Libra-net (11): S(c)iestas everywhere
Plus Science for Kids crowdsourcing, new ResearchNet collaborations, some book donations, and an invitation to party in Ohrid in August
1. At the start of the school year we announced a collaboration with municipality Gjorce Petrov in Skopje and the school Vlado Kantardziev in Gevgelija to annotate all of our Science for Kids videos with multiple-choice questions that can be used for studying and quizzes. We received over 500 questions for our 120 videos, big thank you to everybody who contributed to this experiment in crowdsourcing!
Special thanks to two biology teachers, Rajna Milisavova from the primary school Dimitar Pop-Georgiev Berovski in Skopje and Krunoslav Proshev from the primary school Vlado Kantardziev, whose students led the scoreboard and won a Science-for-kids workshop with a NZD science kit for every student. Stay tuned while we move to the next stage of our project, a Science for Kids learning app on your smartphones!
2. Thank you to everybody who joined us at our in-person S(c)iestas in Florida, New York and Montreal! For Montreal we even created a speakeasy cocktail menu, which we would be happy to test at other S(c)iesta meetups around the world. Needless to say, we are overwhelmed by your support and enthusiasm!
In May Nikola Stikov will be visiting the Emirates (May 1-5 at NYU Abu Dhabi, May 5-7 in Dubai), so please contact Anita Prendzova (prendzova.anita@gmail.com) if you would like to organize a meetup there. Nikola will also travel to Tokyo (May 18-23), and is looking forward to connecting with Macedonians in Japan. In the meantime, check out Nikola’s recent Substack posts, including a list of his favorite (and not-so-favorite) movies from 2022, and a paywalled review of Muse’s latest album and concert.
3. We donated Toso Filipovski’s rock encyclopedias to the Stanford library! Big thank you to Stanford grad student Filip Simeski for arranging the donation, and to the Stanford curator for Slavic and East European collections, Margarita Nafpaktitis, for accepting it. Filip will be defending his PhD thesis this Wednesday, we wish him all the best in his post-PhD career!
4. Earlier this month we had the pleasure of hosting Anastas Vangeli for a S(c)iesta on generative AI. Here you can read Anastas’ Substack post on the topic, and here is the Macedonian translation. We look forward to publishing more guests posts on our Substack, please reach out to Anita (prendzova.anita@gmail.com) if you have suggestions for topics.
5. Panche Naumov is inviting the S(c)iesta community to a summer gettogether in his villa in Elshani (Lake Ohrid) during the second week of August. Please fill out this survey if you would like to join us. Even if you cannot make it, use the survey to tell us if you will be visiting Macedonia this summer, we might plan another gettogether in your city. Also, congratulations to Panche (a member of CeNIIs) for his recent article published in Nature Chemistry!
6. Our Researchnet.mk portal keeps adding collaboration opportunities. Check it out for new announcements from Saso Dzeroski in Slovenia, Aleksandar Kondinski in Singapore, Marko Shuntov in Denmark, Biljana Tasetovikj in Belgium, and Vojkan Nedkovski in Italy. Feel free to add more collaboration opportunities using the following link.
7. When Twitter started blocking Substack links we joined NOSTR. We invite you to follow us there using this public key: npub1fy542mp9ynaelr4xj708460mh0dessy4mcvjax60yjjxvmp7fv8qzj3ayw
NOSTR is in its early stages, but it has the support of Jack Dorsey (the creator of Twitter) and was recently joined by Matt Taibi and other Twitter dissidents. It is a decentralized alternative to social media using the Bitcoin lightning network to make it easy to zap (pay) people you follow (kind of like a blockchain-based Mastodon). If you are curious about this new technology, create a NOSTR profile, add a lighthning supported wallet and reply to one of our posts with the word “С(ц)иеста“. We will zap 10,000 satoshis to the first five people to do so!
And now a paywalled selection of our favorite writings on the web, curated through our Twitter and NOSTR feeds: