Sun, Feb 29, 2004
Dried Squid Leads to Loudspeaker Innovation
#
GregoryAharonian reported in the February 27 issue of his PATNEWS
newsletter an interesting
article in the Feedback section of the February 28 issue of
NewScientist. It describes how JVC's engineers decided to soak
birch wood in sake "to make it pliant enough to use as a loudspeaker
cone." According to its inventor, Satoshi Imamura: (14N)
One night I left the laboratory after another day of failed attempts to mould the wood and went to a restaurant. We were eating dried squid and I wondered why something dry was so chewy. The waiter told me that some kinds of dried squid are soaked in sake. So I went back to the lab and put some of the cone wood in sake. When I came back next day I knew I had found the answer. (14O)
Low-focus
thought at its best. (14P)
/articles |
Posted at 2:36pm
Robin Lakoff: The Linguistics of Food
#
First, a confession. I don't always read my email carefully. A few
weeks ago, I received an
announcement
for last week's PARC Forum, a periodic lecture series that I
often attend.
I skimmed the announcement, and two words immediately jumped out at
me: "Lakoff" and "identity." That was enough for me to put it in my
calendar. (14E)
I had read the announcement carefully enough to see that it was
RobinLakoff, not GeorgeLakoff, who was speaking. This was fine; she
is also a Berkeley linguist, and I was curious to hear her thoughts.
I also assumed that Robin is George's wife, which as it turns out, is
not the case. A little bit of Internet searching suggested that she
might be his ex-wife, but I have yet to confirm this. As for
"identity," I thought that Lakoff might offer some insights that would
be relevant to digital identities. (14F)
Unbelievably, I missed a very important word in the talk's
description: "food." The talk was entitled, "Identity a la Carte; or,
You Are What You Eat," and the theme was how we construct minor
identities of ourselves around food. I walked into the talk a bit
late, but was delighted when I started listening and realized what the
talk was actually about. Lakoff was a charming speaker with a dry
sense of humor, and the talk was entertaining and informative. (14G)
See more....
/talks |
Posted at 2:11pm
Emergent Learning Forum Gathering on Social Networks
#
I've been following AlexGault's blog
for several months now. It is an outstanding source of articles and
information on collaboration and KnowledgeManagement. Earlier this
past week, I learned that Alex had organized the program for last Tuesday's
EmergentLearningForum meeting, "Social Networking, Relationship
Capital and Expertise Management." Both the speaker list
(SpokeSoftware's AndyHalliday, Intel's AnitaLo?, and
TacitKnowledgeSystems' DavidGilmour) and the opportunity to meet yet
another blogger in person were too much for me to resist. (140)
See more....
/events |
Posted at 11:02am
Tue, Feb 17, 2004
Ken Holman XSL Courses in San Francisco
#
XML/XSL guru, KenHolman, will be teaching his
XSLT and
XSL-FO courses in
Burlingame, California at the San Francisco Airport Embassy Suites the
week of March 22, 2004. Ken is not only a well-established guru, he
is an excellent teacher and a great guy.
Purple would still be on my To
Do list had it not been for an hour's session with Ken plus a copy of
his book. (12M)
I met Ken in late 2000, after having spent several months discussing
the OpenHyperdocumentSystem with DougEngelbart and others. We were at
an impasse at that point. Along comes Ken, who had not been part of
the earlier discussions, but -- being a big DougEngelbart fan -- had
wanted to help. After listening to us for a few hours, Ken broke down
what he had heard, which resulted in the clearest picture of our
collective thinking that anyone had offered up to that point. (12N)
Ken also encouraged me to submit
my
paper on graph data models for collaborative applications to the
2002 ExtremeMarkup conference, and offered to present it for me when I
couldn't attend myself. Not only did he selflessly plug me and my
work, he gave me instant credibility with a very tough crowd. There
aren't many people as smart as Ken, and there are even fewer who are
as generous and supportive. (12O)
If you're in the Bay Area and want or need XSL training, I highly
recommend Ken's courses. (12P)
/events |
Posted at 1:16pm
Mon, Feb 16, 2004
Canine Cliques for Dog Lovers
#
A good friend of mine recently launched Canine Cliques, an e-store for luxury dog items. If you love dogs or
know someone who does, please take a look and spread the word! (12L)
/personal |
Posted at 7:57pm
Wed, Feb 11, 2004
Lurkers Redux
#
JohnStafford, an old college buddy,
responded to my
entry on
lurkers. (Welcome to the blogosphere, John!) JackVinson also
responded, and he
included links to some other recent posts on the subject. (12C)
/collaboration |
Posted at 1:57pm
Sam Ruby: "!Echo Wiki: Lessons Learned"
#
SamRuby
posted his slides for his
Emerging Technologies
talk.
He relates his experience with the Atom (originally "Pie," then
"Echo") Wiki and describes several patterns for collaborating
effectively using Wikis and mailing lists. Unfortunately, I didn't
attend the talk myself, but the slides are very good. Thanks to
EricSinclair for
spotting
this. (128)
/talks |
Posted at 1:47pm
PurpleSlurpled Eastern Standard Tribe
#
The PurpleNumbers meme continues to spread, this time thanks to
CoryDoctorow, TrevorSmith, and our own MattSchneider. Trevor created
a
version of Cory's new book, Eastern
Standard Tribe, with PurpleNumbers using Matt's PurpleSlurple. (As
announced on Cory's blog.
Spotted
by JohnSechrest.) (123)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 10:43am
Transclusions, Path-Based Addressing, and Version Control
#
The PurpleWiki community has been rumbling recently, thanks largely to
the contributions of two members of the Canonical Hackers, JasonCook and MatthewOConnor. Jason wrote
perplog, an IRC logger
that supports PurpleNumbers and TransClusions. Matthew
hacked a PurpleWiki node manager, then started adding and fixing
other stuff, including an XML-RPC interface. Additionally,
JohnSechrest developed an experimental email interface to PurpleWiki.
Lots of great stuff. It's forcing us to get off our butts and make
some long-promised changes and explain some long-undocumented things.
OpenSource is a wonderful thing. (117)
A lot of the excitement is because of PurpleWiki's support for
TransClusions. We had TransClusions in mind when we architected
PurpleWiki, but we (or I, at least) didn't think TransClusions would
actually be implemented until much later. However, exactly one year
ago today, ChrisDent got the itch and started
playing. A few months later, Chris
committed some code, and suddenly, we had TransClusions. It was a
total hack, but it worked, and it was
unexpectedly cool. (118)
It's still a hack, and it needs to be cleaned up, but it's suddenly
become a higher priority. First, we have a pretty good idea of how to
support TransClusions "correctly." Second, having had the chance to
use TransClusions regularly, we are starting to recognize their
utility and want to take greater advantage of that. (See, for
example, my early specs for Abelard.) Third, people are starting
to get excited about them. (119)
See more....
/tech/purple |
Posted at 9:24am
Thu, Feb 05, 2004
Dialog Mapping Use Cases
#
The Compendium DialogMapping tool came up in conversation on the
CollaborationCollaboratory. In the course of the discussion, I
explained that I use Compendium for three purposes: (XW)
- Personal note-taking. (XX)
- Taking shared notes during meetings. (XY)
- Facilitating face-to-face group meetings. (XZ)
JohnSechrest
asked in response: (Y0)
I have a client come in. We talk about what? And that causes what to show up on the compendium screen? (Y1)
Specifically, what is the social process that compendium is facilitating? (Y2)
And how is that different than just writing an outline in an editor? (Y3)
I mean different things by taking notes on a SharedDisplay versus
facilitating group meetings, so I'll treat them separately in
answering John's questions. (Y4)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 4:09pm
Are Lurkers Bad?
#
At the OCSI meeting
yesterday, DavidHartzband asked JohannesErnst how many people he
expected to have on the online workspace. Johannes said that we
should keep it small for now, adding, "Lurkers don't help us." (X5)
I'm probably being a bit unfair to Johannes in mentioning it here, but
it got me thinking: (X6)
- Do lurkers help? (X7)
- Do lurkers hurt? (X8)
My answer to both: Sometimes. Lurkers are part of a group's
latent energy;
good things happen when that energy is activated. Lurkers are part of
the all-important weak-tie network, and it's important to keep them
engaged, even if engagement does not translate to participation.
However, having lots of lurkers as a community goes through its
nascent "sausage stage" can hurt if it drives lurkers and other
potential participants away. (X9)
Here's another question: Are lurkers members of a community? This
question is left as an exercise to the reader. (XA)
/collaboration |
Posted at 1:58pm
OCSI Meeting Synopsis
#
I was in Anaheim yesterday for the OpenCollaborativeServicesInitiative
(OCSI, pronounced "oxy") workshop, which was part of the
OMG Technical
Meeting. JohannesErnst, one of the OCSI organizers, invited me to
present my manifesto on collaborative tools (which will be published
in DrDobbsJournal and on the BlueOxenAssociates
web site). (WI)
OCSI is an attempt to get collaborative tool vendors to make their
tools more interoperable. One of its early goals is to develop a
shared architectural blueprint for describing collaborative tools,
perhaps initially in the form of a white paper. This has been a
refrain of mine for quite some time, and so I was very glad to
participate in the group's second meeting. (WJ)
See more....
/events |
Posted at 10:27am
