Canadian Retailer: Bug Out Gary Smith, a Shoppers Drug Mart associate in Saint John, New Brunswick, underscored the frustration many retailers feel when he discovered razor blades for sale at flea markets for less than he pays for the same product at legitimate retail outlets.

"On Saturday someone stole 24 packs of Mach III blades out of my store. That's not for personal consumption. I don't know where they went, but on Sunday there was a flea market where there were lots of blades for sale."

U.S. Olympic Chief Quits Over Lies on College Degrees

According to Mrs. Baldwin's U.S.O.C. biography, she graduated from the University of Colorado in 1962 and received a doctorate in American literature from Arizona State in 1967. On Thursday, she acknowledged that she left Colorado in 1959 after three years at the university, and received a bachelor's degree from Arizona State in 1962. She said she completed doctoral studies at Arizona State, but did not have time to do the dissertation because she had to care for her two children and run the family farm after her parents died. Mrs. Baldwin subsequently taught English at Arizona State for 11 years before starting a real-estate firm in the early 1980's.

Silicon Valley Grows Up The same broken dialogue is now repeating itself between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Hollywood went to Congress to block any sale of DVD's without legislatively mandated copy protection. It sued to block the sale of MP3 players and digital VCR's because these devices make it easy to make fast, durable, portable copies of music or movies.

Washtech.com "People don't think of the Internet as a logical architecture," says Kahn. "They think of it as what AOL does."

O'Reilly Network: Essential Blogging Public Review [May 23, 2002]

Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that's not really useful? Our goal isn't to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Time to blog on

"I think we've moved profoundly from the older period in which news was a lecture," he says. "Now the job is that we tell you what we have learned, you tell us if you think we are correct, then we all discuss it." Whether the thousands of people blogging their own personal subjects can be called journalists, or whether they can make a living at it, or whether the wide availability of the free blogging tools makes for a hard time filtering the signal from the noise, are all debates starting now; but for the people consuming blogs as their premier news service, the arguments are somewhat irrelevant.

Nick Denton Clay Shirky: “You can be sure, as with any technology, that once it becomes good, people will begin renaming what they have. Watch the content management vendors start claiming that they have blogging functions. That’s an inevitability.”

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.

One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

From slashdot:






peer-review is overrated (Score:4, Insightful)

by EccentricAnomaly on Tuesday May 21, @01:46PM (#3559706)

(User #451326 Info | http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday December 16, @05:28PM)

I've gone through peer-review several times and it's mostly an exercise of massaging the egos of people in the field who are 'respected' just for being in the field for so long and who haven't really produced anything new in their lauded carreers. You go through a ton of busywork making sure you have the right damn font and you have all of the right people referenced (whehter or not you actually used their papers) and you get paid nothing, the journal takes your copyright and charges you $10 to make fair use copies of your own damn paper.



In academia, if you have a good idea someone will steal it, if you have a great idea they will dismiss you without listening to it. If you don't believe me, look into whether or not Watson and Crick _really_ discovered the structure of DNA or if it was a grad student who's ideas they orginally dismissed.



In academia there's this absurd notion that if someone understands your explanation of a new idea that they somehow helped you come up with it.



So Bravo to Wolfram for thumbing his nose at academia! I just hope he can back it up.

(5/20/02, 4 p.m. ET) -- Ted Nugent was the target of the Osbourne family's rage after hearing Nugent's comments about The Osbournes show. Nugent told the New York Post, "I think it's an indictment to the soullessness of modern man that we get a kick out of witnessing a magnificent creature reduced to a blithering hopeless idiot." Nugent says the paper didn't print his complete statement.

"My first comment was that, isn't it fantastic and thank God. I think it saved Ozzy's life that he met and eventually married Sharon--I hope he finally realizes he is married to Sharon--because she really has managed what is left of Ozzy into a wonderful, wonderful, increased quality of life," he explains. "I'm confident that they're sharing it with the best of their ability with their children."

Nugent adds, "However, what is displayed on the Osbournes TV show is what I said it was. Its success could be an indictment to the soullessness of my fellow Americans who don't just watch it because it's funny, because it's not funny when you see people that have a scattered shambles of a life like that. And they can criticize me and make fun of me for killing Bambi and all that other vacuous transparencies. But I wish nothing but the best for the Osbournes."

Nugent wants to get on the phone with Osbourne to clear the air and to try to get Osbourne and family pointed in the right direction. "I would like to speak to Ozzy personally about it because...

O'Reilly Network: The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences [Apr. 16, 2002] Jewish grandmothers are among the great innovators of the late 20th century. Raised in Stone Age Eastern European shtetls, brought to America in leaky, cholera-ridden refugee boats, the great army of Snowbird Seniors retired to Florida and bought VCRs, collaborating to sniff out manufacturers' rebates advertised in the Sunday papers.

Unlike their grandchildren, these elderly women actually mastered their VCRs' cryptic interface. They hooked them up in series and set up tape-duplicating farms of sufficient power and elegance to terrify the likes of Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president, who testified in 1982 that the VCR was to the film industry as "the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone."

O'Reilly Network: 2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home You can't be a control-freak on a public network. KPMG learned this lesson the hard way. The big-name Internet carpetbagger consultants have a policy that requires anyone wishing to link to their site to secure a formal, legally binding agreement in advance -- just as anyone using KPMG's trademarks would have to negotiate that right first. When KPMG sent a threatening note to Chris Raettig, an itinerant British engineer, demanding that he produce evidence of his formal agreement granting him permission to link to their site, Raettig countered by sending back a snippy note and posting both to his Web site. Within days, KPMG had become a laughingstock, their brand ("KPMG is the global network of professional advisory firms whose aim is to turn knowledge into value for the benefit of its clients, its people and communities.") flushed down the toilet.

The problem with all of this fake spam from Nigeria is that it's not allowing the REAL Nigerian royalty with misplaced wealth to get their message out.

I would think that using a tool like blog buddy would encourage more narrative posting and less linking to abstracts of other documents. Which could be a good thing.

Blogbuddy seems to be working, and it's a good deal quicker than the web interface.

testing Blog Buddy.

12 things about weblogs



"While the throngs of marketing professionals have not yet embraced the phenomenon clusters of influence are forming. That sort of infrastructure (the social network that creates technical momentum) has a longer half-life than the technical innovation itself."

1stperson.org Want to record something and you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive way to do it without sacrificing quality? The answer is Minidisc! The medium is a cross between a CD and a floppy disc, small ( almost 3" by 3" square ), and uses magnetic as well as optical methods of recording digital audio. They are re-recordable, and very easy to use.

Comparison of Mobile Dictation Recorders The Bottom Line
Sony MZB-3: The Sony remains the recorder of choice for professional use. It has the best accuracy and superior overall performance of speech recognition (listen while transcribing, etc.). Enhanced efficiency of work process will more than justify added expense.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking to use Sony MiniDisc for digital dictation Dragon NaturallySpeaking now offers new features that "AutomaticallyTranscribe Speech Recorded into Sony MiniDisc Player/Recorder

The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Apple, it now appears to me, is walking the Earth, picking up and putting to use all kinds of freely available innerstructure. They seem to be careful not to position themselves against other UNIXes. Or anything in particular, other than the high costs of Windows. I think they expect this stuff to be added, like a new crop, to existing server farms.

welcome to peterme.com

Yesterday's keynote was given by Steven Johnson, talking about a "City of Blogs", where he takes the urban studies notions he discussed in Emergence and applies them to the groundswell of interesting in personal publishing that weblogs have inspired. You can read much of his thesis in his essay for Salon, "Use The Blog, Luke". (Which wasn't his choice of a title...) The basic idea is that weblogs are a great knowledge management medium, but need tools to extract the value of the information therein. To turn it from a writer's medium to a reader's medium (or somewhere in between). I've noodled on this in the past, largely because of my work at Epinions. Epinions 1.0 was a writer's site--it was pretty much designed to support authors to write reviews, filling the site with content. The charter of Epinions 2.0, which is essentially what you still see (though it's probably more a 2.3 or 2.4), is to extract the value of all the content and present it in a way that is truly valuable for readers.

A Very American Movie "Star Wars" is like science fiction, but freed of the future. And yet it is America, all over: flaming, tumbling aircraft; huge enterprises collapsing before they're built; earnest, rich young princesses pretending to be democrats; a corrupt and inept Senate. As entertainment, it's full-speed sideways into a fun-house mirror, as Mr. Lucas's youthful aspiration is methodically replaced by an endless, brilliant, consumerized torrent of guns, gowns, clones and plastic figurines.

The Predator was small and quiet. It flew at 135 kilometers per hour for a range of 640 kilometers, with a ceiling of 7,600 meters and a loiter time of up to 40 hours, and it carried two Hellfire-C missiles under its wings.

On February 8, it was following something very interesting. Several sport utility vehicles, not the sort of auto that even well-to-do Afghans could afford, were driving in the remote Zawar Khili region, near caves where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding. The convoy stopped, and (according to news accounts) three men dressed in robes got out of the most heavily guarded vehicle. One was considerably taller than the others. Osama bin Laden? They stopped (to relieve themselves, presumably). The Predator pilot maneuvered to within eight kilometers, aimed a guide laser, and fired along its beam a missile powerful enough to blow up a tank.

The missile obliterated the men and the tree under which they stood. Bad weather hampered a U.S. effort to get to the site and collect DNA samples, and the eventual results, if any, have not been disclosed. But anticipation was high. Had Osama bin Laden been destroyed?

Earthweb IT Management: Security: Social Engineering: The Human Side Of Hacking

People have been conditioned to expect certain things," says Robertson. "If you dress in brown and stack a whole bunch of boxes in a cart, people will hold the door open for you because they think you're the delivery guy...Sometimes you grab a pack of cigarettes and stand in the smoking area listening to their conversations. Then you just follow them right into the building."

Early this morning I saw the body of a friend's mother being carried away in a green minivan while her daughter sobbed in the kitchen.



About two hours ago I received a job offer.



It has been a long and strange day. Life feels very deterministic right now.

Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters The Web fulfills some of the functions of other traditional public spaces—museums, parks, beaches, and schools. It serves as a medium for artistic expression, a space for recreation, a place for storing and exhibiting items of historical and cultural importance, and it can educate. Beyond these functions, the one that has earned it greatest approbation as both a public space and a political good is its capacity as a medium for intensive communication among and between individuals and groups in just about all the permutations that one can imagine, namely, one-to-one, one-to-many, etc. It is the Hyde Park Corner of the electronic age, the public square where people may gather as a whole, or associate in smaller groups. They may talk and listen, they may plan and organize. They air viewpoints and deliberate over matters of public importance. Such spaces, where content is regulated by only a few fundamental rules, embody the ideals of the liberal democratic society.

The Labs: Stylistic 1000

I think I'll take a year off of the web, so I can come back and have a year's worth of cool stuff to look at. I think it's killing my concentration, what little I have.

That last entry was made by Deseret.

67gbubhy hybhv

Powdered Oxygen Bleach Products: Oxiclean, Oxygen8, Oxyboost, Stain Solver, Oxygen Bleach Plus, White Wave, etc. An Overview

Frequently Asked Questions: Oxygen Bleach Oxy-Boost versus Oxicl__n and Oxygen8

PalmHeads - Palm -> Linux Tools

Classic study of online communications

MetaTalk | Comments on 2175

- As soon as someone busts out the dictionary definition of a word, an argument has descended into semantics, and an argument about semantics is about the biggest waste of energy I can imagine. In the grand scheme of communities, I would put myself as far as possible from the title dictator. You can argue semantics all you want, and who owns what, but I've participated in dozens of mailing lists and community sites, and I'm barely here, and while I'm here I rarely exert any force. I'm on mailing lists where the admin is ever present, telling people publicly that they are idiots when they ask a dumb question, and openly making an example out of bad behavior by banning people in blazes of glory. I'm barely here anymore, and in the continum of community, I'm more janitor than all-powerful dictator.

From the net:



When Peter Parker first discovers he can climb up walls (while in citizen clothing), he tests it out by climbing up a building in an alley. During this scene, you can clearly see his clothes hanging out forwards, indicating that the scene was filmed with him crawling along a floor horizontally.



In the scene where Mary Jane is being mugged by four men, Spider-Man throws two of the men into two windows behind Mary Jane. Then the camera goes back to Spider-Man beating up the other two guys. When the camera goes back to Mary Jane the two windows are intact.



In the scene where Goblin blasts into Aunt May's bedroom to scare her, she is praying with her back to the wall/window that is blasted out. Yet her only injury is three small cuts on the right cheek of her face (which was away from the blast). Later in the hospital, the three small cuts have changed position.



When Peter is beating up the robber that killed his uncle, he smashes his head into both windows of double doors. When he smashes the glass, the same shot is used twice to show his head smashing the glass.



When Harry introduces Peter to his father, Norman, and they're talking on the steps, there's a redhead in a purple sweater that walks behind Norman probably 3 or 4 times.



As the balcony at the youth festival falls apart, Harry Osborne is whacked on the left side of his head by falling debris. However, during the scene following this, Harry has a bandage on the RIGHT side of his head.



In the school cafeteria after Peter saves MJ, he notices the fork that is stuck to his hand. If you look at the back of his hand, the spider bite is gone. In the next scene, it is back again.



When Peter is taking out the trash, and begins talking to MJ, as MJ walks toward him you can see her underwear sticking out above her pants. As the shots change, this underwear seems to appear and dissappear.



In the scene where Peter Parker is taking M.J.'s picture for the school paper, the spiders dissapear.



In every other version of Spiderman - comics, cartoons, films, games, etc., Spiderman gets his web from web cartridges, not his wrists. Also, if he could shoot web from his wrists, how is it that he can shoot through clothing without making a hole? [This is probably the only comic/film discrepancy I'm going to include, just to stop people sending it to me. No other differences though, please...]



After Spidey saves MJ for the first time, there's a stain on Harry's shirt while he's talking on his cell. Then it cuts to Peter, then back to Harry. When it comes back to Harry, there's no stain on Harry's shirt.



In the balcony scene, Peter is in the crowd taking pictures and at one point spots Harry and Mary Jane (MJ) together. MJ is holding a martini glass in her hand as she talks to Harry. In the rest of the scene she is holding a champagne glass.



When Peter is drawing up ideas for his costume the hand is that of comic artist Phil Jimenez, current artist of Wonder. Phil Jimenez is right handed and Tobey is left handed. In one of the cuts the pen is in Tobey's left hand but it shows him drawing with his right.



When Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) is preparing for the super soldier experiment, he is seen wearing a watch on his left hand. After he removes his shirt, the watch isn't there.



When Peter and MJ are talking outside the diner, MJ's trechcoat collar is first lying flat, then is tucked in, then is flat, happens several times when the shot goes back and forth from Peter to MJ.



In the scene when the Osborne is testing the performance enhancers on himself, his heart stops. His assistant comes in and begins to apply pressure to his heart and doesn't remove the arm restraints. The next shot is shown from further away and the arm restraints are removed.



When Peter and Osborne are talking, their distance from the balloons changes.



Peter is supposed to help his uncle paint the kitchen - when Peter leaves the house the kitchen is green, when he comes back his uncle has painted it blue. The following scene the kitchen is green again.



Throughout the movie references to how long Spiderman has known Kirsten Dunst are made. It seems to change anywhere from six years old to sixth grade.



After Spider-Man saves MJ after the World Unity Festival and is swinging quickly away, he is carrying her so that she is facing backwards. When we see a shot of MJ smiling, however, her hair is blowing very lightly in the direction they're heading.



In the final battle scene, Goblin's costume alternates between clean (green) and dirty (white/dusty) throughout the scene.



In the graduation day scene as Norman Osbourne is talking with Peter Parker, Norman's right hand is on Parker's left shoulder then off. This happens a few times as the camera angle switches.



In the last scene where Spider Man beats up the Green Goblin, Spider Man is right next to him smashing him in the face. When Norman Osborn reveals himself as the Green Goblin, however, the camera is shot at a different angle and Spider Man is instantly a yard or so away from him.



After Peter picks up his 'winnings' from the wrestling promoter, we see the sillouette of the robber using his right hand (holding the gun) to hit the promoter on the left side of the head. After the robber escapes and the promoter askes Peter why he didn't stop him, the promoter is injured on the right side of the head.



In the wrestling scene the cage is lowered around the ring for the match. The announcer instructs the assistants to lock the 'doors' of the cage. In fact there are no doors. We see the assistants chaining and locking the 'corners' of the cage. Then at the end of the match when 'Spiderman' has won, the cage is immediately lifted away from the ring and there are no locked chains on the corners.



In the lunch scene, everyone notices Peter dragging the lunch tray. This seems like something noticeable to a point that they would say something when the Daily Bugle is asking who Spiderman is. Something that's not easily forgotten.



This is not a mistake, only a cameo appearance. Jameson (the boss at the newspaper) has the male assisstant who is dressed completely in black and has the glasses. This is in fact the director's brother, Ted Raimi.



In the scene where Peter is following M.J. to the bus stop (the morning after he was bitten), while Peter is talking to her we see the bus start to pull up behind him. Moments later one of M.J.'s friends pulls up in a green Mustang. The scene cuts back to Peter, and we see the bus pass by him again. Don't you think the bus would've passed the Mustang?



How did the referee get back into the cage during the match so quickly when the cage was still just rising?



In the appartment fire scene, Spiderman enters the building twice. In between time the fire backdrafts (explodes) out the building several times from different windows before and after Spiderman enters. Backdrafts only happen once, then the fire escalates rapidly never returning to a more passive state without intervention.



In the bridge scene, the orientation of the elements of the scene gets very confusing. There are so many camera angles that understanding where everything is becomes difficult. Nevertheless, it is very apparent that when Spiderman runs to dive off the bridge (to save MJ and the cable car), he jumps off the wrong side of the bridge.



When Spiderman returns to Peter and Harry's appartment (for Thanksgiving dinner after the firey appartment fight with Goblin), the slashing injury to his arm changes positions (from the apartment to the ceiling of his room to the dinner table).



At the bridge scene, MJ begins to climb down the steel cable, then the Green Goblin swoops in, attacks Spider-man and causes her to fall a considerable distance, yet she manages to catch on to the rail on the cable car. Now unless MJ has super powers of her own, cathing on to a rail after falling from that distance would be nearly impossible. Her arms would be yanked right out of the socket.



More at http://www.movie-mistakes.com/film.php?filmid=2225

Boston Globe Online / Magazine

A week of college costs roughly $1,100 at a $35,000-a-year school, factoring in 32 weeks of education, a half-dozen holidays, and 19 weeks of summer, winter, and spring break. Rob Bellinger's room is about $20 per day, and includes a thin lumpy mattress and wood frame; a desk, bureau, high-speed Internet connection, and 3-by-4-foot closet; and a daily scrubbing of the hall's bathroom.

simple ice cream

ice cream recipes

From a techrhet post:

Perhaps expensive courseware is the subconscious way that English
departments attempt to control and insulate themselves from the
disruptions of the technology and those who use it.

I understand Tari's sentiment about not feeling like there is a place
for her within the academy. I wish there were more hybrid positions out
there, and that they paid better, or that there were positions involving
teaching and lab administration that didn't come with the same sets of
publishing requirements. Similar to the complaints of many writing
center directors, I imagine.

I remember while attending the Itext initiative SIG at the CCCC and
watching all the very, very interesting presentations, and thinking that
if some members of my department were there, they'd be thinking to
themselves, "Ack! This is a secret cabal of evil mutants trying to take
over the Wooooorld!". Such are the fears generated by the potent
combination of interdisciplinarity, technology, and research that gets
all extra-textual.

I'm also struck by how many of the real contributors in this
field/subdiscipline/cabal exist outside of the PhD/Research_University
track. Within many programs there is so much *shame* associated with
doing anything but the four-year research track. I imagine it has
something to do with keeping your placement statistics in good shape.

I'm undoubtedly dead wrong about much of this, so be gentle

The Looping Technique It is within the first stage – Creating – that the experienced, disciplined writer is able to rise above those annoying distractions and obstacles brought on by writer’s block which so often will stymie the young, inexperienced student writer. This is because the disciplined writer is aware of and has mastered the repertoire of various creating techniques available. Those techniques are found under three distinct categories dependent upon the nature of the writing task: (1) the Simple techniques that include, among others, free writing, brainstorming, clustering, mapping, listing, chaining and the Reporter’s Formula; (2) the Expanded techniques which include looping, cubing, track-switching and Classical Invention; and (3) the Enhanced techniques of Reading and Research (i.e., R&R) and Noticing Inside Purpose. For a more in-depth discussion of these techniques, consult Elizabeth Cowan-Neeld’s excellent Writing (Scott, Foresman and Company). For many, knowledge of these techniques ended in that Senior Composition course during high school where the instructors covered one or more of the simple creating techniques. Those in AP courses may have been given the majority of the simple techniques. In either instance, none of the expanded or enhanced techniques were presented to the student.

Nonsense Verse How to make it stick? Like anything requiring discipline, I imagine one of the most effective techniques is forcing yourself to work it into your routine. When I used to go to the gym regularly, I did it X days a week, usually first thing in the morning (when I wasn't awake enough to talk myself out of it), got it out of the way, and felt better for it. When I used to be a ballet dancer, I did special stretching and strengthening exercises religiously--first thing in the morning, and first thing after dinner--because I had to, because I knew it was good for me. It was part of my routine, and I diverged from it only when deathly ill (and I mean deathly--I'm someone who once performed while stricken with bronchitis, that's how determined I was).

An Interview with Sherri Jilek How do you keep a balance between family, work, and your writing?

It is all-consuming to maintain balance. How does one clean house; cook; keep half an acre of flower garden; and another acre and a half outside the fenced flower area; care for two dogs; RV; read from a 1,000 book private library; spend time with children and grandchildren; ad infinitum? The answer for me is to give writing 1st place. I don't give it ALL of my life, but I keep it at the front of my life. First the writing work; then everything else. Discipline has a lot to do with it. I'm a disciplined writer.

Nonsense Verse Discipline is forcing yourself to do something--usually something with a certain amount of regularity--even if at the time you know you should be doing it, it's one of the last things you want to be doing. Working out. Calling your parents. Doing your homework. Finishing your taxes. Brushing up on your French. Cooking rather than dining out. WRITING.

Sociology 101 Book List

Wow, some great stuff on this list.

Some more notes on cultural artifacts.

One of the problems with my writing is that I am trying to summarize an article at a time, out of

context of the chapter, and within Nvivo. This obviously isn't working that great. Plus, I left some

good books in my carrel. I need to write my chapter the way I write any other paper, by inserting

stuff where it belongs, reading, summarizing, categorizing. I guess I can put stuff in Nvivo, but it's

not really worth it at this time. Why am I sandbagging myself, trying to reinvent the wheel? Plus

there's a chance I'll get approval from UVSC, which scares the crap out of me.

Schwarz:

96: Certain forms of underlife, or resistance, can be seen as efforts to oppose a theory of teaching or

learning rather than the technology itself. Schwarz claims that theories of learning or being, when

codified within technology, can become self-fulfilling prophecies that ultimately shape reality. She

cites as an example Hitler's notions of racial purity, which, although mistaken, changed the

composition of Europe [footnote: with the help of technology]. Because computers embed theories

of learning and work, their use in the classroom to teach writing can shape our teaching, for better or

for worse. Consequently it's very important to understand the cultural forces that inform the

technology, so that those embedded values can be examined.

Blocking Ads with a Hosts File

stating the obvious

The current World Wide Web consists almost entirely of pages that are either stories or tools. A few ambitious sites combine these two types of pages in varying ratios, with results that range from unsatisfying to disastrous. But the next stage of the web is going to come from the native form that evolves from, and incorporates elements of, these two existing structures. Even after this form emerges, however, the web will still be populated with plenty of stories and tools, of course, just as television retained the idiom of an anchor at a desk authoritatively reading us the news, even after the invention of the situation comedy and the game show.

If you take a look at the pages we have today, one thing becomes clear: Stories on the web just plain work. The obvious, and so far ultimate, display of this is The Fray, which sets out in its very mission to tell stories. It's the definitive example. But less obvious examples are abundant and instructive. Every news item proffered on whatever portal or provider you prefer is presenting a story. The content presented in web interfaces to Usenet and even Wikis are largely story-oriented. In a medium originally designed to present structured documents, the natural divisions and regular formatting of stories was destined to be a good fit, even if they technically fell outside the precise realm envisioned by the web’s creator.

Handhelds Go to Class Ritchey's class used the handhelds for an assignment to create an ecological footprint, a measurement of the human impact on nature in terms of the land and water used for human consumption and waste. The assignment started with Ritchey beaming worksheet questions, which she was easily able to modify for the next classes when questions came up. The students' job was to record more than 100 facts on their handhelds, such as how much the students' families ate, how much energy they used, how much their laundry weighed, how much garbage they generated, and the square footage of their homes.

Handhelds Go to Class Darrell Walery, district director of technology, cites affordability, portability, and versatility as the reasons he believes the tiny computers will grow in popularity with educators. "The economic factor is a really important piece of the puzzle. I can't buy a laptop for every kid, but I may be able to buy a handheld for every kid," he says. In one year, the cost of the handhelds dropped from $225 to $100. The fact that the PDA is so versatile it can be used in P.E. classes to determine whether a student is fit, on field trips to take oxygen readings, or in art classes to make animated drawings points to its advantages. But the biggest plus, Walery believes, is that students have access to the digital devices 24 hours a day. They don't have to wait to get on the computer in a lab or in class. The information and applications they need are always at their fingertips.

Just to get some writing down.

I find it very interesting that SCA guy chose that computer because it wasn't locked down. It required a combination of his being inquisitive, and of there being gaps in the system due to my own sloppiness. There is always a tension between the administrator's desire for a perfectly controlled space and the instructor's need for a flexible environment that doesn't punish mistakes and allows modifications such as the installation of software or the configuration of programs. Aaron used the space to download music, often the first thing that students do when they find the gates unlocked. They rush to mediums that may or may not be textually-based. It is true that email is popular, but so is music acquisition and the endless acquisition and deployment of graphics. I have often decried the "commercialization" of the net, in part because it is unfortunate that digital music and film, the twin towers of the entertainment complex, are the only channels through which networked identity can flow. Yet music has been a large part of adolescent identity prior to the birth of the internet, and film as well. It is just that they lend themselves more easily to digitalization than other artifacts of adolescence such as cars. Women, of course, are often reduced to pornography (Fark.com).

I'm not just going to take you on a tour of this classroom, but of the matrix that they dip into, because on many different levels they are inseparable.

Salon.com Technology | Swimming with the online card sharks

The economist Earl Grinols calculated that 52 percent of casino revenues come from problem gamblers. Of course, you never have a problem as long as you're winning.

Neat not always organize TRN 121201

Pilers may also discard things they find irrelevant in the process of hunting for their information, while filers may tend to value tidiness more than efficiency by prematurely filing papers they could have discarded, Whittaker said. “Often filers will file information that later turns out to be irrelevant.” When the filers finally cast off paper, 23 percent of the material is thrown away unread, the study found.

Pilers and Filers. I'm a Piler.

Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U.

"University presidents got dollars in their eyes and figured the way the university was going to ride the dot-com wave was through distance learning," said Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information services and chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "They got swept up."
American universities have spent at least $100 million on Web-based course offerings, according to Eduventures, an education research firm in Boston.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

Observe, too, how good writers
establish contexts in which their paraphrases can continue for several
sentences without tedious repetitions of "Jones argued that ..." and
"Jones also argued that ..." and "Jones further argued that ...". Then
think about the relationship you want to project between yourself and
the people whose views you are writing about. Are you building on those
ideas? Accurately stating them and then pounding them into the earth?
Drawing on them in a fragmentary way in the course of assembling your own
line of argument? Letting your own position emerge from the results of a
comparison and contrast between the views of two authors whose views can
be used to illuminate one another? The possibilities are endless, and you
will do better if you choose clearly which one you intend.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

* Graduate students often write badly at first because they are trying to

imitate the prose they encounter in seminars. After all, don't academic

writers use a lot of big words? Yes and no. Many academics are posers

or show-offs, of course, and others just can't write. But good academic

writing is really no different from regular writing. Start with the

English language and work up to the big words from there. The big

words do have a purpose. Some serve as flags that a community can use

to identify its distinctive approach to research. Others are closely

identified with particular authors and their ideas. Sometimes a community

chooses a word in order to contrast their position with some other

position. Collect these words one at a time. As you gradually become a

member of a community you will learn the significance that its words hold.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

Continually invent words

that name your intuitions, and use those words consistently when writing

in your notebook. Work back and forth between the private language of

your notebook and the public language that you use with others.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

Let's ignore the ideologies and just teach people how to write. In

this article I have gathered the best ideas on the subject that I have

encountered in my years as a writer and teacher.

Zap2it.com MOVIES | MOVIE NEWS | STORY

"You always expect a torturous development process, but Brandt and Haas turned in a bang-up first draft that provides a great intro for Paul," said Snider. "They wrote modular stories, one that could have gone with Dominic Toretto and one without him."

Ask Symantec: NAV won't install

Grrl.com - Bonnie Blog

Rejection letters are never fun to get in the mail. As a writer, you either have to get used to people saying they're not interested in your numerous queries and book proposals, or you need to find another profession where people hug you all day long.

Cool stuff. I had to dig a little to find B. Burton's blog, which is a fun read. I like her line about "a job where people hug you all day long." I do tech support for an English department, and although they are grateful to see me on occasion, as soon as I fix their problems I just can't feel the love any more. I think that being a celebrity is sort of like being hugged all day long, but most of them drink themselves to death or engage in other acts of self-destruction, as do lottery winners. Are there any poor but happy people in Amerika?



I was sort of bummed to discover today that Al Roker had a weblog. But Bonnie Burton's blog balances that out, restoring equilibrium to the blogging world. (and Al's doesn't totally suck, btw).

Top CIA official warns next terror attack unavoidable

Without providing any details, Pavitt acknowledged his agency's intelligence-gathering capabilities had been tremendously boosted since September 11 and now exceed those it had during the Cold War.

"Today, the year 2002, I have more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA," he said, adding that the agency was now training more than 10 times as many operatives than just five or six years ago.

SIGNUM: DETRITUS

The Post-it Note’s tactile simplicity is misleading in another way as well. While it often stands in counterpoint to the digital office, a throwback to the days of paper clips, staplers, and typewriters, the Post-it Note is actually postmodernism writ on a square of yellow paper. Unlike its predecessor, the memo, which functions as a self-contained message, the Post-it Note is an analog forebear to hypertext; it acknowledges in its very construction that what’s most important is context – and that context is where you make it, achievable with glue as much as any organic cohesion of ideas.

SIGNUM: DETRITUS

Eventually, however, Fry experienced another moment of inspiration when preparing a report for his boss: to call attention to an important reference, Fry drew an arrow on one of the bookmarks and affixed it to the report. When his boss returned the report with his own comment written on the bookmark, Fry realized his invention might appeal to more than just fastidious hymnal users.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Reawakening the creative mind "Some scientists believe that the essence of creativity is not a state of mind but an activity," he told BBC News Online.

Committee votes to set weight standards for textbooks

Citing concerns about children who lug heavy backpacks in schools, an Assembly committee voted Wednesday to approve a bill that would set maximum weight standards for textbooks.

Maybe this will encourage ebooks.

Salon.com Technology | Inside the Xbox

Takahashi realizes that his book may annoy Microsoft corporate types.

"Any of the insidery stuff they just really didn't want to get out," he said. "The fact that the initial code name was Project Midway -- they don't want the Japanese people to know that because it will hurt their feelings." The Battle of Midway in 1942 was the turning point of the Pacific War. Before the November 2001 launch of the Xbox, all of the players in the console hardware market -- Sony, Nintendo and Sega -- were Japanese firms.

Hmmm...



I know I said at one point that I was going to start writing more commentary in this blog, but I guess I'm full of crap.

Long Distance May Face a Very Short Future

For years, long-distance calls were more expensive than local calls because providers such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint Corp. had to pay fees to local phone companies to have their long-distance calls begin and end on local networks. Over time, the Federal Communications Commission has reduced those fees from several cents each to only half a penny apiece, Pulver said.



"A lot of cost is from originating and terminating a call, not how far it goes," he said. The marginal cost of carrying a call farther on a company's phone network amounts to "some fraction of a penny per call."

The end of long distance. I basically only call my family in Utah, and we get a 4.5 cent/minute rate through a phone card. We probably spend five bucks a month on LD. Eventually I hope we get rid of our land line and go to cell phones.

LinkPimp

Muetze's Palm-Pages: The Must-Have-Software.

Creative VoIP Blaster: User Reviews SUMMARY:

Guys, after a night of problems and terrible but friendly tech support I got my blaster to work with a router (both a Linksys and a Netgear) along with the LAN. I'm somewhat computer savy and when I read in the manual (after I bought two of these) that it would not work I really wondered because I've never seen something that won't work around a router. The biggest problem is that it talks back to your computer through not just one but several random ports. It will work with a router/LAN but it takes a little time and the procedure varies from user to user. Here's a general idea of what you have to do:

Google Search: voip blaster The VoIP Blaster cannot support Lan / Internet connection sharing /

router / behind firewall. To solve this problem you must use the 3rd

party software.

Download from here http:\\www.fobbit.net

Google Search: I have Confirmed that VOIP Blasters:

. work ok when connected to internet isp via modem

. do not work through linksys cable/dsl routers, even with dmz set



These babies are going back...



Here's the last comment from Creative labs:



CREATIVELABS VOIP BLASTER TECH SUPPORT THREAD:



Installation: VoIP Blaster





Support ID: 52941

Request Type: Installation: VoIP Blaster

Product: VoIP Blaster

Current Status: Pending





Support Request Message Thread:





Response from Customer: 9/28/01 1:07:39 PM





Hi Jason,

Thanks for getting back to me. Just one more quick

question. How does the voip blaster work over the

internet? The internet is based on routers and as far

as I know, there is no way for me to communicate with

anyone on the internet without a router somewhere in

between.





Response from Creative: 9/27/01 8:28:08 PM





The VOIP is not supported with any kind of router, hardware or

software. The software is not designed to work with them, and

unfortunately, there's no way around that. I apologize for any

inconvenience.



Jason

Creative Labs Technical Support

Blagg

L545 Index L545 is one of the core curriculum for the SLIS Master of Information Science degree. This course will introduce the basic concepts underlying systems analysis and design, focusing on contextual inquiry/design and data modeling, and the application of those analysis techniques in the analysis and design of organizational information systems. We will work on the processes that project teams should follow to understand their users work and then to build the software to enhance that work practice. The important philosophy introduced in this course focuses on the concept of user-centered design.

Institutional Theory Bibliography

NETWORK INSTITUTIONAL THEORY NETWORK INSTITUTIONAL THEORY:

IP: Bruce Sterling closing CFP Speech

"The supposed explosion of digital creativity

on a million websites and a thousand channels... Well,

come 2002, it boils down to 95% market share by a single

ruthless feudal empire! And you wonder where your

excitement's gone? A thing like Linux... that isn't a

competitive free-market innovation, that thing is like a

slave revolt.



But it gets weirder. The public interest in public-

domain intellectual property freezes dead with the humble

birth of a cartoon mouse on a tabletop in Kansas City. The

Mouse is flash-frozen in legal ice. He's unrotting. He's

undying. He's cryogenically preserved.... In ancient

Rome, folks thought it was pretty decadent when the

Emperor Caligula made his horse into a Senator. But in

the modern US Senate, there's a Senator who's a cartoon

mouse!"

 

Thursday, April 18, 2002

Evaluating websites

Objective: Later in the semester you will be designing a website as part of a
collaborative project.  In order to develop criteria and methods for
evaluating websites, we'll visit several locations and discuss how useful and reliable they are.

Go to
http://php.louisville.edu/a-s/english/chat/ and log into the open forum chat
room.  You can use any user name you feel comfortable with.  We will
use the chat space primarily to share information, especially URLs for websites.

Open a new, different browser window. (usually you can type control-n from
within netscape or internet explorer).  Divide into groups of three and
visit the following websites, one at a time.  Take notes in a word
processor, email note, or web page about each site.  Although we will be
building a list of questions and criteria for evaluating websites in class, we
don't need to start entirely from scratch.  Here are a few questions to get
you started.

• Who is the audience for this site?


• What is its purpose?


• Is this site trying to persuade you of anything?


• What are the underlying themes, values, or ideas expressed by this
  website?


• How is this site different from a booklet or pamphlet?  How is it the
  same?


• How easy or difficult is it to use?  Explain.

You should be adding to this list with your own questions. At the end of class you will email me your list of evalutation questions with the name of each group member attached. Mark Crane

Sample sites

•  


• http://www.louisville.edu/provost/undergrad/elp/


• 
  http://www.geneva.com/


• http://www.scorecard.org


• 
  http://www.beefnutrition.org/


• 
  http://www.dhmo.org/Criteria
  
  
  
  Bonus round:

Select one member of your group to come to the front of the class and share
one of their favorite websites.  They should tell us why it is their
favorite, why they use the site, and briefly discuss usability.

Evaluation Grid (work in progress)

"Ideally, usability tests for documents occur in a setting
that simulates the actual situation, with people who will actually use the
document" (Lannon 336)

Rhetorical	Functional	Usability	Yet to be named
audience purpose claims authority	complete current working links load time	locate understand use information	Visual Ethical Stickiness Underpinnings

 

Sources I used to build this assignment::

• 
  http://www.louisville.edu/infoliteracy/evaluate.htm (U. of Louisville
  infoliteracy pages)


• 
  http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm (Virginia Montecino)


• 
  http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/webcritique.htm (Virginia Montecino)


• http://www.useit.com (Jakob Nielsen)


• Lannon, John. Technical Communication. 8th ed.

Super Bonus Round:

If we have time at the end of class, we'll play around with http://www.blogger.com , a collaborative publishing tool.

 

 

Software for the People - Knowledge Management Research Center Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist who studies how people use IT. In her job as a principal research scientist with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies, she helps design software that people actually want to use because it takes into account the way they work and communicate. She finds that technologies such as instant messaging and e-mail are popular precisely because they facilitate relationships among people who aren't connected by a line on the corporate org chart. Technology, Nardi believes, should above all be "useful."

CNN.com - Net blamed for marital breakups - April 15, 2002

Net blamed for marital breakups


LONDON, England --The Internet is becoming a frequent cause of the collapse of relationships, a leading marriage guidance organisation has warned.
One in 10 of the 90,000 couples who seek the help of UK-based Relate now cite the Internet as a problem, with obsessive use of the medium blamed as well as its ability as a communication tool.
Both men and women complain of becoming Internet "widows" as their partners spend hours at the computer downloading software or looking at pornography.
Sex chatlines and sites such as friendsreunited.co.uk, which can rekindle old school passions, pose further threats to relationships.
Relate's chief executive Angela Sibson told The Times newspaper on Monday: "Our counsellors report that, more and more, the Internet is a relationship breaker."

Community Voices How did you come to be active in the computers and writing community?
What's the most important aspect of the computers and writing community for you, and why is it so important?
What scholarly project in computers and writing has been most influential for you, and why has it been so influential?
What worries you about the computers and writing community, and why does it worry you?
What's the best lesson you've learned from the computers and writing community, and why is it the best?
Why do you choose to be active in the computers and writing community?

Metafilter | Comments on 16376

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

posted by kirkaracha at 11:50 PM PST on April 15

Written in response to the discover of a supercolony of ants in Europe.

Business pros flock to Weblogs Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, says he has been inundated with e-mail since launching a Weblog in 1999, sparking online discussions that have helped change his approach to journalism.

“My readers know more than I do, and that’s a liberating notion, not a scary one,” he says. “Every journalist ought to realize it’s true. No matter what you cover, your readers know more collectively than you do. If we can capture that, we all come out ahead.”

Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children (Alertbox April 2002) Differences between Children and Adult Users
Our usability findings for kids often differed from those we typically find when testing adult users. Some of the more striking differences were:
Animation and sound effects were positive design elements for children; they often created a good first impression that encouraged users to stay with a site.
Children were willing to "mine-sweep," scrubbing the screen with the mouse either to find clickable areas or simply to enjoy the sound effects that different screen elements played.
Geographic navigation metaphors worked: Kids liked the pictures of rooms, villages, 3D maps, or other simulated environments that served as an overview and entry point to various site or subsite features.
Children rarely scrolled pages and mainly interacted with information that was visible above the fold. (We also observed this behavior among adult Web users in 1994, but our more recent studies show that adults now tend to scroll Web pages.)
Half of our young users were willing to read instructions; indeed, they often preferred to read a paragraph or so of instructions before starting a new game. In contrast, most adult users hate instructions and try to use websites without having to read about what they are supposed to do.

Yahoo! News - Hi-Tech School Bullies Working Round the Clock "The crucial difference from traditional bullying is that in the past kids who are being bullied could go home and find a safe haven," NCH associate director John Carr told Reuters.

"But if they're bullied on their mobile (phone) or on the internet, then it's ever-present," he added.

Carr said that schools were generally good in preventing bullying, but NCH wanted to make sure they were reacting to this new angle.

"This is a new and insidious development," said Carr. "It can ruin lives and lead to suicide."

When games stop being fun - Tech News - CNET.com Dennis Bennett was failing his college classes, his marriage was in trouble, and he wasn't being much of a father to his 1-year-old son. But he had progressed to Level 58 as Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North, his character in the online role-playing game "EverQuest," and that was all that mattered at the time.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things My friend Geoff Cohen turned me on to a book called "Cat's Paws and Catapaults," which examines the historical failure of mechanical designs based on nature -- for example, the ornithopter. There are rare exceptions, like Velcro, but for the most part, nature's designs suggest mechanical dead-ends when applied to human engineering.

It seems that this is not the case in networking. Eric Bonabeau's Ant Colony Optimization research (which I've written about here on several occassions) has been used to solve real-life networking problems and to approach optimal solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem inherent in Southwest Airlines' routing. The Santa Fe Institute has also used cellular automata research to solve complex traffic and urban-planning problems

Salon.com Technology | Microsoft's mythical man-years

The trouble is, the whole concept of measuring software productivity in "man-years" or "man-months" is profoundly discredited -- and not by some radical new theory of software development, but in what is probably the single most seminal work on software management: Frederick P. Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month," first published in 1975, when Bill Gates was a stripling and personal computing a dream.

FOXNews.com

Adding the 307 and 1,138 figures equals the alleged 1,445 alcohol-related deaths annually among college students.

But Hingson relies on a key, but unsupported assumption. It does not automatically follow that college students constitute 31 percent of alcohol deaths simply because 31 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are college students.

Minerva Record View 1 Author:Finders, Margaret.
Title:Just girls : hidden literacies and life in junior high / Margaret J. Finders.
Publisher:New York : Teachers College Press, c1997.

vita Books

Finders, M. and Hynds, S. (Under Contract). Literacy Lessons: Teaching and Learning with Middle Schoolers. Columbus, OH: Merrill, Prentice Hall.

Finders, M. (1997). Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. New York: Teachers College Press.

Articles

Finders, M. (2000). “Gotta Be Worse": Negotiating the Pleasure and the Popular. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 44, 146-149.

Beach, R. and Finders, M. (1999). Students as Ethnographers: An Alternative Approach to Research. English Journal 89, 82-90.

Finders, M. & Rose, S. (1999). "If I Were the Teacher": Situated Performances as Pedagogical Tools for Teacher Preparation. English Education 31, 205-222.

Finders, M. (1998/99). Raging Hormones: Stories of Adolescence and Implications for Teacher Education. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 42, 252-263.

Finders, M. (1996). Just Girls: Literacy and Allegiance in Junior High. Written Communication, 13, 93-129.

Finders, M. (1996). Queens and Teen Zines: Early Adolescent Females Reading Their Way toward Adulthood. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 27, 71-89

Research Statement
Margaret J. Finders


My research focuses on three aspects of teaching and learning: 1) social contexts of literacy learning, 2) gender studies, and 3) teacher education. My research agenda includes on-going projects and new work to contribute to understandings about language, literacy, and social life, specifically regarding gender and adolescence. I am interested in exploring the social contexts of literacy learning, examining closely how literate behaviors are entangled in larger political, social, and cultural issues. Drawing on critical literacy theorists, I argue that teachers and students negotiate their identities through multiple, competing discourse communities. I make the case that who they are, their identities, are closely connected to the language they use. In light of this, my focus on pre-service education specifically examines the ways in which sociocultural and equity issues play out in pedagogical and assessment practices in teacher education programs.

Entry into adolescence marks a critical juncture in social and cognitive development because of greater emphasis on academics, an increase in expectations for social experiences outside the home, and an intensification of differential gender roles; yet the dynamics of literacy learning in early adolescence remain severely under-researched. My book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High, published by Teachers College Press, explores the real worlds of seventh grade girls both in and

Sony MZ-N1: OpenMG Jukebox

From your OpenMG Jukebox playlist, you are allowed 3 simultaneous downloads (or "check-outs") of a song at one time. Once all 3 check-outs have been used up, the song will still exist on your harddrive, and you will still be able to play it on your computer's jukebox. However you won't be able to download it to another MD until one of the checked-out copies is checked back in. Checking-in a track will delete the song from the MD and increment the number of your available check-outs in the jukebox by one. Note that there is no way to upload a track recorded on an MD up to the harddrive at high speed (and the "check-in" process doesn't involve any actual audio upload). This is an unfortunate limitation for those that were hoping to be able to transfer their live recordings and interviews onto their harddrive to use with other applications. Perhaps in the future...? The speed of the PC-to-MD transfer ("check-out") depends on the selected MD recording mode - 2-4x for SP (292kbps ATRAC), 16x for LP2 (132kbps ATRAC3), and 32x for LP4 (66kbps ATRAC3).

Serial rights management sucks.

testing archives

Cyber-Serfdom

But with the cost of this technology rapidly decreasing, it will spread faster than you think. And so will the social stresses associated with it. Apropos of such a future, I heard a lot of new phrases this week: "device creep," "Machines don't serve us, we serve them," and "My identity is now less important than the data that is stored about me." Have a nice day.

Cyber-Serfdom The key to winning in business today is adapt or die, get wired or get killed, work 24 hours a day from everywhere or be left behind. Finally, during the question time, Howard Stringer, chairman of Sony America, stood up and said: "Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off."

TAP: Web Feature: Going Post-al?. by Brendan Nyhan. April 5, 2002.

In this changing world, the norms and practices of the lumbering print media leave it increasingly vulnerable to nimble online critics. Over the last two weeks, for example, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman has blasted the right in columns on David Brock's book and Social Security. But Krugman-bashers like Sullivan have unlimited space and time to tear him apart for days between his twice-weekly 700 to 800 word columns. It's no contest, and it's even worse for news reporters who have no means for responding to critics at all.

The newest example of the war between the online and establishment media comes from Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt, who is "widely considered the most slavish recipient" of leaks from Ken Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel, according to an article by Marshall on Salon.com [Salon Premium subscription required]. Following her March 20 story with Neely Tucker on Robert Ray's final independent counsel report, MWO blasted Schmidt as "Steno[grapher] Sue Schmidt" and told readers to e-mail her, presumably to express their discontent with her reporting.

Topica Email List Directory Sorry, I don't mean to lose it, but I've had it up to here with the

whole "well, if you believe *markets are conversations*, why don't you

let us talk freely." There is a big difference between "markets are

conversations" and every fucking idiot and his dog expressing their

opinion. Don't get me wrong -- I love it when people start their own

websites. Great! Go express yourself! Guess what? If you touch a

nerve, you'll get readers. But the simple fact is that most of these

discussion board shitheads couldn't pull readers to their own site if

their life depended on it.



Not to revert to the whole complex adaptive systems theory all over

again, but voices of prominence rising to super-node status in the

network is simply how this shit works. No one said all of the nodes

would be of equal status.

I'm going to post all of my really bitter, dark, negative stuff on the secret blog. I'd tell you where it is, but it's only open to people sneaky enough to find it.

I was going to blog a link to the new holographic dvd storage medium, but what's the point? I won't be able to afford it for about five years. In the meantime it will be discussed by hundreds of online instapundits (not that there's anything wrong with that) and eventually the technology will, hopefully, trickle down to the lower-middle class. And then you are going to see scads of pirating and recording the likes of which make napster and morpheus seem like rubber band guns in a nuclear arms race. We're talking 20 full-length movies per disc. Yum.



This begs the uncomfortable question, however, of "isn't there more to life and identity than your mp3 and video collection?"



Very few people attempt to define themselves outside of their consumer purchases or their employment. We don't even know how to have that conversation anymore, online or off.

Proposed copyright law raises controversy / COPYRIGHT'S NEXT CHAPTER / Latest legislation tries to control the technology itself

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002, introduced by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., would give the entertainment and technology industries up to 18 months to agree to a technological standard that would halt the spread of unauthorized copying of digital video and audio.

The bill would require this on any "digital media device" -- any hardware or software that reproduces, converts, retrieves or accesses copyrighted works in digital form. Penalties for altering the standard would be $200 to $2,500 per violation.

Calendar Live - Press Play to Access the Future Brett Ratner, director of the "Rush Hour" movies, concurs. "I'm thinking about the DVD as I'm making a movie. Things I'm going to put on it. Picking takes for the movie and for the DVD. I even remixed the sound for 'Rush Hour 2' for the DVD, because we have different kinds of sound equipment in the theater and at home. It was a way to enhance that experience."

Calendar Live - Press Play to Access the Future

As audiences became acclimated to music videos' jump-cutting and nonlinear storytelling techniques, they were able to absorb information more rapidly and in different ways, allowing filmmakers to short-cut exposition and action without necessarily sacrificing clarity.

Cyber-Serfdom My favorite, though, was that we now live in an age of what a Microsoft researcher, Linda Stone, called continuous partial attention. I love that phrase. It means that while you are answering your e-mail and talking to your kid, your cell phone rings and you have a conversation. You are now involved in a continuous flow of interactions in which you can only partially concentrate on each.

MetaTalk | Comments on 2061 No! This is exactly wrong. The web is not a tool to replace face-to-face communication between people who are in the same room. It's certainly not supposed to facilitate audience members ignoring the person they paid to hear speak so they can send them messages.

The web still doesn't have effective tools for writing, but the reading tools are pretty good, and they should give people enough experience that they'll be good listeners in person.

Why couldn't Dan just raise his hand?

The conversation continues... Last month, my company held our 25th anniversary PC Forum, the annual meeting of the computer and online market. As you might expect, while the speakers were holding forth onstage, audience members were second-guessing them from the floor.

Only this time, the attendees engaged in some high-tech heckling, using their PCs hooked up to the conference's wireless local-area network (Wi-Fi, for wireless fidelity), and from there to the Internet.

The implications are broad.

No, it won't make private meetings public. But it will make for more two-way communication at public meetings. Listeners can simultaneously query the speaker and communicate among themselves instead of everyone remaining silent while one person at a time speaks.

The Risks Digest Volume 22: Issue 2

(Don't get me started on intuitive. You know what's intuitive?

Fear of heights. Everything else we call intuitive, such as walking or using

a pencil took years of practice. Is that what we want? A control that takes

years of practice?)

That is to say, I am not a fan of the student centered class as it is often

outlined. I have had too many experiences and good teachers that have

pointed me in directions and made things that I thought dull, very

interesting and important. If we only stayed with those thing we knew and

were interested in, life would be dull indeed (not to mention very limited).

We are after all rhetoricians. The trick is not to let students decide the

way, but to get them to think they are deciding the way. Rhetoric can be a

really interesting thing to learn (even if students don't know what it is

when they begin the course).

Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did

Creating an alt. news group If a new group is to be justified, its topic must already be under discussion somewhere in existing Usenet groups. The question is: under what circumstances is a new group warranted?

1. If the topic is consistently dominating discussion in a more general group (e.g. 80% of discussion in alt.books.horror is about one author). Forming a new group because of this reason is called "splitting". If you want to form a newsgroup by splitting from an existing group, you should discuss the idea of a new group in the existing group before coming to alt.config with a proposal. People have to agree that there is a logical way to split the discussion. The old and new group would both be need to be viable after the split.

gladwell dot com / books

We sometimes think of Sesame Street as purely the result of the creative genius of people like Jim Henson and Frank Oz. But the truth is that it is carefully and painstaking engineered, down to the smallest details. There's a wonderful story, in fact, about the particular scientific reason for the creation of Big Bird. It's very funny. But I won't spoil it for you.

Antidote to the Liberal Monotone: Blogging

There are, of course, blogs of all persuasions on the Net, but the stars of the genre tend to tilt right of center. This is understandable, given the leftward swing of the mainstream press. The Web is an outlet for ideologically homeless opinion-mongers, and the smart ones are using it. Their audience? Readers and viewers who are hungry for alternative points of view.

Yahoo! News - Living on Internet Time, in Another Age

This is the crucial difference between the Edison site and newer museums that many children are familiar with. Older museums tend to be places where you can see and learn, but not touch. The newer ones tend to be entertaining interactive spectaculars that say, "Touch me, please," but at their most superficial are not easy to distinguish from Chuck E. Cheese pizza parlors. Aside from a few push-button displays, including kinescopes of Annie Oakley and a boxing match, the Edison site is definitely in the former camp.

Why Microsoft President Quit

"Believe me, things that the press is hearing about today as new initiatives were fully planned out as contingency actions years ago. Nothing happens on the spur of the moment here.

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town The test of any technology is the extreme case. For a car, it is surviving the Paris-Dakar Rally. For a hair dryer, it is baking Don King's hair into a ziggurat. And for TiVo, the digital video-recording device, it is capturing the wily and elusive Academy Awards broadcast.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 03/25/2002

One example of the suspicion attending my evident passion for maternity came from a colleague in my discipline, who wondered aloud, upon learning that I had four children, "Is she part of a cult?"

The Chronicle: Career Network: 03/25/2002

I am convinced that if your heart is in the work, either you will find your audience or your audience will find you. And if your heart isn't in it, find something else to do. Above all, we need to bring passion to our investigations, so that the highest scholarly standards can be informed not only by intellectual rigor but also by love.

The Nando Times: Poor sleep habits linked to moodiness, other problems

A new poll on sleep habits suggests that millions of Americans are in a bad mood, short-tempered and prone to overeat because they are tired.

The National Sleep Foundation Poll, released Tuesday, finds that people say they're much or somewhat more likely to make mistakes, get impatient or aggravated when waiting, or get upset with their children or others when they haven't gotten enough sleep the night before.

One fourth said they were more likely to eat more than usual on days when they didn't get enough sleep, with slightly more women than men reporting this was common.

"The poll establishes a direct association between how Americans are sleeping and their overall behavior, mood and performance," said Richard Gelula, the foundation's executive director. It shows 'you are how you sleep.' And it indicates that some of the problems that we face as a society, from road rage to obesity, may be linked to lack of sleep or poor sleep."

Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog

Another cherished belief that this explodes -- weblogs are useful. The secret to the success of both SOAP and XML-RPC is the weblog. Mail lists stop when someone posts a flame or a challenge from left field. Weblogs keep on truckin. For example, James Snell of IBM sneers at Sun for not joining the interop process. This makes me cringe. IBM didn't join the process (nor did the people he applauds) for many years after it started. But the work can continue. It's just one blog. He can say whatever he wants, believe whatever he wants, and the work continues.

The test of any technology is the extreme case. For a car, it is surviving the Paris-Dakar Rally. For a hair dryer, it is baking Don King's hair into a ziggurat. And for TiVo, the digital video-recording device, it is capturing the wily and elusive Academy Awards broadcast.

In the past year, TiVo has been widely adopted in Hollywood, where it is beloved for its ability to store up to sixty hours of programming; to create a profile of its subscribers based on what they watch and then record shows it believes they will like; and to blitz through commercials at sixty times normal speed. In mid-March, TiVo sent its customers an e-mail urging them to build their Oscar nights around TiVo, but reminding them to "pad" their recordings by at least thirty minutes: "That way, in case the ceremony runs long (ahem!), you're covered."

David Park, an agent at United Talent Agency, went one step further. He said, "I set TiVo to record the Oscars"—slated to run from 5:30 to 8:30 P.M., Pacific Time—"and the hour-long Barbara Walters special that followed it. I knew I had four hours—plenty of time. My girlfriend and I came home after a lovely dinner and chilled on the couch, eating tiramisu and fast-forwarding through the boring parts, the technical awards. We saw Halle Berry freaking out, saw Julia Roberts freaking out, and then, right before she announced Best Actor—it cut off! I said, 'This totally sucks!' " The

nothing, and lots of it

There seems to be a trend lately that describes a history of weblogs beginning from a very different place than I expected. I've seen a few occasions where Andrew Sullivan is credited with bringing weblogs to the masses, most importantly after September 11.

This revision of history doesn't totally surprise me, as I've heard comparisons of the web's history (and weblog history, indirectly) drawn to early television. In the first few years of television, the people creating shows knew the technology inside and out, worked the cameras, lighting, and sound while simultaneously writing, producing, and acting in their shows. The same can be said for many web pioneers. They had to not only code pages by hand, they often ran their own web servers, created their own graphics, and wrote everything themselves. Eventually, TV took off when the professionals showed up. The radio personalities and vaudeville comedians brought their heightened creativity to the medium and it finally gained a wide audience.

The Internet is Missing

Gender & ICT - Design Suchman and Jordan (1989) have argued that incorporation of the everyday work practices of the users of the technology is imperative in order to design appropriate technologies. In particular, the design of technologies that are sensitive to women's knowledge and concerns and work practices is necessary.

IC Online Interview with Robert Cailliau If you can instantly edit, you don't need URLs?
Right. You start out by writing your own set of documentary pages on your local disk. Then you would click your insertion point in the browser. Like in every good application, if you wanted to put the insertion point, you'd click once. If you wanted to make something work or to follow a link, you clicked twice. There was no distinction between editing mode and browser mode. We lost all that along the way. What we see now is mostly inflated rubbish.
So you lost that because you decided to release it to the public?
We lost it because we couldn't port it easily from NeXTStep. Writing an editor is much harder than writing a passive browser. The guy who brings out a passive browser spreads it faster, but it's not necessarily better for the user.

For want of an editor, the web was lost...

IC Online Interview with Robert Cailliau I proposed a range of possible projects for myself, one of which was Hypertext, and another of which was analyzing physics data using object-oriented systems and NeXTStep.
But why were you so hot on Hypertext?
I felt that we needed to be able to do more than just produce something and then output it on paper; we needed to be able to navigate within it. There had been this project called CERNDOC, which was a system completely based on VM, CMS, and the IBM. It was sort of a hierarchical system in which you could search for documentation, get a document out, and then maybe print it. But I felt that the whole thing should have been hypertext-based, or that we should at least look into what could be done with it. I thought that we could maybe even do things on the network, but I had not thought of the Internet.

NetHistory v2.0: An exhaustive list of Internet history resources Welcome to Nethistory, the most comprehensive directory of links (160 and counting) to information about the history of the Internet, World Wide Web, Usenet, as well as related concepts such as email, browsers, online games and BBSs.

O'Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification

Winer and his team don't email one another any more, and they claim radical productivity gains as a result of the switch to instant outlining:
We've been using this tool since November, internally at UserLand. We shipped Radio 8 with it. When we switched over our workgroup productivity soared. All of a sudden people could narrate their work. Watch Jake as he reports his progress on the next project he does. We've gotten very formal about how we use it. I can't imagine an engineering project without this tool.
If you read their outlines, which you can do because this experiment is being done in full daylight (if you're not a Radio user, you might try these renderings rather than the raw OPML files), you'll get a sense of the conventions that are evolving in this new space. Here are some of them:
Blog-like journaling is the basic style.
The top level of each item is date-stamped, and preferably includes a short description.
Older entries are archived (an easy manual operation in the outliner).

O'Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification

Here is another entry for Ryon, the sub-diety.

Here is a test story.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 03/29/2002

Academicians, Ms. Mentor notes, are not always the most courageous fighters for principle. And so, instead of the bright young postcolonialist who'd been brought to campus and royally feted, the department hired a rather foggy personage whose expertise was Old English philology. And since hardly any students would willingly sign up for that, the department quickly made Old English philology a requirement for all majors. Students fled, and the ranks of general studies and communications majors swelled to bursting. But Professor Cheese was appeased and pleased.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Institutional Analysis for Design

(1) Design is a social process, with a variety of players and
issues, and the design process is becoming more complicated as more
considerations are brought to bear on designers' choices.

(2) Computer use is a social process, and the process of computer
use is becoming more complicated as security problems proliferate
and users form themselves into advanced communities.

(3) Computers mediate social relationships, and Web-based tools are
capturing and supporting those relationships in more detailed ways.

Getting to the Root of All E-Mail (washingtonpost.com)

And tucked away in a less-traveled back corner of one of the server rooms, behind the door of a black tower that looks no different than any of the others, is the principal reason for all the precautions: the A root server.

Most people envision the Internet as a global network that resides on no single physical system or network of systems. While that picture is roughly correct, key pieces of the Internet's technological backbone are concentrated in a handful of physical locations around the world.

The Domain Name System (DNS) makes the Web easy to navigate by translating long Internet protocol (IP) numbers into memorable Web and e-mail addresses. It relies on a hierarchy of physical root servers to inform computers connected to the Internet where they need to look to find specific locations online.

At the top of that hierarchy is the A root server, which every 12 hours generates a "zone" file, which in turn tells a dozen other root servers spread around the world what Internet domains exist and where they can be found.

Google Technology

Pigeons naturally operate in dense populations, as anyone holding a pack of peanuts in an urban plaza is aware. This compactability enables Google to pack enormous numbers of processors into small spaces, with rack after rack stacked up in our data coops. While this is optimal from the standpoint of space conservation and pigeon contentment, it does create issues during molting season, when large fans must be brought in to blow feathers out of the data coop. Removal of other pigeon byproducts was a greater challenge, until Page and Brin developed groundbreaking technology for converting poop to pixels, the tiny dots that make up a monitor's display. The clean white background of Google's home page is powered by this renewable process

Harper's Magazine: A Gaza Diary, p. 12 of 14

Arafat loyalists in the camp, such as Faqawi, concede that Hamas is ascendant. If Oslo had led, as many had hoped, to a two-state solution, and thereby given Palestinians some glimmer of a better life, it is a fair bet that Hamas would be a marginal force in Gaza. But Israel's occupation and Arafat's mismanagement have made it only a matter of time before the militants come to power. They already rule the street. If Sharon unleashes Israel's might, as he did in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority will be his first victim.