Nancy Pelosi: if she ran for president, she'd beat Trump.

Preposterous in every way. And written by noted Republican troll, David Gergen.

Nancy Pelosi: if she ran for president, she'd beat Trump.

This Butterscotch Pudding Has a Secret Ingredient That’s 10/10 Fall

Sugar free butterscotch? What manner of perilous magic is this?

A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst—we don't count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. Today, we’re making a new-classic butterscotch pudding without any sugar.

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Photo by Bobbi Lin

Butterscotch is one of those words people can’t agree on. But there are a few concessions:

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Wemogee – Chat App Based Purely on Emojis

Classic example of 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander" thinking. Or in this case how 'emoji thinking' helps those with aphasia. Wemogee might just expand everyone's capacity for image thinking.

Yet another chat app has been made available for download, but unlike most regular chat apps, this particular one puts emojis to the forefront.

14 Google Hangouts Hidden Animated Emojis

14 Google Hangouts Hidden Animated Emojis

Google Hangouts is one of the best ways to continuously stay connected on smartphone and desktop either via…Read more

Developed by the Italian arm of Samsung, Wemogee is a chat app that is made to help people with aphasia communicate. What is aphasia you ask? Aphasia is a complex neurological disorder that is triggered by injury to the Broca and Wernicke areas of the brain.

Those affected by aphasia often suffer from difficulties relating to the production, comprehension and expression of speech.

The way Wemogee works is pretty straightforward: users will be able to chat with each other by selecting one of the more than 140 phrases that can be currently found in the app.

These phrases are depicted as emojis in Aphasic Mode, as well as standard text in Non-Aphasic Mode. To make finding for a particular phrase easier, all of the phrases have been sorted into six different categories.

On its own, Wemogee proves to be a rather easy to use chat app. The selection of phrases are large enough to carry out a simple conversation between two people. However, at the time of writing, Wemogee suffers from a weird bug that prevents the user from receiving an authorization SMS.

Seeing as an authorization SMS is needed to start using Wemogee, and so, not being able to receive said SMS means that you won’t be able to use it at all.

Wemogee is now available for download on the Android Play Store. The app will also make its way to the Apple App Store sometime soon.

10 Chat Tools for Better Communication in Team Projects

10 Chat Tools for Better Communication in Team Projects

When building ideas together in a team environment you need a reliable means of communication. The people you…Read more

Microsoft’s Academic 2.0 is Now Available in Preview Form

This is good news for those of us who want at least some competition with Google Scholar. If they stick with it, this might just do it. And by "they" I mean Microsoft. They have been even more fickle than Google about abandoning viable platforms. Check it. Use it. Let me know how well it works for you.

Some of you may remember Microsoft’s Academic Search, a research project and academic search engine that was discontinued in 2012. However, in March 2016, Microsoft brought back an updated version of the Academic Search system as a Bing-powered service.

Fast forward to April 2017, it appears that Microsoft has big plans for this academia-centric search engine as the company has launched Microsoft Academic 2.0 in preview form, allowing everyone to have a taste of what the system may offer when the full version is made available.

100+ Alternative Search Engines You Should Know

100+ Alternative Search Engines You Should Know

If someone asks you, off the top of your head, what search engines you use or know off,…Read more

At the core of Microsoft Academic 2.0 sits the updated version of the Academic Search system. As the name implies, this system is a search engine that is tailored to look for academia-related content. The content that can be found via this search engine includes academic journals, thesis and conferences.

While the search engine itself will assist you in pulling up publications that are related to your field of interest, the Academic Search system can accommodate a wide variety of parameters.

For example, you could use the search engine to search for authors or even educational institutions. Also, depending on the topic that you’ve searched for, the results that return could include works that were first published in the 18th century or older.

So what else does Microsoft Academic 2.0 apart from the Academic Search system? For starters, Microsoft Academic 2.0 functions more like a full-fledged educational ecosystem. Unlike Academic Search, which is purely a search engine, Microsoft Academic 2.0 has some features that appear to be inspired from social networking services.

For starters, Microsoft has implemented a Follow button on all of the topics that can be found on the search engine. This feature will prove to be useful for those who wish to be updated on a specific topic, author or organization on a regular basis, allowing them to gain access to the latest materials without needing to search for it.

The updated contents will be made available on the user’s dashboard for easy access.

As for those who have published journals or theses online, Microsoft has also provided tools that would allow a user or organization to claim a paper, journal, conference or even an author as their own.

In its current form, Microsoft Academic 2.0 is still very much a work in progress. While the search engine part of the Academic 2.0 runs pretty smoothly, the user experience part of the system is still very much barebones and may not function properly at times.

While it is way too early to tell if Academic 2.0 will manage to be the research hub that Microsoft envisions it to be, there is no denying that Academic 2.0 could potentially be useful for those who are involved in academia.

Libraries.io – Open Source Search Engine For Developers

Libraries.io – Open Source Search Engine For Developers

There are millions of open source projects online with new ones being launched every day. Developers from all…Read more

Cognitive Benefits of Healthy Buildings

This is good news for those of us who want at least some competition with Google Scholar. If they stick with it, this might just do it. And by "they" I mean Microsoft. They have been even more fickle than Google about abandoning viable platforms. Check it. Use it. Let me know how well it works for you.

Oset Babur in Harvard Magazine:

Imagine a business that creates a perfectly energy-efficient environment by adjusting ventilation rates in its workplace. On paper, the outcome would seem overwhelmingly positive: fewer greenhouse-gas emissions to the environment and lowered costs to the business. It’s an idyllic scenario, except for what Joseph Allen and his team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) describe as the potentially serious human cost: workers with chronic migraines, nausea, fatigue, and difficulty focusing. Fortunately, these side effects are avoidable.

“The truth is, we absolutely can have buildings that are both energy-efficient and healthy,” says Allen, assistant professor of exposure assessment science. In 2015, his team published a two-part study that quantified the cognitive benefits of improved environmental conditions for workers. The first phase took place in the Syracuse University Center for Excellence, where knowledge workers, such as architects and engineers, went about their regular workdays as Allen and his team manipulated environmental factors. “We weren’t looking to test an unattainable, dream-state workplace. We wanted to test scenarios and conditions that would be possible to replicate,” he explains. They adjusted ventilation rates, carbon dioxide levels, and the quantity of airborne VOCs (volatile organic chemical compounds that are emitted by common objects such as desk chairs and white boards). At the end of each day, the team asked workers to complete cognitive-function assessments in nine key areas, including crisis response, decisionmaking, and strategy. “We saw pretty dramatic effects,” he reports: workers in optimized environments scored 131 percent better in crisis-response questions, 299 percent better on information usage, and 288 percent higher in strategy.

More here.

The National Blues

Let us tell the story simple and true.

Clusterfuck Nation
Now appearing Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page!

While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens. I mean unspeakably literally. If you want evidence of our inability to construct a coherent story about what’s happening in this country, there it is.

I live in a corner of Flyover Red America where you can easily read these conditions on the landscape — the vacant Main Streets, especially after dark, the houses uncared for and decrepitating year by year, the derelict farms with barns falling down, harvesters rusting in the rain, and pastures overgrown with sumacs, the parasitical national chain stories like tumors at the edge of every town.

You can read it in the bodies of the people in the new town square, i.e. the supermarket: people prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sunk in despair, a deadly consolation for lives otherwise filled by empty hours, trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort.

These are people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them. They do not work at things that matter. They have no prospects for a better life — and, anyway, the sheer notion of that has been reduced to absurd fantasies of Kardashian luxury, i.e. maximum comfort with no purpose other than to enable self-dramatization. And nothing dramatizes a desperate life like a drug habit. It concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, like waiting to be hanged.

On display in the news reports about the mystery of the opioid epidemic is America’s neurotic reliance on supposedly scientific “studies.” Never before in history has a society studied so much and learned so little — which is what happens when you resort to scientizing things that are essentially matters of conduct. It rests on the fallacy that if you compile enough statistics about something, you can control it.

Opioid addiction is just another racket, a personal one, in a culture of racketeering that is edging toward truly epochal failure, for the simple reason that rackets are dishonest, and pervasive dishonesty is at odds with reality, and reality always has the final say.

The eerie thing about reading the landscape of despair is that you can see the ghosts of purpose and meaning in it. Before 1970, there were at least five factories in my little town, all designed originally to run on the water power (or hydro-electric) of the Battenkill River, a tributary of the nearby Hudson. The ruins of these enterprises are still there, the red brick walls with the roofs caved in, the twisted chain-link fence that no longer has anything to protect, the broken masonry mill-races.

The ghosts of commerce are also plainly visible in the bones of Main Street. These were businesses owned by people who lived in town, who employed other people who lived in town, who often bought and sold things grown or made in and around town. Every level of this activity occupied people and gave purpose and meaning to their lives, even if the work associated with it was sometimes hard. Altogether, it formed a rich network of inter-dependence, of networked human lives and family histories.

What galls me is how casually the country accepts the forces that it has enabled to wreck these relationships. None of the news reports or “studies” done about opioid addiction will challenge or even mention the deadly logic of Wal Mart and operations like it that systematically destroyed local retail economies (and the lives entailed in them.) The news media would have you believe that we still value “bargain shopping” above all other social dynamics. In the end, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

I’ve maintained for many years that it will probably require the collapse of the current arrangements for the nation to reacquire a reality-based sense of purpose and meaning. I’m kind of glad to see national chain retail failing, one less major bad thing in American life. Trump was just a crude symptom of the sore-beset public’s longing for a new disposition of things. He’ll be swept away in the collapse of the rackets, including the real estate racket that he built his career on. Once the collapse gets underway in earnest, starting with the most toxic racket of all, contemporary finance, there will be a lot to do. The day may dawn in America when people are too busy to resort to opioids, and actually derive some satisfaction from the busy-ness that occupies them.

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Who is Pooh Bollinger? And what’s got her so worked up?
Find out soon in this space….

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The post The National Blues appeared first on KUNSTLER.

Why You Shouldn't Always Trust Weight Loss Success Stories

Crazy Collaborative Dictionary Project: From Amic to Zzaj

The most appealing and intriguing idea here in Kevin's post is the notion of legacy and continuity so that the idea of coining your own words is paired with the larger idea of creating a commons, a shared play space that defies time for at least as long as the server carries on. The next step is to move it to in-house servers maintained by students from year to year. I expect you to begin to have 'homecomings' soon, Kevin, because you are also creating an extended family of learning.

Now in our 12th year of collecting newly invented words (ranging alphabetically from Aamic to Zzaj) from sixth graders, our Crazy Collaborative Dictionary is pushing nearly 1,000 invented words. The invention of language is part of our lessons around the origins of words, and the roots of the English Language, and we have a blast with this word-invention activity.

But what amazes me is that this year’s class of word inventors weren’t even born when the first class of word inventors began making up words in 2005. Actually, we didn’t use a wiki until 2006, I think, but we used to publish the words as an in-house dictionary document. We started with an old wiki site called Seedwiki, and then moved to Wikispaces when Seedwiki kicked the bucket.

Once I had the first version of the wiki dictionary up, we shifted to the online dictionary concept (as well as lessons about this thing called the Internet and what in the world Wikis were). I’ve had them submit words all sorts of ways. This year, we set up a Google Form to collect words into a database.

A few years ago, we added podcasting to the activity, giving students a chance to record their word and definition. As I now pitch it to them, their voice will be forever (well, we’ll see about that, right? Forever is a long time in Internetland) linked to their word, in this moment in time. Five years, or ten years, from now, they should be able to “listen” to their sixth grade self, reading out their word and definition at the Crazy Collaborative Dictionary. (I am still connecting podcasts to this year’s collection of words)

I think that idea is pretty nifty, as is the concept that many of my students are now “collaborating” with older siblings, some of whom have graduated and are in college, or in jobs. But their words are there, in our dictionary, as are their siblings’ new words. As a father of three kids, I find that idea of cross-year collaboration pretty magical indeed.

Peace (words matter),
Kevin