Because unless you personally do it yourself you'd have to be riding herd on a programmer or a team of programmers as well as 3000 web files and a company full of content producers.
You'd have to make them:
- Write something with the features YOU want and not the features they think would be a good idea.
- Stick to a deadline.
- Design an interface that your content contributors find intuitive, navigable, and non-ambiguous--unless you want to go into the training business too.
It would be worth several tens of thousands of dollars not to have to do this.
Disclaimer: I like programmers. I respect programmers. I enjoy working with programmers. But I don't have illusions about it being easy.
- Whenever possible, use an off-the-shelf product, and a mature one if available. Advantages: It has evolved, and there's a community of users out there to help you via forums, mailing lists, and so on.
- Looks like you've got a total of 3.25 virtual people maintaining about 1000 pages apiece. I worked on a project of roughly this order of magnitude by myself, and it nearly did me in.
- When content contributors do their own page production and uploading, standards can go out the door. Basically, you have to control their access severely. This has always been true. I've seen camera-ready copy that an engineer has run through his typewriter to "correct"--at NASA no less.
- Don't forget low-tech alternatives: for instance, photocopied forms which your content generator co-workers fill out and pass to you. Since your site consists largely of reference material, the pages are probably pretty standard and tabular. Whether this would work depends on factors like the number of pages/week that need updating.
- Mid-tech: set up some strictly controlled forms in Word on a server, used the same way as photocopies, only you can generate the HTML straight from Word (then use another program to clean it up, of course--Dreamweaver does this, among others). That might be a function for your Perl programmers--let the employees "Save As HTML Document," and upload. Then you run everything in the upload directory through a de-Wordjunk script periodically before it goes live. You would have to look over the results, but then no program no matter how expensive removes the need for quality control.
- I hope you're already using style sheets:)
- It all depends on how many people need to modify page content and how often.
Re,... it is not a very culturally significant mummy compared to the king tut mummy...
Hey now, I don't think a mummy is more culturally significant because in life it was a royal personage. A regular worker or manager mummy is pretty interesting too.
Although ancient people of any social rank are interesting to learn about, to me the very small middle class is extra-fascinating. Royalty left plenty of written and pictured records of themselves; and peasant life is oppressed peasant life. I can't identify with either. I can, however, identify with scribes, architects, and engineers of the ancient world, and it's them I would like to know more about. Therefore, this find is culturally significant to me.
Re,...the article authours propose no mechanism for their magical solid-state fission reactor to turn on and off...
Yes, they do:
"One might imagine instances in which the rate of production of [neutron-absorbing] fission products exceeds their rate of removal by gravitationally driven diffusion," Herndon wrote in a recent paper on the subject. If so, he explained, "the power output of the geo-reactor would decrease and the reactor might eventually shut down, thereby diminishing and ultimately shutting down the Earth's magnetic field."
Over time, as the lighter elements moved away from the uranium core, the reactor would restart.
Also, re Without a really strong mechanism operating to separate it out and concentrate it, it's going to remain a trace impurity in other ores, and not a ball at the center of the Earth.
There is such a mechanism. Everyone agrees that the core is iron. How did that happen, when the Earth coalesced from random rocky materials? The same way. If iron, why not uranium? From the article:
...over time, solid uranium particles would rain out from Earth's fluid core at high temperatures. Because of their high density, they could collect at the very center of the Earth.
NOAA has a bunch of mysterious sounds, each scarier than the next. Try "Julia" or "Slowdown" on for size, but not if you're by yourself in the dark thinking about what lives on this planet that we don't know about.
I read 'em in a geeky way (detailed below), but what I read is a broad selection linked from the Online Books Page. Recommended:
John Lathrop Motley's 3-part history of the early Dutch Republic. Sheds a lot of light on Microsoft vs. everybody else, UnitedLinux, etc. These situations aren't new. The players just have different names--and, fortunately, big corporations don't actually have armies.
The novels of George Eliot. This 19th-century writer is head and shoulders above her contemporaries. Again, in these books you will discover that people haven't changed.
The novels of Anthony Trollope, especially the Barchester series.
Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II. Another historical era with big, big similarities to our own. The explosion of activity powered by the sudden end of censorship in England resembles the 1990s in several ways. For instance: Broadsheet = web page.
H. Rider Haggard. Classic adventure stories. Anna Katherine Green, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux--all early detective novelists. William Morris--peculiar, pseudo-medieval language, but good stories.
I download these in text format, run a macro to take out the extra carriage returns, then convert them through MakeDocW and read them on the PDA.
Obv notes accurately: "...physics is full of implausible concepts that work out..." Superconductors play close to the edge. Take this idea, for instance:
Make an ice chest out of single-crystal high-temperature superconductor. (Can't be done in practice yet, but nothing theoretically impossible about it.) The chest is a single crystal, the lid is another single crystal machined to very close tolerance. No gaps when you put it on.
Cool the ice chest down to liquid-nitrogen temp and run a current through it. It is now superconducting, and it is now non-conductive of heat. Put in this ice chest a solid piece of frozen oxygen or whatever you like that's cold cold cold.
Lid on, current now running through lid too.
You are now keeping a piece of oxygen frozen solid at little more than the energy expenditure to keep some nitrogen liquid. Sounds like it doesn't compute, but a cryo guy told me it would work. (Shoulda patented it...)
With BigClock (free clock program) I can set my Palm to ding on the quarter-hour, dingdingding on the half-hour, and do something kind of similar to the Westminster chime on the hour, but it won't actually strike the hour.
Settings for chime. I am not a musician and pert-near musically retarded but this works for me: 1200 400 800 600 1000 700 600 800
But, I want more: I want it to do that Ding-dong, ding-dong... Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!... ("Hey, is it five already?") Surely this would not be hard to program but I can't find one out there.
Karen Holland, the late Austin artist, said, "You need a device that not only has a dated to-do list with an alarm, but if you don't do the thing you're supposed to, the PDA starts telling your secrets."
I don't know whether she meant out loud or over the net. Either would be a mighty fine motivator.
Journalists, lawyers, politicians vs. computers
on
Blogging for Dummies?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Re their integrity, sure--there are some bad apples in every bunch. However, one way journalism is like science is that journalists' output can be checked against the real world. They constantly check up on each other, not out of altruism of course--possibly the reverse, but as long as it works...
As for teaching them to blog or use computers in any way, I don't envy the teachers. Journalists, like lawyers, politicians, preachers, writers, and some/most teachers (the "word-oriented professions"), live and work in a conceptual world that is non-physical.
There seems to be a natural antipathy between word-oriented professionals and machinery. Most word-oriented professionals could, or imagine they could, do their job as well in a non-technical society as in ours. I think it derives from the ancient Greek division between philosophy and work.
This is only a theory. But if you've ever tried to provide tech support to a bunch of reporters you know it's about as easy as convincing cats to become amphibious.
I got the century wrong but yes, this was an idea. Here's a history site. They were so overwhelmed by the idea that you could pump AIR instead of just water (and that it would invisibly kill things in bell jars), that they started wondering what else you could pump--e.g. thoughts. Here's Descartes playing with the idea:
"The cavities of the brain are central reservoirs...animal spirits enter these cavities. They pass into the pores of its substance and from these pores into the nerves. The nerves may be compared to the tubes of a waterworks; breathing or other actions depend on the flow of animal spirits into the nerves. The rational soul (the pineal) takes place of the engineer, living in that part of the reservoir that connects all of the various tubes...."
No matter how secure the file is, if your staff members take down the credit card number on scratch paper, possibly in a legal pad which they keep in their desk, or yellow stickies which they throw away in the regular wastebasket, you've got a problem. I tried and tried to get us some secure waste disposal at one place I worked, never succeeded. Fortunately we did not have any grifters among us (that I ever found out about).
I believe you're confusing medium and content. For instance, these words you're looking at are the result of "computations" in your computer. But, what they really are is a bunch of symbols and what they REALLY are is a statement by me to you.
It always bugs me when people say things like A is just B, for instance 'music is only a sequence of frequencies,' 'life is just a set of complex chemical reactions', etc. Used like this, "just", "only," "merely", and such words (explicit or implicit) mean "and therefore trivial". That's introducing judgement while trying to look objective. It's an extremely 20th-century kind of thought.
Also watch out for the idea that because something (thing A) is big, something small (thing B) is less important. Big, small, container/contained, before/after, and so on aren't on the same scale as important/unimportant.
And, don't confuse "less important" with "unimportant."
Re, "...why does everything have to be made into a computer of some sort?"
Because computers are the hot new technology. In the 1700s, say 250 years ago, things were described in terms of air pumps. Even thought was described using a model of a lot of little air pumps in your brain. That was because they were new, hot technology.
thanks... junkscience seemed so promising a concept... but then I went and looked at it. Man, why can't people just get things straight without adding in their politics? And usually a high level of indignation ("the amphetamine of the emotions"TM)
This is true. When I was a support tech, we got whichever mini-cube was free. Everybody was sick all the time. The ones with children would bring in cold viruses from the daycare and get them on the keyboard. We'd pick them up. We were just lucky there wasn't any MDR TB on the loose.
They said it was a lot worse when they shared headsets, too.
Sounds like John Varley's "The Barbie Murders" in which a cult, all modified to look identical, wearing standard coveralls, and supposedly taking whichever cell was empty for the night, had renegades who secretly grabbed the same cell every time and kept exotic costumes in it for private parties.
Every office has secret stashes of one kind or another ("I know where there's plenty of Red Label Liquid Paper!"). Unless the building itself reconfigures every night they'll develop even under this plan.
You're absolutely right. It is the Tasmanian tiger fetus. Why it's appearing on a cow organ story is a mystery except that both stories contain the word "cloned".
Slashdot Mirror
Because unless you personally do it yourself you'd have to be riding herd on a programmer or a team of programmers as well as 3000 web files and a company full of content producers.
You'd have to make them:
- Write something with the features YOU want and not the features they think would be a good idea.
- Stick to a deadline.
- Design an interface that your content contributors find intuitive, navigable, and non-ambiguous--unless you want to go into the training business too.
It would be worth several tens of thousands of dollars not to have to do this.
Disclaimer: I like programmers. I respect programmers. I enjoy working with programmers. But I don't have illusions about it being easy.
- Whenever possible, use an off-the-shelf product, and a mature one if available. Advantages: It has evolved, and there's a community of users out there to help you via forums, mailing lists, and so on.
:)
- Looks like you've got a total of 3.25 virtual people maintaining about 1000 pages apiece. I worked on a project of roughly this order of magnitude by myself, and it nearly did me in.
- When content contributors do their own page production and uploading, standards can go out the door. Basically, you have to control their access severely. This has always been true. I've seen camera-ready copy that an engineer has run through his typewriter to "correct"--at NASA no less.
- Don't forget low-tech alternatives: for instance, photocopied forms which your content generator co-workers fill out and pass to you. Since your site consists largely of reference material, the pages are probably pretty standard and tabular. Whether this would work depends on factors like the number of pages/week that need updating.
- Mid-tech: set up some strictly controlled forms in Word on a server, used the same way as photocopies, only you can generate the HTML straight from Word (then use another program to clean it up, of course--Dreamweaver does this, among others). That might be a function for your Perl programmers--let the employees "Save As HTML Document," and upload. Then you run everything in the upload directory through a de-Wordjunk script periodically before it goes live. You would have to look over the results, but then no program no matter how expensive removes the need for quality control.
- I hope you're already using style sheets
- It all depends on how many people need to modify page content and how often.
Here's a beautiful photo of the VLA from Astronomy Picture of the Day.
If I genetically engineer (or even just train) birds to sing copyrighted songs, can I avoid paying a royalty to the copyright holder?
Re, ... it is not a very culturally significant mummy compared to the king tut mummy...
Hey now, I don't think a mummy is more culturally significant because in life it was a royal personage. A regular worker or manager mummy is pretty interesting too.
Although ancient people of any social rank are interesting to learn about, to me the very small middle class is extra-fascinating. Royalty left plenty of written and pictured records of themselves; and peasant life is oppressed peasant life. I can't identify with either. I can, however, identify with scribes, architects, and engineers of the ancient world, and it's them I would like to know more about. Therefore, this find is culturally significant to me.
Yes, they do: Also, re Without a really strong mechanism operating to separate it out and concentrate it, it's going to remain a trace impurity in other ores, and not a ball at the center of the Earth.
There is such a mechanism. Everyone agrees that the core is iron. How did that happen, when the Earth coalesced from random rocky materials? The same way. If iron, why not uranium? From the article:
NOAA has a bunch of mysterious sounds, each scarier than the next. Try "Julia" or "Slowdown" on for size, but not if you're by yourself in the dark thinking about what lives on this planet that we don't know about.
- John Lathrop Motley's 3-part history of the early Dutch Republic. Sheds a lot of light on Microsoft vs. everybody else, UnitedLinux, etc. These situations aren't new. The players just have different names--and, fortunately, big corporations don't actually have armies.
- The novels of George Eliot. This 19th-century writer is head and shoulders above her contemporaries. Again, in these books you will discover that people haven't changed.
- The novels of Anthony Trollope, especially the Barchester series.
- Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II. Another historical era with big, big similarities to our own. The explosion of activity powered by the sudden end of censorship in England resembles the 1990s in several ways. For instance: Broadsheet = web page.
- H. Rider Haggard. Classic adventure stories. Anna Katherine Green, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux--all early detective novelists. William Morris--peculiar, pseudo-medieval language, but good stories.
I download these in text format, run a macro to take out the extra carriage returns, then convert them through MakeDocW and read them on the PDA.- Make an ice chest out of single-crystal high-temperature superconductor. (Can't be done in practice yet, but nothing theoretically impossible about it.) The chest is a single crystal, the lid is another single crystal machined to very close tolerance. No gaps when you put it on.
- Cool the ice chest down to liquid-nitrogen temp and run a current through it. It is now superconducting, and it is now non-conductive of heat. Put in this ice chest a solid piece of frozen oxygen or whatever you like that's cold cold cold.
- Lid on, current now running through lid too.
You are now keeping a piece of oxygen frozen solid at little more than the energy expenditure to keep some nitrogen liquid. Sounds like it doesn't compute, but a cryo guy told me it would work. (Shoulda patented it...)With BigClock (free clock program) I can set my Palm to ding on the quarter-hour, dingdingding on the half-hour, and do something kind of similar to the Westminster chime on the hour, but it won't actually strike the hour.
... ("Hey, is it five already?") Surely this would not be hard to program but I can't find one out there.
Settings for chime. I am not a musician and pert-near musically retarded but this works for me:
1200 400
800 600
1000 700
600 800
But, I want more: I want it to do that Ding-dong, ding-dong... Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
Karen Holland, the late Austin artist, said, "You need a device that not only has a dated to-do list with an alarm, but if you don't do the thing you're supposed to, the PDA starts telling your secrets."
I don't know whether she meant out loud or over the net. Either would be a mighty fine motivator.
Re their integrity, sure--there are some bad apples in every bunch. However, one way journalism is like science is that journalists' output can be checked against the real world. They constantly check up on each other, not out of altruism of course--possibly the reverse, but as long as it works...
As for teaching them to blog or use computers in any way, I don't envy the teachers. Journalists, like lawyers, politicians, preachers, writers, and some/most teachers (the "word-oriented professions"), live and work in a conceptual world that is non-physical.
There seems to be a natural antipathy between word-oriented professionals and machinery. Most word-oriented professionals could, or imagine they could, do their job as well in a non-technical society as in ours. I think it derives from the ancient Greek division between philosophy and work.
This is only a theory. But if you've ever tried to provide tech support to a bunch of reporters you know it's about as easy as convincing cats to become amphibious.
Their hard work, your good luck (to get born now instead of in 1600 or 120,000 BC).
I'd go to a local meeting of Slashdotters Older Than Average.
Then there's
This page intentionally blank, but not any more
I got the century wrong but yes, this was an idea. Here's a history site.
They were so overwhelmed by the idea that you could pump AIR instead of just water (and that it would invisibly kill things in bell jars), that they started wondering what else you could pump--e.g. thoughts. Here's Descartes playing with the idea:
"The cavities of the brain are central reservoirs...animal spirits enter these cavities. They pass into the pores of its substance and from these pores into the nerves. The nerves may be compared to the tubes of a waterworks; breathing or other actions depend on the flow of animal spirits into the nerves. The rational soul (the pineal) takes place of the engineer, living in that part of the reservoir that connects all of the various tubes...."
No matter how secure the file is, if your staff members take down the credit card number on scratch paper, possibly in a legal pad which they keep in their desk, or yellow stickies which they throw away in the regular wastebasket, you've got a problem. I tried and tried to get us some secure waste disposal at one place I worked, never succeeded. Fortunately we did not have any grifters among us (that I ever found out about).
I believe you're confusing medium and content. For instance, these words you're looking at are the result of "computations" in your computer. But, what they really are is a bunch of symbols and what they REALLY are is a statement by me to you.
It always bugs me when people say things like A is just B, for instance 'music is only a sequence of frequencies,' 'life is just a set of complex chemical reactions', etc. Used like this, "just", "only," "merely", and such words (explicit or implicit) mean "and therefore trivial". That's introducing judgement while trying to look objective. It's an extremely 20th-century kind of thought.
Also watch out for the idea that because something (thing A) is big, something small (thing B) is less important. Big, small, container/contained, before/after, and so on aren't on the same scale as important/unimportant.
And, don't confuse "less important" with "unimportant."
Re,
"...why does everything have to be made into a computer of some sort?"
Because computers are the hot new technology. In the 1700s, say 250 years ago, things were described in terms of air pumps. Even thought was described using a model of a lot of little air pumps in your brain. That was because they were new, hot technology.
what?
thanks... junkscience seemed so promising a concept... but then I went and looked at it. Man, why can't people just get things straight without adding in their politics? And usually a high level of indignation ("the amphetamine of the emotions"TM)
This is true. When I was a support tech, we got whichever mini-cube was free. Everybody was sick all the time. The ones with children would bring in cold viruses from the daycare and get them on the keyboard. We'd pick them up. We were just lucky there wasn't any MDR TB on the loose.
They said it was a lot worse when they shared headsets, too.
Sounds like there'd be MORE walking around-- Looking for your team members.
Sounds like John Varley's "The Barbie Murders" in which a cult, all modified to look identical, wearing standard coveralls, and supposedly taking whichever cell was empty for the night, had renegades who secretly grabbed the same cell every time and kept exotic costumes in it for private parties.
Every office has secret stashes of one kind or another ("I know where there's plenty of Red Label Liquid Paper!"). Unless the building itself reconfigures every night they'll develop even under this plan.
You're absolutely right. It is the Tasmanian tiger fetus. Why it's appearing on a cow organ story is a mystery except that both stories contain the word "cloned".