8 october 2004: ooh, aah, ooh
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com
This week:
Permalink for this week's stuff
Crime
"As many as 1000 of New Zealand's most precious books, including hundreds of Australasian history titles, have been recovered after a five-month police investigation into a book-stealing ring involving many of the country's university libraries."
Here's a new concept for you: catastrophic success. "A year later, the insurgents are not defeated, conditions are not more peaceful, the blanket of fear is spreading, cooperation is fraying, and attacks on US personnel are growing bolder. Does this prove Bush is failing? No. It proves he's succeeding." And war is peace, and work is freedom.
While we're in Iraq, it's worth noting that "none of the insurgent groups, whether Sunni or Shi’i, have a nationwide legitimacy in this fragmented country; each has a message that appeals only to a specific community... The insurgency can evolve, and indeed, from the vantage point of summer 2004 appears to be evolving, into patterns of complex warfare and violence. Should this evolution continue, the prospects for American success in bringing about Iraqi security, political stability, and reconstruction will be nonexistent."
6 October 2004 | top of page
.edu
"Declining academic standards, tensions between local and foreign students and a system that is making many overseas students feel alienated have been exposed as serious flaws in Australia's bid to internationalise its higher education."
Here's an example of how the Internet can change the way we learn about the world. The BBC publishes its news stories online, essentially using the web as another broadcast medium and following the Editor As Arbiter model, discouraging readers from looking for other points of view about a story. Now Stef Magdalinski has made "News Online wikiproxy", a web site that illustrates how the Internet can easily (yet subtly) enhance your ability to learn and explore ideas. (via BoingBoing) See also Magdalinski's "They Work For You", a web interface that lets you search Hansard for everything said in Parliament by any British MP.
The list of British university 'league tables' continues to grow, as does controversy surrounding them. "Going to university has becomes an increasingly economic decision," says Jimmy Leach, an education editor at the Guardian newspaper. "Since universities fought off teaching-quality inspections there is no independent judgment as to the quality of education students receive. That's a gap we help fill."
Web search has now become the de-facto starting point for most researchers, and premium databases and verticals are increasingly used as fall-through. Three hundred librarians, researchers and information retrieval professionals got together at the WebSearch University conference in Washington DC last month, and naturally some trends emerged. Yahoo's Jon Glick took notes.
Physics professor John Wygant prefers old-fashioned chalk over the glorified slide shows of presentation software: "With blackboard, students are watching you solve (a problem) in your head."
8 October 2004 | top of page
Science
An American study suggests "people don't have neat dividing lines in their brains between entertainment and political news... That doesn't mean they don't know the difference between entertainment and reality. But they find they can use examples from television programs to illustrate points in real life."
A new O'Reilly magazine, "Make", will show you how to DIY tweaks, hacks and modifications to mobile phones, PDAs and GPS gadgets, home entertainment systems, cars, online services, computer hardware, wireless and home networks. The first issue is due in January, and you are invited to contribute articles for the Projects, Features, Reviews, and Everything Else sections.
In the beginning there was Darwinism, then 'creation science', and now intelligent design. Wired Evan Ratliff traces the (ahem) evolution of creationism in American school curriculums.
6 October 2004 | top of page
Cluetrain
"Managers begin to believe that the value of their brand is somehow intrinsic--that, like a diamond in a necklace, the brand has an objective, inherent value." Actually, a brand is more of an 'emergent' quality, a perception of value that arises from a customer's experience of an organisation or product rather than from a marketing manager's bottom-line reports.
Victoria Hale is a rare breed: a drug company chief on a mission to vanquish diseases of the developing world.
"In front of company we were responding as politely as we could to [our kids'] demands for attention and their desire to be a part of the conversation. Suddenly our Indonesian friend remarked, as if he had just experienced an epiphany, 'Now I understand why Australians are so much better at democracy than Indonesians.'"
Two ways to bring new ideas into an organisation: just do it, or be a revolutionary martyr.
This week's Buzzword Bingo phrase is "excess quality", the point at which technology exceeds the basic needs of most of its customers.
8 October 2004 | top of page
Web and 'net
Peoplesoft fires CEO Steve Conway, but not before his determination to resist an Oracle takeover had caused financial and management problems for the company.
In the olden days, we didn't HAVE dialogue boxes or menus.
Installing a web content management system is "an editorial project, not a technical project. The team needs an engineer, but only as a consultant to provide reality checks. The most important roles on the team are the editorial director and the metadata specialist."
New words to savor: thinkos (like typos, but without the keyboard) and informavores (those who breathe the blogosphere). Spotted in David Weinberger's notes about presentations by a couple of Microsoft Research staffers about the future of searching on the web.
So far, 424 people have been invited to join Microsoft's social software experiment, Wallop, and 219 have added content (mainly sharing photos with friends). Wallop aims to integrate Wallop with the rest of your desktop, especially email--see last week's Flipsock for a pointer to social-software developments in MSN Netherlands.
Google has just released some enhancements to its Gmail service, released the Google Desktop search and registered a domain name for a Gbrowser. Pundits with an ear to the wi-fi wavelength are observing that "While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming." And so the race is on... in 5-8 years, will the big G become the most important company in the world?
"Hey, hey, 16K" is gleeful nostalgia for everyone whose first computer was of late-70s vintage, and who thought ASCII art was a pretty nifty interface for playing games. (requires Shockwave)
A Dublin Core metadata toolkit.
Gary Lawrence Murphy uses the term 'information awareness' to describe how the Internet is evolving. In the future you won't go to his web site to read his blog, and you won't subscribe directly to his RSS feed, because he can't afford the technology to support a large number of readers. Instead, he says, you'll be able to "read what I write because you'll connect to my words in the frame of your own neighbourhoods, in the context of your own tribes, picking up my signal across a network of enthusiastic relays each aggregating, reformating and rebundling in their bid for your membership attention."
When you think about usability in a computing environment, you also need to consider usability for the system administrators. Here's how to make running a web server a friendlier experience for your sysadmin.
Computer-game nerd makes good.
New versions of computer programs aren't always better. At OldVersion.com, you can download and install old versions of your favorites. Handy for testing your newly developed web design or desktop application, too.
8 October 2004 | top of page
Arts and letters
We think of him as a dignified, bearded druid type. Really, Leonardo was more of a dandy.
Changing
your perspective can make breathtaking art from the mundane. "The
pictures aren’t labelled, but they’re readable. You stare
for a while at what looks like an abstract pattern, then suddenly say
Oh, those are runoff channels in loose vocanic ash. That’s a big
sandbar. Those bowls are lined up there in place of their owners, awaiting
their turn at the well. How poor do you have to be to mark those painstakingly
divided fields in land that’s almost bare rock? Those guys are drying
something underneath the palm trees. Okay, they’ve laid out about
a zillion carpets on the ground; wonder why?"
How to make your museum's web site more helpful and usable.
Lots of archived Neil Gaiman stuff, including the complete Neverwhere site. Yum.
Oldsters may tut-tut, but youngsters persist in liking comix. The (US) National Association of Comic Art Educators provides study guides and teaching resources for school teachers who want to give kids a theoretical, historical, meaningful and practical education using comics as texts.
What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls? To find out, Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid created paintings based on survey data from a dozen countries.
An introduction to literary life on the web: eighteen web sites that publish or review fiction and poetry. (New York Times login = flipsock, password = sneedle)
The president of Stanford University vetoed a proposed sculpture for the California campus. Artist Dennis Oppenheim joked that the work's title, "Device to Root Out Evil", is now ironically appropriate. "The president and others have conservative views and are afraid of a work of art, and now we know about it. It really worked."
"Although it is still in its adolescence, the European Dream is the first transnational vision, one far better suited to the next stage in the human journey. Europeans are beginning to adopt a new global consciousness that extends beyond, and below, the borders of their nation-states, deeply embedding them in an increasingly interconnected world."
8 October 2004 | top of page
Sport
What it's like to visit the 'Stalin World' museum in Lithuania. (Hint: lots of Stalin statues to look at.) There's another outdoor museum in Budapest that specialises in "Gigantic Memorials from the Communist Dictatorship". (via the Annals of Improbable Research)
A matchmaking service for lonely socks.
Fistfights broke out last week between Christians gathered at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, reputed to be Golgotha where Christ was crucified, and the site of the tomb where he was buried. "There was lots of hitting going on. Police were hit, monks were hit... there were people with bloodied faces," said a witness. Greek Orthodox followers were apparently offended that Franciscans had left their chapel door open.
Would you like the world's longest email address? Register for an account
here.
http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/
Flipsock friend Andrew asks: "Are you sick of the puerile, smutty, silly stuff on the internet that passes for humour? No? - then you'll like this..."
Well, ain't that a laff: there's a Ruwoldt Place in Kambah, ACT. Wonder who it's named after? AFAIK, I'm the only Ruwoldt to have lived in Canberra since Kambah was planned and built.
Ruwoldt Street in Mount Gambier, SA, is named for Johann Joachim Ludwig (1838-1895), who chaired the Mount Gambier East Council in 1883-1884.
Klingons for Christ.
ghuy'cha'! betleHlIj HInoj?* (thanks, Stephen)
* Good grief! May I borrow your funky, exotic-looking
sword thingy for a second?
8 October 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
