Sunday, June 11, 2017

Breath A Little: Have You Seen My Daughters?



When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.”The Journal of Jules Renard(entry, July 1902) ... read more

We take it for granted that to make a journey is to travel from A to B, but it's not always as simple as that. There are often so many stops and starts along the way, hazards and jams; diversions off the beaten, and back on track, with the odd sight-seeing stop, coffee breaks, etc. and overnight stays along the way. But perhaps our real journey starts at A and ends at Zee - that's life.
If a journey starts at A, which would be our birth, and ends at Z - death, then no one would be capable of writing an autobiography from start to finish because none of us really knows when we'll draw that last breath. Guess we could get pretty close, but maybe not to the end. ... birthday-phone-call


Here's Why Friendships Can Be Even More Important Than Family as We Age


Blood is thicker than water, but that doesn't mean our friendships should take a backseat to our family relationships as we grow up.


Plant Seeds Use "Mini Brains" to Decide When to Sprout



Those mean-spirited New York Intellectuals. “Everyone around Partisan Review,” wrote Dianne Trilling, “had his licensed malice.” But she could be as vicious as any of them Familia of ABC 

Cyril Connolly was obsessed with his own worst traits: laziness, nostalgia, gluttony, hypochondria, frivolity. His fetish for failure was, oddly, a source of inspiration Great Media Dragon ;-)  



It’s a heady time for anyone who loves art, as digital imagery makes it possible not just to explore more of a museum’s catalog, but to get closer to an image than ever before. But what if you want to look at more than one museum’s digital images or share them with others?

Until now, that’s involved lots of browser tabs and a sometimes frustrating trip through varying interfaces and image types. But it’s getting even easier to troll through multiple collections and compare what’s inside, reports Shaunacy Ferro for mental_floss, as museums adopt a new technology that frees images from the confines of individual websites.

It’s called the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, an API that makes digital images more accessible. The API was invented by cultural institutions with the goal of giving scholars an unprecedented amount of access to image repositories regardless of location, and it’s one of the more exciting tools in museum tech today. IIIF lets you zoom in on images, quickly build virtual collections, and share them more easily.

One of its cooler uses, though, is comparison. As Ferro reports, it’s easy to pull a huge collection of newly released IIIF images from both the Getty Museum and the Yale Center for British Art into the Mirador image viewer platform, an online, open-source image viewer that lets you compare images side-by-side. Both museums offer this functionality with a single mouse click.


You are likelier to think something is true if you've encountered it more often, a phenomenon psychologists call the "familiarity effect." This has bedeviled efforts to root out widespread misperceptions because debunking them inevitably requires repeating them. A new study offers some hope (and tips) for fact-checkers


Crazy reason this gig was shut down



A SYDNEY music gig has been shut down by the licensing police because the band had too many members.




If The Globalization Of Writing Is So Great, Why Are People Attacking It?


Trout Fishing in Cold River"

The problem with problems

If you work in the arts in higher education (or any education, for that matter), you are likely talking or hearing more about “complex problems,” or perhaps “wicked problems.” These are shorthand for a wide ... read more


W.G. Sebald is famous for his Holocaust writing, depiction of vacant landscapes, and sense of drifting melancholy. But comedy was key to his brilliance Cold River

The friendship of Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendtended over questions of good, evil, and historical responsibility. Their argument continues to be relevant   Shakespearean Proportions 

“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was 23  Wisdom of 23 years olds 








24/7 Wall St: “The U.S. fertility rate is at its lowest point in history, with 62.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The total fertility rate has been below replacement level since 1971. Despite this, the nation’s population is the largest it has ever been. In addition to births, the U.S. population has been growing due to immigration and longer life expectancy. 24/7 Wall St. has determined the number of people alive today who were born each year since 1933. While the fertility rate has declined, the mortality rate has declined as well, increasing the share of Americans who are from a younger generation. Due to increased access to health care, which has improved dramatically over the last century, life expectancy has gone up significantly. The average person born in 1930 lived to 59.7 years of age in. By 2012, the average life expectancy had increased to 78.8 years.



Personal Kanban a life changing time management system that explodes the myth of multitasking




A small-town newspaper in Texas is surprised (and unhappy) to get caught up in a Ukrainian fake news operation. And BuzzFeed explains how fake news sites are targeting, of all things, Indian restaurants. 


Karol Plicka  Plicka

Scientists Discover a 2D Magnet R&D Magazine. MoiAussie: “A real first – could have many applications.”



If you know the four key ingredients that make fake news successful and viral, you can use them to fuel your own battle. This Nieman Lab article explains the process.