Stuff that isn’t blog-post-worthy, but may be helpful to think out loud.
I haven't seen an official breakdown of the impact of provincial budget cuts on the UofC itself. Saw this mention in a related article on executive salary freeze:
In its 2013 budget released two weeks ago, the province cut the University of Calgary's operational budget by about $32 million, or seven percent.
The university states that is equal to a nine percent difference in funding when it includes a two per cent increase which was promised in the 2012 budget.
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Gehl, R.W. (2013). What’s on your mind? Social media monopolies and noopower. First Monday. 18(3).
On noopower1 through marketing and repetition extended into ubiquitous social media:
Operating within the larger political economy of advertising-supported media, it is not surprising that Facebook, Google, and Twitter mirror marketing’s penchant for experimentation and repetition. Software engineers working for these firms pore over data about what actions users most commonly take — that is, what is most often repeated within the architectures of the sites. These engineers then constantly tweak their interfaces, APIs, and underlying software to reinforce these actions and to produce (they hope) new ones. The tiny changes in the Google homepage, for example, are akin to ripples on the surface of a body of water caused by motion deep underneath, as software engineers seek to increase the attention and productivity of users of these sites.
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The potential for thinking through new re–combinations, new ways to draw up code and language into a new media politics are suggestive. But I want finally to return to the question this article began with: more or less? This text has been framed by a belief that social media monopolies ought to be disrupted — and in the name of at least two of the things they are axiomatically understood to promote (social justice, solidarity as a form of community) and do not. It has been argued that this disruption might be attempted through a toolset — silence, disruption of language, and the exploitation of language's capacity for polysemy (the metaphor and the lie) — that is not often considered as apt for such a task. My conclusion, and here I return to salute Ivan Illich, is that these tools can be deployed to produce other kinds of more convivial engagements — a better commons — than our apparently ‘social' media enable. Above all, I have wished to take seriously the idea that communication density, and increasing communicational volume, does not — in and of itself — indicate more understanding, freedom, openness, or ‘good'. To make this case demands also taking seriously the idea of a media politics that begins with silence.Read More
"At the University of Calgary we have built a strong financial foundation due to the hard work of many people over the last several years," says Cannon. "We have contingency funding set aside, and we will continue to work to find operational efficiencies and grow revenue. We will continue to move toward our Eyes High goals. Nevertheless, a budget reduction of this size means that we have some difficult decisions to make in the coming months.
Read MoreAlthough its economy is still strong, growth is high and unemployment is low, a decline in bitumen prices brought on by decreased pipeline capacity has thrown the province's finances off the rails.
Alison Redford's government announced it would cut spending and borrow billions to cope with a multi-billion-dollar shortfall.
(also, the National Post's crazy "pay us $150 to quote an article as you are legally entitled to do freely under fair dealing" nonsense is disabled by Safari's "disable javascript" feature...)
Read MoreFrom a great resource on P2P infrastructure, linked by @sleslie:
@brlamb I thought you'd like that one. cf bit.ly/L0x7hO for a list of emerging p2p architected projects
— Scott Leslie (@sleslie) July 4, 2012
Freedom requires infrastructure.
A man who has no tools to acquire his necessities of life is a slave to his necessities. Given those tools, he becomes a slave to the labour required to fruitfully use them. Only by transcending each difficulty as it comes, in a process not dissimilar to metasystem transitions, can the individual achieve freedom.
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Instead, here's a plea to car-having readers who do not wish to live as I do: understand that your car is a luxury. Understand that when you get in your car to run a ten-minute errand, the same errand might take someone without a car two hours on the bus. When you turn your key in the ignition, please feel the same sense of wonder and good fortune that I feel every time I take my dirty clothes down to the basement instead of hauling them to the laundromat: what a lucky person I am to not only live in a world where someone was smart enough to invent this thing that makes my life easier, but that I, by some additional happenstance of good fortune, can have one.Read More
got this awesome spam comment overnight, in response to my brief post describing why I'm trying comments again.
flip flopping like a politician. I just posted about an idea I had for visualizing discussion data, and realized that having comments disabled would be harmful. discussion would likely still occur, via twitter or email or whatever, but the thinking-out-loud collaboration would be lost.
so... flip-flop, the 5th? 6th? comments are now enabled for posts, but they close automatically after 14 days. that gives lots of time for shared thinking-out-loud, while still providing mitigation against trolls and spammers and those who use blog comments as places to vent their spleens.
Read MoreYou make my rain pants sweaty.
Best bike-related pickup line evar.
25 Pick Up Lines for Cyclists and Bike Lovers | EcoSalon | Conscious Culture and Fashion
via Bow Cycle
Read MoreOn why he won't be posting stuff to the new Branch semi-private conversation thingy (the one I linked to earlier )
Anyway, I can't just use it, because then I would be breaking a rule, one that keeps me from using services like Quora and Google-Plus. I'm not going to willfully put my writing in spaces that I have no control over. I'm tired of playing the hamster. The business models of these companies, if they become successful, keep them from being part of the web. And it's not in my interest to support what they do, that's the broad reason I don't use them. Further, I am creating an archive of my writing, over many years. And if I scatter my writing all over the place, even if these services were part of the web, it would be against my interest to do that. Having it all in one place is value, to me at least.
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