Lord of the Hackers

Hackers used to be known simply as computer people. But if we take the computer as representative of a way of knowing, a way of seeing the world, then we are all computer people now. We use computers in different ways, of course, and they can offer more than one perspective on our lives.

instructor Resources

It started out simply enough: smuggling aerosol snack cheese and crackers into my top secret study space for snack purposes. But now I'm out of crackers and squirting the cheese straight into my mouth. I am so ashamed.

One Toke Over the Harvard Line? (washingtonpost.com) • Here's a vignette we're dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday's Ford's Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. "I know I shouldn't have," a witness told us yesterday, "but I started laughing."

Andrew is watching...you.

Hacktivism and Human Rights: Using Technology to Raise the Bar

Hacktivism is finding ways to speak truth to power using technology in this way. It's technology or hacking in the service of human rights, or civil liberties, or the environment.

When the truth commission in Guatemala was able to conclude that we find that more than 200,000 were killed during the armed internal conflict, more than 93% were people killed by the government. The army of Guatemala can no longer deny that this occurred, because the basis on which we made this claim was defensible on scientific grounds.

Good (or Unwitting) Neighbors Make for Good Internet Access

Several of the major cable and phone companies that provide high- speed wired connections to the Internet say customers are violating their service agreements — and perhaps breaking the law — by letting others outside a given household piggyback using 802.11.

"Anyone who is using it that way would basically be stealing," a spokesman for Time Warner Cable said of those who patch into its Road Runner cable modem service. "It's the same thing as cable theft."

20 Questions With...Cory Doctorow

11. I am most happy when:

I've gotten up early, done Tai Chi in a nearby park, come home and written 500 words on a novel, blogged 10-20 items, eaten some granola, watched a TiVoed South Park, gone to work, accomplished good stuff, gone to a movie and topped it off with a good dinner with great conversation

This is the voice of a person with no children.

Plus, what's so special about these MIT guys is that they have documented the heck out of this little endeavour. I'd gladly hire one of these guys to work with me. Sure, it's not the best idea every conceived--but at least it's documented. I could now go and reproduce their efforts without much thought.
In all, it seems rather impressive to me. It's a neat new UI that's not typical. It's documented to all heck. That beats half of everything I've ever done.

Metafilter | Comments on 15205

New scholarship on the origins of the Koran claims that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. For example, Islamic martyrs are not rewarded in paradise with "virgins," that's a mistranslation. Oops. (NYT member: metafi, password: metafi)

posted by homunculus at 9:00 PM PST (15 comments total)





So they're really rewarded with vegans? Must be hell!

posted by HTuttle at 9:37 PM PST on March 1

The Austin Chronicle Screens: Information Wants to Be Worthless

Net types like to catfight about whether blogging is the Way Forward or utter self-indulgence. Since it is almost certainly both at once, blogging is quite the hot topic. So there will be some bloggery debate, with scowling, and finger-wagging, and pepper-gassing. Yes, blogging has its limitations. There isn't much in the way of original content, for instance. Weblogging consists mostly of logging one's websurfing activities, then making sardonic comments about whatever you see. An activity one's admirers find hilarious. Yet admirers rarely pay for this. Except in their admiration.

The Austin Chronicle Screens: Information Wants to Be Worthless

Back in the Neolithic dawn of the Internet, you see, the academics who built it used to beat the living crap out of a businessman the very moment they saw him. One peep of commercial spam on their stainless not-for-profit network, and the net-gods would reach right into your router and just throttle you, like an egg-sucking dog. Businessmen would take one look at that impossible Internet code, and they'd pick up their gray flannels and flee headlong to CompuServe and Prodigy. You young folks these days, you probably don't even remember "CompuServe." They croaked from being way too compu-servile.

. Interesting speculations on student motivation, the role of humor, and different ways of reading are offered in Chapter 10; however, no conclusions are drawn. I found myself searching for those places I marked in other chapters which could allow me to piece together an argument. Linking these cites would allow readers to think associatively but critically. Another example of hypertextual leaping occurs in the discussion of underlife, specifically addressed in "Underlife_and_Identity" (13). Some of the best insights and analysis of student dialogue and the role of underlife occur in this chapter. "While some language is clearly inappropriate, students benefit from talking in ways that they choose. Slang, for example, is part of youth culture and can be a critical ingredient in the struggle for identity" (104-5). The underlife issue is picked up again in "Net_Working_in_the_Workplace_of_the_Future" (15) and could have been integrated in the earlier chapter. While networking in the workplace had some interesting ramifications, it had little application to the ethnographic focus of the book. If sections of this chapter and other seemingly irrelevant chapters could appear as hypertextual links, the book might not seem so fragmented. Chapter 9 features Todd, one of Burns' students, and includes many of his posts and responses to them; Tornow comments that the online environment worked for Todd. But the chapter is sandwiched in between two theoretical chapters and adds little to either the ethnogra

Meatball Wiki: ConflictResolution Collected on this page are some techniques to resolve conflict. Since conflict is a natural part of life, most will likely apply in any context. However, certain forms of conflict are unique to OnlineCommunity, so some will likely only apply in that context. Also related, the ConflictCycle?, ConflictIntensity?, SourcesOfConflict and HealthyConflict.

Rhinoskin Leather Flipcase for the Palm m100 Series Review It took me a little bit of time to get used to the idea of leather cases being made under the Rhinoskin name, but I am definitely warming to the idea. Marking yet another departure from their famed line of hard protective cases made of aluminum and titanium, Rhinoskin has now come out with a Leather Flipcase for the Palm m100 series PDA. This case is available in both brown and black. For this review, I was presented with the brown version.

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches Years went by. One day I was looking through Rolling Stone or some other corporate rock rag, and there he was, the punk apprentice locksmith. Axl Rose. Now a corporate rock star himself. With a corporate biography of his troubled youth in Lafayette Indiana, his many run-ins with the law, (oh, the daring outlaw! How glamorous!) and his many jobs, including his apprenticeship as a locksmith (what a loser job!) So I put two and two together, and realize that this punk asshole rockstar, this small-talent whiney-boy, not only did he steal the guitar for which I had swept floors and cleaned toilets and scraped dishes for months; but also he's getting bad-boy rockstar mileage out of the fact that he had, quote, brushes with the law, unquote, for things like stealing guitars from loser nerdy graduate students who have never even shot heroin.

Microcontent News: Weblogs, email digests, Webzines, personal publishing, content strategy, Microads. Corante. Weblogs are perfect for Google: frequently updated websites crammed chockfull of tasty links. It's no wonder that Google loves Weblogs so much.

Of course, if that's the case, why doesn't every Google search land the searcher on a blog? That question underscores a crucial point about weblogs and Google: weblogs are the voters in this political system. In other words, weblogs don't get elected by Google... but the sites they voted for do.

So even if you never visit a blog, you're being influenced by them. The collective votes of the weblog community are determing what sites you see on Google, the world's largest search engine.

Microcontent News: Weblogs, email digests, Webzines, personal publishing, content strategy, Microads. Corante. But Google didn't stop there. Its insatiable appetite for fresh content spilled over to any frequently updated websites, including Weblogs. If Google noticed a page updating frequently, it started visiting that page much more frequently so it could suck the latest content into its database of over 3 billion documents. As they put it in their latest press release, "Google refreshes millions of web pages every day to ensure that Google users have access to the most current information."
Putting it Together: Google loves Weblogs

Reading list

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think brought all the best lessons from usability down to a readable text that began a discussion, and explained the give and take that usability and design sometimes have to work against. It was refreshing to read after hearing only decrees from on high, delivered in the full style of academics telling everyone how Things Should Be Done. If I had to pick one web-specific book as my all time favorite, this would be it.

Your Thumb Here: Newest ID of Choice at Store and on Job Businesses and government agencies defend the practice as a reasonable response to the widespread traffic in false identifications. But civil rights advocates worry that fingerprinting is being used to intimidate people who patronize businesses that serve lower-income people. Some wonder if fingerprint databases can be protected from abuse.
Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington, said the technology can protect privacy, making it harder for a thief to use a stolen charge card encoded with a thumbprint. But Mr. Crews said that big, compulsory databases, like those for driver's licenses and other ID's that store people's finger or facial images, can be abused by officials, identity thieves or others who find a way into them. "You create a honey pot for hackers," he said.

Absolute Powerpoint
Can a software package edit our thoughts
by Ian Parker
Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren't listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So, one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft's PowerPoint program, and typed:

• Family Matters
  
• An approach for positive change to the
  
• Wyndham family team
  

I'm sure I blogged this before, but it's still great.

The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century Yet something more important may be afoot. At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation.

The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe Housecalls does not describe what it does as anthropology; it prefers to say that its researchers generate ''reality-based product differentiation.'' But the language of Margaret Mead and her followers constantly creeps into the company's official literature.

Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe

By LAWRENCE OSBORNE

Angela Macri crouches beneath the shower nozzle and blinks into the blazing lights of a one-person film crew. The shower curtain has been drawn back so that her movements are exposed to the camera; Macri seems a little nervous as she adjusts the faucets.

''Look up a moment,'' says Terri Marlowe, the camerawoman, as she checks the light reading.

Field Studies Done Right: Fast and Observational (Alertbox Jan. 2002) Last week, The New York Times ran a long article about companies using anthropological techniques to study their customers. It's always great to see articles that promote field studies, but the information in the Times article perpetuated two common mistakes that not only produce bad data, but squander a company's research budget:

portfolio

Find out what is expected for your career path. Positions in fund-raising and what is called "Institutional Advancement" require leather and top-quality portfolio because your contacts will be persons with money.

This just struck me as funny.

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/writebetter/

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

With so many writers apparently uneasy about the state of the world, I would expect plenty of mordant commentary on our entanglement in the wheels of the runaway technological locomotive. But almost none of the stories in these 13 Asimov’s issues--not even those set in a "real future"--offer a genuine critique of technology, of its use by and its impact upon humanity. David Marusek’s biting "VTV," about new extremes of media manipulation, is a standout exception (3/00). Critique requires that its author gaze unflinchingly at present and future, ugly and perverse as those might appear. What we have instead here is a pervasive techno-anxiety that for the most part looks away from the source of its fears.

Web 'turns people into goldfish'

A US EXPERT RECKONS obsessive web browsing can cause attention spans to drop to as little as nine seconds - equivalent to a goldfish.

"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT. "If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC.

A US expert reckons obsessive web browsing can cause attention spans to drop to as little as nine seconds - equivalent to a goldfish.

"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT. "If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC.

Online Journalism Review, Gary Baum: On Publishing Scoops and Canards

In fact, it seems to have become the gospel at the trail-blazing news Web site, which has gained fame in recent months for its eye-catching, jaw-dropping reports on the current war on terrorism in the region. However, Debkafile has received a mixed reaction from the media it so confidently challenges; critics have questioned the publication's accuracy and objectivity, giving its overall coverage comments ranging from "just plain scary" to "complete bunkum."

PostNuke.com :: Rogue Content Management

How do I do a fresh install of Post-Nuke

nothing, and lots of it

A related lesson, learned from several client meetings:
I didn't use "Lorem Ipsum" latin filler text in mockups or prototypes shown to customers until a few meetings went like this:

Me: So, here's what the proposed home page will look like, and you just simply click on the discussion ar...

Client: What's that paragraph say about healthcare funding getting slashed?

Me: What? Oh, that. I just copy and pasted the first story on Yahoo News' medical news page, I thought it'd fit as filler text since this was a medical site. Now about the functionality of the featur...

Client: Well, can we change that? I mean, I don't want to look at bad news when visitors see the site.

Me: I just put that in for this photoshop mockup, it won't ever be seen by anyone. Now about the new proposed sub-sectio...

Client: Ok, but if you could change all the mockups, that'd be great, I don't want to show these around the office with that bad news on there.

I've used Lorem Ipsum as filler text from then on.

HotScripts.com : PHP-Nuke

PHP-Nuke is a Web Portal System, storytelling software, news system, online community or whatever you want to call it. The goal of PHP-Nuke is to have an automated web site to distribute news and articles with user system. Each user can submit comments to discuss the articles, similar to Slashdot and many others. Features: web based admin, polls/surveys with comment option, statistics, user customizable box, themes manager, friendly admin GUI with graphic topic manager, moderation system, Referers page, sections manager, an integrated banners ads system, backend/headlines generation (RSS/RDF format), Yahoo like search engine, Ephemerids manager, file manager, download manager, faq manager, advanced blocks system, reviews system, newsletter, multilanguage content management, encyclopedia generator, md5 password encryption, support for 25 languages, 100% modular and very easy to use and configure. PHP-Nuke is written 100% in PHP and requires Apache, PHP and a SQL Database Server. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Adabas, mSQL and many others.

Online Pedagogy with Discussion Management Software

Feenberg's Textweaver project

But here is the rub: interactive text based applications lack the
pizzazz of video alternatives and cannot promise automation, nor
can they be packaged and sold. They do not conform to the fantasy
of total central control over a flexible, disseminated system
defying spatial and temporal boundaries. On the contrary, they are
labor intensive and will probably not cut costs very much. Hence
the lack of interest from corporations and administrators, and the
gradual eclipse of these technological options in public discussion
(if not on campus) by far more expensive ones. But unlike the fancy
alternatives, interactive text based systems actually accomplish
legitimate pedagogical objectives faculty and students recognize and
respect.

To resist the automating trend in education is not simply to wallow in
an old-fashioned Mr. Chips sentimentality. Rather, it is a question
of different civilizational projects with different institutional
bases. The traditional conception of education must be preserved
not out of uncritical worship of the past but for the sake of the
future. I have tried to show here that the educational technology
of an advanced society might be shaped by educational dialogue rather
than the production oriented logic of automation. Should a dialogic
approach to online education prevail on a large enough scale, it could
be a factor making for fundamental social change. This prospect is
explored in all its utopian impl

Red Rock Eater Digest - Critical Theory of Technology

The Factory or the City: Which Model for Online Education? [1]

Technology and Modernity

Much recent discussion of the Internet emphasizes its promise
of epoch making changes in our lives. In no domain are these
anticipated changes more radical than in education. We are told that
the substantive content of instruction can now be delivered better
by computers than by teachers. Are we on the verge of a fundamental
transformation of all our assumptions about education as we enter
a postindustrial information age, or are we instead witnessing
significant but more modest changes in education as we know it?
As a participant in the early development of online education,
I hope to be able to bring a touch of realism to the debate.

news.telegraph.co.uk - Pink hair girl sees red as school photo is altered

"We have been trying to resolve the issue of Ashley's pink hair since before Christmas," he said. "Initially, we were assured that she would return it to the natural colour over the holiday but since Christmas her hair has remained pink.

Literacy.org

A nice site with literacy resources.Duh.

In Praise of Sloppy HTML - The Web Developer's Journal My point is that there are many cases where it should be spent on something else, that perfecting HTML is often not the best use of resources. To be fair, there are also many cases where perfect HTML is worthwhile, and for mature businesses that's probably most of the time, but for young businesses it's worth considering the sloppy HTML option. It may be the only way to get through those lean, early years and get to a stable position where you can start contemplating perfection. A two percent budget shift from perfection to promotion in those early days may mean the difference between success and failure.

With the World Redesigned, What Role for Designers? As Ms. Kare wrote in a follow-up note, "When times are confusing, it's more important than ever to produce images of clarity and simplicity."

Salon.com Life | Don't say "cheese" I treasure the photos I have of my boys, their doe-eyed looks, their fat baby bottoms, their naked boy bodies rollicking in the tub. I want to hold them forever in those moments; preserve them, keep them alive. I'd love to always hear their baby boy voices, their made-up words, the songs they sing. I'd love to always watch them dance their little boy dances. I want to keep my boys forever. But I can't, any more than those Victorian mothers in those silvery tinted Daguerreotypes could hold onto their stillborn babies by having them photographed cradled in their arms as if alive.

Winter 2002: Weblogs, part II: A Swiss Army website?

Because weblogs handle text, images, and other media, they are by definition a kind of information management system for "capturing, organizing, manipulating, and accessing information" [5]. Many groups and individuals, including the IU, are looking at ways to use and improve how weblogs can be used for this. The ability of weblog software to provide automatic and consistent date-based archiving, persistently assigned URLs, and interoperable workspaces, has sparked much recent discussion about ways that weblogs can be used as content management systems (CMS) "to manage the content of a web site" [6], and for knowledge management (KM) to "consciously and comprehensively" gather, organize, share, and analyze "knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills" [7].

little.yellow.different [remix] And apparently, my other option is to drive out to Pier 3 in San Francisco, where NBC is showing the opening cermony on a giant boat with free food and giveaway prizes. While the offer is tempting, am I really going to jump in my car and drive out to a pier to watch singing and dancing Mormons?

Jarrett House North : Confessions of a referral junkie I would have written my scripts anyway, and Manila Envelope. But I think unconsciously I was adjusting my web writing to the stuff that had gotten me attention in the first place. And I'm not super happy about that.

ACM: Ubiquity - Need "Therapy" for Your "Information Pain"? LOUIS ROSENFELD: Information architecture the thing is the structure of an information system and the ways it's organized and labeled. Every information system, be it book or Web site, has an architecture. For a book, it's the stuff we all know and count on-chapter and section headings, tables of contents, back of the book indices, sequential pagination, consistent information on the cover and spine, and so on. But for a Web site, your guess is as good as mine-the architecture might consist of many different kinds of hierarchies for navigating, sets of terms used for labeling content, search interfaces, site maps, indices, data models . . . . Unlike books, sites have no conventional information architecture, but that's another story.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan, Canada whose canola fields were contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola. Although Schmeiser never planted any Monsanto seed, Monsanto took him to court for using their intellectual property without permission -- and they won.
Roundup-Ready canola was found among Schmeiser's canola crops along a major haulage roadside. Monsanto's position is that it doesn't matter whether Schmeiser knew or not that his canola field was contaminated with the Roundup Ready gene, and that he must pay their Technology Fee. Since Monsanto won this suit it has lodged similar suits against farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, and Louisiana.
The case is on appeal. And apparently Schmeiser's fields continue to be contaminated. Schmeiser has been growing his own canola seed for 40 years, but he had to purchase brand new seed because his old stock was contaminated by Roundup-Ready canola volunteer plants.

Foam Props: All About Foam: The History of Foam: Mount Rushmore In brief, the truth of the matter is that Mount Rushmore was carved out of foam. And why not? Foam was lightweight and durable, and far faster to work than granite. In fact, with the addition of a special granite-like coating the four presidents appeared to be seamlessly carved into that mountain

Hot-Synching With a Heavenly Presence

A growing number of people are finding that pocket-size computers are useful for religious purposes, from saying a virtual rosary to relaxing with a virtual Zen garden while using the palmtop's stylus to rake images of digital sand.

kottke.org comments

Joshua makes a great point about emergence. and that's also where Aaronland's point is related. one strategy is to establish a default structure --based on a limited number of nodes and edges-- and then allow the taxonomy to "emerge", based on your own feedback and/or other user feedback. the results can actually take an implicit form, where the most common groupings rise to the top. you can then set a cutoff point so it returns a smaller result set. hey, maybe you can write a simple sorting application, a-la christina's suggestion, where each post-it is actually a SQL insert. you insert or post-it all the items and then start ranking them in categories. the problem though, is that whenever you add more categories, you will need to re-rank all the previously inserted items to see how where they fall in the updated "bigger picture".

Really cool thread on developing a personal taxonomy

Web journals by professionals

Fortune.com - The Readers' Corner

Good Indie MP3s

AlterSlash ~ the unofficial SlashDot digest

1. Let me know when there is a problem - early on so I can get help and resolve it. If a spec isn’t clear, let me know so I can get an answer.

2. Remember, better is the enemy of good enough - at some point, it’s time to let the working code go and not try to wring even more performance out of it - as long as it does what is needed.

3. Sure, writing documentation and help screens suck - but everyone has to take their turn in the barrel.

4. Don’t keep trying to get your pet hardware/software through based on a project “need” or “solution.” Yea, I know you want a bigger, faster box running Linux, but once it’s clear that it ain’t happening, constantly bringing it up as the “solution” to every problem is counter-productive. ( A real situation I ran into - one of our programers kept pushing a Linux server becasue he needed one for another project (that was on hold but that he wanted to revive))

4. Have a life - if your getting burned out, say so. Everyone needs a break, and let me run interference for you. As a follow-on, when the rules get bent to help the team, don’t brag about it.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

Dan's idea was to use a high gain rooftop antenna to offer wireless Internet service. What if I found a place that already had wireless Internet service, and used a high gain antenna to take advantage of that service from a great distance? It would be just like sitting in Starbucks with a notebook computer and a latte, except that I'd be at home where the coffee is considerably cheaper.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Being the Janitor, An Interview with Dan O'Donnell, about Cleaning Up Q: How did you end up being a janitor?

O'Donnell: I was in school during the day so I needed a job that I could work at night. So, I got a job as a janitor at an insurance company and I did that for a little while. My wife Carrie worked as a janitor for another company, and one day she told me that they had just fired someone and needed to hire someone to take his place. So I moved over to that company because I would be working with Carrie cleaning these doctors' offices. Later on I found out the guy whose place I took got fired because he was stealing drug samples.

Clay Spinuzzi: Curriculum Vitae Spinuzzi, C. (2002). Toward integrating our research scope: A sociocultural field methodology. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 16.1, pp. 3-32.

Corporate Mofo Goes to The World Economic Forum

"Where is your jacket, young protestor?" called out a petite policewoman, who asked us to refer to her as "Officer Smith."

"I'm not cold," I said through chattering teeth. "And I'm not a protestor, either. I do a Web site, and I'm writing about the demonstration. Have any thoughts?"

"Yeah, let them move to Afghanistan and see how they like it there," Officer Smith said.

I had to admit she had a point.

great article.

Trooping off to find their corner of a foreign field, in much the same spirit as an earlier generation went to Spain with the International Brigade, the volunteers were Web designers, engineers, students, delivery drivers. They came across as cool, wired types, as comfortable in their modernity as any of their fellow-surfers in the Internet cafés. So did Mohamed Atta, Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah, and the other hijack suspects, who left a forensic spoor of brand names across the length and breadth of the United States. We know them best as efficient modern consumers—of Parrot-Ice, Tommy Hilfiger, Econo Lodge, AAA discounts, Starbucks, Cyber Zone, Golden Tee '97 golf at Shuckum's Raw Bar and Grill, Salem cigarettes, Heineken and Budweiser, Chinese takeout from Wo Hop III, lap-dancing at Nardone's Sports Go-Go Bar and the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret.

http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?020204fa_FACT

The experience of ministering to this impossible parish radicalized my father. A lifelong reflex Conservative voter, he joined the Labour Party. His High Church theology became ever more attenuated and symbolic. He climbed his way through the tower blocks less as a priest than as a psychiatric social worker. He grew a beard that made him look like Karl Marx, left his dog collar in the drawer, and went about in an open-necked plaid flannel shirt. Although his church congregations were now tiny, he worked around the clock, negotiating with the authorities on behalf of his parishioners, succoring the needy, counselling the desperate, befriending the friendless.

http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?020204fa_FACT

Robert Brooke "Underlife and Writing Instruction," College Composition and Communication, 1988. Braddock Award.

http://www.twinturboz.net/freaky.gif



stare at the rear left corner for 60 seconds.

ToyIdeas

Mechanical Toys Page

I must have passed seven sleeping students while walking over to my library carrel. Let's just end the charade, shall we, and install cots?

prison survival guide

The most senseless use of time in prison has to be constant television watching. There are adult men in prison who watch cartoons and soap operas for hours each day. They know all the soaps' characters, plots, and can figure all the possible scenarios of upcoming episodes. They live through the tube. They call television the "Boob Tube" because it will make you dumb if you aren't already. Its shameless, naked images will poison your mind and spirit. Its fantasy will rob you of all original creative thinking abilities. Constant television watching develops the dangerous habit of always wanting to be entertained, which causes laziness.

Television is a no-no. Cut out television for one month and you will be surprised at what you can get accomplished in that time. Knowing how to manage time properly is important in everyday life. When we learn how to get the most out of our days, we will come to know a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. There are only twenty-four hours in a day. The more you begin to actually do the clearer it becomes that there never is enough time to get things done. Then you will understand the value of time.

ANDREW S. FASTOW - ENRON CORP. - CFO.com

Ethics Schmethics--an early article praising Enron for its innovative finance strategies.

Numbers Tell the Story

Despite the traditional rules of financing, Fastow reduced the balance-sheet debt, maintained the credit rating, and reduced the cost of capital while simultaneously growing the balance sheet. In just the last two years, Enron has nearly doubled its total assets from $16 billion to $30 billion--without shareholder dilution and without a drop in the company's credit rating. "He has successfully financed billions of dollars in a manner that has held credit quality," says S&P's Barone. "And that is not an easy thing to do. It is a testament to Andy's focus on cash flow and his ability to think outside the box."

Protect your PDA screen with our D.I.Y. guide - Product Reviews - CNETAsia

Making your own screen protector is actually pretty simple. All you need are:

A sheet of clear plastic wrapper, the kind you use to wrap your books. A single sheet you buy from the stationary shop for about S$1 can make you enough protectors to last a long time. Also note that plastic wrappers have different thickness. If it's too thick, your screen will not be too responsive. If too thin, it may not provide enough protection.

A pair of scissors or penknife.

Monitor cleaner, the kind you use to spray on your PC monitor to clean your screen.

Lint-free cloth or camera lens cleaning wipes.

A plastic card, e.g. a credit or ATM card.

Epinions.com - Cheap Screen Protector

Cheap Screen Protector

by gsearle | Aug 06 '01 (Updated Jan 09 '02)



The Bottom Line Don't shell out $25 for a PDA screen protector when a cheap (often free) sheet of vinyl will do.





I was appalled to see PDA screen protectors being sold for $25.00. All I wanted was a piece of plastic to cover my PDA's screen, and these companies wanted me to shell out this kind of money! Well, I found a really cheap alternative that works really well - vinyl sheets! This is the same stuff that manufacturers use to create those temporary, easy-to-remove labels that you find stuck to new electronic equipment

Adondo's Cheap to make, last forever PDA screen stylus

Smithsonian Benefactor Cancels $38 Million Gift (washingtonpost.com)

"Apparently, the basic philosophy for the exhibit -- 'the power of the individual to make a difference' -- is the antithesis of that espoused by many within the Smithsonian bureaucracy, which is 'only movements and institutions make a difference, not individuals.' After much contemplation, I see no way to reconcile these diametrically opposed philosophical viewpoints," she said.

Small could not be reached for comment last night. Smithsonian officials had maintained throughout the eight months of increasingly strident debate that they would maintain final say over the nature of the exhibit. That sentiment was repeated yesterday in a statement by Marc Pachter, acting director of the American History Museum.

TIME.com: Pssst. Wanna See My Blog?

I believe this is the first time in my life I've had something in common with RuPaul. The cross-dressing superstar and I have both started blogging, which is almost as much fun as it sounds. A blog, short for weblog, is a kind of spontaneous online public journal. Users typically add to a scrolling list of entries a couple of times a day with whatever ramblings come to mind--what they had for dinner, how their grandparents are getting along, their 10 favorite songs of the year--all sprinkled with links to cool Web pages they have discovered. Blogs are so easy to put together that new ones pop up every day.

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The Oregon Experiment
by Christopher Alexander

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Hardcover - 202 pages (July 1988)
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Last Days of the Corporate Technophobe

Executives who are computer challenged often need a compelling reason to catch up. It could be an embarrassing episode, a new job that comes with expectations of proficiency, a realization that their children know more about computers than they do or not-so-subtle nudging from secretaries and others.

They often feel more comfortable receiving instruction in private, in part because they can openly acknowledge their deficiencies. One executive attending computer classes offered as part of the Wharton advanced-management program told classmates that she had lost her "Internet virginity" at the school, recalled Robert Mittelstaedt, vice dean for executive education. Another Wharton executive program offers tutoring by M.B.A. students.

Last Days of the Corporate Technophobe

"I thought I was very organized," said Mr. D'Addario, president and chief executive of D'Addario Industries of Bridgeport, Conn., and chairman of Wise Alloys of Muscle Shoals, Ala. "I thought I had it down pat. It was pretty foolish. Not being able to use a computer in the year 2002 is like not being able to read in the 1950's."
Many senior executives — pressed for time, aided by secretaries and reared in the typewriter age — have been slow to adopt technology. But now, sometimes reluctantly, the final holdouts are surrendering to the inevitable. Even the thinning ranks of the computer-illiterate are feeling pressure to log on and catch up.

Borg Like Me?

What I've learned from all this is that the subjective process of becoming a cyborg, in the hardwired sense, greatly suppresses one's appetite for objective theorizing about it. Where "wounds are openings to possibilities," as the French technocultural critic Jean Baudrillard once suggested, they are equally openings to infection. There's nothing like having a stinging, aching, seven-inch scar running down your thigh and a large foreign object lodged inside of it, slugging it out with your body's defense mechanisms, to make you appreciate the complicated trade-offs and mixed emotions involved in real-life bio-mechanical bonding. It is as much a world of wound management, site infection, tissue mutation, implant extraction and rejection, and reams of HMO paperwork, as it is a world of life-restoring body repair and trendy cyberpunk mythology. All rhapsodic cyborg theorists should book a date with a bone saw (or at least heed the words of those of us who have) to remind themselves that, in our cyborgian future present, and in the end: it's all about the meat, stupid.

John Blandford is reading this blog.

This is my new "blog this" bookmarklet that automatically italicizes and blockquotes selections, Phil on blogger showed me how to do this. It is soooo coool.

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Markzilla

SM: I don’t think the 100-plus architecture schools across the country realize how alike each program is, how interchangeable their curricula and faculty are. I’ve spoken at most of them. The faculty are usually all dressed in black. They all seem to say the same things. It’s all become redundant and very stale, unimaginative. What’s ironic is that you hear professors talk about how out of the box we need to be, how risk-taking is part of being an architect, yet the faculty is often guilty of sitting on their hands. If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community or to challenge the status quo into making responsible environmental and social-structural changes now and in the future, it will take the “subversive leadership” of academics and practitioners to keep reminding the students of architecture that theory and practice are not only interwoven with one’s culture but have a responsibility for shaping the environment, breaking up social complacency, and challenging the power of the status quo.

Architectural Record | Interview - Sam Mockbee

SM: I don’t think the 100-plus architecture schools across the country realize how alike each program is, how interchangeable their curricula and faculty are. I’ve spoken at most of them. The faculty are usually all dressed in black. They all seem to say the same things. It’s all become redundant and very stale, unimaginative. What’s ironic is that you hear professors talk about how out of the box we need to be, how risk-taking is part of being an architect, yet the faculty is often guilty of sitting on their hands. If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community or to challenge the status quo into making responsible environmental and social-structural changes now and in the future, it will take the “subversive leadership” of academics and practitioners to keep reminding the students of architecture that theory and practice are not only interwoven with one’s culture but have a responsibility for shaping the environment, breaking up social complacency, and challenging the power of the status quo.

The most obvious theoretical implication arising from these claims is that the role and application of synchronous text-based computer-mediated communication in education is at least as important as its asynchronous counterpart. The asynchronous mode has been presented as one of the key characteristics of CMC for group support and online educational applications@Cite(RapaportM91a, HarasimLM90b, HiltzSR90a, TuroffM90a). Not only does it provide the convenience of time independence, but it is also reported to foster richer intellectual exchanges@Cite(LevinsonP88a ", p. 115") and to allow variation in the individual cognitive styles of participants@Cite(TuroffM89b ", p. 11"). Synchronous CMC, on the other hand, has been the subject of various studies@Cite(DobosJ85a, SiegelJ86a, WiltonJA88a, PeytonJK88a, WilkinsH91a), but synchronicity, per se, has not been the focal issue.

Found some cough drops last night with Menthol, eucalyptus, and benzocaine. Yeah! But now my throat seems to be doing better. It was one of those wimpy, two-day, lack-of-sleep colds.

Phil Agre's analysis of the responses to the David Nobel's articles My messages debunking the cyberspace ideology have made some people happy. Those people are sick of the hype, and are relieved to know that they're not alone. But other people are upset, and these upset people have kept me thinking away at the problem. The upset people often argue that their wild-eyed millennialism is simply an expression of their "optimism" -- the implication being that their critics have some kind of personality problem. This argument is simplistic, not to mention offensive. Mindless optimism and mindless pessimism are equally useless. What's needed, instead, is analysis. And the problem with cyberspace is not that it is disproportionate to the wondrous reality, but that it is analytically *wrong* -- that is, it describes the world inaccurately.

Forbes.com - Magazine Article No wonder we are so smirkily obsessed with sex and the momentary release of orgasm: Almost all other routes to ecstatic experience have been effectively blocked.

There has got to be a better cough drop out there. I am using these gutless halls things. I have also been trying cold-eeze. They are supposed to shorten your cold while providing very little throat relief. I want to be made numb and healthier at the same time. Painless healing! That's all I ask.



Things I have lost:



1. one nimh aaa battery. This is maddening. Only three left now.

2. Brian Street's Literacy and Development Why didn't I just buy this book? Now the library gets $55

3. My enthusiasm for much of life. (I know I left it around here somewhere)

Red Rock Eater Digest - notes and recommendations

You see this conflation, for example, in Foucault's talk about the

"production of subjects". The idea is that, by becoming a doctor

or a citizen or a psychiatric patient, you become inserted into an

all-encompassing social being -- a way of seeing, thinking, acting,

interacting, talking, writing, feeling, and so on. There is, to

be sure, some truth in this: to become a doctor is certainly to be

socialized to a significant degree into ways of thinking and acting

and so on. Much of this lies beyond individual consciousness: it

happens so complicatedly, and in so many different ways, and with

so much nonobvious structure, and with so many appeals to emotion

and reason, and with so much seclusion from the outside world, that

it is bound to change you. In fact, the very difficulty of becoming

a doctor is part of what causes it to change you so completely:

the skills require effort to master, and demands rain down upon

the emerging doctor from so many directions that great dedication is

required to integrate them all by slow degrees into a smooth everyday

performance.

Life will have to wait (1/29/2002) For Bay design engineer Steve Chen, 43, the most painful personal test came last summer. He had to decide whether to go immediately to his mother's bedside in Japan or take a day or so to get his work in order. The doctors had told him his mother was dying of cancer. They said he probably had a few days, but they were wrong.

``She was already dead,'' Chen says of the day he arrived in Japan. He helped with the funeral and handled the bureaucracy of death. Then he brought his mother's ashes back with him to Cupertino.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Part IV. Bad Design

(24) Bad Information Design in Scholarly Books

I often read scholarly books, that being part of my job. And
most scholarly books come with endnotes. This "scholarly apparatus"
is indispensible if you are trying to map a new field, and so I spend
much time referring back and forth between the text and endnotes.
(I don't care about the choice between footnotes and endnotes, and
I understand the publishers' concern that footnotes depress sales.)

Now, properly designed books make this flipping-back-and-forth easy
by printing things like "Endnotes for pages 137-144" at the top of
each endnote page. What pisses me off is the majority of publishers
that don't do this. In fact it's doubly annoying: they make you
flip around to remember what number chapter you're reading, which
makes you feel stupid because you can't remember the number from
one minute to the next, or else you have to exercise great cognitive
effort in order to keep the number in mind when you'd rather be trying
to understand what's in the book, and then they make you flip around
in the endnotes to find the endnotes for that chapter number. Ack!

There are plenty of other ways to present scholarly notes, as
designers of more arts-oriented scholarly books have shown for years.
But publishers, well, publishers have their habits.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us

Then you haveThomas Sowell. His columns in Forbes rarely make logical sense, but the logical problems are not evident at first because he writes with such assaultive hostility that you feel like you've been kicked by a mule. It took me years of reading his columns at the newsstand before I managed to penetrate their toxic surface and search for an actual argument.

(9) The Language of the Staff in Computer Stores

People who work in computer stores are a different breed. The level
of product knowledge that they require is so great that management
can't also require them to act like salespeople in other stores. So
when you go to Fry's, you have to adapt yourself to a different kind
of interaction. It's not rude, exactly, but rough, as if Wal-Mart
were staffed by cowboys. But okay. If you can find the right gear
then it's not so bad.

Except for one thing. It pisses me off when computer store workers
ask people questions they couldn't possibly answer. Say, for example,
a customer comes in looking for a scanner for a Macintosh. The store
workers are liable to say something like, "Do you have FireWire?".
I can't quite tell whether they are being clueless or lazy, or whether
they are actually being sadistic. The average human being has no idea
even what sort of question that is, or what sort of thing FireWire
is, or whether having FireWire is a good thing or a bad thing, or
how they would possibly know whether they have it. The customers
who get asked this question all go into a little dance. You've seen
it. It's a slight bow, a slight twist off to the side, and a sort of
recoil. Then they stammer. Not only can't they answer the question;
not only can't they come up with a suitable way to explain that they...

This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow "We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that presidents cough up and compromise on important principles...we are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years."



Translation: Nixon should never have turned over those tapes 30 years ago, and by god I'm not going to make the same mistake today.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society

[I don't know what to make of this paper. It's the strangest thing

I've ever written. It grows out of many years of careful observation

of the process by which I do whatever it is I do for a living. But

its significance is not just personal. I believe that everyone has

an intellectual calling, and for years I've evolved methods to force

students out of an attitude of passive conformity, doing whatever the

professor wants, and instead to discover what it is they really care

about, so that they can articulate in intellectual terms a calling

that they really feel, really believe in, and really get up in the

morning to act on.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Social and Technological Resources for Learning [A lot of useful work is happening in the community of education people
who descend intellectually from a Russian psychologist named Vygotsky.
According to Vygotskian psychology, thinking has its origins in social
interactions: you interact with other people, you internalize those
patterns of interaction, and that's what thinking is. This theory has
innumerable consequences, all of which are illuminating and productive.

Net Presence I decided that I was more interested in the social aspects of computer work than with the technical aspects. My dissertation, which is probably one of the more peculiar theses ever accepted by MIT outside of art and architecture, offers a deconstruction and partial reconstruction of AI's technical ideas about human action. From there I took a series of short-term jobs as I went through the painful process of shifting from a semi-nonconformist computer person to a semi-outsider social scientist.

Abstract. Many people believe that information technology will bring massive
structural changes to the universities. This paper draws on concepts from
both computer science and social theory to explore what these structural
changes might be like. The point of departure is the observation that the
interaction between information technology and market economics creates
incentives to standardize the world. Standardization can be a force for
good or evil, depending on how it is done, and I consider in particular
the forces that operate on the *places* in which university teaching is done.
Information technology allows these places to be more diverse than in the
past, and a good rule of thumb is that the places in which learning occurs
should be analogous in their structure and workings to the places in which
the learned knowledge will be used. Universities can support this increased
diversity of learning places with appropriate structural reforms, including
decentralized governance and explicit attention to certain aspects of the
university organization, such as media services and the career center, that
have historically been marginalized.



The twentieth century has taught us to be skeptical of revolutions. Proposals
for revolutionary social change have invariably rested on superficial ideas
about the world, and as a result they have changed both too much and too
little, with tragic results. What, then, are we to make of the revolution
that

PageSix.com: Cindy Adams: FUTURE'S ON THE LINE FOR CHENEY It would almost seem - almost - almost as if, if somebody eventually needs to be thrown overboard in light of Enron's end run, that the wise heads, wise guys and wise asses on top of the mountain are readying the VP to be the designated sinker.

Space Trader Information Space Trader is a complex game, in which the player's aim is to amass enough money to be able to buy a moon to retire to. The player starts out with a small space ship, armed with one simple laser, and 1000 credits in cash. The safest and easiest way to earn money is to trade goods between neighbouring solar systems. If the player chooses the goods to trade wisely, it isn't too difficult to sell them with a profit. There are other ways to get rich, though. You might become a bounty hunter and hunt down pirates. It is also possible to become a pirate yourself and rob honest traders of their cargo. Beware, though: pirating is a way to get rich quickly, but the police force will go after you.

www.palmopensource.com - The PalmOS Open Source Portal

Palm::Datebook - Handler for Palm DateBook databases. The Datebook PDB handler is a helper class for the Palm::PDB package. It parses DateBook databases

It's Clear Bush Tax Cuts Have Hurt Americans Published on Sunday, December 9, 2001 in the Boulder Daily Camera

It's Clear Bush Tax Cuts Have Hurt Americans

by Paul Krugman



Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush interrupted his inveighing against evildoers to crack a joke. Bush had repeatedly promised to run an overall budget surplus at least as large as the Social Security surplus, except in the event of recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he remarked to Mitch Daniels, his budget director. "I hit the trifecta."

Lucky him, indeed. The Enron analogy will soon become a tired cliche, but in this case the parallel is irresistible. Enron management and the administration the company did so much to place in power applied the same strategy: First, use cooked numbers to justify big giveaways at the top. Then, if things don't work out, let ordinary workers who trusted you pay the price. But Enron executives got caught; Bush believes that the events of Sept. 11 will let him off the hook.

Justice wears a Burka!

He had ordered massive draperies to conceal the offending figures. But initially not only could the story not be confirmed — it was strongly denied

Attended three meetings this week. They could have all been combined and the essential business conducted in 20 minutes. But when is that not true. Goodbye, 4.5 hours of my life that I'll never get back.

Yesterday was pajama day at my son's preschool. He was so excited that he put on his scooby doo slippers the night before and paraded around the house. Ezra is five. He was totally stoked. It's a cliche, perhaps, but it would be great to feel that way on occasion. Of course, he gets pretty upset at times too, so there is a downside to this instant enthusiasm. Ezra brought home a borrowed copy of Ranger Rick from preschool, and he is also very excited about Ranger Rick as well. RR just reminds me of how completely removed from nature I've become in the last five years of graduate school.

Like many bloggers, I've decided to write more and post to fewer links in this weblog. It's like flossing though--great in theory, but nobody ever does it.



I found out last night that my estranged 25 year old sister had a brain tumor taken out a week ago and is recovering. Her eight month old son is in the hospital awaiting a heart transplant. I don't know if it would be possible for her or her family to experience any more stress right now.

Signing With Your Baby: Use sign language to communicate before your baby can talk. Infants develop the fine muscles in their hands before they develop those required for speech, so they're equipped to communicate with you before they can speak.

I should say that I don't really think they're on about transferable
skills as much as about explicit teaching of skills. The big news
from their project (they were at it for seven years, and it's
impressive work) is that, in general, they're finding that explicit
instruction in writing in pre-professional programs (i.e., how to
write like a social worker or an architect) doesn't show much
evidence of efficacy. People learn genres by dwelling in them
(Michael Polanyi, call your office), not by paying attention to them,
or to the skills you need to wield them. I draw the further
conclusion that explicit instruction in the academic literary essay
probably doesn't help a whole lot when you start actually writing and
publishing scholarship -- and that if the skills you develop writing
term papers don't have much in the way of consequences for an
academic career, they probably don't transfer over into writing
persuasive business plans or client referrals or building program
summaries. Or MOO dialogue.

Not to say that you don't learn _something_ by practicing all those
genres, and that the something might be general. I think I learn
genres quicker than I used to, for instance (especially now that I
know that's what I'm doing).

Russell Hunt, from Techrhet

Ex-Doors bandmate reflects on life with Jim
by Brett Milano

I just want to lay the hint out there that there's another way of living. It goes beyond materialism, and it goes beyond girls with navels selling millions of records.''

New Scientist "We think it will prove very effective," said Kazuyuki Oi, a spokesman for the Hokkaido police. "One of the reasons is that foreigners are very big. We are trained in judo and kendo, but the nets may be a more effective way to tackle violent fans."

In an exercise, police dressed as hooligans were successfully restrained using the gun, the newspaper reports.

ONLamp.com: Slash's Wiki Plugin [Jan. 17, 2002] What A Wiki Is

"The nice thing about a Wiki is its simplicity."

While the story and comment format is fine for discussions, there's a whole class of collaborative work that can't be done with a standard Slash site. Occasionally, it's useful to have a brainstorming session, where getting ideas down coherently is more important than following a traditional call-and-response question format. Business people call this "synergy," but it really means something here.

Though I can't prove it at the moment, I suspect that's what lead Ward Cunningham to come up with the idea of a Wiki. It's like one of those smart whiteboards, where anyone can write anything and erase anything, but there's still a record of all revisions. The theory goes that putting simple but effective tools in the hands of smart people and staying out of the way can produce great results.

Three Roses, Cognac on Poe Birthday Jerome said the man, wearing the traditional black hat and coat, with a white scarf concealing his face, appeared to be different from last year's so-called Poe Toaster.

``He appeared to be a younger man,'' said Jerome, who has witnessed the ritual for 20 years. ``He stood erect and walked quickly.''

The man made no gestures, other than the secret signal he sends Jerome to show he is the genuine Poe Toaster, as he laid the tribute.

Search Results Assistant Professor of English
Prairie State College, a comprehensive community college located 25 miles south of downtown Chicago, has an opening for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English. For position description and qualifications, please see our web site at www.prairiestate.edu. Send a cover letter, resume, and unofficial transcript to Office of Human Resources (English position), Prairie State College, 202 S. Halsted Street, Chicago Heights, IL 60411. Questions? Call Rose King at 708-709-3541. Review begins February 11, 2002, but position is open until filled. OEO/AA [R]

The Register

It's the XP 'product activation' slavery agreement that drove me, finally, to Linux. And fortunately, a lot of the newer Linux distros now install nicely on any x86 machine. I've been able to install it successfully and then refer to the documentation to tweak it properly, just as I used to do with Microsoft's products before the cheap bastards shrank their documentation to a mere glossy advertisement brochure.

Carl G Boice, Robert. "Work Habits of Productive Scholarly Writers: Insights from Research in Psychology." Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition Eds. Gary A. Olson and Todd Taylor. Albany: SUNY, 1997, 211-28.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Institutional Analysis for Design Even though networked individualism is a compelling idea, however,
I am always uncomfortable with theoretical constructs that declare
qualitatively new conditions to have arisen just because technology
has helped us do more of the things we already did before. As a
result, I prefer to think of networked individualism as a permanent
condition, one that already held during the Stone Age and that has
become more intense in fits and starts throughout history. On this
conception, networked individualism is independent of particular
technologies; the concept encourages us to go looking for the diverse
means by which people maintain an ongoing awareness of one another --
visits, parties, rumors, letters, phone calls, Web pages, and so on,
all of them embedded in the society's larger workings in various ways.

nothing, and lots of it

There was an interesting post at Kuro5hin the other day, by a high school student wondering why he couldn't just keep a weblog to learn the finer points of english and grammar. I've found that practice does indeed make perfect. If I had to point to one thing that allows me to write well today in comparison with my college-aged self, it'd have to be email. After seven years of churning out thousands of words a day, I've grown a lot as a writer. Keeping a weblog here and with MetaFilter has also helped, especially in terms of learning how to make a point and structure an argument. Maybe blogs have a place in education, I know just the daily act of writing has immensely helped with expressing myself.

kuro5hin.org || Weblogs in high school english?

It's often been said to me that communication is one skill that many people lack or are poor in. Why not use a weblog in high school english classes?

Hazards of Design Let us turn from the situation of the designer to the situation of the user. Computers, evidently, are machines that we build so that we can talk about them in a certain way, and ethnomethodology recommends that contexts of computer use are self-organizing with regard to the production of every aspect of rational order. Although computers abundantly supply the linguistic resources that users might employ in accounting for their behavior, in other words, we must still look to each occasion of computer use for the unique way in which it interprets these resources and makes them relevant to ongoing practical concerns. What the people do provides a reflexive ground for making out what the machine has done, and vice versa, and all of this is accomplished only for all practical purposes, being endlessly revisable in light of subsequent evidence. Woolgar (1994) has described this process from the related perspective of reflexive sociology.

O'Reilly Network: How the Wayback Machine Works [Jan. 21, 2002]

Am I disillusioned? No. Is it depressing to see a lot of my friends out of work? Yes! But the goal of universal access to human knowledge is in many ways an original goal of the Net. It's a tremendous goal. It makes me want to jump out of bed in the morning and try to get this thing done. People working on digital divide issues want to join in, advocates for children's literacy programs want to join in. It's not about driving slick cars, it's about using this technology for the betterment of education and people. I'll take that any day over random stock option grants.

O'Reilly Network: How the Wayback Machine Works [Jan. 21, 2002]

Kahle: We're trying to show how people can do it themselves. We're trying to encourage everyone to take their old content that's not online and put it online. A professor at UC Berkeley said that students use the Web as the resource of first resort, which is a huge change. But that's a little dangerous if the Web doesn't have the good stuff on it, and many people complain it doesn't. Instead of trying to whip students to go back to the physical library, let's put the good stuff on the Net. Otherwise, we could have a whole generation learning from ephemeral content collections, as opposing to learning from the books of the ancients. And a lot of materials are not there yet.

Why do I ask this of you as you go about developing a web site? Because developing a web site is only a part of the learning goals for this course. Writing web sites, especially writing interactive web applications, is an inherently heuristic activity. I don't believe anybody can be engaged in writing interactivity without having to rethink what such interactivity is in a digital society, and especially how that interactivity affects learning in a society in which all knowledge will be available to anyone who can effectively appropriate it. Your accumulating understanding, shared with and growing out of the accumulating understanding of your classmates, is as valuable a part of this course as your growing ability to construct data-driven web pages.

How large a house can you afford?

bryanboyer - zui-huh?

"Every current artist who says they hate computers has a secret computer room labeled 'top secret' where it's ok to use computers."

--John Maeda

nothing, and lots of it

If they ever create something like an iWrite application that automatically stores and categorizes local copies of writing (which could offer weblog as a format option), with some sort of instant html-ize and upload to your homepage.mac.com account, they stand to legitimize the collective work of online writers if they choose to allow print and custom book creation. I can see the Steve Jobs presentation now “The Great American Novel will be written on an ibook running iWrite, and printed, published, and delivered instantly for $14.95 for the first 50 pages.”

New Scientist | Mobile Phones | Write here, write now

Pinning messages in mid-air, using the location's Global Positioning System (GPS) reference, could become the next craze in communications. The messages are not actually kept in the air: they're stored on an Internet page. But that page's Web address is linked to coordinates on the Earth's surface, rather than a person or organisation. As you move about, a GPS receiver in your mobile phone or PDA will check to see if a message has been posted on the website for that particular spot. If you're in luck a snippet of info-left as text or a voice recording by someone who passed there previously-will pop up on your screen or be whispered into your earpiece.

Over half the nation's workforce is now directly engaged in producing, processing, and distributing information. In the age of the information superhighway and multimedia technology, the talents of skilled information professionals are in unprecedented demand. Information professionals have the expertise necessary to manage the acquisition, organization, preservation and retrieval of all types of information. They have the knowledge that enables them to make best use of information - both when making individual decisions and when meeting the needs of society.

Organizations in business, education, science, government, and industry all depend on accurate and relevant information. They all need specialists who can connect people and knowledge, whether these specialists are called librarians, information scientists, knowledge managers, or archivists.


In turn, prospective information professionals must take care to seek an education that will best prepare them for an exciting and demanding career.

UCLA's Department of Information Studies is widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation. We offer students:


an academic program at the forefront of the field
a dynamic, diverse and highly respected faculty
a learning environment rich in first-class resources and facilities.
Our MLIS program prepares students for successful, rewarding and challenging careers as information professionals. Our PhD program prepares students for careers as internationally respected, rigorous and creative researchers.

COMPUTER NEWS DAILY - NYT SYNDICATE

Nearly half of American adults believe incorrectly that they would risk electrocution by using a portable phone while in the bathtub.
``We are technologically illiterate,'' an expert committee set up by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council said Thursday. ``As a society, we are not even fully aware of or conversant with the technologies we use every day.''
The panel met at the National Academies to discuss a Gallup poll used in its two-year study of what to do about how little Americans know about technology.

Protectv: $79.95 box that filters out profanities based on close captions. Interesting.



http://www.protectv.com/buy_online.html

Goat Milk Carries Spider Silk in Canada Experiment

``The spiders unfortunately are territorial carnivores. They eat each other, and this has caused them to resist all forms of domestication,'' Turner said.

The perils of spider farming.

Strained relations / Business magazines struggle to maintain objectivity under pressure from their biggest tech advertisers Silicon Valley heavy hitters PeopleSoft and Sun Microsystems sank their teeth into Forbes and Fortune, respectively, in some cases threatening to pull their ads in protest of hard-hitting coverage, according to reliable sources

Knuth versus Email

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

InsiderOne - The Drama You've Been Craving Gough is a self-made DIY kinda artist. In that Rolling Stone profile, writer Gavin Edwards reports that early on Gough bought a Tascam 144 four-track recorder, the same model Bruce Springsteen used to record Nebraska. After getting his recorder, Gough began writing a song a day, says Edwards; then in 1997 he released his first EP on his own label, Twisted Nerve.

IP: the web runs on love, not greed >

In our disappointment of grand riches, we have failed to see the miracle

>on our desks. Ten years ago, it was easy to dismiss visions of a wondrous

>screen in our homes that would provide the whole world in its magical

>window. The idea of a universal information port was considered

>uneconomical, and too futuristic to be real in our lifetimes. Yet at any

>hour of today, most readers of this paper have access to the full text of

>the Encyclopedia Britannica, precise map directions to anywhere in the

>country, stock quotes in real time, local weather forecasts with radar

>pictures, immediate sports scores from your hometown, any kind of music

>you could desire, answers to medical questions, hobbyists who know more

>than you do, tickets to just about anything, 24/7 e-mail, news from a

>hundred newspapers, and so on. Much of this is for free. This abundance

>simply overwhelms what was promised by the most optimistic guru.

The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed
>By Kevin Kelly
>
>Right on cue, the demise of the dot-com revolution has prompted skepticism
>of the Internet and all that it promised. An honest evaluation would have
>to admit it has been a very bad year for hip startup companies, hi-tech
>investors, and hundred of thousands of workers in the technology field.
>Three trillion dollars lost on Nasdaq, 500 failed dot-coms, and half a
>million hi-tech jobs gone. Even consumers in the street are underwhelmed
>by look-alike gizmos and bandwidth that never came. The hundreds of ways
>in which the Internet would "change everything" appear to have melted
>away, or to have not happened at all. As the end of the year approaches a
>collective New Year's resolution is surfacing: "Next year, next time, we
>won't believe the hype."
>
>This revised view of the Internet, as sensible as it is, is a misguided as
>the previous view that the Internet could only go up. The Internet is less
>a creation dictated by economics than it is a miracle and a gift.
>
>Netscape's legendary IPO in 1995 launched the web in the mind of the
>public. That jumpstart happened not much more than 2,000 days ago. In the
>2,000 days since then, we have collectively created more than 3 billion
>public web pages. We've established twenty million web sites. Each year we
>send about 3.5 trillio

CNN.com - Transcripts The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan.



ZAHN: And this book points out that the FBI's deputy director, John O'Neill, actually resigned because he felt the U.S. administration was obstructing...



BUTLER: A proper...



ZAHN: ... the prosecution of terrorism.

Salon.com Technology | The geeks who saved Usenet "Usenet has always been about arguing about itself," Jones says of the posts that were unearthed. "And the arguments that you see today are the same arguments that go way back into the early '80s, and I'm sure that those arguments will continue well into the future."

Salon.com Technology | The geeks who saved Usenet "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments."

DAT-Heads Digest #198 The RIAA's campaign against bootleg dealers climaxed this year with the federal conviction of New York bootlegger Charles LaRocco. A Long Island record dealer, La-Rocco was arrested in 1996, 1997 and again in January for running a distribution network that supplied millions of bootleg CDs to record stores and Web sites.

winterspeak.com Here's how to empty your inbox (and keep it empty)



1. Put the oldest, crustiest emails at the top. This will help you remember to get rid of them.

2. Delete all spam (without opening it).

3. Go through all personal messages from friends and family (the most important emails). Read them, enjoy them, delete them. If you must keep them, copy and paste the text into a text editor and save it in your hard disk as "'initials of sender' 'date' 'keywords'".



4. Your inbox now contains email of middling importance only. Sequentially engage each email to remove it from the inbox:



- If the email is a to-do item or appointment, copy and paste it as a to-do or appointment into your calender program. To-do items should be tied to specific days, so Outlook users are out of luck. Delete email in inbox



- If email is a item of correspondence tied to a project, save it in the folder for that project as " ". Delete email in inbox.



- If the email is reoccurring (newsletter, list), read the email and enjoy it if you have time, else delete it. You'll be getting a new one tomorrow anyway.



5. Continue until your inbox is empty, and keep it that way.

Absolute Powerpoint "What I miss is, when I used to lecture without PowerPoint, every now and then I'd get a cool idea," he went on. "I remember once it just hit me. I'm lecturing, and all of a sudden I go, 'God! "The Wizard of Oz"! The scene at the end of "The Wizard of Oz"!'" Nass, telling this story, was almost shouting. (The lecture, he later explained, was about definitions of "the human" applied to computers.) "I just went for it--twenty-five minutes. And to this day students who were in that class remember it. That couldn't happen now: 'Where the hell is the slide?'"

Absolute Powerpoint Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing key-the key to success. The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the Wyndham girls burst into tears.
PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn't seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it-you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

'Cutout' Macs a Real Passion "To make sure that Caitlin grew up with the right priorities, I created huge padded rainbow apples, the early Apple logo, to go at each end of her cot," she said.
"My Mac is not a tool," Dragon Tongue said. "It is a lifestyle, a friend, a place, a home, sometimes a pain, never a 'thing.'"
Ken Forbus, a professor of Computer Science and Education at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said people create these models for many reasons, but many Mac modelers want to remember machines they loved.
"These paper models serve as tangible reminders of cherished devices," he said. "That's unusual these days. People used to bond with their computers with ceremonies upon their installation and decommissioning. Now computers flow through our lives, not staying long enough to become companions. In fact, given the transient nature of today's machines, these paper versions will probably outlast the machines themselves."

Crazy Apple Rumors Site This went on for a while and by about 11:30pm, we were all so full of caffeine we were getting kind of paranoid. Chet said "What if Steve pulled his face off and there was this hideous gorgon underneath, with fire and brimstone spewing from its nostrils? Its foot-long tongue split at the end, it throws its head back and bellows 'All look upon me and despair!' Then it starts eating the souls of everyone in the Moscone Center."

Corporations Behaving Badly The movie won’t include product placements and Coca-Cola says that its marketing program includes a literacy campaign. But, “the bottom line is that an adored literary phenomenon is being put to work to sell more junk food,” says SaveHarry.com organizer Jacobson.

Corporations Behaving Badly Under the federal False Claims Act, whistleblowers who file qui tam lawsuits against companies defrauding the government are entitled to 15 to 25 percent of whatever funds the government recovers in cases where the government joins the lawsuit.



Durand filed a False Claims Act lawsuit in May 1996. The government intervened, and earlier this year, Durand was awarded $77 million as his part in the recovery of the lawsuit.

Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos The memo laments al-Qaida’s sluggishness in realizing the menace of these weapons, noting that “despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply.”

NBA Pages Britney Spears for TV Special NEW YORK (Variety) - Britney Spears will perform during a televised one-hour literacy special next month organized by the National Basketball Association.
Six networks will carry a simultaneous run of ``The NBA All-Star Read to Achieve Celebration'' at 11 a.m. on Feb. 9, the weekend of the NBA All-Star Game in Philadelphia.

War

Returning to the war, the airstrikes quickly turned cities into "ghost towns," the press reported, with electrical power and water supplies destroyed, a form of biological warfare. The UN reported that 70% of the population had fled Kandahar and Herat within two weeks, mostly to the countryside, where in ordinary times 10-20 people, many of them children, are killed or crippled daily by land mines. Those conditions became much worse as a result of the bombing. UN mine-clearing operations were halted, and unexploded U.S. ordnance, particularly the lethal bomblets scattered by cluster bombs, add to the torture, and are much harder to clear.10

Migrating from MAC to Windows Both versions of Eudora keep their mailboxes in the same format (UNIX mbox). However, Macintosh and Windows file systems handle text differently, so line feed conversion must be done. You can do this by FTPing the files in ASCII (text) mode, or by using a carriage return/line feed conversion utility (like the shareware application CRLF). It's very important that you FTP or convert the files to take care of the carriage return/line feed processing.

Palm, Long a Leader, Has Big Plans for 2002

The new chairman and chief executive, Eric A. Benhamou, has vowed to correct the missteps of 2001. "We simply did not innovate enough," he said this month. "We have made it a priority to correct this trend."

Accelerated Publishing

There are exceptions. Less than three weeks after the twin towers atrocity, www.BookSurge.com produced 09/11 8.48am: Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy. It was on sale within the month. The content of the 320-page book (a traditional ink and paper job) is choral. It brings together dozens of witnesses, weaving their voices into a complex narrative. It is, essentially, a bundle of stories. And, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, people have become the incarnation of their stories.

Laptop Composing If there’s one thing the Internet has taught us, it’s that new technology rarely destroys old ways of doing business. Similarly, the rise of virtual studios probably won’t mean the end of big-name producers who put together songs on two-inch tape using mixing boards the size of pool tables. And while more singers and rappers might be tempted to try producing their own tracks, Chad Hugo doesn’t recommend it. ‘‘Most artists should just worry about what they do best – the vocals,’’ he says. But even if the virtual studio doesn’t turn every recording artist into a producer, it has already turned at least one group of producers into recording artists. The globetrotting Neptunes recently used Pro Tools to add live instruments to some of the keyboard tracks they’d been working on, and the group’s debut album is due out early next year.