James Duncan Davidson, Kris Krug and Pinar Ozger are on a photo expedition covering the oil leak in the Gulf. The photos they’re managing to get are surreal. Water isn’t supposed to look like that.
Photo by James Duncan Davidson
Photo by Kris Krug
Photo by Pinar Ozger
Photo by James Duncan Davidson
Photo by Kris Krug
I read a whole bunch of posts today on the topic of comments on blogs, triggered by some critiques of Gruber’s Daringfireball which hasn’t ever had comments. Gruber wrote a post about the Google/Admob/Apple drama, and was called out for not having comments on his blog, and how that’s bad form. Gruber responded with this:
You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response.
and
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.
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I hadn’t heard the term “commonplace book” before, but it sounds like a perfect description of the “outboard brain” - the main reason I started blogging. It wasn’t about publishing anything, or discussing or commenting or connecting. It was documenting a flow of ideas and contexts.
Steven Berlin Johnson gave a talk back in April, describing the history of the commonplace book. He was using it as an introduction and context for the need to be able to remix content - as an argument against locked down electronic books that implement DRM to prevent copy and paste - and it nicely describes both the need to remix, and the need to document.
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When I started at the Teaching & Learning Centre, I knew a bit about what Randy Garrison was doing - he was the new Director of the TLC, and he’d been working on something called “community of inquiry” - but I didn’t know too much more than that. I didn’t pay it much attention, since it didn’t overlap what I was doing very much.
Years passed, and I’m now planning the research proposal for my MSc thesis. And it turns out that the Community of Inquiry model is probably the best fit for what I want to do to investigate differences in discourse between two cohorts. More info on my research proposal at a later date…
Read Moreyes, HTML5 is essentially a diluted buzzword for “something shiny on the web that doesn’t use flash” - BUT - by using standards, you get to have content used in ways you haven’t predicted. For instance, Grant Hutchinson has been playing with a Newton-powered webserver (not linking directly to the server to spare it from the network) for years.
Today, he fired up the web browser on one of his Newtons, and pointed it at the Apple HTML5 showcase site. What happened? Fireworks? Crashes? Missing content? Plugin Required error messages?
Read MoreI’ve been playing with settings and techniques for minimizing the amount of data gathered about me online. DoubleClick is probably the most invasive, as it silently tracks you as you wander the web, quietly recording what you do, and how you got there, as part of Google’s advertising distribution network.
It has an opt-out policy, and they provide a page with a link that is supposed to set a cookie to flag you as opted out - verboten for tracking - but it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve got the opt-out cookie set, but every day, I have fresh cookies from DoubleClick, waiting to be deleted.
Read MoreI sent a copy of this letter to my alderman today, to ask him to support improving Calgary’s bicycle infrastructure
I just read that there is a vote coming up in council, regarding a potential bicycle strategy for the City of Calgary.
I urge you to support endorsing a comprehensive bicycle transportation strategy, aimed at making Calgary a bike-friendly city. It is currently extremely unfriendly, even dangerous, to those of us who ride bicycles.
Read MoreI’d maintained a personal home page with handy links and utilities for years, but gave it up when iGoogle etc… came along. In my current attempts to withdraw as much as possible from The Allseeing Eye of Google, I’ve resurrected a personal homepage. I found a copy of my old one from 2003 on a backup CD. Oh, the ugly. It burns. So, I created a new one from scratch.
Read MoreNot sure if it’s actual “truth” (or is it just truthiness?) but this is a pretty interesting animation/presentation by TheRSA.org and Cognitive Media on motivation in the workplace, and what drives innovation. It probably won’t display in the RSS feed, so here’s a direct link.
Read MoreI’ve been trying to extricate myself from Google’s All Seeing Gaze. (for more info on why, see this article linked by @brlamb).
There are plugins and opt-out cookies etc… but all of those work only in the browser. Often, in just a specific browser. I think I’ve found a better way. No opt-out. Works for any app that touches The Tubes.
Just modify your /etc/hosts file to include the contents of this great shared .hosts file. All requests for nefarious tracking servers will be dumped to 127.0.0.1 (your own computer) rather than routed out to The Big Snoops In The Ether. Some semblance of privacy, without having to opt out in every browser you use.
What’s the worst that could happen? I mean, to stop drilling, we’d have to stop driving to 7/11. That’ll never happen.
More photos on the Big Picture.
(photo by AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Read MoreQuick notes on chapter 2:
As I was reading the chapter, the phrase “correlation does not equal causation” kept popping into my head.
There was much focus on how higher education is correlated with higher earning potential, and even higher education correlated with even higher earning. BUT, what if higher education was simple a tribal marker, a product of the real causes of higher earning? Things like family wealth, support, intelligence, personal motivation, social success, or any other factors that make individuals generally more successful - and also possibly more likely to seek and attain higher education.
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