Things to Do
If you're in New York City on Saturday February 25, definitely stop in at Eyebeam's Open Studio where you can meet the current Eyebeam residents.
If you haven't called Cathy's hotline yet, you should.
Things to Read
Cathy -- Francis Lam on The Stir-Fried Tomatoes and Eggs My Chinese Mother Made -- I’ve been thinking a lot about the "present and invisible." Tomato & eggs are a staple comfort food in Chinese home cooking, but the dish rarely shows up in cookbooks or restaurants, because cookbooks and restaurants focus on noteworthy dishes. This gets me thinking about analogs in the media - what kinds of important things are invisible, if we only focus on what's new or extraordinary?
Caroline -- Annalee Newitz's reporting on The Quantified Troll -- a great review of research on harassment, trolling, and abuse inside Wikipedia, where apparently 30% of harassment comes from contributors who have made a significant number of edits and so are presumably invested in the site.
Jamica -- Why open source software is better for society than proprietary closed source software. "Lately I've been thinking a lot about the open source movement which is fairly known for its software contributions but not as much considered for hardware. I see the open source community as a great entry point for new programmers and hackers and this read touches on a slew of other benefits."
Lam -- six new pieces on the networked public sphere. "Great essays that inform how I think about social data in the context of how we consume information and interact with one another online."
Logan -- “Notes on a Schema for Stories” by David E. Rumelhart. Logan also wrote a great roundup of his reading on narratology.
Amanda -- Aimee Lucido's tips on Being an Ally to Women In Technology mostly in the context of one woman's story about her experiences as a female engineer. I'm also loving Sara Yasin's essay about wearing, and taking off hijab: "The biggest change, when I decided to stop wearing hijab almost seven years ago, was this: I realized I didn’t have to be so nice all the time."
Inspired by the tech team at INN whose nerd alert Cathy Deng introduced to the lab, I decided to take a stab at adding some regular roundups of things we're excited about that probably won't make it into a full post.
More to Read
A few more URLs that we've been chatting about lately...
