Good for quick use on the interactive white board to establish the main and sub-headings in a piece of writing or similar

"Mullenweg said he’s concerned that Silicon Valley is creating products that are so engaging that they’re also incredibly distracting, to the detriment of creativity and productivity."

Nick Carr's ideas seem to be gaining influence.

Depressing but probably true.

Getting RQDA to work

Qualitative research plug in for R

"Inside, Adam had tricked out the van to be a mobile solution to Chinese bureaucracy. There are a couple of Mac laptops and a printer, plus an old couch, Christmas lights and bamboo mats. It's as cozy as a dorm room. And confused visa applicants line up outside."

THIS is how to deal with paperwork. Via HN

An unexpected business opportunity arising from the ban on electronics in New York schools

"I couldn't afford to live anywhere," Simons recalled. "I started living out of AOL's headquarters."

We had a VT once who got thrown out by his gf and was found living in the first aid room... he has a proper job now so no names, no packdrill. Why not? Sounds ok to me as long as he had some mates

"When you assume that what you’ve got in-hand, right now, is good enough, you stay focused on doing — not fiddling."

Reacting to 'the best camera is the one you have with you', a modern version of 'f/8 and be there'

"The damage from software patents is astounding, and the IP is so puny. There is an imbalance in the legal universe, and it needs fixing. Software is algorithms, and that is mathematics, and it's wrong, totally wrong, to let math be patented. These patents should never have issued."

There are some people in the US who understand it all, and who are not cynically making a buck

The official history of Windows. As an Acorn Archimedes user, I refused to take Windows seriously until Windows 95.

Interesting, the most commonly used 150 words in the latest blockbuster from OFSTED

"Today, PCs are in the kitchen, in the living room, at the coffee shop, in your purse, on the train, in the passenger seat of your car. Increasingly they are mobile, always connected, affordable, and beautiful."

Ubiquitous computing; but can you *really* have one interface for the whole dynamic range?

Standard date format. My current time is Mon May 21 15:12:11 BST 2012 which would be 2012-05-21T:01:15:12:11

"Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day. "

I'd be clawing at the speakers within minutes of it being switched on. I use quiet PCs. I'm thinking of getting an SSD drive to stop the clicks from the spinning rust.

"The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates the loans will cost £12bn a year by 2015-16. This is an increase of £5 to 6bn a year and "eclipses" the £3bn savings achieved through the cuts announced to the teaching grant, the report says."

"See, all those little design decisions actually matter, and there were places were we could have stopped and said "no, don't do this.""

Via HN. Perhaps the fine grained options need to be discoverable? Simple surface, structure underneath? A personal computer in a few years will I suppose be a touch device the shape and size of a notebook with handwriting recognition. Bet it still runs a Bash prompt...

"In elevators I see people swiping back and forth between their home screens. On the sidewalk I see people reading and walking, headphones in, bumping into people and barely dodging more dangerous obstacles."

OK it is longer than 2 weeks, but there appears to be no box number yet.

UK version: 700,000 births a year, so 1 in 2000 on the same apparent calculation basis as XKCD

"So what we can say is my 11 year old son just watched a bunch of videos on the Internet. "

"Stress is, I'm sure, what many of the million-and-a-half unemployed young people today feel - unable to get a job because they've had a poor experience of school and lack the necessary skills and qualifications to find employment."

I thought that we have a lot of unemployed young people because the UK is currently enduring the worst recession since the 1920s.

"One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects."

"They're interested in another possible explanation: Human beings commit fraud because human beings like each other."

I sometimes wonder about all the emphasis on team work &C. Teachers tend to be autonomous and cooperate for short periods with other teachers. We tends to pull in resources from other services e.g. libraries. External exams marked by 'disinterested' strangers. Suits me. Via longform

Via longform.org

"But church leaders said they had to silence it completely because the bell's computer software could not be programmed locally to stop it chiming at night."

OK, timer switch on the power to the actuator arm - the bit that does the ringing? PC sends commands, just motors not on at night?

We go to Giggleswick on holiday quite often. They have a church bell that rings the quarters. I get used to it after one night.

"I now clearly see that with respect to technology–specifically Internet-connected devices–we are still in a state of nature. Our relationship to technology is totally unsophisticated. We lack balance and harmony. We are natural over-consumers on a path to technological obesity. I unequivocally think that technology is a good thing, but I am equally convinced that if we do not develop a sophisticated relationship to technology, we will suffer consequences small and large, physical and mental, personal and interpersonal."

Interesting, via Richard, thanks for the link

"CLV equals the product of ARPU, gross margin, and average customer lifetime."

Simple enough for the business students...

Possibly should get out more. Nice work though,

"His mystique in the design world only deepened when, at the height of his career, he gave up Web work to learn to make movies with a handheld video camera."

Link is to a good example.

"In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word "Brzezinski" and never fully regained her stride."
...

"For a while, I was a little worried about what they would come up with, especially after my father-in-law called to ask how important it was that I be able to use both upper- and lower-case letters."

When people started word-processing their own work. This chap had a *custom* word-processor made. Via Shaun Blank

"It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register."

Personally, I just go to the corner shop and get rice and some veg.

"The point is, humans seek novelty yet are pattern-recognition machines. What you put out will initially work quite well as they check it out for the first time, but afterwards, they will learn to filter your marketing efforts out unless they are genuinely useful (more on that later)."

Via HN. Some really clever people are trying to get us to look at things. Continuous novelty is a good one for teaching as well (but within a secure framework).

"Many of the most important banner ad best practices focus on conspicuity. Some examples include using bright, standout colors in your ads, using big buttons to make the ad look more clickable, and creating strong, concise calls to action."

And a page full of 'conspicuity' is when I click the readability button...

nice

Short interview with Eames, like the 60 second interview in the Metro.

Interesting page about design. The page has a fixed width layout, and Firefox stops showing a horizontal scroll bar at 1063px (I'll check on the netbook later). Perhaps the last of Ram's Ten Principles could be applied more to the site?

"To minimize processing, large parts of the file format exactly matched the data structures, so you could slam the bits right into memory. Unfortunately, this means that details of the 68000 compiler’s memory layout persist even in this new code, three processors on."

Bernstein is recoding Storyspace, and showing how the old machine layout lives on in the new code...

Corporate April Fool joke. Nice.

"In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn."

Piaget in the age of ubiquitous technology?

"Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us."

Via HN

These people have *printed out* all of the commit messages for an application, together with screenshots and so on. They have made it into a book, so the team can have a physical document of the development process. Wonderful stuff.

Via daringfireball

"...if firms managed their staff rationally I would have to get a proper job."

Recruitment consultant

"It is an extraordinarily complex situation when you are having to check with the Meteorological Office on whether or not to add VAT on pasties in Greggs."

You can't make this stuff up. We need a pastie tax app for mobile phones.

"Through it all, Noether was a highly prolific mathematician, publishing groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man’s name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory. And when she applied her equations to the universe around her, she discovered some of its basic rules, like how time and energy are related, and why it is, as the physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute put it, “that riding a bicycle is safe.” "

I always thought it was Jordan who spotted the application to physics?

Strangely addictive

Sign this now

"What I want you to explain is why, in this day and age, with the internet handling a large quantity of the sales, are labels still attempting to pretend that the purchaser's country makes any difference."

Because they want to charge different prices in different countries, and they are worried about people finding out. Bad language in article (author quoting a rant)

"This is where the designer looks at the scaled down version of the icon, for each resolution, and begins a sometimes painstaking process of pixel-perfecting the visuals."

Lots of work for things you just click on: maths here as well

"Schmitz discovers that Daisey made up scenes, never took notes, conflated workers, never visited a dorm room, and so on. Watching it unravel from Beijing makes me wonder: What does the debacle say about how we all look at China? Why were so many people so eager to believe it?"

The issues are complex and its down to people who work for wages being able to bargain.

"Why should they be penalised because of where they live? Surely we should be looking at a situation where we look to close the gap in income between different parts of the UK rather than make it worse, which is exactly what this will do."

This guy gets it.

_why the lucky stiff dug up again by journalist

Is there anything remotely like this in Birmingham? If not, why not. Via HN of all places.

Heavens Above helping me find the planets

"You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward."

There is a lot to be said for small course corrections and the practice of taking small localised advantages.

"The council said if children had good attendance levels they were likely to achieve better exam results.

It added that if children had an attendance rate of 94%, the equivalent of missing 10 days per year, they were more likely to achieve five GCSEs at grade A*-C or equivalent than they would if their attendance was 90%, the equivalent of missing one day a fortnight."

Correlation != cause

Strange how changes work through systems to do the opposite of what they were intended to do. The question is: will anyone change the system to fix this?

"Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writing computer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digital chatter – from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories – into a real-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood, particularly in regard to financial markets"

Pretty neat idea...

Ace! Via Hacker News. Just in time for teaching bearings.

Via daringfireball. Gruber has tagged this as 'from zero to the U.S. president's daily briefing in two years'. I am taken by the faux leather or real leather cases these chaps want to use with their iPads, thus adding gravitas to a bit of ephemeral electronics.

I'm old school, what happened to the meeting table? Chaps facing each other across the baize?

Can we not find work and a living wage for these people?

There is so much that needs to be done, built, constructed, made, enabled &c. Why the negativity?

"Police locked onto Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed 28-year-old from New York – allegedly LulzSec hacktivist supremo Sabu – after he apparently made the mistake of logging into an IRC chat server without using the Tor anonymisation service"

Perhaps we should find jobs/redistribute wealth/include people with these kinds of skills?

There is plenty of (useful, positive, constructive) work to be done.

"A family might combine services from two or three different organizations into a learning plan"

What about the children whose parents don't know how to combine services or how to formulate a learning plan?

Rainbo remix. Bungle goes old school. Very strange, but sort of comforting.

"It doesn't happen in other parts of the world. With encouragement and good teaching, everyone can improve their numeracy."

Yup, that's right, because other countries DON'T CHANGE THEIR QUALIFICATIONS EVERY 5 MINUTES and LET SCHOOLS GET ON WITH IT

Was that loud enough?

I've had thoughts along these lines, but did not write the essay. Certainly higher ed and offices. In fact, coffee shops are quieter than my office - just no storage.

"Salem said that the average US 21-year-old has sent over 250,000 emails, text messages, and IM sessions, has spent over 14,000 hours online, and doesn't accept information from a single source, but checks with his or her network instead. "

"This is akin to saying, “I will solve a math equation that I can only half see.” It’s absurd, but it’s precisely what someone does when they start making critical decisions with incomplete data."

This isn't my world, but nicely written

1. Images above headlines, else headlines don't get read
2. Captions read more than dense body copy
3. Don't break left margin (l-to-r languages)
4. Images must be relevant, either story appeal or demonstrations

There you are, just saved you 5 minutes. Via HN

Interesting but does not know about £ unless I'm really bad at drawing. Via HN

OK: I'm really bad at drawing. You need to draw the bottom of the glyph with no loop, else it identifies your handiwork as a character from an Indian language

Fun, but does not give the original meaning of the @ sign, or at least the one I was taught

Discussion of a software issue (making paying for film content easy) by use of a physical analogy (design of loos in office buildings).

This needs summarising on one side of A4 in less 'techie' language as we see more people using free software. Via Karanbir Singh's post

Englebart's report in a nicely formatted Web version. Annoying table of contents list that 'follows' you as you scroll. Readability version gets rid of the table of contents but also gets rid of the images.

"If you don’t like Metro, WOA won’t let you seek refuge in the more conventional Windows desktop. That’s because while WOA will have a desktop option, just two apps can use it – Microsoft’s Office 2015 and Internet Explorer 10."

This one is going to be fun. People have got more used to devices over the last few years, but still...

There are about 45000 social workers (qualified) in England as of 2008. Allow the usual 9% turnover figure and you need around 4000 new entrants each year.

One for the Business Studies students, a good reason to get interested in statistics.

"these are the guys with designer stubble, iPads and BMW X5s who preach that you can do anything with a brand provided that you mix in the occasional distinctiveness."

Run for the hills the moment these people turn up

"The big deal is that privacy and security is not a big deal in Silicon Valley. While technorati tripped over themselves to congratulate Mr. Morin on finessing the bad publicity, a number of concerned engineers e-mailed me noting that the data collection was not an accident. It would have taken programmers weeks to write the code necessary to copy and organize someone’s address book. Many said Apple was at fault, too, for approving Path for its App Store when it appears to violate its rules."

Via Scripting News

Tradecraft in the networked era, Smiley would be impressed. Via Daringfireball. Gruber makes the point that copy/pasting a password is still vulnerable to keyloggers.

Microsoft breaks backward compatibility... and more details about win8