Umpteen decades ago, scientists studying productivity at Western Electric's manufacturing complex were baffled because everything they did seemed to work. They increased lighting levels: productivity went up. They decreased lighting levels: productivity went up. They finally figured out that what was increasing productivity was the workers' perception that management was displaying an interest in improving their working conditions. See Hawthorne studies
An article like "color me productive" that doesn't mention the Hawthorne effect and explain why they don't think this is just more of the same... is garbage.
Furthermore, any study that doesn't compare the relative effects of: spending money on painting the walls red; spending the same money on alternative improvements (bigger cubicles, better chairs, quieter rooms, better lighting); spending the same money on raises... is garbage.
Most of my nontechnical acquaintances are savvy enough to select "help" from a menu or read the glossy "getting started" summary card packed at the top of the box. If Clippy has the answer for them, they don't call tech support.
The problem is not whether the person on the phone has a detectable accent or a professional demeanor. The problem is that for the last five years, tech support people, foreign or domestic have been human versions of Clippy. Only with fewer preprogrammed answers. The problem is that in so many cases they appear to be reading from a top forty FAQ sheet and cannot solve any problem that the average user can't solve themselves.
I'm happy with anyone who actually solves my problem, and I'll be most other customers are, too.
I looked into this very carefully back circa 1985 to 1989, because I was in the computer unit of a research institution that was heavily into Digital gear, had databases and so forth that exploited Digital terminals, and had standardized on Macs for personal computers.
At the time I found three "winners."
--Apple's own MacTerminal had the most complete, accurate, and lovingly faithful VT100 emulation of anything I ever tested. It worked with everything, and in particular supported double high/double wide characters, everything about keypads. It was by far the best VT100 emulator of any kind, on any platform, I ever evaluated. No graphics, though (no "sixels").
--White Pine Software's Mac240 was a very faithful VT240 emulator and was quite good for graphics.
--Versaterm was not a flawless VT100 substitute, but it was very good at everything it did, and it did a lot.
Many programs that claimed VT100 emulation were quite poor at it, particular issues involving commands that affected the VT100's internal state.
The quick test is to try double high/double wide characters. An emulator that doesn't do them is not aspiring to be a high-fidelity DEC emulator. If an emulator does do them, it's a sign that the developers were really trying and probably knew their stuff.
Much as I'd love to love them, Red Ryder/White Knight were lousy at VT100 emulation. If that means anything to anyone.
Apple distributed something called Carbon Dater which analyzed OS 9 executables, built a list of OS API calls, and called out those that were not supported in Carbon (the OS 9 compatibility API in OS X).
As opposed to waiting until the new API kicks in, it seems to me that a truly thoughtful and responsible organization might distribute tools to developers that catalog the API calls that their applications use, and ask them to return the results to the vendor so that the vendor can make an informed decision about which deprecated, unsupported, undocumented calls are actually being widely used... rather than waiting for things to break and reacting after the fact.
(I know... I should get my head out of the clouds...)
...and deposited it, and it cleared. Just for the record.
I have to say though that during the long, long wait, I was really impressed by how dead that website was and how impossible it was going to be to straighten things out or prove I had actually signed up for it, if the check didn't arrive. I thought I had saved a screenshot somewhere, but I hadn't.
Helps wardrivers find the good stuff...
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...they'll beam a wifi and a cellphone signal at a building and measure the reflections. If the building is much more reflective at wifi frequencies than cellphone frequencies, they've found something really worth finding. How they get it once they've found it is another matter, of course.
I have here in my hand a list of 283, a list of 283 lines of code made known to the Secretary of OSDN as being patented by Microsoft and who nevertheless are still working and shaping functionality in the Linux department....I have here in my hand a list of 57 card-carrying patent infringements......I have here a list of 81 patents potentially infringed by LINUX, including three big ones...
Patently, bad measurements are worse than no measurements.
"Measurement drives performance." If you are measuring the wrong thing or using misleading measurements, you will do the wrong thing.
Anyone who thinks they can devise a meaningful measurement the quality of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony versus Brahm's First... or which tastes better, vanilla ice cream or fresh pineapple... or who is a better ballplayer, Willie Mays or Sammy Sosa... needs to have their head measured, preferably with a standardized test.
In order to tell whether measurement in some way is superior to not measuring it at all, you need a way to measure the quality of the measurement. But to do that, you need...
Word needed. Fectassertion? Infalliclaimism?
on
How To Lose An Election
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A word is needed for the, um, logical fallacy? Dishonest rhetorical technique? Honest self-deception? in which administrators, and proponents of policies, use language that automatically asserts the infallibility of the device, technique, or procedure being proposed.
"This couldn't have happened because we have procedures in place that prevent it..."
For example: no recounts are allowed because no recounts are needed because our voting machines are perfect.
This rhetorical technique is used all the time (and on both side of the aisle). For example: who could complain about making sure that felons don't vote (in those states where felons are not allowed to vote?) On the other hand, who wouldn't complain about disenfranchising people whose first four letters of their first name, their surname, and their race happens to be the same as that of a felon?
This just in. Microsoft has announced a beta version of a revolutionary new news aggregation service to be called "Dotdotbackslash." Unlike automatic services such as Google News, this one relies on the human judgements of hundreds of Microsoft MVPs to locate and make available the most relevant information needed for IT managers.
Very seriously, I have often wanted a way to communicate hazardous conditions to nearby drivers. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a car going about 65 mph in the left lane of route 128 whose right front tire was extremely low. We got to a section where traffic was choked up and everyone was going about 20. Their passenger window was open, and I was able to match speeds, open my window and yell "Flat tire! flat tire!" They did not seem to understand. This isn't a joke, I did NOT get a hostile response, I'm just saying that it's not easy to communicate. They probably couldn't even hear me over the wind. And, yes, it was a dangerous distraction for me to be trying to do that in congested highway traffic.
I've seen many cars with their headlights off at night, and trucks with badly secured loads. One time I saw a truck with some kind of hose on a big spool that had come undone. There was about five feet of hose dragging on the road behind the truck. Then there were six feet, then seven, then ten, then fifteen. By that time I was passing the truck. I honked a couple of times, which I'm sure meant nothing, and proceeded on my way; heaven only knows what happened.
I can't speak for anyone else if if I had a flat tire or a load that was coming loose I'd want the surrounding cars to let me know.
and in the fifties I read all about it in "The Lost City," a Rick Brant Electronic Adventure, by John Blaine. (Pseudonym of Harold Leland Goodwin). Like Tom Swift, but more up-to-date and nerdier. This is based on many-decade-old recollections, but they end up stranded on a mountain ledge in Tibet with a hand-crank generator. As I recall the book mentions that they need to crank quite hard to power the filaments in the vacuum tubes. It's Morse Code, of course, not voice. I seem to recall that the radio waves are described as being in the radar wavelength range, but it's really been a long time and I'm into very unreliable memory here.
I wish I could remember why they need to go to Tibet to test the equipment. Probably because If They Didn't, There Wouldn't Have Been Any Story.
Rick's father is a dignified scientist. Rick and his father are always accompanied by lovable sidekicks Zircon (?) and, um, can't remember his name exactly, it's not "Chowdah" but something like that--an Indian (not a native American, but a person from India) who speaks amusingly broken English and makes comic errors due to his entire knowledge of the Western world having been obtained from a copy of the World Almanac.
There seems to be quite a bit more about this at this website
The New York Times article actually says something about the methods used. It basically works by looking at the kinds of operations that need to be performed when interpolating between pixels in manipulations such as changes in size, rotation, etc.
And, "Professor Farid said that for now the technique does not work as well with files created in JPEG, the compressed picture format most commonly used online. As the size of a JPEG file shrinks, the correlations between pixels become much less obvious. 'At 90 percent quality, it falls apart very quickly," Professor Farid noted.'"
Boy, does that ever sound familiar. See my story ("good riddance to bad rubbish") above. The only difference is that in my case they said the payment had arrive a couple of days late, but the bank's cancelled check image showed that it had been cashed a week before the bill was due.
I wonder why they were so aggressive about turning over accounts paid through online bill paying services to collection agencies?
When the phone companies were split up, I retained my AT&T long distance account out of habit and inertia. One day my bank offered free trials of their online bill-paying service, so I tried it out, with no problems with any company--except AT&T.
The service says to allow one week for payment. I authorize payment THREE weeks before the bill is due. Online screen shows bill as "paid" TWO weeks before it is due. AT&T claimed the payment was two days late. After a lot of phone calls the bank got me an image of the cancelled check showing it was, in fact, cashed ONE week before the bill was due. Got that?
Now get this. Remember, this is the first month I'm using the online bill-paying service, and have never paid a bill late before (in something like twenty years), didn't pay this one late, and even at the beginning AT&T acknowledged having received payment.
I start getting obnoxious calls every evening from a collection agency.
Even after AT&T acknowledges that the bill was paid, the collection agency keeps calling.
Even after AT&T says the collection service has been told to stop, it keeps calling. (The collection agency, or at any rate the people who are calling me, say they have no record that AT&T has told them to stop).
Even after I mail the collection service full documentation of everything, including screen shots of the bank's online bill-paying records and the image of the cancelled check, they keep calling and people at the collection agency tell me they have received the records and everything is OK, the collection agency keeps calling. (The people who are calling claim not to have been told to stop by the people at the agency who acknowledged receiving the records).
EVENTUALLY they do stop.
At this point I'm a tiny little bit furious so I fire off an angry letter to the office of the president of AT&T telling the story, opining that a refund of the month's bill would be fair recompense for my bad treatment and that if they'll do that we'll call it even and I'll stay with AT&T.
I get a phone call on my answering machine from the president's office saying they completely understand and agree are sorry it all happened and they will send me a check for $65 and want to keep me as a customer.
The check doesn't arrive.
Here is a company that could have easily kept me as a customer. The only, single, solitary thing they needed to do was not to actively drive me away.
One of the few good things about closed source is that if a vendor wants third-party developers to write to its closed-source OS, it is beneficial to the vendor to create and make available well-written, accurate, complete, up-to-date documentation.
Admittedly Microsoft's documentation for developers has been going downhill lately, along with almost everyone else's. The physical volumes became CD's which became help-system files which became scraps of sample code. In order to develop to the Windows SCSI API, it is necessary to use guesswork, intuition, trial-and-error, and the assistance of the Windows community's "tribal knowledge." The PC community has long been used to using magazine articles and "Undocumented WIndows" books as sources of information.
But it is now about to get worse. I potentially foresee a situation where favored developers have access to source code, and documentation will decline to the point where it is difficult or impossible for non-favored developers to work in any development environment but VB.
In the Apple world, documentation was absolutely superb from about 1983 to about 2000 and underwent a precipitous decline with the advent of Darwin-based OS X. (A noticeable portion of the official documentation seems to have been generated automatically from header files!) I don't think this is a coincidence.
It is more honored in the breach than in the observance, though.
Notice, however, that many articles do have an "external links" section, which in many cases does point to sources and references. I think that, being a Web encyclopedia, the (lazy) tendency is to include Web references.
I know that when I work on a Wikipedia article, I am almost always working from my home, not from a library. It is usually convenient to check facts and give references that are available on the Web, and less convenient to give proper references to books and journal articles. I suspect this is true for many other contributors.
I agree with this criticism of Wikipedia. However, I disagree with the statement that "other encyclopedias cite sources for their work." Some articles in some encyclopedias have a bibliography, but even when present it is not comparable to, say, the standards of citation for a journal article. I probably need to look at the Britannica 3 again, but my experience is that MOST statements in MOST encyclopedias are delivered ex cathedra, as it were.
I just took a quick look at an Encarta article and I see a contributor's name, but no sources for any of the information in it.
Encyclopedias are not themselves considered acceptable as references in a scientific work.
I don't believe the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica had any citations other than the contributor's initials at the end of the article. Of course when you have contributors like Lord Rayleigh and Sir Ernest Rutherford, perhaps their initials are sufficient.
online for 48 hours, One great source--if you can trust it, contains the familiar criticism that "it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability."
How do you respond to this comment?
Does you feel that the Wikipedia community has group standards that are comparable to, say, the group standards of people who have graduated from journalism schools?
I don't think a true do-it-yourself webcam is a possibility these days, any more than making your own chip. But there are a lot of entertaining things you could do with the optics. For starters, replace the lens with a pinhole. You might be able to get a really wide-angle view that way, with minimum geometrical distortion. (Or, then again, you might not).
Go buy a pair of, say, 2-diopter reading glasses at a drugstore. Replace the webcam's lens with a tube about 500 mm long and the reading glass lens at the end. Now you have an extreme telephoto lens. Not sharp? Once again, stop it down...
Is the webcam chip sensitive to UV? Is there an easy way to filter out the visible? Then you can go out and get a bees-eye view of flowers, some of which have dramatic patterns on them visible only in ultraviolet.
Slashdot Mirror
Umpteen decades ago, scientists studying productivity at Western Electric's manufacturing complex were baffled because everything they did seemed to work. They increased lighting levels: productivity went up. They decreased lighting levels: productivity went up. They finally figured out that what was increasing productivity was the workers' perception that management was displaying an interest in improving their working conditions. See Hawthorne studies
An article like "color me productive" that doesn't mention the Hawthorne effect and explain why they don't think this is just more of the same... is garbage.
Furthermore, any study that doesn't compare the relative effects of: spending money on painting the walls red; spending the same money on alternative improvements (bigger cubicles, better chairs, quieter rooms, better lighting); spending the same money on raises... is garbage.
Most of my nontechnical acquaintances are savvy enough to select "help" from a menu or read the glossy "getting started" summary card packed at the top of the box. If Clippy has the answer for them, they don't call tech support.
The problem is not whether the person on the phone has a detectable accent or a professional demeanor. The problem is that for the last five years, tech support people, foreign or domestic have been human versions of Clippy. Only with fewer preprogrammed answers. The problem is that in so many cases they appear to be reading from a top forty FAQ sheet and cannot solve any problem that the average user can't solve themselves.
I'm happy with anyone who actually solves my problem, and I'll be most other customers are, too.
Old memories only, I'm afraid.
I looked into this very carefully back circa 1985 to 1989, because I was in the computer unit of a research institution that was heavily into Digital gear, had databases and so forth that exploited Digital terminals, and had standardized on Macs for personal computers.
At the time I found three "winners."
--Apple's own MacTerminal had the most complete, accurate, and lovingly faithful VT100 emulation of anything I ever tested. It worked with everything, and in particular supported double high/double wide characters, everything about keypads. It was by far the best VT100 emulator of any kind, on any platform, I ever evaluated. No graphics, though (no "sixels").
--White Pine Software's Mac240 was a very faithful VT240 emulator and was quite good for graphics.
--Versaterm was not a flawless VT100 substitute, but it was very good at everything it did, and it did a lot.
Many programs that claimed VT100 emulation were quite poor at it, particular issues involving commands that affected the VT100's internal state.
The quick test is to try double high/double wide characters. An emulator that doesn't do them is not aspiring to be a high-fidelity DEC emulator. If an emulator does do them, it's a sign that the developers were really trying and probably knew their stuff.
Much as I'd love to love them, Red Ryder/White Knight were lousy at VT100 emulation. If that means anything to anyone.
Apple distributed something called Carbon Dater which analyzed OS 9 executables, built a list of OS API calls, and called out those that were not supported in Carbon (the OS 9 compatibility API in OS X).
As opposed to waiting until the new API kicks in, it seems to me that a truly thoughtful and responsible organization might distribute tools to developers that catalog the API calls that their applications use, and ask them to return the results to the vendor so that the vendor can make an informed decision about which deprecated, unsupported, undocumented calls are actually being widely used... rather than waiting for things to break and reacting after the fact.
(I know... I should get my head out of the clouds...)
...and deposited it, and it cleared. Just for the record.
I have to say though that during the long, long wait, I was really impressed by how dead that website was and how impossible it was going to be to straighten things out or prove I had actually signed up for it, if the check didn't arrive. I thought I had saved a screenshot somewhere, but I hadn't.
...they'll beam a wifi and a cellphone signal at a building and measure the reflections. If the building is much more reflective at wifi frequencies than cellphone frequencies, they've found something really worth finding. How they get it once they've found it is another matter, of course.
...would be a good story for some in the military to be reading, I think.
And if you are not old enough to recognize that, and do not even know who Lowell Thomas was, take a look at this site.
I have here in my hand a list of 283, a list of 283 lines of code made known to the Secretary of OSDN as being patented by Microsoft and who nevertheless are still working and shaping functionality in the Linux department. ...I have here in my hand a list of 57 card-carrying patent infringements... ...I have here a list of 81 patents potentially infringed by LINUX, including three big ones...
Patently, bad measurements are worse than no measurements.
"Measurement drives performance." If you are measuring the wrong thing or using misleading measurements, you will do the wrong thing.
Anyone who thinks they can devise a meaningful measurement the quality of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony versus Brahm's First... or which tastes better, vanilla ice cream or fresh pineapple... or who is a better ballplayer, Willie Mays or Sammy Sosa... needs to have their head measured, preferably with a standardized test.
In order to tell whether measurement in some way is superior to not measuring it at all, you need a way to measure the quality of the measurement. But to do that, you need...
A word is needed for the, um, logical fallacy? Dishonest rhetorical technique? Honest self-deception? in which administrators, and proponents of policies, use language that automatically asserts the infallibility of the device, technique, or procedure being proposed.
"This couldn't have happened because we have procedures in place that prevent it..."
For example: no recounts are allowed because no recounts are needed because our voting machines are perfect.
This rhetorical technique is used all the time (and on both side of the aisle). For example: who could complain about making sure that felons don't vote (in those states where felons are not allowed to vote?) On the other hand, who wouldn't complain about disenfranchising people whose first four letters of their first name, their surname, and their race happens to be the same as that of a felon?
This just in. Microsoft has announced a beta version of a revolutionary new news aggregation service to be called "Dotdotbackslash." Unlike automatic services such as Google News, this one relies on the human judgements of hundreds of Microsoft MVPs to locate and make available the most relevant information needed for IT managers.
Slogan: "News for PHBs--Words that Buzz"
Very seriously, I have often wanted a way to communicate hazardous conditions to nearby drivers. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a car going about 65 mph in the left lane of route 128 whose right front tire was extremely low. We got to a section where traffic was choked up and everyone was going about 20. Their passenger window was open, and I was able to match speeds, open my window and yell "Flat tire! flat tire!" They did not seem to understand. This isn't a joke, I did NOT get a hostile response, I'm just saying that it's not easy to communicate. They probably couldn't even hear me over the wind. And, yes, it was a dangerous distraction for me to be trying to do that in congested highway traffic.
I've seen many cars with their headlights off at night, and trucks with badly secured loads. One time I saw a truck with some kind of hose on a big spool that had come undone. There was about five feet of hose dragging on the road behind the truck. Then there were six feet, then seven, then ten, then fifteen. By that time I was passing the truck. I honked a couple of times, which I'm sure meant nothing, and proceeded on my way; heaven only knows what happened.
I can't speak for anyone else if if I had a flat tire or a load that was coming loose I'd want the surrounding cars to let me know.
and in the fifties I read all about it in "The Lost City," a Rick Brant Electronic Adventure, by John Blaine. (Pseudonym of Harold Leland Goodwin). Like Tom Swift, but more up-to-date and nerdier. This is based on many-decade-old recollections, but they end up stranded on a mountain ledge in Tibet with a hand-crank generator. As I recall the book mentions that they need to crank quite hard to power the filaments in the vacuum tubes. It's Morse Code, of course, not voice. I seem to recall that the radio waves are described as being in the radar wavelength range, but it's really been a long time and I'm into very unreliable memory here.
I wish I could remember why they need to go to Tibet to test the equipment. Probably because If They Didn't, There Wouldn't Have Been Any Story.
Rick's father is a dignified scientist. Rick and his father are always accompanied by lovable sidekicks Zircon (?) and, um, can't remember his name exactly, it's not "Chowdah" but something like that--an Indian (not a native American, but a person from India) who speaks amusingly broken English and makes comic errors due to his entire knowledge of the Western world having been obtained from a copy of the World Almanac.
There seems to be quite a bit more about this at this website
The New York Times article actually says something about the methods used. It basically works by looking at the kinds of operations that need to be performed when interpolating between pixels in manipulations such as changes in size, rotation, etc.
And, "Professor Farid said that for now the technique does not work as well with files created in JPEG, the compressed picture format most commonly used online. As the size of a JPEG file shrinks, the correlations between pixels become much less obvious. 'At 90 percent quality, it falls apart very quickly," Professor Farid noted.'"
Boy, does that ever sound familiar. See my story ("good riddance to bad rubbish") above. The only difference is that in my case they said the payment had arrive a couple of days late, but the bank's cancelled check image showed that it had been cashed a week before the bill was due.
I wonder why they were so aggressive about turning over accounts paid through online bill paying services to collection agencies?
When the phone companies were split up, I retained my AT&T long distance account out of habit and inertia. One day my bank offered free trials of their online bill-paying service, so I tried it out, with no problems with any company--except AT&T.
The service says to allow one week for payment. I authorize payment THREE weeks before the bill is due. Online screen shows bill as "paid" TWO weeks before it is due. AT&T claimed the payment was two days late. After a lot of phone calls the bank got me an image of the cancelled check showing it was, in fact, cashed ONE week before the bill was due. Got that?
Now get this. Remember, this is the first month I'm using the online bill-paying service, and have never paid a bill late before (in something like twenty years), didn't pay this one late, and even at the beginning AT&T acknowledged having received payment.
I start getting obnoxious calls every evening from a collection agency.
Even after AT&T acknowledges that the bill was paid, the collection agency keeps calling.
Even after AT&T says the collection service has been told to stop, it keeps calling. (The collection agency, or at any rate the people who are calling me, say they have no record that AT&T has told them to stop).
Even after I mail the collection service full documentation of everything, including screen shots of the bank's online bill-paying records and the image of the cancelled check, they keep calling and people at the collection agency tell me they have received the records and everything is OK, the collection agency keeps calling. (The people who are calling claim not to have been told to stop by the people at the agency who acknowledged receiving the records).
EVENTUALLY they do stop.
At this point I'm a tiny little bit furious so I fire off an angry letter to the office of the president of AT&T telling the story, opining that a refund of the month's bill would be fair recompense for my bad treatment and that if they'll do that we'll call it even and I'll stay with AT&T.
I get a phone call on my answering machine from the president's office saying they completely understand and agree are sorry it all happened and they will send me a check for $65 and want to keep me as a customer.
The check doesn't arrive.
Here is a company that could have easily kept me as a customer. The only, single, solitary thing they needed to do was not to actively drive me away.
OpenTalk, AppleTalk, HyperTalk, LocalTalk, MacinTalk... ...BabelTalk, YadayadaTalk, JargonTalk...
One of the few good things about closed source is that if a vendor wants third-party developers to write to its closed-source OS, it is beneficial to the vendor to create and make available well-written, accurate, complete, up-to-date documentation.
Admittedly Microsoft's documentation for developers has been going downhill lately, along with almost everyone else's. The physical volumes became CD's which became help-system files which became scraps of sample code. In order to develop to the Windows SCSI API, it is necessary to use guesswork, intuition, trial-and-error, and the assistance of the Windows community's "tribal knowledge." The PC community has long been used to using magazine articles and "Undocumented WIndows" books as sources of information.
But it is now about to get worse. I potentially foresee a situation where favored developers have access to source code, and documentation will decline to the point where it is difficult or impossible for non-favored developers to work in any development environment but VB.
In the Apple world, documentation was absolutely superb from about 1983 to about 2000 and underwent a precipitous decline with the advent of Darwin-based OS X. (A noticeable portion of the official documentation seems to have been generated automatically from header files!) I don't think this is a coincidence.
...was to it easier for him to booze at the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona.
Glad to know that Microsoft's human resources department isn't influenced by upper-management decisions...
For what it's worth, they are officially encouraged. See Wikipedia Policies: Content guidelines, specifically Cite sources.
It is more honored in the breach than in the observance, though.
Notice, however, that many articles do have an "external links" section, which in many cases does point to sources and references. I think that, being a Web encyclopedia, the (lazy) tendency is to include Web references.
I know that when I work on a Wikipedia article, I am almost always working from my home, not from a library. It is usually convenient to check facts and give references that are available on the Web, and less convenient to give proper references to books and journal articles. I suspect this is true for many other contributors.
I agree with this criticism of Wikipedia. However, I disagree with the statement that "other encyclopedias cite sources for their work." Some articles in some encyclopedias have a bibliography, but even when present it is not comparable to, say, the standards of citation for a journal article. I probably need to look at the Britannica 3 again, but my experience is that MOST statements in MOST encyclopedias are delivered ex cathedra, as it were.
I just took a quick look at an Encarta article and I see a contributor's name, but no sources for any of the information in it.
Encyclopedias are not themselves considered acceptable as references in a scientific work.
I don't believe the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica had any citations other than the contributor's initials at the end of the article. Of course when you have contributors like Lord Rayleigh and Sir Ernest Rutherford, perhaps their initials are sufficient.
online for 48 hours,
One great source--if you can trust it, contains the familiar criticism that "it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability."
How do you respond to this comment?
Does you feel that the Wikipedia community has group standards that are comparable to, say, the group standards of people who have graduated from journalism schools?
I don't think a true do-it-yourself webcam is a possibility these days, any more than making your own chip. But there are a lot of entertaining things you could do with the optics. For starters, replace the lens with a pinhole. You might be able to get a really wide-angle view that way, with minimum geometrical distortion. (Or, then again, you might not).
Go buy a pair of, say, 2-diopter reading glasses at a drugstore. Replace the webcam's lens with a tube about 500 mm long and the reading glass lens at the end. Now you have an extreme telephoto lens. Not sharp? Once again, stop it down...
Is the webcam chip sensitive to UV? Is there an easy way to filter out the visible? Then you can go out and get a bees-eye view of flowers, some of which have dramatic patterns on them visible only in ultraviolet.