Technology: August 2003 Archive Page

I watched my mom -- a woman with three Master's degrees, in library science, comparative literature, and management and public policy; a woman who was fluent in French and German and did her Stanford undergraduate senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger -- lose her mind over the course of two years. She was 58.... [S]he had noticed her spelling getting worse because MS Word's spell-checker was catching more errors in her writing. --Mike Edwards --I Dreamed about Mama Last Night (Vitia)

While MS-Word is here presented the bearer of bad tidings, read the whole blog entry to learn how Amazon.com helps give the story some closure. Very touching.

Despite the fact that Dr Dennis Jerz professes to be quite knowledgeable in web page design, and in fact has taught classes about it, his own weblog front page suffers from a classic newbie mistake that one would not expect to see on a professional web site. Newbies at web page design often attempt to "do things the cool way", and when it doesn't work out quite right, insist on sticking with it simply because of the amount of work put into it and it's "coolness" factor. Dr Jerz recently decided to change from using tables for layout, the traditional and well established way to do web layout, to using a newer cascading style sheet layout on the front page of his weblog. Some of his users complained that they could no longer see his web page - for some reason, their browsers smushed his main page into a one character wide vertical line. So, to fix this compatibility problem, he gave the main section of his page a fixed width of 700px. Instead of the text gracefully wrapping itself to the size of the browser window, the text now leaves a really ugly white gap on the right hand side of his weblog. Even worse, on an 800x600 pixel display, a fairly common display setting in the web world, the right side of the text gets cut off which forces you to use the now present horizontal scroll bars to read his entries. In conclusion, after putting much time and effort into improving the front page of his weblog, Dr Jerz now has an uglier, less usable front page. Isn't changing technology great? -- Will GaytherProfessor claiming to teach 'web usability' makes classic mistake.E-mail)

Yeah, yeah. See what I have to put up with? Go ahead and gloat -- I made a mistake.

I tried to do without the table in order to reduce the download time. Unless you give it a fixed width, the contents of a table don't display until the whole table has been downloaded. When you use CSS columns, the text starts displaying right away, and then the browser redraws it if necessary. When it worked, the page seemed to load a few seconds faster... but as several Mac users pointed out, the results were often chaotic.

Will is a former student who created the weblog software I use, so I'm more than happy to let him poke fun at me. He's absolutely right about how people (whether newbies or not) are reluctant to change things that they've worked hard on.

I'll just note that in the title he suggested for this blog entry, he used double quotes, which I had to change to single quotes because because otherwise the "preview" button will mangle all the data! :P

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message's author were an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor." --Brian McWilliams --Building a Time Machine by Spam (Wired)

--Nerds and Geeks (Kairosnews)

Over on KairosNews, blacklily8 playfully taunts editor Charlie, "Can you tell me what the difference is between a geek a nerd? You seem to be the expert!"

I had a minute before heading home for the day, and thus spake Google:

http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=geek

http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=nerd

The Jargon Lexicon notes that the word "nerd" probably derives from the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Circus," but as I recall reading that book to my son (it was one of a dozen or so Seuss books we regularly checked out of the library) I'm fairly sure it was spelled "nurd".

"[E]excuse me, I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for 43 years. Could you help me figure out what I am seeing?" -- Mike May --Mike's Journal (Sendero Group)

A fascinating excerpt:

I found it very distracting to look at people’s faces when I was having a conversation. I can see their lips moving, eye lashes flickering, head nodding and hands gesturing. First, I tried looking down and if it was a woman, a low cut top would be even more distracting. It was easiest to close my eyes or tune out the visual input. This was necessary often in order to pay attention to what they were saying. I am sure there will come a time when all this visual communication will mean more to me but for now it is just distracting.

May's description of the visual component of music (via a marching band), his musings on a game of catch, and his new reaction to the previously meaningless pleasantry "Nice to see you" are all quite interesting. Another fascinating passage:

When I noticed dark patches behind me, it didn’t register right away that these were my footprints. I never thought of footprints as images other than when reading about them in an old west novel. To me, they were the thump; pivot push and the texture of the sand on my foot not dark splotches following me around like a shadow.

The reflections on the site are organized the old-fashioned way -- chronologically, not reverse-chron like a weblog. I'm so used to coming into online stories in media res that I felt a bit... insulted? by the clinical introduction that tells me what I'm about to read. It's not a criticism of the site (though it is too long to read online in one sitting -- I jumped to the end after I was about a quarter through); rather, it's an observation about my own perception of the world (or at least, of online texts).

Such concerns about donations have been raised in fields of study as diverse as auto engineering and medicine, but Microsoft'sdonations are a special case. Because students are likely to keep using the technology after graduation, they help to maintain Microsoft'ssoftware industry dominance. -- Ariana Eunjung Cha --Microsoft'sbig role on campus : Donations fund research, build long-term connections  (MSNBC/WashPost)

Slashdot Takes 'Gullible' out of Dictionary

Geek community website Slashdot has posted a link to "Why computer virus writers are useful and we should thank them", which purports to be a transcript of a teleconference with "Samuel D. Forrester, one of the most famous immunologists in the world".

Journalism 101... check your sources. I'll help you. Google for Samuel D. Forrester. Nothing (although Google will soon pick up on the Slashdot story, much to Orlowski's dismay).

Note "Forrester"'s definition of immunology:

Immunology is the study of the complex and sophisticated immune system. The immune system is a network of cells and organs that work together to defend the body against attacks by "foreign" invaders or germs. The body provides an excellent environment for germs. When they do break into a system, it is the immune system's job to keep them out or to seek and destroy them.

Now, see this definition, from the amazingly acronym'd AAAAI, where the I stands for "immunology":

Immunology is the study of the complex and sophisticated immune system. The immune system is a network of cells and organs that work together to defend the body against attacks by "foreign" invaders or germs. Our body is susceptible to invasion from germs. When the germs do break into the body, it is the immune system's job to keep them out or to seek and destroy them.

(Tip of the hat to dilger on Kairosnews.)

NASA mission managers fell into the habit of accepting as normal some flaws in the shuttle system and tended to ignore or not recognize that these problems could foreshadow catastrophe. This was an “echo” of some root causes of the Challenger accident, the board said. --Shuttle [Columbia] Report Blames NASA Culture (MSNBC)

This suggestion comes from Tracy, a former technical writing student. She was in my class the day I had planned to introduce a book on the 1986 Challenger accident. That class was scheduled for 12 September 2001. Obviously, we had other things to talk about that day.

Yet even though Mr. Crowley had moved mountains on the scientific and business fronts to get the treatment into testing, he couldn't seem to speed the drug to his own rapidly weakening children. When he sold his company, he gave up control of the medicine they needed. The shortage of the drug, conflict-of-interest questions and Genzyme's own internal protocols rose up in his path. His personal goal -- getting the drug to his kids -- at times conflicted with the company's view of how to get the drug to market as soon as possible. --Geeta Anand --For His Sick Kids, a Father Struggled to Develop a Cure (Wall Street Journal)

The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn't be read anymore. --CD-Recordable discs unreadable in less than two years (CD Freaks)

The site has posted a rough translation of the Dutch text.

Next to page views and hit counts, the blog indexes are a good way to see if your story has people talking -- with either good or bad feedback. Plus, marketing folks at media companies are starting to watch them, and PR people are using them to track companies and product releases, according to David Sifry, who runs Technorati. --Mark Glaser --Weblog Indexes Help Journalists Track Stories -- and Boost Their Egos (OJR)

A New Zealander who sent millions of junk emails out every day has shut his business after his personal details were posted on the web. --Spammer ducks for cover as details published on web  (New Zealand Herald)

Spammer Shane Atkinson was outed by the Juha Saarinem of the NZ Herald. But like Pez candies lined up inside their plastic dispenser, new spammers are probably stepping forward even now. B*stards.

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. -- Jakob Nielsen --Usability 101: The What, Why and How of User-Centered Design (Alert Box)

Huh? Quality attribute? Maybe that's an important and useful technical term in information design, but I wouldn't put it in a 101 course. How about (the admittedly simplistic) "Usability is the measure of how easy things are to use."

Nielsen appears to be re-trenching; the internal links in his document point to meaty sites on the NNGroup (a research team that sells reports) -- he seems to be calling attention to work done by his associates. Jakob is possibly hoping that more people will use this "101" page as an entry point to usability studies, rather than some of his older classic works (the ones that contributed to his near-cult status).

Technonerds go to movies strictly for entertainment, and of course, the most entertaining part comes after the movie when they can dissect, criticize, and argue the merits of every detail. However, when supposedly serious scenes totally disregard the laws of physics in blatantly obvious ways it's enough to make us retch. The motion picture industry has failed to police itself against the evils of bad physics. --Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics (Intuitor)

The site also sells wonderfully geeky chess and science T-shirts. Thanks for the link, Julia.

You might be surprised to learn that the outskirts of the solar system are loaded with Plutinos, Centaurs, cubewanos and EKOs. Astronomers didn't even know this a decade ago. In fact until 1992 they hadn't even invented three of the terms. | Now it seems they don't have enough of these crazy names. -- Robert Roy Britt --Crazy Names: The Solar System's Nomenclature Wars (Yahoo/Space)

"With the help of Miss Sunshine they discover that he is allergic to the feathers in his pillow. | However, Mr Sneeze then receives a visit from Mr Silly and his pet chicken Rover which causes him to start sneezing again.... The story is followed by four pages of information on allergies from Allergy UK and two pages promoting the use of GSK products Piriteze and Piriton." --Mr Sneeze in drug row (BBC)

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross'," said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax.

"You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for moviegoers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money. -- --Hollywood finds itself at the mercy of cellphone-toting teenagers (Cape Times)

If we find what we're looking for, we will suddenly know life on another planet is highly probable and that we may not be alone. The discovery would arguably be the most profound one in human history. But what then? --William Speed Weed --starTREK: NASA thinks we can find another Earth in another nearby star... (Discover)

Two comments.

1. Another Earth in a nearby star? Wouldn't it be better to find a planet orbiting a nearby star?
2. William Speed Weed? Really?

"Art and technology mean essentially the same thing,? says Montfort," explaining that, contrary to his interviewer's suggestion, poetry and computer science do go together. "Go back to the Latin ars and the Greek tekhne -- both refer to ways of doing things that aren't in nature already. In new media, the computer is being employed as a means for creating arts. So art and technology are not opposing threads. When you study a poem, do you consider sound or sense? Well, you consider both. It's not a question of there being one of those elements that's not important. It's the ways in which they work together." --Creative Computing: Where poetry and programming make a new art (Boston University Alumni Web)

Bari Walsh offers a nice write-up of Nick Montfort, a Ph.D. student whose scholarly and creative work I admire. I look forward to reading his Twisty Little Passages. Meanwhile, The Exhaustion of Libraries was a pleasant alphabetical treat.

I do wish the sharp-eyed designer who created BU alumni magazine's website didn't rely upon fixed-pitch type -- those letters are just too small for me to read.

He was that rarity among physicists, one who could write in a clear, persuasive and entertaining way. His "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems," in which three noblemen, Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio, meet in Venice to argue over the relative merits of Ptolemy's ancient Earth-centered cosmos and the newer Sun-centered Copernicanism, may be the first great piece of popular science writing. | The book was also his downfall. It was Galileo the writer, not Galileo the scientist, who got himself into trouble. Like so many people who are good with words, he succumbed to the temptation of making his opponents seem not just wrong, but also stupid. -- George Johnson --Contrarian's Contrarian: Galileo's Science Polemics (NY Times)

Reviews of two new books on Galileo, both of which challenge a belief long held and promultaged by the Protestant academics who wrote the history books.

This is really nothing new... but it's good to see the idea getting coverage in the mainstream press.

Inspectors from the TV Licensing Agency patrol neighborhoods using wireless detectors to attempt to pick up the "local oscillator" signal from a television in use. Anyone caught using a TV without a license is subject to a fine of up to $1,600. It doesn't matter if you watch TV once a month; it doesn't matter if you heartily disapprove of the BBC's editorial direction (or, indeed, its existence); it doesn't matter if you think the Beeb hasn't produced anything worth watching since "Fawlty Towers" went off the air in 1979: You still have to pay. | What do you get for your money? --Josh Chafetz --The Disgrace of the BBC  (Weekly Standard)

BBC correspondent Andrew Gillian sounds like the Iraqi information minister:

[O]n April 3, after U.S. troops had taken control of the Baghdad airport, Andrew Gilligan (remember that name) reported on the BBC World Service and on the BBC website, "Within the last 90 minutes I've been at the airport. There is simply no truth in the claims that American troops are surrounding it. We could drive up to it quite easily. The airport is under full Iraqi control." That was Gilligan's story, and the BBC was sticking to it--until another correspondent pointed out that Gilligan was not, in fact, at the airport, but U.S. troops quite clearly were.

Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office? I've heard this lament time and again in my son's schools over the years. To listen to these parents, you'd think the schools were forcing children to use a history book that says the world is flat.|Such complaints speak loudly to Apple's (AAPL ) fall from grace in education. -- Charles Hadad --Apple's School Days Are Numbered (Business Week)

"NOAA today posted online satellite images taken before and after... the historic blackout of the Northeastern United States, which plunged millions of people into darkness." --Satellite Images of Northeastern US Blackout (NOAA)

One day in the future all the lights in the city go out. The turbines stop, the telephones become quiet, the traffic lights shut down, TVs dim and computers download, and elevators wedge between the office towers’ floors. Hospitals with battery-run backup supplies stay functional, but the banks and the stock exchange with their E-Money, the government offices and transnational boardrooms, the TV studios and radio stations, the cafes and bars and restaurants, are all unplugged. We’d be engulfed by a night unlike anything anyone has known since before the Edison Illumination Company lit up New York City in eighteen eighty-two, extending the hours of the day, turning the streets into a twilight spectacle of artifice, priming the crowds for the first time to watch and wait. --Powe's Outage (via Matthew G. Kirschenbaum)

MGK points towards a timely book: B. W. Powe, —B. W. Powe, Outage: A Journey Into Electric City (1995)

But "computers download"? That makes no sense in this context.

In lieu of a truly good design, often people on the team will accept any design that makes the specific feature they care about (because they like it, because it'snew, because they work on it, etc.) discoverable, regardless of it'srelative importance compared to other features (note that this corollary is often applied without knowledge of the base myth). Scott Berkun --The Myth of Discoverability (UI Web)

The message: designers have to prioritize for their users. Of course, they shouldn't do so arbitrarially: "Many mediocre designs are the result of the avoidance of tough decisions on the part of the designer, rather than an inability to design well." Via WebWord.

At UWEC, for a while there was a very strange link on the home page... I asked one of the IT people about it, and was told that one of the board of directors had complained that he couldn't find a particular report, so they added a link to the home page just for him. **Shudder! **

"I always wanted my work to be read by someone else, someone out there who would grade me seriously, a regular person," [10-year-old Raya Allen] said. "With a teacher, it's their job. When someone else is reading it, they are doing it on their own free will." --A Young Writers' Round Table, via the Web (NY Times)

Interesting article about the effort to incite enthusiasm for writing by letting kids read each other's work online. Via KairosNews, where EMason also suggested the NYT article "Can Johnny Blog," which offers a good overview of blogs in education.

Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room table. "Unless they can be detected," he says, "these stones will bankrupt the industry." --The New Diamond Age (Wired)

Long but interesting deconstruction of the diamond industry. See also "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?"

"One of the younger guys had been a prison guard and thought this would be less demanding; another was finishing a computer science degree and needed a part-time job in his Queens neighborhood. The military man listened to the rest of us and declared, 'I wanted to serve my country.'" Beth Pinsker --Confessions of a Baggage Screener (Wired)

God bless quiet heroes.

UK online centres are for people who have limited or no access to skills in using new technologies. The centres will help people to develop the skills to use the Internet to access information, send email using a PC, mobile phone, digital television or games console; (please note not all centres will have the same facilities), and explore the opportunities that new technologies offer such as for further learning and updating skills. --What is a UK Online Centre? (UK Dept. for Education and Skills)

Local businesses are encouraged to join the progam and have their facility identified as a UK Oline Centre. This makes sense -- companies that want to make money via the Internet will benefit if the general public becomes more Internet literate.

"The purpose of this study is to further investigate breadcrumb usage by evaluating the following research questions:

1. Do users choose to use breadcrumbs as a navigational tool?
2. Does breadcrumb usage improve navigational efficiency?
3. Does the location of the breadcrumb trail on a page effect usage?
4. Does a breadcrumb trail aid the user’s mental model of the site structure?

Rogers and Chaparro --Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage (Usability News)

The answer to each of these questions is pretty much "no"... that is, users of a fake website weren't particularly more efficient when they navigated through a site that uses breadcrumbs. The researchers also note that "breadcrumb" isn't really a good name for this technique -- and they are right. Anyone have a better name?

The researchers did note a slight usability increase if the breadcrumb trail is placed below the title, rather than at the very top of the page. I'll probably implement that soon.

While this study suggests that the presence or absence of breadcrumbs makes little difference to the users, I like breadcrumb navigation because:

If you only have a few pages on your site, this kind of structure probably seems like it's more trouble than it's worth. But if you plan to expand the site organically (that is, adding new articles wherever the need arises), this kind of navigational structure saves you from having to re-edit the navigation bars on unrelated pages, every time you add a new page. ("Navigation")

Newbie web authors generally start with very small web pages, with each page linking to every other page. Each time they add a page, they add the link to every other page. At a certain point, when they realize they need yet another page, or they need to change the title on an existing page, it becomes a real bother, and they start resisiting the idea of letting their site grow further. I felt much the same way before I reorgainzed my site along the breadcrumb model (back in early 2000).

Of course, professional developers have access to menu-generating tools, and typically the new content is generated by someone else and handed to the web editor.

See also Croc o' Lyle's related links for "Breadcrumbs Affect User's Mental Model of Web Sites".

"The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction.... In creating community software, we are, to some extent, trying to create a third place. And like any other architecture project, the design decisions we make are crucial. Make a bar too loud, and people won't be able to have conversations. That makes for a very different kind of place than a coffee shop. Make a coffee shop without very many chairs, as Starbucks does, and people will carry their coffee back to their lonely rooms..." Joel Spolsky --Building Communities with Software (Joel on Software)

Will has almost finished the code for adding comments to postings on this blog... actually, as far as he's concerned, he pretty much has finished, but I asked for a "preview comment" feature. Will sent me the above article, which makes a good point:

Q. Why don't you show people their posts to confirm them before you post them? Then people wouldn't make mistakes and typos.

A. Empirically, that is not true. Not only is it not true, it's the opposite of true.... It's like those studies they did that showed that it's safer, on twisty mountain roads, to remove the crash barrier, because it makes people scared and so they drive more carefully...

Hmm... this makes some sense, but then I can think of plenty of times I've botched a comment with malformed HTML, and I really appreciated the ability to preview. I suppose comment pages don't really need HTML, do they? Maybe simpler is better.

But I do think it's important to note Joel's community is all about software development... the behaviors he has observed may be particular to or more prominent in software developers. Perhaps readers of a weblog on literacy will behave differently, and will prefer to see their post in-context before the submit.

But maybe I'll be a weasel and ask for a prominent "Post Without Preview" button and a smaller, less obtrusive "Preview" link. Well, this is food for thought.

Update: Nick writes: "How about 'I'm Feeling Lucky'?"

"What we need is a C-SPAN for science: a cable science network (CSN). This network would carry live lectures by knowledgeable scientists on topics ranging from climate change to biological warfare, as well as debates on issues from the biological basis of aggression to missile defense." Terrence J. Sejnowski --Tap into Science 24-7 (Science)

"I have concluded that AOL's brand would benefit from being removed from the corporate name..." AOL executive Jon Miller --AOL Time Warner (Internal Memos)

Yup, just like it's good for the diseased limb if you cut if off from the rest of the body.

This is an amusing attempt at corporate spin. He even tries to beat the critics to the punch: "there is no question this will provide the media yet another opportunity to write negatively about the merger of AOL and Time Warner." You can't blame the guy for trying.

"When students in Biloxi, Miss., show up this morning for the first day of the new school year, a virtual army of digital cameras will be recording every minute of every lesson in every classroom.|Hundreds of Internet-wired video cameras will keep rolling all year long, in the hope that they'll deter crime and general misbehavior among the district's 6,300 students -- and teachers." Greg Toppo --Who's Watching the Class? Webcams in schools raise privacy issue  (USA Today)

This article goes beyond the typical "privacy rights eroding" comments you'd expect to find, and even interviews a teacher who likes the cameras:

Page, a former biology teacher, granted open access to anyone who wanted to view his classroom, no password required. He says families tuned in regularly and loved it. ''You could see if the kid was wearing the same thing they left the house in that morning.''

I do think it's very sad that we even have to consider turning schools into panopticons.

Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher and social reformer, published his plan for the Panopticon penitentiary in 1791. Essentially, it was for a building on a semi-circular pattern with an 'inspection lodge' at the centre and cells around the perimeter. Prisoners, who in the original plan would be in individual cells, were open to the gaze of the guards, or 'inspectors', but the same was not true of the view the other way. By a carefully contrived system of lighting and the use of wooden blinds, officials would be invisible to the inmates. Control was to be maintained by the constant sense that prisoners were watched by unseen eyes..... Beyond the metaphor, a model of power also lies in the concept of the panoptic, and it takes us well beyond the Orwellian jackboots and torture, or even the rats. The normalizing discipline, the exaggerated visibility of the subject, the unverifiability of observation, the subject as bearer of surveillance, the quest for factual certainty - all are important aspects of the panoptic as model of power. The question is, to what extent are all these necessarily present in each context? Sociologically, is electronic surveillance panoptic power?" (Lyon, "From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon.")

Be warned; this is a (strictly hypothetic) Google fan's nightmare.

• 2014: Google, using its Geolocation feature, starts to heavily censor content for certain countries. Entering "Hitler" at Google.de returns zero results.
• 2015: Google buys the Yahoo! Directory and removes the DMOZ Open Directory Project.
• 2016: Google is successfully sued by Microsoft for spidering Windows Servers. Also, Internet Explorer 9 won't allow accessing anything but MSN search.

--Phillip Lessen --The Rise and Fall of the Google Empire (Google Blogoscoped)

From Phillip Lessen's Google-focused blog. The post "Googling Politics" describes using Google to do some informal quick-n-dirty text analysis.

Fully 80% of adult Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for at least one of 16 major health topics online. This makes the act of looking for health or medical information one of the most popular activities online, after email (93%) and researching a product or service before buying it (83%). | Our finding represents a substantial enlargement of the population we have called online "health seekers" in the past. Previously, we have reported that 62% of Internet users said "yes" when we asked if they look for health or medical information online. For the first time, we prompt respondents with questions about specific health topics, to give a fuller portrait of what Americans are looking for online. Not surprisingly, the number of health seekers increased when we asked Internet users more specific questions. --Half of American Adults Have Searched Online for Health Information (Pew)

The above is a summary of the full document, a PDF file.

"After a user selects ?print? from the browser, the page is formatted before it is sent to the printer. The width of the layout is reduced to about 650 pixels for 8.5" x 11" paper, or 630 pixels for A4, assuming normal margins.|If all the elements of a page can't wrap around to fit within this 630-650 pixel area, content on the right will simply be cropped off. This is often caused by absolute positioning of page elements, such as fixed table widths, or large images. A web page with a fixed size of 800x600 pixels may look great online, but will lose its right edge completely when printed.|Flexible layouts relying on relative positioning are better for printing, allowing the page to compress down to fit onto paper." James Kalbach --Printing the Web (Boxes and Arrows)

At my UWEC site I had a little PERL script that would re-format my pages for print -- very helpful to me since I often taught in classrooms with no computers, so I had to print my handouts and make overhead slides. The sidebar always got cut off.

Now I'm experimenting with a CSS layout that doesn't rely on table. The Boxes and Arrows article looks like a good starting point.

"Information pollution is a worldwide scourge that afflicts not just travelers but everyone. In the United States, for example, you can't buy a lawnmower without a label saying that you're not supposed to mow your feet. |Most instruction manuals are littered with "important" warnings that caution against obvious stupidities, burying actual dangers amid a mass of irrelevancy. An out-of-control legal system has made a joke of the entire warnings concept; products are now less safe because nobody bothers to read warnings anymore. | In information foraging terms, information pollution is like packing the forest with cardboard rabbits: frustrated wolves are bound to hunt elsewhere." Jakob Nielsen --Information Pollution (Alert Box)

While this article doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said, Nielsen's usual no-nonsense, efficient style makes the point very clearly.

"I couldn’t help reflecting on the connection between hypertext and napalm, via Vannevar Bush..." Jonathan Delacour --As We May Incinerate (Jonathan Delacour)

A fascinating exercise in connecting the dots, and a glimpse into Vannevar Bush's "war guilt".

"Textual history teaches us that authors have been taking back their words for a long, long time (in the form of variants and revisions and new editions), and that 'their' words, as we read them on the page, might or might not originate with the person named on the title sheet. In other words (so to speak), the textual critic knows that all writing is, of necessity, social." Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --Social Hardware (Matthew G. Kirschenbaum)

Kirschenbaum cites Adrian Johns's observation that (in K's words) "that the trustworthtiness and reliability of the printed word is a relatively recent development, born of a concerted effort by the modern publishing industry and not print’s 'natural' tendency toward stability and fixity."

I was thinking a little more about folk authorship as it appears on the Internet, where it seems most changes are additive -- comments tacked on at the bottom of the page, blog posts marching across pages of archives, blogrolls swelling in length.

But maybe the most significant way that the Internet changes is simply that pages disappear -- whether the author takes them down deliberately, or (as in my own case) the author moves, and takes on a new URL as a sign of a new affiliation.

As a compromise between chaos and fixity, I like the idea of saving old versions of texts. I like the idea, but I'm too lazy to bother saving versions of my own texts. Well, shortly before each major site-wide change I make a copy of the whole website... but the chance of anyone out there actually needing a particular version of one of my pages is probably insignificant.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to ping The Wayback Machine, to ask it to archive a particular page for posterity?

(Checks Google.)

Lo and behold... if you use the Alexa toolbar or you click on "Show Related Links" (MS Internet Explorer), the Wayback Machine will check the site within a few days and the archive will appear six months later.

"The Forever Flashlight uses no batteries or bulbs. Instead it uses Faraday's Principle of Induction and a bright LED to produce light without batteries. The light is shaken for about 30 seconds to recharge a capacitor and it will then provide about 5 minutes of light. As the light is shaken, a magnet passes through a metal coil generating electricity. During prolonged use it can be shaken for 10-15 seconds every 2 or 3 minutes." --Forever Flashlight (Think Geek)

How many times have you shaken a flashlight when its batteries are dying? It's such a natural action, even though usually it never does any good. This sounds like great design to me. Does anyone know how the light compares to, say, the focused beam of a Mini MagLite? Via WebWord.

P.S. My birthday is October 11. Hint, hint, hint.

I already have a blue LED on a flexy neck that plugs into my laptop's USB port. It casts out a fairly nice general light, with a little spot that I aim at the keyboard (particularly at the navigation keys, which are in different locations on every keyboard I use, so the light really helps when I'm up late typing and don't want to disturb anyone else).

"Academics are already seeking to study early games as the awakening of a potent new art form. Future developers will want to see how earlier designers approached play and mechanics -- and solved complex problems using limited technology." Suneel Ratan --Arcade Addicts Joust with Past (Wired)

There was a time not too long ago when cinema wasn't considered worthy of academic study. While there's a heap of difference between cinema as an art form and cookie-cutter Hollywood blockbusters, and while it's probably true that most students who want to study cinema are interested in contemporary works, few people in the movie industry thought seriously about preserving old reels, so much movie history is lost.

Software that emulates the old consoles will help somewhat, of course... but the hardware is important, too.

Update, 11 Aug: Matt Hoy send a link to his collection of restored arcade games and writes, "There is definetly a "purest" movement in the collecting community. They recognise the usefullness of emulation, but would rather have original hardware, even if it's buggy and prone to failure."

I had forgotten about the monster-looking guys on the "Space Invaders" console -- those figures had nothing to do with the images displayed on the screen (since we only saw the exterior of the ships).

--Merely OK -- Usability Testing: What is It? (EServer TC Library)

Of the 15 or so of my resources included in the EServer TC Library, my handout on Usability Testing is ranked the worst. Does anyone out there have any suggestions to make it better? Write a review, and post it on the page.

The rest of my resources are at least "Good", so I'm not at all unhappy. At any rate, I think this model of online review is desperately needed in academia.

--Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (Cowles Gallery)

Rosemary Frezza first suggested the Washington Post's current article on Burtynsky, but since that will expire soon she did a little hunting and found the Cowles Gallery link.

There is really no quotable text in the gallery press release ("BURTYNSKY's photographs, monumental both in scale and subject, capture the indomitable spirit of nature in the face of human-imposed adversity." Bleah.)

There's also edwardburtynsky.com, where the artist writes:

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Good stuff.

"Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes? | The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year." Rick Weiss --A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research  (WashPost)

I was at a meeting the other day where a faculty member pooh-poohed the information students can find on the Internet. He was, of course, referring specifically to the bad information on the Internet, but he didn't specify.

I pointed out that there is nothing wrong with electronic text as a medium -- what matters is whether the information has been peer-reviewed. I suggested that students who repeatedly hear their teachers tell them to avoid the Internet are getting only half the message. While it's true that the costs involved mean that less crap gets printed than gets thrown online, we aren't doing our jobs as educators if we simply tell students "Stay in the print world because there you're less likely to come across a document that requires you to use your critical thinking skills to evaluate its credibility."

Since the Washington Post article on which this blog is based will expire soon, here's a link to zonker's comments: "Dissociated Press | Fighting for Access to Taxpayer-funded Research".

"For years, researchers have worked to improve gloves that can translate American Sign Language into spoken and written speech.... Some members of the deaf community are ambivalent about the technology, which aims to 'fix' deafness, a trait they accept and even embrace as culturally unique. Many also are wary of a machine that can translate only a few hundred words -- much less the nuances crucial to human communication." Elisa Batista --Glove Won't Speak for the Deaf  (Wired)

Early in 2002, I blogged a USA Today story about a teenager inventing a glove that translated sign language. While the more complicated system described above measures arm movements in addition to finger position, sign language also uses facial expressions and whole-body actions. Neither of these systems is capable of capturing that range of meaning (although the technology is beign explored for computer interfaces that turn your body into a game controller -- probably a good way to market sports titles).

The play/movie Children of a Lesser God does an excellent job examining the biases that the hearing world brings to its understanding of the deaf world.

Kudos to Batista for doing more than simply writing a cheerleading "ain't technology great" article (the kind of thingone often finds in Wired).

"This is a very bad time for a new, young anchor to be starting out, because they'll be the first to go. The point and click selection process