Text-friendly Authoring Let me start by trying to dispel a common misunderstanding. "Text-friendly authoring" isn't in the least about eviscerating your web documents by cutting out all the other media such as images, sound, executable code etc. On the contrary: the intention is to use the appropriate media for each purpose, and to use them to the full; but to avoid those other media getting in the way for readers who cannot use them. Nor is it about creating a complete additional text-only version of your site: that might, very occasionally, be justified, but I don't recall meeting a situation where I would have chosen that approach myself, and have reviewed quite a number of examples of other authors doing this where I came to the conclusion that their approach had been misguided [1].

Research Summary Obesity has increased in recent decades despite no increase in calorie consumption and a rise in dieting and exercise. While typically treated as a public health issue, obesity is also an economic phenomenon that is avoidable through behavioral changes. Economists expect these behavioral changes will be undertaken if their benefits outweigh their costs. In their Harris School paper, The Long-Run Growth of Obesity as a Function of Technological Change, University of Chicago researchers Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner examine whether the economic benefits and costs of obesity can be used to explain its variations across time and populations.

Exhibition of High Speed Photography

Denial and the Ravaging of Cyberspace Back in the summer of 1993, "cyberspace had remained practically free of advertisements, but marketers were beginning to eye the medium." Eight years later, Weber wrote, "it's difficult to remember that quaint, commercial-free Internet. Marketers didn't just eye the medium -- they conquered it." He added: "The Internet has been transformed largely into a place of commerce."
But the Internet remains, for many, an object of illusion.
As if looking backward through the wrong end of a telescope, some observers are dazzled by the virtues of their personal treks online. But whatever cyber-stars are in the eyes of certain individuals, the business calculations of hard-nosed number crunchers are focused elsewhere. And the documented trends are enough to make the most avaricious media tycoon grin.
Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online, the authoritative Jupiter Media Metrix research firm reported in early summer. At the top of the heap were AOL Time Warner's sites, with 32 percent of all minutes spent online in the nation, followed by Microsoft (7.5 percent) and Yahoo (7.2 percent).

How My Electric Car Saves the World Wherever I go in the Insight, people wave, shout, honk, roll their windows down, give me the thumbs up, pull alongside. They always smile. Boys playing ball have dropped their bats and mitts and run after me. Bicyclers in the Berkshires have flagged me over to the roadside to talk. Firemen have stopped polishing their fire engines to ask how the car works. In parking lots, people leave me exuberant notes or they wait for me to return so they can quiz me. Honda reports having sold 7,084 Insights by July of this year; they are still rare, and enticing.

Meme Central - Memes, Memetics, and Mind Virus Resource

FQS 1(1) Katja Mruck: FQS - Idea, Realisation, Future Perspectives

Call for chapters on qualitative methods found here.

Special: Neo-Luddite Computer Solution Neo-Luddite Computer Solution

The computer industry is a chicken on growth hormones, sloshing around in a nutrient bath with its head cut off. Hardware is out of date as soon as it's installed. Program bloat is rampant, outstripping ever-larger hard drives. As sacrifice on its neophilic altar, featuritis demands the constant obsolescence of programs no one has had time to learn in the first place.

He Who Controls the Bootloader Although few in the Be community ever knew about the discussions, Gassée says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, preinstallation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS preinstalled, but made changes to the bootloader — rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer — before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license.

Be was forced to post detailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how to unhide their hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled.

Bootloader as Trade Secret

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Delhi children make play of the net In the slums of Delhi, an experiment has shown how illiterate street children can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computers and the internet.
The aim of the experiment, funded by the Indian Government, local institutions and the World Bank was to see what role computers might play in educating India's illiterate millions.
The results were startling, showing how much children with little or no English and no computer training at all could achieve.

Technology Item 11 "Palm Pilots" 1501 Total Responses I just discovered something interesting. With people who have PalmOS devices that support and run PalmOS 3 , you can change what type of battery your battery display indicator thinks it's measuring with a Grafitti shortcut combination (this was news to me!).

I'm using NiMH batteries in my new Handera, for example, and the battery display was just completely out to lunch. Here's what you do:

1) Open a blank memopad document

2) Grafitti the shortcut character (like a cursive lowercase letter l)

3) Grafitti a period (dot then dot)

4) Grafitti the digit 7

Your display should now say something like [Nicad]

5) Repeat steps 2-4 until it says the type of batteries you're using. Different versions of PalmOS support different types of battiers. 3.5 supports alkaline, NiCad, NiMH, and rechargeable alkalines at a bare minimum.

Ein

From Corey Doctorow:



"Timo, it's pretty straightforward. Meerkat aggregates something like 2500 different RSS (headline syndication) channel, that are clustered in categories. Anyone who operates a Website can publish its ongoing contents as a channel. People who've signed up to put their feeds in Meerkat have chosen a category for their channels, and that what you see in the "Categories/Channels" window. Choose which channels you want to see feeds from, choose how many hours' worth of content you want (Meerkat gets thousands of new headlines/day), using the "Show Me" window. Optionally, you can filter the results by entering keywords to either include or exclude from the headlines using the "Search For" box. Once you've told Meerkat which channels, how far back, and which keywords to look for, click the "Refresh" button and the page will reload to show the results, 50 headlines at a time. You can click on a headline to see the story. The other columns (Source, Category and Date) show you more info that you can use to refine your settings (for instance, if a certain source returns awful results, you can eliminate that from the channels you want to see). There's lots of advanced stuff, too -- you can create an account, which lets you save "Profiles" (settings for different purposes) and "Mobs" (collections of links that you want to save). Is that clear?"



I owe him $1.00 for that.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Microsoft lobbying campaign backfires; even dead people write in support of firm Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft for its conduct as a monopoly.

The pleas, along with more than 100 others from Utah residents, are part of a carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign by the software giant that may be backfiring. Microsoft sought to create the impression of a surging grass-roots movement, aimed largely at the attorneys general of some of the 18 states that have joined the Justice Department in suing Microsoft

Beaming Data Holds Promise, With Limits, for Networking Dr. Kavehrad and a colleague, Dr. Svetla Jivkova, have been researching a system that sends pencil-thin infrared beams bouncing around a room, connecting computers to one another and to a central transmitter and receiver that is wired to a larger network. The researchers said the technology could transmit two gigabits a second, or about a thousand times as much data as a cable modem, with few transmission errors.

Keeping Up in Class With Software for a Hand-Held One of the most common student uses of a hand-held computer is to keep track of assignments and grades. Due Yesterday (www.due-yesterday.com), $15, and 4.0Student (www.handmark.com), $19.99, are good replacements for pocket calendars. Both provide tools that allow you to enter information about courses, including meeting times, contact information for professors and assignments. They offer views of due dates that can be customized by the week, by individual course or with all classes included. Assignments and test dates can be exported to the Palm's datebook and to- do list with either program, allowing students to coordinate schoolwork with the rest of their lives.

InternetNews - Web Developer News -- Working on a Unified Code for 'LOL' or :) The OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee (TC) will work to develop Human Markup Language (HumanML), a schema for embedding contextual human characteristics -- cultural, social, kinesic (body language), psychological and intentional features -- within information. OASIS said HumanML would have applications in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, conflict resolution, psychotherapy, art, workflow, advertising, cultural dialogue, agent systems, diplomacy and business negotiation.

Debating Merits of Palms in Class Warhaftig, who uses a Palm IIIxe to keep his students' contact information, said he fears the students will use the devices' infrared capability to beam notes to each other and play games rather than read that William Faulkner story.
"I know when I’m in a faculty meeting that is boring me to tears, I will read The New York Times on AvantGo and look like I’m (concentrating) on the meeting," said Warhaftig. "The magic in the classroom is getting kids to concentrate."

Hmmm...how about creating lessons that don't suck? Or curriculum that employs the palm in useful ways. Blah, I say! Blah on you sir! Good day!

Houston Bridges 'Digital Divide' In a fresh assault on bridging the gap between the haves and have-nots of the Internet revolution, Houston launched an innovative program Monday providing each of its 1.8 million residents with free e-mail accounts and access to word processing software

Teen-age Teacher: 15 Going On 3D Powers said that for the past few years, she frequently asked him questions about the software on a listserv.
"I thought this was a very sage-like, wise, older person who knew everything you needed to know about Cinema," she said.
"Then I went to Siggraph and he walked up to me with his little name tag and introduced himself. It was a standard double take –- I almost choked."

One man's trash is another's gold | csmonitor.com Mark (who didn't want his last name used) lives near Austin, Texas, and may be the king of dumpster divers.

He was a casual diver for years, finding clothes, dog food, microwaves - pretty routine stuff. But then he started finding computer equipment - high-end items that big corporations had chucked. He realized he was onto something.

He started selling 250-400 items per week on the online-auction site eBay. He's now turned the activity into a full-time business and has a network of 50 buyers. He dives from 4 a.m. until around 8 a.m. three days a week.

Mark recently found a bunch of Windows 2000 servers (1,000 to be exact) that usually retail for $800 dollars per unit. He thinks the company may have gone out of business before the servers were received, but he doesn't know for sure. He sold them for $90,000. He also found 23 units of IBM website-building software that retails for $10,000 per unit.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit And some readers, quite bored with the current rash of computer crimes, wondered aloud how they might do a lot more damage should they decide to undertake their own crime spree. "You are, of course, right about the fact that virus writers have been (so far) staggeringly unimaginative and shortsighted in their work," wrote one reader, clearly entering some kind of fugue state. "One can draw parallels with graffiti artists, or bacterial pathogens, or terrorists. But just to give one example -- if *I* were to make a virus, I'd for damn sure do something INTERESTING like, for example, seek out every Excel spreadsheet on the hard drive and change ONE randomly-selected "2" to an "8"...And not crash, interfere with anything else, or otherwise attract attention, except to spread. It wouldn't make CNN -- at least, not right away -- but once it did, the story would not be about how millions of people had trouble with e-mail. It would be more like how Merrill-Lynch had to declare bankruptcy."



Watch out for that guy.

What's Really in Their Backpacks While basically everybody wears Jansport backpacks, according to Amanda Bove, Fossati's 13-year-old cousin and a high school freshman, they're likely to take one of those gel pens to it.

What's Really in Their Backpacks After one of Mark Frey's students complained that her wallet had been stolen, school security guards quickly sealed off the classroom and began searching backpacks.
"As they started the search, there was a wave of movement of people going to the back and hiding things in a pile," said the computer science teacher, who works at Skyline High School in Oakland, California.

CNN.com - Nuclear-testing supercomputer unveiled - August 16, 2001 "It opens up a whole new way of studying how materials behave, how they perform under different conditions, how they age," he said. "It's beautiful."

Here's a review of the Archos:

http://www.futurelooks.com/reviews/electronics/audio/MP3/Archos_jukebox_6000/page1_frame.htm



I'm serious: For $200 bucks I could have this USB file carrying box with images of disks, etc.



Right now I am trying to image machines in our labs for preparation for school on Monday. It's terribly frustrating because half the machines sit on one subnet, and half on another, and imagecast won't communicate across the subnets due to IP multicasting being shut off at the router level for some reason.



So I get one machine perfect, gather the image, and send it to about seven other machines at a time, because our sh*tty network is so slow that's all I can do. Meanwhile, people on real networks can image 30 machines at a pop.



Then I have to transfer the clone image to another imagecast control station on the *other* subnet. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to send 1.4 gigs over the network, at 3.5 mbps. Then I image a handful of machines on the other subnet.



I could use the archos and at least hand carry the image over to the other imagecast control station, saving an hour here and there.



I'm ready to sit down and learn ghost, and just image each machine with an autobooting CD. Setting it up would suck, but it would only take three hours total to image 85 machines, as opposed to all of the dribs, drabs, false starts and file swapping with Imagecast on our crappy network.



Once I get these things imaged, I'll be set, because we have deep freeze installed so the machines won't degrade over time or get filled up with weird crap that people download. I'm starting to understand the whole appeal of thin clients. PeeCee's suck.

Here's a review of the Archos:

http://www.futurelooks.com/reviews/electronics/audio/MP3/Archos_jukebox_6000/page1_frame.htm



I'm serious: For $200 bucks I could have this USB file carrying box with images of disks, etc.



Right now I am trying to image machines in our labs for preparation for school on Monday. It's terribly frustrating because half the machines sit on one subnet, and half on another, and imagecast won't communicate across the subnets due to IP multicasting being shut off at the router level for some reason.



So I get one machine perfect, gather the image, and send it to about seven other machines at a time, because our sh*tty network is so slow that's all I can do. Meanwhile, people on real networks can image 30 machines at a pop.



Then I have to transfer the clone image to another imagecast control station on the *other* subnet. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to send 1.4 gigs over the network, at 3.5 mbps. Then I image a handful of machines on the other subnet.



I could use the archos and at least hand carry the image over to the other imagecast control station, saving an hour here and there.



I'm ready to sit down and learn ghost, and just image each machine with an autobooting CD. Setting it up would suck, but it would only take three hours total to image 85 machines, as opposed to all of the dribs, drabs, false starts and file swapping with Imagecast on our crappy network.



Once I get these things imaged, I'll be set, because we have deep freeze installed so the machines won't degrade over time or get filled up with weird crap that people download. I'm starting to understand the whole appeal of thin clients. PeeCee's suck.

We have this problem all the time. Pine will misbehave as well. It usually occurs for me when I am using the default windows telnet client. Whenever I get on a machine I usually install "putty" or "tera term pro". Perhaps the default telnet client can be reconfigured as well, I'm not sure.



http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html (tera term)



http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html (putty)







----

http://www.louisville.edu/~mecran01







>>> mdcobb02@LOUISVILLE.EDU 08/17/01 02:28PM >>>

I have a couple of users in the libraries that are stating that there are =

differences in the way that they are able to function when they Telnet =

into Athena. Their complaints are that they can't edit pages, arrow keys =

don't function anymore, etc. Easy Editor now shows up on the top of the =

screen when they log to web pages now, and this was not always the case. =

Can someone offer me some assistance on this one?



Mioshi Cobble

Technology Consultant

OLT

Free Software Hippy Sells out--but in a good way. Recently, I changed my mode of dress to be a bit more traditional, and I cut my long hair. I did this in part because my fiancee wanted me to, but also in part because I realize that non-hackers are sometimes threatened by the "typical hacker style." This actually wasn't my idea; I got it from Jello Biafra, a social commentator and spoken-word artist (who is most famous for leading the now-defunct punk band "Dead Kennedys"). Jello pointed out that the "Halloween costume" approach (i.e., wearing clothes that seem like a costume to you, but are "normal" to most people) can really work when trying to reach people who don't agree with you. Some people are uncomfortable enough with our ideas, and if our dress, clothing, piercings, or mannerisms turn them off, they won't even take the time to listen to our ideas. Since I was never that attached to long hair and my "t-shirt and jeans," I decided to make the changes, in case it might help to reach such people who would otherwise be turned off. I kept the beard, though, because I really don't want to shave every morning!

That's an example of a superficial change that I've personally done to make myself more accessible to non-hackers. I also think a lot about how our work can improve everyone's life, and I always try to address my points to a person's individual concerns.



I felt this way when I cut my hair. But at some point you become the costume, don't you?

Testing BlogBuddy.

Salon.com Technology | Linux in China: Not ready for prime time A backlash against Microsoft in the Chinese media has given strength to the open-source community in China, and certain agencies of the Chinese government are embracing Linux with a kind of nationalistic spirit. Open-source software is being touted as the white knight that can save China from a vendor lock-in with Microsoft, a scenario some in China refer to as an "opium dependency," conjuring up images of the unjust British colonialists of two centuries ago.

Human centered systems in the perspective of organizational and social informatics -- Rob Kling In 1993, the term "digital libraries" was popularized when it became the focus of a $24 million research program jointly sponsored by ARPA, NASA, and NSF. Many computer scientists, in fields such as human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and information systems, who had not previously been concerned with the design of libraries became keenly interested in this research opportunity. Imaginative entrepreneurial computer scientists and information scientists soon began organizing research conferences on digital libraries, and a new field was soon born.

Salon.com People | Samuel Mockbee In the last century of American homebuilding, there may no other time when architects were so irrelevant. Less than 10 percent of single-family residences are designed by architects now, and most of the rest come from mass-produced blueprints that make entire neighborhoods identical. The small percentage of homes architects actually do design go overwhelmingly to the wealthy. And while many charities such as Habitat for Humanity address low-income housing needs, the notion that poor people could ever inhabit unique pieces of architecture anymore is almost laughable.

Somebody forgot to tell this to Samuel Mockbee.

Nonzero Any book with a subtitle as grandiose as "The Logic of Human Destiny" is bound to have some mealy-mouthed qualification somewhere along the way. We might as well get it over with.

I remember an isolated phone booth in Honeyville, Utah, where my grandparents once lived. It was beat to pieces most of the time, but probably one of the last analog lines in America. I wanted to go play with phreaking toys there, but never did. The local boys used to tease me for my long hair. They're all underemployed alcoholics now. I'm an underemployed academic. At least they get to go shoot rats in the dump at night.

Hmm...just read about a p2p spam-fighting tool, and it struck me as an excellent example of distributed cognition. To what degree does distributed cognition occur in the networked classroom?

DaveNet : Connecting with Blogger The Internet is a writing environment

I'd say that the Internet is 25 percent cash register and 75 percent writing environment.

If you adopt the writing environment view as both Blogger and UserLand do, it's easy to see how Web services make a difference, they allow desktop apps to connect to the cloud.

With the new functionality that Blogger has developed, you can now use our writing and design tools to create for a Blogger website. It's done through an open and documented XML-RPC interface, so it will be possible for tools on any platform to hook into Blogger.

NewsForge | Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions There is also another, very human problem to overcome: that most people don't understand computers or software, but have memorized only the keystrokes and mouseclick patterns they need to get through the day, so the second they are given a new program they need to memorize a whole new set. This is not an OS-to-OS migration problem per se, but one that can crop up any time a new piece of software is introduced in a workplace environment. But then, because Dave and Mike aren't constantly running around fixing PCs, they have time to train people and answer users' questions, a luxury they would not have if they were fighting Windows problems all day long.

Windows, Windows Everywhere For instance, Apple Computer continues to do well, but not for its stockholders. The company gained tax-exempt status as a religion in 2015. Authorities were convinced the designation was appropriate after many users took to flagellating themselves in public when Steve Jobs failed to make any significant new-product announcements at Macworld in Boston. Apple evangelists have become common in shopping malls and airports. The cult tends to attract very nice people, and they've managed to integrate into society quite well. The rest of us simply avoid talking about technology around them lest we get flooded with irate e-mail

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

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

They found that people in the Caspian Sea area have learned to read the numbers on bar codes to see where products were manufactured. The buyers believe that products from American companies are better if they were built in America.

dooce.com "You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and your going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you."



From Rushmore.

The Art of Mehndi -Part 2 - Henna Paste Recipe

OPAC Name Headings Search Title Long Date Library
1 Hayden, Dolores. Grand domestic revolution : a history of feminist designs for American homes, neighborhoods, and cities / Dolores Hayden. 1981 Belknap Campus Libraries
ART LIBRARY book stacks Call #: HQ 1426 .H33 1981 Status: On Shelf

2 Hayden, Dolores. Power of place : urban landscapes as public history / Dolores Hayden. 1995 Belknap Campus Libraries
EKSTROM LIBRARY book stacks (3rd or 4th floor) Call #: F 869 .L857 H39 1995 Status: On Shelf

3 Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American dream : the future of housing, work, and family life / Dolores Hayden. 1984 Belknap Campus Libraries
EKSTROM LIBRARY book stacks (3rd or 4th floor) Call #: HD7293 .H39 1984 Status: On Shelf

4 Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American dream : the future of housing, work, and family life / Dolores Hayden. 1986 Belknap Campus Libraries
EKSTROM LIBRARY book stacks (3rd or 4th floor) Call #: HD 7293 .H39 1986 Status: On Shelf

5 Hayden, Dolores. Seven American utopias : the architecture of communitarian socialism, 1790-1975 / Dolores Hayden.

Leisure Town: Q.A. Confidential

Hypercapitalism, software culture, and identity.

Comm 690 Syllabus Readings

The following texts are required.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuell Castells

The Wired Neighborhood by Stephen Doheny-Farina

A coursepack available at Gray's College Bookstore

HPV Drivetrain Analyzer

Awk gear inches calculator

Cassettes from Harris Cyclery

Salon.com Technology | Holding up the rear Denied a chance to indulge himself in what Lewis calls "butt pedestals," he decided to investigate just how prevalent Aeron addiction had been in the dot-com world. "It became this casual thing that we could do in our spare moments, you know," he says. We would "check into the auction sites and see what was available, and sometimes we could track down a phone number and ask a few innocent questions."





"How long you guys been in business," Lewis and his friends politely inquired. "What happened? And do you have any Aeron chairs?"

Rebels in Black Robes Recoil at Surveillance of Computers A group of federal employees who believed that the monitoring of their office computers was a major violation of their privacy recently staged an insurrection, disabling the software used to check on them and suggesting that the monitoring was illegal and unethical.

This was not just a random bunch of bureaucrats but a group of federal judges who are still engaged in a dispute with the office in Washington that administers the judicial branch and that had installed the software to detect downloading of music, streaming video and pornography.

'Igniting Fear With Flying Metal' Most people would never think to make a "hurricane of fire" by molding five jet engines into a circle.

The jets have about 130 pounds of thrust apiece, so when they are turned on, they create a stationary tornado with wind speeds up to 300 mph. Gas then gets shot into the wind, where it is ignited creating, well, a hurricane of fire.

Copy lines containing "*" in word!!a>

Practical exercise: Capturing the context of HCI with the Activity Checklist
During the practical exercise participants will be introduced to the Activity Checklist based on the principles of Activity Theory. The Checklist is a conceptual tool for identifying the most important factors influencing the use of computer technologies in a particular setting. By applying the Checklist to a series of examples, participants will get a hands-on experience of using Activity Theory as a framework for design and interpretation of studies of human computer interaction. The exercise will be organized into five phases:
In the first phase participants will be provided with some observational data which they will be asked to analyze, i.e., to indicate potential problems, formulate requests for further analysis, and provide some suggestions on how the problem can be solved.
In the second phase the Activity Checklist will be introduced. The general structure of the Checklist corresponds to the four main perspectives on the use of the technology to be evaluated:
focus on the structure of the user's activities -- the extent to which the technology facilitates and constrains attaining the user's goals and the impact of the technology on provoking or resolving conflicts between different goals;
focus on the structure of environment -- integration of target technology with requirements, tools, resources, and social norms of the environment;
focus on the structure and dynamics of interaction -- internal vs.

Activity Theory and Process Modelling Thus, we believe it essential that effective process modelling approaches and tools provide adequate support for these softer aspects. In this context, activity theory would appear to have much to offer and a process modelling approach, centred on this theory, is the central focus of this paper. Activity theory has its origins in Russian psychology research (Vygotsky, 1978) and, more recently, has been adopted by a growing number of researchers working within the human-computer interaction (HCI) field as an alternative framework to the dominant cognitive psychology paradigm (Kuutti, 1996). Activity theory incorporates notions of intentionality, history, mediation, motivation, understanding, culture and community and it is these aspects that have proved attractive to HCI researchers pursuing this direction Û in particular, it provides a framework in which the critical issue of context can be taken into account. Thus, in extending their horizons, the HCI community has moved into the realm of process modelling. Unfortunately, however, a perusal of the activity theory literature reveals very little in the way of prescriptive guidelines or tools that might be employed by practitioners. Our research here can be viewed as a first step towards addressing this limitation.

Slashdot | Is This How to Carry Your Gadgets? If you want the ultimate computer geekware, let me clue you in. NOTHING. No phone, no PDA, no other crap. A real geek doesn't need toys. Wherever he goes, people hand him THEIR toys, all he needs is his mind. And besides, a real pro wants to be SHIELDED from all the annoying calls, pages, etc.

I have often tested this principle when I do consulting gigs. I call it the "Naked Consultant Game." Whenever possible, I go in to the site carrying nothing but a pencil. Occasionally a client will be puzzled, asking where's my phone, laptop, etc. I ask them if they want me to fix their stuff, or if they'd rather look at a bunch of cheap plastic toys. I tell them I'd gladly carry a bunch of crap to gawk at, but it will cost them extra, and take me longer to get onsite carrying all that crap.

Utilikilts Company: Products...

TDK's TMBG archive

Winamp Generated PlayList

Some interesting tunes.

See Steve Ballmer dance like a monkey:



download via SwarmCast

I'll be using this weblog as a general dissertation work space from now on, rather than keeping notes in my unnetworked journal as I've done in the past.

Things to do today:

• summarize Selfe and Constanza articles and put in Nvivo.
  
• code summaries
  
• sort summaries by code
  
• Find chapter one draft and start inserting summary sections.
  

Articles: Star Wars II: Return of the Name If you read much Herbert, you may see the very beginnings of the "Butlerian Jihad" in this story. Remember all the "Mentats" in the Dune books? Human computers? They existed because of the one prohibition that came out of the Butlerian Jihad: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man's mind." They discovered, almost too late, that relying on machines to do your work turns you into a slave.

Freshmeat.org palm apps sorted by rating!

Envelope Glue - Make your own - stamp pads, art paper, envelopes, glue, rubber stamp cleaner, embossing powder, embossing fluid, wax seals, and more TO MAKE REGULAR DYE INK: (non-embossible)

To make the "ink" you'll need:

A baby food jar OR an old film canister

Rit POWDERED Dyes, in various colors

Rubbing Alcohol

Directions:

Baby Food Jar: Add your entire package of dye to the jar, add alcohol to the top of the jar, replace lid and shake. Film Canister: Fill canister 1/4 way full of dye, add alcohol to the top, replace the lid and shake.

Slashdot | Is This How to Carry Your Gadgets? You will know the Truth, and the Truth will lift you of a great Weight.

This is the Truth: You don't need so many gadgets.

Truly. Honest. I stand up and say "My name is Geek and I am a gadget addict". But now I'm cured. Or almost.

You don't really need to carry along the mobile phone. If somebody wants to speak with you, will call again. If you want to talk to somebody, then I recognize it's damn useful, but again, it's so urgent? They are very convenient in traffic jams, but again, I have found that having a book with me it's almost as good, and the jam does move faster when I get interested!

And you may be surprised, but there is life beyond the PDA. Come on! Do you really to have with you at all times ten thousand addresses?

If you really need special clothing for carrying all your iron, IMHO it's time to rethink your life. Your lower back will thank you for that, at the very least :o)

Catch the Assembly '01 Buzz He and his friends were proud to show off to me, and explain the lightning-quick speed of the network. The monitor showed a server ping time of just 4 milliseconds, compared to more typical speeds of 100 or 200 milliseconds, they said.
It's hard to overemphasize the cosmic or even spiritual aspect of linking up with all that connectivity and power, like being part of Star Trek's Borg collective. Tapping into the network -- to many, at least -- means being a part of a whole and, contrary to some of the grousing from hard-core demo coders, the young gamers seem mostly in awe of demos.
"It's such a beautiful audio and visual show," said Mikka's friend Mikko Ikola, also 15. "The music and video compos are so beautiful."
But Assembly is a party, and that means a full assortment of kicks. A couple dozen beanbag chairs were stretched out before a screen as big as some art theaters house, showing DVDs of recently released Hollywood movies. Lounging while watching George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg shiver under water in that famous boat movie was a surprisingly effective way to recharge for more demo viewing.

CNN.com - Study: Multitasking is counterproductive - August 5, 2001 "People in a work setting," says Meyer, "who are banging away on word processors at the same time they have to answer phones and talk to their co-workers or bosses -- they're doing switches all the time. Not being able to concentrate for, say, tens of minutes at a time, may mean it's costing a company as much as 20 to 40 percent" in terms of potential efficiency lost, or the "time cost" of switching, as these researchers call it.
"In effect," says Meyer, "you've got writer's block briefly as you go from one task to another. You've got to (a) want to switch tasks, you've got to (b) make the switch and then you've got to (c) get warmed back up on what you're doing.

Collaboration Merrill Lynch estimates that by the end of last year, there were almost 40 million miles of fiber optic cable already in place in the U.S. alone, most of it still unlit. Whether you prefer to fly on Boeing or Airbus jetliners, by this time next year, on many flights you'll be able to get an Internet connection on the back of the seat in front of you that will be fed by either a broadband (Boeing) or a narrowband (Airbus) link that you can communicate in real time with the rest of the world through satellite. Talk about "instant messaging."

Real Water Rockets 1 - the 250 ml starter. Water Rockets - 250 mls


If you have never seen one of these things fly, and perhaps doubt that they can, this is the one to start with. This page will tell you how to put together a neat little rocket, make a connector that you can then use as a nozzle and then launch it using a bicycle pump to gauge the pressure. This baby is simple to construct, small enough to handle reasonably safely but demonstrate the basics of water rockets.

Cars The popular Mini Sonic is a fast pusher propeller racer. Top speeds of over 7 m.p.h. can easily be reached with the Mini Sonic.

White House Protests "whitehouseprotests.Com is a full service, web based corporation that enables you, from the comfort of your home or office, to organize a demonstration using a custom designed, full size banner to be displayed by our staff directly on the sidewalk in front of the White House or Capitol buildings in Washington, D.C. A full size 8 x 10 photograph will be taken during the demonstration of your message which will be mailed directly to you."

The Village Voice: Features: Tech Wars in Meat Space by Erik Baard The technology exists for real flying saucers to project laser messages onto the sides of buildings or display text on their underbellies with light-emitting diodes.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy, the techno-artist collective that makes the remote-controlled GraffitiWriter, sees nothing ahead but growth. "[T]he IAA has identified the already emerging market of cultural insurrection as the most stable market in the years to come," says their Web site. "IAA research has examined the primary behavior patterns of this market and is developing technologies that best serve the needs of the burgeoning market."

Water Rockets - Clifford Heath I couldn't stop laughing for days after firing my first water rocket. It flew hundreds of feet vertically (I've measured 135 metres or 450 feet), and cost a few bucks and a bit of pumping.

Bigfoot Water Rocket Launcher Systems

How to Build a Water Rocket

Build your own paper rocket! Build your own paper rocket!

Anthropologists adapt technology to world's cultures

PC Forum 2001 Transcript Shirky This is one of those problems, like open source, where it looks like socialism but it's driven by libertarianism. Napster is a system like a democracy or a market, where it is the selfish impulses of the individual users that drive the system. As long as the architecture is built in such a way that it channels enough of those selfish users to provide resources, it doesn't matter whether or not it is "from each according to their hard drive, to each according to their bandwidth." [Laughter and applause]

PC Forum 2001 Transcript Shirky One of the big losers here is the IT department. They have been given the task of controlling their network, so they've created an illusionary world for themselves, where they think that the company intranet plus a firewall will give them sharply reduced information flow at the borders the network. Well, forget it - people use instant messaging and email all day long. The workers have bypassed this model. Businesses that are predicated on the control of intellectual property at the edges of the network are being slowly dragged into a regime where those borders are officially semi-permeable. Any hierarchically organized business is going to have a problem when I can set up an ad hoc workgroup of five people from five different companies and build a space for us to share files, without having to go down the hall and bug the IT guys. Big server companies and ASPs are challenged by this, but the bigger challenge is that within the culture of individual businesses, centralized control of networking is coming up against the users' ability to build their own stuff, on the fly, without having to tell anybody. That change in business culture is going to be the big thing in the next five years.

PC Forum 2001 Transcript This past year, we went to the Cebit trade show and saw the first-ever, large-scale, utterly canned demo of Bluetooth melt down. Not only did it not work well, nothing talked to anything. We had waited for the industry to give us a wireless peer-to-peer networking standard, but they failed. Then we go to San Francisco, and some guy has got an open AirPort Base Station running Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). We fire up our iBooks and we're connected to the Internet. So we say, "Why are we waiting for Bluetooth? Let's bring our PCs into the workplace all over again." That is what arouses enthusiasm. It also arouses skepticism, because the business press says, "Why are you enthusiastic about this?" And the technical people say, "We are enthusiastic about it because it's returning us to our roots as a nerd pride culture." And the business press says, "But where's the market opportunity?" And the technical people say, "But it's cool!" [Laughter]

PC Forum 2001 Transcript Cory Doctorow, OpenCola We've heard a lot of talk about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "cornucopia of the commons" in the context of peer-to-peer architectures. The interesting thing about the commons in a P2P network is that it's full of cows that shit grass - every cow that grazes the commons provisions the resource that it's grazing. It's like Metcalfe's Law, squared. [Robert Metcalfe noted that the value of a network grows as n-squared, where n is the number of users.] Not only does the network gain value because more people are connected to it, it gains capacity. I think that's a really radical departure from any architecture we've seen so far.

Salon.com News | The rigged missile defense test There was only one thing that all the happy salesmen forgot to mention about their latest test drive. The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it. In other words, it would be fair to say that the $100 million test was rigged.

No wonder, then, that Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the Air Force officer who oversees the NMD program, told the Washington Post on the eve of the test that he was "quietly confident" about the outcome. The general knew about the GPS beacon, while the reporters didn't.