You may find Th e Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird helpful. It's essentially a primer in basic graphic design intended for people exactly like you. Here's the paragraph from the introduction entitled "Who Should Read this Book?":
If you are squeamish about choosing colors, feel uninspired by a blank browser window, or get lost trying to choose the right font, this book is for you. In it, I take a methodical approach to presenting traditional graphic design theory as it applies to today's web site development industry. While the content is directed towards programmers and developers, it provides a design primer that will benefit readers at any level.
The table of contents in brief:
Layout and Composition
Color
Texture
Typography
Imagery
The text is reasonably friendly, and has lots of illustrations to demonstrate what the author discusses. It won't turn you into a graphic design guru, but it will probably help you figure out where to start. In general, a good book. My one real criticism is that in his discussion of legitimate sources of images, the author doesn't discuss public domain or the Creative Commons, only doing it yourself, royalty-free (but copyrighted) images, hiring professionals, and obtaining rights-managed images.
Another good book, not specifically about web design but a mainstay of introductory design classes, is The Non-Designer's Design Book. In the second edition, it covered:
Proximity
Alignment
Repetition
Contrast
Four chapters on typography
Note that I have linked to the third edition, which is scheduled for release later this month and may cover slightly different things. I don't know how much or even if it's been updated.
The same author puts out a book entitled "The Non-Designer's Web Book". I do not think that this book will be as helpful to you. It covers a lot of very basic material about building web sites (some basic HTML, acceptable image formats, and so on), and it sounds like you've already got that part of it.
Archivists typically have to respect the rules of the communities they serve regarding access to materials. Sometimes that means, say, putting a bunch of somebody's steamy love letters under lock and key until all of the named parties have died off. Other times it means managing intellectual property rights. And sometimes you run into cases like this one, where the cultural rules regarding the material are more involved.
I still think my favorite example was a living history project - the researchers involved had been recording traditional stories. One of them was an explanatory myth about why it snows. The problem was that there was a strong tradition requiring that the story be told only when there is snow on the ground. There's a doozy of an access control problem, unless you take the cheap way out and declare that there is always snow on the ground somewhere.
A library should include the Internet, and books, but also staff who teach, providing some means of focusing people on the knowledge that they have become however fleetingly interested in. Without that you're unlikely to have a library that does anything but collect dust and books.
The "staff who teach" bit is especially important. The common belief is that "kids these days search all the time, of course they know how to do it." But when I've taught lessons on using Google, I've found that very few of them were aware of the existence of advanced search operators like "inurl:" or "site:" for narrowing the scope of your search. Many of them typed in natural language queries like "How many drunk driving accidents were there in Austin Texas last year?" When the results were bad, they'd type in another version of the same query, but still phrase it as a question (e.g. "What's the drunk driving rate in Austin Texas?"). In one case, a student actually exclaimed in surprise when I demonstrated that you can search for an exact phrase by putting it in quote marks, which is fairly basic.
And once they find results, they rarely spend much time evaluating the credibility of the site. It's not practical, given a large number of students, for the teacher to check every single reference. But when I've been grading I try to follow up at least one citation per paper, and some of the stuff my students have selected is just plain bad. In one case, a student who had written a paper comparing drinking habits in Europe and the US cited a web site written by a sophomore at a high school reporting a conversation about drinking with an unnamed European exchange student. Quite aside from the dubious source, the site wasn't even nicely designed. It's harder to look past a shiny surface; but in this case the pink text on a gray background in MS Comic Sans was kind of a giveaway that maybe this site isn't the most trustworthy one in the world.
... the speed of young people's web searching indicates that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority and children have been observed printing-off and using Internet pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them.
Comfort with searching and effective searching are two different things. This is one area where libraries are actively developing. I'm enrolled in library school at the moment, and I've been following job postings. There are a lot of library jobs these days for "instructional librarians" who teach information skills exactly like these, usually by visiting other teachers' classes, and also by holding their own mini-classes. We're not really doing enough, though. An awful lot of librarians, particularly the older ones who are comfortably set in their ways, still expect that people will come to the library when they need information, which is simply no longer the case.
I overheard two undergraduates talking in the lobby of the library on my campus - one of them said "Let's get out of here. I don't like the library." The other one said "Yeah, it's not home." I've been thinking a lot about that ever since. How can the library compete with "home"? The answer I've come up with is that it can't. Since we can't expect most people to come to us, we've got to go to them. Some of that can definitely be digital - Ask-a-librarian services over IM are rapidly proliferating, for example. I've already mentioned the instructional librarians visiting other teachers' classes. But the mini-classes on searching that my campus library offers are usually held at the library. It would be better to schedule them in the computer labs at the dorms. Heck, it'd be neat to have a reference librarian actually hold office hours in the dorms, probably in the afternoon,
Five minutes training for most people, but not everyone. My boss uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and it took him nearly two weeks to complete the five-minute training due to some complications.
Namely, he's blind. He cannot read the training phrases off the screen, because he can't see them. Instead he had to have a screen reader (JAWS in this case) read the phrases aloud to him so that he can repeat them back. But of course, Dragon was not expecting to hear audio input from anything other than the user, so that confused things. There were problems even using a headset. And since he can't actually use the program at all without having the screen reader running, it was pretty awful trying to get the training done. I'm not even sure how he finally managed to do it - I suspect he probably got a sighted friend to help. Thankfully the training files can be copied from one computer to another so you don't need to retrain it on each different installation.
Once the training was finally finished, it worked well. He has poor fine motor control as a result of leukemia treatments - he can type, but only slowly and with a high error rate. His speech is slightly slurred as well, which reduces the accuracy of the transcription. Even so, the Dragon transcriptions are definitely better than manual typing. It's helped him a lot.
I just wish that the Dragon programmers would come up with a more easily accessible training routine. There aren't a whole lot of users with the same disabilities as my boss, but for the few like him having good, well-trained dictation software is vital. With it, he can control his computer reasonably well, if rather more slowly than a sighted person with normal motor control. Without it, using the computer is basically impractical. When he can't use Dragon, sending a single rather short email can take upwards of an hour.
I've been attending university for nearly a decade now, with one year yet to go before I finally finish. And I still use old files. Not very often, admittedly, but once every two or three years I'll go back and read through old papers I wrote. I suppose it's a bit narcissistic, but I find it interesting to read old work and see how I've developed since then. It's rather interesting - it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see that a paper I wrote six years ago, even if it was good then, doesn't measure up to my current standard. I also find it interesting to read the teachers' comments now that I myself am a teacher, though most of those are handwritten in the margins of things rather than electronic.
Thankfully, I switched to OpenOffice.org as of build 643C in the pre-1.0 days. Stuff before that are in Word 97 format, but hey, OO.o can read those, so I'm sitting pretty.
OMG, Spoiler Alert!!1!!
on
Linux Firewalls
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The reviewer wrote:
I don't want to give away too much of the material in Linux Firewalls; so I will just say...
I totally stopped reading right there. Jeez man, don't spoil the technical manual! The suspense is all I read for!
Load that source code somewhere - in your browser is fine, or you can open it in a text editor. Search for the string "XMLHttpRequest." On line 228 you will find a function called NE(), which creates a new XMLHttpRequest object and returns it. (In IE, ut uses Microsoft.XMLHTTP, but the two are functionally identical).
The NE() function is called repeatedly by other functions, which are themselves called by yet other functions. XMLHttpRequest is essential to the functionality of Google Maps.
And as for Firebug, I'm sure you looked at the panel showing network activity. If you look at the requests originating from JavaScript, you'll see that they return JavaScript code which does not have surrounding HTML. Here's an example from a recent Google Maps session. If this were being accessed via an IFRAME element in the requesting document, the JavaScript data would have to be wrapped in HTML in order to be parsed by the browser so that the JavaScript could be accessed by the parent frame. But in this case you can see that it does not have the accompanying HTML. It's plain JavaScript. In the absence of that HTML, the web browser loading it into an IFRAME would treat it as plain text, because it is. However, information which has been retrieved using an XMLHttpRequest does not need any surrounding HTML, because it is being handled directly by the JavaScript. It can be easily executed using a call to eval(), preferably after doing some security checks to make sure that he code is coming from a trusted source.
The Google Maps API is now integrated with the Google AJAX API loader, which creates a common namespace for loading and using multiple Google AJAX APIs. This framework allows you to use the optional google.maps.* namespace for all classes, methods and properties you currently use in the Google Maps API, replacing the normal G prefix with this namespace. Don't worry: the existing G namespace will continue to be supported.
And that's just a recent refinement. Google Maps has used the XMLHttpRequest object for ages. Yes, it's possible to get a similar effect using hidden iframes and such, but doing it that way is really awkward. They'd have to be crazy to pass that amount of data back and forth that way when they've got XMLHttpRequest.
It makes a menu in which sub-items are revealed when you move your mouse over them. And it's being done badly, for the following reasons:
1) It relies on all kinds of things which IE either doesn't support or supports badly, including: the child selector (that's the > bits), using the:hover pseudo-class on elements other than anchors, display: table, and display: table-cell. There's no way this sucker is ever going to work in IE. Not IE 7, and definitely not IE 6. Just look up IE's support for the various properties used here on WebDevout.net's CSS compatibility list.
2) The code has needless redundancy built into it. Example: in that first rule set, they're using three selectors:
ul.nav <-- an unordered list of the "nav" class .nav <-- any element at all of the "nav" class ul <-- any unordered list
Stacking selectors by separating them using a comma can be useful, but this has been done badly. The first selector alone should have been sufficient for their purposes, or the second one alone. And the third one is simply atrocious, because it makes the rule apply to EVERY unordered list in the document unless it is explicitly overridden. If there is EVER an unordered list in the document which is NOT part of the menu, it's going to be totally fubared by the menu formatting instructions. Selectors which apply to every element in the entire document are dangerous that way unless you use them really carefully or make only tiny modifications. For example, I like changing the cursor over label elements so that people will know they do something if you click them, like this:
/* Make labels for form elements have a pointer. */ label { cursor: pointer; }
The modification is very simple, does not change the basic appearance or functionality of the element, and provides a useful bit of feedback to the user.
3) Inconsistent use of whitespace. Note that sometimes a rule will start immediately after another with no whitespace, like this:
ul.nav li:active,.nav ul li a:active{
background-color: black;
color: white; }.nav a{ <--------------- here
text-decoration: none; }
The rule set for ".nav a" starts on the same line as the previous rule set finishes, which is ugly as sin. For improved comprehensibility, it should have at least two carriage returns after the previous rule set. And the author didn't even do it consistently.
I'll happily agree that this is an ugly bit of code. And no, the CSS pocket reference will not be especially helpful in untangling this snarl; it's a reference, for looking up properties and selectors. It shows you what individual bits do, but does not explain how the many bits may be combined. References are primarily useful when you're building your own code, and rather less so when interpreting somebody else's.
That said, I have to take issue with your conclusions.
1) "CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags"
First off, CSS doesn't use tags. It uses selectors to refer to tags. Second, CSS itself is not irrational. It is abstract, and takes a while to wrap your head around. It has some inadequacies and shortcomings, such as making multiple columns have an equal height or centering content vertically as well as horizontally, both of which are a serious pain in the ass. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. CSS also gives you quite a lot of fairly fine-grained control over your pages. Moving the presentational stuff out of your HTML makes it considerably easier to read (assuming that you don't keep throwing extraneous DIVs into it instead of learning the inheritance rules and the box model), and has truly amazing benefits
I'm surprised the writer didn't evaluate Koha, which is a GPL'ed integrated library management system. It can handle Z39.50 MARC lookups. (For those that don't speak the lingo, that means getting cataloging data, usually from the Library of Congress' public gateway.)
Koha may have been overkill, I guess, since it also has a bazillion features for things like managing branch libraries, cataloging serials, and keeping track of vendor relationships.
1) It's not a technical paper, it's a position paper on a technical issue.
2) I did not say that the paper should be ignored or deprecated. I said that the paper seems "awfully rough" and that "as a position paper, it could be better."
3) It's not a Slashdot comment. Slashdot comments are not used as a basis for policy or technical standards, thank goodness. This position paper, however, may well influence the policy or technical standards. Therefore, it should be held to a higher standard than Slashdot comments are.
Finally, Slashdot is very useful as a discussion forum and a source of interesting links. And nothing else.
There, a nice meal for you. You may crawl back under your bridge now.
Hmm. Interesting. That could well be a valid consideration. I should point out, though, that the position paper doesn't make that clear at all. Perhaps the phrase "related patents" implies everything that you've written to the audience for whom it was intended. But the implication was lost when it got distributed to a wider audience (e.g. Slashdot).
How extremely irritating that patent considerations lead a major stakeholder to propose a technically inferior solution. The patent system could do with an overhaul. Ditto for the copyright system. And I don't seriously see it happening any time in the near future with so many lobbyists singing the praises of strong intellectual property into the ears of legislators.
For a position paper issued by a major company, that was awfully rough. I found several spelling mistakes ("anoher" for "another") for example. Apparently Nokia can't be bothered to run a spell checker on documents like this one. And call me crazy, but usually you don't use smiley faces like:-) in a position paper (as he does on page four). Then we have sentences like this one, which is the bit about Ogg being proprietary:
Anything beyond that, including a W3C-lead standardization of a "free" codec, or the
active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg,..., by W3C, is, in our
opinion, not helpful for the co-existence of the two ecosystems (web and video), and
therefore not our choice.
Holy comma splice, Batman! And isn't it redundant to talk about a "W3C-lead standardization... by W3C"? But te worst thing here is the totally unclear use of "proprietary." At other places in the document, the author recommends selecting "older media compression standards, of which one can be reasonably sure that related
patents are expired (or are close to expiration)." Which seems odd. Isn't the whole attraction of Ogg Theora that it isn't patented at all? Why recommend an older standard that IS patented over a newer one that isn't? And how exactly does that come under the label "proprietary" anyway?
As a position paper, then, it could be better. It does in fact give their position. But it does so in a way which is unclear, and its author doesn't seem to think that writing a position paper is different from writing a comment on a web forum.
Crud, when I pasted that correction from the Wikipedia article, it eliminated the negative signs before the degrees. That should read "-20 to -30 C".
Also, I've just skimmed the article, and it has little or no mooring in reality. Consider this, from fairly late in the article:
Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, 'we want to exterminate the Negro population.'
Holy cow! That's a pretty serious allegation. The article provides a reference at that point. But the reference is a link to somebody's Yahoo mail Inbox. Huh??? In my world, that's not an acceptable standard of evidence. Particularly since it's not even publicly available.
I've never complained about editorial oversight on Slashdot, and it seems fairly pointless to do it now. It just seems weird that they can't even be bothered to filter out the obvious wackos.
The summary has been partially copied from the linked Wikipedia article, but it cuts off unexpectedly. The summary ends with "cool the seeds to the internationally." Which makes no sense. The full version from the Wikipedia article is "cool the seeds to the internationally-recommended standard 20 to 30 C."
1) Intelligence is not a fixed, immutable property. 2) People who believe it IS fixed and immutable tend to avoid intellectual challenges. 3) People who avoid intellectual challenges learn less, and more slowly than people who seek them out.
Therefore, in order to raise smart children, we should:
1) Teach them that intelligence can be increased. (E.g., "Einstein was a great mathematician because he worked really hard at it for a long time" rather than "Einstein was a born genius.") 2) Assign responsibility to effort rather than innate ability. (This works both ways; if the child does well on an assignment, you can say "That's a good job." But if they do poorly, you can say "You didn't put in enough effort." Either way, the problem is with the child's actions, not with the child's identity.)
This makes a great deal of sense to me. I have observed that I learn more from trying things that are hard than from repeating things I find easy. I think the same thing probably applies to other people; so in order to encourage learning, we should encourage people to believe that it's a good idea to try out things that are hard to do and see mistakes as opportunities to learn.
Thanks to the Public Library of Science, their complete publication is available to us under the enthralling title Structural Extremes in a Late Cretaceous Dinosaur. I found Figure 1 especially interesting for its 3D visualizations of the skull structure. The thing's mouth really does resemble the shape of a vacuum cleaner, particularly one of those older models where the brush is on the end of a tube and all the machinery is in a little tug-along chassis. I'm inclined to think that it probably bit off the plants it was eating rather than "sucking" them up, though.
Still, neat stuff, and yet more proof that there are a whole bunch of Really Weird Things(TM) out there.
With the exception of the Chinese and maybe the string theorist, all of the TA's have better English skills than most of the (native English-speaking) American undergrads, who can't write a coherent lab report to save their lives.
I'm a writing instructor, and I've observed the same thing in my foreign undergraduates. By and large, they're much better at writing than the American kids.
No doubt there are all kinds of factors contributing to that, but I suspect that the important one is that foreign students have a lot more writing assignments in their background. Writing is something you learn by doing, preferably in some kind of environment where you get feedback about your writing from another person. The American K-12 educational system doesn't put a whole lot of emphasis on that.
True enough - but remember that the girl in question didn't put her own photograph online. It was put on flickr by the counselor who took the pic to begin with. I wonder if he asked her permission before "going public" with it?
Other posters have pointed out that any picture is fair game in Australia. But the girl is from the U.S., as is the counselor; and the suit was filed in a U.S. court. And who knows where the flickr server may have been located physically? I have absolutely no idea which set of laws pertains, but it's pretty clear that the pic was taken in one country and used in another. I'm sure the lawyers will have all kinds of fun working out jurisdictional issues.
And it's pretty clear that Creative Commons had nothing to do with any of it.
It's pretty clear from the article that the photographer chose the CC license, and the company fulfilled its terms. However, I'm pretty sure that the CC license doesn't actually affect the primary claim of the lawsuit, which is that the girl's privacy was broken and her reputation smeared. The CC license constitutes permission from the photographer to use the photograph for commercial purposes, but doesn't constitute permission from the subject of the photograph to have the image so used. If the picture had been, say, a nice picture of a mountain lake with no people in it, then nobody would care. The lake wouldn't care that its reputation might be damaged. But when there are people in the photo, then you need consent from each one before publishing it, particularly if you're making money off doing so. That's pretty standard operating practice.
Basically, it looks to me like Virgin Australia screwed the pooch on this one.
Oh, and it's unclear to me whether the counselor is 1) being sued; 2) suing; or 3) not currently involved directly in litigation.
Obviously, adding technology to a classroom is not inherently beneficial. The mere presence of a bunch of transistors in the room will not improve the students' comprehension. But it's also a bit premature to dismiss it completely. Socrates strongly disliked the whole "marks on papyrus scrolls" technology which was cutting edge in his day -- which is why he never wrote anything down himself. We depend on his student Plato for our knowledge of Socrates' ideas. You and I, right now, are as close to the beginning of digital technology as Socrates was to the beginning of books.[1]
Education takes place inside the student's skull. It's a process of acquiring new concepts, trying to understand them, and then use them. Usually education involves failing to grasp the concept a few times, and then "getting it." The job of the teacher is to introduce the concepts, and to create an environment where the student can try them out, get it wrong, and then get it right. Digital tech can probably help with both steps (introducing concepts, and creating the learning environment). So far a lot of the ways we've tried it have not worked very well -- PowerPoint is an excellent case in point. So PowerPoint isn't useful. Fine. That doesn't mean nothing will ever be useful. Let's try a whole bunch of approaches, scrap the ones that don't work well, and then try even more approaches.
[1] The Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures had been using written communication for a good long while before it reached the Greeks, of course; but Socrates was close to the beginning of books within his own culture.
There are a great many more than 15 Oz books. "All 15" is way off. There are forty canonical titles, and hundreds more non-canonical titles. For more details, see the Books of Oz database, which currently lists 740 entries, and has probably missed some. Since the first one was printed in 1900, that's a rate of about 6.91 Oz books per year. Of course, not all of them are equally good. The first fourteen are good, and so are most of Ruth Plumley Thompson's sequels, but after that the quality varies widely. I did rather like "Mr. Tinker in Oz" by James Howe (who also wrote the Bunnicula series). And avoid "The Yellow Knight of Oz," it stinks.
Why prefer local bookmarks to Google Bookmarks, you ask?
Because what I choose to bookmark reveals a good deal about me, and I'd prefer not to hand that information to a corporation. Even one whose motto is "don't be evil."
The article mentions that the Mozilla devs might integrate their own bookmark synchronization code straight into Firefox. I might consider using that, as long as I can set it up to use MY server for storing the data.
Slashdot Mirror
You may find Th e Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird helpful. It's essentially a primer in basic graphic design intended for people exactly like you. Here's the paragraph from the introduction entitled "Who Should Read this Book?":
The table of contents in brief:
The text is reasonably friendly, and has lots of illustrations to demonstrate what the author discusses. It won't turn you into a graphic design guru, but it will probably help you figure out where to start. In general, a good book. My one real criticism is that in his discussion of legitimate sources of images, the author doesn't discuss public domain or the Creative Commons, only doing it yourself, royalty-free (but copyrighted) images, hiring professionals, and obtaining rights-managed images.
Another good book, not specifically about web design but a mainstay of introductory design classes, is The Non-Designer's Design Book. In the second edition, it covered:
Note that I have linked to the third edition, which is scheduled for release later this month and may cover slightly different things. I don't know how much or even if it's been updated.
The same author puts out a book entitled "The Non-Designer's Web Book". I do not think that this book will be as helpful to you. It covers a lot of very basic material about building web sites (some basic HTML, acceptable image formats, and so on), and it sounds like you've already got that part of it.
Hope this helps.
(1.5) Refer to poster's sig: Yes I make mistakes. Don't we all?
Archivists typically have to respect the rules of the communities they serve regarding access to materials. Sometimes that means, say, putting a bunch of somebody's steamy love letters under lock and key until all of the named parties have died off. Other times it means managing intellectual property rights. And sometimes you run into cases like this one, where the cultural rules regarding the material are more involved.
I still think my favorite example was a living history project - the researchers involved had been recording traditional stories. One of them was an explanatory myth about why it snows. The problem was that there was a strong tradition requiring that the story be told only when there is snow on the ground. There's a doozy of an access control problem, unless you take the cheap way out and declare that there is always snow on the ground somewhere.
The "staff who teach" bit is especially important. The common belief is that "kids these days search all the time, of course they know how to do it." But when I've taught lessons on using Google, I've found that very few of them were aware of the existence of advanced search operators like "inurl:" or "site:" for narrowing the scope of your search. Many of them typed in natural language queries like "How many drunk driving accidents were there in Austin Texas last year?" When the results were bad, they'd type in another version of the same query, but still phrase it as a question (e.g. "What's the drunk driving rate in Austin Texas?"). In one case, a student actually exclaimed in surprise when I demonstrated that you can search for an exact phrase by putting it in quote marks, which is fairly basic.
And once they find results, they rarely spend much time evaluating the credibility of the site. It's not practical, given a large number of students, for the teacher to check every single reference. But when I've been grading I try to follow up at least one citation per paper, and some of the stuff my students have selected is just plain bad. In one case, a student who had written a paper comparing drinking habits in Europe and the US cited a web site written by a sophomore at a high school reporting a conversation about drinking with an unnamed European exchange student. Quite aside from the dubious source, the site wasn't even nicely designed. It's harder to look past a shiny surface; but in this case the pink text on a gray background in MS Comic Sans was kind of a giveaway that maybe this site isn't the most trustworthy one in the world.
And in fact the original report [PDF] found exactly this:
Comfort with searching and effective searching are two different things. This is one area where libraries are actively developing. I'm enrolled in library school at the moment, and I've been following job postings. There are a lot of library jobs these days for "instructional librarians" who teach information skills exactly like these, usually by visiting other teachers' classes, and also by holding their own mini-classes. We're not really doing enough, though. An awful lot of librarians, particularly the older ones who are comfortably set in their ways, still expect that people will come to the library when they need information, which is simply no longer the case.
I overheard two undergraduates talking in the lobby of the library on my campus - one of them said "Let's get out of here. I don't like the library." The other one said "Yeah, it's not home." I've been thinking a lot about that ever since. How can the library compete with "home"? The answer I've come up with is that it can't. Since we can't expect most people to come to us, we've got to go to them. Some of that can definitely be digital - Ask-a-librarian services over IM are rapidly proliferating, for example. I've already mentioned the instructional librarians visiting other teachers' classes. But the mini-classes on searching that my campus library offers are usually held at the library. It would be better to schedule them in the computer labs at the dorms. Heck, it'd be neat to have a reference librarian actually hold office hours in the dorms, probably in the afternoon,
Five minutes training for most people, but not everyone. My boss uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and it took him nearly two weeks to complete the five-minute training due to some complications.
Namely, he's blind. He cannot read the training phrases off the screen, because he can't see them. Instead he had to have a screen reader (JAWS in this case) read the phrases aloud to him so that he can repeat them back. But of course, Dragon was not expecting to hear audio input from anything other than the user, so that confused things. There were problems even using a headset. And since he can't actually use the program at all without having the screen reader running, it was pretty awful trying to get the training done. I'm not even sure how he finally managed to do it - I suspect he probably got a sighted friend to help. Thankfully the training files can be copied from one computer to another so you don't need to retrain it on each different installation.
Once the training was finally finished, it worked well. He has poor fine motor control as a result of leukemia treatments - he can type, but only slowly and with a high error rate. His speech is slightly slurred as well, which reduces the accuracy of the transcription. Even so, the Dragon transcriptions are definitely better than manual typing. It's helped him a lot.
I just wish that the Dragon programmers would come up with a more easily accessible training routine. There aren't a whole lot of users with the same disabilities as my boss, but for the few like him having good, well-trained dictation software is vital. With it, he can control his computer reasonably well, if rather more slowly than a sighted person with normal motor control. Without it, using the computer is basically impractical. When he can't use Dragon, sending a single rather short email can take upwards of an hour.
I've been attending university for nearly a decade now, with one year yet to go before I finally finish. And I still use old files. Not very often, admittedly, but once every two or three years I'll go back and read through old papers I wrote. I suppose it's a bit narcissistic, but I find it interesting to read old work and see how I've developed since then. It's rather interesting - it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see that a paper I wrote six years ago, even if it was good then, doesn't measure up to my current standard. I also find it interesting to read the teachers' comments now that I myself am a teacher, though most of those are handwritten in the margins of things rather than electronic.
Thankfully, I switched to OpenOffice.org as of build 643C in the pre-1.0 days. Stuff before that are in Word 97 format, but hey, OO.o can read those, so I'm sitting pretty.
The reviewer wrote:
I totally stopped reading right there. Jeez man, don't spoil the technical manual! The suspense is all I read for!
^_^;
Okay, fine. The primary JavaScript library for the Google Maps API, in which the basic functionality of the thing is created, can be found here:
http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mapfiles/95/maps2/main.js
Load that source code somewhere - in your browser is fine, or you can open it in a text editor. Search for the string "XMLHttpRequest." On line 228 you will find a function called NE(), which creates a new XMLHttpRequest object and returns it. (In IE, ut uses Microsoft.XMLHTTP, but the two are functionally identical).
The NE() function is called repeatedly by other functions, which are themselves called by yet other functions. XMLHttpRequest is essential to the functionality of Google Maps.
And as for Firebug, I'm sure you looked at the panel showing network activity. If you look at the requests originating from JavaScript, you'll see that they return JavaScript code which does not have surrounding HTML. Here's an example from a recent Google Maps session. If this were being accessed via an IFRAME element in the requesting document, the JavaScript data would have to be wrapped in HTML in order to be parsed by the browser so that the JavaScript could be accessed by the parent frame. But in this case you can see that it does not have the accompanying HTML. It's plain JavaScript. In the absence of that HTML, the web browser loading it into an IFRAME would treat it as plain text, because it is. However, information which has been retrieved using an XMLHttpRequest does not need any surrounding HTML, because it is being handled directly by the JavaScript. It can be easily executed using a call to eval(), preferably after doing some security checks to make sure that he code is coming from a trusted source.
I hope you have found this educational.
Err, yes it does. From the Google Maps API reference:
And that's just a recent refinement. Google Maps has used the XMLHttpRequest object for ages. Yes, it's possible to get a similar effect using hidden iframes and such, but doing it that way is really awkward. They'd have to be crazy to pass that amount of data back and forth that way when they've got XMLHttpRequest.
1) It relies on all kinds of things which IE either doesn't support or supports badly, including: the child selector (that's the > bits), using the
2) The code has needless redundancy built into it. Example: in that first rule set, they're using three selectors:
Stacking selectors by separating them using a comma can be useful, but this has been done badly. The first selector alone should have been sufficient for their purposes, or the second one alone. And the third one is simply atrocious, because it makes the rule apply to EVERY unordered list in the document unless it is explicitly overridden. If there is EVER an unordered list in the document which is NOT part of the menu, it's going to be totally fubared by the menu formatting instructions. Selectors which apply to every element in the entire document are dangerous that way unless you use them really carefully or make only tiny modifications. For example, I like changing the cursor over label elements so that people will know they do something if you click them, like this:
The modification is very simple, does not change the basic appearance or functionality of the element, and provides a useful bit of feedback to the user.
3) Inconsistent use of whitespace. Note that sometimes a rule will start immediately after another with no whitespace, like this:
The rule set for ".nav a" starts on the same line as the previous rule set finishes, which is ugly as sin. For improved comprehensibility, it should have at least two carriage returns after the previous rule set. And the author didn't even do it consistently.
I'll happily agree that this is an ugly bit of code. And no, the CSS pocket reference will not be especially helpful in untangling this snarl; it's a reference, for looking up properties and selectors. It shows you what individual bits do, but does not explain how the many bits may be combined. References are primarily useful when you're building your own code, and rather less so when interpreting somebody else's.
That said, I have to take issue with your conclusions.
1) "CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags"
First off, CSS doesn't use tags. It uses selectors to refer to tags. Second, CSS itself is not irrational. It is abstract, and takes a while to wrap your head around. It has some inadequacies and shortcomings, such as making multiple columns have an equal height or centering content vertically as well as horizontally, both of which are a serious pain in the ass. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. CSS also gives you quite a lot of fairly fine-grained control over your pages. Moving the presentational stuff out of your HTML makes it considerably easier to read (assuming that you don't keep throwing extraneous DIVs into it instead of learning the inheritance rules and the box model), and has truly amazing benefits
I'm surprised the writer didn't evaluate Koha, which is a GPL'ed integrated library management system. It can handle Z39.50 MARC lookups. (For those that don't speak the lingo, that means getting cataloging data, usually from the Library of Congress' public gateway.)
Koha may have been overkill, I guess, since it also has a bazillion features for things like managing branch libraries, cataloging serials, and keeping track of vendor relationships.
Pardon me, but:
1) It's not a technical paper, it's a position paper on a technical issue.
2) I did not say that the paper should be ignored or deprecated. I said that the paper seems "awfully rough" and that "as a position paper, it could be better."
3) It's not a Slashdot comment. Slashdot comments are not used as a basis for policy or technical standards, thank goodness. This position paper, however, may well influence the policy or technical standards. Therefore, it should be held to a higher standard than Slashdot comments are.
Finally, Slashdot is very useful as a discussion forum and a source of interesting links. And nothing else.
There, a nice meal for you. You may crawl back under your bridge now.
Hmm. Interesting. That could well be a valid consideration. I should point out, though, that the position paper doesn't make that clear at all. Perhaps the phrase "related patents" implies everything that you've written to the audience for whom it was intended. But the implication was lost when it got distributed to a wider audience (e.g. Slashdot).
How extremely irritating that patent considerations lead a major stakeholder to propose a technically inferior solution. The patent system could do with an overhaul. Ditto for the copyright system. And I don't seriously see it happening any time in the near future with so many lobbyists singing the praises of strong intellectual property into the ears of legislators.
For a position paper issued by a major company, that was awfully rough. I found several spelling mistakes ("anoher" for "another") for example. Apparently Nokia can't be bothered to run a spell checker on documents like this one. And call me crazy, but usually you don't use smiley faces like :-) in a position paper (as he does on page four). Then we have sentences like this one, which is the bit about Ogg being proprietary:
Holy comma splice, Batman! And isn't it redundant to talk about a "W3C-lead standardization ... by W3C"? But te worst thing here is the totally unclear use of "proprietary." At other places in the document, the author recommends selecting "older media compression standards, of which one can be reasonably sure that related
patents are expired (or are close to expiration)." Which seems odd. Isn't the whole attraction of Ogg Theora that it isn't patented at all? Why recommend an older standard that IS patented over a newer one that isn't? And how exactly does that come under the label "proprietary" anyway?
As a position paper, then, it could be better. It does in fact give their position. But it does so in a way which is unclear, and its author doesn't seem to think that writing a position paper is different from writing a comment on a web forum.
Crud, when I pasted that correction from the Wikipedia article, it eliminated the negative signs before the degrees. That should read "-20 to -30 C".
Also, I've just skimmed the article, and it has little or no mooring in reality. Consider this, from fairly late in the article:
Holy cow! That's a pretty serious allegation. The article provides a reference at that point. But the reference is a link to somebody's Yahoo mail Inbox. Huh??? In my world, that's not an acceptable standard of evidence. Particularly since it's not even publicly available.
I've never complained about editorial oversight on Slashdot, and it seems fairly pointless to do it now. It just seems weird that they can't even be bothered to filter out the obvious wackos.
The summary has been partially copied from the linked Wikipedia article, but it cuts off unexpectedly. The summary ends with "cool the seeds to the internationally." Which makes no sense. The full version from the Wikipedia article is "cool the seeds to the internationally-recommended standard 20 to 30 C."
The basic point of the article is:
1) Intelligence is not a fixed, immutable property.
2) People who believe it IS fixed and immutable tend to avoid intellectual challenges.
3) People who avoid intellectual challenges learn less, and more slowly than people who seek them out.
Therefore, in order to raise smart children, we should:
1) Teach them that intelligence can be increased. (E.g., "Einstein was a great mathematician because he worked really hard at it for a long time" rather than "Einstein was a born genius.")
2) Assign responsibility to effort rather than innate ability. (This works both ways; if the child does well on an assignment, you can say "That's a good job." But if they do poorly, you can say "You didn't put in enough effort." Either way, the problem is with the child's actions, not with the child's identity.)
This makes a great deal of sense to me. I have observed that I learn more from trying things that are hard than from repeating things I find easy. I think the same thing probably applies to other people; so in order to encourage learning, we should encourage people to believe that it's a good idea to try out things that are hard to do and see mistakes as opportunities to learn.
Thanks to the Public Library of Science, their complete publication is available to us under the enthralling title Structural Extremes in a Late Cretaceous Dinosaur. I found Figure 1 especially interesting for its 3D visualizations of the skull structure. The thing's mouth really does resemble the shape of a vacuum cleaner, particularly one of those older models where the brush is on the end of a tube and all the machinery is in a little tug-along chassis. I'm inclined to think that it probably bit off the plants it was eating rather than "sucking" them up, though.
Still, neat stuff, and yet more proof that there are a whole bunch of Really Weird Things(TM) out there.
I'm a writing instructor, and I've observed the same thing in my foreign undergraduates. By and large, they're much better at writing than the American kids.
No doubt there are all kinds of factors contributing to that, but I suspect that the important one is that foreign students have a lot more writing assignments in their background. Writing is something you learn by doing, preferably in some kind of environment where you get feedback about your writing from another person. The American K-12 educational system doesn't put a whole lot of emphasis on that.
True enough - but remember that the girl in question didn't put her own photograph online. It was put on flickr by the counselor who took the pic to begin with. I wonder if he asked her permission before "going public" with it?
Other posters have pointed out that any picture is fair game in Australia. But the girl is from the U.S., as is the counselor; and the suit was filed in a U.S. court. And who knows where the flickr server may have been located physically? I have absolutely no idea which set of laws pertains, but it's pretty clear that the pic was taken in one country and used in another. I'm sure the lawyers will have all kinds of fun working out jurisdictional issues.
And it's pretty clear that Creative Commons had nothing to do with any of it.
It's pretty clear from the article that the photographer chose the CC license, and the company fulfilled its terms. However, I'm pretty sure that the CC license doesn't actually affect the primary claim of the lawsuit, which is that the girl's privacy was broken and her reputation smeared. The CC license constitutes permission from the photographer to use the photograph for commercial purposes, but doesn't constitute permission from the subject of the photograph to have the image so used. If the picture had been, say, a nice picture of a mountain lake with no people in it, then nobody would care. The lake wouldn't care that its reputation might be damaged. But when there are people in the photo, then you need consent from each one before publishing it, particularly if you're making money off doing so. That's pretty standard operating practice.
Basically, it looks to me like Virgin Australia screwed the pooch on this one.
Oh, and it's unclear to me whether the counselor is 1) being sued; 2) suing; or 3) not currently involved directly in litigation.
Obviously, adding technology to a classroom is not inherently beneficial. The mere presence of a bunch of transistors in the room will not improve the students' comprehension. But it's also a bit premature to dismiss it completely. Socrates strongly disliked the whole "marks on papyrus scrolls" technology which was cutting edge in his day -- which is why he never wrote anything down himself. We depend on his student Plato for our knowledge of Socrates' ideas. You and I, right now, are as close to the beginning of digital technology as Socrates was to the beginning of books.[1]
Education takes place inside the student's skull. It's a process of acquiring new concepts, trying to understand them, and then use them. Usually education involves failing to grasp the concept a few times, and then "getting it." The job of the teacher is to introduce the concepts, and to create an environment where the student can try them out, get it wrong, and then get it right. Digital tech can probably help with both steps (introducing concepts, and creating the learning environment). So far a lot of the ways we've tried it have not worked very well -- PowerPoint is an excellent case in point. So PowerPoint isn't useful. Fine. That doesn't mean nothing will ever be useful. Let's try a whole bunch of approaches, scrap the ones that don't work well, and then try even more approaches.
[1] The Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures had been using written communication for a good long while before it reached the Greeks, of course; but Socrates was close to the beginning of books within his own culture.
There are a great many more than 15 Oz books. "All 15" is way off. There are forty canonical titles, and hundreds more non-canonical titles. For more details, see the Books of Oz database, which currently lists 740 entries, and has probably missed some. Since the first one was printed in 1900, that's a rate of about 6.91 Oz books per year. Of course, not all of them are equally good. The first fourteen are good, and so are most of Ruth Plumley Thompson's sequels, but after that the quality varies widely. I did rather like "Mr. Tinker in Oz" by James Howe (who also wrote the Bunnicula series). And avoid "The Yellow Knight of Oz," it stinks.
The parent quoth:
Huh?
In the article I read, the author starts out like this:
How is that a "first time this has happened" tone? Or maybe you were reading a different article?
Why prefer local bookmarks to Google Bookmarks, you ask?
Because what I choose to bookmark reveals a good deal about me, and I'd prefer not to hand that information to a corporation. Even one whose motto is "don't be evil."
The article mentions that the Mozilla devs might integrate their own bookmark synchronization code straight into Firefox. I might consider using that, as long as I can set it up to use MY server for storing the data.