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19 november 2004: fried v rice |
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This week: New(er) article: who is Geoffrey Ebert, and what does he want with us Earthlings? New(ish) article: testing for the fun factor (and why Halo is so very playable)
Remember
11 November 2004 | top of page .eduRunning a student union is a multi-million dollar business these days. Coalition politicians, many of whom served their political apprenticeship on campus, now want to pull the ladder of opportunity up behind them, lest any future students get funny ideas about running for Parliament. Universities seem set to go along with the plan, in (possibly vain) hopes cooperation on student union fees will earn them some brownie points in industrial relations, research funding and other areas tipped for Government reform over the next couple of years. Glyn Davis sees an end to the Dawkins one-large-size-fits-all approach to higher education. Increasing corporatisation of public universities, new players in the private education sector and heightened competition from American universities (hello, good evening and welcome the Free Trade Agreement!) will cause a shift in the landscape. He calls for "a regulatory framework that embraces diversity by establishing clear criteria for colleges, teaching universities and research universities... [in which] independent commissions ensure rigour and autonomy in accreditation. Such policy evolution... requires bargaining rather than fiat from Canberra. It is time for ministers of education from across Australia to resume their conversation about the future of our university system." Washington University neuroscientist Steve Petersen "argues that the environment would have to be very bad to interfere with a child's normal neurological development. His tongue-in-cheek advice to parents is: 'Don't raise your child in a closet, starve them, or hit them on the head with a frying pan.'" Despite claims, science does not prove that our adult lives are determined by infant experiences. Education minister Brendan Nelson plans to make it easier for private universities to establish campuses in Australia. Should a private university fail, then another 'equivalent' university would have to guarantee to finish educating its students. The latest round of Australian Research Council funding for 'basic' research has been announced, with the usual suspects topping the list for grants. A restructuring proposal will go to IDP Education Australia's board next month. IDP needs to cut costs and increase revenues from its marketing of Australian university courses to overseas students. An American survey of 1100 colleges and universities finds enrolments in online courses are growing. 19 November 2004 | top of page ScienceI'm delighted to learn that Iran's first national festival of the potato will be held next month. The festivities will be complemented by a scientific seminar and exhibition. How big is the biggest squid? So big, we can't see the other side. Very good article in Columbia Journalism Review about how an obsession with presenting a 'balance' of opposing views can actually distort a news article's accuracy. It's especially a problem in reporting on any story with a scientific or medical angle. Leonardo da Vinci designed gliders based on bird wings; George de Mestral was inspired by grass burrs to invent Velcro. Wired magazine summarises the nascent field of biomimetics, designing technology based on natural mechanisms. A shape-shifting robot comprising many independently moving components has been demonstrated walking, rolling and slithering for the first time. It looks reminiscent of those magnetic ferret-and-ball toys you see at the markets; its creators envision it "being used to inspect hazardous environments or in space exploration where they could replace devices such as the Mars rovers". (thanks, Paul) Amateur archaeologists are excavating World War I sites in Belgium. 19 November 2004 | top of page Cluetrain
You can commission traditional garments from tailor shops in India and Pakistan, via eBay. Good opportunity to put your fair-trade ethics into practice. "Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be obeyed. But be careful what you ask for. You might get it." Your boss wants to reduce the cost of answering employees' enquiries about routine stuff like where to find forms, resetting their password or using the online payroll system. This case study will give you some good ideas and advice. Where ideas collide, innovation happens: it's the Medici effect. In information technology, "vendors that upsell compulsively are bad, but there’s a worse variety: vendors with which you have an established relationship and that provide you with a key technology--but that take your business for granted." Fight back by finding new suppliers. The Six Sigma management method includes 'kano analysis', a way of matching customers' needs to the features of your product or service. This model helps you identify which features are must-haves (or the customer will be unhappy), more-the-better (happier customers through new technology) and delighters (unexpected loveliness that stimulate the initial purchase and ensure customer satisfaction after the sale). Kano analysis is useful when you're planning a new web site or computer/business system. 19 November 2004 | top of page Web and 'netA 'user persona' is a fictional character that helps designers, software developers and engineers emphathise with and understand the real people who will use their new product. Personas make it easier to be human-centered. A new content management system (CMS) will allow speakers of Inuit to publish and read web sites in their own language. Inuit is not currently supported by browsers developed for Windows and other standard operating systems. The CMS technology can also be used for other syllabic languages such as Cree, Oji-cree and Korean. For a news organisation, deciding whether to link to other news sources raises all sorts of other questions. "For BBC News, it seemed the options were either to swim against that tide and try to keep everyone within a BBC walled garden, or to facilitate the journey across channels, and thus make BBC News a great starting point as well as a great online news resource. It is also pretty clear that this starting point approach came of age when the Google News service started winning awards for being a 'news site' rather than a 'news aggregator'." Responding to the English government's review of the Beeb's online services, the BBC's governors note explicitly that online audiences need time to mature in the way they use interactivity. Other keys to Aunty's long-term online strategy: being open about what the BBC does, and putting a safer web search at the heart of efforts to connect the BBC's audience with the rest of the Internet. "I must take issue with the Wikipedia entry for 'Weird Al' Yankovic—for in allowing it to remain active, you are perpetrating a great injustice." Web content management is still a relatively new field, so standard ways of doing things are only just starting to emerge. Before launching your new content management system, you need to do some 'acceptance testing' to make sure it works properly. Does it meet the expressed business and functional requirements? Execute as intended? Satisfy the business and functional requirement in a usable way? Some commentators claim that the Internet is reinvigorating civil society and grassroots politics. Sandy Starr disagrees: instead, by championing spontaneous collectivism, Internet geeks and gurus are giving up on human agency. "Ignorance cannot be overcome, nor progress maintained, through this passive stance..." The best product designs and the best intentions "won't always lead you to success, because the problem goes beyond your product and beyond your design or development process. Building better, more innovative, and more profitable products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult level." Here's how to make your pilot project a success, and follow that success with long-term change. Excerpts from books about programming and web development: lots of useful stuff here! Includes chapters on ASP, ColdFusion, CSS, CURL, graphics, HTML, HTTP, Jabba, javascript, JXTA, Mozilla, Perl, PHP, RSS, rule-based applications, Tapestry, web design, XForms, XML, XQuery and XSLT. The Creative Commons organisation has released a beta of The Publisher, "a desktop, drag-and-drop application that licenses audio and video files, and sends them to the Internet Archive for free hosting." Once the file is uploaded, the application gives you a URL where others can download the file. It can tag MP3 files with Creative Commons metadata and publish verification metadata to the web, with a 'some rights reserved' copyright licence instead of the traditional 'all rights reserved' model. (via Futurismic) HTML forms: what they are, how to do them and how to fix common problems. 19 November 2004 | top of page Arts and lettersWith a movie remake in the wind, it's time to tell the truth about Charlie's Grandpa Joe: he's the real villain of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", a ratbag bastard industrial spy if ever there was one. Isn't that why we love him? (thanks, Trevor) What life was like in mediaeval England. Here's an art form that needs a name. First, animate a drawing of a robot walking. Make stencils of the individual cels. Spray-paint the images onto various vertical surfaces in a cityscape. Photograph the resulting graffiti. Join the photos together to make a digital animation. Add cello-like music. Impress friends and strangers. (via BoingBoing) Flipsock friend Paul White has been creating again: "Linsday Cox asked me to contribute to an exhibion on at the moment up in East Brunswick (top of the 96 tram line, corner of Blythe and Nicholson), so I gave him something I whipped up after talking to Simon 'Storymachine' Norton, who had an idea about making static loops from little video snippets (which I 'borrowed'). Much more interesting than just a still image--make it wobble a bit." The piece is called "6twenty7" and requires Shockwave and sound. The ABC's animation showcase, Strange Attractors, offers 12 animations by 12 animators, who each discuss their practice and trade secrets. Includes Lindsay Cox's "s-crash" and Simon Norton's "Storymachine", mentioned above. (requires Flash/Shockwave, Real Player and sound) DIY ambient music, with an attractive abstract graphic and a simulation of a Hammond organ. The Hammond Flower allows you to "play with the drawbars, investigating the ingredients of a note rather than the notes themselves." (requires Shockwave and sound) (via Collision Detection) The dangers of inappropriate eruditism: if you use a fancy word, people may force you to look it up. Suddenly you become a hierophant, revealing figs all over the place. Without taking away from its cultural and political significance, JM Tyree reckons the 9/11 Commission's report can be read as a work of literature. "Whatever the Report's flaws... it is a terrific read. Historians may wind up disagreeing--just as they did with the Government's report on My Lai; they'll be able to use it, though, as a starting point. I have to say that my favorite part of the Report is the footnotes." It's old news already: the world's first novel written for SMS, a "marriage of haiku and Hemingway, twice daily in 70-character servings", was published in September. Amazon.com has learned a new trick that will be very helpful for researchers and ego-surfers. Now, when you view a book's contents, you can also see a list of all books cited in its bibliography. As well, Amazon offers a list of other books that cite the book you're looking at. The importance of human editors: if your language can use the same word as three different verbs, it's best not to rely on automated grammer-checking. "Pete and Bob totally rock!" comments flipsock friend Andrew. Watch the videos in order, and be a little bit patient: the story takes a while to get going, but it's worth the slow build-up. (requires Flash and sound) In spite of the odds it faces in the ultra-competitive self-improvement segment of the publishing market, the forthcoming self-help book The Life-Changing Power Of Perspective firmly believes that it can be a bestseller, the 179-page non-fiction paperback said Tuesday. Cases heard in American civil and criminal courts: Advance Whip & Novelty Co. v. Benevolent Protective Order of Elks; People v. Fester; Outlaw v. Commonwealth; Fried v. Rice... Good news for Australian digital artists and writers: Queensland University of Technology is working on an Australian version of the user-friendly Creative Commons copyright licensing system. 19 November 2004 | top of page SportHistory, geography and a stiff drink will help you forget this is actually an amusing advertisement of the 'cultural stereotype' genre. (thanks, Andrew) Gamers and Harry Potter fans will love this... Click on the hairband (next to the key), and see whether you can get past the locked door. Hint: requires *lots* of patient waiting around. (Flash/Shockwave and sound) (thanks, Yun-Joo) Make an origami dragon whose eyes (and face) follow you around the room. (via BoingBoing) "A chimpanzee, blasting away at an onslaught of asteroids, picking up powerups and avoiding certain death -- all while flying past Saturn like the Cassini probe itself. What is not to love about this game?" The claim that playing computer games is making kids fat is thin on evidence. The talk about 'couch potatoes' tells us less about reality than about the new ideologies that dominate public life. 19 November 2004 | top of page |
2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
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