I, Cringely | The Pulpit . But then the good times ended, leaving these same tribes in shock. Having spent half a decade awash in Baby Ruth bars and parachute cloth, they suddenly had to do without. So the cults arose, rituals of paramilitary activity -- marching around in fake helmets carrying fake guns -- that were intended to coax from the sky more cargo planes, more parachutes, more PXs.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Lions face new threat: they're rich, American and they've got guns The shortage of such beasts is now so great that hunters have been making use of a mane-extension service back in the US where fake hair is weaved in to give their trophies an extra flourish before they hang the heads.

INTERNET STUDIES: NEW KID ON CAMPUS
Increasing numbers of academic programs about the Web are emerging at the
undergraduate level, although they have been present in graduate studies
longer. Students at institutions such as Brandeis, Cornell, and the
Centenary College of Louisiana can earn minors that focus on the Web and its
effects on society. A graduate program at Marlboro College deals with
instruction employing Internet tools. Steve Jones, head of communications
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president of the
Association of Internet Researchers, said his institution likely will soon
have a Ph.D. program on Internet studies. Brandeis' Internet program offers
classes in security, Web design, and e-commerce, as well as classes dealing
with the social aspects of the Web. Although many colleges and universities
now offer Internet-related courses, only a handful have organized them into
degree programs or even an area of concentration. Jones said, "It's an
incredibly exciting time, the point of birth of an area of academic
studies."
(Associated Press, 22 April 2001)

disinformation | chemtrails The domestic bio-warfare connection was given the most validity after former Lycos 'Entertainment News Service' reporter William Thomas wrote an article series about contrails that occasionally dripped down to earth in cobweb-like strands. Thomas said he and a medical expert collected samples of a 'brown, gel-like substance' that splattered over the sides of two aluminium structures in separate states and had them tested at an 'EPA'-licensed facility.

What are Cybernetics and Systems Science? Systems theory or systems science argues that however complex or diverse the world that we experience, we will always find different types of organization in it, and such organization can be described by concepts and principles which are independent from the specific domain at which we are looking. Hence, if we would uncover those general laws, we would be able to analyse and solve problems in any domain, pertaining to any type of system. The systems approach distinguishes itself from the more traditional analytic approach by emphasizing the interactions and connectedness of the different components of a system. Although the systems approach in principle considers all types of systems, it in practices focuses on the more complex, adaptive, self-regulating systems which we might call "cybernetic".

CCCC 98: Cynthia Selfe's Keynote Address One of the primary arguments for the project to expand technological literacy rests on the claim that such an effort will provide all Americans with an education enriched by technology, and, thus, equal opportunity to access high-paying, technology-rich jobs and increased economic prosperity after graduation. The truth of this claim, however, has not been borne out and is not likely to be so, and this is one of the primary reasons why we need to pay attention.

Word!

Social Aspects of Literacy The following is a guide to information, including books, av materials, journal articles and websites available through the Reference Library at Library Media Services in the Winnipeg School Division No. 1 on "Social Aspects of Literacy." If you wish to obtain any of the information, please call the Reference Library at 788-0203 ext. 143, or come down and visit our library. We are located in the Prince Charles Educational Resource Centre at 1075 Wellington Avenue.

I need to do a lit. search and find out who is really applying what we know about social literacy to electronic literacy in composition.

Social Aspects of Literacy The following is a guide to information, including books, av materials, journal articles and websites available through the Reference Library at Library Media Services in the Winnipeg School Division No. 1 on "Social Aspects of Literacy."

Grounded theory: a thumbnail sketch This distinction between "emergence and forcing", as Glaser frames it, is fundamental to understanding the methodology. Most of you, whatever your discipline, will have been exposed more to hypothesis-testing research than to emergent research. The research processes you have learned and the thesis structures you have internalised are those of hypothesis testing, not of emergence. Doing grounded theory well is partly a matter of unlearning some of what you have been taught or have acquired through your reading.

Slashdot | Data Munging with Perl Yes, you are missing something. You're absolutely right that you can get all the reference material you need on the web. That's what it does best. However, when you're trying to *learn* a new language, it's better to have your editor, a couple console windows, and a book open. That speeds up the write/compile/run cycle. No flipping back and forth from the browser. You learn faster.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]


Re:The power of paper? (Score:5, Interesting)
by interiot (interiot54793@dbn.domainvalet.com) on Thursday April 26, @12:38PM EST (#44)
(User #50685 Info)
Get a second monitor to read documentation from. Not only would it pay for itself within 4 books, but it's more useful than a stack of spent books.

Balancing act is tough for women Although Silicon Valley women now contribute substantially to family income,
they still bear the brunt of household duties.
The study found that half of Silicon Valley women overall -- and 33 percent of women in marriages and partnerships -- provide the majority of their household incomes. But 47 percent also do most of the errand running, cleaning and child care, while 46 percent share those tasks. Only 7 percent of women said that someone else had the main responsibility for running the household.

DUST MITES: A Primer

David Eggers, on criticism: But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one.

Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO) Feb. 6, 1998 It's depressing to admit it, but humans can't multitask -- we can't pay attention to two things simultaneously. (Obviously,we can be aware of many things at many levels simultaneously, but that's not the same thing as paying attention.)

Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age I have noticed that the mobile-gadget wielder develops the odd sensation of being entitled to all sort of facts. You get in the habit of knowing things, or at least of being able to find out. It's as if there's a permanent mental hotline to the information specialists at the public library. Can't quite identify Bob Dole's running mate in 1996 or that actor up on the screen or a science-fiction story encountered 10 years ago? You get a twitchy feeling that you ought to push a button and pop up the answer.
But Huberman has more in mind than facts and trivia. His research consistently finds informal communities making better decisions than any of their members, knowing more and thinking better than experts.

Chicago Tribune | Print Edition -- 3 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE READING THIS Parts of it were written years ago. Some came from old journals, some from episodes I wrote shortly after they happened. But in earnest, I spent about 8 months on it. I tend to write pretty quickly, in huge bursts, when I get going, and then edit very slowly. The structure was a huge problem, because I was constantly struggling between wanting to play around with the form of it all, and then having the actual material, the subject matter, overwhelm all the tricks and gimmicks.

Survival of the fittest Jini services, Part 1 - JavaWorld April 2001 In the near future, Frank Sommers argues, all information capable of digital capture will be recorded, and made available via the Web in the form of active, persistent objects. The primary consumers of this information will be machines (software), which will let people intelligently use increasingly larger portions of that vast resource.

My Manifesto - Archive - A Hearbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: Revised I too have been keeping tabs on Eggers' literary stardom, or, as one recent Eggers essay said it best, fallen into a "relentless Google search for Egger's soul."

FoE! Log #8: The Dave Eggers Backlash Is "Five Minutes Ago" Eggers' accepted $1.4 million paperback book deal with Vintage, turned-down seven-figure movie deal, and rapid-firing of agents has been making news lately.

My Manifesto - Archive - FoE! Log #18: Eggers Is Everywhere check out this comment from his Coupland summary:

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Life | Dead man talking 'The army was a right-wing finishing school for Tim,' agrees Lou Michel. 'They taught him to separate his emotions from his actions and the motto Tim remembers was: "Blood makes the grass grow greener." After the Gulf War, he really became indifferent to life. This is the man who told me: "I understand what they felt in Oklahoma City. I have no sympathy for them."'

Google Search: Nice thread on using Palm pilots for ward record keeping.

Content Management There are two fundamental elements to content management: (1) storing stuff in a content repository, and (2) supporting the workflow of a group of people engaged in putting stuff into that repository. This chapter will treat the storage problem first and then the workflow support problem.

I can't believe I am getting whipped into a frenzy over speed bumps. This signifies something I would rather not think about.

Metafilter | Comments on 7216 In addition, further respondents to this thread, in the interest of full disclosure, should declare whether they have young children or not.
posted by mecran01 at 7:22 AM PST on April 25

The response below pisses me off!


I have two daughters, 12 and 5, and at no time during their lives did I agree with speed bumps. I am aware of the phenomenon whereby new parents become obsessed with safety entirely out of proportion to the existing threats. My ex-wife is the master of this sort of excess. At one point, she told me that it was unacceptable to leave the children (then 11 and 4) unattended for the 90 seconds that it takes me to put a bag of trash in the dumpster.

In much the same way that I don't think non-parents should tell parents how to raise our children, I don't think parents should impose their irrational fears on everyone else. It is not uncommon, for example, for parents to press pre-schools not to allow any sort of junk food in any kids' lunches because they don't want their own children exposed to the horror of Ding Dongs, or whatever.

You want to keep your kids safe? Do what I did: teach them not to play in the road.

I can't stand that psuedo-neo-libertarian smugness crap.

Joel on Software Human Task Switches Considered Harmful

More on "task-switching." I tend to agree that the time required for task switching with people, especially writing projects, can be a real drag.

CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES/ ** (PG) .Roger Ebert writes: It may not be brilliant, but who would you rather your kids took as a role model: Crocodile Dundee, David Spade or Tom Green? It is a melancholy milestone in our society when parents pray, "Please, God, let my child grow up to admire a crocodile rassler," but there you have it."

ZDNet: Content Management for Dummies Content Management for Dummies
By Jim Lynch, PC Magazine
February 7, 2001

Atomz Publish from Atomz Corp., a developer of Web-hosted applications, is an easy-to-use, content management system designed with midsize to large Web sites in mind. This application allows everyone from Web developers to nontechnical users to edit and update Web content directly via a browser: There is no need to install any software, and you don't even have to be familiar with HTML.

The Seattle Times: Never again, New York: Authorship for no fun and no profit It fell to my brother Pat, during the writing of "The Visionary Position," my second New-York-published book, to strong-arm money out of my editor at Random House. Pat, who owned a bookstore at the time, wrote to Random House president Alberto Vitale explaining that he was writing a check to me for the amount he owed Random House because he heard the publisher was having trouble paying me. There must have been subsequent rumblings in the corporation, for my check from Random House arrived within days, along with a letter from my editor saying that she hoped this "cleared up any misunderstanding" I might be having about her.

5. THE “CULTURE WARS” -- TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY

Video games, music, and murder
1990, number of teenaged boys who played violent interactive video games: 0.
Number of rap music (including “gangsta”) albums sold, 1990: 74 million.
Number of teenage boys arrested for murder in 1990: 6,600.

1999, number of teenage boys who played violent video games: 5 million.
Number of rap/gangsta albums sold: 125 million.
Number of teenage boys arrested for murder: 3,700.

Rate of non-Hispanic white teenagers arrested for murder (reporting states) in 1990: 3.1 per 100,000.
Rate in 1998: 1.1 per 100,000.

Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age It is an industry truism that children most readily learn the necessary new styles and habits. They know to power-cycle gadgets that crash, and they instantly acquire the most esoteric special typing skills. "They're mutants!" says Michel Mayer at I.B.M. "They're cyborgs! I don't know how they do it!" He doesn't seem all that unhappy about it.

Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age So the editors have sent me forth, equipped. I have joined what the Japanese are calling the oyayubizoku (the thumb tribe), named for the organ we so compulsively poke at our tiny keypads.

Handsets in Europe Strike a New Chord as Pop Music Replaces Beeps The snippets of song, known here by the German word "Klingeltöne", have become so common that trains, stadiums and pubs regularly turn into impromptu karaoke centers as soon as a phone rings. If Eric Clapton's "Layla" beeps out from someone's phone on a train, people all over the car start singing. When a phone rings "Who Let The Dogs Out?" in a pub, the whole bar bursts into rapping and barking; the effect gets increasingly raucous as last call approaches.

Suck.com: Hit & Run 04.19.01 Teacher evaluations are designed and executed to give students the illusion of authority. Anybody who has spent any time around college administrators knows that the complaints of disgruntled students are viewed with nothing but contempt, and that those student evaluations they hand out at the end of the semester generally end up unread at the bottom of some archival dumpster

IRISS '98: Ethnomethodology and the Study of Online Communities: Exploring the Cyber Streets Textual Analysis and Ethnography
Ethnographies have always taken advantage of written materials from a culture, but that has usually formed only a part of the evidence for analysis. Online communities present the researcher with nothing but text. The ethnographer cannot observe people, other than through their textual contributions to a forum. All behavior is verbal in the form of text. There are no other artifacts to analyze other than text. Interviewing presents possibilities to meet people in person, but given the dispersed geographical nature of most current online communities, interviewing must usually be done online, again via text.
This necessary emphasis on text presents both opportunities and severe limits. In one sense, there is less for the ethnographer to miss in a text-based world of interaction. All speech, behavior, community rules, and community history is, in principle, likely to be available online for the researcher's inspection. This may make the task seem deceptively easy. A researcher could sit down at his or her own computer, browse through a community's archive, monitor current postings, and have the world's easiest fieldwork conditions.

Computer News The News-Times Voice-recognition software is not at all daunting Tape a photo of a good friend next to the computer and talk to it, not to the machine, he recommended.
Which I did, and found helpful.

Computer News The News-Times Voice-recognition software is not at all daunting He and his wife, another injured writer, arranged their lives around the technology, converting their apartment's two bedrooms into offices and sleeping in the living room so each can have a private space in which to talk-type. With this application, privacy is imperative, Barnstone said.

Computer News The News-Times Voice-recognition software is not at all daunting Indeed, as the days passed after my brief, happy sessions training with Via Voice, I found myself avoiding it. As near as I could tell, the problem was my self-consciousness about talking to a machine. Even with no one else around, I felt shy, unable to write. Without my hands on the keyboard, my brain stopped dead. The words that will flow easily when I get deeply into a writing project just refused to come out. I was a beginning writer all over again. Worse: I had no idea how to work.

The Village Voice: Machine Age: Talking to the Machine hen I was 18, I decided to write a novel by dictating it into a tape recorder. the idea, as I recall, was to avoid the quagmire of writing a first draft, and jump directly to the revision stage. What I found, though, was that in seeking to make my writing process easier, I had made it far more difficult, for the taped draft, once transcribed, was full of endless sentences, rambling digressions, and other conversational misdirections that rendered it literally impossible to read. The trouble with dictation, I came to understand, had to do with the dichotomy between spoken and written speech, the way that, by its nature, talk is loose and formless, while writing cannot help but be more controlled. Even the most natural writer has two distinct voices, one for conversation and one for the page. And in trying to merge mine, I realized that the key to writing was writing, and that there could be no alternatives to putting in the necessary work.

State of the Art: If Typing Won't Do, Speak Up For example, the act of composing prose is very different when you're talking to a computer. To maximize accuracy by gauging context, speech programs analyze entire phrases or sentences, not individual words. You see nothing on the screen until just after you stop speaking.
As a result, you learn to form each sentence in your head before speaking. Otherwise, you develop Speech Recognition Babble, in which, to avoid stopping in midphrase to think (impairing accuracy), you keep spewing words, keeping the sentence alive at all costs. ("Mary had a little pet, and it was a baby animal on a farm, and it was small and. . . . ")

State of the Art: If Typing Won't Do, Speak Up Speaking conversationally, I can dicate about 130 words a minute, and people walking into my office and watching NaturallySpeaking 5.0 pour prose (like this column) into Word or Outlook Express often think they have stumbled onto the set of a "Star Trek" movie.

I've decided to move Markzilla here, because
1. posting to blogspot is faster than ftp-ing
2. There's less chance it will be indexed by school crawlers and read by folks in the department
3. Blogger is starting to surpass other weblogging software in ease, support, and reliability. yeah!

Blogs and Pulitzers What I said (to him and others, I hope) is that most of the people are *** not trying to win Pulitzer prizes ***, not "not going to win". (I was thinking Pulitzer as in "distinguished fiction" or poetry -- excellence in writing.) Some of them are (and could win one), but many bloggers are writing for their friends and others who share their interests. They are driven by passion and not the craft of writing. (You can tell that my writing is like that.) I was trying to deflect the condescending attitude many of the press have about web logs wrt the writing. The press, being "professional writers", measure the writing quality, style, technique, choice of topic, and target audience against what they were taught in school, with a Pulitzer as a goal. I want to emphasize that many writers don't care about that, they just care about communicating with their readers or expressing themselves for their own good feeling.

--Dan Bricklin, on Weblogging.

Science -- Roberts et al. 291 (5512): 2318a Bringing all of the scientific literature together in a common format will encourage the development of new, more sophisticated, and valuable ways of using this information, much as GenBank has done for DNA sequences."

This makes me drool.

kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products "Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies."

How the Blogger Deal Happened

Teenage Overload, or Digital Dexterity? But now that more than half of American households have computers, the younger generation has steadily been sharpening its skills. While many adults are perfectly adept at, say, toggling between e-mail and a spreadsheet, perhaps with a phone conversation or two thrown into the mix, teenagers can multitask many of their elders under the table, juggling a half-dozen activities without missing a beat.

How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O. (Owens also found that, within the company's message boards, high-status employees had their own secure mailing lists, the electronic equivalent of the key to the executive washroom.)

How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O. Owens's findings are so striking, and so consistent, that they could serve as an unintended primer for those who want to be a boss, or at least want to be mistaken for one. If your e-mail messages are late, unevenly capitalized and sloppy, you could be C.E.O. material. If your e-mail messages are earnest and combative, or if you run them through spell-check before hitting send, then you may be destined for middle management. And if you ever use e-mail to forward jokes, send greeting cards or use happy-face "emoticons" -- well, you're giving yourself away. These are all strategies used to build social relationships within a company, to provide a kind of social lubrication. ("Gee, what a neat tie!") Owens acknowledges that those who do so play "an important role that tends to be greatly underestimated." But they are almost always low-status workers.

NNM Winter 2001 - Weblogs

a class on weblogs!