1) The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has little or nothing to do with web accessibility. (It may, pending the results of NFB v Target. But not now.) You need to check out the requirements in Section 508 if you'll be working with/for federal agencies. You need to read up on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), including Joe Clark's criticism of them. I suggest starting with WebAIM and Mark Pilgrim's excellent (though dated) Dive Into Accessibility.
2) Hire a good writer and a good photographer, or an agency which has 'em. Content is king. "Punching up" the design doesn't mean a thing without that foundation.
I've been using the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) for about three weeks, and it has a loooong way to go. It's slow and lacks user interface basics like "Undo." The next version just adds more half-implemented bells and whistles.
Hopefully Yahoo will buy Zimbra a few usability engineers. And an accessibility consultant. And a fleet of documentation writers. If their track record holds (del.icio.us, flickr), this will be good for folks like me who could care less what dotcom is at the helm, but just want the product to be less mediocre.
IMO, this article covers most of what this guy says, and is more intelligent about pedagogy:
Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Tim McGee. "The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian." Computers and Composition 19 (Dec 2002), 453-470.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows all the rules of English grammar, which is a twisted, irregular, dynamic beast. Besides, different nationalities, organizations, kinds of writing, etc. use different grammars. There isn't just one grammar to learn!
English grammars are made up of piles of different standards. Many are quite arbitrary and silly. Some of the rules MS Word enforces (that/which, don't end sentence in preposition, etc) were invented in the 19th century by English compositionists who thought English grammar needed to be more systematic and like Latin. Or by Strunk and White, the masters of arbitrary rule-creation, who have perpetuated the idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" way to write.
Of course, most of the problems cited in this discussion (and committed on/.) aren't grammar problems at all, but errors of spelling or usage...
In my experience most of the classes you take the first couple of years are not going to be useful for you (in a specific sense) in the long term.
What if you have no idea what you'll be doing 10 or 15 or 20 years from now? Most 18-year-old students don't. Hell, I'd argue most people don't, even after they have degrees and kids and jobs and lives. A year or two working or traveling or both won't hurt.
My guess is the hyperbole here (7*24=168) is intended to make the argument that if X amount of work is compromising your health, it really doesn't matter if you work X+20 hours, or all the time.
cbd.
CACM lead story
on
ACM on E-Voting
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"The problems and potentials of voting systems" is the lead story of this month's Communications of the ACM. Unfortunately, the content is not available online unless you are an ACM Portal subscriber or have access through a library. I've read a couple of the articles since my copy of CACM arrived earlier today, and it is very important stuff indeed.
Here's a short excerpt from one article, "Small vote manipulations can swing elections":
[Considering the 2000 Florida election,] an adversary capable of changing one vote per voting machine could have swung 25 electoral votes from Bush to Gore. This would have made the final electoral college totals 246 votes for Bush versus 291 votes for Gore, rather than the actual 271 votes for Bush versus 266 votes for Gore. Thus, an adversary with the ability to manipulate one vote per machine could have changed the outcome of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election.
In my mind, ACM should be trying a lot harder to get the information in this issue of CACM into the public eye. Not only the article I've excerpted, but all of them.
Yes! Or the Megasuperblisteringium, or the Optimizitrollion. Hell, if the names are gonna be silly, they might as well be REALLY silly. None of this wimpy silliness.
It's because standards created from whole cloth and handed down from on high are invariably awful.
Often true. But many (if not most) documention style guides aren't developed prescriptively, in the manner you describe. They're developed descriptively, from existing documentation. And they're frequently updated, revised, and extended. IMO Apple's style guides are an excellent example of this method of development.
Without gloves, biking for longer than 30 seconds is painful many winter months. My commute (in western Illinois, less than an hour from Missouri) is only 2 miles, and I wear Thinsulate gloves, and my hands are STILL cold when I get to work.
Personally, I'd like to see a heat pump that moved heat from the small of my back (well insulated by a pack full of books and student papers) to my hands, nose, and ears!
Preference for Anglo-Saxon vs. French/Latin reflects 19th century fascination with Anglo-Saxon because it was "more natural" than French/Latin. (Interestingly, some people believed A/S was harder and therefore better.) This "rule" is probably the tiredest of the tired old saws folks are spouting out here. You'd do much better to have a friend who's willing to spill a little red ink peer-review your presentation than waste time looking up etymologies.
I have to disagree with "start at the top." I think many professors and instructors are suspicious, and rightly so, of being told they must use a certain text, software, or other product in a course.
For me, pedagogy should drive technology, not the other way around. I consider the courses I'm assigned, how I like to teach, and what I would like to teach---then look for the specifics that match my pedagogical frame.
These are good suggestions which work in many disciplines. And you need not complete a service learning project, or ask the student to present on actual research, to get him or her to care -- and the benefits extend beyond enforcing academic honesty.
Well, homework need not be graded to generate credit or to be a requirement. For example, you can do the "check, check-plus, check-minus" thing. Combine that with enforcement, and some more creative assignments, and cheating is no longer less trouble than doing the effin homework.
And the comparison to the "corporate world" should really go like this: Hey, I did all the work on this report. How come my boss's name goes at the top? And how come his golf partner got a raise, not me?:)
Whatever you were told, and whatever you did, the bottom line is that you must (1) follow academic honesty or cheating policies, and (2) respect the student's privacy at all times. The former are usually locally derived; the latter is a matter of federal law: FERPA, commonly called the Buckley Amendment.
You can throw the proverbial book at students. But you have to do it privately.
SunRays are also very small, which is good for installations where labs are also used for classrooms. Students don't have to avoid kicking minitowers shoved under the desk or "prairie dog" to see over hardware sitting on top of desks. This is a problem where I work now.
Where I was a graduate assistant, SunRays are used for a writing environment -- 30 in each of five classrooms. The desktop interface is basically a Windows 9x clone built with TWM (which was adequate, but I think IceWM or something else would have been better).
Can someone point me to the web site of Konigsberg University, mentioned out in this article? How about something written by Samuel Forrester in a peer reviewed journal? How about something Google or any search engine that refers to him? If he's one of the world's leading immunologists, I'd like to read some of the other things he's written.
Some good suggestions in this thread. I'd definitely stick with LaTeX. I sometimes got better results making pdfs with ps2pdf, and sometimes better with pdflatex, so tweak 'em both.
I never quite understood the machinations of.out,.lof,.toc, and other files, but I suspect that if you have problems with hyperlinks, twiddling with those would solve your problems.
Also, comp.text.tex is your friend, through Google Groups or a newsreader near you.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has little or nothing to do with web accessibility. (It may, pending the results of NFB v Target. But not now.) You need to check out the requirements in Section 508 if you'll be working with/for federal agencies. You need to read up on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), including Joe Clark's criticism of them. I suggest starting with WebAIM and Mark Pilgrim's excellent (though dated) Dive Into Accessibility.
2) Hire a good writer and a good photographer, or an agency which has 'em. Content is king. "Punching up" the design doesn't mean a thing without that foundation.
"Microsoft Zimbra" makes perfect sense. Worst. Webmail. Ever.
I've been using the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) for about three weeks, and it has a loooong way to go. It's slow and lacks user interface basics like "Undo." The next version just adds more half-implemented bells and whistles.
Hopefully Yahoo will buy Zimbra a few usability engineers. And an accessibility consultant. And a fleet of documentation writers. If their track record holds (del.icio.us, flickr), this will be good for folks like me who could care less what dotcom is at the helm, but just want the product to be less mediocre.
IMO, this article covers most of what this guy says, and is more intelligent about pedagogy:
Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Tim McGee. "The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian." Computers and Composition 19 (Dec 2002), 453-470.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows all the rules of English grammar, which is a twisted, irregular, dynamic beast. Besides, different nationalities, organizations, kinds of writing, etc. use different grammars. There isn't just one grammar to learn!
/.) aren't grammar problems at all, but errors of spelling or usage...
English grammars are made up of piles of different standards. Many are quite arbitrary and silly. Some of the rules MS Word enforces (that/which, don't end sentence in preposition, etc) were invented in the 19th century by English compositionists who thought English grammar needed to be more systematic and like Latin. Or by Strunk and White, the masters of arbitrary rule-creation, who have perpetuated the idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" way to write.
Of course, most of the problems cited in this discussion (and committed on
cbd.
In my experience most of the classes you take the first couple of years are not going to be useful for you (in a specific sense) in the long term.
What if you have no idea what you'll be doing 10 or 15 or 20 years from now? Most 18-year-old students don't. Hell, I'd argue most people don't, even after they have degrees and kids and jobs and lives. A year or two working or traveling or both won't hurt.
cbd.
My guess is the hyperbole here (7*24=168) is intended to make the argument that if X amount of work is compromising your health, it really doesn't matter if you work X+20 hours, or all the time.
cbd.
"The problems and potentials of voting systems" is the lead story of this month's Communications of the ACM. Unfortunately, the content is not available online unless you are an ACM Portal subscriber or have access through a library. I've read a couple of the articles since my copy of CACM arrived earlier today, and it is very important stuff indeed.
Here's a short excerpt from one article, "Small vote manipulations can swing elections":
In my mind, ACM should be trying a lot harder to get the information in this issue of CACM into the public eye. Not only the article I've excerpted, but all of them.
cbd.
Yes! Or the Megasuperblisteringium, or the Optimizitrollion. Hell, if the names are gonna be silly, they might as well be REALLY silly. None of this wimpy silliness.
cbd.
I couldn't agree more. Most CPU names (and I indict Intel and Transmeta too---"Efficeon," bleah) are silly.
cbd.
It's because standards created from whole cloth and handed down from on high are invariably awful.
Often true. But many (if not most) documention style guides aren't developed prescriptively, in the manner you describe. They're developed descriptively, from existing documentation. And they're frequently updated, revised, and extended. IMO Apple's style guides are an excellent example of this method of development.
cbd.
That is called a fresnel lens, and a really good one is piles of fun on a good sunny day.
cbd.
Biking!
Without gloves, biking for longer than 30 seconds is painful many winter months. My commute (in western Illinois, less than an hour from Missouri) is only 2 miles, and I wear Thinsulate gloves, and my hands are STILL cold when I get to work.
Personally, I'd like to see a heat pump that moved heat from the small of my back (well insulated by a pack full of books and student papers) to my hands, nose, and ears!
cbd.
Very good. See also this a hilarious summary of Tufte's essay in PowerPoint style.
cbd.
Preference for Anglo-Saxon vs. French/Latin reflects 19th century fascination with Anglo-Saxon because it was "more natural" than French/Latin. (Interestingly, some people believed A/S was harder and therefore better.) This "rule" is probably the tiredest of the tired old saws folks are spouting out here. You'd do much better to have a friend who's willing to spill a little red ink peer-review your presentation than waste time looking up etymologies.
cbd.
Please, please, please send this question along. This is my problem too.
cbd.
One way: when you post something to Slashdot, reach the many, many faculty and graduate students who read it by including a URL. Two others:
I regularly read all of these sites looking for courseware news. I know other folks who do the same.
cbd.
I have to disagree with "start at the top." I think many professors and instructors are suspicious, and rightly so, of being told they must use a certain text, software, or other product in a course.
For me, pedagogy should drive technology, not the other way around. I consider the courses I'm assigned, how I like to teach, and what I would like to teach---then look for the specifics that match my pedagogical frame.
cbd.
Hear, hear!
These are good suggestions which work in many disciplines. And you need not complete a service learning project, or ask the student to present on actual research, to get him or her to care -- and the benefits extend beyond enforcing academic honesty.
cbd.
Well, homework need not be graded to generate credit or to be a requirement. For example, you can do the "check, check-plus, check-minus" thing. Combine that with enforcement, and some more creative assignments, and cheating is no longer less trouble than doing the effin homework.
:)
And the comparison to the "corporate world" should really go like this: Hey, I did all the work on this report. How come my boss's name goes at the top? And how come his golf partner got a raise, not me?
cbd.
Whatever you were told, and whatever you did, the bottom line is that you must (1) follow academic honesty or cheating policies, and (2) respect the student's privacy at all times. The former are usually locally derived; the latter is a matter of federal law: FERPA, commonly called the Buckley Amendment.
You can throw the proverbial book at students. But you have to do it privately.
cbd.
SunRays are also very small, which is good for installations where labs are also used for classrooms. Students don't have to avoid kicking minitowers shoved under the desk or "prairie dog" to see over hardware sitting on top of desks. This is a problem where I work now.
Where I was a graduate assistant, SunRays are used for a writing environment -- 30 in each of five classrooms. The desktop interface is basically a Windows 9x clone built with TWM (which was adequate, but I think IceWM or something else would have been better).
cbd.
And you don't have to remember if you're typing on a Sun keyboard or PC keyboard...
cbd.
Can someone point me to the web site of Konigsberg University, mentioned out in this article? How about something written by Samuel Forrester in a peer reviewed journal? How about something Google or any search engine that refers to him? If he's one of the world's leading immunologists, I'd like to read some of the other things he's written.
thanks,
cbd.
Some good suggestions in this thread. I'd definitely stick with LaTeX. I sometimes got better results making pdfs with ps2pdf, and sometimes better with pdflatex, so tweak 'em both.
.out, .lof, .toc, and other files, but I suspect that if you have problems with hyperlinks, twiddling with those would solve your problems.
I never quite understood the machinations of
Also, comp.text.tex is your friend, through Google Groups or a newsreader near you.
good luck,
cbd.