Biomedical and Electrical Engineer with interests in information theory, evolution, genetics, abstract mathematics, microbiology, big history, IndieWeb, mnemonics, and the entertainment industry including: finance, distribution, representation
I'm sorry you've run into this issue. I can't help but wonder if most of the spam is really pingback spam? Much of what you've gotten likely isn't arriving via webmention as I see the following header in your page:
<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/www.miriamsuzanne.com/xmlrpc" />
My guess along with some minor sleuthing is that the entirety of the spam you're seeing is of the pingback variety as the mechanism by which webmention works is mean to actively decrease the amount of unwanted spam. Vanishingly little Webmention spam has been seen in the wild.
Removing the pingback link from the header of that particular page (or others that might get linked to with heavily trafficked sites like CSS-Tricks which are often pirated) should solve your immediate problem. Hopefully those who are working on additional anti-spam features will add to these measures to further mitigate this sort of issue for the broader publics' use and adoption. I've personally experienced this sort of "attack" at least once in the pingback space and another using the even older refbacks specification. On my small personal site, I leave them all on however, particularly for the small slice of academic blogging community that still uses pingbacks and the benefits generally outstrip the annoyance. Naturally your mileage may vary and you may consider turning them off.
Of course, you'll probably also realize that the reason the CSS-Tricks notification was caught in spam was because it also came in as a pingback and not by webmetion. (I'm pretty sure that they don't have webmention set up to send them, so their site would have only sent a pingback.)
Many of the older systems, including WordPress which are frequently used by these same sorts of pirates, will still send/trigger pingbacks. Within the IndieWeb space, most sites explicitly sending webmention notifications will include h-cards with author names and timestamps which is part of why Max Böck’s filtering solution works well.
On the positive side, I wonder if this sort of notification behavior might help sites like CSS-Tricks to track these sort of bad actors for help in potential take downs of this sort of piracy?
A refback (remember those?!) today reminded me about this post: Non-technical IndieWeb: Fun, Creativity, Community, and “Content” https:/
I should try to add more on #creativity and #fun to my IndieWeb Collection https:/
The #IndieWeb community smartly doesn't rely on email, but if you insist, you can subscribe to This Week in the IndieWeb, a weekly digest of recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of wiki edits, sent out every Friday afternoon.
https:/
A whole new level of #indieweb? #ownyourinfrastructure?!
To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet https:/
A nice thread to contemplate for community CoC. #indieweb https:/
The @LitFestPasadena website is up for 2016! Save the date for June 4: Pasadena Community's Free Book Festival! http:/
Richard Macksey's Humanities Center @JohnsHopkins celebrates 50 years as intellectual community http:/
I use and love @withknown every day; Have you seen it/used it yet @geofdotedu?
Why we built Known http:/
How is it that @HomeDepot hasn't partnered up with @LtlFreeLibrary to help customers build their own libraries? #DIY #community #books
This brings up, not surpisingly, an old trope in mathematics: "what use is abstract mathematics?" Some of the philosophy is disccussed well in Michael Harris's new book Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation [http:/
Often courses like analysis and topology seem awfully abstract, but become much more useful when combined with other topics like linear algebra and group theory to build up other abstract topics like Lie groups and Lie algebras which have more specific problem applications. A few years ago I was shocked to see a Birkhauser/Springer text entitled Stochastic Models, Information Theory, and Lie Groups [http:/
I might suggest you sit back and enjoy the abstract portions of the ride for a bit while keeping your eyes out for applied areas for application. You'll find enough applied math as you go along. In general, you may find that many applied areas will become more comprehensible to you because you better understand the abstract math which underpins them.
One bright light at the end of the tunnel for analysis is that it builds up things for measure theory which underpins probability theory.
For resources, you might find Francis Su's (he's the current president of the MAA) online lectures to be interesting/useful. They can be found via http:/
There are also a wealth of materials via India's IIT http:/
Response to JHU's academic freedom statement created by the Task Force on Academic Freedom:
Paragraph 5 of the statement beginning: "Academic freedom also entails academic responsibility." repeats itself unnecessarily in almost exact language with the following two sentences which should be combined into one:
"Faculty who express their personal views on controversial subjects in the classroom must make it clear that students may disagree with those views."
is followed by an intervening sentence, and then essentially repeated in the final sentence of the paragraph:
"Professors who express their personal views on a contested issue must make it clear that students may disagree with those views without penalty."
Also from a grammatical standpoint, while the issue at hand is academic freedom, which we can all agree is important, it is not so important that a major research university should capitalize it unnecessarily in a document like this. Except in the cases where it starts a sentence (and then only the 'A' in academic freedom should be capitalized), or perhaps in the main title which appears in all caps, academic freedom should not be capitalized anywhere in the document.
From a semantic and administrative standpoint, while it's lovely that we have such a statement, it really doesn't do much to actually institute any actual mechanisms to prevent administrators or professors from abusing the academic freedoms of others in the community. The general concepts stated here are, to a great extent, already living within our community; the real step would have been in going further spelling out something further. Where are the broad guidelines for actually instituting and safeguarding these freedoms? In essence, we've written a lovely preamble to a constitution, but forgotten to include the actual articles.
Admittedly, it's incumbent upon users to double check, but the DRASTIC change from the old theme to the new is really TOO much of a change. As a theme publisher, you really should have created a totally new theme with a different name. Though the new design is lovely in and of itself, with a new name, it also would have likely benefited by not having the old one-star reviews or the support forum issues which are likely to scare new samplers/users of the new theme away.
You're also likely to have even worse problems from users who don't double-check to see the changes/updates and have issues. I'd imagine that many who had the older version may want to go back to the original version 1.2.3.
Though there were a few quirks with the old version (< v1.2.3), it was both lovely and very functional, particularly within the Education space. This new theme doesn't really have any type of educational feel at all and instead seems more like a plain vanilla WP blog format.
For the sake of the community, I honestly hope that you republish the old version under its original name and then republish v2.0 under a new name. If you do this, I'll come back and give the original a 5 star review along with some notes about how to navigate the home page slider that seemed to be one of the bigger issues in the original.
At the most basic level [book:Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D.|460669] has some relatively sound advice. If you need something entertaining my friend Adam Ruben's book [book:Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School|7769479] is pretty good.
For some of the other topics you mention, start reading The Chronicle of Higher Education. Most of it is available online without a subscription, but they've got lots of current faculty writing regularly on the topics you mentioned.
Slowly you'll find a community of online professors like Robert Talbert (http:/
On twitter, you might consider following some the people on this list to start: https:/
Within twitter, there are a handful of hashtags you might following/comment along with including: #mathchat, #PhDchat, #PhDLife and likely a handful of others.
On the practical side, consider creating accounts on mendeley.com, academica.com, researchgate.com, etc. as a way to find people, help, material, etc. You might also consider starting yourself a blog (aka Commonplace book) to collect all your thoughts: http:/
Finally, for graduate level math, I highly recommend spending the $100-200 for a Livescribe Pulse pen: http:/
Feel free to ping me here or via other means (http:/