Now you can use www.eduardomorais.pt to get to this very same website. Some day I might use the address for something different. I’ll think about that later.

What a wonderful way to discover new webcomics. I’ll try hard not to lose hours in this.

… should be mandatory in every school curricula (PDF link). (via Boing Boing)

Maciej Ceglowski explains the obvious: no computer metadata scheme can ever represent the relationships between humans with any sort of accuracy. I like the notion that social graphs inevitably fall into a kind of Uncanny Valley.

A digital library of independent art books and magazines. Yay!

This is a impressive and (deceptively) simple webapp that allows you to route actions in a service (eg. liking a video on YouTube) to another (eg. tweeting about it). Granted, many sites offer this ability already, but I like IFTTT because it provides a central dashboard for all your routing while often being more customizable. Sure you could use Yahoo Pipes or Tarpipe, but those are just too excessive. Here’s a list of IFTTT recipes.

An interesting post on urban renewal, real estate speculation, nostalgia and gentrification. This seems a pretty universal phenomenon: right now downtown Porto has a mix of successful (?) and not-successful renewal, in the form of new drinking establishments all over the place and costly overhyped low-quality apartments like those the article describes. The former are all too dependent on fashions and are risky business, while the latter can’t have a good future value — being located in buildings surrounded by abandoned fire hazards, in streets where the drunken hordes roam on weekends.

An infographic about grade inflation, a pretty universal reality in Western universities as insititutions — despite an ambiguous rhetoric of ‘excellence’ — create pressures for higher grades.

Short of putting direct pressure on professors (as it happens in the countries where class averages are taken into account in performance evaluations), sometimes the curricula are designed in a way that encourages low standards; and the system is designed to make it hard to fail students (giving the students lots of second opportunities not to, having the professor go through a bureaucracy to fail a student, etc). That said, while not being fanatical about it, I know the bell curve tends to be a fact of life, so I’m almost always going to give out a lot more ‘B’s and ‘C’s. ‘A’s should really be exceptional.

I like Stellar. As Jason Kottke put it, it tracks your (and others’) favourite things online, by reading your ‘favourites’/’likes’/etc. from YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Flickr, and crossreferencing it with other users. It’s a cool way to discover neatness.

On the other hand Stellar makes Tumblr, which I described as “blogging for the lazy” upon discovering it, feel like a bureaucracy — even a ‘reblog’ requires at least two clicks and considering whether to add some comment. By contrast, your Stellar blog/stream/wall (there called the ‘flow’) is a product of your one-click ‘liking’ and favouriting around. ‘Creating’ is actually consuming and, at best, Stellar may cement the reputation of some users as good curators. Nowhere there’s that tiny Tumblr pretense of being a place where people do create original posts or at least original captions to other people’s stuff (95% of posts are probably n-th level ‘reblogs’, but still). Stellar is cleaner — only stuff you somehow declared to like, with no comments and no ‘via’ paths. I like it.

But considering the Web is shaped by the tools it offers, does Stellar’s architecture represent the level of engagement we desire? And should we even care?

I’ve been ‘attending’ Harvard University’s free online Computer Science class, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. I hope to plug some holes in my CS understanding, left from sometimes inadequate self-teaching and an academic background too focused on the end-user understanding of computers. Having had almost no direct contact with a foreign academic systems (except for a couple of University of Texas workshops and seminars held here in Porto), let alone Ivy League, here are some remarks after ‘attending’ the first couple of weeks (meaning watching four videotaped lectures and doing a couple of ‘problem sets’):

• Organization: it’s mentioned 700 people are taking the CS class in-site, but I have no idea how many more are taking it online (for a [obviously high] fee you can actually get graded). Dozens of staff provide service to just that one class. Plus all the extra seminars people can attend (or freely download videos of), such as A Crash Course in Java or Using the Vim Text Editor. Comparison to my own experience as academic instructor — all alone with sixty students in a small room — is headspinning.
• Dress-code: the utter lack thereof. Students come on stage wearing shots and flip-flops, exactly the kind of clothing items a high-profile portuguese university attempted to ban while soliciting students to denounce colleagues. Only shows that what University should be all about is knowledge, ideas, and creativity; not suits. Rigorous dress-codes send the very wrong idea presentation is more important (I haven’t seen any portuguese college soliciting students to rat out plagiarists — which would still be wrong). Presentation has a certain amount of importance, of course, (I often find myself wearing a polo shirt just to look a bit different from most students — ‘more teacherly’, if you will), but very tiny indeed — if it’s hot outside, by all means skip the socks.
• Colloquialisms and rhythm: the instructors’ speech is very free-flowing, sometimes even low-level curse words pass by. But that doesn’t mean the teaching is by any means dumbed-down, by the contrary, the rhythm at which new information is passed on to the students is much more unrelentless than anything in my own academic experience.
• Notes: the lectures’ notes are provided to the students so they don’t spend their time writing down stuff instead of paying attention. In my teaching, I’ve often interrputed students writing down stuff I say, an habit so embedded in some students they often don’t even look to something I’m showing. I always give out some links that I hope work as notes, but perhaps I should systematize this.
• Giving (Free / open-source) software in a virtual appliance, such as a VirtualBox VM: what a great idea! Not really practical in my video editing classes, but a good way to ensure students do their exercises in the ‘same’ computer in Multimedia Lab, for instance (of which usage of some open-source tools is part of the syllabus).

So yeah, I’m enjoying it.