Usability: June 2007 Archive Page

--Text to Speech (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s on my PDA, and have listened to student papers that were submitted to finish off incomplete grades, a dissertation chapter that touched on a subject I know a little bit about, an administrative planning document on assessment, a 93-page article of mine that I've been developing, on and off, for about five years; and today when I drive to work briefly I'll be listening to a Gamasutra article on Zork.

TextAloud offers a free version, which was good enough for short and routine stuff, but the AT&T professional voices sound excellent -- far better than anything I had ever experienced before, and I figure they're well worth the cost of about a DVD movie each (one male, one female).

I have been toying with the idea of having my journalism students practice taking notes from audio recordings, and I figure a tool like this will let me work a little more efficiently, since I won't have to get a voice actor to record the dialogue each week. Of course, once I get a sense of what kinds of mistakes the students make, I can firm up the scripts and get someone to record them more dramatically.

I can imagine, with this text-to-speech program, setting up an RSS feed of all my student's overnight blogging on a given topic, converting it to an audio file, and then listening it on the drive in to work.

It almost makes me wish I had a longer commute.

What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? --Bizarre Sign (Lushlush)

Does it mean "Don't forget to knock your head here?" Obviously, it would be much less painful to bang into a light sign hanging from a chain than to bang into that horizontal bar right behind it. So I guess, in a way, they do want people to bang into the sign. It's just like those "low overhead" signs hanging outside garages -- it's better if the top of your vehicle makes that sign wiggle than if your vehicle gets wedged under a support.

(I flipped the image and cropped it to emphasize the effect. Not something one would do as a journalist, but that sort of thing is frequently done in the context of design.)

I designed this site to enable those of us who are having difficulty in solving Adventure / Colossal Cave to work together to solve the game.

This is not a hints site, and there is no spoiler space. Information is presented as fully as I can, though the information in the walk through tends to be less detailed and that in the object, people, and places pages to be more detailed. --afjbell --Adventure/Colossal Cave Home Page (Hypertext Walkthrough Index Page)

A useful site that breaks Adventure down into objects, places, and a walkthrough (all hyperlinked). The same site also similar treatments of Zork and a few other games.

When the steam train roared into history, hissing smoke and howling into the night, it was an awesome beast, adorned in the finest woods, ivory, gold, and intricate inlays, like some Serpent King on a sacred tapestry. The automobiles of the 20's to 60's, each was a work of art. The television and radio affected the world in more ways that can be imagined, changing the entire dynamic of human social structure and communication. They were both appropriately gifted with the most lavish of hand tooled, wooden scrolled cabinetry, housings which borrowed architectural details from the grandest schools, churches and banks.

Sadly, the personal computer, which has impacted the world more profoundly than probably all of the previously mentioned inventions put together, never recieved the same kind treatment. It went from a buzzing beige cube, to a buzzing white one, to the garish space-eggs you see nowadays. --"Datamancer"

--The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine (Datamancer)

I absolutely love the round porthole window over the DVD drive. There should be a little brass plate on the frame under the monitor, and around the monitor there should be shelves with cubbyholes. Lots of cubbyholes.

--How NOT To Use Powerpoint By Comedian Don McMillan (YouTube)

Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.

I generally ask my students to post their presentation notes on their blog, and rather than read through their blog entry word-for-word just take the class through the links and talk us through their main points.

Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm" -- the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question. It is a crucial part of Google's inner sanctum, a department called "search quality" that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.

[...]

Until now, Google has preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them.

But last year, Mr. Singhal started to worry that Google's balance was off. When the company introduced its new stock quotation service, a search for "Google Finance" couldn't find it. After monitoring similar problems, he assembled a team of three engineers to figure out what to do about them.

Earlier this spring, he brought his squad's findings to Mr. Manber's weekly gathering of top search-quality engineers who review major projects. At the meeting, a dozen people sat around a large table, another dozen sprawled on red couches, and two more beamed in from New York via video conference, their images projected on a large screen. Most were men, and many were tapping away on laptops. One of the New Yorkers munched on cake.

Mr. Singhal introduced the freshness problem, explaining that simply changing formulas to display more new pages results in lower-quality searches much of the time. He then unveiled his team's solution: a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new information and when they don't. (And yes, like all Google initiatives, it had a name: QDF, for "query deserves freshness.") --Saul Hansell --Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine (New York Times)

Interesting details... so PageRank is not as important now as it once was.