17 september 2004: footsteps of Aeneas
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com
This week:
- Helpful
- Feedback
- Must-do for Neil Gaiman fans (and thingies)
- Wayfinding
- Web and 'net
- .edu
- Pattern recognition
- Out standing in a field
- Celestial shenanigans
- At work and play
- In the footsteps of Aeneas
- Good practices in online captioning
- Listmania
Permalink for this week's stuff
Helpful
The kind people at Apple don't assume all their customers are geniuses: they simply tell you, clearly and succinctly, how to carry your G5.
16 September 2004 | top of page
Feedback
In a message to the Oz-teachers discussion list, the charming Peter Macinnis remarked:
"Sneedle Flipsock is an example of the way networking on the Web is emerging as a new medium -- in about three years from now, people will begin to recognise it as a phenomenon, but the trend-hounds are onto it already. Woof.
"If you are checking Sneedle Flipsock out on the Web, why not sign up for it by e-mail, and get all those insights on education, science, the Web, technology, society and Stuff, every Friday?"
Thanks, Peter! Egoboo is always welcome :-)
This seems a good moment to recommend Peter's latest book, The Killer Bean of Calabar, and other stories:
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"With ripping yarns and unusual views of famous people, Macinnis explains the whys and wherefores of poisons and poisoning," says the Gleebooks review.
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Lindy at Abbey's Bookshop says "This rather entertaining book is full of facts, anecdotes and little asides, all concerning poison. Who has used it, how and why and where it was used, and what it actually is, are all explored in an accessible and well researched style."
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"He tells a good story," said my mum a couple of weeks ago (we're a laconic family). She's now immersed in Peter's previous Bittersweet: the story of sugar.
The Killer Bean of Calabar has been picked up for hardcover distribution in the USA, and will be translated into Polish--tres excitement! It's available from most Australian bookshops, usually in the 'popular science' section, for around $25. Go. Buy it. Enjoy.
Back to Peter's cmment about networking on the web/Internet... I've been reading about social networks lately. This interest started last year as a mild curiosity about the concept of 'emergent behavior', wherein large groups of individuals start to act as though they've planned ahead. (As Noam Chomsky has observed many times, when a number of individuals act individually in their own best interests, it can look to an outsider like a conspiracy.)
There's a new academic discipline developing, incorporating concepts from sociology, psychology, behavioral science, computer networking and engineering, biology and zoology, 'pure' mathematics and other areas. Similar ideas are being explored by technology geeks who are interested in developing 'social software'--systems that enable groups of people to connect, converse, collaborate and be creative in new ways.
The upshot is that the Internet and the World Wide Web are changing the way we behave, as individuals and as groups. Some of these changes are quite subtle (emergent behaviors), some are relatively minor (do you use the word "google" as a verb, or leave out words like 'the' and 'or' when doing a web search?), and some will have profound, long-term effects on how we live, play and do business.
Hmm... there may be an essay or three in this...
16 September 2004 | top of page
Must-do for Neil Gaiman fans (and thingies)
Neil Gaiman is the guest of honor for Continuum 3: creatures natural and unnatural, a speculative fiction and pop culture convention to be held in Melbourne, 15-17 July 2005. Register early to avoid disappointment!
15 September 2004 | top of page
Wayfinding
Does the Corellian Trade Spine pass through Coruscant? And where the hell is Aduba III?? These star charts will help your navcomp sort it all out.
15 September 2004 | top of page
Web and 'net
American researchers find up to 45 per cent of web users' time is wasted because of some computer or software malfunction or the user's inability to use them. Even inexperienced web users can suggest more useful categories and link titles than the experts who develop web sites about health and medical subjects.
A British government web site for people with diabetes has been criticised for its lack of usability. People would need the reading ability of an educated person aged between 11 and 16.8 years old to understand the site, but the average reading age of British citizens is only that of the average educated nine-year-old.
15 September 2004 | top of page
.edu
For centuries, Yale University operated in serene isolation from the city of New Haven. "Its brick walls and black gates became, in a city dogged by poverty and crime, emblems of an elitist neighbor. New Haven's image was further darkened by a student's murder, and, as the years went on, some students and faculty found more reasons not to come." Over the last 10 years Yale has bought commercial property and built boutiques; encouraged employees to live in the least-developed neighborhoods; and lured academics with spin-off income from their research. The Yale-New Haven story is an illustration of how universities and their local communities depend on each other.
Peoplesoft's student administration system claims another scalp, as the University of Massachusetts finds itself unexpectedly unable to enrol students. Peoplesoft representative Steve Swasey blamed the problems at the UMass Amherst campus on difficulties in setting up the software on the school's systems, not a flaw in the software itself. Sounds like spin to me.
An OECD report finds decisions on how teaching is organised are now mainly taken by schools rather than by local, regional or national authorities.
"More people around the world are completing university courses and other forms of tertiary education than ever before, according to the 2004 edition of Education at a Glance, the OECD's annual compendium of education statistics. However, progress has been uneven across countries and some have significantly fallen behind, potentially compromising their future ability to keep up with economic and social progress." Australian enrolments in TAFE and university programs have increased 20 per cent over the last decade. Other findings:
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around 89 per cent of men and 78 per cent of women with university degrees are in employment, compared with around 84 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women who ended their education at secondary level
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in Australia, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Ireland and the United Kingdom the earnings benefit of tertiary education increased by between 6 and 14 percentage points between 1997 and 2001
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rising tertiary education levels among citizens seem generally not to have led to an "inflation" of the labour-market value of qualifications
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in 2002, 1.9 million students were enrolled in the OECD area outside their country of origin, with nearly three quarters of them choosing Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States as their destination
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women still earn less on average than men in all OECD countries, whatever their level of education
The Graduate Careers Council of Australia's latest research report shows "graduate salaries are failing to keep pace with average weekly earnings, highlighting the waning value of a first degree. However women benefit more financially from a bachelor degree than males and postgraduate degrees are huge salary boosters".
A Senate inquiry into Australia's relationship with Indonesia recommended in May that Indonesian studies be designated of "strategic national importance" and that the Australian Research Council and the department of education prioritise funding for the area. Universities say not enough students are enrolling in Indonesian language courses.
The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) is inquiring into the handling of plagiarism allegations at Institut Wira, the University of Newcastle's Malaysian business campus. The school's former director, Dato Marimuthu, says he thought in 2003 that too many 'fail' grades would hurt future student recruitment. Corruption commissioner Peter Hall says University of Newcastle officials lacked "vigour and zeal" in dealing with the allegations.
"Welcome to the University of Bums on Seats, where we believe that nobody should be exempt from a university education." (Not affiliated with Evil Science University.) (thanks, Trevor)
"Experienced observers on American campuses have begun to notice a new group of mothers and fathers emerging over the past two years. Informally they're being called 'helicopter parents' because of the way they hover over their offspring well beyond the standard moment to say goodbye... [Parents] are arriving on campus with more serious questions than ever before about the cost of higher education, and what their child's school of choice is doing to earn their dollars." Some campuses are now running 'parent orientation' programs to educate and reassure these parents.
15 September 2004 | top of page
Pattern recognition
Typographers tend to think we recognise words by their overall shape; psychologists think we recognise strings of letters. A review of the evidence for both theories concludes that "Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognise a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognise a word." This has implications for design of typefaces.
"With Asia leading as the largest market for mobile devices, and a common model for ubiquitous urban computing, Asian people are increasingly of interest to Western technology business and design cultures." If they are to succeed in this networked world, westerners need to beware the dangers of technological orientalism.
Prepare for the emergence of Homo interneticus whose mentality "is likely to be significantly different from that of the typical reader of printed works or of writing or of the typical member of purely oral cultures. These differences include deep assumptions about time and space, authority, property, gender, causality and community."
The Wall Street Journal opined recently that "Consumers' newfound freedom to customize their lives--from burning their own music CDs to publishing political commentary online--is throwing basic business models... into disarray." In other words, to succeed in business you really, really need to listen to what your customers want.
15 September 2004 | top of page
Out
standing in a field
No sex, please, we're Dutch cattle.
Warm drift, graze gentle,
White below the sky,
Soft sheep, mirrors,
Snow clouds.
Some poetry, please, we're English sheep--and virtual sheep can play, too. (thanks, Trevor)
The view from Mount Kilimanjaro is pretty good (photo, right).
14 September 2004 | top of page
Celestial shenanigans
Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be a giant, supernova kaboom.
Critical Thinking 101: if a 30-year-old spacecraft develops the wobbles, is it more likely to be due to (a) dark matter, (b) alien interference, (c) some kind of weird quantum effect or (d) a leaky fuel tank?
Surely the Holy Prepuce must be the ultimate collectible--though if 17th century scholar Leo Allatius was right then it's currently orbiting Saturn and could be a bit tricky to bring back to Earth.
14 September 2004 | top of page
At work and play
'Narratologists' say the value of games is best understood by treating them as stories; 'ludologists' say value is best understood by analysing games as a form of play. Here's a summary of the current state of this game-theory debate. (via BoingBoing)
Women and gaming: Surprise! Not every woman likes pink shopping-themed computer games.
Ethics and gaming: curly questions with various answers.
Was the question always "To be or not to be" or was Hamlet trying to make another point? Find out for yourself by comparing high-resolution scans of the British Library's 93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642. (via BoingBoing)
Colin Mayhew's quest to convert a Mini Cooper r50 into "full biped, intelligent version having great strength, dexterity and a library of mechanical knowledge... a robot with the ability to repair vehicles, direct traffic and watch over high-accident crossroads to preempt accidents."
A color printer, scissors, string and glue: paper toys to make.
Discovered this week that the School of Population Health at the University of Melbourne is home to the Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Tobacco Control. It's there for a worthy cause--helping indigenous people give up smoking--but at first blush it sounds more like a department of silly walks.
A newsletter (PDF) from the School of Population Health notes that "Over 50 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders aged 13 and over smoke compared with 21 per cent of the general population nationally. Indeed, tobacco is the main cause of preventable mortality among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians."
14 September 2004 | top of page
In the footsteps of Aeneas
"After a week of travelling through post-communist dereliction we were entering a Homeric landscape... Our driver sensed the frisson of excitement as he navigated the curves dropping down to a cranky pontoon ferry, worked by rusting wires and pulleys, and the battered old gates of Butrint... Walking around the archaeological site, admiring its rich array of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Venetian monuments set in woodland glades, it became clear that to focus only on excavating one or two monuments or to survey the archaeology of the region would be indulgent... [Our overall objective] should be to protect the magic of Butrint and the quintessential spirit of its Mediterranean setting. So close, yet so far from modern Europe, the ancient city was an oasis promising a source of great tourist income for this region."
via Ansible | 14 September 2004 | top of page
Good practices in online captioning
Joe Clark reviews online captioning for video and audio on the web. Covers captioning standards, standards-compliant Web pages with captioning, and has a good bilbiography of online resources.
14 September 2004 | top of page
Listmania
The 72,364th most-used word in the English language is "immunoprecipitated". (requires Flash)
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Paris Hilton have more in common than you might think.
14 September 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:
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
