Category Archives: Technology

SILS Academic Productivity Seminar

Posted on October 1, 2008 by | 2 comments

On Friday 10/3 from 10 – 11:30am:
SILS Academic Productivity Seminar:

Are you struggling with information overload, focus and concentration, or the quiet chaos of an unstructured, unscheduled “job” (despite all that ILS training)? We feel your pain. Join us to share your ideas and learn from others. We’ll discuss productivity methods and systems, tech tips, the latest tools… and just vent.
Sessions include:
# 10:10 – 10:20 – Inbox Zero – Erin White
# 10:20 – 10:30 – Your Computer’s Desktop is Not a To-Do List – Mike Brown
# 10:30 – 10:40 – Literature alerts and push-button citations – Fred Stutzman
# 10:40 – 10:50 – Zotero Firefox plug-in – John Weis

2 Comments

Posted in Technology

Where to watch the debate tonight

Posted on September 26, 2008 by | 1 comment

C-Span’s Debate Hub is better than twitter, or so they say.
I’ll watch it on TV at a neighbor’s house, then come back and see what the folks on FriendFeed and around the blogs say as well.

1 Comment

Posted in Politics, Technology

ConvergeSouth program change

Posted on September 24, 2008 by | Comments Off on ConvergeSouth program change

Since BlogHer cancelled several parts of their Fall Tour, including the one in Greensboro, this does not mean that you go home on Friday night after ConvergeSouth as there WILL be a Saturday program, says Sue.

Comments Off on ConvergeSouth program change

Posted in Blogging, Media, North Carolina, Technology

Congratulations to danah boyd!

Posted on September 23, 2008 by | Comments Off on Congratulations to danah boyd!

danah boyd was hired by Microsoft, where she will have freedom to continue her research on online social networks at Microsoft Research New England in Boston. Congrats, danah!

Comments Off on Congratulations to danah boyd!

Posted in Technology

Today is OneWebDay

Posted on September 23, 2008 by | Comments Off on Today is OneWebDay

OneWebDay is….

….an Earth Day for the internet. The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet. So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.

There will be events organized around the world, including in Belgrade, Serbia and Greensboro, NC.

Comments Off on Today is OneWebDay

Posted in Technology

A non-biological biological clock

Posted on September 21, 2008 by | Comments Off on A non-biological biological clock

cricket%20clock.jpgA clock is supposed to tell time. Furthermore, it is supposed to do it accurately and precisely. These days, it is not too difficult to build a mechanical, quartz, digital or atomic clock that is marvelously accurate and precise. But if a clock is not so good, it will have a systematic error, i.e., it will go slightly too fast OR slightly too slow and will, over time, get seriously inaccurate.
On the other hand, a biological clock is messy – it relies on ineractions between molecules. Thus, it will display occasional fluctuations – getting a little bit ahead at one point, a little bit behind at another. But, in the long run, a biological clock is self-correcting and will remain accurate for the entire duration of life of the organism.
This kind of clock – imprecise at short timescales but accurate at long time-scales – is much more difficult for human engineers to design. But someone has just done that!
Now, it appears that the motivation for building such a clock was not to emulate biology, but more of an artistic quirk, a way to do something that grabs the media attention, but it worked. You can see the mechanism of the Escapement here and watch a movie here (for some strange reason, they are hogging the movie for themselves and not providing an embed code).
The designer explains his motivation:

Most clocks just tell time, simply and reliably. Not the $1.8 million “time eater” formally unveiled Friday at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.
The masterpiece, introduced by famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, challenges all preconceptions about telling time. It has no hands or digital numbers and it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time.
—————————–
Rather than having it toll the hour by a bell or a cuckoo, the clock relies on the clanking of a chain that falls into a coffin, which then loudly bangs closed.
—————————-
The clock, four feet in diameter, displays time using light-emitting diodes. The light races around the outer ring once every second, pausing briefly at the actual second; the next ring inside indicates the minute, and the inner ring shows the hour.
The lights are constantly on, the apparent motion regulated mechanically through slots in moving discs.
Weirdly, the clock’s pendulum slows down or speeds up. Sometimes it stops, the chronophage shakes a foot and the pendulum moves again.
Because of that, the time display may be as much as a minute off, although it swings back to the correct time every five minutes, said Taylor.

Comments Off on A non-biological biological clock

Posted in Technology, Time

Shaking Up Computer History: Finding the Women of ENIAC

Posted on September 12, 2008 by | Comments Off on Shaking Up Computer History: Finding the Women of ENIAC

From SCONC:

Thursday, Sept. 25
11:30 a.m – 1 p.m
(Free lunch if you’re early)
Lecture: “Shaking Up Computer History: Finding the Women of ENIAC”
Historian, computer programmer, telecommunications lawyer, and film producer Kathy Kleiman will speak about the women who programmed the first all-electronic programmable computer, ENIAC, over sixty years ago. Sponsored by Duke University’s Office of the Provost, Office of Information Technology, Women in Science and Engineering, and RENCI.
Bryan Center, Von Canon A/B/C, Duke

Comments Off on Shaking Up Computer History: Finding the Women of ENIAC

Posted in History of Science, Science Education, Science Reporting, Technology

The Challenges of Innovation

Posted on September 2, 2008 by | 1 comment

In Business Week:

That is why isolating people in organizational silos is one of the biggest obstacles to innovation. Companies that are serious about innovation do everything possible to break down silos and encourage communication and collaboration across the organization and beyond.

But read the rest of the article as well. Sound familiar to any of you?

1 Comment

Posted in Society, Technology

What are teachers for?

Posted on August 31, 2008 by | 9 comments

Just as I posted this clip about the way kids use blogs and social networks, David Warlick posted this intriguing analysis of the way kids use online technologies. Dave posted an interesting graph that shows that kids assess that they acquire various skills equally in school and in off-school online environments.
What?
Yes, there used to be a time when you went to school to learn A, B and C: facts, learning skills, social skills with peers, and then went home to learn skills D, E and F: how to deal with adults, perform acts of personal hygiene, and learn to do household chores.
But today, the distinction between school and off-school is blurring. With the increasing use of the Web in teaching, the kids go to school to learn how to learn (including how to find information online), not to sponge-up facts as recited by the teacher. The font of knowledge used to be the teacher, but today that same knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, it just needs to be sought, understood, processed and connected to other pieces of knowledge.
The killer quote for me is this one:

I’d have to say, though, that the most interesting question that came from one of the teachers was something like, “If I gave you an assignment to make a video, would it bother you that I don’t know how to make a video and can’t teach you how?” The students glanced at each other and then shrugged in unison, each saying, “We’d just ask each other.” One of the boys said, “I’d probably ask someone else anyway.”

So, the teacher, apart from not being the source of information, is not even regarded as a source of skills on how to find information.
So, what will the role of teacher be in the future?
Not reciting facts. Not teaching technology. But managing the learning process: teaching critical skills – how to find, evaluate, connect and build upon the information that exists out there, how to determine what is important and what not, how to figure out what source is trusted and which one is suspicious.
The teacher of the future will be someone who coaches kids in the skills of media use and criticism. Instead of teaching facts, teaching how to evaluate facts. Instead of teaching this generation’s ideas and biases, enabling them to form their own. Schooling as a ‘subversive activity’ at its best.
Which is good.

9 Comments

Posted in Education, Technology

Atemporal and ahistorical Google Maps?

Posted on August 30, 2008 by | 9 comments

Online maps ‘wiping out history’:

Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map, the president of the British Cartographic Society has said.
Mary Spence said internet maps such as Google and Multimap were good for driving but left out crucial data people need to understand a landscape.
Mrs Spence was speaking at the Institute of British Geographers conference in London.
Google said traditional landmarks were still mapped but must be searched for.
Ms Spence said landmarks such as churches, ancient woodlands and stately homes were in danger of being forgotten because many internet maps fail to include them….

Really? Is this true? Aren’t Google Maps including a LOT of information? What do you think?

9 Comments

Posted in History, Technology

Just testing my FriendFeed widget….

Posted on August 29, 2008 by | 4 comments

Let’s see if this works, and if it is too wide for the sidebar:

4 Comments

Posted in Technology

iNaturalist rocks!

Posted on August 27, 2008 by | 7 comments

iNaturalist%20logo.gif
Thanks Bill for drawing my attention to iNaturalist which has the makings of an awesome site!
What is it?
It is essentially a Google Map where people can add pins every time they see an interesting critter: a plant, fungus, animal, etc. What is recorded is geographical coordinates and time when it was posted.
Moreover, people can link from the pins to pictures of the sighted critters if they upload them on Flickr (nice way to interlink existing social networking sites instead of reinventing the wheel). And they can put additional information, e.g., description of the habitat where they saw the creature. They can try to identify it and others can chime in agreeing or disagreeing on the ID. One can also view maps in various ways – by time, by broader groups (e.g., insects, birds…), or by the degree of agreement people have about the ID.
The site has, apparently, just started, thus the number of people and the number of sightings is still relatively small and limited to mainly a couple of geographic locations (mostly California and Washington state).
But, imagine a couple of years from now, with millions of people pinning millions of sightings, providing additional information and then having the community agree on the ID? How about ecologists putting in all their field survey data (at least after publication if not before)? How about everyone who participates in the Christmas bird hunt? What an incredible database that will be! Something that one can search with machines, build and test models, and use the results to test ideas about, for instance, effects of weather events (hurricanes, fires, floods, El Nino, etc.) or broader weather changes (e.g., Global Warming).
In order for this database to become useful, I hope that the developers, as soon as possible, make sure it is possible for all the info to be machine searchable. And also to provide, perhaps, various fields that will lure people to put in more information. Right now, there is a date when the pin is posted, but the date of actual sighting is much more important. Exact latitude and longitude. Perhaps altitude. Perhaps depth for aquatic organisms. Exact time of day of the sighting. Description of the habitat. Number of individuals. Measurements of different kinds (one often cannot infer from pictures if the critter is 3cm or 30cm long, for instance). Behavioral observations. And of course the ID.
Such a database would be biased of course. People will tend to record when they see something unusual, or cool, or charismatic megafauna, rather than grass or field of corn or a bunch of squirrels in a tree. Also, more critters will be found in urban areas, on farms, in parks and by the roadsides than in places where one needs climbing (or diving) gear, or an hour of work with a machete in order to get to the habitat. But ecological models using the database could be made to account for these biases anyway.
In any case, I urge you to bookmark this site, and to use it. And let’s see how it shapes up over time.

7 Comments

Posted in Birds, Ecology, Environment, Insects, Invertebrates, Plants, Technology

Court win for Fair Use

Posted on August 26, 2008 by | 2 comments

Judge Rules That Content Owners Must Consider Fair Use Before Sending Takedowns:

A judge’s ruling today is a major victory for free speech and fair use on the Internet, and will help protect everyone who creates content for the Web. In Lenz v. Universal (aka the “dancing baby” case), Judge Jeremy Fogel held that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).

2 Comments

Posted in Blogging, Open Science, Society, Technology

Obligatory Readings of the Day: Science Outreach and Online Behavior

Posted on August 25, 2008 by | 1 comment

Science promotion is not science outreach, damn it!:

We’ve all encountered this: the science communication department at a large university is usually devoted to marketing the research of that particular university. The so-called “outreach” products of such departments – the public talks, articles, and events for school groups – are all forced to suit this purpose. Mediocre research is described in glowing terms as “world-class” or “ground-breaking”. Poor communicators are put forward again and again so that they can be seen as a leader in their field.
This is promotion, not outreach. Describing this as educating about science is like saying that a car commercial is designed to teach viewers about engine design.

Interview with Eva Amsen:

There are different kinds of science outreach: One type of outreach is aimed at elementary and high school students to get them interested in a career in science. Another type is aimed at people who don’t work in science and never will work in science but who are curious about the world and like hearing about science. That is my favourite kind of outreach, because to a certain extent everybody *is* interested in science. People will say that they don’t like science, but what they don’t like is the memory of sitting in a science classroom in high school. Once you point out that there is science involved in many of he things they read about in the news every day – alternative fuels, stem cell therapy, forensics – it suddenly becomes interesting and you have an eager audience wanting to learn more about DNA fingerprinting or energy conversion.

You go to war with the data you have:

My interest in these experiments has less to do with questions of political polarization and more to do with interest in international news. Are internet readers more inclined to look for information about other countries, since they’ve got such a wealth of information at their fingertips? Or are they more inclined towards information on their home countries, since they can easily choose to avoid international news. Extrapolating from Pew’s data suggests that wired readers might consult more sources and perhaps consume a more diverse diet; Farrell’s research points to a strong homophily effect, which suggests the possibility of geographic cocooning.
Guess I’ll need to design my own experiments using whatever data I can as a proxy to indirectly answer the question… and hope other researchers find other data and other methods to challenge my assumptions.

1 Comment

Posted in Science Education, Technology

To those who do not like the democratization of knowledge

Posted on August 25, 2008 by | Comments Off on To those who do not like the democratization of knowledge

strip.gif
[Comic strip taken from Unshelved]
The anti-technology curmudgeons are back. Not just worrying about technology in classrooms (for which Dave has a great response), but culture in general.
Nice to see a couple of good responses to the doom-and-gloom crowd.
First we: DIGITAL_NATIVES by Jonathan Imme:

There used to be a time when we would be called ‘nerds’ or ‘techies’. Strange people with a near-obsessive compulsion to embrace new technology, and who’d rather communicate with their friends online than offline. People for whom the Internet itself was the ultimate source of information for solving any kind of problem whatsoever.
However, society is now slowly coming to terms with the fact that a whole generation is growing up that has only ever known the ‘digital age’, and has therefore entirely accepted the digital way of doing things. We call ourselves the Digital Native generation.
—————
Then again, we Digital Natives are not only characterized by our self-sufficient attitude to new technologies. We also have a different concept of the culture of information, communication and entertainment. We listen to music and watch films online. The fact that we also use file-swapping sites comes from the simple fact that we’re not about to pay for content on principle – no matter how exciting it may be.
—————-
Looking to the long-term, and in the light of our contemporary grasp of copyright law and our extensive recommendation and exchange activities among our friends, industry moguls would be better off sending us not to prison but to the business development units of the entertainment companies.

Then, in WIRED (also in print, I hear): The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn’t Led Us Into a New Dark Age by David Wolman:

When in doubt, blame the latest technology. Socrates thought the advent of writing would wreak havoc on the powers of the mind. Christian theologians denounced the printing press as the work of the devil. The invention of the telephone was supposed to make letter-writing extinct, and the arrival of the train — and later the car and plane — was going to be the death of community.
Now comes a technological bogeyman for the 21st century, this one responsible for a supposed sharp uptick in American shallowness and credulity: the Internet and its digital spawn.
————————–
Or consider the Public Library of Science: By breaking the publishing industry’s choke hold on the circulation of scientific information, this powerful online resource arms scientists and the masses alike with the same data, accelerating new discoveries and breakthroughs. Not exactly the kind of effect one would expect from a technology that’s threatening to turn us into philistines.

Comments Off on To those who do not like the democratization of knowledge

Posted in Society, Technology

Carrboro Creative Coworking – the pricing list released

Posted on August 24, 2008 by | Comments Off on Carrboro Creative Coworking – the pricing list released

You know I am excited about Carrboro Creative Coworking. Looking at the pricing list which was released today, I think there will be a place for me there I can afford….

Comments Off on Carrboro Creative Coworking – the pricing list released

Posted in North Carolina, Society, Technology, Workplace

There is no need for a ‘Creepy Treehouse’ in using the Web in the classroom

Posted on August 24, 2008 by | 7 comments

I love the way Web works! So, I was on FriendFeed earlier today and I saw through this link there that Paul Jones posted a note on Pownce (on which I am registered but never check) about this article in Raleigh N&O:
An iPod Touch for each student?

A Chapel Hill middle school could become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys.
It’s still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school officials know that students may use the iPod Touches more to download the new Jonas Brothers single than to tap the riches of human knowledge. But Principal Susan Wells says that to dismiss the technology as a distraction or a gimmick ignores today’s tech-driven world.
“It’s a world we better figure out, because we can’t ask our students to come into a classroom, put those things aside and sit in a row and think we’re interesting,” she said.
“We’re just not that interesting.”
……..snip……….
Mountain View High School in Meridian, Idaho, banned the use of all iPods last year when they suspected students were using them to cheat. Principal Aaron Maybon said some students would record audio of them saying answers to test questions. Then they’d wear a baggy sweater with the iPod concealed underneath and run the ear buds through the sleeve to their wrist. When they needed an answer, they would rest their head on their hand.
“We did have to take a hard-line approach to that,” Maybon said. “You can restrict all kinds of stuff and you can drive yourself nuts trying to police all of it. They [Culbreth] are probably kind of opening themselves up to something.”
Wells said Culbreth teachers are eager to start using iPods in class.
“These teachers say this pilot signals their commitment to our students to meet them where they are, as opposed to where the teachers are comfortable,” Wells said.
“They state their commitment to teach 21st-century skills, because technology is the future for students and teachers.”

Yup, this year, when both of my kids are out of Culbreth school!
A couple of days before, John Dupuis posted (check a long comment thread on FriendFeed) a link to When Professors Create Social Networks for Classes, Some Students See a ‘Creepy Treehouse’

A growing number of professors are experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, and other social-networking tools for their courses, but some students greet an invitation to join professors’ personal networks with horror, seeing faculty members as intruders in their private online spaces. Recognizing that, some professors have coined the term “creepy treehouse” to describe technological innovations by faculty members that make students’ skin crawl.

The ‘Creepy Treehouse’ is defined as, among else:

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.
With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

So, which is it? Good or bad? I think a lot of people (including many teachers and administrators) are not familiar with the Web sufficiently enough to see it is more than one fuzzy big Scary Place. Thus they get confused when they hear Good News and Bad News one after another – which is it? If you think that Web is a single thing, you will not understand the distinctions between different parts of it and different ways of using it. Thus, either you dedicate yourself to learn more about it, or you pick one side (Good or Bad) and stick to it.
There is a difference between using online techologies in teaching and teachers inviting students to friend them on Facebook. The former is acknowledgment that kids today have a very different worldview and behavior and we need to learn it and use it for education. The latter is personal intrusiveness.
Not using the Web in teaching these days is a criminal act of mis-education. It is preparing the 21st century kids for a 19th century world. FAIL.
Or, as David Warlick says:

I’m pretty sure that it was Alan Kay who said that, “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.” Does it have to stay that way? At what point does it stop being the technology and become the medium — and become transparent?
This is a barrier for us, this sense that we’re striving to modernize classrooms by using more technology. I still do not think that the kids do this. When they go out and buy the latest game system, they are not buying the latest technology. They’re buying better games. They are buying better experiences.
Folks out there who are making valuable and sustainable uses of technology, do you still think of it as integrating technology? If not, when did that stop? When did it become sustainable?
I guess for me, it happened when I started thinking about my job as entirely about inventing and communicating, rather than helping people integrate technology.

7 Comments

Posted in Education, Technology

10 Alternative Ways To Follow Democratic Convention News

Posted on August 24, 2008 by | 2 comments

Links by Myrna the Minx, something for you to bookmark and use. I’ll probably use FriendFeed and visit some of my favourite blogs (including Pam and the Blenders who will be there – see the NYTimes article about the bloggers at the Convention).

2 Comments

Posted in Media, Politics, Technology

CollectiveX

Posted on August 23, 2008 by | 2 comments

I have no competing interests, nobody is paying me to say nice things, but I have helped set up a CollectiveX group site and it was easy and I like its functionality a lot:

2 Comments

Posted in Technology

Looking for the mouse…

Posted on August 22, 2008 by | 3 comments

Watch what Clay Shirky said at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008 (transcript here):

The quote that everyone likes, for a good reason, is the following:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
—————–
It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing– from now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse.

Kevin Kelly likes it. Bjoern Brembs says:

Most scientists have not made the transition of this four-year-old, yet.

The thing is….it’s not just screens. I keep looking for the mouse and the “post comment” button whenever I read a book!

3 Comments

Posted in Society, Technology

Aggregator of RSS feeds about Gynecology

Posted on August 22, 2008 by | Comments Off on Aggregator of RSS feeds about Gynecology

Vedran keeps cranking these at an incredible rate (the first numbers indicate these aggregators are quite comprehensive and the feedback is that they are useful) – here is the latest one: Aggregator of RSS feeds about Gynecology

Comments Off on Aggregator of RSS feeds about Gynecology

Posted in Medicine, Technology

The 21st Century Workplace is wherever you and your laptop happen to be

Posted on August 22, 2008 by | 3 comments

12 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today. As you know, point #4 is one of my pet peeves:

4. People don’t have to be in an office. This is the one I wish most businesses would get, right now, right away. It’s so obvious once you get away from the traditional mindset. Traditionally, people worked in offices (and of course most still do). They go into the office, do their work, go to meeting, process paperwork, chat around the watercooler, clock out and go home.
These days, more and more, that’s not necessary. With mobile computing, the cloud, online apps and collaborative processes, work can be done from anywhere, and often is. More people are telecommuting. More people are working as freelancers or consultants. More businesses are allowing people to work from anywhere — not just telecommuting from home, but literally anywhere in the world. People are forming small businesses who have never met, who live on different continents. People have meetings through Skype or Basecamp group chat. They collaborate through wikis and Google apps.
If you are stuck in the traditional mindset, think hard about what things really need to be done in an office. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for working in an office, but often those barriers have other solutions you just haven’t explored yet.
The advantages of a decentralized workplace are many. Workers who have more freedom are happier, and often more passionate about their work. They enjoy collaborating with others who are smart and talented, and work is no longer drudgery. Flexible schedules work well for many people’s lifestyles. Mobile computing is actually good for many types of businesses where people need to be on the go. And what really matters isn’t that the worker is present, but that the work is being done.

3 Comments

Posted in Society, Technology, Workplace

Geeks for Government!

Posted on August 20, 2008 by | Comments Off on Geeks for Government!

Jessica reminds us that several scientists and geeks (i.e., Web designers and programmers) are running for various political offices this year. Some of them even got together on an ActBlue Geek Page.
Of them all, I particularly like the savvy campaign ways of Sean Tavis who is running for Kansas State House, trying to displace a Creationist, anti-woman Neanderthal from that seat. Both Kevin Z and Ed Cone noted his online savvy and ability to raise funds online by using the Web well. Listen to this NPR story about this and read his XKCD-style stick-figure cartoons.
And if you want to donate to any of these guys, go for it. We need more people in government who actually understand how the world works.

Comments Off on Geeks for Government!

Posted in Politics, Technology

A college student gets to redesign a town!

Posted on August 16, 2008 by | Comments Off on A college student gets to redesign a town!

Downtown Revival:

The decline of downtown Gastonia, N.C., began long before Jennifer Harper was born, exacerbated by the collapse of the state’s textiles manufacturing industry and the exodus of retailers to suburban shopping malls. But the young Gastonia native is lending her design skills to help restore the town center to its prime – and its roots.
Harper, who graduates in August with a master’s degree in industrial design from North Carolina State University, walked into city hall a few months ago when she heard that city officials were planning a new convention center for the downtown area.
———————
This time it was city officials who were surprised – at the quality of the design work coming from a college student.
“They were really interested in the historical aspects of the design,” Harper says. “And they were very pleased with the concept.”
City officials have promised to include Harper’s name on a plaque in the park. And she’ll receive credit from her professors at NC State’s College of Design, who have agreed to accept the Gastonia park design as Harper’s master’s project.

Comments Off on A college student gets to redesign a town!

Posted in North Carolina, Technology

Rage 2.0

Posted on August 16, 2008 by | 16 comments

Why Rage? Because Henry inspired me (though Mrs.Gee made him edit out the ‘excessive’ language). Why 2.0? Because I am all gung-ho about everything 2.0. So there!
So, like Henry, I will now proceed to rage about something….
Hotels
I’ve been traveling a lot lately, often staying in some very top-of-the-line hotels around the USA and Europe. Lovely hotels. Very comfortable. Very clean. Great service. Good food. Lots of cool amenities. More and more environmentally friendly. Nothing really to complain about. And I certainly do not want to single out Millennium UN Plaza hotel just because something that irks me very much happened there. Something that reminds me that the hotel industry as a whole has not entered the 21st century yet.
So, let me collect my thoughts and start with my own premises as to what a hotel needs to provide. At a minimum, every hotel room in every hotel in the world should provide these four essentials:
1) Bed. Hopefully a bed that is comfortable, does not squeak, and will not break down under my puny weight.
2) Bathroom. Hopefully a clean one with cold and hot running water and a decent pressure in the shower head.
3) Electricity. It is pretty essential – for lights and for recharging cell-phones, camera batteries, blackberries and laptops.
4) Online Access. Free (well, included in the room price), fast and reliable.
Most hotels are really good at providing the first three:
If your bed breaks, you call the reception and in 5 minutes your bed is either fixed or you are moved into a beautiful large suite for the rest of your stay.
If something in your bathroom leaks, you call the reception, and their plumber will be up in your room in no time, and if it cannot be fixed in 5 minutes you are moved into a beautiful large suite for the rest of your stay.
If your power goes off or a light-bulb burns, you call the reception, and their electrician will be up in your room in no time, and if it cannot be fixed in 5 minutes you are moved into a beautiful large suite for the rest of your stay.
But, if your online access does not work, you call the reception and they have no idea how to help you. They cannot send their internet technician to your room because they do not have one. Last weekend, when I called the reception to inquire about a sudden loss of online access, the receptionist forwarded me to tech support. I was naive – I thought it would be a hotel employee. Nope – the first question:
– Where are you?
– Room 3424
– Which hotel? (Yikes! Not in my hotel?)
– Millennium UN Plaza.
– Which city is that? (OMG, this one is continents away!)
Anyway, it was not my job to talk to the tech. Hotel should have taken that call and figured that out. Part of their hotel service. What they are paid for. I have already figured out that my computer is OK and that the problem is with the hotel network (soon I learned that the entire hotel lost it, not just me). There was nothing that the nice person in India could do remotely and I knew that from the start. When I was forwarded to the tech, I expected a hotel employee who could actually physically come up and check the network.
I checked at the desk a couple of times, politely. As the day progressed, I saw more and more people, more and more agitated, asking the same question “When the hell are you going to fix this!?” To which the poor receptionist could only shrug her shoulders – it is not something she was taught to deal with. The hotel had no way to deal with it. They do not understand yet that Internet is one of the Four Basic Essentials of a hotel room. They do not even use it on their own computers (how do they run a hotel? how do they provide up-to-date travel/weather/shopping/tourist information to guests without the Web?!).
As Henry notes:

Actually, I do know the reason for all these things. It’s because the people at the other end of the phone, or across the desk, are often powerless to address the problem in hand, because they are too dim, or haven’t been trained, or that the systems with which they are meant to be dealing are so distributed and fragmented so that any one person in the company feels no sense of responsibility.

That is exactly right – nobody there could do anything, or cared to try anyway. Even with a potential riot at hand, with dozens of red-faced guests shaking their fists at them. “We are aware of the problem”. Shrug.
Wifi was working in the lobby, as someone soon discovered, which soon was packed by busy travelers furiously typing on their laptops. People doing their work. Work for which constant online access is a must. Kind of work that most busy travelers these days do (most people never travel more than 100 miles from their birthplace/home and then do not stay in hotels, but those who travel tend to travel a lot and are highly connected people – the clientele of this hotel for sure). The hotel industry has to wake up to this reality.
Then I checked their ‘internet cafe’ in the basement. A tiny, ancient PC, with a tiny screen, the only browser being an old version of Internet Explorer, access through dial-up modem and all that for 50 cents per minute! No thanks.
24 hours later, the hotel was still internet-less. I checked my e-mail once I got home the next day.
Over my recent travels, I noticed several different continua in the hotel industry concerning the Internet.
Some only have an “office” just like the one I described above, but more and more do provide either wifi or cable or both in each room.
Some provide crappy access, some are decent, and a rare hotel provides a really good, fast, reliable access.
Some provide access for free as they should (and many savvy travelers now consciously pick such hotels, which should be a hint for the rest of the industry), some charge relatively low prices ($5-10 per day), and some charge exorbitant amounts of money (hundreds of dollars for a few hours, e.g., the hotel in Trieste I stayed in back in April).
The three continua do not necessarily overlap – free wifi can be crappy and an expensive one can be good, and reverse.
But what is common to all of them is that this is all outsourced and if they have a problem they do not have a person on staff who can fix the problem, someone who is intimately familiar with the particular hotel’s network.
I went back to my room and looked around. There were several objects in the room that, if there was a problem, hotel would fix quickly, yet they looked so quaint, so 20th century, so useless in today’s world.
There were alarm clocks. Why? Mrs.Coturnix and I are not gadget-happy folks, yet between us we had at least 4 or 5 “things” that have the alarm clock function on them (two cell phones, a blackberry, two laptops).
There were radios. Who listens to the radio (except locally, when at home – that’s different)? If I want music, I do not want to depend on some local DJ and his taste. I will go online and find exactly the music I want to hear at any given moment (and put it on my iPod if I want to). If I want news, I do not want to depend on the scheduling and choices of the radio news team. I will go online and find exactly the news and information I need at that moment. Even if I overhear some piece of news on the radio, I will have to go online to check if it is true, because Corporate Media is not to be trusted – it is unreliable.
There was a TV. I have not turned on a TV in a hotel in years! What for? For entertainment, TV is crappy – there is so much more and better stuff online. And anyway, I am traveling, my entertainment is likely happening outside of my room – sightseeing, meeting bloggers, participating in a conference…. As for news and information, TV is even less reliable than radio. The Web rules.
There was a telephone. A land line. Why? Because that is the only way to call the reception desk until they adopt a more modern technology. When was the last time you used your room land-line phone to make a call out? To a friend? A decade ago?
I’ll be perfectly happy to get a room without an alarm clock, without a radio, without a TV and without a telephone if I am guaranteed flawless perfect online access included in the price of the room.
Which brings me to my second Rage of the day….
Olympics
I love Olympics. It is one of the most exciting equestrian events in the world. Oh, there are other sports there as well, some really cool to watch as well. Even the exotic, strange sports with unfathomable rules, like baseball.
As a kid, I watched the Olympics every four years. Belgrade TV was very good at it. We had some good sportscasters who knew when to shut up and let the athletic drama unfold itself in silence. We watched all the sports in which Yugoslavia had representatives (especially if they had a chance at a medal), e.g.,. basketball, handball, waterpolo, shooting, kayak/canoe, tennis, table-tennis, long jump, even soccer. And we watched a lot of other events because they were exciting, and had exciting personalities from other countries. And yes, we got to see the equestrian events, at least an hour for each of the three disciplines. In real time. We rooted for the good ones, or for the underdogs, or for whoever was neither Russian nor American. And we had great fun watching together, with good food and drinks.
In 1980., we hated the Americans for boycotting the Moscow games, for undercutting the very idea of the Olympics, the time when politics is supposed to be pushed aside and people around the world enjoy the achievements of the best athletes no matter where they come from and under which flag they compete. Yet the Games were fun to watch. The basketball tournament was legendary – Yugoslavia, USSR and Italy had incredible battles between themselves for the three medals, unforgettable matches. And without Americans, a lot more athletes from smaller countries got into the spotlight and won medals. It was almost more fun because the Americans were not there – more diversity.
In 1984., we hated the Russians for boycotting the Los Angeles games, for the same reasons as four years earlier. We hated them even more because this led into the Games becoming an American self-love-fest like we never saw before. It was boring. American nationalism in our faces hour after hour….
If the Games were given to Belgrade for 1992 (lost them in the last round of voting to Barcelona), there may not have been a war there. We would have something to strive for, something unifying, and something that would potentially bring jobs and money (and yes, national pride for the whole country, not its little parts). We were so excited about the candidacy alone. Darn!
The 1992 games were the first for me here in the USA. It was the pay-per-view year. I was working at the barn at the time. We got some money together and one of the guys bought the pay-per-view for the entire equestrian package and taped it all. We gave him the blank tapes and he made copies for all of us. I watched the entire equestrian program like that. And I watched some of the other events on TV and was sick of the way it was made: mad American nationalism, 100% focus on US athletes and on sports in which those athletes were meant to win a gold (otherwise it was a Satanic unfairness, or the referees were biased America-haters, or whatever excuse could be found except the idea that some athlete from another country could actually be better and on that day luckier than the American one).
Since then, I did not watch the Games.
This year, I am not watching either. And no, I am not boycotting. If I did not boycott the 1980 and 1984 games, why boycott these ones? How are they different? Every government in the world does stuff some of us don’t like. The purpose of the Olympics is to inspire progress in international relations. For people of different nations to see and get to like the people from all other nations, by watching their athletes, seeing they are human, identifying with their agonies and triumphs. Games are supposed to undermine the politics of bad governments. Some are a little better than others. But Reagan’s USA, Brezhnev’s USSR and today’s China – not much different even in degree. I will not let politics intrude into the Games ideals. If governments want to boycott, they have the right to do so, but they are idiots if they do. Individuals – whatever anyone wants to do for whichever reason. I have none.
But the main reason I am not watching this time is because I am incapable of watching them on my own terms. I do not want the NBC coverage. I want to watch events I want to watch. I want to watch them when I want to, how I want to, where I want to.
I see that danah thinks along the same lines:

I want an Olympics where the “best” is broadcast on TV, like now. But I also want an interactive version. Take gymnastics. I want to know on each apparatus who is up live. And I want to be able to switch between different cameras and choose my own view through the stadium so that I can watch whichever competitor I want. I want to be able to watch live, all day, on ALL sports (even judo and the other weird ones where Americans are not so present). I want interactive live and I want to be able to pull down and follow any individual Olympian or team through their events at a later point. I want the Olympics to be treated as a bunch of spliceable objects that I can remix live for my own viewing pleasure. And I want to be able to see it ALL. Is that that hard to ask for? Hell, I’d be willing to pay for such interactive watching options. And I’d certainly be willing to watch ads to see things LIVE. But boy does it annoy me to watch a “live” NBC broadcast that is already well reported on in the NYTimes.

Is there any way the next Olympics can be done like this? With no exclusive media rights given to anyone? I want to read the athletes’ blogs. I want to see the amateur movie clips from the events (and behind the scenes, e.g., in the horse stables at the equestrian venue) on YouTube. I want to listen in on press conferences live. I want it all on my computer live, the way I want to see it. Not the way some 20th century, dinosaur-age TV producer thinks I want to see it.
End of Rage.

16 Comments

Posted in Media, Society, Technology, Workplace

Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility

Posted on August 15, 2008 by | Comments Off on Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility

Vedran has done it again: Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility

Comments Off on Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility

Posted in Technology

The MIST facility

Posted on August 15, 2008 by | Comments Off on The MIST facility

First Line of Defense:

A new facility at North Carolina State University will help provide increased protection to first responders by testing their turnout gear against potentially harmful chemical and biological threats.
The Man-in-Simulant Test (MIST) laboratory, located in NC State’s College of Textiles, will allow researchers to evaluate the capabilities of protective garments against non-toxic vapors that resemble chemical and biological agents. The new facility will give researchers the necessary technological advances to provide test results and analysis faster than similar facilities.
The MIST facility is the only one of its kind located at a university in the United States. The laboratory was funded by a two-year, $2 million grant from the Department of Defense secured by U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge, who serves on the U.S. Homeland Security Committee.
In the main testing chamber, researchers can test the penetration of chemical vapors through protective clothing on mannequins and human subjects. During testing, subjects can perform the same tasks as a first responder, such as climbing a ladder, crawling, or carrying a victim to safety, in an environment that can be controlled for temperature, wind speed and vapor concentration.

Comments Off on The MIST facility

Posted in North Carolina, Science Practice, Technology

The Virtual Computing Lab

Posted on August 14, 2008 by | Comments Off on The Virtual Computing Lab

My old neighbor, while I was living in Raleigh, is making some headlines now: Power to the People:

Within weeks of completing his master’s degree in advanced analytics at North Carolina State University, Arren Fisher scored a job in data analysis at the Laboratory Corporation of America.
“It involves predictive modeling,” Fisher explains. “In layperson’s terms, super duper data mining.”
Despite the tight national economy, Fisher and his classmates are getting lots of job offers because they’re experienced users of the advanced software programs that marketing firms utilize to predict consumer behavior. But they didn’t have to book time in a computer lab to use the software. They had an entire university computer lab – with hundreds of advanced programs – available on their personal computers and laptops at any hour of the day or night.
The system – called the Virtual Computing Lab – is the wave of the future, say the information technology experts at NC State. It’s convenient, free and powerful for the users, and saves the university money by easing the demand placed on traditional computer labs in libraries and academic departments.

Comments Off on The Virtual Computing Lab

Posted in Science Practice, Technology

Aggregator of RSS Feeds about disability and special needs issues

Posted on August 9, 2008 by | Comments Off on Aggregator of RSS Feeds about disability and special needs issues

Aggregator of RSS Feeds about disability and special needs issues, another one made by Vedran. As always, you can contact him with suggestions for more feeds to add.

Comments Off on Aggregator of RSS Feeds about disability and special needs issues

Posted in Medicine, Technology

Aggregator of news about infectious diseases

Posted on August 8, 2008 by | Comments Off on Aggregator of news about infectious diseases

Aggregator of news about infectious diseases, another one made by Vedran. As always, you can contact him with suggestions for more feeds to add.

Comments Off on Aggregator of news about infectious diseases

Posted in Medicine, Technology

The myth of the creative class

Posted on August 7, 2008 by | 1 comment

Jeff Jarvis – The myth of the creative class:

Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don’t lament that, not for a moment.
The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I’ll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit – as defined by the public rather than the priests – which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.
————–snip————-
I’ve long disagreed with those who say that copyright kills creativity, for I do believe that there is no scarcity of inspiration. But I now understand their position better. I also have learned that when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.

1 Comment

Posted in Blogging, Society, Technology

BioBarCamp is in session!

Posted on August 6, 2008 by | Comments Off on BioBarCamp is in session!

You can follow BioBarCamp virtually on FriendFeed and livecast!

Comments Off on BioBarCamp is in session!

Posted in Blogging, Open Science, Technology

Paperless Office? Bwahahahaha!

Posted on August 5, 2008 by | 7 comments

Today, I have everything I need on my computer, and so do most working scientists as well. Papers can be found online because journals are online (and more and more are Open Access). Protocols are online. Books are online. Writing and collaboration tools are online. Communication tools are online. Data collection and data analysis and data graphing and paper-writing tools are all on the computer. No need for having any paper in the office, right? Right.
But remember how new that all is. The pictures (under the fold, the t-shirt is of Acrocanthosaurus at the NC Museum of Natural Science) of my old office are only five years old! You know I am a Web junkie. If I could have survived without paper, I would have ditched it all. But I could not (and the pictures show only half of the office – there were two large file cabinets full of reprints behind the photographer – my brother – and much, much more, plus more in the lab itself):

Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Academia, Open Science, Science Practice, Technology, Workplace

In which I agree with Shermer on something….

Posted on August 4, 2008 by | 7 comments

Michael Shermer – Toward a Type 1 civilization. Ignore the nutty libertarianism – read only this sentence:

Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone.

7 Comments

Posted in Open Science, Politics, Society, Technology

Praxis #1 – second call for submissions

Posted on August 4, 2008 by | Comments Off on Praxis #1 – second call for submissions

PraxisThe new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century – Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open – send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern.
The business of science – from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity – those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in analytic way than personal, if possible (i.e., not “I will cry as my minipreps did not work today”, but more “let me explain the reasons why I chose to work with advisor X instead of Y” or “how to give a good talk”, or “why publish OA” or “how does an NIH section work?”) and perhaps most importantly how the new technology – mainly the Internet – is changing the world of science.

Comments Off on Praxis #1 – second call for submissions

Posted in Academia, Carnivals, Science Education, Science Practice, Technology

Online publishing and networking tools for kids and their teachers

Posted on August 4, 2008 by | 1 comment

Classroom 2.0:

…the social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.

NoodleTools: Basic Language Literacy:

Online Opportunities for Young Writers – Publications Which Accept Student Submissions

1 Comment

Posted in Blogging, Education, Technology

The Web about the Web

Posted on August 2, 2008 by | 3 comments

CNN creates blogging policy, encourages employees to engage in sockpuppetry:

Chez Pazienza, a former CNN producer who was fired six months ago for having a personal blog, obtained a copy of the new blogging policy that his former employer sent out to all staff (I’ve also copy and pasted it below). While it allows employees to blog, they have to get it approved by a supervisor and it bars them from mentioning anything that CNN would cover — in other words, it keeps them from talking about just about anything but their own belly lint. And even that would be ruled out if we all found out tomorrow that a new form of AIDS is spread through belly lint.
What especially caught my eye was the rules for commenting on other websites or chat rooms:

The 10 Commandments of the Social Web:

It’s clear that the social web has become increasingly complex and with so many places to communicate it is frequently challenging to figure out where the best place to go and talk is. This blog and others are all striving to cover the numerous tools available to you to express yourself to those that you know and those that you’ll never meet or speak to.

Live Webcams: Hospitals and Labs:

Would you like to watch live what’s happening at a hospital or in a lab? Here are some options:

Also Baruch Marine Lab Web Cam and University of South Carolina Roach Camera.

3 Comments

Posted in Blogging, Media, Technology

Web 2.0, Science 2.0, OA, etc.

Posted on July 31, 2008 by | Comments Off on Web 2.0, Science 2.0, OA, etc.

There is a new study out there – Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial – that some people liked, but Peter Suber and Stephan Harnad describe why the study is flawed (read Harnad’s entire post for more):

To show that the OA advantage is an artefact of self-selection bias (or any other factor), you first have to produce the OA advantage and then show that it is eliminated by eliminating self-selection bias (or any other artefact).
This is not what Davis et al did. They simply showed that they could detect no OA advantage one year after publication in their sample. This is not surprising, since most other studies don’t detect an OA advantage one year after publication either. It is too early.
To draw any conclusions at all from such a 1-year study, the authors would have had to do a control condition, in which they managed to find a sufficient number of self-selected self-archived OA articles (from the same journals, for the same year) that do show the OA advantage, whereas their randomized OA articles do not. In the absence of that control condition, the finding that no OA advantage is detected in the first year for this particular sample of journals and articles is completely uninformative.
The authors did find a download advantage within the first year, as other studies have found. This early download advantage for OA articles has also been found to be correlated with a citation advantage 18 months or more later. The authors try to argue that this correlation would not hold in their case, but they give no evidence (because they hurried to publish their study, originally intended to run four years, three years too early.)

How to do research – special free sample:

Key to doing research is having a discovery network in place to do the grunt work of navigating through the data smog for you. But even more importantly, constructing a discovery network is central to your professional formation, because it makes you ask yourself who you are and what sort of things you want to discover.
In many ways, your discovery network already discovers material out there and then evaluates it for you automatically, filtering through only the material you need. But the machine doesn’t know what you are working on at the moment, and of course is not as finally discriminating as your brain. So you need to filter the stuff your filters have been sending you. This is where the art comes in.

The confusion over data rights:

There was a time when I had the naive opinion that academics were all about the open dissemination of science, especially the sharing of basic scientific data. Alas, it turns out that for some the public domain is not exactly that. I suppose that this is a minority opinion, but it is clear that the confusion about scientific data and ownership needs to be resolved and fast. It should be obvious, but it isn’t and even those of us who should know better get confused. In the above case, if there was a paper where the data source had not been cited properly is understandable, but downloading and using sequences; Yowza!!!
There is a distinction between data and content/information. Too many people have trouble making the distinction and as a result there is confusion the ownership rights around the two. Anyway, this issue isn’t going anywhere soon it seems.

Virtual world interoperability:

As the number and variety of virtual worlds increases, so will the demand for interoperability. This will include not only teleporting between worlds, but also interworld communications, interworld asset portability, interworld currency exchange and many other issues. The technological aspects are an important part of this, and the public beta is an important step in the right direction. However, there are many social and business aspects that will also need to be addressed, and these may be even more difficult than the technological ones.

So open it hurts:

Web 2.0 visionaries Tara Hunt and Chris Messina blogged and twittered about their romance to all of geekdom as if it were one of their utopian open-source projects. Sharing their breakup has been a lot harder.

Five Life-Changing Mistakes and How I Moved On:

I’m out meeting with the press right now to promote SmartNow.com and I’m getting quite a reaction. Not to the business, but to me. You see, it’s been awhile since I met with them, at least eight years. Many of the people in the press are same ones I met all those years ago. Many I don’t know. No matter if they knew me before or not, they all ask the same question: “What mistakes have you made and what have you learned from them?” And this isn’t a normal “check-the-box” reporter question. This is a loaded question with heavy reference to my past, some would say my infamous past.
First some background, I was the CEO of Pets.com. In case you haven’t heard of it, Pets.com and its mascot, the Sock Puppet, became the symbol for the dotcom bubble and its subsequent bust. Some have even charged me personally with bringing down the U.S. economy. Pets’ short period of success was fueled by positive press about the company and myself. Pets received even more press when it failed.
As the public CEO, I failed, and it was a very public failure. In fact, I was labeled one of the biggest failures ever. How bad was it? I had people laugh in my face when I introduced myself for years after the company closed. It happened as recently as a year ago. A couple of people asked me what it felt like to be one of the best-known failures in the U.S. Most just walked away from me. One woman told me to my face that I was a loser. I could go on and on, but you get the point: I became a symbol for something greater than myself, and we aren’t talking puppet envy here.
What most people don’t know is that the very same week that Pets.com failed, my marriage of seven years failed as well. Actually, it had been failing for a long time. It became officially over that week. My husband decided to call it quits the day before I announced to the employees and the public markets that I was shutting down Pets. It was a really bad week…….

A Whole Lotta Thoughts On Blog Network Success (bonus tips included):

First, though, I want to enumerate some reasons why running a blog network, blog ad network or a blog “alliance” is harder than folk realize. But hopefully some of this post can help solve some of the stumbling blocks, as well as highlight the issues so folks go into these projects with eyes wide open.

Cuil: Why I’m trying to get off of the PR bandwagon…:

Journalists thrive off of conflict. That’s why we want a competitor to Google so badly and why we play up every startup that comes along that even attempts to compete with Google.
The problem is that competiting head on with Google is not something that a startup can do.

Comments Off on Web 2.0, Science 2.0, OA, etc.

Posted in Blogging, Open Science, Science Practice, Technology

The Web: how we use it

Posted on July 30, 2008 by | Comments Off on The Web: how we use it

Best time to appreciate Open Access? When you’re really sick and want to learn more about what you have.:

* Complete OA still a long way off. One thing I re-learned during this was that it is incredibly frustrating to see how much of the biomedical literature is still not freely available online. Shame on Elsevier and all the others who are still hoarding this important information.
* Thanks to those providing OA. Related to the above issue, I came to appreciate was the societies and publishers have decided to go the OA route. I spent a lot of time reading material from ASM, BMC, PLoS, Hindawi, and a few others. And I am grateful to these groups.
* Google rocks for science searching. Cuil, not so much. If you need to find something about some scientific concept or issue, Google really does a great job. While I was out, Cuil was announced as a possible new competitor for Google in searching. From my experience, Cuil is really really lame for science searches. I like their presentation in a magazine style. But the search results were not so good.

Free Microsoft tools for scholarly communication:

* This is for real. Don’t mistake the Microsoft research division, which doesn’t sell anything, for the Microsoft product divisions. Tony Hey believes in open access and open data, and is putting Microsoft resources behind them. For background, see Richard Poynder’s interview with Tony Hey (December 2006), and my previous post on the Microsoft repository platform (March 2008).
* The new tools are free of charge. The announcement doesn’t say they will ever be open source, but Microsoft encourages open-source tools in the open chemistry projects it funds. So it’s possible.
* The authoring add-in should help publishers (including OA publishers) reduce costs, at least if they want to provide XML, and it should help them decide to use XML. The repository platform and e-journal service are even more direct contributions to OA. I don’t know much about the e-journal service, apart from a swarm of great ideas raised at a Microsoft brainstorming meeting in November 2005. And I don’t know much about the repository platform except that it will be interoperable, play well with Microsoft tools like SQL Server Express, use semantic processing to create arbitrary relationships between resources, and serve as a back end compatible with DSpace and EPrints front ends. I look forward to user reviews.

Nature Publishing Group launches Manuscript Deposition Service:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today launches the first phase of its Manuscript Deposition Service. The free service will help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates for public access.
From today, the NPG Manuscript Deposition Service will be available to authors publishing original research articles in Nature and the Nature research journals. NPG expects to be able to announce the availability of the service for many of its society and academic journals, and for the clinical research section of Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, shortly.

Who Writes Wikipedia?:

“When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.”

On information overload:

Over the last few months I have witnessed a steadily growing stream of writers declaring news feed, blogging and/or social media bankruptcy, citing such things as information overload, hobbies becoming ‘work’ or even the fact that so many people on the internet can be jerks about such small things.

Gene Wikiality:

Still, for the gene wiki to become what the researchers envision, they’ll need informed people — lots of them — who are willing to log in during a coffee break or three, check out an entry or two, and make necessary edits and additions. They’ve built it; it’s time to see if the scientific community will come.

The passionates vs. the non passionates (definitely also check the discussion on FriendFeed):

“….Some things that I’ve noticed about late adopters (er, non-passionates) and how they use computers they really are much different than the passionates who I usually hang out with. They really don’t care about 99% of the things I care about. FriendFeed? Yeah, right, they haven’t even heard of it, and if I try telling them about it, they say “why would I do that?” See, most people just want to work their 9 to 5 jobs, go home, pop open a beer, sit on the couch, watch some movies, play with their kids, etc.
Stay up all night talking to strangers? No way, no how. Most of the non-passionates I know are just barely trying out Facebook (90 million users). Twitter? Yeah, right. (Two million).
Heck, these people don’t even know how to use an address bar in a browser. Think I’m kidding? I’ve watched how normal people (er, non-passionates) use computers. You go to a search box, and type “Yahoo” even if you are already on Yahoo. Think I’m kidding? Ask the engineers over at Yahoo how many times a day people search for Yahoo on Yahoo’s own search engine. Same over at Google.
When I travel, I look at what people use — thanks to being on planes a lot in the past few months I get to see what people use. Most are using technology I used back in 2000. That’s eight years ago, or 100 in Internet years. I look at them the same way you’d look at them if they told you they just started using a telephone.
The exception? Blackberry. But show me a Blackberry user that knows how to look up Google Maps or uses the Web more than once a week? I’ll show you a passionate. I’ve talked to hundreds of people in airports and I haven’t found a Web-using Blackberry user yet that’s not a passionate (meaning, someone who is really passionate about technology).
And let’s not forget the fact that of the six to seven billion people in the world only about a billion even have a computer in the first place. So, that means that five to six billion people really don’t care about Windows or OSX or all that.
We can be so arrogant sometimes to forget that there are more people who are NOT like us, than who are like us in the technology world……”

Passion, Early Adopters and the Mainstream:

Sometimes I wonder whether people have forgotten why we do what we do. Most people who blog do it because they have a passion for what they are writing about. Many people creating these fancy Web 2.0 sites are doing it because there is some passion for what they are doing. Even “how to be successful” guides highlight that you should have passion for your work if you want to be successful. Given this need for passion, I find it interesting that people are trying to focus on the mainstream users. Granted, the big reason for this is massive traffic and huge revenue, but how do you get there? You have to start somewhere, right?

Passionates:

The activity is the thing to focus on, not the technology. Technology enables the activity, and people will get excited about the technology if they’re excited about the activity first and the benefits of the technology has been explained to them. But you don’t make passionate photographers by showing them lenses, you make passionate photographers by showing them pictures that rip your heart out.
That said, I understand the point Robert is making. There are some people (early adopters) who will try out anything simply because it’s new and interesting. But those are technology early adopters…a very small population of people who get a large amount of attention because of their predilection to try new things. A much larger population (although much more fractured) are those people who are already passionate about some activity or other, and can become passionate about new technology as it relates to that activity, but they just haven’t been introduced properly.

Correct. I am a technological Luddite. I barely use HTML and would not recognize any kind of code if it hit me in the face. I have had a cell-phone (not an iPhone!) for a year now and I barely use it. I never got a Blackberry. My iPod-Touch is still in its box two months after I got it. I do not check e-mail or Web on anything smaller than a laptop. I do not regularly read tech blogs (except an occasional post about social aspects of the Web). I am not interested in the newest shiny thing. Technology itself does not excite me, it is what I can do with it. I usually wait for the Darwinian process to work out its magic first, then adopt the winners, once forced into it because everyone else is using it and expects me to use it, too.
I use Dopplr to meet people who travel (or when I travel). I have a profile on LinkedIn only because everyone else does – I never check it. I have logins elsewhere mainly so I can check where the links are coming from to my blog (e.g, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr….). I never signed up for Twitter as it does not do anything I need it to do. And that is it.
But I was an early adopter of blogs, because my blog let me shout and be heard and get feedback. I was an early adopter of Facebook, when it got started some years ago, but I have tested and deleted most of the apps there – I use it for only a couple of things (and those come via e-mail notifications) so I do not spend time on it. I am an early adopter of FriendFeed because it is a great source of good links, filtered by people who are interested in the same things I am. I am an early adopter of Open Access evangelism because I lost my library access privileges at the University and could not get the papers to blog about. If I were still doing science, I’d be using CiteULike probably, but not most of the myriads of other “science social networks” that are springing up seemingly every day. We all have our own passions and our own needs.

Comments Off on The Web: how we use it

Posted in Blogging, Media, Open Science, Technology

The Web’s navel-gazing

Posted on July 29, 2008 by | Comments Off on The Web’s navel-gazing

We knew the web was big…
The Blogosphere Needs to Mature – But How?
Tracking Facebook’s 2008 International Growth By Country
The Web’s Dirty Little Secret
The Future of the Desktop

Comments Off on The Web’s navel-gazing

Posted in Blogging, Society, Technology

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. Really?

Posted on July 19, 2008 by | 3 comments

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship by James A. Evans, ironically behind the paywall, has got a lot of people scratching their heads – it sounds so counter-intuitive, as well as opposite from other pieces of similar research.
There is a good discussion on FriendFeed and another one here.
A commentary at the Chronicle of Higher Education is here, also ironically behind the paywall.
Here is the press release and here is the abstract:

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print–scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse–electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

For now, let’s see what others say:
Peter Suber:

* It’s hard to say much based on a newspaper summary and a press release. But at first glance, Evans’ results conflict with the many studies showing that OA articles are cited significantly more often than non-OA articles. These studies differ from one another on how to explain the correlation between OA and increased citation counts, but they agree on the correlation. However, there may be ways to reconcile the two sets of results. For example, authors may cite fewer articles when they have more to choose from, but they may still cite OA articles relatively more often than TA articles. Or the average number of citations per article may decline with the growth of the total number of articles accessible to authors, but OA articles might bring the average up, and TA articles might bring it down. Or the multiplication of ejournals may be narrowing the scope of the average paper, and therefore shortening the average reference list, but citations may be growing overall and the of citations of OA articles may be growing faster than the citations of TA articles. (On the other side, the Economist said that “the same effect applied whether or not a journal had to be paid for” –though without specifying exactly which effect.)
* Evans’ results also appear to conflict with a recent study by Arthur Eger, Database statistics applied to investigate the effects of electronic information services on publication of academic research – a comparative study covering Austria, Germany and Switzerland, GMS Medizin – Bibliothek – Information, June 26, 2008. Eger found that “a larger content offering coincides with a dramatic increase in Full Text Article requests, and an increase in Full Text Article requests, after about 2 years, coincides with increased article publication.” If Evans is right that “less is sampled”, then the two studies are definitely incompatible. But if look only at Evans’ conclusions about citations, the two studies may be compatible. Evans is saying that access to more literature reduces the number of different sources one cites, and Eger is saying that it increases (“dramatically” increases) the number of articles one requests or samples. Researchers may be viewing more articles but citing fewer. Are they using their enhanced access to browse neighboring topics? Are they exploring serendipitous discoveries, only some of which turn out to be citable? Does their wider reading help them zero in on citable research?

Brandon Keim asked (and commenters are answering):

What do you think, scientist and scholar Wired Science readers, especially those whose careers have spanned the jump from paper to screen? What have you gained — or lost — from the internet’s rise?

Philip Davis:

In other words, it is not the additional online access that this causing the change in citation behavior but the tools that accompany the online access — tools that allow readers to link to related articles, rank by relevance, times cited, etc. It is these tools that signal to the reader what is important and should be read. The result of these signals is to create herding behavior among scientists, or what Evans describes as consensus building.
A highly-efficient publication system can come with unanticipated consequences — the loss of serendipity. In an earlier blog post, we discuss how the Internet is changing reading behavior in general, reducing the depth of inquiry. In another blog, we discuss how signaling can help readers save time.

David Crotty:

Evans brings up a few possibilities to explain his data. First, that the better search capabilities online have led to a streamlining of the research process, that authors of papers are better able to eliminate unrelated material, that searching online rather than browsing print “facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature.” The online environment better enables consensus, “If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.” The danger here, as Evans points out, is that if consensus is so easily reached and so heavily reinforced, “Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly.” And that’s worrisome-we need the outliers, the iconoclasts, those willing to challenge dogma. There’s also a great wealth in the past literature that may end up being ignored, forcing researchers to repeat experiments already done, to reinvent the wheel out of ignorance of papers more than a few years old. I know from experience on the book publishing side of things that getting people to read the classic literature of a field is difficult at best. The keenest scientific minds that I know are all well-versed in the histories of their fields, going back well into the 19th century in some fields. But for most of us, it’s hard to find the time to dig that deeply, and reading a review of a review of a review is easier and more efficient in the moment. But it’s less efficient in the big picture, as not knowing what’s already been proposed and examined can mean years of redundant work.

Martin Fenner:

The greater availability of research papers in recent years thanks to electronic publication (and open access) should broaden and not narrow the papers that we read and ultimately cite in our own publications. But looking at my own behavior when reading papers or writing a publication, and thinking about many discussions we had on related topics, these findings make perfect sense.
Today’s technology allows us to make the distribution of scientific papers in electronic form very efficient, and thanks to this technology we have new business models (author-pays) and an ever-increasing number of journals. Access to research articles is now easier, cheaper and for a broader audience than in ever was before. This is of course a wonderful development, but unfortunately creates a new problem: information overflow and how to filter out the relevant information.
Twenty years ago the typical researcher would use the personal or institutional journal subscription to regularly follow the important papers in his field. Index Medicus and Current Contents were used to find additional articles, but they were cumbersome to use. Today few researchers regularly read printed journals. Most papers are found by searches of online databases and by subscriptions of tables of content by email or RSS. There are many clever tools to facilitate this, but most people probably are overwhelmed by the information and stick to some very specific research interests and high-profile journals.

Thomas Lemberger:

In any case, the study highlights two complementary strategies in information retrieval: finding relevant papers by targeted searches versus staying informed on a broad range of topics by systematic browsing. In our Google-driven era, we may have the tendency to forget the importance of good old-fashioned ‘table-of-content-skimming’ to stimulated cross-disciplinary thinking, widen our horizon and cultivate scientific curiosity.
Perhaps it is a specificity of printed media to provide “poor indexing” and therefore enforce broad exposure to unrelated areas of research. On the other hand, some web technologies already help to browse through vast amounts of online publications (for example an RSS aggregator helps me to generate a daily literature survey; this can be further combined, for example here at Frienfeed, with other community-centered feeds; other aggregators highlight information by automatic clustering: Postgenomic and Scintilla). However, these tools remain imperfect and, in our reflection on the future of scientific publishing, we will need to find the right balance between the two strategies above and think of how the increasing efficiency of searching engines can be complemented by means providing continuous exposure to diversity.

Bill Hooker does the most detailed analysis of the paper so far (so click and read the whole thing, graphs and all):

What this suggests to me is that the driving force in Evans’ suggested “narrow[ing of] the range of findings and ideas built upon” is not online access per se but in fact commercial access, with its attendant question of who can afford to read what. Evans’ own data indicate that if the online access in question is free of charge, the apparent narrowing effect is significantly reduced or even reversed. Moreover, the commercially available corpus is and has always been much larger than the freely available body of knowledge (for instance, DOAJ currently lists around 3500 journals, approximately 10-15% of the total number of scholarly journals). This indicates that if all of the online access that went into Evans’ model had been free all along, the anti-narrowing effect of Open Access would be considerably amplified.
In fact, the comparison between print and online access is barely even possible when considering Open Access information. The same considerations of cost — who can afford to read what — apply to commercial print and online publications, but free online information has essentially no print ancestor or equivalent. Few if any scholarly journals were ever free in print, so there’s a huge difference between conversion from commercial print to commercial online on the one hand, and from commercial print to Open Access on the other.
Indeed, I would suggest that if the entire body of scholarly literature were Openly available, so that every researcher could read everything they could find and programmers were free to build search algorithms over a comprehensive database to help the researchers do that finding, then in fact the opposite effect would obtain. Perhaps it’s true that the more commercial online access you have, the less widely a researcher’s literature search net is cast, but as I mentioned above I see no reason to attribute that more to the mode of access than to its cost.

Perhaps with greater accessibility, people have quit citing old papers which they used to cite just because everyone always cites those papers without even reading them. Those who have the least access, tend to cite very old stuff, textbooks, popsci articles, e.g., these guys. Those who have good access can both browse and search and find what is truly relevant to their work. They cite only stuff that they have actually read and found useful. Perhaps people are just getting more honest.

3 Comments

Posted in Academia, Open Science, Technology

Web 2.0 and education

Posted on July 14, 2008 by | Comments Off on Web 2.0 and education

What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education by Paul Anderson:

The report establishes that Web 2.0 is more than a set of ‘cool’ and new technologies and services, important though some of these are. It has, at its heart, a set of at least six powerful ideas that are changing the way some people interact. Secondly, it is also important to acknowledge that these ideas are not necessarily the preserve of ‘Web 2.0’, but are, in fact, direct or indirect reflections of the power of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and macro level that a billion Internet users produce. This might well be why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, maintains that Web 2.0 is really just an extension of the original ideals of the Web that does not warrant a special moniker. However, business concerns are increasingly shaping the way in which we are being led to think and potentially act on the Web and this has implications for the control of public and private data. Indeed, Tim O’Reilly’s original attempt to articulate the key ideas behind Web 2.0 was focused on a desire to be able to benchmark and therefore identify a set of new, innovative companies that were potentially ripe for investment. The UK HE sector should debate whether this is a long-term issue and maybe delineating Web from Web 2.0 will help us to do that.

Comments Off on Web 2.0 and education

Posted in Blogging, Education, Technology

Running the green light….

Posted on July 10, 2008 by | 4 comments

Antony Williams, who I had a great time with over coffee yesterday, alerted me to his blog post about a new chemical with some amazing properties – shining UV light onto the solution turns the liquid green instantaneously, and removal of the UV source results in instant change of color from green back to transparent.
Aaron Rowe and Kyle Finchsigmate also blogged about it.
You can see the chemical structure here:
greenUVmolecule.png
See those two rings with nitrogens highlighted in blue? See the bond that connects those two rings? That bond is broken by UV light and immediately rebinds once the light is gone.
Think of the applications for this!
And here is a video so you can observe the color changes for yourself:

4 Comments

Posted in Fun, Science News, Technology

Educational Benefits Of Social Networking

Posted on June 22, 2008 by | Comments Off on Educational Benefits Of Social Networking

This should be interesting to all of us, be it people who study capabilities of online education or people who study teen online behavior. It also appears to be a part of gradual shift from media scares about “online predators” to a more serious look at what the Web is bringing to the new generations and how it changed the world:
Educational Benefits Of Social Networking Sites Uncovered:

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts, going against what results from previous studies have suggested.
The study found that, of the students observed, 94 percent used the Internet, 82 percent go online at home and 77 percent had a profile on a social networking site. When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.
————-snip—————–
“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. “Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential.”
————-snip—————–
Interestingly, researchers found that very few students in the study were actually aware of the academic and professional networking opportunities that the Web sites provide. Making this opportunity more known to students, Greenhow said, is just one way that educators can work with students and their experiences on social networking sites.

Comments Off on Educational Benefits Of Social Networking

Posted in Education, Technology

How to top-down control the “grassroots”

Posted on June 12, 2008 by | 5 comments

GOP-ers really do not understand the Internet, do they?
More…
(Via)

5 Comments

Posted in Politics, Technology

3D visualization

Posted on June 2, 2008 by | Comments Off on 3D visualization

Another SCONC event:
RENCI to Show the Power of Visual Communications at Lunchtime Bistro:

The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) invites the public to a Renaissance Bistro lunchtime demonstration and lecture from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, June 26 in the Showcase Dome room at the RENCI engagement center at UNC Chapel Hill.
The Bistro is free and includes lunch on a first-come, first-served basis.
RENCI experts, Eric Knisley, 3D visualization researcher, and Josh Coyle, new media specialist, will demonstrate three-dimensional visualizations and interactive touch screen displays. Attendees will observe a brief demonstration of the Showcase Dome, a research environment equipped with a 15-foot tilted multi-projector dome display for interacting with data in an immersive 180-degree field of view.
RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill is located in the ITS Manning Building on UNC Chapel Hill campus, 121 Manning Drive. Parking is available in the UNC Hospitals lot on Manning Drive. For directions, see http://www.renci.org/focusareas/eduoutreach/bistro.php.
RSVP by June 23 to jshelton@renci.org.

Comments Off on 3D visualization

Posted in North Carolina, Science Education, Science Practice, Science Reporting, Technology

Equestrian sports in Serbia

Posted on May 24, 2008 by | Comments Off on Equestrian sports in Serbia

Before I went back to Belgrade, I did not know if there was a website with information about the racing and equestrian activities there. There used to be one some years ago, but it has not been updated in a very long time. So, I was happy when, while there, I was given URLs of the Belgrade Racecourse website and the Federation for Equestrian Sport of Serbia website. The former looks good and easy to navigate.
The latter is little old-timey in appearance but that may be on purpose, to emphasize the long tradition. It is also a little too PDF-happy for my taste – it is OK to use the format for things like forms that need to be downloaded, filled out and sent in, but it is not needed for calendars and results – I would have organized them differently.
What is missing on both sites is an English version (for at least some parts of the content) and something interactive – perhaps a forum or a blog. There used to be one for racing/trotting folks and one for equestrians on the old site, but not any more. For someone like me, the only way to communicate with old friends and current people is via Facebook. There should be a better way especially that so many of the old riders now work as trainers in other countries and would probably like to have a way to keep in touch.
What I would also like to see is an accumulation of historical material. I remember many volumes of books at the office back then and there, full of information about Serbian (then Yugoslav) horses, from pedigrees to results to newspaper clippings. I’d love to see all those things scanned in and organized in some way on the site.

Comments Off on Equestrian sports in Serbia

Posted in Balkans, Horses, Technology

Google Maps are not enough…

Posted on May 24, 2008 by | 1 comment

…so other smart people are developing new kinds of maps – follow the links within to explore.

1 Comment

Posted in Society, Technology

Spider Boat

Posted on May 16, 2008 by | Comments Off on Spider Boat

I’d like to sail on this thing:

Bay Area engineer Ugo Conti has sailed the world, but has always suffered from seasickness. A queasy stomach became his motivation to design “Proteus” – a spider-like sea craft made for smoother sailing. He designed the Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel to cross the ocean while flexing with the movement of the waves. And it may change the way people take to the high seas.

Comments Off on Spider Boat

Posted in Technology

Removing the Bricks from the Classroom Walls: Interview with David Warlick

Posted on May 12, 2008 by | 2 comments

David Warlick is a local blogger and educator. We first met at the Podcastercon a couple of years ago, then at several blogger meetups, and finally last January at the second Science Blogging Conference where David moderated a session on Science Education.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job?
I’ve been an educator for more than 30 years, starting as a middle school social studies, science, and math teacher. Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that when I entered the classroom, desktop computers didn’t exist. It constantly astounds me what has been happing around us.
I remained in the classroom for almost 10 years, after which I moved to a central office position supporting instructional technology for a rural school district in NC. I’d been seduced by computers (Radio Shack Model III), and taught myself how to program them, since there wasn’t much instructional software available. After that, I moved to the North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction where I wrote and supported curriculum for the state, ran a state-wide bulletin board service (FrEdMail) and finally built the nation’s first state department of education web site.
I left the state in 1995, and started consulting, doing business as The Landmark Project. the Internet was still a wilderness, and I wanted to build landmarks for teachers and learners. I maintain a number of web sites which, combined, receive more than a half-million page views a day. I’ve also had the opportunity to visit educators across the U.S. and Canada, and even in Europe, Asia, and South America.
It seems that I should be near the end of my career. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it.
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I always wanted to be Johnny Quest’s father, Dr. Benton Quest (1960s cartoon series). Wikipedia describes him as: “…’one of the three top scientists in the world,’ and apparently something of a Renaissance man; his scientific and technical know-how spans many fields.” I wanted to travel the world, have great toys to play with, and solve problems for people. I got part of it, in that I get to travel the world and play with great toys, and there’s some adventure, thought it has more to do with navigating exotic airports than defeating evil despots.
But now that all the travel is starting to wear me down, I’m thinking I’d like to settle back to one or two interests, and study/work the hell out of them. Digital photography has always appealed to me. I also enjoy composing music with a computer. I’d also like to find some topic and set up a web site/blog/social network around that topic. No idea, though, what it might be.
You are quite an evangelist for the use of online tools in the classroom. You used to teach with a blackboard and chalk – how and when did you get to embrace the modern tools in education?
My main subject was History. It’s what I had studied in college. But I always taught about History from the perspective of technology, focusing in on the invention of the bow & arrow, agriculture, paper, the steam engine and explore how these technologies affected and changed our cultures. The first time I saw a Radio Shack Model I computer operate, I knew, at that moment, that this was one of those technologies that was going to change everything. Here was a machine that you operated by communicating with it. I was thunder-struck. I was seduced.
However, it was sometime later that I started to learn, and am continued to learn that it isn’t the fact that we have a machine that we can communicate that makes computers so important. It’s that they give us new ways of communicating with each other. This, I’ve learned as an educator — not as a technologist.
SBC%20Saturday%20004.jpgOne of the important concepts you write about is the Flat Classroom. Can you, please, explain it to my readers?
It’s simple. According to a recent PEW Internet & American Life study, 64% of American teenagers have produced original digital content and published it to a global audience. How many of their teachers are published authors, artists, musicians, composers, or film makers? From the perspective of our children’s information experience, they are more literate than many of their teachers. Our classrooms are flat.
The central question that we should be asking today is, “How do we drive learning if we can no longer rely on gravity?” Where do we get the energy. It’s a sobering and threatening idea for most educators. However, I think that once we can get to the other side of this problem, we, teachers and learners, will be much happier. Here are just a few ideas:
* We need to redefine literacy to reflect today’s information landscape and not just teach it as skills, but to instill it as habit.
* We, as teachers, need to model learning, not just inflict it. We need to practice new literacy in front of our students.
* What students learn has become less important. The answers are all changing. It as important today to be able to invent answers to brand new questions. What’s become more important is how students are learning.
* We need to understand our students information experience and learn to harness the energy that comes from it, to replace the vanishing energy of gravity.
“Please turn off your cell-phones, i-Pods and other electronic devices, kids” – why is this sentence, spoken at the beginning of a class period, wrong? What should a teacher say instead?
This is wrong on so many levels. But principally, we have to recognize, accept, and respect our students out-side-the classroom information experiences. For the first time in history, we are preparing our children for a future we can not clearly describe. So much is changing and so fast. I think that there are clues in our students information experience that we can use to better prepare them for that future.
I recently read about six schools in New York City (where they’ve banned cell phones) that are giving cell phones to all of their students (2,500 of them), preloaded with 130 minutes of talk time. More minutes are added based on test scores, good behavior, and other activities. The teachers are starting to use text messaging to share homework assignments, remind them of upcoming tests, and other activities. What I’d love to see is text-messaging become a platform for doing homework assignment in collaboration.
I know that this may seem weird to some, but no less (NO LESS) weird than many of the applications we use every day would have seemed 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
What is your basic advice to teachers who are not themselves Internet-savvy, yet want to take a plunge and get their students to produce online content, be it blogs, podcasts or videos? How do you explain the pros and cons and the usual traps some teachers fall into?
Be a good teacher, and pay attention to your students information experiences. Your students can teach you a lot about these new tools, and what better way to model yourself as a lifelong learner.
Become 21st century literate. Once you’ve accomplished that, then you can teach yourself what ever you need to know. Most of the teachers who are doing extraordinary things in their classrooms didn’t learn it in a workshop. They learned it by engaging on online conversations with other innovative educators.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I have to plead the 5th on this one. I do not read any science blogs regularly, though SEED may well take the place of WIRED as my favorite magazine. I’m fascinated by science, all areas of science. Science constantly reminds me of the frontiers we have yet to chart.
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
It thrills me to see that part of learning science is learning how to talk about science. And this is what the Science Bloggers conference is about. It’s about the softer side of our explorations, bringing them home, and making them a part of the everyday conversations of the rest of us. I think that, deep down, we all crave frontiers.
It was so nice to see you again at the Conference and thank you for the interview.
============================
Check out all the interviews in this series.

2 Comments

Posted in Education, SBC'08 Interviews, Science Education, Technology