I'm not sure what a "79% correlation" even means. The way to describe correlations is to provide estimated correlation coefficients. It appears that even the original article uses this bizarre percentage notation ("r = 63.5%"), which suggests that perhaps the authors don't understand correlation as well as they think they do. Sigh. This is what happens when computer scientists try statistics without any training...
Actually, you're right. Words used together as a compound adjective modifying a noun should be hypenated. There's one little catch here: Because "high school" is itself an adjective modifying "level," we should put a hyphen between "high" and "school" (think of it as a first-order compound) but a longer en-dash between "high-school" and "level" (a second-order compound).
So: high-school-level, where the second dash should be HTML entity ߝ (but Slashcode won't allow it).
I know the submitter found the link via Google News, but to say that it's "courtesy of" Google is misleading. The transcript comes from The News & Observer, the main newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. It documents a panel at Duke University.
I used to work at The N&O. Real people do produce these things, you know -- they don't just materialize out of the ether when Google aggregates them. If anything, this is the downside of Google News -- the increasing commodification of news production. But the Internet in general was doing that anyway.
so now we have 20 years' worth of posts instead of just six with which employers can perform ad hoc background checks on potential employees -- their political statements, sexual practices, bad teenage poetry, etc.
sure, historical context is cool, but at what price?
As a good little human factors bunny, I must say: please don't forget interface. To most reasonably non-technical users of computers, the interface is the computer. Cliche, yes, but true -- you might very reasonably divide your chronology into
hardwiring
punchcard
command line
smart terminal
early GUI
...
Not that that's a comprehensive list or necessarily a good organizational conceit, but from an end-user perspective, it's what's important. (A caveat: the "end-users" of punchcard systems and such were very unlikely not to be techies.) This is, as usual, the lesson that some of the Slashdot crowd would do well to learn from Apple: not everyone cares what's under the skin of their computing environment. Not everyone knows or wants to know or needs to know.
Steven Johnson, founder of Feed, has an excellent book, Interface Culture, which details the progression of computer interfaces and turns a critical eye on their cultural and psychological implications.
I'm reading this book now for a seminar on human-computer interaction, but it's just as applicable to the sort of course you're proposing. What I particularly like is its focus not just on the development of GUIs but also on the power of textual and hypertextual interfaces, which honestly are the only popular interface innovation of the last decade or so, since the desktop-metaphor GUIs have stagnated.
Good luck with your syllabus. Count me among the folks who would like to see what you come up with. (For the record, I really like the idea of teaching about the history of computer science problem-solving (i.e., NP complete problems, number systems, etc)... this is often overlooked in favor of histories of the big iron that folks were building, but the math is just as important.)
Last week I was discussing this very issue with folks at the Human-Computer Interaction research lab at my university. (We have a bunch of interactional data related to wireless network usage that we want to analyze, visualize, cross-reference, etc.) Ultimately, for maintainability down the line, we decided on SQL Server on Win2k server.
Now, I've never set up a SQL Server install before, but I got it running, put some tables in it... then decided I wanted to use one of my home computers to log in and add some new tables. First I look for some Mac client -- any Mac client -- for SQL Server. Of course there is none, unless you want to cobble together some obscure ODBC driver with a half-assed shareware GUI. That's OK, I thought, I'll just connect with one of my Linux boxes. Or OS X on my Powerbook.... After two days of trying to make any of the ODBC solutions compile on either of those OSes, I set up ActiveState Perl with DBI + DBD::Proxy on the SQL Server box and got in that way, despite inadequate and sometimes incorrect documentation. This is such a hack and a speed liability that I don't consider it a real solution.
What did we finally do? Wipe Windows off the machine and install MySQL on Linux. We don't need any of the features SQL Server has that MySQL doesn't, and now cross-platform access is easy. We can use Perl and GUI interfaces on Macs and Linux boxes, and MyODBC to get at the tables with Access, which some of the non-technical people in the lab like to use.
If you're considering a SQL Server solution, check out the cross-platform issues first. We didn't lose any money on this because we have some sort of site license for MS products, but still. I assumed such connectivity wouldn't be a problem. The database world is less platform-agnostic than I would've thought.
The critical changes that the "digital revolution" has wrought and continues to wreak are sociological, not technological. It's great that I can order groceries online and have them at my door in an hour, but it's better that I can pop into a chat room or bulletin board and meet someone with whom I never otherwise would have had contact.
The Internet's communications media allow unprecedented forms of interaction. They may be sparse media compared to face-to-face or even telephone communcation, but by quantity of people and power to eliminate much of the significance of geographic distance, the new media in many ways trump the old. Text-only media are truly different beasts -- specifically _because_ they aren't media-rich. (I'm not exluding HTML or other rich-text systems from that group, just differentiating between them and richer mechanisms like voice- or video-conferencing.) Sparse media exercise imagination and force creativity. Anybody can capture a scenic vista on videotape; it takes skill to capture it in words. We've had sparse media for ages (e.g., telegraphs) but they haven't been synchronous (real-time, like chat) -- although, honestly, asynchronous sparse media like newsgroups don't have much in common with telegraphs, either, because of their one-to-many aspect. Being one-to-many is a huge sociological change -- it means the decentralization of the power to distribute ideas. But you guys know that. I mean, what was the mechanism in the past? The printing press. How many people can either afford one of their own or convince companies that control the big ones that their ideas are worth printing?
So we have these sparse media that encourage creative and imaginative interaction (surrounded, of course, by variations on "N E 1 WANNA CYBER W/ A HOT 15/M???", but let's ignore that for a moment), and their reach is, in theory, global. (That last condition becomes less theoretical all the time.) What can happen? An economist named Gary Becker writes about the dating behavior in economic terms. He talks about what kinds of characteristics and activities enhance a person's value on the marriage market and even goes so far as to phrase it in terms of partial differentials -- i.e., what's the change in desirability per unit change in job prestige? Stuff like that. He also discusses picking an optimal mate, concluding that we pick someone with the most good characteristics (some sort of weighted sum) _from the pool of available people we know_. Statistically, the larger the pool of people, the more we can maximize desirable characteristics. If we believe this guy, that makes the Internet the best possible marriage market. It's a huge pool of people, and we have these sparse media that promote creativity, hide superficial aspects of self like appearance and socioeconomic status, and allow us to judge each other solely based on what we have to say.
If the Internet is so ideal a market, that would truly be a digital revolution, but it doesn't seem to be that way. Most of us don't connect with soulmates in AOL chat rooms. Why not? Becker's work is soundly stuck in the realm of theory, but I don't think it's an entirely wrong-minded approach. Maybe we just don't have the interface or the specific application that promotes mate-finding online. I wouldn't really expect Yahoo Personals or some such to do the job.
The Internet _does_ have the potential to transform human interaction. E-mail and instant messaging have made us more prolific communicators and often open up new relationships or facilitate existing ones that wouldn't otherwise emerge or deepen.
That's the real digital revolution, not any gadget or Web app.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what a "79% correlation" even means. The way to describe correlations is to provide estimated correlation coefficients. It appears that even the original article uses this bizarre percentage notation ("r = 63.5%"), which suggests that perhaps the authors don't understand correlation as well as they think they do. Sigh. This is what happens when computer scientists try statistics without any training...
Of course, Microsoft and IBM have had researchers and, indeed, research groups studying social computing since the mid-1990s.
They've known for at least a decade that these were important areas to study. TFA should know better.
All in all, a decent wet the appitite type of review.
You wet your bed. You whet your appetite. Please don't wet my appetite.
Actually, you're right. Words used together as a compound adjective modifying a noun should be hypenated. There's one little catch here: Because "high school" is itself an adjective modifying "level," we should put a hyphen between "high" and "school" (think of it as a first-order compound) but a longer en-dash between "high-school" and "level" (a second-order compound).
So: high-school-level, where the second dash should be HTML entity ߝ (but Slashcode won't allow it).
I know the submitter found the link via Google News, but to say that it's "courtesy of" Google is misleading. The transcript comes from The News & Observer, the main newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. It documents a panel at Duke University.
I used to work at The N&O. Real people do produce these things, you know -- they don't just materialize out of the ether when Google aggregates them. If anything, this is the downside of Google News -- the increasing commodification of news production. But the Internet in general was doing that anyway.
but the more likely scenario is you're gay, say, or transgendered, and your boss doesn't like that ...
and even if you were a white supremacist 15 years ago, should that count against you now?
so now we have 20 years' worth of posts instead of just six with which employers can perform ad hoc background checks on potential employees -- their political statements, sexual practices, bad teenage poetry, etc.
sure, historical context is cool, but at what price?
- 5-gig disk
- 10-hr battery
- firewire to sync with iTunes 2 on a host mac
- ability to recharge over firewire as well as with AC adapter
- iTunes-like interface for exploring your MP3 library
... organized by artist, song, or playlist
- 20-minute skip protection
- $399 price tag
- a web page: http://www.apple.com/ipod/
all in all, not the breakthrough apple was hyping, but certainly a damn fine mp3 player (which it better be for the money).Not that that's a comprehensive list or necessarily a good organizational conceit, but from an end-user perspective, it's what's important. (A caveat: the "end-users" of punchcard systems and such were very unlikely not to be techies.) This is, as usual, the lesson that some of the Slashdot crowd would do well to learn from Apple: not everyone cares what's under the skin of their computing environment. Not everyone knows or wants to know or needs to know.
Steven Johnson, founder of Feed, has an excellent book, Interface Culture, which details the progression of computer interfaces and turns a critical eye on their cultural and psychological implications.
I'm reading this book now for a seminar on human-computer interaction, but it's just as applicable to the sort of course you're proposing. What I particularly like is its focus not just on the development of GUIs but also on the power of textual and hypertextual interfaces, which honestly are the only popular interface innovation of the last decade or so, since the desktop-metaphor GUIs have stagnated.
Good luck with your syllabus. Count me among the folks who would like to see what you come up with. (For the record, I really like the idea of teaching about the history of computer science problem-solving (i.e., NP complete problems, number systems, etc)
Andrew
Last week I was discussing this very issue with folks at the Human-Computer Interaction research lab at my university. (We have a bunch of interactional data related to wireless network usage that we want to analyze, visualize, cross-reference, etc.) Ultimately, for maintainability down the line, we decided on SQL Server on Win2k server.
... then decided I wanted to use one of my home computers to log in and add some new tables. First I look for some Mac client -- any Mac client -- for SQL Server. Of course there is none, unless you want to cobble together some obscure ODBC driver with a half-assed shareware GUI. That's OK, I thought, I'll just connect with one of my Linux boxes. Or OS X on my Powerbook. ... After two days of trying to make any of the ODBC solutions compile on either of those OSes, I set up ActiveState Perl with DBI + DBD::Proxy on the SQL Server box and got in that way, despite inadequate and sometimes incorrect documentation. This is such a hack and a speed liability that I don't consider it a real solution.
Now, I've never set up a SQL Server install before, but I got it running, put some tables in it
What did we finally do? Wipe Windows off the machine and install MySQL on Linux. We don't need any of the features SQL Server has that MySQL doesn't, and now cross-platform access is easy. We can use Perl and GUI interfaces on Macs and Linux boxes, and MyODBC to get at the tables with Access, which some of the non-technical people in the lab like to use.
If you're considering a SQL Server solution, check out the cross-platform issues first. We didn't lose any money on this because we have some sort of site license for MS products, but still. I assumed such connectivity wouldn't be a problem. The database world is less platform-agnostic than I would've thought.
Andrew
The critical changes that the "digital revolution" has wrought and continues to wreak are sociological, not technological. It's great that I can order groceries online and have them at my door in an hour, but it's better that I can pop into a chat room or bulletin board and meet someone with whom I never otherwise would have had contact.
The Internet's communications media allow unprecedented forms of interaction. They may be sparse media compared to face-to-face or even telephone communcation, but by quantity of people and power to eliminate much of the significance of geographic distance, the new media in many ways trump the old. Text-only media are truly different beasts -- specifically _because_ they aren't media-rich. (I'm not exluding HTML or other rich-text systems from that group, just differentiating between them and richer mechanisms like voice- or video-conferencing.) Sparse media exercise imagination and force creativity. Anybody can capture a scenic vista on videotape; it takes skill to capture it in words. We've had sparse media for ages (e.g., telegraphs) but they haven't been synchronous (real-time, like chat) -- although, honestly, asynchronous sparse media like newsgroups don't have much in common with telegraphs, either, because of their one-to-many aspect. Being one-to-many is a huge sociological change -- it means the decentralization of the power to distribute ideas. But you guys know that. I mean, what was the mechanism in the past? The printing press. How many people can either afford one of their own or convince companies that control the big ones that their ideas are worth printing?
So we have these sparse media that encourage creative and imaginative interaction (surrounded, of course, by variations on "N E 1 WANNA CYBER W/ A HOT 15/M???", but let's ignore that for a moment), and their reach is, in theory, global. (That last condition becomes less theoretical all the time.) What can happen? An economist named Gary Becker writes about the dating behavior in economic terms. He talks about what kinds of characteristics and activities enhance a person's value on the marriage market and even goes so far as to phrase it in terms of partial differentials -- i.e., what's the change in desirability per unit change in job prestige? Stuff like that. He also discusses picking an optimal mate, concluding that we pick someone with the most good characteristics (some sort of weighted sum) _from the pool of available people we know_. Statistically, the larger the pool of people, the more we can maximize desirable characteristics. If we believe this guy, that makes the Internet the best possible marriage market. It's a huge pool of people, and we have these sparse media that promote creativity, hide superficial aspects of self like appearance and socioeconomic status, and allow us to judge each other solely based on what we have to say.
If the Internet is so ideal a market, that would truly be a digital revolution, but it doesn't seem to be that way. Most of us don't connect with soulmates in AOL chat rooms. Why not? Becker's work is soundly stuck in the realm of theory, but I don't think it's an entirely wrong-minded approach. Maybe we just don't have the interface or the specific application that promotes mate-finding online. I wouldn't really expect Yahoo Personals or some such to do the job.
The Internet _does_ have the potential to transform human interaction. E-mail and instant messaging have made us more prolific communicators and often open up new relationships or facilitate existing ones that wouldn't otherwise emerge or deepen.
That's the real digital revolution, not any gadget or Web app.
-Andrew