Ron Avitzur explains how the Graphing Calculator came to be:
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.
A weblog set up to collect information about relief efforts.
...via BoingBoing
Joe Gandelman gathers blogger accounts of the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean coastlines:
2004 decided not to go quietly today when the biggest earthquake in 40 years struck deep in the Indian Ocean, triggering massive tsunamis -- wiping out Asian coastal areas and instantly drowning and killing more than 12,000 people.
In a grim reminder that the well-laid plans of holiday goers, governments and politicians hinge on a higher power, the earthquake -- an estimated 9 point magnitude -- struck quickly and without mercy, decimating coastal areas some 1,000 miles away in a record-setting catastrophe. Far away, yet even with newspaper accounts the Internet made it seem MUCH closer...because some local weblogs instantaneously started telling bits of the horrific story...
...via blogdex
Jenny over at The Shifted Librarian provides some Great RSS Quotes from My Aggregator:
500 down, 3061 to go "At the beginning of this week I had 310 feeds showing around 25,000 unread posts. I had toyed with the idea of declaring RSS bankruptcy and just starting again, but I was getting increasingly unhappy with chaotic state of my feeds and deep down I knew that hitting 'mark all posts read' would do nothing to solve the problem in the long run."
A paper by Stephen Coleman on The Network-Empowered Citizen:
The main conclusion of this research is that new sources of networked knowledgesharing have emerged and are producing a new kind of empowered citizen. Networkempowered citizens are not like liberal-individualists, insofar as they recognise the value of pooling knowledge, but neither are they like members of virtual communities, because their principal commitment is to pursuing offline interests and values. Networkempowered citizens go online to augment their store of bridging social capital, enabling them to make heterogeneous connections and acquire knowledge conveniently. Civic networks should be respected and promoted as sources of empowered citizenship. Network-empowered citizenship weakens the sustainability of vertical structures of government and calls for new forms of co-governance in which the shared common knowledge of citizens feeds directly into the making of more relevant policies and more accountable, legitimate and effective decisions.
At Many2Many, Ross Mayfield has some thoughts on citizen's media, aggregation, powerful people and the power of the people:
...While an index can be a common point of meaning (e.g. the Dow), you gain greater affinity for an organization or individual who interprets where it is going (e.g. broker). Each shock leads to new models that are opportunities for new entrants. In this market of memes, anyone can be a broker, analyst or quant with the right skills and desire — and the right moment of entry.My point is really the middle of the road. Aggregation will augment Citizen’s Media as it needs to scale. Editorial process will augment emergent practice. The long tail will wag the dog. If we will it to.
An article in D-Lib Magazine on The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web:
RSS is increasingly being deployed within science publishing, and the reasons for this are manifold. RSS presents a very simple XML structure for packaging news titles and links, and delivering them down to user desktops and handhelds. Associated as it is with the burgeoning new technologies of blogs and wikis, RSS has received a significant impetus to growth. There is already a general public awareness of RSS, and it is being widely implemented. There is also growing support from browser vendors, and a number of the common browsers now have some degree of built-in RSS functionality. Indeed, it is becoming almost ubiquitous [n17]. It provides a ready B2C channel and can also be used in simpler B2B contexts.
...via Many2Many
Science News has compiled their list of Science News of the Year 2004 including:
Hot stuff An Israeli site yielded the oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire in Asia or Europe, from around 750,000 years ago (May 1, 165: 276*).
Human origins A skull found in a Romanian cave boosted the controversial theory that Neandertals interbred frequently with people (May 22, 165: 328*). Other evidence indicated minimal or no genetic contact between Neandertals and ancient people (March 20, 165: 181), and Stone Age Homo sapiens may have had better memories than Neandertals did (Sept. 18, 166: 183).
Sleep on it Sleep showed signs of improving memories and problem solving (Jan. 24, 165: 53*). Scientists linked an inner-brain structure to the enhancement of spatial memories during sleep (Nov. 6, 166: 294).
Bad traffic Spending time in traffic dramatically increases a person's short-term risk of heart attack, a study found (Nov. 13, 166: 316), and diesel fumes suppressed immunity in rodents (March 13, 165: 174).
D'lightful Benefits linked to vitamin D were extended to anticancer effects, muscle preservation, diabetes prevention, and mitigation of autoimmune diseases (Jan. 31, 165: 77; Oct. 9, 166: 232*, Oct. 16, 166: 248*).
...via BoingBoing
Some musings at elearningpost on rich e-learning experiences, what people need to know, and how we translate information to knowledge and knowledge to action.
Bruce Sterling gives a Felix Burda Memorial Lecture on 'Shaping Things to Come'.
He begins by discussing six major trends in technology:
Betsy Devine tells everyone what happens when your husband wins the Nobel prize for physics:
Nobel Prize and mathThere is no Nobel Prize for mathematics*--but there's lots of math involved in Nobel Prizes.
Word problems....
- If 7 of us fly to Stockholm on the redeye, plot our best distribution onto airplane seats, bearing in mind that Amity's husband Colin has very long legs and neither of Frank's parents should have to sit immobilized for too long.
- Which will be harder and take more time: to find the required white-tie-and-tails Nobel outfit in Boston and lug it to Stockholm, or to figure our how to take 8 different measurements of my husband and then convert them all into metric so that someone in Stockholm can rent the outfit for him?
- Rank these four events in order of probabability: Lightning will strike Mel Gibson, Lightning will strike Mel Brooks, Betsy Devine will have triplets nine months from now, Frank Wilczek will need to wear white-tie-and-tails to some event unrelated to Nobel Prizes.
Show all calculations, and remember, neatness counts.
...via Jim Moore's Journal
Success breeds its own problems. For RSS one of them is bandwidth growth--popular pages get hit constantly by aggregators looking for updates. Glenn Fleishman has started a blog on RSS bandwidth usage (Regular Sucking Schedule).
Check out Google Suggest, which guesses at what you're typing, makes real-time suggestions including how many matching items.
...via Dan Gillmor and The Shifted Librarian
Amy Gharan at Contentious talks about effective corporate e-learning and how much of it is not:
Rather than burden employees with a constant stream of detailed documents about new regulations, products, laws, policies, and minutiae of the business landscape, just deliver overview-level, 'so what'-style highlights of the new information. Focus on context: How the new information relates to what employees already know and do. If they understand how the information landscape is changing, they'll be able to navigate it more effectively.Then, make the full details easily available on demand. That is, accept that they will probably end up looking up details when they have a specific need rather than memorizing them in advance.
...via elearningpost
Via BoingBoing, a pointer to info on Google's Project Ocean, which involves a collaboration between Google and Harvard University:
Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu.
Lilia Efimova at Mathemagenic is musing on conversation overload and why it seems easier to participate in weblog conversations than mailing list conversations:
Weblog conversations are easier to "jump into" in a middle - as each weblog post have to be meaningful on itself (see also Jill on good hypertext), bloggers make more effort summarising earlier arguments or at least linking to them. In case of a mailing list without threading you have to read all messages to get into the context of conversation).Weblog conversations are "relaxed": of course, timely response may be important, but you know that nothing awful happens if you react a couple of months later. In a case of a mailing list reacting in a couple of months can easily turn your message into "off topic", as conversation moves to new areas and context is lost.
Parts of weblog conversations are easier to "wave" into your own thinking. It could be a "personal KM researcher" bias, but I could hardly do without connecting discussions I have with others with my own thinking (re: conversations with others vs. conversations with self)....
Wired offers their guide to cool tools for 2004
Mark Hurst at Good Experience provides a gift guide for parents of geeks.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book on a blog--that is, the writing project is on a blog and it's about (proposal stage currently) blogging in corporations.
Here's a good set of resources and links on online communities of practice.
Interesting article from WritersUA on Design Checklists for Online Help, where 'online help' is defined as "'brief task-oriented modules of information' that support the user in accomplishing their tasks."
Among other things:
An article at elearnspace by George Siemens shares his perspective on Learning Management Systems:
The very notion of “managing learning” conflicts with how people are actually learning today. Outside of primary and secondary school, most of our learning falls into the “topping up what we know” category. As a result, we need tools that allow for rapid creation and breakdown. Searching Google, blogs, and wikis has a very quick learning structure creation and breakdown. An LMS has a long creation/breakdown process (and once the learning structure has been broken down (i.e. end of course), it is no longer accessible to learners). LMS' still view learners as canisters to be filled with content – this is particularly relevant in light of the heavy emphasis on object repositories for learning. Essentially, most LMS platforms are attempting to shape the future of learning to fit into the structure of their systems, even though most learning today is informal and connectionist in nature.
Although learning management systems are an important part of an e-learning environment, there are other important pieces too. Siemen lists the following:
Any learning environment should:
Portals Magazine writes about business blogging:
Though the potential of blogs and aggregators is tremendous, these tools don't make sense for every organization, particularly those in which central control over content is a major concern. For now, they are best suited for companies or institutions where innovation is a goal and the serendipitous discovery of information is desired. Blogs and aggregators can also work well in situations where information needs to be distributed, commented upon, searched, and made easily available for later use; email, instant messaging, and standard Web sites do not allow for this combination of capabilities.For businesses or divisions in which community building is an objective, such as developer networks, cross-functional collaboration teams, research groups, or customer user groups, blogging tools deliver ideal capabilities. By the same token, individual and group control must be acceptable, and even desired, for blogging to work in a corporate setting. In addition, the personal voice must be seen as a good thing, whether to form a more direct connection to customers or to allow for more meaningful discussions within the firewall.
...from an article at ZDnet on Google and how it all works.
...via JoHo the Blog
The City of Philadelphia has signed an agreement with Verizon to provide wireless internet access for the city:
The city of Philadelphia and Verizon Communications Inc. struck an agreement Tuesday that would allow the city to provide wireless Internet access as a municipal service even though Gov. Ed Rendell signed legislation giving Verizon the power to scuttle the project.Philadelphia's plans are the most ambitious of any major U.S. city to provide free or cheap high-speed wireless to all residents.
This is an exception to the new law that's passed in PA which says that cities can't offer municipal wireless for a fee without the permission of their local phone company.
From an article at The Feature on haptic interfaces:
Haptics (from the Greek term "to touch") is already a money-making technology in the gaming, medical, graphics and automotive industries. Typically, computers don't provide tactile feedback and must resort to sounds and visual indicators to represent things you'd normally feel in the real world. But haptics bring physicality back into the digital domain by generating the sensations of pressure, temperature, vibration and texture. Anyone who has picked up a game controller with a well-built rumble mechanism knows how much better the game-playing experience becomes when they can feel explosions, potholes in the road, collisions and so on.Doctors and nurses in training can learn what it feels like to insert a catheter into a patient's arm by practicing on a dummy equipped with a force-feedback haptic simulator that lets them feel the pop of a needle puncturing a vein. Animators can use a 3-D armature device to mold a virtual clay lump on a computer monitor. And if you get a chance to take a ride in a late-model BMW, check out the iDrive knob, which can switch from smooth rotation to stepped clicks depending on the particular function it's controlling so that information is imparted to drivers' fingers instead of forcing them to take their eyes off the road.
...via BoingBoing
From a post at elearningpost about companies moving classroom content online:
Learning is fundamentally a social activity. I don't know how long it's going to take for stakeholders to understand this simple truth. E-learning is not about providing multimedia instruction just-in-time; its about providing the raw materials for learners to think purposefully about a problem and to negotiate its meaning in a group setting. This purposeful understanding is more than just the sum of what is given and what is discussed, it is the attainment of dependable self-reliance -- the ability to make responsible decisions.
There is a certain amount of research and evaluation that says that people learn at least as well and possibly better with good (one assumes) online learning as in face-to-face. There's also key evidence that the processing of information into knowledge and skill is primarily done through interactions, particularly focused conversations with faculty and peers and experts in the field. University campuses are successful in part because they provide a place where focused conversations are easy. As we move more 'content' online we will also want to continue to provide and even create new ways for people to process that material through conversations, serendipitous interactions and social synergies.