Final Projects/Grades

I'm turning in the final grades this morning. Look for one last e-mail from me, with comments on your projects and course grade, this afternoon. :)

My final project

Hi all,

Sorry it's taken me some time to post this - my internet connection has been somewhat spotty. Anyway, my blog is at 505project.blogspot.com.

I basically just examined various science news sources and compared blogs with mainstream coverage.

Have a great summer!

contacting me

If anyone needs to contact me after today, e-mail is always the best bet. The UW e-ddress will be good for another month or so, but after that make sure you send to my regular account. That's cindy at wambeam dot net

Mike's Final Project

Feel free to view my final project here

Check out my ongoing final project

Here is the link to my final project.
Most of them are finished.
If I remember right, two links are still not working.
Welcome feedbacks or suggestions tomorrow.

Wednesday's Class

Several people have pretty tight schedules, so I think it would be best for us to meet up in the regular classroom at 4. We'll take care of class evaluations, then decide if we want to head elsewhere before or after our roundtable discussion of your final projects. Plan on spending the first hour in the classroom, then we'll find somewhere with sandwiches or pizza or drinks.

Peek at my final project

My final project was a simple web site that explained my thesis research and communicated the project status to committee members, affiliated researchers, and peers. You can view it at http://students.washington.edu/roxanen/. I will discuss it in my 5 minutes tomorrow.

"I thank you for insulting me."

From CNN:

Cambodia's ex-king has computer, will blog
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Posted: 11:03 AM

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/05/31/royal.blogger.ap/index.html

Excerpt:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) -- "I thank you for insulting me."
Thus blogged former King Norodom Sihanouk to a critic of his support of gay marriage.
He didn't share any of the insulting e-mails with his readers, but noted: "My country, Cambodia, has chosen to be a liberal democracy since 1993. Every Cambodian ... including the King has the right to express freely their view."

It was one of thousands of commentaries that fill the Web site of the world's most colorful and pugnacious royal blogger, offering Sihanouk's views on anything from environmental rape through Hollywood stars and killer spouses to the rough-and-tumble of Cambodian politics.

CMC International

Death by a Thousand Blogs. Here's a quote from this NYTimes article:

"The collision between the Internet and Chinese authorities is one of the grand wrestling matches of history, visible in part at www.yuluncn.com. That's the Web site of a self-appointed journalist named Li Xinde. . . Mr. Li travels around China with an I.B.M. laptop and a digital camera, investigating cases of official wrongdoing. Then he writes about them on his Web site and skips town before the local authorities can arrest him."

You can see Li's blog at http://www.yuluncn.com/. The text is in Chinese, but you can see photos and get a feel for things. Claire, is this going top-bottom and left-right as we discussed in class yesterday?

Meeting Place for Last Class?

It has been proposed that we meet somewhere a bit less stuffy for our final class next Wednesday. If we can find a place that's not too noisy, I think we could have a fun and relaxed time hearing about everyone's final projects over food/drinks. Does anyone have a proposed location?

How tied are we to campus? Do people have a way to get a bit south on Rainier (is it Ave or Street?). There's an Ethiopian restaurant down there, where we could eat great food in a fairly quiet setting with big tables. I'd buy us a few vegetarian and meat-eaters combos. You'd just have to be willing to eat with your fingers. :)

I do realize that some people might be unable to get away from campus, though, so I'm very open to finding somewhere closer (or even heading to the HUB, if we know of a quiet-ish spot). I'll make sure that everyone in class is notified ahead of time.

An Alternative would be to meet in our classroom for the first hour, then meet up somewhere afterward.


also emailed to everyone, just to make sure you all get a chance to response

en francais: "bloc notes"

mentioned this in class today. . .

I followed a trail of blogs to the original (in french), then back to the closest English resource. According to Loic Le Meu, the official French translation of blog is "bloc notes." Translated back to English, this means "note pad."

Collaboratory

One of the authors (Derrick L. Cogburn) we read for today mentions collaboratories, and I thought you might want to see the collaboratory with which he's affiliated. I've heard the term used before, most often in terms of writer's workshops, but his seems to have specific projects between 6 universities (3 in the U.S., and 3 in S. Africa).



quick edit: it seems to me that this group hasn't been very active since 2003. Even their blog is mostly dead.

Unsupported

Gizomodo weighs in with some information about the joys of call center support from a cellular provider. From the post:

"The verizon DSL support office is actually outsourced to a company called Calltech, located here in Columbus, Ohio. So you are actually getting North American support, but its VERY poor. They hire their support in at $9/hour, no matter what your skill set is and knowledge."

The dependence on scripts and the turnover rate (at least in this example) is also addressed.

Digital Divide

Just a quick note on Warschauer's article...In the "Hole in the Wall" segment, the author fails to mention an important aspect of the project -- one significant reason it failed, besides unstable Internet access, was a low literacy rate in the rural areas the project was implemented in. I am not just speaking of specialized technology literacy (e.g. Internet surfing, using a Web browser or application) or even literacy as a whole: there is a basic need to translate programs into Indian regional languages. Hindi and English are common in larger metropolitan areas but there are many other dialects which are primary to people in India. In fact, the "official" languages of India are Hindi and English but there are 22 official "scheduled" languages (for example, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Nepali). I recall from a class I took as an undergrad that there are something like over 400 living languages in India.

I am familiar with this particular project and other similar early Internet access projects in India. The concept is wonderful in theory, but as we discussed in class the other day, the Internet is still largely about reading -- and reading English (predominantly), no less. India has a great education system, but many people slip through the cracks and/or leave school at an early age. Recently, India has worked around this issue by trying public projects where the Web browser interface offers more iconic cues and less text. I haven't followed the success of these projects, but its relatively easy to find out more through Google if you are interested.

Response to HCI in the So-Called Developing World: What’s in it for Everyone

I found Cogburn’s article to be interesting, but lacking in many respects. The most significant shortcoming is his failure to focus on HCI and UCD. I suspect he realized at some point that there is little to say about UCD, HCI, and developing nations because all users benefit from well-designed systems whether or not they reside in developed or less developed nations.

The author also appears to dislike some of the terms used, but he fails to suggest alternatives. For example, Cogburn often refers to the “so-called developing countries,” suggesting that the distinction is prejudicial or mean-spirited. For me, the author seems to be struggling with an imaginary ethical dilemma. If he does not like the word develop, there are plenty of other ways to distinguish between nations. For example, nations could be compared based on their economies. Some nations still heavily rely in farming, others manufacturing, and still others are transitioning into information based economies. This distinction would have been very useful for this article.

The author also disapproves of the fast/slow metaphor, although he believes it has merit. As an individual who has an affinity for antiques, carpentry, farming—essentially items or work done by hand, I agree that the terms fast and slow may not be entirely appropriate because they make assumptions about one’s intellect. Nonetheless, the distinction is useful because all nations have a share of each. Thus, a nation can improve as its citizens improve their “knowledge skills and abilities.” The author appears to miss the importance of this fact, that as we progress towards an information based economy, individuals will have the freedom to choose their place in the world (assuming they live in a free society) by either acquiring the knowledge skills now required or by applying themselves to a slower, but possibly more enjoyable, pastime like building wooden boats or farming.

New Search Tools

Grokker, a "new way to look at search." This reminds me of the chat system we looked at earlier in the quarter (colorful circles against a black background). It does give a really nice visual sense of organization, so it's not just pretty. :)

From SearchEngineWatch.com, a news article about book search tools. This is a "hack" or work-around by someone who wanted to limit their google search to print material.

From NewScientist.com, a look at Google's plans to rank search items by quality, not just recent dates and relevance to search terms.

Rising IQ Scores

Yesterday in class I mentioned reports of a rising IQ rate around the globe. Here's a link to an article about this, from Wired magazine: Dome Improvement.

Quoted from the beginning of the article:

Twenty-three years ago, an American philosophy professor named James Flynn discovered a remarkable trend: Average IQ scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades. Despite concerns about the dumbing-down of society - the failing schools, the garbage on TV, the decline of reading - the overall population was getting smarter. And the climb has continued, with more recent studies showing that the rate of IQ increase is accelerating. Next to global warming and Moore's law, the so-called Flynn effect may be the most revealing line on the increasingly crowded chart of modern life - and it's an especially hopeful one. We still have plenty of problems to solve, but at least there's one consolation: Our brains are getting better at problem-solving.

Unless you happen to think the very notion of IQ is bunk. Anyone who has read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man or Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences or any critique of The Bell Curve is liable to dismiss IQ as merely phrenology updated, a pseudoscience fronting for a host of racist and elitist ideologies that dare not speak their names.

Academic Blogging Resource

This is a blog set up by academicians from the Rhetoric/Composition community. There are several interesting articles (or are they "posts"?), and it looks to be a good resource.

Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and the Culture of Weblogs, with scholarly articles like Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.