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26 April
NYTimes [requires 'free' registration}
Computers in Schools, Sure. But What About
Technical Support?
"While companies entering the information age consider computer support a
standard cost of doing business, schools, whose budgets are less flexible, seem
to be taking longer to reach that point. In the meantime, schools have been forced
to make do, sometimes sharing one or two tech administrators for an entire
district, and leaving a handful of tech-savvy teachers to handle computer crashes
and finicky networks.
The issue has become increasingly
important with the infusion of federally
administered technology discounts
through the E-rate program, private grants
and state and local initiatives to put
computers in the classroom. And now the
long-term cost of maintaining these
networks has emerged as "one of the
hottest topics among educators,"
according to the National School Boards
Association and others."
posted by mcm 11:10 AM
24 April
Doors of Perception
The design challenge of pervasive computing
"Locating innovation in specific social contexts can, I am sure, be a resolution to the
innovation dilemma I talked about today. Designing with people, not for them, can bring the
whole subject of 'user experience' literally to life. Looked at in this way, success will come to
organizations with the most creative and committed customers (sorry, 'actors').
The signs of such a change are there for all to see. Enlightened managers and
entrepreneurs understand, nowadays, that the best way to navigate a complex world is
through a focus on core values, not on chasing the latest killer app. Business magazines are full of talk
about a transition from transactions, to to a focus on relationship. We are moving from
business strategies based on the 'domination' of markets, to the cultivation of communities.
The best companies are focusing more on the innovation of new services, and new
business models, than on new technology per se. They are striving to change relationships,
to anticipate limits, to accelerate trends.
As designers and usability experts we need to study, criticize and adapt to these trends. Not
uncritically, but creatively."
posted by mcm 2:05 PM
Technology Review
Biological Computing
"Programming is the question that the Amorphous Computing project at MIT is trying to
answer. The project's goal is to develop techniques for building self-assembling
systems. Such techniques could allow bacteria in a teaspoon to find their neighbors,
organize into a massive parallel-processing computer and set about solving a
computationally intensive problem—like cracking an encryption key, factoring a large
number or perhaps even predicting weather."
“...researchers are launching a
more extensive foray into the world of amorphous computation: Knight's students are
developing techniques for exchanging data between cells, and between cells and
larger-scale computers, since communication between components is a fundamental
requirement of an amorphous system. While Collins' group at B.U. is using heat and
chemicals to send instructions to their switches, the Knight lab is working on a
communications system based on bioluminescence—light produced by living cells.”
posted by mcm 8:05 PM
21 April
NETFUTURE
Genome Hacker
"If there's one thing hackers understand, it is the appeal of blind power,
which might be described as throwing a wrench into the works and seeing
what happens. This brings to mind a recent comment by Donella Meadows,
who teaches environmental studies at Dartmouth: "It is only a matter of
time before [biological] hackers appear who think it might be fun, as
computer hackers do, to create and release their own viruses".
NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility, current issue #105 is loaded with great articles. Check it out if you have time. -ed
posted by mcm 1:33 AM
20 April
Editor & Publisher Online
Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To
Life Without 'Editions'
In these still-early days of constant Web publishing, many newspaper Web
sites are holding on to the old way of doing things. Even washingtonpost.com,
a well-funded newspaper Web operation if ever there was one, produces an
afternoon Web edition called PM Extra. Major breaking news will go on the
site whenever it happens, but at 1 p.m. each day, the site posts a collection of
breaking news from staff and wire reports.
On the other hand, chicagotribune.com dispenses with the idea of editions
and publishes local breaking news whenever it happens, with its DayWatch
feature. This site has a sizable dedicated staff of online reporters and rewrite
editors, who between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. post stories to the Web
as soon as they're ready. (During off hours, there's always an online editor
watching the news, ready to call in reporters when something big breaks.)
If there's a trend, the Tribune site is representative of it. On the Web, your
deadline is NOW. And this should be the case not just for large news sites,
but small ones as well.
Snowdeal threads 6 big posts on the network news machine. Prepare yourself. - Ed
posted by mcm 10:43 PM
18 April
The Guardian Online
Not just a pretty page
Brenda Laurel, Don Norman, Jacob Nielson, and Ben Schneiderman
sit down and talk about the business of usability.
"Online: Are talking webpages and voice
recognition the answer?
Jakob: It's the Star Trek fallacy. Voice is a great
user interface to show on a TV show. However, in
the real world, voice has a lot of downsides as a
user interface because it is, by definition, not
visible.
Ben: Exactly. Why use something that is slower
and more error-prone than a visual interface?
Let's not undermine the great efforts that have
gone into this technology. It works remarkably
well. It's just not very useful.
The Air Force has spent 30 years and several
billion dollars trying to make voice interaction
work so why doesn't it work? Because when
you're pulling 6Gs and you say "Fire" and it says
"please repeat", you're not gonna use this thing
ever again. Literally.
Jakob: That is the cute answer. What is the real
answer?
Ben: The deep answer is that the cognitive load of
voice interfaces is greater than hand/eye
coordination. Speaking requires your
short-term memory, whereas hand/eye
coordination is parallel processed in other parts
of your brain."
The Biomechanics of Facial Movement
"Fewer
facial positions are necessary to visually represent speech since several sounds can be made with the same mouth position. These visual
references to groups of phonemes are called visemes. How do I know which phonemes to combine into one viseme? Disney animators relied
on a chart of 12 archetypal mouth positions to represent speech..."
CNET (from 6/22/99)
10 Questions About Information Architecture
Information architecture. IA. Industry buzzwords? Fancy degrees? Web firms can't hire information architects fast
enough, but, while the field has been around and growing for years in software, engineering, and library science,
very few people understand exactly what information architects do and why we need them in Web design. And
we do need them.
Posted by mcm 18 April, 2000 3:33 PM
What are banner ads saying about us?
"I have been tracking over the last couple of months, what information is being sent from my own computer to DoubleClick ad servers. I used
a packet sniffer to do the monitoring. I found more than a dozen examples from different Web sites of information being transmitted to
DoubleClick that most people who consider rather sensitive. All this information can be tied to me, because all transmissions to the
DoubleClick ad servers also include the same unique ID number in a DoubleClick cookie. I found both personally identifiable information
and transactional data being sent to DoubleClick servers."
Posted by mcm 16 April, 2000 11:08 PM
sendmail
The Web's Essence in Brief
"InYourPants.com, besides being the most wonderfully named
e-commerce site ever, is the purest expression of what's good about
the Internet today. A small company - bordering on microscopic,
really - it uses open source tools and an intuitive grasp of geek
culture to stand toe-to-toe with every bloated, over-promoted
cyber-mall out there. If you'll pardon the expression, InYourPants is
where it's at."
Posted by mcm 15 April, 2000 1:03 PM
Wired
A High-End Learning Portal
"No single university is going to make the commitment to
marketing resources that we are," Kirschner said. "We're not
creating courses. We're a marketplace for courses."
By not dictating course content or tuition fees, Fathom will allow
universities to retain control of their intellectual property.
"We have structured the project in a way that we have control
over how our identity is projected," Columbia's Rupp said.
But Fathom will face challenges in driving participation and forging alliances
to make their model succeed online. "It remains to be seen what the revenue
model will be for the entire content category," DeRose said.
Posted by mcm 14 April, 2000 2:39 PM
Salon
Twilight of the crypto-geeks
Lone-wolf digital libertarians are beginning to abandon their faith in technology
uber alles and espouse suspiciously socialist-sounding ideas.
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cult-like following among the
technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an
over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and
a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best
defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography
but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact
nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every
sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The
slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles
widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space."
"Like Stephenson, like the reluctant Zimmermann, like the unhappy
Berners-Lee, the father of public key encryption has come to the conclusion that
software may reduce the amount of trust you need in human beings, but as one
moves about in the world, the sense of security, privacy and autonomy turns out
to be "a function of social structures," as Diffie says."
NYTimes
[requires 'free' registration - well, maybe]
A Chip in Every Pot
Engineers Can Put a Computer in Every Home Appliance, but Why?
"News articles champion the coming era of "smart"
appliances and "pervasive" or "ubiquitous"
computing. Engineers have demonstrated how
once-dumb machines, if embedded with tiny
computers, might communicate wirelessly and
embark on tasks like making coffee or ordering
groceries. Some manufacturers, like Merloni, an
Italian company, have already started to sell a
few products. It appears that the age of "things
that think," a phrase that emerged from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media
Laboratory in 1995, is nearly upon us."
Wired
Honey, There's a Bug in My Car
Manufacturers are starting to equip a range of products from cars to refrigerators with
programmable computer chips and Internet access -- and since everything that's connected
can become infected, the new world of computing will hold invisible threats.
Posted by mcm 13 April, 2000 5:04 AM
NYTimes [requires 'free' registration]
A Proposal to Build a School Web Site
With Ads Aimed at Students Draws Officials' Interest
"The Internet can give students a broader understanding of
learning," Mr. Brown said. "It teaches them that learning is not linear,
that you can go from way over here to over there in one step. If you
have a Web site with commercials on it and the Board of Ed benefits
from it and children are benefiting from it, by all means do it. And the
technology exists to turn off the advertisements during class time."
Posted by mcm 9 April, 2000 12:49 AM
FEED
Crowd Control: The FEED Dialog on Designing Online Communities
"The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces
our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and
television before it." I'm assuming that we all agree that this is by no means a definite outcome. But
what should we be doing as designers and critics to ensure that this doesn't happen? "
posted by mcm 2 April, 2000 6:36 PM
CNET
The week in review: Dot-coms in danger
Never
mind the volatility, several publicly traded dot-coms
showed immediate signs of failing.
Once-heralded
start-ups Peapod, Drkoop.com and CDNow each acknowledged
they are running short of cash. Meanwhile, this week's
IPO landed Artistdirect in hot water with federal regulators
and perhaps shareholders, and Silicon Valley icon Seagate
bucked the trend to go public by agreeing to be acquired
in a $20 billion deal that will again make the company
private.
Posted by mcm 1 April, 2000 1:55 AM
The New York Times
Weavers Go Dot-Com, and Elders Move In
[requires 'free' registration]
"This village in the remote southern savannas, little
more than an airstrip and scattered mud huts, could
easily be taken for one of those far-flung places untouched
by the digital revolution. But it was in this community
of 2,000 people that an organization formed by indigenous
women of two tribes revived the ancient art of hand-weaving
large hammocks from locally grown cotton -- and then
took their exquisite wares online. They hired a young
member to create a Web site. And last year, they sold
17 hammocks to people around the world for as much as
$1,000 apiece, gigantic sums in these parts. Perhaps
too gigantic. The foray into electronic commerce created
tension between the weavers and the traditional regional
leadership in the same way, perhaps, that many a geeky
start-up has sent shivers down the spines of corporate
titans. Threatened by the women's success, regional
leaders moved in and took control of the weavers' organization.
The woman who created the Web site quit in a fury, and
the group has been struggling since then to get by."
Posted 29 March, 2000 11:42 PM Thanks Snowdeal!
First Monday
Interactive Features of Online Newspapers
'"Mass communication was originally modeled as the one-way
transmission of a message from source to receiver,"
Heeter offers a concise review of the traditional conceptualization
of mass communication. From Shannon and Weaver's model
of communication, to the "magic bullet" theory, to the
"two-step flow" model of media effects, to the principal
of selective attention and perception, and finally the
Westley and MacLean model, with its concepts of gatekeepers
and feedback - all of these perspectives basically maintain
a view of mass media as a one-way flow. Interaction,
on the other hand, demands a two-way (or multi-directional)
model of communication. With the interactive features
of new media, the receiver is recognized as an active
participant. People seek information or select information
more than they "receive" information sent by journalists.
To understand why and how people expose themselves to
information, communication scholars must consult selective
exposure research rather than media effects research.
At some Web sites, online readers can do more than actively
select information - they also can add information.
The distinction between source and receiver, therefore,
is dissolving'
InfoArcadia
Manifestation
About Information Design
"A well-designed graph tells us more about a specific
phenomenon or situation, than any text can. The design
that conveys the information (interface) makes is easier
for our brain to absorb the facts. In the past charts,
graphs and tables were already used to make information
more clear. Today, information design is a (graphic)
specialty, which incorporates aspects of marketing
strategies, public relations and technical manipulation.
In the old days the encyclopedia structured the path
form A to Z. Now we have to find our own way using modern
search- and navigation systems."
Posted by mcm 29 March, 2000 3:25 PM
Electronic Frontier Foundation
EFF's Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy
Dated, yet still relevant common sense approach to protecting yourself and your personal information online.
Freedom Forum
Internet may not bring us together, reporter reflects
"Citing Moore's Law, an observation that the number of transistors
that can be placed on a piece of silicon doubles every
18 months, Markoff said, "Change is not linear...I
don't think we have a good grasp of what it means when
an exponential process drives the economy. All bets
are off, everything's different, the world's turned
upside down."
"We're talking about permanent, accelerating change," he added.
What that means for Markoff is "don't trust anything
you see. For example, we now think of the Web as being
largely what we've experienced over the last four years.
It's a huge mistake to think of the Web as permanent
in any way, shape or form."
Posted by mcm 29 March, 2000 7:29 AM
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