Blackbeltjones/Work “The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about - into it, vacant minds expand” - Dr. Jonathan Miller

My emboldening:

“Opifer Ltd found globally around thirty different schoolbook series for newcomers and sent them to East Timor for evaluation. The evaluation
team, which consisted of local teachers, finally came down in favour of the
Finnish book series.

“The fact that they wanted the books in a politically neutral language definitely contributed to the selection outcome. Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian, English and French are all associated with colonialism”, Billany explains.

The best asset of the Finnish Opin Itse books is its illustrations. Furthermore, there isn’t that much text to the books. The teacher can pretty much decide on the actual language of instruction.“

If anyone in Finland is reading this, I’d love to see a couple of these illustrations.

» Children in East Timor learn Finnish from schoolbooks [Thanks Fiona]

Filed under: Society and culture
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In the Feburary 2003 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a little suntin-suntin’ which might be worth looking over:

““The Minority Slowness Effect: Subtle Inhibitions in the Expression of Views Not Shared by Others”
Five studies revealed that people who hold the minority opinion express that opinion less quickly than people who hold the majority opinion. The difference in speed in the expression of the minority and majority opinions grew as the difference in the size of the minority and majority grew. Also, those with the minority view were particularly slow when they assumed the majority to be large, whereas the opposite was true for those with the majority view. The minority slowness effect was not found to be linked to attitude strength, nor was it influenced by anticipated public disclosure of the attitude.”

Slowness in systems is something I’ve been trying to think about for a while, and recent reflection on not-so-smartmobs has reminded me of this. Thing is, nearly everything webby I’ve ever worked on has tried to be as quick, fast, easy and responsive as possible.

The ethnography we had done showed that the processes we are trying to support with our system can typically be ongoing for 2-5 years I.R.L.; and stuff like Robert Axelrod’s “The evolution of cooperation” points to the role of slowness and turn-based systems in reaching concensus-based change [like waiting 4 years before being able to vote for a government… heheh]

Trying to think of networked online systems that are ‘slow’, and so far all I can think of are distributed computing things like Seti@home, or Phil’s Pepysdiary.com. The latter is not so much ‘slow’, but long, if you see what I mean.

Any thoughts?

» Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Feb :”The Minority Slowness Effect: Subtle Inhibitions in the Expression of Views Not Shared by Others”: John N. Bassili [thanks Fiona for this…]

Filed under: Social Software
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This is a nice short read on maps and territory:

“The map is simplified to make it legible. In so doing, the author imbues it with his own vision of the world and his own priorities.

Maps are subject to all kinds of manipulation, from the crudest to the most subtle. They are eminently political objects, and governments rightly consider them an effective propaganda tool.”

Compare with Rashmi’s:

“it is incorrect to think that Recommender Systems cannot have an agenda, or less of an agenda than categorization. Recommender Systems are explicitly designed to encourage people to buy. Often, they are the technique that helps the telemarketer suggest another product to you in a late evening phone call. In contrast browse, or search systems are much more self-directed. Recommender System algorithms are fine tuned for marketing and sales purposes not for helping you discover information. “

We’ve got to make our navigation, search, taxonomy, user-interface – everything as ‘impartial’ as possible, whilst still making it buzz and fizz enough to get people involved and active within the system. We’ve just started our detail design phase, so these thoughts will be at the front of our minds.

» Le Monde Diplomatique: A political look at territory [via Demos Greenhouse

Filed under: Society and culture
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I tried to install the Beta of MSFT’s new IM-on-steroids app, ThreeDegrees last night. I fell at the first hurdle of seeing the swathe of patches and upgrades to WinXP one had to go and download first.

Reknowned software explorer, BetaNaut and fridge-magnet Yoz Grahame got a little further, but not much further. He’s written a funny and informative report back from the frontiers of insidious-installation here:

“I don’t know which of the scenarios I’m imagining is worse: The one where a crazed developer with MS Paint gets that past QA, or the one where the design team achieves group consensus to prove they’re the gang that’s down with the kids.

...the kids have to be down with installing a metric arseload of supporting extras before they can get jiggy with the winking action. This includes MSN Messenger 5.0 and the MS Black Ops P2P Infiltrator. I had a brief bout of swearing when MSNIM 5 started up because it was clearly ignoring my preference to hide the never-used info tabs on the left. Investigation showed I was wrong; it hadn’t so much ignored my preference as removed the option entirely. Clearly, being able to view Expedia travel deals in a 100-pixel-wide buddy list is too important a feature to ever be turned off. “

The Flash demo on the threedegrees website hasn’t really convinced me it’s worth going through all the pain Yoz is reporting. I can’t see any obvious new functionality or ‘delight’ that the thing could deliver, but then again I’m about ten years older than the oldest person they’re trying to target with this thing. Which is depressing as hell in itself!

» Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader: Three degrees of separation, and rising

Filed under: Social Software
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” In the comic or ‘graphic novel’ From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, the creation of the uncanny can be attributed to a perfect interaction of certain thematic elements and of visual procedures, including the position of the camera, the repetition of textual and graphic material and the superposition of imagination and reality.”

» Image & Narrative: “Looking Inside Out. The vision as particular gaze in From Hell (Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell)” by Lisa Coppin, 2003

Filed under: Comic Books
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[1] In a mix-up of gargantuan proportions, everyone registered for O’Reilly ETCON gets sent to the ASIST IA summit, and vice-versa; with resulting cross-community mindbombing. IAs grokking Alan Kay and Eric Drexler, denizens of the tech-cave sucking Stewart Brand and Mark Bernstein’s brains dry.

[2] Someone actually goes and does what Victor suggests.

Filed under: Conferences and events
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Matt Webb, in conversation [recalled, paraphrased], today:

“Imagine, a universal machine, where everything it could possibly do has it’s own button. That’s what the interface is like.”

Filed under: Misc.
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Storing in public a rough note of an ultracrepidatary half-formed thought/position had/held talking with Tony:

Professional craft is a response to scarcity. Where there is no scarcity, there is no need for professional craft. It becomes personal based on subjective drivers. Opinions, points-of-view, and reportage are now non-scarce. In the post-postfilter world, what professional crafts do we look to?

Filed under: Society and culture
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Not a lot going on right now apart from work, so I’ve started a photoblog.

First entries in an ongoing celebration of the mundane:

• Bloggers at the British Museum:
  After lunch with Webb, Coates and Cal
• My workplace

Ho hum. Back to project plans.

Filed under: Misc.
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William over at iSociety posted this last week and it’s been swirling around in my head, but not being that well read or good at philosophical investigation, I’m not getting very far… ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’, indeed.

“Recommender systems, reputation systems and blogging networks all demonstrate an American pragmatist approach to truth: most people think x, and the system which consulted them is fair and open, therefore x is true. They suffer from a Pollyanna effect, whereby negative comments play no role; degrees of positive preference determine what’s valid.”

William paints it as an either/or; but our experience is that the play of BBCi search/select-few-human-built taxonomy truth-through-refutation against the googlesphere* / many-anon-humans-decide postivist truth seems to yield a happy solution (for now) – it’s the top-down + bottom-up model we’re shooting for on my current project too.

So here’s the thing: in your opinion, does the googlesphere pollute the taxonomist’s view over time – will it always win? Should we lock all the library scientists in a (luxury) retreat and keep them pure holy fools for our own good??? I really should get round to reading the Surgeon of Crowthorne shouldn’t I.

Or go get some coffee, calm down and shut the hell up.

• Googlesphere [noun]: The post pyra/google blogosphere…

Filed under: Social Software
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Tom Steinberg at iWire on the brou-ha-ha about blogs, power-laws and Clay’s part in it all:

“the blogosphere environment actually conspires against the successful evolution of difficult ideas, unless they get programmed into a form of application. This is a flip side to the creativity of the blog world, where the same constraints (i.e. noise and miscommunication) can often lead to serendipity and innovation.”

Not sure I buy everything Tom says there, but it’s a thought-provoker to be sure. Once we’re up-and-running with a decent, active population, we’ve definitely got our own ‘pearls-in-the-mud’ problem on our project. We’ve got a couple of things we think might help.

One is that we will have a strong geographical focus – so that the big national power-law curve of what people are working on becomes many smaller domains. These will have their own zipf curves I’m sure, but more comprehensible and accessible. Themes within these smaller local domains can, and will go TransLocal, which is when things get interesting.

Secondly, these smaller domains will have access to human editors: acting in sherpa-not-censor mode; who can cluster quicker, smarter and cheaper than an algorithm; at least while we are in start-up mode – also giving feedback and encouragement to those building and sailing their ships.

Thirdly – the ‘t’ word. Taxonomy. We have a large, but discrete problem domain, which gives us a large, but discrete taxonomy we can generate. Done well, it will give people structure to build their own ideas around, go translocal and ultimately the ability to improve that structure based on their experience.

We’re trying to get just the right amount of mud for good stuff to happen, but some killer pearl-detection officers and equipment on hand for everyone to enjoy.

Can we have our cake and eat it? The next couple of months will show us.

» iSociety: Scaling Clay Shirky

Filed under: Blog watch
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of a word given by a friend to me today:

Ultracrepidate ul-tre-krep’i-date, v (Latin, from ultra, beyond, and crepida, sandal)

To criticize beyond sphere of one’s knowledge. This very interesting-sounding and useful word for a common practice has a very interesting etymology. In a Roman story, a cobbler criticised the sandals in a painting by the painter Apelles, and then complained about further parts of the work, to which Apelles is said to have replied, “Ne sutor ultra crepidam”, or, roughly, “The cobbler must not go beyond the sandal”. As true today as it was then.

And with that, back to the wireframes for this cobbler.

» Forthright’s Favo[u]rite Words

Filed under: Misc.
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BBC News Online is going to get a new look in the next few days. Editor-in-Chief Mike Smartt makes the >ahem< smart move of explaining to the existing user-base what’s going to be happening. Maybe some more screenshots/illustrations would have been better than a portrait of Mike, but the new design is a real evolutionary continuation and shouldn’t take that much getting used to.

“Our story pages have a new look too and we’re providing more effective links to our wealth of in-depth, analysis and feature material, along with our archive of more than two million items.

The redesign and technical improvements should also mean material downloads much more quickly.

But we’ve made sure the overall character of the site has not been lost and the navigational structure so many of you tell us you value so highly remains pretty much the same.”

Congratulations to Paul Sissons, Maire Flynn, Max Gadney and the rest of the team involved.

» BBC News: “News Online to get a new look”

Filed under: Interface innovations
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Title freely adapted from Mies’ : “God is in the details”; the goal of holonic selfconsistency of the architect’s parti though all scales, all points of the experience. See also Adam’s invocation of Aalto today:

“Always consider a thing in terms of its next larger context”

I love this post at Rogue Librarian, about using good typography as the starting point to a greater design journey.

“Start with the typography, and use it to define your style, simplify your color scheme, and clean up the visual lines in your site.”

» Roguelibrarian.com: “Looking good with less”

Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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Less than a year from Dan Gillmor’s “the former audience” Japanese camera phones moblogging-the-news scenario, the team at BBC News Interactive have made it reality:

“if you think you have a picture worth looking at, if you found yourself in the right place at the right time, send it to BBC News Online.

If you want to send your picture from your mobile phone, dial 07970 885089. You can send them from any network or phone.”

Also – check out the copyright notice at the bottom of the page….

» BBC News: Talking Point: Send us your pictures

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Update: Nice mention/analysis on Dan Gillmor’s blog.

Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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