Truce or dare "We were nailed for tens of thousands of dollars," said Cary White, an IT manager at a financial services company in San Diego who acted on a letter from Microsoft. "We received a letter addressed to our CEO that they received a tip we were not compliant with Windows, Word and Excel. ... That was a fishing expedition."

"My company is to completely go away from Microsoft," White said. "We're not going to buy any more Microsoft products. It's my decision. They're alienating their customers. I don't trust them."



Does anyone trust Microsoft?

Twenty years later, a hiring boom is going on, plucking newly minted Ph.D.s from anthropology departments across the country, much to the distress of more tradition-bound academics, who think their graduates shouldn't sully the purity of their field by working in industry.



Stanford graduate Genevieve Bell of Hillsboro, Ore., says that when she left a teaching position at Stanford for a job at Intel, "as far as the faculty was concerned, it was a total sell-out. (Working in industry is) thought of as second tier."

She was watching vendors display their wares to discerning customers and praise their value and durability. But it was the customers' ability to read intricate origination codes on the merchandise that was the surprise.

"They'd flip the cell phone over, take the battery out and actually read the bar code on it to see where the phone was built," Canavan says.

She and two colleagues were doing fieldwork for their employer, Motorola, investigating how the company could best enter the emerging markets of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Anthropologists adapt technology to other cultures. Interesting. What about the subcultures within the US?

Hazards of Design "[w]hen most successful, ritual performance works by a circular logic in which it creatively brings about a context and set of identities that it portrays as already existing." Such is also the case of computer system design, whose first step is the articulation of a grammar of action for the site whose activities the system is to represent (Agre 1994). Designers present this ontology and grammar as already existing in the site, as structures already immanent in that site's activities. And yet much of the work of implementing a new computer system is arranging for the activities actually to conform to the ontology and grammar of action that the system inscribes, and moreover to do so accountably -- and not just accountably to the site's members but also for purposes of capture by the machine. From keypunch data entry to barcode readers and wireless handheld transaction units, technical means are proliferating for maintaining a correspondence between the unfolding structures of human activity and the accumulating data structures of the machines. This correspondence can only be established, however, so long as the activity is accountably isomorphic to the formal structures that the design process has inscribed.

Hazards of Design This account is valuable in directing our attention to the local accounting practices of a group, but it does not offer much guidance in reconstructing how these practices operate, or how they interact with the practices of design. To this end, Woolgar (1991, 1996) offers the further heuristic suggestion that the computer itself be regarded as a kind of text. Texts, of course, are open to a range of interpretations, and the practices of reading and writing are open to investigation in the ways that the literary metaphor suggests. They are also open to the forms of sociological investigation that I mentioned earlier in my sketch of the reflexivity of written notes. Within this framework, it becomes possible, in Woolgar's terms, to investigate designers' work of configuring the user, that is, predisposing the user to certain kinds of interpretation of the computer-text -- starting with the user's own self-interpretation as a user, as a person located outside of the designer's organization and outside of the computer itself.

Hazards of Design From an ethnomethodological perspective, what is most significant about the relationship between designer and user is the production of cognitive order in the distinct sites of their work. It is useful to compare the case of a paper note passed between intimates. Far from locating the meanings of that note in semantic conventions that might be applied to the marks on the page, ethnomethodology would draw attention to the relationship between the sender and receiver. The note will be written with a reflexive orientation to the practical circumstances and consequences of its being read, and it will be read with a similar orientation to its writing. In particular, the recipient's work of making out the practical force of the note will depend on its ascription to an author, and to the assumption that its author designed it to be read. An analysis of the reciprocal understanding of the writer and reader is thus central to any appreciation of the note itself.

Technology Is Fun When I went to 4th grade I started learning more aboutb going to the enternet and searching different things about different famous people.I also startde going to the library typing more things like my different storys that bwe had to work on in the class room and sometimes my teacher tell some of us to go down to the library and see if there is any room for us to get on the computer to type our gooodiest peace that we had written.

corey My earliest experiences with computers including the Internet was.

Around 1995 August 16th 2:00pm we were in computer class at Byck

Elemetry School. We took a computer apart and put it back together.

We had a fun time. Than we learned how to use the Internet. The

First thing we did was we went to Internet explorer. Than we went to

Animals dot org. lernd about in danger species. So after we learnd about

In danger speciesthe



Mmmm....good research question.

Tech talent alarm sounded (7/21/2001) The economist told one final, unnerving story. Back in 1870, England was leading the second stage of the Industrial Revolution with such inventions as the steam engine. But then the United States started reaping the payoff from its new public schools and universities.

Tech talent alarm sounded (7/21/2001) ``Everyone over the age of 45 in my lab was born in the United States. No one under the age of 45 in my lab is from the United States.''

TIME.com: TIME Magazine -- My Kingdom For A Door In every case Brill asked, How does the physical environment contribute to workers' job satisfaction and performance, both individual and team? "The single most powerful factor," Brill found, "is the ability to concentrate on work without distraction. The second is frequent, informal interactions between workers. These themes need to be balanced." Consider, says Brill, that at least half of all professionals' time is spent doing quiet, focused work, and two-thirds of people in open offices are disturbed by others' conversations. Offices that have no enclosures, he declares, are "ludicrous."

Joel on Software - The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you're tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can't get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.

Joel on Software - The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code There are extensively documented productivity gains provided by giving knowledge workers space, quiet, and privacy. The classic software management book PeopleWare documents these productivity benefits extensively

Joel on Software - The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code But if you find a bug in code that you wrote a few months ago, you'll probably have forgotten a lot of things about that code, and it's much harder to fix. By that time you may be fixing somebody else's code, and they may be in Aruba on vacation, in which case, fixing the bug is like science: you have to be slow, methodical, and meticulous, and you can't be sure how long it will take to discover the cure.

Joel on Software - The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code What they realized was that the project managers had been so insistent on keeping to the "schedule" that programmers simply rushed through the coding process, writing extremely bad code, because the bug fixing phase was not a part of the formal schedule. There was no attempt to keep the bug-count down. Quite the opposite. The story goes that one programmer, who had to write the code to calculate the height of a line of text, simply wrote "return 12;" and waited for the bug report to come in about how his function is not always correct. The schedule was merely a checklist of features waiting to be turned into bugs. In the post-mortem, this was referred to as "infinite defects methodology".

Tribblescape - Palm Zone The Oblique Strategies are a creativity tool designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Originally published as a deck of cards, they are intended to provide an extra creative push when working on artistic pursuits under a tight deadline. When experiencing artist's block, simply draw a card and apply its instructions to the work in progress.

Palm Freeware - www.mywirelesspalm.com More cool palm freeware, including the interesing adaptation of Brian Eno's "oblique strategies."

We've seen ongoing discussions about the virtues and hassles of courseware such as WebCT on this list, and in general I am in favor of teaching people to use html and write their own pages.



I am also a paid staff member in charge of the department website, and in response to the new chair's desire that our office staff begin adding more "content" to our site (which is a good thing) I have been toying with the idea of installing some sort of content management system, or CMS.



Content management systems can be something as simple as blogger, which let an individual write journal entries in a form and click "submit" to upload the files, or something more complex like http://www.slashdot.org , "news for nerds" which allows multiple users to submit stories which are approved by an editorial staff. Each story can be responded to by users, and readers can filter the discussion topics so that they only see the comments that receive high ratings by peer evaluators.



Recently a new hire from UT Austin showed me a cool setup made with ColdFusion (yet another server program, but an expeeeeensive one) that allows users to create and link to pages, upload word documents, etc. all within the browser. The software automatically creates a site map of all of the content.



With that in mind, I'm trying to decide whether the office staff should learn html or an authoring package, or whether to install some sort of content management system that will allow website updates via the browser. The situation is slightly different than the classroom, simply because the staff don't have the time (or often the inclination) to spend a semester learning the web tools. There is also the problem of turnover, and reteaching new people. Finally, I have a lot of oter responsibilities in addition to maintaining the website, so I can't devote unlimited time to teaching html to the staff, and in the Fall we will all simply be too busy.



On the other hand, it only takes about an hour to learn the basics of dreamweaver, and much of their work would consist of updating existing pages.



So has anyone encountered this situation before or are you using a content management system to keep your pages updated?



Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions,



MC





disclaimer: the words "content," "user," and "management" are all symbolically enclosed in invisible, postmodern quotes indicating that I know they are problematic :)

I, Cringely | The Pulpit The best solution I think would be for Gates and Ballmer to simply buy a small country and declare Microsoft's sovereignty. Belize would be nice. It's a small tropical country in Latin America where the dominant language is English and the CIA 2000 Factbook says the Gross Domestic Product is $740 million. Microsoft could easily buy Belize ($2 billion is $400 per acre and would probably be enough) pay off the $380 million national debt, then throw up luxury condos for 20,000 programmers. Gates couldn't be king, because Belize is part of the British Commonwealth and already has Queen Elizabeth II to do that job, but I'm sure he could get a title of some sort. Prince Bill?



Once Microsoft is not only outside the USA, but is itself a sovereign nation, all anti-trust bets are off. As a diplomat, Gates couldn't even be arrested for speeding on visits back to Redmond, a result that might make the move worthwhile in itself.



Cringeley is nuts, but I love reading him.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit Microsoft now receives as much as 33 percent of gross income from the sale of a simple desktop PC. A 128MB Celeron 633, fully equipped without monitor is $250 without Windows Millenium, and $375 with it."



I'm assuming those are wholesale prices, but my goodness, that's disgusting. As crappy as the linux desktop is, this certainly is disturbing. If I were an OEM I'd hire 10 smart hackers to get the Linux desktop user-friendly. Poor Eazel.

Open Publication License
Draft v1.0, 8 June 1999 (text version)


I. REQUIREMENTS ON BOTH UNMODIFIED AND MODIFIED VERSIONS

The Open Publication works may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part, in any medium physical or electronic, provided that the terms of this license are adhered to, and that this license or an incorporation of it by reference (with any options elected by the author(s) and/or publisher) is displayed in the reproduction.

Proper form for an incorporation by reference is as follows:
Copyright (c) by . This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, vX.Y or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).

YIL | Feature If you're looking for the next big net thing, try heading back to school. Armed with unlimited bandwidth, college dorm rooms are the real hotbed of invention.

Gram Parsons' Guitar Tablature How Much I've Lied

Gram Parsons' Guitar Tablature How Much I've Lied

Gram Parsons' Guitar Tablature How Much I've Lied

Gram Parsons' Song Lyrics A friend came around.

Tried to clean up this town,

His ideas made some people mad.

But he trusted his crowd,

So he spoke right out loud

And they lost the best friend they had





On the thirty-first floor your gold plated door

Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain

Gram Parsons' Song Lyrics Blue, so blue, my love is burning blue.

Any brighter flame would be a lie.

Blue, so blue, my love still burns for you,

But I know that I'll only make you cry.



Evan Dando has some great Gram Parsons covers.

Google Search: "enable our students" writing technological literacy

Hackers Developing Anti-Censorship Software At the conference, human rights workers urged hackers to do what they could to use technology to advance human rights.
Patrick Ball, deputy director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (news - web sites) and its Science and Human Rights Action Network, said encryption had helped his group save lives and bring human rights abusers to justice.
``Hacking is finding things out. It is knowledge, especially when things are hidden, obscure and important,'' Ball said.
The Cult of the Dead Cow is known for making a splash at DefCon. In 1999, the group released Back Orifice, which can be used by malicious hackers to gain unauthorized access to PCs running Windows 95 or Windows 98 (news - web sites).

Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq here was something else familiar about the game Marcus was playing, but it took me a while to put my finger on it. He was using the Internet the way adults often use their pasts. The passage of time allows older people to remember who they were as they would like to have been. Young people do not enjoy access to that particular escape route from their selves -- their pasts are still unpleasantly present -- and so they tend to turn the other way and imagine themselves into some future adult world. The sentiment that powers their fantasies goes by different names -- hope, ambition, idealism -- but at bottom it is nostalgia. Nostalgia for the future. These days nostalgia for the future is a lot more fashionable than the traditional kind. And the Internet has made it possible to act on the fantasy in whole new ways.

Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq Marcus had stumbled upon AskMe.com late in the spring of 2000. He was studying for his biology exam and looking for an answer to a question. He noticed that someone had asked a question about the law to which he knew the answer. Then another. A thought occurred: why not answer them himself? To become an official expert, he only needed to fill in a form. He did this on June 5, 2000 -- a day already enshrined in Marcus's mind. "I always wanted to be an attorney since I was, like, 12," he said, "but I couldn't do it because everyone is going to be: 'Like, what? Some 12-year-old kid is going to give me legal advice?"'

Yahoo! Groups : TechRhet Messages :Message 3449 of 4210 Well, this is what got my back up. I was informed that I HAD to use
WebCT. ... And it's beginning to look like the person who told this
to me was not actually authorized to do that...

It's been an interesting week, here at MO-West. There were meetings.
There were phone calls. There were more meetings. A Big Honcho came
to my office *personally* to reassure me that I would not be coerced
or forced into using any tech I didn't want to use. He seemed
genuinely excited that I was working with some technologies that will
fit what I plan to do with my course.

Yahoo! Groups : TechRhet Messages :Message 3505 of 4210 We talked about the draconian "contract" requiring faculty to use
WebCT.

We talked about copyright issues. And Intellectual property issues.
And academic freedom issues. And security issues.

The dean indicated that the online DE decisions, for example to use
WebCT for all online courses, the decisions were made by a committee,
and none of these issues -- I mean NONE -- came up. They weren't
aware of them, and didn't think from the point of view of faculty who
teach online; especially they didn't think about faculty who are
experienced with other technologies for teaching online courses.

Somehow... in the midst of the conversation, I became a member of the
MWSC Distance Education committee.

Now would someone tell me how THAT happened?

Yahoo! Groups : TechRhet Messages :Message 3416 of 4210 WebCT becomes a pretty irrelevant teaching tool right before their eyes.

Comments on subverting the rush to generic courseware

Note to self: never rent and watch "The Sixth Sense" late on Friday night when you're home entirely along. Shudder.

The full cost, ecological and social, of putting computers in the classroom.

Lisa Gabriele
National Post
Thirteen ways of becoming an author:

1. Start small. Put aside a few words every week. Whatever you can afford. Words you won't miss. After a while, you'll have a few hundred words, then before you know it, you'll have a few thousand, and then suddenly you will have a book. Hopefully a good one that you can retire on. Writing a second book is really hard, and inadvisable.

2. Write what you know. But be careful. Just because you know To the Lighthouse by heart does not mean you should write that book. Somebody else already did.

3. If you hit a writer's block, stop and take a break. Try to keep breaks under ten years in length.

4. Have a muse. If none is apparent, hire one from the back pages of your local urban weekly magazine. Get a receipt.

5. Start young. God, not too young. But ask yourself, "Is 35 considered young, anyways?" Then stop worrying because it is so not young.

6. If you are going to write a memoir, ensure that you were wonderfully poor, or terribly rich, or survived a brutal war (domestic ones, especially) and, in the end, you came out pretty much OK. If the above criteria do not apply to you, write of baseball.

7. Good luck with the sex scenes. Again, write what you know (hee hee).

8. Stay away from ghostwriters. They don't really exist.

9. Get an agent. Thank the agent in your book.2

WRite Away! Volume 4, Number 2 (December 1998) WR: In general, what does an activity theory perspective buy you?
CB: It can help make people foreground the immediate setting, in terms of goals, practices that are coming out of that setting, tools and artifacts within each setting, rules and conventions that are appropriate to various kinds of communication in the setting, the institution itself that the setting is a part of, which is very, very important.
WR: What are the implications of an activity theory perspective for teachers of writing in the disciplines?
CB: In those university settings where there’s more and more involvement of students in faculty research—which is a really exciting reform movement—it has, I think, important implications for writing across curriculums. Students are actually participating in research settings, or what some of my colleagues are calling communities of practice. These students are starting to understand what people think and do when they do research on a problem set.

I'm reverse outlining my prospectus by inserting short paragraph summaries in brackets, i.e. "[literacy is tied to specific cultural contexts]"



After I've done that, I then run a macro that combines all of the bracketed comments into one long list, which I then play with. I'm doing this so I can locate areas most needing expansion and work on my overall structure and argument. BBedit has a built-in macro that lets you "copy lines containing" but in windows you have to do the following:



You can use the EditReplace function in Word to cut lines containing

the target string if you turn on Use Wild Cards or Pattern Matching.

Search for (^p)(*)(TargetString)(*)(^p) and replace with \1 should

delete any lines except the first one which contain the target string.



Would be easy to write a Word macro to do the copy bit but you would

have to tell us which word processor you currently have and which

version. Word 6/7 has a different macro language than Word 97.



Ron

Tips and Tricks These macros were created by Bernie Cosell for use with DCart32. Since DCart32 does not have the Batch processing capability, Bernie decided to write his own. They automate almost all of the restoration process using an external Windows macro tool. Bernie has let us post them here for other users to try. You will need to get the macro utility describe in the readme. Many thanks to Bernie for his hard work.

Metafilter | Comments on 8871 http://streamboxripper.cjb.net/

this is my journal Wiki capabilities?[ Questions ] [ LINK | PRINT | SEND ]

I'm looking to put up a combined wiki/weblog. The only existing option is PikiePikie, but i'm looking into combining stand-along weblog software with UseModWiki, which i'm already using. The other major alternatives are Zope, which has both though not combined AFAIK, and Manila, which isn't GPL (i trust Dave Winer, but what about his heirs?), and doesn't do wiki though that could probably be added.



Wiki/Weblog convergence? My little brain hurts.

Just saw Cast Away with Tom Hanks. A little overdone at times, but not bad. Not as good as I wanted it to be. It gave me flashbacks to when I lived in Micronesia. And Tom Hanks is right, green coconuts are a natural laxative.

SourceForge: Project Info - Java Progect Manager A desktop application for Palm Progect Manager (http://progect.sourceforge.net), OS independant !!! Please participate to the forums !

You've Got Maelstrom: Dealing With Too Much E-Mail "I know you can put these things in files and have them organized, but it never seems worth the trouble," he said

The family is in Oregon for three weeks. I'm filling up our empty house with the sounds of NPR and bad videos.

They've been gone less than 24 hours.

Using a Web Site to Provide Literacy Lesson Models for Preservice Teachers Using a Web Site to Provide Literacy Lesson Models for Preservice Teachers
by Susan Tancock