sneedle flipsock

2 July 2004: for so long treated as nouns

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This week:

 

Recommended reading for web people

M'colleague Jolanda is leaving, and looking for a list of reference books she'll need in her new role as web manager for a large statutory authority. Here's my current shortlist:

All the links are to Amazon.com listings. Feel free to buy these books elsewhere :-)

1 July 2004 | top of page

Games and stories

The Two Things Game is based on the idea that "For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important." For example, the two things about driving a car are: (1) Don't hit anything and (2) Don't let anything hit you.

What it's like to play Civilization and Intersite Democracy Game, two online role-playing games that let you explore what makes a civilisation: expansion and consolidation, research and defence, conquest and peaceful diplomacy, the ebbs and flows of culture, teamwork and human nature.

Why must Spiderman remain celibate?

There's a Hollywood remake in the works, with Martin Scorsese directing Brad Pitt and Leonardo di Caprio. Before you see that, make sure you see the Hong Kong original of "Infernal Affairs", a police corruption thriller starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau.

1 July 2004 | top of page

Mammoth sale and other historical niceties

In a truly mammoth sale, auction house Guernsey offered: "head of triceratops; tooth of T-rex; dinosaur embryos on the half shell; exquisite fossil fish; the skull of a saber-toothed tiger; and a one-story-high woolly mammoth skeleton from Siberia... [and] a skeleton of a humpback whale found in 1844 and once owned by showman PT Barnum." Paleontologists weren't happy, particularly about the smuggled dinosaur eggs.

Short memory. "The United States invaded a distant country to share the blessings of democracy. But after being welcomed as liberators, US troops encountered a bloody insurrection. Sound familiar?" Yes, it happened in the Philippines (1898) and Mexico (1913), long before even the South Vietnam debacle started in 1961.

1 July 2004 | top of page

Finding one's voice

David Weinberger on copyright and 'digital rights management':

"When it comes to creative works, we are not 'consumers,' and we are not users. Rather we appropriate creative works, that is, we make them our own. We apply them to our own context. We get them somewhat right or entirely wrong. They become part of us. That's how how we learn and how culture changes. But that means that creators should lose control of their works as quickly as possible. Obviously, creators need to be be paid for their work, but not for every bit of value they create: you shouldn't have to pay me if you re-read my book or lend it to a friend, even though you are getting more value from my book. Tough noogies on me. A pay-per-use system and allowing artists to control their works much past launching them into the world will kill culture."

Weblogging has started to appear in companies as a tool for communicating with stakeholders and clients, and for sharing knowledge with colleagues. While newspaper companies are flirting with the idea of blogs as news, the future of coprorate blogging is still very much of the crystal ball domain.

"We need the term 'authenticity' so we can talk about phonies, and simultaneously shouldn't trust its implication that only 'unfiltered' voice is 'real.' But, then what marks an inauthentic voice from an authentic one?"

Lynne Truss's successful book about punctuation, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", itself contains errors of punctuation, thus falling victim to the notorious Muphry's [sic] Law of Editing. So who buys this book? Timothy Noah would "like to think it reveals a late-blooming hunger for self-improvement by the ignorant masses... [but] Truss wants you to read her book not to learn the rules of punctuation but to join her in bewailing, as you review these rules, the sorry ignorance of those who don't know them."

BBC TV has dropped makeover shows in favour of arts and current affairs, and viewers are switching to other channels. Another move in the endless dance of public interest and the public's interests.

1 July 2004 | top of page

Career path for a mercenary

The Boston Globe reports that London-based Aegis Defense Services has won a US$293 million Pentagon contract to coordinate security in Iraq. Aegis is headed by Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, whose career highlights include:

  • an arms sale to Sierra Leone that violated a 1998 United Nations embargo (the Sandline affair)

  • serving as commanding officer of two British soldiers convicted of murdering unarmed Catholic teenage rPeter McBride in North Belfast, 1992

  • inspiring the 1997 military coup in Papua New Guinea, when Spicer's company received a US$36 million contract from the government to brutally suppress a rebellion. The PNG army toppled the sitting government and arrested Spicer (he was released later).

via JOHO The Blog | 1 July 2004 | top of page

.edu

New figures from the US Census Bureau show the proportion of residents with high school or university qualifications is continuing to rise. Last year 27.2 per cent of adults in the USA had a bachelor degree.

UNSW's dean of medicine, Professor Bruce Dowton, has resigned. His report on Bruce Hall's scientific (mis)conduct has never been made public, but he has been criticised within his faculty and the university for letting Hall off.

The government's new funding model for universities' "teaching and learning" activities is based on the idea that "the funding each university receives depends on relative performance of the university, that is one's place on the scale depends not only on one's own activity and performance, but also on the activity and performance of all other Australian universities. This in turn means that no university can predict where it will end up on the scale." Which makes budgeting and planning a right bugger.

Portrait of the academic as media floozy: as universities vie for top students, academic staff and funding, "they count on their bookish professors to leave the library and enter the studio, where their insights on the day's news might help put their institutions on the map."

30 June 2004 | top of page

Vicious prose, petty bickering

"If literary criticism is marked by vicious prose and petty bickering, then art criticism exists without firm judgments... The state of cultural criticism today, in the view of many, is debilitated, perhaps even moribund."

Slave manpower was doubled this week in an effort to ensure that erection of the gigantic Reagan Pyramid remains on schedule to be completed in time for the 40th president's mummification and ascension into the Afterworld.

"It is not my function as a citizen in a participatory democracy to question our leaders." Therefore I should not be allowed to say the following things about America...

"With its pseudowindows swimming in a blue background; its pop-up menus that don't work on a Mac; its jumble of news with ads with promos that make it impossible to tell who paid whom for what... the [recently redesigned] Fox News Web site looks like a porn site without the tits."

30 June 2004 | top of page

World o' web

Internet usage rose in Japan, France, Switzerland and Australia from April to May 2004. Usage dropped in Sweden and the USA.

BBC Radio 3 has launched its new web site. Features include permanent URLs for each edition of each program, improved linkages between schedules and program pages, search engine optimisation and other good stuff. ABC Radio National, are you listening?

More BBC goodness: a non-BBC person has worked out how to generate your own customised RSS news feed of BBC stories, based on a keyword search. (via Matt Jones)

"As a medium for reaching US adults on a regular basis, the Internet may well be at saturation." Regular use of the Internet has flattened out at 63 per cent of the population, and further penetration will require the conversion of 'Unconnected' consumers and Internet 'Resistors'.

Mitre 10, Fly Buys and other New Zealand organisations prove that user-centred web design has benefits for business. The benefits are proven by improved web-related sales and customer loyalty figures.

A person using a screenreader "is actually using three applications at once: the web site or web application, the browser, and the screen reader... by all means try the software for yourself. It's an interesting thing to do. But don't think that it will substitute for getting people with disabilities to test your product, website or web application for you."

30 June 2004 | top of page

Summer in the park

Things to do in New York's Central Park in summer.

30 June 2004 | top of page

Social history

Matt Jones looks back on four years of weblogging:

"It seems that the 'outboard brain' model is the one I'm most comfortable with, and get most utility from, and now this memory prosthesis is becoming more mobile and less textual. I've been trialling Nokia Lifeblog for the last month or so, and along with del.icio.us I'm finding that it's filling many of the roles of memory prosthesis that this blog used to.

"So, the question is what to do here other than to write more self-indulgent bitkipple about design and social technology and comics and science and cities and games and most importantly, magic for another four years?

"Wait a minute. I like doing that..."

We've gone from README to NEEDME, says Halley Suitt, tracing a line from the geeky text file that comes with your new software, through high-profile whistleblowers, to the way women have changed business practices in the last 40 years.

30 June 2004 | top of page

For so long treated as nouns

"Games and game-like visualizations finally do something that eBusiness has not done--they force authors, users, and viewers to understand business processes as processes, as customer flows through businesses. Chris Crawford's most important game design principle is that design is about verbs, not nouns. Business interactions, personal interactions, social interactions, political interactions--are these are verbs too, not nouns, but we have for so long been treated as nouns, as the results of algebraic queries across database tables. Should it be any surprise that games could lead us out of these chains?"

30 June 2004 | top of page

The fantasy of risk-free technology

For Professor Sir Colin Berry, "Almost no new technology can be assured to be risk-free. If your position is that you don't accept any incremental risk, you are in effect saying no to all new technologies, whether it be a better anaesthetic, a better car, a better aeroplane, a safer environment for children--in fact anything worth having."

30 June 2004 | top of page

Woman driver

"The Paris-Madrid road race of 1903 was a wonderfully disgraceful affair. Three hundred cars set out, conferring death and dismemberment along the dust-choked roads south. Six of the drivers were killed outright and nearly twice as many gravely injured. The hospitals were stuffed with mangled sightseers. By the time the surviving drivers reached Bordeaux the race was called off, and in Madrid the garlanded welcome arches were quietly dismantled." Among the spectators, probably, was three-year-old Hélène Delangle, destined to become one of Bugatti's top drivers.

30 June 2004 | top of page

E-government news

The Bichard Inquiry found that Britain needs a national IT system for keeping track of criminal records. More importantly, the IT system needs clear, consistent policies and procedures about who keeps records and when they can be shared, disclosed or destroyed.

The English Parliament's Select Committee on Public Accounts reports that it is "unsatisfactory" that Customs and Excise has so far spent over £100 million on its e-program without a rigorous business case. Customs should have exercised better control over the commissioning and management of consultancy contracts; used sensitivity analysis in evaluating the business case; and, early in the project, appointed a senior responsible owner for the overall e-program.

Wandsworth borough is unimpressed with the government's new IT system for administering student loans: "faults in the computer software mean that the system is extremely slow and constantly breaks down. It regularly loses information that has been logged on and is at times totally inaccessible." The government says the system's OK and points to poor Internet access and other glitches as likely causes of the local council's problems.

Advertising planning matters in newspapers is less cost-effective than advertising on local councils' web sites. A report (PDF) recommends introducing online planning applications, using geographical information systems (GIS) to identify neighbours that could be possibly affected a proposal, and allowing interested parties to register to be notified of developments in their area.

via eGovernment Monitor | 3 July 2004 | top of page

How fast can you run?

If you were the fastest human sprinter, you could probably leave Road Runner (meep! meep!) in a cloud of dust, but you'd have trouble outrunning an enraged rabbit.

via Frankenstein Journal | 3 July 2004 | top of page

Hitch Hiker's returns to radio

Hitch Hiker's is back, in a new BBC Radio series. Will it be as good without Peter Jones as The Book and Douglas Adams typing the scripts on toilet paper ten minutes before recording starts?

Whatever you do, don't panic. And please do not press this button again. (Requires Shockwave)

2 July 2004 | top of page

A trip down memory lane...

...for early adopters: Martin Belam rediscovers "The Beginner's Computer Handbook - Understanding & Programming The Micro".

...for typesetters and designers of printed material. These days desktop computers make it all so easy to produce an ugly publication. Back then, it took real skill.

2 July 2004 | top of page

Turning a profit in online education

One in 12 tertiary students in the USA attends a for-profit institution. Enrolment in for-profit institutions is growing at three times the rate of nonprofit colleges and universities, and a big part of that growth is in online education. (User name = flipsock, password = sneedle)

2 July 2004 | top of page

Weapons of mass destruction, yours for a price

The US Department of Energy is spending US$6.5 billion on nuclear weapons this year, and will spend up to US$38 billion over the next five years. This does not include the missile-defense program, only the maintenance, modernisation, development and production of nuclear bombs and warheads.

2 July 2004 | top of page

The libraries of our ancestors

The librarian who sold $680,000 worth of books owned by the NSW Parliament to antiquarian dealers was allowed to retire before an inquiry could begin into his business dealings with the biggest second-hand book seller in America.

"In popular imagination, the word Timbuktu is a trip of three syllables to the ends of the earth... [Yet here, in recent years,] thousands of medieval manuscripts that include poetry by women, legal reflections and innovative scientific treatises have come to light, reshaping ideas about African and Islamic civilisations. Yet even as this cache is being discovered, it is in danger of disappearing, as sand and other grit are abrading many of the aging texts, causing them to disintegrate."

2 July 2004 | top of page

One size fits all

Satisficers and maximisers: satisficers tend to settle for 'good enough' and on the whole are less likely to be depressed and suicidal than maximisers, who aim to make the best possible choice and, in western society, become overwhelmed by too many choices.

Business gurus Stephen Covey and Tom Peters each collect US$65,000 per public speech. Can anyone's generic, one-size-fits-all management advice really be worth that much money?

2 July 2004 | top of page

Art and design

The Mona Lisa is a little bit warped.

A good bartender can emboss a clover leaf into your on-tap Guinness. At his Richmond cafe, Chris Phillips draws portraits in your latte foam. (via BoingBoing)

"The skill of design, at its core, is the ability to reach into the mystery of some seemingly intractable problem... [and convert it into] a way of knowing and understanding... When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design."

2 July 2004 | top of page

Schrodinger's cat is either dead or alive, not in-between

Stand by for tremblings and arguments in the quantum physics department: a research fellow at Harvard, Shahriar S Afshar, has demonstrated experimentally that two of the three popular interpretations of quantum mechanics can't be right. If Afshar's experiment can be replicated, then only John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum still stands as a robust theory. (via BoingBoing)

2 July 2004 | top of page

Hard times at Walden

It's been a difficult year in Walden. First Zonker found his plants were longer talking to him. And this week true-blue American university football coach and Army reservist BD lost his helmet, and more. "[T]he sight of that bandaged stump on a stretcher and that never-before-seen hair was powerful and affecting... It was as if someone I knew had been wounded in Iraq."

Garry Trudeau comments: "What I meant to convey is that BD's life has been irrevocably changed, that another chapter has begun. He is now on an arduous journey of recovery and rehabilitation. What I'm hoping to describe are the coping strategies that get people through this... I have to approach this with humility and care. I'm sure I won't always get it right... But it seems worth doing. This month alone, we've sustained nearly 600 wounded-in-action. Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name."

2 July 2004 | top of page

In the style of...

Tolkien in the style of [insert name here]:

“Woolheaded man!” sniffed Arwen, folding her arms beneath her breasts, then unfolding them again so she could tug on her braid.

Aragorn grimaced. If only Legolas were there. Legolas always knew how to talk to girls.

[more]

2 July 2004 | top of page

Mirabilis

"Cliff rescue hailed as miracle," says the headline. Certainly I'd say the people who rescued the missionary were brave, generous and highly skilled, but they're probably not saints or deities. Neither was the missionary's landing in some trees a genuine miracle: more a collision of physics and ecology. Now if God had spontaneously materialised a big rubber mattress for him to land on, *that* would be a miracle.

Mystery 'blob creatures' are really just bits of dead whales.

 

28 June 2004 | top of page

 

2004 flipsocks:

17 Dec: the sock has flipped
10 Dec: anything anywhere any time
3 Dec: instant flattery
26 Nov: the steamroller of branding
19 Nov: fried v rice
5 Nov: the page with no name
29 Oct: and then there were none
22 Oct: filled with naughty laughter
15 Oct: get souls and disconcert the public
8 Oct: ooh, aah, ooh
1 Oct: pinch and a punch
24 Sep: design is the new art
17 Sep: footsteps of Aeneas
10 Sep: slow art, viral aesthetic
3 Sep: I can see your house from here
27 Aug: forever blowing bubbles
20 Aug: jargon for the digital age
13 Aug: beautiful plumage, the Norwegian blue
6 Aug: brokenated terribility
23 Jul: Alice underground
16 Jul: color-coded
2 Jul: for so long treated as nouns
25 Jun: looking for love, echidna-style
18 Jun: joy-to-stuff ratio
11 Jun: fun's fun but a girl can't dance all night
4 Jun: pink dinosaur
28 May: two people every minute
21 May: incompitnce [sic]
14 May: zygomatic smile
5 May: mailbox
30 Apr: bananaguard
23 Apr: mmmmmWAH!
15 Apr: playtime
8 Apr: googlewhack
2 Apr: we wish to inform you...
18 Mar: daffy dills
12 Mar: echo chamber
9 Jan: refund profologies

 

Also on this site:

about this site
home page

articles:
who is geoffrey ebert?
testing for the fun factor
chicken at the (higher education) crossroads
crawford's theory of interactivity
froghunting
home-page real-estate wars
the eagle has landed

listmania:
must-reads for web people
recent reads
pop-culture quotes

neology:
they shoulda been words

recipe:
lemon and rosemary risotto

reviews:
Written In Blood by Chris Lawson
The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Without whom (web):

frankenstein journal (Chris)
tbn97 (Troy)
webster's encyclopedia [sic]
science playwiths (Peter)
neroliwesley.com.au (Neroli)
Fraser
Jonathan
Maverick IT network consultants (Rick)
Look! There's a castle! (Brent)
Cairns Corporation (Gerald)
Homosapien Books (Julie and Bruce)
Southern Sky Watch (Ian)
Panda's Thumb (Ian again)
ABC Science-Matters (official)
science-matters (unofficial)
chisig
Bovios
Disinfo.com (Alex Burns)
Lee Battersby
Little Malop Gallery
Digest of Usability Resources and News (Dey)
WooWooWoo (Andrew)

 

 

Without whom (also):

Ramona P Lovechild
Dombardo
Katherine with a K
Katherine (no relation)
Catherine
Teresa
Corey
Claire
Claire (no relation)
Helsbels
Iain
Toby and Jann
Andrew
Paul, Warren, Dr K and The New Reality
Stephen
Tania
Trevor

 

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/