February 2008 - Posts
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annual design selections (funny how they can't get their_own_ site in order)
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the realtime buzz - 5:15 pst !
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from 2008 TED prize talks
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socio- demo- etc. -graphic maps
... you might want to put aside time for
The three 2008 TED Prize winners, each granted “a wish to change the world,” will unveil their wishes at the legendary conference. Streamed live on the Web: TED 2008 today at 5:15pm PST.
from Communication Arts, news.
previous events have been - eventful. yeah, that's the word.
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very cool resource. research literature reviews are so differnt than 25 yearsa ago (yeah, i know - duh)
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for & about parenting educators
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special issue on parenting education
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review of parenting education programs from university of minnesota
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lots of good parenting resurces at univ of minn
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toola to adapt content delivery to a vistor's clickstream
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MUST READ
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*ring*
"hello ?"
"this is your landlord, just wanted to make sure that you're all right."
"um, sure..."
"you see, the neighbor across the street hasn't seen you in a while, and your mailbox is packed, so he gave me a call."
"well, that's nice, neighbors looking out for each other."
"why don't you put in an appearance and go get your mail, that will reassure the guy."
"yeak, ok, gotcha."
*click*
that's a highly paraphrased version of a telephone encounter recently. kinda answers some questions brought up in recent discussions with family members about what would happen if i just dropped dead or something. by the way, i don't think i've talked to any neighbors in years, and i'm certain i haven't talked to anyone across the street.
thing is, that "full mailbox" alert normally wouldn't have worked. used to be that the mailman would take all the mail back to the post office for safe keeping when it accumulated like that. not sure why that didn't happen this time. it's a pain in the ass when it does, but it's the right thing to do. of course, i've got whoever it is trained to realize that i only grab the mail out of the box after random lengthy periods. it's a type of behavioral reinforcement schedule.
but ok, sure, i admit, i've been just working on my website or watching tv or reading or playing games for the last six weeks or so, and i haven't really cared about schedules. been getting to sleep between four & six a.m., more or less, and getting up six to ten hours later. and growing a beard. also been primarily living on delivered food, with a weekly stop at the local pub being my only outing. so i bet it does look awfully deserted around here. especially with the snow covered trackless driveway (until the other day), which conceals the drifts of undisturbed pine needles and cones.
oh yeah - i waited until after dark to get my mail. i'm such a stinker ;-)
"... Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed, especially because its prevalence appears to be growing. ..."
The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure
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see videos section for rube goldberg machines
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good place to start for a purported "parenting center"; look at the rest of the site as well.
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probably _the_ source for science and health publications. wow. also, decent site navigation design, by role, etc.; portal tools, more.
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case management systems
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resources for behavioral / community health providers
xo news - you get it when i do:
From: service@laptopgiving.org
Sent: 2008.02.20 18:30:25 Eastern Standard Time
Subj: Update On Your XO Laptop
Dear Donor,
We wanted to update you on the status of your XO laptop.
Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.
You can continue to check on your order status at www.laptopgiving.org.
If you have any other questions regarding your XO laptop, please do feel free to reply to this email or contact our Donor Services team at 1-800-201-7144.
Thank you again for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
OLPC Donor Services
so why send me stuff when nothing has changed ? are we that short on attention span ? this is how all their bad g1g1 pr trouble started in the first place.
i often do the same thing when i'm not sure that something i'm trying to communicate is getting across. i start to repeat myself, elaborate on the topic, try to put things a different way, etc. bad habit. it could also be my reaction to what are bad listening habits in others. i think people get used to those bad habits in each other. i sometimes get odd reactions when i do that "active listening" thing, giving feedback on what i just heard. no acks/nacks in the world, it's all open loop comms. not good.
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interesting upgrade of older tool; not sure of the business model, or whether their tech is lagging.
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whoa - i hadn't realized how cool this was... "my library" too...
annoying things about google web history rss:
- if you spend time visiting pages on one site, the rss contains only the last page visited on that site before another web site page gets recorded;
- page titles aren't always recorded; and often a site's homepage title is recorded for all pages in that site;
- i can isolate various types of searches, but i can't exclude them to only get "browsing" history;
- google books items have unusable links;
- using the <guid/> element for non-standard purposes.
looking at the google.com/history list itself, i can understand how the first & third item occur, but that rss needs help. i wonder if it would make sense to populate <description/> with something from a page's meta tags, or something else from within google's infobase.
while i'm picking on google rss feeds, their "my library" feed:
- needs item <pubdate/>. it can't be there because they don't record the time when you add an item to your list.
- would also be nice to have isbn's someplace, so that these feeds could be mashed up with amazon data, for example.
- and this feed's item <guid/>s are funky too.
- should add one's notes, personal reviews and tags ("labels" - come on guys, everyone calls them tags).
would be better off just generating my own feed from their book list export xml, since it has some (not all) of the above data.
item & feed authorship is another funky item. i suppose with books it needs to be the book's author(s), but for browsing history there's nothing that makes sense. unless there's item annotations being kept someplace, in which case these could be added to <description/>, and the author is the annotator. as for the feeds themselves, google needs to pull itself out of the attribution besides "generator".
i realize that there's a lot of different ways to go with these things, but some of this seems pretty basic. and they're google, fer chrissakes.
no, i'm not talking about the avalanche in my living room. i just (re)discovered google book search, and its companion "my library" feature. looks to me like a decent alternative to accumulating interesting book links in my amazon wishlist (beware - 3mb page!). my brother john does a bit of this too.
the main drawback is that amazon is far richer in information, and i can also use their links to generate income. however, the purpose is a better fit with google. google books also has some fairly extensive excerpts of these books online, even some of the ones no longer available from amazon.
i went ahead and tried to import my entire amazon wishlist into "my library", and it reported 4 duplicates and 13 failures (no book found) out of 365 (?) total. not bad. of course, i already had a full extract of my wishlist data, so pulling out all the isbn's was simple.
then i looked at the "my library" rss feed (another nice feature). discovered it was showing the books i had added farthest back. uh-oh - apparently the import feature treats the items farther down in the list as most recent, the opposite of the order i had (most recent first). easy enough to re-sort, and re-import in the other order - but how do i get rid of 348 entries ? there's no way to clear the list.
so i futzed around with automating it, but for the item delete function google is looking for an authentication cookie. rather than messing with making system.net.webrequest have cookies, i just generated a page with a button for each item, in a way that bypassed the item deletion confirmation, and used that. i could have used some client-side script and automated the items on that page, but i can hit "tab-enter" 350 times faster than i could have programmed it, especially since i don't expect to repeat this. sure, something ajax-y would be better. never did figure out how to do posts instead of gets that way (needed in this case to do book deletes without needing confirmation of each deletion).
ok, a lot of fooling around for not much, i admit. still, it's interesting to check out. but what originally caught my eye was their landing page, with its random selection of various items. that's what really sucked me in. i started just refreshing the page and then opening whatever looked interesting (as anyone following my browsing history may have noticed ;-)).
just one more bibliophile resource to add to the list. interesting how books are surviving the electronic information age. i still run into the project gutenberg site now and then, and it looks like they have audio books now.
and another good resource: www.ibiblio.org. man, haven't been around there in ages either.
oh god, i'm swamped - time to start shutting things down.
bummer - noticed that the history rss links google generates for viewing google books don't resolve to anything useful. google books is beta, but google web history is not. they still have lots of details to attend to in their products.
(reminder to self: need to update my website for pointers to the stuff from the last few days. yeah, self gets stuck with all the work.)
highly recommended: nova: ape genius. just caught this on pbs. takeaway:
- control of emotions is critical to accomplishment;
- so is the ability / desire to teach.
interesting, that last part: if the teaching skill is taught (metaknowledge), then the developmental acceleration can really begin. as for the emotional intelligence thing, humans have a long way to go in that regard. our sentimentality (positive or negative) is not a differentiator, but a common bond. hate kills - but so does love.
one more notch towards the recognition that we need to rethink all of our assumed definitions.
as for this nova episode itself, there are some goosebump moments. felt like i was watching the dawn of human evolution - because i was.
almost forgot a thought i had: if we gave the apes ritalin or something, would they learn better ? would we end up creating a biochemically supported slave species ? morlocks & eloi, a brave new world:
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
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