter.

Actor Ethan Hawke always puts on a good AMA.

Tagging Semantic Articles Outside of the Factbox

One of my favorite Semantic MediaWiki features is the factbox. It’s a quick way to browse wiki content by property values.

What if you want a similar browsing interface within a wiki page? For example, let’s say you want a value for a property you use to ‘tag’ an article to provide a link to a list of all pages with that property/value pair. Here’s one way how. 4

For the past year one of the ways we’ve been using our wiki is to publish an internal monthly newsletter. Each newsletter article is a wiki page, with a template providing consistent navigation.

Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 1.19.10 PM

 

Along the right hand column of every article are the tags for the audience and topic areas related to the article.

linked-list

Recently I made an addition to the list of Audience and Topic Area tags to provide dynamic links to all pages with that property value. I’m leveraging the SMW Special:SearchByPropertySpace special page.

In the article template, with the property “Facets Article Topic Areas” you’ll want to use an arraymaptemplate 5 to format the comma separated list of values. 6

'''Topic Areas''': {{#arraymaptemplate:{{{Facets Article Topic Areas|}}}|SearchByPropertySpace-FacetsArticleTopicAreas|,|, }}

What this will do is take every value for the property Facets Article Topic Areas and use the SearchByPropertySpace-FacetsArticleTopicAreas 7 template to format each value. Each value is separated by comma, and our final output will be separated by a comma and a space.

In the template “SearchByPropertySpace-FacetsTopicAreas” we have the following.

[[Special:SearchByProperty/Facets-20Article-20Topic-20Areas/{{#replace:{{{1}}}| |-20}}|{{{1}}}]]

This creates a link to Special:SearchByProperty where the property name is Facets Article Topic Areas and the value is each comma separated value from our arraymaptemplate.

The replace parser function converts values with spaces to URL encoded characters.

SearchByProperty

The result is that every topic area listed on the page becomes a link to Special:SearchByProperty that shows all pages with that value.

Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 5.02.52 PM

When editors add a new article they only have to add a list of topic areas. 8 This makes in-article links to all other articles a click away without having to scroll to the bottom of the page to view the factbox.