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Technology
Meditations, comments, gossip and other tidbits about technology. |
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August 31, 2003 |
Tomorrow (assuming the asshats at my ISP continue to provide me with service), I'm going to change the back-end of my site from Radio Userland (my subscription runs out in, oh, about seven minutes) to Movable Type. This isn't even interesting to me, so I'm not going to explain how or why. However, knowing how these change-overs normally go, I may suffer some service interuptus. Here's a link round-up to tide you over:
11:53:55 PM
Link Round-up Technology
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August 29, 2003 |
This meme is on the way out, but I thought a follow-up was in order. Back in May, I wrote about PowerPoint and referenced Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Wired recently published an excerpt from the essay with the less brainy title 'PowerPoint is Evil':
At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.
The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.
10:25:06 AM
Technology
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August 28, 2003 |
I received a couple interesting links while being Slashdotted yesterday:
- Engrish - A site dedicated to humourous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design. I always think of video games, which are rife with engrish. Why, I might even buy a t-shirt.
- Open Here - The art of instructional design. This might be the book version of the Hall.
8:38:24 AM
Mixed Bag Technical Writing Technology
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| This guy has a peculiar kind of fetish: women in spacesuits. He's got them organized by decade. There isn't much revealing here (pun fully intended), except that spacesuit design in the movies hasn't changed much in fifty years. Actually, his fetish is more like 'women in heavy gear', as he also has pages dedicated to women in deep sea diving suits and women in scuba gear (subtle difference, there). |
8:26:55 AM
Internet Technology
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August 27, 2003 |
The very serious Jim Elve references this news report that states Canadians must have neutral expressions in their passport photos (he might have cited a Canadian report):
"The International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, has released a recommendation regarding a new specification for photos in passports," explained Suzanne Meunier, spokeswoman for the Canadian Passport Office. "What they say is that the facial expression should be neutral ... no smiling, no laughing, no frowning -- no expressions, basically."
I had to renew my passport in Ireland, through the Canadian embassy in Dublin. I was apparently prescient, unknowingly satisfying these new requirements. I blurred a few data points to prevent forgery:
Customs people are always flumoxed when they try to run my passport through the reader. As you can see, it's not machine readable.
9:54:23 AM
Canada Technology
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Some quick and dirty links:
- A really poorly organized page about computer gripes. A classic example of not designing a Web site to scale over time, but still interesting reading.
- Colleen offers an entertaining rant about things she dislikes, which include 'ads in bathroom stalls' and 'Cougars (not the animal type'. I must start on my own.
- Flying anywhere soon? Don't look at this page.
- On a related subject, more flight-related angst.
- RadShelters4U, should our fears about North Korea's nuclear program come to pass.
9:20:49 AM
Link Round-up Technology
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My Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness was posted to Slashdot this morning. Hilarity ensued. I appear to be back up now, though, so that suggests that I was only down for a couple of hours.
Some tossers complained in the Slashdot comments that the page isn't very funny. Well, indeed, it's not a Saturday Night Live sketch or anything, but I think it's mildly amusing. So do other people, given the email I've received about it.
9:10:53 AM
Technology
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August 26, 2003 |
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August 25, 2003 |
On BoingBoing, Cory talks about Bob Hunter discussing the newspapers from his breakfast table. This reminded me of the BBC (in fact, all the British news shows), who regularly review the newspapers each day. The Beeb would regularly get guest pundits in to hold forth on the day's news. Radio does the same thing over there, I think.
When I first saw this, I couldn't believe it. One media organization is giving air time to another? And it suggests that TV news recognizes their inherent inferiority to the print media. It was all very strange, and I never really got used to it. Besides, at its heart it's media reporting on media, and that's always a bit distasteful to me.
9:50:40 AM
Canada Technology
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In the past couple of years, there's been a lot of press about the lack of women in science and technology. Furthermore, a lot of grant money has been thrown at the issue. Frankly, I think people are going about this the wrong way.
I fully believe that women should receive equal pay for equal work, and should have the opportunity to work in any position they desire. Obviously, these are critical issues which society continues to (slowly) address. However, I don't believe that men and women are, on average, equally good at or inclined towards every job. That doesn't mean that woman can't be brilliant code monkeys or men can't be fantastic care-givers, but on average we are not equal. That's simple, scientific fact.
While we must ensure both genders can work in any job, we shouldn't be overly concerned with achieving demographic parity in a given field. If we're serious about such parity, why don't we have 'get boys into nursing' or 'make more girls soldiers' programs? Is it urgent that we have a 50-50 split in science and technology? What's acceptable? 35% women? 45% women?
Clearly girls are aware of opportunities in science and technology--they do better than boys in those subjects throughout school and university. So why expend resources 'programming' them to like science and technology? Parents, if your girl's a geek, just send her to computer camp.
The real barriers to entry are the parents, professors and employers who are discouraging or preventing women from entering and excelling in science and technology. That's where this money should be spent--lobbying, convincing, legislating and otherwise demonstrating that women deserve the same opportunities and compensation as men do.
9:16:42 AM
Technology
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August 21, 2003 |
Both Gizmodo and Slashdot are discussing this grand project:
Japanese researchers in robot technology are advocating a grand project, under which the government would spend 50 billion yen a year over three decades to develop a humanoid robot with the mental, physical and emotional capacity of a 5-year-old human.
Governments don't undertake these grand projects anymore. It's reminiscent of the U.S. space program in the sixties. Which subsequently reminded me of that West Wing episode in which the president decides they can cure cancer in ten years.
10:15:13 AM
Technology
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