politics and freedom of information (or the lack of it)

The Memory Hole [rescuing knowledge, freeing information]

twinned with

oneworld,

mediachannel

and

Z mag


pbf rubbish monkey

amoungst all the scary shit - some light relief is needed


How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows

Rule Number Three: Failures Are Good. Good Failures Are Better.


puppetmaster2

One of the twelve contestants IS NOT REAL. He or she is a fictional persona developed by one of the other eleven contestants. This fictional character is called the PUPPET, and the person pulling the Puppet's strings is, you guessed it, THE PUPPETMASTER.


Have just discovered that I am subscribed to the news feed of the café - via gmane - don't know how I did that - but I wondered whether I could also subscribe to weblog rss feeds in the same way ?

If anyone knows, please email me.


Why I Write / George Orwell

via: kottke

CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar

really worth a watch!

Some top notch speakers, Introduced by Terry Winograd.

I am listening - and occasionally watching

judith says 'hard on'

phew, no pictures


a couple of old links about e-learning

the NODE: networking June 1999
Don Tapscott on the Future of Education. Don is a noted authority on new media and information technology and their implications for business, education, government, and society.

Online Teaching: The Delights and Dangers of Pseudonymity
from JCMC 4 (2) December 1998


Wabi Sabi

a memory crossed my mind from a great little book


elasticspace | Experience Design Reading, Books, Magazines, Resources
V. Comprehensive!

Forlizzi: Theories of Experience Our goal is to make experience accessible to designers -- to make our theory of interaction design live in practice, by allowing designers to conceive of designing experiences rather than designing products.


Also check out the theories and the resources sections

via: brightlycolo[u]redfood


How to get the most out of conferences - UIWEB.COM

Some really useful advice.

Particularly worth scrolling down to:
How to justify going to conferences


- www.networkphotographers.com -
some nice images here by Roger Hutchin's amoungst others

I went to a great talk by Patrick Sutherland at lunchtime, he is the curator of the exhibition which is on downstairs (which I linked to last week).

Patrick runs the Photojournalism course at LCP and his work in Spiti: the Forbidden Valley, is published in a book



HBS Working Knowledge: Organizations: Time to Treat Toxic Emotions at Work

Now I wonder why this caught my attention?


Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation
Word Bursts Reveal Hot Topics

Is something similar happening within the cmc world?
Matt (bbj) has a mention of something along these lines.


Cooper: Design Research: Why you need it " In addition, the time you spend up front understanding users and the domain will save time during the design and development process by reducing guesswork, re-work, and exploration down blind alleys. Knowledge is power, and empowering your design team with knowledge about your business goals, your technical boundaries, and your users will provide an extra edge in ensuring that your product isn't the one gathering dust on the shelf after the tradeshow."


Noah Grey wrote a piece of software called Greymatter, and with it helped the blogosphere take its first hesitant steps into the limelight. Then he kind of disappeared, and then he kind of came back again. Last week, he kindly agreed to spill his heart to WriteTheWeb - The heart of the matter
" I don't put much stock in the "personal publishing revolution" idea, though. To me, it isn't so much a new revolution but merely a new way of doing something very, very old. I believe that perhaps the most defining element of who we are - the element that most makes us human - is the fundamental need to express ourselves in the best way they can; something which goes back not only to the obvious pre-web ancestors of this medium (Montaigne, Samuel Pepys, even St. Augustine), but really, to the first time one caveman (or woman) called others together around the proverbial fire and said, this is what I saw, and this is how I felt about it."

spot on!


Marc Prensky's writings Including various chapters from Digital Game-Based Learning. Not sure about the underlying ethos, but some of his ideas seem plausible...

Better read it properly I guess :)


Matt's upsideclown: [in a] Climax state

" I sit on a bench and watch the beauty in people's faces. Deep wrinkles on old men, and bright eyes with keen faces walking by. Above the people and the concrete is a slate blue sky, cold, impassive and clear. I can feel the pace of my heart beating. In glorious London around me, it's reflected, and I can feel also the pulse and energy of London inside; London is my brain, in society, reflections of crowds in our turmoil, of its variety in the rainforests, in the cosmos. One and the same, infinite recursion. "

~sweet


Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Which looks at how
Social Software Encodes Political Bargains
and Identifies that there is little
Testing [of the] Group Experience

But the most interesting (for my mind) is the notion of Bariers:
"What kind of barriers work best?" Most groups have some sort of barrier to group membership, which can be thought of as a membrane separating the group from the rest of the world. Sometimes it is as simple as the energy required to join a mailing list. Sometimes it is as complicated as getting a sponsor within the group, or acquiring a password or key. Sometimes the membrane is binary and at the edge of the group -- you're on the mailing list or not. Sometimes its gradiated and internal, as with user identity and karma on Slashdot. Given the rich history we have with such social membranes, can we draw any general conclusions about their use by analyzing successes (or failures) in existing social software?




Interview with Jacques Bertin

J. Bertin:
The use of computers shouldn’t ignore the objectives of graphics, that are:
- Treating data to get information.
- Communicating, when necessary, the information obtained.


UserFriendly Strip of the cartoon variety, not the tease



IT and Society (all full text & free) latest issue [3]
- is about Navigation and is edited by Ben Shneiderman, Jonathan Lazar, Melody Ivory


I am not sure about joking about something so damb scary but...
Mark does and he writes brilliant article in the NewStatesman

so what the...
Read my lips


Geometry Lectures
Thursday 13 March 2003 at 6pm (also streamed live (win or ram) and then archived)
Gresham College Venue: Barnard's Inn Hall

Harold Thimbleby on 'Designing anything: from Lego to mathematics'

Inside every complex gadget is a programming language. How are programming languages designed, and how should they be designed? What are the common design problems? A look at a range of programming languages: the language of Lego, the extraordinarily popular general purpose language Java, and the specialised mathematics programming language Mathematica.


f~art

tom friedman
soap and pubic hair

and

j.otto
who's
* * * B U B B L E S O A P * * *
is nice

Saw these two artists at
http://yerbabuenaarts.org/
back xmas / new year 2001/2


Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso

This is stuck on my fireplace with a fridge magnet...

Flow_Joshua Davis
“Asking questions is healthy, it enables us to clarify doubts and gain new information. Life should be more about holding questions then finding answers. The act of seeking an answer comes from the wish to make life, which is basically fluid into something that is more certain and fixed. This often leads to rigidity, close-mindedness and intolerance.
On the other hand, holding a question, exploring its many facets over time, puts us in touch with the mystery of life. Holding questions accustoms us to the ungraspable nature of life and enables us to understand things from a range of perspectives.

And I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing. "

We should all try and keep it that way !

and he going to continue this theme at sxsw interactive

"You know for a long time I have always believed in this idea of "releasing of control" and letting chance direct you - and there's something about young kids that is fantastic in terms of how they tackle problems and live life."

yes yes yes yes yes yes i agree



I am always looking for quotations and this site seems extensive.
Quotations & Quotes: Daily Quotation Server - Literature, Poetry, Science & Philosophy

Plausible impossibilities should be preferred to unconvincing possibilities.
Aristotle

Other Quotations by Aristotle

Building Communities with Software by Joel on Software.

Some interesting comments about how and why community software works.

You may have missed your chance to read this - as it is only available to subscribers it seems - but I guess you might be able to get Joel to send you the old post...


I am only an eighth (the spelling of that always looks wrong) of the way through this article and cannot wait any longer to pass it on. Maybe prompted by the title...

interdisciplines : The Future of Web Publishing : Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought

Some quotes that have already jumped out at me :)

'In an evolutionary competition, the symbolic "thieves" quickly out-survive and out-reproduce the honest sensorimotor "toilers," who must learn everything the hard way, from experience.'

'The child grounds his first word meanings through direct sensorimotor toil, the old way, and can then (in principle) acquire all the rest through symbolic theft, consisting of recombinations of his already-grounded symbols, rather as in the case of dictionary definitions.'

'So " cognitive barter " may be a better descriptor than " theft " for the adaptive advantage conferred by language.'


Designing for Aliens: What management guru and design advocate Tom Peters needs to learn about managing design By Darrel Rhea
"The key talent of great designers is having deep empathy for the people they design for. They intuitively understand how people experience products, services, communications, and environments. They care about the emotional and cognitive response these experiences evoke. This intuition and caring is enhanced by systematic inquiry into the nature of the human aspects of the problem and possible design solutions."

via: George Olsen on B&A



Matt says: I still don't know what it means to be in London. Thoughts on what it means to be somewhere - that I would argue is - special.

Genaside II put words into my mouth (head).