Via Nature (via Smart Mobs), news of a study that says if you haven't seen a news article within 36 hours of its publication, you're probably not going to see it:

Dezs and his colleagues collected such data for a single day on the Origo portal, during which time it released 3,908 news stories. On a typical day, Origo logs a total of 6,500,000 hits. The researchers looked at the relationship between the number of hits per item and the date the item was released, as well as the patterns of visits to the site by individual users.

Unsurprisingly, each item receives the most visits on the day it is posted, and the number of hits falls off rapidly after that. There is a daily rhythm because nearly all readers of the Hungarian site are in Hungary, so hit patterns are not affected by having readers in different time zones. After just three days, most people who are ever going to read the item have already done so. Even with an archive, online reporters cannot pretend they are writing for posterity.

You can find the original research paper here

I got to San Antonio last night about 9. The ACE/NETC conference is at the Marriott Rivercenter right next to the San Antonio River Walk. I had good flight connections and a trouble free flight (go here to read the adventures of those who traveled by bus.

Today I attended an all day meeting for the eXtension IT Advisory Committee. We discussed history of, future plans, infrastructure and next steps. Earth-shattering decisions were saved for a later meeting. There's a lot of potential for technology and collaboration--I'm looking forward to what we can do with it.

I haven't seen much of San Antonio yet though I did go on the boat ride on the river. It's cold (very, very cold) in the hotel and hot and humid outside. Talks start tomorrow so I'll try to catch up with those, post the slides for our talk on synidcation on Thursday and other updates on the conference (no pictures though unless someone feeds me them from another source--I haven't got a camera or even a camera phone--so behind the times...)

According to the Financial Times (where you can't read the full article without a subscriiption):

The US military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks that can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants.

The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft....

...via Smart Mobs

ABC News is now offering podcasts.

From oreilly.com -- The Art of Project Management:

In The Art of Project Management, you'll learn from a veteran manager of software and web development how to plan, manage and lead projects. This personal account of hard lessons learned over a decade of work in the industry distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice. Inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, this is the book you and your team need to have within arms reach. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.

Topics include:

• How to make things happen
  
• Making good decisions
  
• Specifications and requirements
  
• Ideas and what to do with them
  
• How not to annoy people
  
• Leadership and trust
  
• The truth about making dates
  
• What to do when things go wrong

BBC News talks about podcasting:

However, the same can be said of television, as a surf through the channels on satellite or Freeview will reveal, and this does not mean there is not great stuff too.

The quality of some of the podcasts I have listened to is certainly as good as many supposedly professional radio stations, and as the tools for finding and filtering what is out there improve we will inevitably see new ideas, new approaches and new names emerge.

And a podcast with no listeners may take up disk space, but it is not stopping anyone else doing their own thing, so there is absolutely no argument for any form of quality control.

...via SmartMobs

From The Register:

Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.

...via Smart Mobs

Chicago Crime is using Google maps to pinpoint the location of crimes committed in the city of Chicago.

They also have RSS feeds providing the latest crime information for a particular beat or block.

...via Smart Mobs

Stowe Boyd attends the IDG Syndicate conference:

Am I hearing that the value chain has changed so dramatically -- in the shift to open media -- that much of the old mindset is not only broken but dangerous. I wonder if that will be outed, here.

This is a group that is set and determined to talk about content, who think in terms of page turns, click throughs, and leading the readers by the nose around pages to get to specific ads. Although they talk the talk about good writing (although they call it content), they are not talking about good reading. They are not primarily interested in the activities and goals of the active reader.

The Ohio State University redesigned their web pages and blogged the process, including design graphics in process:

After nearly 422 meetings, 57 sketches, and countless bogus posts to this page by internet gambling sites (but not anymore, Jim figured out how to block those), launch for the redesigned front door and associated second level pages is set for Monday, May 16. With that in sight, we're in the final "crossing the Ts and checking the links" phase of a process which began well over a year ago. The loose plan goes like this:

April 20 - sub-index pages finalized
April 25 - html versions of level two pages finalized
May 2 - Front door + level 2 audience pages up and running parallel to existing design
May 9 - Items promoting launch in various outlets, OSUToday, Buckeye Net News, Lantern, splash page, e-mail lists
May 16 - New design goes live

here are the latest tweaks to the front door, we're very close to calling this "finalized." And just for context, we'd like to remind folks that this is all in context of a larger identity system now in place at Ohio State.

...via Matt in comments. Thanks!

Jerry Thomas, Director of OSU Center at Lima, has started a weblog on Trends and issues in extension.

Check it out. There are already interesting pointers to a three day conference on Extension, the Land Grant Institutions and Education, podcasting and Extension, the Organic Trade Association, and 15 minutes of tech fame.

Yay! More Extension bloggers.

Or, how to find WiFi with your clothing:

As an example of AwareFashion we designed a shirt that senses switched-on mobile phones in the proximity. The shirt looks like a fashionable normal shirt, however if mobile phones are near the shirt glows unobtrusively at the end of sleeves. The design is orientated at the human sensory perception. Humans sense their environment with sensory cells, that generate electronics impulses which travel though nerves tracts and are processed.

...via SmartMobs

From Wireless Watch Japan via Smart Mobs, consumers are using cellphones to scan the QR code on grocery store produce which then links them to a mobile website with information on origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content, etc.

QR codes are reducing the fear factor for foodstuffs in Japan as agricultural associations embrace the new wireless technology tagging fresh produce for quick access to mobile information web sites. A new English language report [.PDF] released this month by NTT DoCoMo on QR code use in agriculture reveals the growing popularity of this medium.

Here.

Sometimes we don't even have to comment...

What students get up to these days:

The Too Fast For Tracks™ project is being developed by Christopher Hall at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program in order to explore a rapid prototyping approach to toys. The Too Fast For Tracks™ system allows children to quickly set up and make alterations to a vehicles path though a system of infrared beacons. By placing beacons around their play space children set the rules that guide the vehicle. The open-ended structure of the system is designed to encourage spatial exploration and social interaction.

Great whitepaper from Touchstone on solving wicked problems--those problems which are difficult to define, large, complex, changing and which do not respond to a traditional linear problem-solving approach (in the beginning of the paper, they mention that most of us don't actually solve problems with a linear model, but we think we do, which, it turns out, is significant):

Solving a wicked problem is a fundamentally social process.

Most wicked problems involve lots of stakeholders. In a corporate project, stakeholders could include:

• All the members of the project team
• Upper management
• People in other parts of the organization working on related projects
• People in other departments, like Finance or Purchasing, who have some general oversight function
• External stakeholders, such as customers, investors, partner companies, regulators, watchdog organizations, and organizations in other countries.

What makes wicked-problem solving so challenging is that none of these stakeholders can be safely ignored. Many are involved in defining the problem, and many also add constraints to the solution. Other teams working on related projects have a particularly large stake, because one team's solution is the next team's problem.

No project leader is brilliant or experienced enough to go off and solve a wicked problem alone. It is not even possible to assemble a team of brilliant people to go off and solve the problem, because the moment they go off, they leave behind stakeholders whose input is essential.

....

Faced with the frustration of wicked-problem solving, some people get fixated on some aspect of the problem or solution. They recognize that that aspect is vital to the project's success, and that it will get mishandled or forgotten unless they make sure that it is not. These people will make the same point, meeting after meeting. Henry, in the example above, will hold onto his idea for using the pemory widget-for weeks, if necessary-until it is time to incorporate it. Without a system to document or capture the full range of thinking and creativity that occurs in wicked-problem solving, people have to remember to keep in existence any idea that comes up out of sequence. Since repetition is one key to memory, project meetings are a ritual of repetition so that nobody forgets an important idea.

Without a system to document or capture the full range of thinking and creativity that occurs in wicked-problem solving, people have to remember to keep in existence any idea that comes up out of sequence. Faced with wicked problems, few people today are able to have meetings be effective. We often hear that there are "too many meetings" and that they don't go well. People identify with a point of view and defend it. Topics are continually rehashed, with little progress and virtually no learning taking place. Side issues seem to consume valuable meeting time.

Most complex problems these days are also wicked problems and learning how to recognize them and solve them is critical to organizations.

...via elearningpost

Stephan Downes talks about what he considers the three most important principles for effective e-learning :

No doubt there are other aspects of effective e-learning. Pedagogical theorists will talk about scaffolding, talk about learning objectives and outcomes, talk about practice and examination, and more. In various contexts these are all important and will play a significant role in determining the success of failure of a given learning enterprise.

None of these, though, are as central to the design of effective learning as the three criteria listed above. By ensuring that e-learning content is interactive, usable and relevant a designer can be virtually sure that the e-learning outcome will be a success. or at the very least, appreciated by the learners. Who are, after all, the final judge.

...via elearningpost

There's a Time Traveler Convention at MIT on Saturday. Tell your time traveling friends.

Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Can't the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?

Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their "home times" and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.

Unfortunately, we of the present (2005) don't have time travel, and so we only have one chance at observing the convention. If the time travelers don't leave us their secrets, we won't be able to go back in time and see our convention in all its glory unless it is publicized in advance.

...via BoingBoing