Binoche, naked for ‘Playboy’ · ELPAÍS.com

For some reason I must have thought a “serious” and “intellectual” actress wouldn’t be interested in modeling naked for Playboy. Well, I am often mistaken, and this time the proof comes from an old number of El Pais, in which there’s the news of nude Binoche portraits being published precisely on Playboy. Almost every actress gets published nude on some magazine, but she is not “any” actress as well as Playboy isn’t “some” magazine.

Of course, to celebrate one’s body is extraordinary. Euphoria from publishing must also be a potent drug. On the other hand, why would she not?

We are left with the voyeurism of looking at her.

“In the photos my body is seen in a different way, as though they also showed the soul. We are used to separating the body from the spirit, or the body from emotions,” she says.

Buried among a lot of stuff fromthe Connectivism Course CCK08, I found this jewel of an ontology theory: the so-called Nodality Theory, or NoT. It’s really very good, very interesting, and there may even be some truth in it!

NoT™ (v1.0): Nodality Theory: An ontology for all ages «

NoT™ posits a basic unit of study, known as the node.

Nodes may be considered as:

1. individual humans
2. appliances created by humans

Nodes connect to form networks. In networks, nodes communicate with other nodes.
From this arises further areas of study:

-Connectivity theories (e.g. connectivism)
-Communications theories (pattern recognition and symbolic representation)
-Network theories (social and machine)

[...]

SOME Q’s and A’s

Q. Can a nerd be a node?

A. Of course.

Q. Is a book a node?

A. Nerds will often use e-book format.

Q. Is a non-e-book book (NEBB) a node?

A. Yes, a NEBB is a node.

Q. Well, how does a node connect with a NEBB?

A. Human nodes connect via the sensory. You read it. Appliances connect often via scanners.

Q. Is a NEBB an appliance then?

A. Yes, an early form.

Q. Do appliances connect with each other? How?

A. Absolutely. With or without wires.

Q. Well then, how do NEBBS connect with other NEBBS?

A. Through human nodes, same as now.

Q.  Makes no sense to me.

A. You should become a connectivist then, then you would have no worries. Connectivists don’t believe in making meaning. (In connectivism, a phrase like ‘constructing meaning’ makes no sense-10th post down that thread).

Q. How will I understand this, then?

A. Through Connecti-Vision™.

[...]

Live action for LazyFeed starting today!

I got the first news of LazyFeed during the summer from Louis Gray, then got an invite and began checking it out.

I like LazyFeed! It is a Web-based recommender system plus feed reader. It’s lazy, or better, it caters to “lazy people” since it recommends readings that it infers may interest people, by analyzing the content one is subscribed to (including social networks) and extracting new topics. Lazyfeed also let you

Save all kinds of topics and don’t worry about missing out on anything. The most recently updated topics will rise to the top, keeping you always updated.

Here is a nice and simple tutorial to learn how to use LazyFeed.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

In this first image, you can see LazyFeed’s interface after login. On the left, the list of my categories. On the right, Lazyfeed’s posts and tweets, plus, in the upper portion, its hot topics of the moment, which may be expanded if dropped on the “What interest you?” bar.

The second image shows the same interface after dragging the tag “Web 2.0″ over the “Interest” bar. Asd it can be seen, Lazyfeed is a good tool for discovery.

Last, Lazyfeed has always some topic to propose to lazy me…

Dave Sifry, blogger and photographer has a nifty new twitter/blog crawl mashup called Hoosgot (Who’s Got?).

Simply place a request with Hoosgot (with the keyword… ‘hoosgot’ followed by the actual words) and use the power of what has been called the lazyweb 2.0. In a few moment you’ll get the answer.

Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up in Hoosgot.com. It’s that simple. Try it, the power of the lazyweb 2.0!

Twitter Charts

See the distribution of my tweets during the day as of 7th November, 2009.

Enter http://xefer.com/twitter/<your-own-twitter-id> and you can have it, too.

• Adding a ‘SixthSense’ to Your Cellphone – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  Technology from Pranav Mistry ready to go Open Source. Go build a new wearable interface for augmented reality!!
  (tags: delicious augmented-reality)
• Clip it!
  Nice tool to capture and save a full webpage in one single image. Sorry PC's, it works in Mac only!!
  (tags: delicious tools clipping)

It is widely known that titles of books, films and other works, are often translated very liberally. Sometime, they are literal; sometime they are extravagantly different. “War and Peace”, rest assured, is literally the same title in all languages, at least in those languages of the Western world.

Image via Wikipedia

So, it is somewhat interesting when some books, especially if bestsellers, get their title translated or changed considerably. First example, I’m sure widely known, is from the famous Harry Potter series. The first book’s title in the US is “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone“, which is a fine title, no doubt. However, the bell rings after noticing that the UK original title is “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone“. The old idea of the Philosopher’s Stone (the lapis philosophorum, “a legendary alchemical substance, supposedly capable of turning metal into gold”, La piedra filosofal in Spanish; La pietra filosofale in Italian) is thus abruptly taken from quite many kids from the US. Perhaps the American publisher thought US kids might have difficulty with this idea, while their British or Australian pals certainly have not. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if the book in US-English talks about the Philosopher’s Stone or not: it is however a curious caase of difference between the American and the British English worlds. Also, in other languages, the Philosopher’s Stone remained as such.

Another interesting case, much more recent, is the title of the first book of the ultra-famous Millennium series from the almost unknown Swedish writer Stieg Larson. The first book in the US is “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“. Good. Pity that the original title is Män som hatar kvinnor,  literally “Men who hate women“, a binding title, no doubt! A hard title, one which is bound to be remembered. Might be that in the US such a title could be considered offensive or reproachable?

In Spanish, though, the title was rendered into the innocuous Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres, “Men who did not love women“, which is placed in the past and opts to avoid the word “hate”. Same spin in the French title, Les hommes qui n’aimaient pas les femmes, but both Portuguese and Italian are faithful to the original: Os Homens que Odeiam as Mulheres, and Uomini che odiano le donne.

Well, how’s the book? I’m reading it, so I’ll tell later.

P2: The New Prologue « Blog « WordPress.com

I’m looking forward to finding an interesting way to use the fascinating new P2 theme for Wordpress. Perhaps in the new WPmu STEMmED site?

According to its authors, it has:

# In-line editing for posts and comments.
# Tag suggestion.
# Collapsible comments.
# Real-time notifications when a new comment or update is posted.
etc…

It is a sort of quick Twitter-like environment for groups. The image below is inspiring!

Sometimes people object to using Wikipedia for academic purposes. I am not going to deal with the pros and cons of such use here (though I am convinced the pros far outnumber the cons). I am going to talk about a professor who took the bull by its horn and decided to build upon Wikipedia, with his students.

I am talking about wikipedia turbouser Jon Beasley-Murray, author, with his students, of the Wikipedia pages/articles El Señor Presidente on the book by Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias, The General in his Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez, etc. So, he got to be a writer of great value for Wikipedia and the community at large.

Jon Beasley-Murray is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. His profile can be found here: User:jbmurray – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray}. Here’s a nice quote:

In Spring 2008, I coordinated the educational project Murder, Madness, and Mayhem. In one semester we promoted three articles to Featured Article status, eight to Good Article status, and one to B-Class status. More details are available on our project page.

See also: “Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?”

I am working on a further essay, “Advice on Using Wikipedia in Colleges and Universities“. Do tell me what you think.

The fact is that Jon’s  collective goals for his class were to bring a selection of articles on Latin American literature to featured article status (or as near as possible), but none of them had such status at the beginning.

This is what bavatuesday’s Jim Groom (deus ex machina of UMW Blogs) has to say:

This is a remarkable project, and a herculean task realized in the short time span of less than 15 weeks. Jon and his students are [a] model for thinking, sharing and contributing with[in] the open space of the internet. An important act of faith and intellectual responsibility. It is ever so impressive.

Jon’s project lives –> here <– on Wikipedia. PLUS, check this –> Presentation <– by Brian Lamb on the use of Wikipedia in Academia.

The VIR-ED project is a research project looking at how we can adopt 2.0 thinking to creatively engage people in higher education learning and research.

Here’s a compelling video with a message: Viral Education 2.0

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]