Month: July 2013

On Editing Wikipedia in Museums

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As a self-professed Wikipedia junkie, I love that there are people going to museums on edit-athons. An awesome New York Times article dives deeper:

Amid this vast ocean of bewilderment, however, a small group of volunteers managed to expand the well of shared human knowledge last week by joining a daylong group editing session sponsored by Wikipedia and the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington. The gathering — called an edit-athon — was the latest collaboration between the online encyclopedia and cathedrals of culture like the Smithsonian to expand and improve Wikipedia entries, which are subject to the vagaries of volunteer contributions. At the same time, the Smithsonian is able to better publicize what’s in its extensive collections.

“Wikipedia is driven by this desire to share knowledge freely with the world, and that is in sync with our mission,” said Sara Snyder, webmaster at the Archives of American Art, a Smithsonian research center that held an editing session in March to beef up the digital encyclopedia’s entries on female artists.

These amateur-professional collaborations began in 2010 as the brainchild of Liam Wyatt, a former bartender, fire twirler, podcaster and vice president of Wikimedia Australia, during an unpaid five-week stint as Wikipedian in residence at the British Museum. The following year, the Archives of American Art appointed its own Wikipedian in residence and organized an edit-athon, enlisting local volunteers to create new articles using the archives’ resources. Other institutions, including the New York Public Library, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona have joined what has been called the GLAM-Wiki initiative. (GLAM stands for galleries, libraries, archives and museums.)

And in case you didn’t know, there are super dedicated Wikipedia editors out there. Take Gerald Shields, for instance:

Mr. Shields said he generally edited articles on North Korea and on feminism, primarily because few other people do. He combs through the English-language version of The Pyongyang Times for citations, and last year, even spent part of a trip to China trying to track down a photograph of Ri Sol-ju, the wife of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. At the museum, Mr. Shields, camera in hand, took on the role of the day’s official chronicler.

Don’t read the article if you aren’t prepared for a serious nerd alert.

Interview with Matt Mullenweg as WordPress Celebrates Ten Years

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Readers of this blog and anyone else hosting theirs on WordPress will appreciate this San Francisco Chronicle interview with the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, as the site celebrates its 10 year anniversary (yay!):

Q: It’s been 10 years. What’s been the most significant change for WordPress?

A: The big shift has been how it’s changed from being just something that people used just for blogs to being something that they build entire websites or applications on top of. People are now using WordPress for things I never could have imagined even five years ago.

The result of this has been that because there’s so much more flexibility and so many more options for customization, it started to gain some significant market share of the top websites in the world, actually over 18 percent now.

That’s obviously a big responsibility, because that’s lot of the Web that’s dependent on the work we do. I also think there’s a huge opportunity because the tools we’re building have the opportunity to democratize Web publishing and make it so everyone is on equal footing, and has an equal opportunity to create a really amazing website.

 

Q: What’s next for WordPress?

A: I think the key is taking things that are possible now, if you are a developer, and making them so that they’re easy for anyone, so you don’t need the “WordPress for Dummies” book.

I don’t think it’s a goal. I don’t think it’s something you wake up and say that you did it. I think it’s really a process. It’s constantly and tirelessly iterating every aspect of the software to make it more accessible.

 

Q: Take me back 10 years ago. What was it like?

A: It wasn’t super exciting. It was mostly me. I moved out to an apartment and I ate A&W fast food. I was in school studying political science, but I was way more excited about online stuff. To bootstrap WordPress, I did pretty much everything. I was on the support forums. I was writing the code and doing the design and marketing. Over the next couple of years, people came in and said, “Hey, I can do that better” and they were right. So it was just building up that community, and getting people to work together.

Had no idea about this staggering statistic:

Q: Why do you think WordPress has endured and others have not?

A: It has that resilience of being something that matters to a lot of people. There are 20,000 people who make their living from WordPress. They want to see it continue to grow.

I recommend WordPress.com to everyone I meet if they want to start a blog. Here’s to ten more years, Matt and the entire Automattic team!

Implanting False Memories in the Mouse Brain

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A fascinating new paper coming out of MIT details how researchers were able to implant false memories in mice. From the abstract:

Memories can be unreliable. We created a false memory in mice by optogenetically manipulating memory engram–bearing cells in the hippocampus. Dentate gyrus (DG) or CA1 neurons activated by exposure to a particular context were labeled with channelrhodopsin-2. These neurons were later optically reactivated during fear conditioning in a different context. The DG experimental group showed increased freezing in the original context, in which a foot shock was never delivered. The recall of this false memory was context-specific, activated similar downstream regions engaged during natural fear memory recall, and was also capable of driving an active fear response. Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means.

In their research, scientist Susumu Tonagawa and his team used a technique known as optogenetics, which allows the fine control of individual brain cells. They engineered brain cells in the mouse hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in forming memories, to express the gene for a protein called channelrhodopsin. When cells that contain channelrhodopsin are exposed to blue light, they become activated. The researchers also modified the hippocampus cells so that the channelrhodopsin protein would be produced in whichever brain cells the mouse was using to encode its memory engrams.

The Guardian summarizes:

In the experiment, Tonagawa’s team placed the mice in a chamber and allowed them to explore it. As they did so, relevant memory-encoding brain cells were producing the channelrhodopsin protein. The next day, the same mice were placed in a second chamber and given a small electric shock, to encode a fear response. At the same time, the researchers shone light into the mouse brains to activate their memories of the first chamber. That way, the mice learned to associate fear of the electric shock with the memory of the first chamber.

In the final part of the experiment, the team placed the mice back in the first chamber. The mice froze, demonstrating a typical fear response, even though they had never been shocked while there. “We call this ‘incepting’ or implanting false memories in a mouse brain,” Tonagawa told Science.

Why is this fascinating? Because a similar process may occur when powerful false memories are created in humans, even if the process is much more complicated in the human brain.

 

A Reservation-Thieving Bot Battle on Urbanspoon

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A fun story in Ars Technica today about an engineer who hacked a bot that hacked Urbanspoon:

It’s not uncommon for new San Francisco Bay Area restaurants to spring up and take both the neighborhood and nation by storm (see Mission Chinese Food). But State Bird Provisions (SBP) in the Fillmore district lived this ascent in hyper speed. Despite only opening in 2012, the small plate virtuosos earned distinctions like Bon Appetit’s Restaurant of the Year 2012, the James Beard Foundation’s Best New Restaurant 2013, and a place in Zagat’s 10 Hottest Restaurants in the World. Needless to say, it’s hard to just walk up and get a table, even midweek. SBP easily made theSanFranciscoWaits Tumblr.

Diogo Mónica, a security engineer at Square, knows this pain as well as anyone. He was a fan from the start, calling SBP “nothing short of spectacular.” But as the restaurant’s profile grew, its online reservations portal kept returning the same message: “No reservations are currently available. Reservations are taken online up to 60 days in advance. As tables become available, they will be shown here.”

Rather than getting discouraged, Mónica went to his developer tool kit. He SSHed into his remote server and wrote some code to get notified (via e-mail) every time the SBP reservations page changed. (See the code in full on his blog.) He learned that new reservations open around 4am everyday, saw that most were gone by 5am, and received heads-ups about newly available times from cancellations. But curiously, his setup revealed that most of the primetime reservations were scooped up by 4:01am.

“One day I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 4am), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 4:01am,” he wrote. “It quickly became obvious that these were reservation bots at work. After a while, even cancellations started being taken immediately from under me. It started being common [to receive] an e-mail alerting of a change, seeing an available time, and it being gone by the time the website loaded.”

How does one deal with reservation-thieving bots? With one’s own reservation-thieving bot, of course. 

This is like Inception for programmers. Read the story for the rest of the highlights.

Rainer Maria Rilke on Patience

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Someone in social media cited Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as their favorite book. I haven’t read it, but this quote on patience is sublime:

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

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(via Brainpickings)

Karen Cheng on Discipline and Quitting

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I profiled how Karen Cheng learned to dance in 365 days in an earlier post. She’s now published a super piece on trying and learning that it’s okay to quit:

Try everything. Be curious, ask questions. Let yourself be pulled in weird and interesting directions. Let your friends drag you to that thing you’re not so sure about. Go to a real bookstore. Sign up for an art class, a cycling class, an improv class. Bring a friend. When your friend bails, show up to class anyway.

I’ve tried a lot of things–and quit just about as many. Piano. Guitar. Singing. Cello. My band. My job at Microsoft. Juggling. Card tricks. Unicycling. Programming. Tae Kwon Do. Judo. Swimming. Origami.

Dancing was just another thing I tried. It stuck because I loved it the most.

Think about your job or hobby. Are you doing it because you really, truly love it? Or because it’s what you’ve always known?

What if you can’t afford to quit?

Okay, so you can quit your hobby. But what if you can’t afford to quit your job?

I felt that way at my old job. Two years into working at Microsoft Excel, I realized I was in the wrong career. I didn’t want to project manage anymore–I wanted to be a designer. But I had no design skills, and I didn’t want to go back to school. Going $100,000 in debt was not feasible, and three years is too long to wait for your dream.

So I taught myself–every day I would do my day job in record time and rush home to learn design. I hacked together my piecemeal design education in six months. I did not feel ready but I started the job search anyway. I was a lot less experienced than others, so I had to get creative to set myself apart. After getting rejected a few times, I got the job as Exec’s designer.

This is really great advice. I recommend reading the entire post and checking all the links.

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Also see: Cal Newport’s advice on not necessarily doing what you love.

Is It Possible to Get Too Much Exercise?

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Is it possible that there is an upper limit to how much exercise the body can take? The answer seems to be yes:

For some time, exercise scientists, as well as a few highly committed exercisers and their spouses, have wondered if there might be an upper limit to the amount of exertion that is healthy, especially for the human heart. While the evidence is overwhelming that exercise improves heart health in most people and reduces the risk of developing or dying of heart disease, there have been intimations that people can do too much. A 2011 study of male, lifelong, competitive endurance athletes aged 50 or older, for instance, found that they had more fibrosis — meaning scarring — in their heart muscle than men of the same age who were active but not competitive athletes.

Now the latest Vasaloppet study and a separate study of rats running the equivalent of several rodent marathons that was published this month in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology are likely to further the debate about possible upper limits to safe exercise. Providing some counterbalance, though, is another animal study, published this month in PLoS One, that suggests that even if strenuous prolonged exercise increases the chances of some arrhythmias, it may lessen the chance of suffering fatal heart problems.

I’m not training for an ultra-endurance event anytime soon…

How to Make a Walmart Cashier’s Life Easier

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A reader writes to Consumerist and provides some tips on what NOT to do as you’re checking out at your local Wal-Mart:

1. Talking on your cell phone while checking out. Doing it until you get to me is fine, but when you reach us, please be polite and tell the person on the other end of the phone to either hang on, or that you’ll call them back. We don’t demand a lot from our customers, but respect IS one thing we would all like.

One other thing regarding this–regular customers aren’t the only ones doing this. Some of the other associates have also been guilty of it–and have even complained about the customers doing the same thing! I have also had a regular customer who has one of those ear pieces where she would carry on a conversation with the person on the other end the entire time I was checking her out–and she didn’t even bother acknowledging me!

2. Please don’t bathe in perfume or other smelly stuff. For some of us, only a huge wind in the other direction will keep us from getting headaches from this–and it isn’t likely to happen inside a store. A little bit definitely goes a long way!

3.Please do not dress (or in this case, undress) like you are at home. That butt crack when you bend over is not exactly becoming. Neither is the large rip in your pants that shows you are not wearing underwear. Eeeww!

4. PLEASE save the electric carts for those who truly need them! We do not have an unlimited supply and there are people who really can’t move very far without one. If you can walk to the car–or across the store–without difficulty, you probably don’t need a cart. (One example: There is one customer who will come in through Lawn & Garden, walk from there–to the front of the store with no sign of a limp–and get an electric cart. When he is finished, he brings it back, plugs it in and walks back through the store to Lawn & Garden–with no limp!)

I didn’t know about the resolution if an item has been rang up twice:

If we have done something wrong like ringing something up twice, believe us when we say we can’t correct it AFTER you have paid. You will have to go to the service desk. Be pleasant and understanding. It may be the end of the day and we may have had a rough day.

The advice can apply to any retail store, obviously.

Why Twitter Parody Accounts Should Stay Anonymous

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I completely agree with Matt Buchanan’s piece in The New Yorker:

Parody accounts are, oddly, one of Twitter’s most distinguishing features. Anyone can have virtually any username on the service, as opposed to Facebook and Google Plus, which require users to display their real names. While fake Twitter accounts are sometimes created in an attempt to deceive, they’re just as often meant to be humorous, and have become a routine reaction to practically every news event, a fact lamented by Alex Pareene in The New Republic. Most fake Twitter accounts are, in fact, unfunny; some are in poor taste, like the fake Tsarnaev brother accounts that emerged almost immediately after the two were identified as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. But at their best, they ascend to “the highest cultural rung” of “the making-fun-of-others department,” as Louis Menand wrote of parody in the magazine in 2010. “Part of the enjoyment people take in parody is the enjoyment of feeling intelligent,” Menand noted. “Not everyone gets the joke.” The highly self-selected audience necessary for parody presents itself automatically on Twitter, which allows its users to choose exactly whom to follow.

 So why does the unmasking ultimately happen? Buchanan concludes:

Yet Twitter also constantly undermines the parody it creates. The primary currency of social media is fame, and it is fame that drives the authors of popular parody accounts to uncloak themselves, destroying the account in the process. If fame is all the authors of parody accounts care about, as @MayorEmanuel wrote in one of his last tweets, “it’s pretty clear that the party’s over.”

Do you have a favorite parody account on Twitter? I am a fan of @TheTweetOfGod and Lord Voldemort.

Tony Conigliaro: The Bartender with a Lab Coat

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Something I want to learn is to mix good (or just decent, to start) cocktails. In “The Bartender with a Lab Coat,” The New York Times profiles Tony Conigliaro and his skills in concocting signature cocktails:

It is here that he, along with a team of four technicians and a revolving door of mixology interns, works his alchemy, mixing herbs and spices, perfumes and flavors, fruits and vegetables and even tree bark and rocks.

Concocting one of his signature cocktails is a process that requires not just a sophisticated palate but also patience. It is not abnormal for a recipe to take him up to two years to release, as the ingredients must be replicable to his standards before it goes to any of his three London locations (he also has a bar at the Zetter Townhouse and is responsible for all cocktails served at a new restaurant, the Grain Store).

“I like to tell a story through flavors and creating bespoke ingredients,” he said, describing how he reinvented the Prairie Oyster, a concoction Sally Bowles, Liza Minnelli’s character in the film “Cabaret,” consumed every morning.

Another drink, the Rose, came from a perfume project in which Mr. Conigliaro wanted to “recreate the experience of sipping a glass of Champagne while walking in an English summer garden.” The drink’s secret is a sugar cube containing rose essence; the cube reacts with the Champagne bubbles, propelling the aroma through the cocktail.

Mr. Conigliaro recently released a book titled The Cocktail Lab on this art/craft, and The Times summarizes:

Highly produced with colorful photos of enticing-sounding drinks with names like Blush, Luna, Oh Gosh and the Wink, the book also offers classic cocktails with a twist, from a white truffle martini to a marshmallow milkshake. But some recipes require more time than talent (a Vintage Manhattan mixture has to age for a minimum of six months in a cool, dark place) while others seem strictly for professionals — the famous Prairie Oyster being one example, as making it requires a centrifuge, a half-sphere silicone mold, some vege-gel, orange food dye and soy lecithin.

I’ve placed The Cocktail Lab: Unraveling the Mysteries of Flavor and Aroma in Drink, with Recipes on my to-read list for 2013.