Archives for January 2005

Excerpt from:
Many-to-Many: K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism
Slashdot has a roundup of criticism of the Wikipedia, including a pointer to a Kuro5hin article by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of the Wikipedia, making three strong criticisms of the Wikpedia as it stands.

The first criticism is that the Wikpedia lacks the perception of acccuracy:
My point is that, regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia, it is not perceived as adequately reliable by many librarians, teachers, and academics. The reason for this is not far to seek: those librarians etc. note that anybody can contribute and that there are no traditional review processes. You might hasten to reply that it does work nonetheless, and I would agree with you to a large extent, but your assurances will not put this concern to rest.

This analysis seems to be correct on the surface, and at the same time deeply deeply wrong. Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don%u2019t like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.

This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia%u2019s driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress %u2014 the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today.

Just what every geek wants to hear! :)

When I found out that it’s ok to buy something because I think it’s cool, I was relieved. I like buying things that are cool (even if they are a little more expensive :-). Turns out that “cool” is good for your brain. How cool is that?

When I use the term “cool”, I’m really talking about aesthetics. What is aesthetically pleasing obviously varies from person to person, but there are certain things that seem to be more aesthetically pleasing than others. How about the Apple iPod? The iPod is the runaway best seller in MP3 players, even though the iPod was late to market compared to other MP3 players, and it’s generally more expensive than similar models. So why is it the best selling MP3 player out there? Need I say it — it’s cool. It looks good. It feels good.

So how is cool good for you? Donald Norman discusses this idea at length in his book Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. When something is aesthetically pleasing, it makes you feel good. And when you feel good you are more creative. You think outside the box. You have new ideas about how to use things. “Feeling good” about something is an emotion, and that emotion has a huge impact on us as consumers and users.

Scientists used to think that emotion got in the way of thinking; that it impeded our ability to make good decisions. However, we’ve learned that, in fact, emotion is actually

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…

Do you care what your users think of you?

STOP IT.

Our best advice for creating passionate users is:

Care ONLY about what your users think of themselves as a result of interacting with your creation.

That’s a major shift for a lot of people, especially our tech book authors (and instructors). It’s so natural to write with a critic sitting on your shoulder representing the person who isn’t even in your target audience anyway, slamming you for leaving something out, or not being technical enough, or not proving how smart you are. I have a little story about this…

One of my jobs at Sun was to help raise the customer ratings of the Java instructors–to help instructors find more strategies for making every student/customer happier with the classes. A big mystery was why some of the most technically proficient instructors, who really knew their stuff and were good at delivering it, were getting average scores in after-class surveys. Meanwhile, the technically stronger instructors were pissed off that some of the less-competent instructors were getting fantastic scores.

The typical response was, “The instructors getting the good scores are just better entertainers. The post-class scores aren’t a good reflection of what’s REALLY important–delivering technically correct and advanced material.” They’d complain that there was no line item on the survey that measured the things that mattered like, “Does the instructor know the material?”< %

excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…

Selected items from:
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | 100 things we didn’t know this time last year
26. The full names of Scooby Doo’s Mystery Inc members are: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Scooby “Scoobert” Doo. Shaggy is actually Norville Rogers.

31. Herrings break wind to communicate and keep the school together.

43. In 1911, Pablo Picasso was one of the suspects arrested for the theft of the Mona Lisa.

70. And reports of UFOs have dwindled since the late 1990s. In the UK, sightings have gone from about 30 a week to almost zero; it’s a trend echoed in the US and Norway.

75. Freak conditions above Everest can cause the sky to “fall in”. An analysis of weather patterns in May 1996, by University of Toronto researchers, said eight people died when the stratosphere sank to the level of the summit.

81 . When people are in love, weird things happen. Men get more female hormones, and women get more male. Scientist Donatella Marazziti says it’s as if nature wants to eliminate what can be different in men and women, perhaps to help the mating process.

89. Continuing in this cheery vein, more than 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents worldwide each year. The first was Bridget Driscoll, knocked down by a car travelling at 12mph in London on 17 August 1896. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death, and warned: “This must never happen again.”

99. Dom Perignon, the Benedictine monk, was originally employed by his abbey to get the bubbles out of the champagne, according to Gerard Liger-Belair’s new book, Uncorked: the Science of Champagne.