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Job titles to treasure (an occasional series)
The University of Melbourne is looking for a "Cuckoo/Branch Relief
Assistant". Details from their HR web site, under general staff vacancies.
I know we have possums, rosellas and assorted other wildlife on the campus,
but wasn't previously aware of any cuckoos. Some of the nearby elm trees
have, admittedly, been looking a bit stressed: perhaps they're the ones
needing branch relief.
9 January 2004 | | top of page
Career options: forensic palynology
In the hands of forensic
palynologists like Lynne Milne, pollen can help solve crimes: "Pollen
can help destroy or prove alibis, link a suspect to the scene of a crime,
or link something left at the crime scene to a suspect. It can also help
to determine what country or state drugs, food, merchandise, and antiques
among other things, have come from."
9 January 2004 | top of page
Neology
Provoked to laughter by Sneedle Flipsock's 'they shoulda
been words' page, m'colleague Eunice recommends Luciferous
Logolepsy, a collection of over 9000 obscure English words. I'm pretty
good with crosswords but, skirring
through the Luciferous
Logolepsy
site, I now feel a bit of a sciolist.
Yippee! Lots of new words to play with! (Thanks, Eunice)
9 January 2004 | top of page
Another apology from John Howard
Sneedle Flipsock subscriber Jill points us to another
excellent speech by a John Howard, this one delivered at the launch
of "Australia
Shamed: A List of Dissenters," a register of signatures of people
opposed to the Federal Government's harsh policies towards people seeking
asylum from persecution.
In three months during 2002 the list collected 4200 signatures from Tasmanians
in coffee shops, civic centres, council chambers, charities and churches.
A companion volume collected signatures from kids under 15 years old.
The books were lodged with the Tasmanian Archives and as an historical
record. The organisers stress that the list "is not a petition. It
is a message to posterity. Through The List our children and our children's
children will be able to see that we did not support the Australian Government's
harsh treatment of asylum seekers." (Thanks, Jill)
9 January 2004 | top of page
Crystal ball: e-learning
Reed S Gaither offers some predictions about the immediate future
of e-learning and multimedia in education, and the aforementioned
Henry Jenkins discusses what
kinds of media literacy education are needed by kids of all ages to
help them cope with this new technological future.
7 January 2004 | top of page
RIAA's scorched-earth lawsuits reduce file-sharing
In the last year or so, the US record industry has introduced legal download
services and taken strong legal action against file-sharing. A Pew
Internet research report shows this strategy seems to be having a
short term effect on record industry revenue and consumer behavior. Says
mediawatcher Henry Jenkins: "What we need to be looking at, however,
is whether it may also be having a negative impact on consumer relations
which can come back and haunt the record industry down the line."
In other words, is the RIAA simply pissing people off?
7 January 2004 | top of page
Buzzword bingo: work-life balance
"Concern about the way work submerges us as individuals is
as much about our psychology as it is about our workplace...
"We
are in danger of becoming obsessed by our jobs, if the latest studies
are anything to go by. And while that may sound a poor outcome for the
employee but ideal from the organisation’s perspective, it can
create problems all around...
"The rhetoric may be about a more flexible workplace but in
practice few organisations are having much success in offering viable
alternatives, such as part-time jobs, to staff.
"And that’s before they even tackle the harder questions:
how to get the most from workers without burning them out; how to nurture
soft skills in fast-moving and aggressive workplaces; how to reduce
stress when the pressure is on to get the most out of a dwindling number
of employees."
7 January 2004 | top of page
News sites slow to adopt accessibility measures
The Online Journalism Review notes that some US news sites have tried
to make their content more accessible to people with disabilities. "Editors
and designers at the few news sites that have gone out of their way to
accommodate the visually impaired report that the
effort was neither difficult nor costly. "
Also in OJR recently, a rundown on how free
content is a thing of the past for British newspaper sites and a how-to
checklist for earning
revenue from news.
7 January 2004 | top of page
Image maps with CSS
"While collaborating on a horror fiction web project, I decided
early on that I’d do my best to code the site using only standards-based
XHTML and CSS. When the other designer sent me his concept for the site,
I began to despair. He wanted the page to look like an old weathered
book, with rough edges and grungy textures. The menu items were scattered
about the page. How could I turn a well-structured document into something
that looked so organic?"
The answer: use
CSS to make image maps.
7 January 2004 | top of page
Creating prehistory
While their pals write egregious, mendacious fiction for kids, "some
other Creationists are still sticking to the old explanations about how
all these extinct and fossilised species were killed off during the Flood.
I still haven’t figured out how they reconcile this with God’s
commandment that Noah take all the animals with him on the Ark. Maybe
they blame
it on the ticket agent."
7 January 2004 | top of page
Graphical search results
Grokker 2 is software that presents your search
results in graphical relationships.
7 January 2004 | top of page
Slow light explained briefly
Lene Hau, Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at Harvard
University, takes 24
seconds to explain the newish concept of slow light, then summarises
the explanation in seven words.
7 January 2004 | top of page
How Powerpoint makes us stupid
Edward Tufte reckons a presenter's over-reliance
on Powerpoint can make you understand less information and feel socially
inferior. The software's design and function turns every meeting into
a sales pitch; it "routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes
content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play--very
loud, very slow, and very simple." You can buy Tufte's
28 page essay on Powerpoint, which includes his analysis of an important
NASA presentation on why the space shuttle exploded. Meanwhile, David
Byrne has been making art with Powerpoint. (Thanks, Trevor)
7 January 2004 | top of page
Beware nerds carrying almanacs
The FBI has asked American police to keep tabs on people
who read almanacs. What worries Teresa Nielsen Hayden is that the
alert doesn't include "travel guidebooks, high-resolution terrain
maps, architectural guides, government directories, maps of underground
water, power, and transit systems, lists of major industrial sites, the
Yellow Pages for pete’s sake, or any of the other references that
might reasonably be used..." to plan terrorist attacks.
7 January 2004 | top of page
Letter C declared unusable
"Our research indicates that 83% of the words being looked
up are words that contain the letter 'C'." states Nielsen. "Most
of this can be traced back to the lingual travesty which is the 'i before
e' rule, which incidentally is one
diphthong we could live without."
To be thorough, we really should impose a moratorium on two punctuation
marks as well. Jennifer Jacobson reckons "Some publishers and scholars
want to purge
the colon from book titles; the only thing that's worse: semicolons."
7 January 2004 | top of page
Finding your writerly voice
'The Rambler' asked Heather 'Angry Little Rabbit' Havrilesky how he could
become
a better writer. His letter is long and self-indulgent. Her answer
is long, amusing, direct, sincere and helpful. Good advice for bloggers,
diarists, wannabe columnists and op-ed authors, and anyone else with an
interest in writing. Just be careful that you don't succumb to the varieties
of insanity known to affect writers.
7 January 2004 | top of page
A short thank-you from Big Strides
Despite the macabre images, this music
video for "Suicidal" by Big Strides made Andrew laugh. Me
too. Requires Shockwave and sound. (Thanks, Andrew)
6 January 2004 | top of page
Desirable error message
Someone out there knows how
computers should respond to users: type your name into the dialogue
box and enjoy. (Thanks, Debbie)
6 January 2004 | top of page
John Howard's apology
Any John Howards who would like to reiterate this
apology should apply for copyright permission, which will be granted
immediately. It's a beautiful piece of writing by a talented man, and
every word is both sincere and true. (joyfully rediscovered via Geoff
Oakley's home page, via Debbie)
6 January 2004 | top of page
Mac eye for the Windows guy
You're
kidding me: beige?? (thanks, Trevor)
5 January 2004 | top of page
Brand recall measured by drawing logos from memory
Globes and circles seem ubiquitous in corporate logos and logotypes.
Marketers love to do research projects that quantify their customers'
recognition of logos, because it helps justify spending money on advertising
and promotional activities.
A low-cost alternative to such market research is this nifty little exercise,
in which an Austrian design company asked a bunch of people to draw
12 well-known logos from memory. Most participants seemed to remember
that Apple's logo is an apple, perhaps because of the obvious connection
between the idea, the word and the company's name. The variety of attempts
at the more abstract Toyota
logo suggests that perhaps a logo isn't really all that important to your
organisation's public image... (via BoingBoing.net)
5 January 2004 | top of page
How to rip vinyl
From Boingboing.net this week, how to transfer
music from vinyl to MP3 and a computer
game's disclaimer that indemnifies Hasbro in the event that a foreign
government disbands the Internet.
5 January 2004 | top of page
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