Australians have made millions of corrections to the rough text generated by the digitization of their country’s newspapers by their national library. @wragge is analyzing these text edits, and it’s interesting to see where crowdsourcing draws big crowds
In case you’re wondering how scholars access articles at a large research university, here’s a full month’s worth of data from Wally Grotophorst at George Mason (spoiler: ResearchGate + Google Scholar = 30x the traffic Sci-Hub gets)
Great to see the return of the NetNewsWire RSS reader and its commitment to the open web. I particularly like @brentsimmons and co.’s “How to Support NetNewsWire” page on GitHub, which tells it like it is.
Still confused by the size and function of Belle’s legs
Who’s a good hiking companion? Belle’s a good hiking companion
There’s this sign for the “OCR World Championships” nearby and I had to google it to make sure that scanning old books hadn’t become a combat sport
Pretty sure this covered bridge is actually a time portal
Every sign on this trail sounds like an amazing Johnny Cash song
![mp-photo-alt[]=mp-photo-alt[]=](https://social.dancohen.org/uploads/2019/e8e5304077.jpg)
Over @kottke, a sampler of recent writing on how algorithms are draining serendipity out of our lives, featuring @gchicco, @chaykak, and yours truly.
With Boris Johnson assuming the office of Prime Minister of the U.K., we’ve got a rebroadcast and update of the “European Disunion” episode of the What’s New podcast, featuring my interview with European political history expert Mai’a Cross.
This is like finding out that Abbey Road is an actual road
Starting in November, Macmillan will let each library system, including those that serve millions of people, buy only one copy of their new ebooks for the first eight weeks after a book’s release.
I have successfully completed the mandatory parent training class so that I can teach my twins how to drive. Now I ask you to pray for me
Using computer vision to analyze the visual style and composition of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie
A bald eagle has moved into our neighborhood
I told her to sit
New on my blog: “Engagement Is the Enemy of Serendipity”—a seemingly minor change to the New York Times iPad app provides a good case study in what’s wrong with the algorithmic personalization of our media, and why we need to bump into the unexpected.
Recording a podcast today with a human/robot movement scientist, I asked if she could train a robot arm to crack an egg for cooking (à la @robinsloan’s Sourdough), and she said that was hard, but that she’s training a robot arm to crack a whip to hit a specific point in space.
Free local history talk
Nearby lake looking nice this evening
Good series on the Space Age and the race to the moon this week on News@Northeastern, which includes many rare photos from our Boston Globe collection.
Was the “Use the Force” moment at the end of Star Wars, when Luke switched off the computer and went to manual controls, based on the moment when Neil Armstrong decided to switch to manual controls with just seconds left on the Apollo 11 lunar landing?
On our second rebroadcast + update of the summer, @podcastwhatsnew revisits an interview with an intellectual property lawyer who used to be a rock star, and we look more closely at the Music Modernization Act that he hoped would pass (and it did).
Kind of sad to see music and theology as lacking relationships with other fields in this visualization of college departments and the books they assign in courses.
