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James Huff and I ran the second half of our “Developmental Theories and Engineering Thinking” class this afternoon. The topic: behaviorism and social learning. Being the pedagogically adventurous type, we decided to place the following restrictions upon ourselves:
This blog post chronicles our lesson plan for future reference. We split the class into two: Mel’s team (Farrah, Tosin, Canek, Les, Justin, Francesca, and John) and James’s team (Joi, Ruth, Dana, Nick, Farshid, Tasha, and Kelsey).
Part 1: behavorial conditioning with cards
James’s team goes off to another activity in a separate room – which we’ll reveal later. We’re left with Mel’s team in the classroom with several decks of cards, a buzzer, and a meditation bell kindly lent to us by Ruth Streveler. Mel’s team is given no verbal instruction; the buzzer and bell serve as feedback whether their actions are correct – but eventually they figure out they’re playing a game with hidden rules, namely Bartok (chosen for its similarity to the familiar game Uno as well as for its mechanism for adding new rules during gameplay).
Once they figure that out, Mel stops them and explains their challenge: they are to think of several new rules (the rule-adding phase of Bartok) and then try to teach the game – including the new rules – to James’s team when they return, without speaking to them or directly instructing them, implying that they need to show them the “correct” actions through example. The group is given some time to come up with the new rules and play a few rounds in order to get used to them; Mel gives the bell and buzzer to another member of the group, and play proceeds.
Part 2: enter social learning, stage left
James and his team return. They are told to pick a person on the other team to “shadow” and to see what they can learn. Mel’s team models the desired gameplay behavior for several minutes, then each person hands their cards to their “shadow” from James’s team and gameplay continues, with Mel’s team providing feedback (via the bell and buzzer) as to whether James’s team is getting the rules “right. After a period of gameplay by James’s team, the class gets back into one large circle for discussion of the card game — the rules are revealed, the strategies discussed, behaviorism debated.
Unknown to Mel’s group, James and his team have been spending their time outside the classroom talking about Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, and they have their own game to bring in… but they’re not telling anyone. Each person has adopted an Erikson stage and is analyzing the behaviorism discussion in light of that specific stage; they are starting all their comments in the person of someone in their chosen Erikson stage, and their goal is to get their partner from Mel’s team to do the same. This is obviously a much more subtle and difficult task than playing a card game.
Again, we leave this open-ended; bell and buzzer may be used, verbal feedback (“no, that’s not right, you mean… <rephrase>”) may be given so long as explicit instructions aren’t revealed, James may indicate allowed and not-allowed responses and facilitate the modeling by following each comment from Mel’s group with a “correct” rephrasing from someone from his group, and so forth. The discussion will probably get a little stilted and sound odd, because… well, Erikson doesn’t exactly make for the most natural flow of conversation! How long will it take Mel’s group to figure out that something is going on?
Part 3: all is revealed
Finally, after everyone is thoroughly confused and/or frustrated (or amused), we’ll reveal everything we just wrote about, and see how the class responds. Some questions:
Readings
The class had to read several hundred pages of (already-assigned-by-the-professor) work on the topics; student presenters are usually expected to expand on this material. Our original readings from Dr. Evangelou:
In lieu of powerpoint slides and such for the background/expansion, we figured “hey, why reinvent the wheel?” and decided to contribute to the Wikipedia pages on our topics so they included all the information we wanted to give the class. Therefore, our “readings for further reference” follow. Note that these articles also have good links in them (to related topics, researchers, techniques, specific studies, etc) but we centered around these as the “core.”
We’re a bit over a week away from the Teaching Open Source symposium (unconference!) at SIGCSE, which is the largest CS education conference in the world. This year it’s in Raleigh, NC, home of Red Hat (and formerly myself as well – so I’m looking forward to revisiting some old haunts while in town. I miss the BBQ!)
First: I know we have a lot more people coming than the attendee list indicates — if you’re registering, either edit the page to add your name, or email me and I’ll add it for you.
Second: the event is going to be unconference-style — don’t worry, we’ll explain this at the start the event itself (it’s much easier to explain in person). If you want a preview of what you’ll be in for, see the links at the bottom of the event page. The general idea is that in most conferences, the “hallway track” has way more interesting conversations than the “sage on the stage” presentations do — so why not try to facilitate a lot of hallway-track style interactions?
What this means in practice is that people come in with questions, thoughts, projects, materials, etc, and then we go around the room doing a rapid-fire pitch of our ideas at the start of the day, then take some time to group common interests into session slots (so 3 people interested in sharing various “FOSS for the humanities” ideas might share a session, and 2 people presenting on capstone classes may share a session — and that is how the schedule’s built). Think of a jazz jam session translated into conference format and you’ll mostly have it. (FOSS community members: it’s interesting to see how different academic conference culture is from what we’re used to. Useful culture-bridging moment, to be sure.)
Third: Because it is unconference style, it’s good to start thinking about session topics you’d like to see now. Check out the current ideas and then add your own. FOSS community members — what would you like to see CS faculty discuss? Here’s your chance!
Questions? Holler here. I’ve also posted this to the TOS mailing list.
I’ve gotten some feedback on my post on fielding common questions at your Eucalyptus talk since it came out nearly 2 weeks ago, and have updated the text accordingly — check it out if you’re curious. I was actually urged (by EuCa employees) to put pricing information there – a level of transparency that surprised even me.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to Dr. Karl Wurst, who some of you have seen around the Eucalyptus IRC channels recently. Karl chairs the CS department at Worcester State University and is a long-time member of the Teaching Open Source community who’s been getting his students involved in open source projects since 2010. He’s taking his junior/senior Software Development class into Eucalyptus as their spring term project, and they have taken on the challenge of testing eutester against the new 3.0 release – no small feat, considering that they’re testing new test software against newly-released software with no prior experience with the platform.
I predict the readability of Eucalyptus getting-started documentation will dramatically improve over the coming weeks as they progress – which is incredibly important if we want new folks to pick up on the project. Most people fail silently; if they can’t get something to work, they’ll quietly give up and go away, and you’ll never be the wiser. By committing to fail publicly and loudly, Karl’s class is taking a vital role (and one that requires no small amount of bravery). They speak for the people who won’t. And as newcomers, they’ll be able to write better explanations for other newcomers than all the old-timers out there. Fresh eyes are an asset; if you have them, use them.
His students are blogging as they go along, and it’s interesting to see their take on the project from a newcomer’s perspective. If you see them on IRC or the mailing lists, say hello and introduce them to whatever you’re working on – and if you see something interesting on their blogs, drop by and leave a comment. Those sorts of small contacts with the “real world” are ordinary everyday things to those of us who are used to the open source world (or heck, industry in general), but trust me; they’re absolutely magical the first time you start getting them as a student. (I still remember being awed as an undergrad that people were emailing me about things that weren’t homework.)
So welcome, Worcester State! Welcome to the wild and wooly wide, wide world of Eucalyptus. Glad you’re here.
Welcome to round 6 of Ask a Geek Feminist! How it works:
Your question, if it appears in a post, will be quoted (possibly edited for length) but not attributed to you, unless you ask us to attribute it. Since we’re not making them publicly visible, questions can be about anything you like; however obviously if you stray too far from our comment policy the chances of ever seeing an answer are pretty slim. Check out previous posts answering questions to see how this worked before.
Questions do not have to be about feminism or or obviously feminist topics: they could be about geeky interests including pop culture, about careers, about social life and so on. Given the name of this blog though, feminism might appear in the answer…
If you have a 101 (introductory) questions about feminism we suggest that:
If your question boils down to “why are there so few women in science/computer science/mathematics/engineering/physics, and what should we do?”, we’re unlikely to answer, please see this list of resources to turn to.
Questions will be accepted until comments on this post close in about a fortnight. (I don’t want to accept them constantly, because of the work of anonymising them.) If you miss out and find comments have already closed, another round will run within about six months… You can also ask questions non-anonymously in Open threads, although they may not be promoted to the front page.
One of the best things about blogging over multiple years is that sometimes, you really do end up writing for your future self. Case in point: around my senior year of college, I had an epiphany that I should study “Engineering:Education” that came while I was…
…posting a two-page dense ramble of engineering education resources in response to Nikki’s innocent query to the metaf07 list for thoughts on ways to do a 2-credit independent study on pedagogy at Olin. “Mel, you covered 10x more material than any 2-credit independent study could cover in a semester,” said Marco. (April 30, 2007)
Flash forward almost 4 years, and I’m in the first year of my PhD in engineering education, hunting for good books to read deeply. I’ve been flat-out sick this weekend and have a next-revision of my lit review due today. So I go dig up that email, curious about what my younger self found so fascinating, and…
Warning: this email shows the tip of the iceberg of my obsession with engineering education. I can go on about this stuff for hours.
I think Andy’s suggestion is great. Your list looks awesome. One thing I’d make sure to do is look at what other schools are doing, as well as getting some outside readings on pedagogy/educational theory, since it’s helpful to have various frameworks for looking at these kinds of things. (imo, that’s one of the great things about Meta; you learn how to apply rigorous frameworks from different disciplines to a subject you’re interested in – in this case, Olin).
So get some readings on, for instance, different schools’ grading philosophies (Chris Morse has some readings on grading and evaluation – I’ve cc’d him here, hi Chris! and one book that totally spun my head around was “Punished By Reward” by Alfie Kohn, which Gill gave me Junior year.) Zhenya, Stolk, Somerville, Allen, Lynn, Raymond, Debbie, and Rob have thought a ton about this stuff over the years too. Talk to them! Our faculty came here because they’re really into the whole “teaching” thing as well as the whole “engineering” (or math or science or whatever) thing. They are your best resources EVER.
The IEEE Education Society and the ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education, which Sherra Kerns used to be president of) have some good journals and resources, as does the NSF (although you’ll have to dig a little harder for the NSF stuff, which is mostly “oh noes, students becoming less interested in technology, must find out WHY!”)
Another helpful thing may be to learn about research methods in the humanities and social sciences (esp. education) because their “way of thinking” and how they run their studies, form their theories/ideas, analyze data, what’s important to them, the terminology, etc. is very different from the way engineers talk. Arthur Applebee’s “Curriculum as Conversation” may help clarify some of this a little, but also read at least one research paper written by an Education PhD (maybe a thesis from the Harvard Grad School of Education? Nick Tatar’s predecessor in OSL, Zach First, attends HGSE now; ask Nick or Rod if they can get you in touch with him) and compare it – and its research methods – to an article in, say, the ASEE or IEEE pubs written by an engineer on education.
Caryn Park (Mark Chang’s wife) is doing her PhD dissertation in Education and has some fascinating stuff on multicultural education (mm, discussions on diversity in college admissions!) and also some very important stuff on imperialism that y’all should read (imperialism = “dude, we Know Better so we’re going to go Help Out all these Poor Unenlightened People and make them Happier.”)
OSL [student life] people – Rod and Nick et. al – can give you a completely different view of higher education – the bird’s eye view of why we have Trustees, the history of colleges (did you know we stole the idea of grad school from Germany, or the idea of a residential college – as in, dormitories – from England? Or that the first US colleges were made exclusively to train priests? Did you know that the lecture method of teaching comes from pre-Gutenberg days when monks copied down Bibles by listening to another monk read the Bible from a lectern? Replace “Bible” with “lecture notes” and you’ll get the idea.) They also have some very interesting perspectives on education in higher education… notice how NOBODY at Olin except for some folks in OSL actually have education degrees. Typically, faculty and administration at schools past the secondary level have received no training in education whatsoever! This has some very, very interesting consequences.
Read “Teaching Engineering” and “The Torch And The Firehose,” two classics on how engineering classrooms can be/should be/are run. (Rebecca may have interesting stories on “The Torch And The Firehose.”) It’s sort of like a manual for new engr profs. Also read “Understanding By Design” which is THE classic on curriculum design, and compare it to some of the classes you’ve been through.
Read a few of Piaget’s papers (he was the one who started the line of thought that, y’know, what students do is kind of important to their learning – previously everyone was operating under the assumption that kids were blank slates and that education was moving memorized facts from the prof’s brain to the students)’. I also like Papert’s stuff (he was the first person to propose that kids could learn about computers from — gasp! — playing with computers). Then again, theory might not be your cup of tea; that’s totally cool, the rest of the readings are definitely “more fun” than the ones in this paragraph. (note: I’m the kind of person who gets a kick out building up the notion of multiplication through through agonizingly painstakingly slow moves through abstract mathematics, this stuff is the education equivalent, you have been warned.)
Do an IEEE search for papers written on Olin by Olin (and non-Olin!) faculty – there is some interesting stuff on how the original curriculum was designed, a paper on competencies from when competencies were started, about Olin’s CS curriculum, etc. There’s also a book “Educating the engineer of 2020″ which has an entire section on Olin. In terms of the history of engineering education, try to find some stuff on MIT, which is where the idea of “engineering science” (teaching engineering as a science and a discovery process) got started. It’s also where the academic field of electrical engineering got started (after WWII, the government gave MIT’s research labs 6 months after their research ended to write down everything they’ve learned; the newly displaced researchers then proceeded to take these ready-made lecture notes to colleges across the country and set up EE programs there).
Also look at past Olin material – the ABET binders we’ve collected in the conference room by Ozgur’s [design professor Ozgur Eris] office are a good start. [now-retired director of institutional research] Ann Schaffner can point you towards all sorts of statistics. (Look at ABET’s accreditation criteria, btw; everyone goes on about how they’re “restricting us” but they’re like 18 pages long – ~2 pages on general engineering programs, and a half-page each for each degree, so only ~3 pages are actually relevant to Olin.) Look at ABET reviewer comments and external Expo evaluator comments if you can get them; look at exit surveys from the classes of ’06 (and soon ’07 – I feel old now) on how well they think their Olin education has prepared them.
Other good “general public” education books: “In Schools We Trust” by Deborah Meier, anything on multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner (“Frames of Mind” or “Multiple Intelligences” seem to be the classics – he was the one who came up with the ideas of
kinesthetic/visual/mathematical/etc. intelligence instead of just one measure of IQ; “Disciplined Mind” is also good), check out the TLL (Teaching & Learning Laboratory) at MIT [now in 2012, former TLL-er Sanjoy Mahajan is on the Olin faculty] and the HGSE (Harvard Grad School of Education), and look at the Futurepaths study [by Susan Silbey at MIT] (which is looking at Olin, among other places). For an interesting view on gender in engineering education, check out Smith (and talk to Zhenya). Also talk to Gill & Brian about the engineering certificate program at Wellesley.On teaching: “What The Best College Teachers Do” is good, “Stuff You Don’t Learn In Engineering School” is a little hokey so don’t actually read past the table of contents but it’s fascinating to see what they include (ironically, their chapter titles match up reasonably well with stuff we cover in our competencies), and “Thinking Like An Engineer” is long and dense (so pick one chapter of it, if anything) but has some cool stuff on how one can think about ethics in engineering (and teaching students about such), and also on the Philosophy of Engineering (yes, it’s actually a field [which, in 2011, I learned drives me nuts to read]) which is the tacit stuff we absorb but don’t usually think about – for instance, why are we supposed to dislike bureaucracy and like action and hacking? Why do we value idiosyncratic individuals instead of folks who “fit in”? (the “great man” theory of science and technology) How are these values passed on, consciously and unconsciously, to students as they go through engineering school?
Also on Competencies, try to get the Big Conversations video featuring Woodie Flowers’ talk, and then after your minds have been sufficiently blown by his speech, go hunt down the research study he mentions in his talk. (And let me know if you find it. I’m still looking.)
If you want to get into the more new/subversive/radical educational philosophies check out Neil Postman (esp. “Teaching as a subversive activity”), “The Saber-Tooth Curriculum” (hilarious parody of the modern education system), “The Teenage Liberation Handbook” (on unschooling), anything by John Holt or John Taylor Gatto (also on unschooling – Holt is the founder of the movement, but Gardner has a semi-relevant book also called “The Unschooled Mind”).
Look for material on the Open Courseware movement and on the rising trend of adult education (University of Phoenix, etc.) because much of the “let’s involve the learner!” trends have been pushed forward by adult students who, after years of working as professionals, wanted to have control over their own educations. Chomsky (who is pretty much provocative no matter what he’s saying) has written a book called “Chomsky on MISeducation” but it’s not the most readable thing in the world. I’d do a chapter at most.
Also, look at how other fields educate their students – one thing I’ve heard over and over again from engineering faculty is how teaching is like acting, so I’m trying to learn how drama students learn theatre in college. How do musicians learn? Historians? English majors? Dancers, studio artists, athletes, skateboarders?
Phew. I’m undoubtedly missing stuff here, but that should give you a starting point… and again, I’m totally happy to talk to people about this stuff anytime. Aaaaanytime.
I am now terribly intimidated by my 20-year-old self. And… I think I have a few more books to put atop that lit review of mine now. Yes.
I bribed myself to stop doing this:
With this:
I don't have a lot of space for a proper chair/desk setup at home, but this little desk is something I could squeeze in with some rearranging.
It gets me out of bed to check my email in the morning, and is a good deterrent to doing terrible things to my back on those days when I want to hack on a personal project for a weekend day and don't want to go out to a cafe or library.
My feet still hurt when standing for long periods though I got an anti-fatigue mat, but I hear that gets better with time.
I still have a sitting desk at work which I'm pretty happy with. This way I stand sometimes and sit sometimes too.
For Doctor Who fans, a new blog has launched, Doctor Her.
Doctor Her is the brainchild of Courtney Stoker, who has also written about Doctor Who for Geek Feminism:
Doctor Her’s first post is Which Companion is the Best Feminist Role Model for my Daughters? The start of an on-going research project.
When I told people of my plans to move to Montreal, it usually prompted one of two reactions: one was some version of joyful envy, many people exclaiming breathlessly “Montreal is one of my favorite cities,” one person once even clutching my arm and told me as he looked me straight in the eye: “you are so lucky, there is no city quite like Montreal in North America.”
The second reaction came off as a thinly veiled mixture of disdain and disbelief usually peppered with many “reallys:” “oh wow, really, really you would really leave NYC?” I am pretty certain they really were thinking something along the lines of “what a fool, how dare she leave a great job, a great university, a world class city (the only city to live) for some Canadian mid-sized city, which is like tundra for a good chunk of the year?”
The decision to move weighed heavily on me, if for no other reason I had a choice to stay or to go and I honestly have not had a “choice,” a decision to make about where to go since I got accepted to graduate school (and even then the choice was more obvious than this one). So over a month into my move what is my verdict? In a word, “win.”
I don’t miss NYC at all—though I get why some people cannot leave the place—and know that despite some oddities and difficulties of living in Montreal, it fits my tastes and needs much better than NYC which dwarfed me in so many ways. I never felt I could enjoy it, I grew tired of the cramped living quarters, the noise ate at my soul, and I simply felt more overwhelmed by the fact that I could not even get a handle on the neighborhoods in my vicinity, much less all the other hoods in the area.
Instead of dogging NYC anymore, I think I will spend a little time on first impressions, as they will soon be lost to the familiarity borne with time and experience. In essence Montreal is chock full of life but rather intimate, a quirky city with lots of charm but some grit and lacking the way over designed and done feel of cities like Portland.
Here are some of quirks:
1. The Hawt Metro: I fell in love with the Metro when I first rode it a few years ago. I just love the powder blue color of the cars and the super sweet 1960s aesthetic of many stations. Even better and unlike NYC, they are just clean and quiet. The downside? The temperatures approximates a sauna during the winter and while you would think this is a good thing, when you are layered with the clothing necessary to survive outside (re: long underwear along with Canada-coat, gloves, hat, and scarf), it is hooooooot down there and you feel like you need to pass out.
2. Spend money, get free stuff: In many establishments you get free stuff (like blueberries or some like sports bar) when you spend over a certain amount of money, like 70 bucks. Quirky local tradition.
3. The culture of negotiation and the kick ass standard lease: Housing is amazing here. There is plenty of it, there are many different styles, and it is rather fun exploring all the different hoods that make up the city. Problem is too that lots of apartments have weird problems and issues and I had to steer clear of anything that could even possibly have mold. I spent weeks day in day out looking for a place, desperate to move out of my corporate apartment very nicely provided by the university but still not my ideal living situation. Finally found a place that fit all my needs in the perfect location and I took it to only find out that places are priced to negotiate and I was faced with the decision to negotiate or not. Sort of did, was not thrilled about it (thinking that I might lose the place) but it sort of worked and I scored the place. If price is up to haggling, the lease on the other hand, is standard (you can buy one at your local bodega… ). It is the law to use it and it is like a no nonsense, straightforward lease, which is very protective of renters.
4. Montreal is known for its exceptional food but you know Poutine is just plain gross: Food here is good and I can tell that I will get a handle of restaurants in a way that felt impossible in NYC. The gluten free religion seems to be spreading, thankfully. There are many little Fruiterias! to get your fruits veggies which I am still exploring and right around my house is a crazy supermarket that is so cheap, which is weird because consumer goods generally ain’t cheap in Montreal like they are in the states but this place is a gem and everyone agrees (and almost impossible to notice from the street!). Now Poutine is disgusting. Ok it did not help that the first night I went out to eat it, I was still under the clutches of Noro virus, and I think it re-activated the nausea that had been zapped by some strong medicine and the hospital, the day before, which brings me to the next point, the health care system.
5. Healthcare, I had to use it way too early: So last week I came down with the Noro virus and you usually wait it out as it runs through you quickly but I was dehydrated before I even started to vomit to for 8 hours straight, at which point severely tired and so nauseous (I was yelling to make it stop), I went to the hospital. Now I had talked to lot of people about the healthcare system in Montreal as it seems good, really great but a bit over taxed, especially compared to where I had lived in Edmonton where it was like a magic fairy tale dream. I had heard of two things: the care is excellent but the facilities are “shocking” and the wait times unless dire can be atrociously long. So facilities, yea they are kinda shocking, somewhat shabby but who cares, so long as the care is good, no? Packaging is irrelevant so long as the goods are derived. Before going I was scared of the long wait times (and also the taxi took me by mistake to Montreal General Hospital was looked too much like a HUGE version of the creepy buildings in The Shining for me, and I was supposed to go to Jewish General so left for there). The wait time: nearly none, somewhat as shocking as the facilities first looked to me. I think it was a combination of the time I arrived, with the fact that my lounge was parched and yellowish-gross (sorry, it was gross), indicating I was dehydrated, oh and I was crying bit hysterically, for despite my high threshold for pain, nausea terrorizes me. I was covered by insurance and since I did not yet have my McGill health cards (it takes three months to qualify for the local stuff), I did pay and the price was laughably cheap compared to what I would pay in NYC for the same treatment.
6. Now for my favorite, snow so nice, ice oh Christ: Well this winter has been, by all accounts, weak and warm, the spirit of winter barely making its way from the underworld to the outerworld. But even though it is has been more idle than full throttle, I still got a pretty accurate taste of what winter is like, with a few days of 20- c temps, and having to walk a number of times on a layer of frozen ice that makes it feel like a very dangerous mini-ice age in the making.
I do rather love the quiet snow falling and just love love sprinting through the snow with my dog, Roscoe, who has taken a liking for prancing in the white stuff and looks awful cute with his winter man’s ice beard. After a sizable snowfall, it is clear they city does not toy with the snow removal although the sidewalk snow plows do look somewhat like very large and dangerous but kinda cute toys. But let’s be frank, winters are hard, so hard that I think I would go mad if I had to stay through the entire thing, being born and raised in the tropics… So the fact that I am writing this from the southern hemisphere in the height of summer gives me the assurance I can handle the rest of the snow, ice, ice and snow upon my return.
I’m at the airport on the way back from a lovely visit to Penn State’s Schuylkill campus (many thanks to Elinor and Tom Madigan for being such gracious hosts, with thought-provoking conversation and amazing food!) and gleefully eyeing the (gigantic!) moon pies sitting beside me.
One of the folks I met last night at dinner was David Beahm, who left a comment that I started responding to… and the response grew long enough that I decided “okay, it’s a post now.” So here goes.
You are also forcing me to rethink my approach to educational videos, which have been strictly screencasts with voice-over. How do you deal with those when you encounter them?
I turn the volume up really, really loud.
I’m halfway serious about that. I can hear some (bass), so I certainly watch and enjoy videos (especially music), but usually can’t understand words in them — I’d compare it to your experience watching an unsubtitled film in a language you don’t know. You get some things, sure — but you can’t assume you’ll actually extract and learn content from them, since you simply don’t know what you’re missing.
I’ve been blessed with some extremely good and patient friends, including a wonderful boyfriend, who are in my field. The “in my field” bit is important, since I’m an engineer and most people can’t grok the technical terminology even if they can hear. As I’ve gotten into more and more advanced material, it’s harder and harder to get support, so you can imagine the nightmares I’m having of my PhD defense in a few years.
Anyway, these wonderfully gracious people occasionally transcribe short videos for me (insanely time-consuming), or sit next to me and repeat the words back while the video is playing (so I can switch between lipreading them and seeing the video), or… similarly awkward arrangements — but they’re the best we can do, and it’s better than nothing. I am incredibly grateful for this — and it obviously doesn’t scale, nor is it a system I ought to rely upon. Because it’s so labor-intensive, this happens for perhaps one video every few months. Now, compare that to the frequency you probably watch web videos at… there are people who watch more web videos in a day than I’ve had made fully accessible to me in my entire lifetime.
Anyhow, returning to the original point: as far as educational videos go, I assume by default that I can’t use them. I find a book or website or something else on the same subject (guessing from the video title). There are platforms (such as dotsub and opencaptions) that let people transcribe web videos so folks like me can understand them, but the vast majority of videos are untranscribed. To get an idea of what the video world looks like for me, mute your computer audio, go to YouTube, and start trying to watch the clips you’d normally find interesting. Suddenly, the world looks much, much smaller.
This isn’t just a problem for people with hearing loss or auditory processing issues. Students with attention deficit, students who aren’t 100% fluent in English… captioning and transcribing has been shown to help them considerably as well. On a more pragmatic, publisher-facing note, no transcripts means the video is harder to find (because search engines don’t pick up keywords in the text).
Now, I think educational videos can be excellent and I’m not saying people shouldn’t do them — they are accessible to most, and if you can make more immersive, interactive multimedia — why not? (Heck, I make these videos myself sometimes.) Some people learn visually, some auditorily… the main thing, though, is to make sure that each student can get to the content in a format that’s accessible to them.
Let me repeat that, because it’s important. We need to make sure that each student can get to the content in a format that’s accessible to them. I’m used to having to ask for this myself, and wait for it (getting the content on a delay compared to my classmates in many cases), so when someone anticipates and accommodates me ahead of time, it’s glorious. (And sometimes students struggle silently and don’t ask. Sometimes I do this, too. I’m a very proud person…)
The easy solution for video is to post the voiceover script alongside it. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. If you want to consider visually impaired users as well, things like “selecting colors with high contrast for color-blind people” and “provide a text description of the visuals so screenreaders can read that out loud” become important. I totally realize that not everyone has time to do that all the time for every little video, which is why I’m also a fan of releasing your work under a Creative Commons license so that it’s possible for others to remix it into a more accessible format (translate into different languages, subtitle, remaster, etc).
That’s probably more than you wanted to know. I’ve dealt with this all my life, and can talk about it… pretty much forever.
Some of you need sponsoring from KDE e.V. to attend Akademy. The board will handle sponsorship requests for travel and/or accommodation in 3 rounds. The budget is limited and only the funds not spend in a round will be transferred to the next round. (So you want to be in the first round.) The deadlines for sending requests to the board are:
We try to handle requests within one week after these deadlines.
For more information about reimbursement rules please check KDE e.V.’s reimbursement policy.
Using real footage and sounds from a working science lab, the Inside Knowledge team have reconstructed the White Stripes song Seven Nation Army from scratch. Here’s the video:
This is an open thread, for general discussion of any topic as long as you adhere to our commenting policy. Feel free to suggest links, ask questions, share videos, comment on older stories whose individual comment threads are closed, or anything else that tickles your fancy.
I’ll start at a new job next month (more about that later) and am moving to Berlin. I’m looking for an apartment. If you know of a nice place please let me know.
I’m looking for:
This is Part 2 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked.
Rewards. These are one of the most important aspects of your crowdfunded project and getting them right is essential to your success. Getting them wrong, on the other hand, can not only mean that it’s harder to find supporters, but also that you might succeed with a millstone around your neck. So, a few thoughts to help you think about your reward levels:
1. Understand how much work is required to create each reward
Coming up with ideas for what sorts of rewards you can offer is the easy bit of planning your rewards. But you also need to know in great detail how you are going to produce each one.
One mistake I made when doing Argleton was that I decided to cover some of the hard-backs in silk. It took something like nine prototypes for me to figure out exactly how I was going to make them. It then took hours to cut and bond the different pieces of silk, then to embroider them and add the backing paper ready for binding. It was a huge amount of work and I hadn’t realised before I added the silk covers as a reward that they would be so time consuming.
I should have completed the prototypes and had my manufacturing plans nailed to the floor before I launched the project.
2. Limit handmade rewards
I was lucky with the silk-covered hardbacks of Argleton: Only 14 people pledged at that level, and that was about the limit of how many I could realistically make in a reasonable amount of time. If even another ten people had wanted this reward, it would have caused significant problems.
I should have limited the number of silk-covered hardbacks OR I should have had another way to produce those rewards.
3. Beware the low value, labour intensive reward
For a while, I toyed with the idea of including a hand-made lace bookmark as a reward level, but when I thought about how much time it would take me and how much its perceived worth would be, I realised that it was a bad idea.
I’ve seen and heard of projects where creators have offered beautiful little hand-made trinkets at a price point that actually jeopardises the project. If you offer something that’s low value but labour intensive, you risk firstly not paying for your time (it’s not enough to just pay for the materials), and secondly also risk annoying your supporters because of how long it takes you to fulfil your promise.
4. Prepare for runaway success
How do you scale up your rewards if your project is wildly successful? With some rewards, it’s easy enough to simply order more. But with others, does a bigger order have an impact on your supplier? For example, with Queen of the May, my next project, I will be offering a leather-bound edition. If I outsource that to a bindery, they will have the same scaling issues as I would if lots are ordered.
Check with suppliers about how bigger numbers will affect their ability to fulfil your order. If they foresee a problem over a certain order size, make sure you limit the number available to your backers.
5. Make use of non-physical rewards
One way to extend your rewards is to add non-physical rewards. With books this might be an ebook version, an audiobook version, or some other downloadable media. If you are working with an illustrator or designer, for example, why not give backers high-rest digital versions of the illustrations as well as using them for a physical reward.
I did this to some extent with Argleton, but I could have done a lot more.
6. Make use of exclusivity
Different reward levels aren’t just about different physical or digital objects, but also about the exclusivity of a reward. Again, thinking about fiction, this might include allowing a supporter to name one or two of your characters, or buying a spot on the dedication page. The nice thing about rewards like that are that they add value without adding cost, so they can dramatically increase the amount you raise without increasing the project costs.
I didn’t do this with Argleton, mainly because I didn’t think of it, but I will with Queen of the May.
7. Add rewards if you overfund
One fantastic project that I find myself inspired by is Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick reprinting drive. One thing that Rich is doing which is very important is that the more pledges he gets, the more he gives his backers at all levels. By adding new rewards, either by asking people to “add $5 to your pledge to receive $new_thing” or creating entirely new reward levels, he is giving his existing backers an incentive to pledge more money. He’s also encouraging new backers to sign up by offering them more per reward level than he previously could have.
I think this is a very clever tactic, and one I hope to be able to employ with Queen of the May. I already have some ideas in mind for new rewards that I can offer people and will soon be researching costs so that if I overfund, I can add the new rewards very quickly.
8. Pricing
It’s really important to get your pricing right. This isn’t just about understanding your production costs, time and admin, but also making sure that your prices makes sense. I’ll cover budgeting in another post, but here want to talk about how prices make sense.
One important aspect of how human brains work is that comparisons are important. If you go into a shop that sells suits at the £200 price point and you see a suit at £500, it seems expensive. In a shop that sells suits at £1000, on the other hand, a £500 suit looks like a bargain. Make sure you have an expensive reward that positions you as the £1000 suit shop, not the el cheapo market stall.
You also need to think about how backers will view the spread of reward prices. Human babies naturally think logarithmically, and as adults we retain that logarithmic sense, so a reward schedule that goes up in a sort of logarithmic way feels right. Reward levels that go up in regular intervals risk feeling cheap.
Kickstarter has a blog post that looks at funding levels, and $50 and $100 levels both account for a lot of the income. But lower levels are more popular, with $25 appealing to the most people. The valuable thing about low-value rewards is that they bring in more backers which means that you have more people to ask for help in spreading the word. (Again, I’ll go over promotion in another blog post.)
Matt Haughey also has a good post with tips on using Kickstarter from the point of view of an enthusiastic backer. He goes into some detail about prices, and I found it particularly interesting when he said “I fund most projects in the $20-40 range, which I consider a “what the hell” level equivalent to a single visit to an ATM”.
Make sure that you have some ‘what the hell’ rewards that people really want. Don’t just fill up the bottom end of your reward schedule with postcards and wallpapers, make them something that people truly desire and can afford.
Next time, I’m going to talk about budgeting, an issue that’s close to my heart at the moment as I’ve spent much of the last month doing exactly that for Queen of the May. (And remember, if you want to be amongst the first to know when that project is up on Kickstarter, join my mailing list!)
by noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) at February 16, 2012 05:07 PM
This is a very silly but somewhat amusing comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal featuring the ghost of well-loved computer scientist Grace Hopper:
If you’ve talked about going to China, you’ve talked about the Great Firewall. I talk and think about it so often — every day when I need to connect to the internet — that I can’t even remember how much of the cultural consciousness it occupies in the US. But I remember wondering what it was like to be behind it.
If you’re in the US, you’ll hear something about all these different familiar websites that are blocked — twitter, youtube, facebook, google docs.. as an American, you think you would be outraged. But what you don’t hear, is that unless you’re an expat, nobody on the ground even notices the “missing” services.
Think about that. Think for a minute about several billion people for whom Google Maps is just not a thing. (According to Peter Hessler’s “Country Driving”, maps themselves never really were). A nation who have never seen the Double Rainbow video. None of the cute cat videos you’ve come to know and love. For whom the facebook IPO meant pretty much nothing.
Another fascinating side-effect of this, is the flourishing of Chinese websites which do exactly the same thing as popular US websites:
http://demohour.com is the successful kickstarter clone you’ve never heard of (look at it!). Weibo (== twitter). Youku (== youtube). QQ (== we don’t have an analogue, but maybe like gmail without any limits and no encryption — where gigabytes of product CAD or copies of SolidWorks get slung). Renren (== facebook). Taobao (== eBay but same-day or next-day delivery, and mostly sourcing from manufacturers).
There’s a whole other internet out here.
Well and how do you get by in China? Every traveler I’ve met has either a VPN subscription, runs their own VPN service, or uses an SSH tunnel SOCKS proxy. If you visit, come equipped with at least one. And there’s the onion router, which China works to actively keep from working locally. Expect horrible connectivity everywhere you go — even if you have a good line, connections out of the country are usually throttled in addition to being subject to transpacific lag, which serves to make the .cn equivalent seem that much more utile, and the US version seem sluggish.
How much fun is this stuff to care about? Like this:
This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:
I watch a lot of dystopian/post-apocalyptic movies, and one RECURRING theme is “once there are no laws, women are cattle” in one form or another. I find it a. ridiculous, and b. a sad commentary that it is just assumed that with no one to stop them, men will just rape and enslave women to their heart’s content.
I really want to see a (non-sketchy or “omg they rule by being sexy”) matriarchal dystopian/post-apocalyptic setup, just for a change of pace, or a “hey, even though things got crappy, there is still a shred of humanity in more than JUST the protagonist of the movie”
The friend who forwarded me this question said someone else had mentioned Octavia Butler and Ursula K LeGuin, but feel free to explain why they fit below for those who aren’t familiar with their work. Still, they can’t be the only people to have explored this type of dystopia. Does anyone have any suggestions of movies, books, games or other media that fit the bill?
All right, folks – it’s studyin’ time.
As many of you know, I’m deaf. Or more specifically, I’ve had a bilateral high-frequency severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss since age 2. Hearing aids have historically been awful at helping out with this sort of loss, so I had them as a child but never wore them (because they didn’t, y’know, help). I speak, lipread, and have mainstreamed my whole life because that’s how my (highly geeky) young life happened to turn out, but have tremendous respect for Deaf culture and would never impose technology or coping mechanisms on others that they didn’t want. I’m also an open source hacker, electrical and computer engineer, and all-around gigantic geek, and when I found out (very) recent technology developments in the hearing-aid department have been aimed directly at my type of loss, I immediately asked where I could sign up as a guinea pig.
And so next week I’m meeting with an audiologist and a hearing aids specialist who are also researchers at Purdue, and we are going to have a big geek-fest conversation about technology options, where they’re at, how they work, the state of the field, etc etc… and what might work best for me.
I want to preload my brain with as much useful information before this conversation as possible. As readers of this blog may have noticed, I’m trying my best to keep a record of what this sort of journey looks like as a patient and a curious hacker — it may be a useful story to have out there later on.
So. What should I know? What should I be familiar with? What questions should I ask? (What are you curious about?) Go!
A few things to keep in mind:
Thank you!
Jason Priem from UNC Chapel Hill’s library/info department gave a talk on altmetrics, total impact, and decoupled journals this morning at Purdue. Actually, he’s giving it as I type this — welcome to the talk liveblog.
One common theme throughout the presentation is that scholarly communication has always been limited by the best-available technology. Writing individual letters by hand made sense when we didn’t have the printing press – at least it let us get our ideas out to others. Printing centralized journals made sense when we didn’t have the internet – we could reach far more people this way, and that was worth the constraints of large-scale centralization and all its accompanying restrictions of limited print space and needing to wait many months or even years to hear about scientific progress. But now that we do have the internet, we no longer need industrial-scale replication in order to reach a wide audience – and so the next publishing revolution will promote a diversity of outputs.
Research has several different types (or stages) of output; the web changes them all.
Jason discussed the example of using Twitter for research. He no longer reads the table of contents of many journals – he simply follows a hundred or so other researchers and reads the papers they tweet about. More and more researchers are beginning to use Twitter as a scholarly tool — and cooler yet, there’s no significant differences in adoption or usage between disciplines or stage of career. (See “Prevalence and use of Twitter among scholars” here.) This means English grad students and tenured chemistry faculty were equally likely to use Twitter intensively for research. I can’t help but wonder if this sort of thing might lead to interdisciplinary conversations that may not previously have taken hold.
(A better version of the graph can be viewed here.)
There are several different types of scholarly tweets. “Primary” tweet-citations (“citwations”) link directly to a scholarly paper, but far more common are secondary citations — tweets referring to blog posts that in turn refer to scholarly papers. This is due in part to questions of access; researchers are hesitant to link to papers behind a paywall their colleagues (and followers) may not have access to, but they know that everyone can read a blog post.
This isn’t an entirely new idea — it’s just that we’ve recently acquired the tools to actually do it well. The Science Citation Index was created by Garfield in 1961. The big idea was to use crowdsourcing (remember, this was 1961, long before “crowdsourcing” was a buzzword) to fill the role formerly held by individual expert judges. Instead of asking one person how “good” an article was, why not just see what researchers use — what data do they mine and cite? The more folks use it, the better it’s likely to be. In other words, Garfield invented Google PageRank decades before the internet took hold.
So why does Google PageRank make a lot more sense to us than “scholarly citation indexes?” Well, a citation index has limitations. It only deals with academic people using scholarly articles as resources for a single use – writing other scholarly articles. And of course, there are a lot more people than researchers. And even researchers do a lot more with articles than write other articles about them. There’s this entire universe of usage we aren’t capturing or counting.
For instance, I’m an engineering education researcher(-in-training); my work is designed to be read by – and impact the work of – people who do not publish scholarly articles. Engineers. Hackers. As a grad student who hasn’t yet been primary author on a peer-reviewed journal paper, my citation impact is zero – but my impact is arguably nonzero. My work on teaching open source has reached dozens of faculty, touched hundreds of students, been read by thousands of hackers, been blogged, tweeted and dented, found its way into classes being taught, textbooks being written, conference talks…
When I stand up several years from now and present my portfolio and defend my dissertation, I want this work to count. When I look for a faculty position (if I do), I want to go to a school that values the sort of impact I care about — and I want a way to show them what that is and how they can evaluate me on it. That’s the idea behind Altmetrics, and I’m sold. I think I’ll pitch Shannon on letting me do my end-of-term project on publicly instrumenting my scholarly life to gather and display altmetrics and getting all my old research open-access, so I’ll be clear to “do it right” going forward.
Altmetrics impact is mostly orthogonal to traditional citation impact, so if you care about it, it’s important to make sure you gather it because it’ll be invisible in your portfolio otherwise. There’s a great slide showing the correlation of one type of citation to the other (the image below, grabbed from Jason’s slides). You can see that html and pdf downloads correlate with everything, that social media has its own cluster of correlation in the lower right, and that traditional scholarly citations have their cluster in the upper left. But the picture is clear; relying on scholarly citations alone misses a giant portion of the real impact that your work is having.
You can also look at large bundles of altmetrics data and see the different “types” of articles — there are, of course, a few (3%) that become popular with all walks of people, scholarly and nonscholarly, as well as many articles (a bit over 50%) that aren’t popular with anyone at all. But there are articles that do well with traditional citation metrics but aren’t “popular” on the internet – canonical papers, methods papers, things researchers cite as foundational work. And there are articles people share on scholarly networks like Mendeley but don’t cite in their own papers – what do we make of those? (There are more of these than we may think. 80% of the articles in PLoS are in at least one researcher’s Mendeley library.) How about articles with a high Mendeley ranking but no Facebook posts — are those the ones of interest to a specialized population but nobody else?
As for gaming the system — yes, every system can be gamed, including our existing citation system. But the more data you have, the easier it is to spot gaming by eye or by automation — it’s a classic instance of “more eyeballs make bugs shallow,” – the eyeballs need sufficient data on the “bugs” to make them “shallow.”
All right. We’ve talked about a different sort of citation and impact tracking system, but we’re still applying those trackers to conventional outputs – papers in scholarly journals. What if we applied web tools to those as well, and started publishing with the best tools the 21st century had to offer, instead of the best tools the 17th century had?
Let’s talk feature set. Anything that tries to supplement or replace journals will have to have feature parity on four fronts: certification (“yes, this research is high-quality”), dissemination (getting research out there), archiving (keeping it findable in perpetuity), and registration (are you who you say you are?).
Of these four, existing simple web tools do a far better job of everything except certification. (Heck, mailing lists do a better job.) Certification is still vital, though; it’s why we have peer review. We want high-quality research, and high-quality anything requires careful scrutiny, feedback, and filtering.
Jason’s point was that this filtering doesn’t need to be done in a centralized place by a single group of people. And he launched into a description that looked surprisingly similar to the discussions on content stamping we were having at OLPC some years back.
And it’s already being done. “My twitter feed is like a private journal,” Jason said. “The people who care about my work – the… you know, four people who care about my work – they follow me on twitter, and they’ll read everything I write, and that’s peer review.” More large-scale examples are F1000 and ArXiV, and there are others.
Like any good hacker, Jason had a call-to-action in his talk. Want to try things out for yourself? Check out Total-impact, a web tool that lets people put in collections of (scholarly or nonscholarly) materials and get a wide range of citation stats on them. I wonder how well the opensource.com/education articles play in the semi-scholarly spaces… probably not that well (since that’s not the intended audience), but we could be surprised.
During 2 months a couple of students aged between 13 and 17 have been helping to solve KDE tasks during the Google Code-In contest. As last year I did mentor a few of them, 19 to be precise. To give you a short update on how much work was done, here comes a list of their achievements:
2 Students also worked on different tasks, just in case you wonder why the numbers are different here 
Now 34 tasks seem little work, but the numbers behind the tasks are quite impressive:
All this work would not be possible if KDE and Amarok were not Free Software as it empowers the users and the developers alike and gives great opportunities to students to improve their skills. That is just one of the reasons I love Free Software
With the latest developments in HTML5 and the still fairly new ARIA (Accessible Rich Interface Applications) attributes introduced by the W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), browsers have now implemented many features that allow you to make your JavaScript-heavy Web applications accessible.
Since I began working on making a complex web application accessible just over a year ago, I discovered that there was no step-by-step guide to approaching the changes necessary for creating an accessible Web application. Therefore, many people believe that it is still hard, if not impossible, to make Web applications accessible. In fact, it can be approached systematically, as this article will describe.
This post is based on a talk that Alice Boxhall and I gave at the recent Linux.conf.au titled “Developing accessible Web apps – how hard can it be?” (slides, video), which in turn was based on a Google Developer Day talk by Rachel Shearer (slides).
These talks, and this article, introduce a process that you can follow to make your Web applications accessible: each step will take you closer to having an application that can be accessed using a keyboard alone, and by users of screenreaders and other accessibility technology (AT).
The recommendations here only roughly conform to the requirements of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), which is the basis of legal accessibility requirements in many jurisdictions. The steps in this article may or may not be sufficient to meet a legal requirement. It is focused on the practical outcome of ensuring users with disabilities can use your Web application.
The steps to follow to make your Web apps accessible are as follows:
If you are a total newcomer to accessibility, I highly recommend installing a screenreader and just trying to read/navigate some Web pages. On Windows you can install the free NVDA screenreader, on Mac you can activate the pre-installed VoiceOver screenreader, on Linux you can use Orca, and if you just want a browser plugin for Chrome try installing ChromeVox.
As you implement your Web application with interactive controls, try to use as many native HTML tags as possible.
HTML5 provides a rich set of elements which can be used to both add functionality and provide semantic context to your page. HTML4 already included many useful interactive controls, like <a>, <button>, <input> and <select>, and semantic landmark elements like <h1>. HTML5 adds richer <input> controls, and a more sophisticated set of semantic markup elements like such as <time>, <progress>, <meter>, <nav>, <header>, <article> and <aside>. (Note: check browser support for browser support of the new tags).
Using as much of the rich HTML5 markup as possible means that you get all of the accessibility features which have been implemented in the browser for those elements, such as keyboard support, short-cut keys and accessibility metadata, for free. For generic tags you have to implement them completely from scratch.
What exactly do you miss out on when you use a generic tag such as <div> over a specific semantic one such as <button>?
Compare these two buttons. The first one is implemented using a <div> tag, the second one using a <button> tag. Try using a screenreader to experience the difference.
| .custombutton { cursor: pointer; border: 1px solid #000; background-color: #F6F6F6; padding: 2px 5px; } |
<style>
.custombutton {
cursor: pointer;
border: 1px solid #000;
background-color: #F6F6F6;
display: inline-block;
padding: 2px 5px;
}
</style>
<div class="custombutton" onclick="alert('sent!')">
Send
</div>
|
<button onclick="alert('sent!')">
Send
</button>
|
Many sophisticated web applications have some interactive controls that just have no appropriate HTML tag equivalent. In this case, you will have had to build an interactive element with JavaScript and <div> and/or <span> tags and lots of custom styling. The good news is, it’s possible to make even these custom controls accessible, and as a side benefit you will also make your application smoother to use for power users.
The first thing you can do to test usability of your control, or your Web app, is to unplug the mouse and try to use only the [TAB] and [ENTER] keys to interact with your application.
Try the following:
No? Let’s fix it.
If you have an element on your page that cannot be reached with [TAB], put a @tabindex attribute on it.
Here we have a <span> tag that works as a link (don’t do this – it’s just a simple example). The first one cannot be reached using [TAB] but the second one has a tabindex and is thus part of the tab order of the HTML page.
(Note: since we experiment lots with the tabindex in this article, to avoid confusion, click on some text in this paragraph and then hit the [TAB] key to see where it goes next. The click will set your keyboard focus in the DOM.)
|
.customlink {
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: pointer;
}
Click |
<style>
.customlink {
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: pointer;
}
</style>
<span class="customlink" onclick="alert('activated!')">
Click
</span>
|
| Click |
<style>
.customlink {
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: pointer;
}
</style>
<span class="customlink" onclick="alert('activated!')" tabindex="0">
Click
</span>
|
You set @tabindex=0 to add an element into the native tab order of the page, which is the DOM order.
Next, you typically want to be able to use the [ENTER] and [SPACE] keys to activate your custom control. To do so, you will need to implement an onkeydown event handler. Note that the keyCode for [ENTER] is 13 and for [SPACE] is 32.
Let’s add this functionality to the <span> tag from before. Try tabbing to it and hit the [ENTER] or [SPACE] key.
| Click |
<span class="customlink" onclick="alert('activated!')" tabindex="0">
Click
</span>
|
|
Click |
<span class="customlink" onclick="alert('activated!')" tabindex="0"
onkeydown="handlekey(event);">
Click
</span>
<script>
function handlekey(event) {
var target = event.target || event.srcElement;
if (event.keyCode == 13 || event.keyCode == 32) {
target.onclick();
}
}
</script>
|
Note that there are some controls that might need support for keys other than [tab] or [enter] to be able to use them from the keyboard alone, for example a custom list box, menu or slider should respond to arrow keys.
Have you tried tabbing to all the elements on your page that you care about? If so, check if the order of tab stops seems right. The default order is given by the order in which interactive elements appear in the DOM. For example, if your page’s code has a right column that is coded before the main article, then the links in the right column will receive tab focus first before the links in the main article.
You could change this by re-ordering your DOM, but oftentimes this is not possible. So, instead give the elements that should be the first ones to receive tab focus a positive @tabindex. The tab access will start at the smallest non-zero @tabindex value. If multiple elements share the same @tabindex value, these controls receive tab focus in DOM order. After that, interactive elements and those with @tabindex=0 will receive tab focus in DOM order.
The one thing that always annoys me the most is if the tab order in forms that I am supposed to fill in is illogical. Here is an example where the first and last name are separated by the address because they are in a table. We could fix it by moving to a <div> based layout, but let’s use @tabindex to demonstrate the change.
.customtabs input {
width: 50px;
}
|
<table class="customtabs">
<tr>
<td>Firstname:
<input type="text" id="firstname">
</td>
<td>Address:
<input type="text" id="address">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lastname:
<input type="text" id="lastname">
</td>
<td>City:
<input type="text" id="city">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
|
||||
|
Click here to test this form, then [TAB]: |
| Firstname: |
Address: |
| Lastname: |
City: |
<table class="customtabs">
<tr>
<td>Firstname:
<input type="text" id="firstname" tabindex="10">
</td>
<td>Address:
<input type="text" id="address" tabindex="30">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lastname:
<input type="text" id="lastname" tabindex="20">
</td>
<td>City:
<input type="text" id="city" tabindex="40">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Be very careful with using non-zero tabindex values. Since they change the tab order on the page, you may get side effects that you might not have intended, such as having to give other elements on the page a non-zero tabindex value to avoid skipping too many other elements as I would need to do here.
Some of the controls that you create may be rather complex and open elements on the page that were previously hidden. This is particularly the case for drop-downs, pop-ups, and menus in general. Oftentimes the hidden element is not defined in the DOM right after the interactive control, such that a [TAB] will not put your keyboard focus on the next element that you are interacting with.
The solution is to manage your keyboard focus from JavaScript using the .focus() method.
Here is a menu that is declared ahead of the menu button. If you tab onto the button and hit enter, the menu is revealed. But your tab focus is still on the menu button, so your next [TAB] will take you somewhere else. We fix it by setting the focus on the first menu item after opening the menu.
|
#custommenu {
background-color:#777;
padding: 3px;
border:1px solid #666;
}
.squarebuttons button {
border: 1px solid black;
}
|
<div id="custommenu" style="display:none;">
<button id="item1" onclick="displayMenu('none');">Menu item1</button>
<button id="item2" onclick="displayMenu('none');">Menu item2</button>
</div>
<button onclick="displayMenu('block');">Menu</button>
<script>
function displayMenu(value) {
document.getElementById("custommenu").style.display=value;
}
</script>
|
|
#custommenu2 {
background-color:#777;
padding: 3px;
border:1px solid #666;
}
|
<div id="custommenu" style="display:none;">
<button id="item1" onclick="displayMenu('none');">Menu item1</button>
<button id="item2" onclick="displayMenu('none');">Menu item2</button>
</div>
<button onclick="displayMenu('block');">Menu</button>
<script>
function displayMenu(value) {
document.getElementById("custommenu").style.display=value;
document.getElementById("item1").focus();
}
</script>
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You will notice that there are still some things you can improve on here. For example, after you close the menu again with one of the menu items, the focus does not move back onto the menu button.
Also, after opening the menu, you may prefer not to move the focus onto the first menu item but rather just onto the menu <div>. You can do so by giving that div a @tabindex and then calling .focus() on it. If you do not want to make the div part of the normal tabbing order, just give it a @tabindex=-1 value. This will allow your div to receive focus from script, but be exempt from accidental tabbing onto (though usually you just want to use @tabindex=0).
Bonus: If you want to help keyboard users even more, you can also put outlines on the element that is currently in focus using CSS”s outline property. If you want to avoid the outlines for mouse users, you can dynamically add a class that removes the outline in mouseover events but leaves it for :focus.
At this stage your application is actually keyboard accessible. Congratulations!
However, it’s still not very efficient: like power-users, screenreader users love keyboard shortcuts: can you imagine if you were forced to tab through an entire page, or navigate back to a menu tree at the top of the page, to reach each control you were interested in? And, obviously, anything which makes navigating the app via the keyboard more efficient for screenreader users will benefit all power users as well, like the ubiquitous keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy and paste.
HTML4 introduced so-called accesskeys for this. In HTML5 @accesskey is now allowed on all elements.
The @accesskey attribute takes the value of a keyboard key (e.g. @accesskey="x") and is activated through platform- and browser-specific activation keys. For example, on the Mac it’s generally the [Ctrl] key, in IE it’ the [Alt] key, in Firefox on Windows [Shift]-[Alt], and in Opera on Windows [Shift]-[ESC]. You press the activation key and the accesskey together which either activates or focuses the element with the @accesskey attribute.
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<button id="accessbutton" onclick="alert('sent!')" accesskey="e">
Send
</button>
<script>
var button = document.getElementById('accessbutton');
if (button.accessKeyLabel) {
button.innerHTML += ' (' + button.accessKeyLabel + ')';
}
</script>
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Now, the idea behind this is clever, but the execution is pretty poor. Firstly, the different activation keys between different platforms and browsers make it really hard for people to get used to the accesskeys. Secondly, the key combinations can conflict with browser and screenreader shortcut keys, the first of which will render browser shortcuts unusable and the second will effectively remove the accesskeys.
In the end it is up to the Web application developer whether to use the accesskey attribute or whether to implement explicit shortcut keys for the application through key event handlers on the window object. In either case, make sure to provide a help list for your shortcut keys.
Also note that a page with a really good hierarchical heading layout and use of ARIA landmarks can help to eliminate the need for accesskeys to jump around the page, since there are typically default navigations available in screen readers to jump directly to headings, hyperlinks, and ARIA landmarks.
Having made the application keyboard accessible also has advantages for screenreaders, since they can now reach the controls individually and activate them. So, next we will use a screenreader and close our eyes to find out where we only provide visual cues to understand the necessary interaction.
Here are some of the issues to consider:
This is where the W3C’s ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) standard comes in. ARIA attributes provide semantic information to screen readers and other AT that is otherwise conveyed only visually.
Note that using ARIA does not automatically implement the standard widget behavior – you’ll still need to add focus management, keyboard navigation, and change aria attribute values in script.
After implementing a custom interactive widget, you need to add a @role attribute to indicate what type of controls it is, e.g. that it is playing the role of a standard tag such as a button.
This menu button is implemented as a <div>, but with a role of “button” it is announced as a button by a screenreader.
<div tabindex="0" role="button">Menu</div> |
ARIA roles also describe composite controls that do not have a native HTML equivalent.
This menu with menu items is implemented as a set of <div> tags, but with a role of “menu” and “menuitem” items.
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<div role="menu"> <div tabindex="0" role="menuitem">Cut</div> <div tabindex="0" role="menuitem">Copy</div> <div tabindex="0" role="menuitem">Paste</div> </div>
Some interactive controls represent different states, e.g. a checkbox can be checked or unchecked, or a menu can be expanded or collapsed.
The following menu has states on the menu items, which are here not just used to give an aural indication through the screenreader, but also a visual one through CSS.
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.custombutton:before {
content: "";
}
.custombutton[aria-checked=true]:before {
content: "\2713 ";
}
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<style>
.custombutton[aria-checked=true]:before {
content: "\2713 ";
}
</style>
<div role="menu">
<div tabindex="0" role="menuitem" aria-checked="true">Left</div>
<div tabindex="0" role="menuitem" aria-checked="false">Center</div>
<div tabindex="0" role="menuitem" aria-checked="false">Right</div>
</div>
Some of the functionality of interactive controls cannot be captured by the role attribute alone. We have ARIA properties to add features that the screenreader needs to announce, such as aria-label, aria-haspopup, aria-activedescendant, or aria-live.
The following drop-down menu uses aria-haspopup to tell the screenreader that there is a popup hidden behind the menu button together with an ARIA state of aria-expanded to track whether it’s open or closed.
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.menu {
border: 1px solid black;
}
.menuitem:hover {
background: grey;
}
.menuitem[aria-checked=true]:before {
content: "\2713 ";
}
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<div class="custombutton" id="button" tabindex="0" role="button"
aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">
<span>Justify</span>
</div>
<div role="menu" class="menu" id="menu" style="display: none;">
<div tabindex="0" role="menuitem" class="menuitem" aria-checked="true">
Left
</div>
<div tabindex="0" role="menuitem" class="menuitem" aria-checked="false">
Center
</div>
<div tabindex="0" role="menuitem" class="menuitem" aria-checked="false">
Right
</div>
</div>
[CSS and JavaScript for example omitted]
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The main issue that people know about accessibility seems to be that they have to put alt text onto images. This is only one means to provide labels to screenreaders for page content. Labels are short informative pieces of text that provide a name to a control.
There are actually several ways of providing labels for controls:
I'll provide examples for the first two use cases - the other use cases are simple to deduce.
The following two images show the rough concept for providing alt text for images: images that provide information should be transcribed, images that are just decorative should receive an empty @alt attribute.
  Image by Noah Sussman |
<img src="texture.jpg" alt=""> <img src="lolcat.jpg" alt="shocked lolcat titled 'HTML cannot do that!"> <img src="texture.jpg" alt=""> |
When marking up decorative images with an empty @alt attribute, the image is actually completely removed from the accessibility tree and does not confuse the blind user. This is a desired effect, so do remember to mark up all your images with @alt attributes, even those that don't contain anything of interest to AT.
In the example form above in Section 2.3, when tabbing directly on the input elements, the screen reader will only say "edit text" without announcing what meaning that text has. That's not very useful. So let's introduce a label element for the input elements. We'll also add checkboxes with a label.
<label>Doctor title:</label> <input type="checkbox" id="doctor"/> <label>Firstname:</label> <input type="text" id="firstname2"/> <label for="lastname2">Lastname:</label> <input type="text" id="lastname2"/> <label>Address: <input type="text" id="address2"> </label> <label for="city2">City: <input type="text" id="city2"> </label> <label for="remember">Remember me:</label> <input type="checkbox" id="remember">
In this example we use several different approaches to show what a different it makes to use the <label> element to mark up input boxes.
The first two fields just have a <label> element next to a <input> element. When using a screenreader you will not notice a difference between this and not using the <label> element because there is no connection between the <label> and the <input> element.
In the third field we use the @for attribute to create that link. Now the input field isn't just announced as "edit text", but rather as "Lastname edit text", which is much more useful. Also, the screenreader can now skip the labels and get straight on the input element.
In the fourth and fifth field we actually encapsulate the <input> element inside the <label> element, thus avoiding the need for a @for attribute, though it doesn't hurt to explicity add it.
Finally we look at the checkbox. By including a referenced <label> element with the checkbox, we change the screenreaders announcement from just "checkbox not checked" to "Remember me checkbox not checked". Also notice that the click target now includes the label, making the checkbox not only more usable to screenreaders, but also for mouse users.
This article introduced a process that you can follow to make your Web applications accessible. As you do that, you will noticed that there are other things that you may need to do in order to give the best experience to a power user on a keyboard, a blind user using a screenreader, or a vision-impaired user using a screen magnifier. But once you've made a start, you will notice that it's not all black magic and a lot can be achieved with just a little markup.
You will find more markup in the WAI ARIA specification and many more resources at Mozilla's ARIA portal. Now go and change the world!
Many thanks to Alice Boxhall and Dominic Mazzoni for their proof-reading and suggested changes that really helped improve the article!
WARNING! This post might contain spoilers for my next novelette… or it might not. I’m not sure yet. But if you’re spoiler-sensitive, you might want to look away now.
Queen of the May is the story of a young woman stolen away by faeries who has to find her way back to the human world. I can’t say I was thinking I’d be writing faerie stories, but here we are with a fully fledged faerie realm and an unwilling human abductee who has to work out from first principles how the faerie magic works and how to use it to get home.
Of course, if I want my heroine to make sound, reasoned decisions based on the information she has available to her, I need to know just how the faerie realm works. And this is where the questions start.
Firstly, what species of faerie are we talking about? The dainty, winged Cottingley Fairies? The beautiful and fair-haired Tylwyth Teg of Wales? The human-sized, malicious elves of Pratchett’s Lords & Ladies who live in Fairyland? (Which then raises the question of whether elves are a subspecies of fairy?) Shakespeare’s meddling and incompetent Oberon? Any one of dozens of other species? Or even an entirely new fae species previously and heretofore unknown to man?
Once we’ve established the species, which is not necessarily easy, that raises even more questions.
It’s at times like this that I feel less like an author and more like an ethnographer.
Getting radical realtime transparency in a project can be slow and frustrating, especially in the beginning. Most folks don’t know this, but in order to have public conversations, leaders need to send out a ridiculous number of private messages to get things rolling. In fact, looking at my own inbox history for the past half-decade, I’ve sent anywhere between 2-20 private messages – on average (not maximum, average) – to get a single public message during the early stages of a project’s “open” life.
You really need to keep poking people in private asking them to put their messages public. It’s thankless and invisible work. It takes a while to build a new cultural habit, and for a while it’s going to seem like you’ll be doing this forever… but trust me, it will come. It’s going to take longer than you want it to, it’s going to take an unexpected route, but keep the faith – it will come.
There are three strategies it’s useful to have up your sleeve for times like this.
Start the conversation in private, then say something like “hey, this is really good, could you resend it to the public list and I’ll reply there?” This is good for starters if folks are new to the “default to open” concept and are reacting with great nervousness. This nervousness stems from wariness that they may not want to go public with some hypothetical future thing – in effect, worrying about a problem that hasn’t happened yet. Going this route allows beginners in radical transparency to look at something they’ve already written and assess the risk for only that specific situation – no unknowns here, no future commitments. After a few times of going “oh, I guess that retroactive transparency was okay!” it’s much easier to ask people to give “open by default” a chance.
Publicly announce that you’ll only respond to things sent to the public list. Reply to private emails with a reminder of this. This only works only if the people you’re trying to persuade are unable to route around you. It’s also a bit of a strongarm tactic, not appropriate for all situations and best used in moderation if at all. But if you’re a project manager, or an instructor, or a senior engineer, or something of the sort, you might be able to get away with it – and boy, folks learn fast this way.
Get others to help you with the nudges-to-public. Those 20 private emails to get a single public email? No reason why you’ve got to be the only one doing it. Train others to become Agents of Transparency as soon as you can, especially if they were once on the other side of the conversation. To begin with, ask them to work specific mailing lists, specific people, or specific conversation threads into the public eye – coach them from behind if needed. After a little while, they’ll be able to do it on their own – then just ask them to keep an eye out in general, and hey presto!
The key thing to keep in mind is that this is an investment. You’re putting resources into something that may not see returns for a little while. But the returns will come, and they’ll be worth it – when a project tips over into living, breathing, and practicing true realtime transparency, the results of the culture shift can be stunningly refreshing.
Keep going.
Akademy is getting closer and that means it is time to submit talk proposals. I’m sure you have something interesting to talk about. Check out the Call for Papers for more details and some suggestions of what the program committee is looking for. Submit now – don’t procrastinate 
Don’t know what to talk about or have questions/doubts? Find me on IRC or email me.
Also don’t forget to register to attend the conference! Akademy is free but you need to register to attend.
All right, I know the open source world has fast turnaround times, but this is just ridiculous. And awesome.
You may have seen my first attempt at a business card design for Eucalyptus community members. I sent it out thinking that maybe there would be feedback in a week or so, and I’d crank out a v.2.0 then…
It took four hours.
I woke up this morning to find that Jef van Schendel, a design student in the Netherlands who hacks on Fedora, had taken my design draft and made an svg mockup with color matching, more whitespace, and better alignment. Simultaneously, David Butler, the VP of Marketing at Eucalyptus, dropped a “contributor” logo variant into my inbox.
And so less than 24 hours after the first design was posted, we have an infinitely better one. BAM.
Helpful hints for future Euca swag designers: Eucalyptus-blue is #003f5e or 0, 63, 94 in RGB, and Eucalyptus-green is #8cc63f or 140, 198, 63 in RGB. Also, here’s how to make custom colors in LibreOffice.
The LibreOffice file is available for download here. It’s basically Jef’s design converted to LibreOffice and using David’s logo. As with the first card design, you’ll need the Gillius ADF font – ttf-adf-gillius from Ubuntu repositories, adf-gillius-fonts in Fedora ones, or just download Gillius Collection fonts directly.
Finally, a reminder from Greg:
Because we don’t have our trademark policy yet, use of this design is restricted to those who have explicit permission to do so. Which we will give quite liberally, but still, that permission is legally required to ensure that we maintain legal control over our trademarks.
So if you want that permission, find us on IRC (#eucalyptus, irc.freenode.net) or the mailing list (http://lists.eucalyptus.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community) and let us know of your intention to use these cards. If you’re even considering this, it’s likely to be a very brief conversation that ends with us saying “approved, go for it.”
Happy conferencing! And remember, release early, release often. You never know who’s watching!
As a vegan and a female, I often wonder whether I'm getting proper nutrition—especially when it comes to things like iron, vitamin D, calcium, and B12, since these important nutrients are found in high concentrations in animal products. While I can make guesses as to what I'm not getting enough of based on how I feel, I've never really felt certain whether I really need this supplement, or whether I ought to be eating more lentils or what. Because the real way to figure that out is to get a blood test, and I'm not a doctor and getting blood tests for personal reasons in the US sounds expensive and like a lot of work.
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That's why InsideTracker caught my attention. It's a service where you sign up for a blood draw, and they perform a lab analysis on your blood for what they call "biomarkers"; basically a measure of the level of certain nutrients in your blood. Then their websites gives you nutrition suggestions to improve your results. As a person with a science background, and someone who wants to be in charge of my health and maximize my well-being and energy, it sounded perfect.
I gave it a shot. Here are my initial impressions.
My results were part unsurprising, part surprising. I have low blood iron ("ferritin" and "hemoglobin"), low vitamin D (thanks Boston winter), and elevated B12. I'm guessing the B12 is a combination of my nutritional yeast obsession, fortified cereals, and the multivitamin I take daily.
I came up with a few things I plan to do based on my results.
I'll aim for the lower end of the 3-6 months recommendation for my next blood test. I particularly want to make progress on the low blood iron levels.
I wonder how much blood levels of these "biomarkers" fluctuate on, say, a day-to-day basis. I would love to be able to get faster feedback, and I wonder how much the immediate context of when you get your blood drawn affects results (despite the required 12-hour fast). I was on my period when I got my blood drawn this time. Does that affect my results? Unfortunately, getting more frequent blood draws at this point is prohibitively expensive.
Even the 3-6-monthly blood draw is a fairly big expense, but if you're someone like me who can spring for a $30 monthly supplement that you might not actually need, the cost savings from the feedback might make it cheap. And if it makes you healthier, that may be worth the cost.
We'll see what I think after I get my next test in a few months.
100 yr old Kit Connell playing Nintendo DS
Read more: 100-year-old woman feels 80, thanks to Nintendo DS
I absolutely love the idea of playing DS and then taking a break for tea before playing again. What’s your gaming routine like? Mine often involves texting my sister and seeing if she wants to play together!
ACTA (“Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”) is a proposed new international law establishing international enforcement standards against counterfeit goods and pirated intellectual property items. ACTA was negotiated as a “trade agreement” which means that it was negotiated in private without open involvement of all the stakeholders. There has been no formal opportunity for input from people other than those who were lucky enough to be invited into the private discussions.
This is a bad way to build Internet policy. The Internet is a fundamental platform for communication and interaction. There are many stakeholders. The voices of human empowerment, human rights, and competing economic interests must be heard. These voices must have a place at the table when policy is debated. ACTA was not created through such a process.
Here are some examples of of how closed the ACTA negotiation process has been:
ACTA is extremely controversial. That controversy has become focused in the last couple of weeks as net-savvy citizens across Europe have made their deep concerns known.
One aspect of the controversy about ACTA is the closed process where only a tiny subset of people affected by the law were allowed to participate. Another great controversy is about the actual content of ACTA. We know that the goal of stopping unauthorized access to digital content can lead to very dangerous results. The proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation in the U.S made this abundantly clear. This is an area where even good intentions can lead to imbalanced and dangerous results.
European citizens are now evaluating how ACTA language affects life in their jurisdictions. Deep concerns are developing. These are exacerbated by the fact that the discussions over the content of ACTA are procedurally closed, and the involvement permitted to citizens is a “yes” or “no” response from their representatives. The European Parliament is scheduled to vote on whether or not to ratify ACTA sometime later this year, perhaps as early as June.
Building a healthy Internet takes all of us. It cannot be left to private, invitation-only process that excludes most of us. Some links for more information are below, and there is a great deal more information available. Please consider learning more and making your voice heard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.1/whats-wrong-with-ACTA
This feeling is a large portion of the criteria I use for choosing places to work, study, and otherwise spend my time.
The joy of working in a university… [is] about being in the company of people who are smarter than I am… I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I don’t want to rank any higher than about tenth. Being in the company of people who outshine me intellectually doesn’t just challenge and improve me, it gives me pleasure… Befuddlement is nature’s way of telling you that you are learning. You ought to find your university buzzing with ideas that seem intriguing but not (yet) quite within your grasp. If you have all necessary prerequisites and understand everything you hear each week, you cheated yourself. You didn’t pick a good enough college. –Geoffrey Pullum
Now for the random things.
There is, apparently, an Edward Tufte / Richard Feynman LaTeX package. Yes, you too can typeset documents like the masters!
I’ve been meaning to try a number of open source drawing programs – the kind that let you turn your tablet computer or tablet input device into a sketchpad, complete with fake charcoal, pencils, watercolors, and the like. I’ve had these tabs open for weeks, but never got around to trying them, so let me list them here in the hopes the public declaration of interest will further lower my activation energy on this.
Update 22 hours later: Jef and Dave sent in card and logo redesigns, and we now have a much-improved second version of the card, which you should use instead. Thanks, guys!
Folks, we’ve got a business card template. Here’s a preview.
Disclaimer: I’m not a graphic designer, as this template makes painfully obvious. I threw this together in 16 minutes (yes, I timed myself) so it’s a very basic design. The colors and fonts don’t even match the Eucalyptus logo. However, you can use this design to run a pre-cut business card sheet through a home or hotel printer, and that’s what we need, because people are going to events tomorrow. (Actually, at this hour, I think it may even be today already.)
The template is a LibreOffice file, so you’ll need that installed before you can edit it. (LibreOffice is cross-platform and commonly available in Linux distributions – OpenOffice would work too.)
You’ll also need Gillius ADF, a Libre font from the “Gillius Collection” – download it here. I chose this font because it’s also commonly available in the repositories of Linux distributions. Ubuntu calls it ttf-adf-gillius and Fedora calls it adf-gillius-fonts so you can yum or apt-get install to your heart’s content.
Once you have those prerequisites installed, head to this ticket to download the template. Enjoy – and if you know graphic design better than I do, please feel free to fix.
Had visits to both Vocational Rehabilitation (Voc Rehab) and the Disability Resource Center (DRC) today. Brave new world! It’s been a great experience so far, which is important; I have so much anxiety and emotional wobbliness around the topic of my hearing that I’m not sure I’d be able to handle it otherwise. I need to feel like I’m going through this gracefully, need to feel like I’m beyond reproach… I carry around this huge desire to prove myself an equal, regardless of how much I rationally know I do not need to.
Honestly, I’m not sure if I could have done it earlier. Because right now, I have the following sources of strength and privilege, of “proof” that I’m not broken:
I hate this. I should not need that – nothing out there requires that I prove myself. But I need that security of competence-perception for myself, for whatever reason. I’m doing well in my classes, and I don’t need help right now – which is what enables me to go in and say “okay, maybe I should try this out in case I want it later.” No matter what, I save face – I’m coming from a place of strength.
Before I had enough things on my resume to “prove” to any other observers that I wasn’t broken, I… couldn’t bring myself to do this. The word “disabled” carries such a giant wave of assumptions with it that I needed other huge landmark criteria to make people do a double-take and actually look at me as a person instead of automatically washing my Mel-hood out with stereotypes. Or at least that’s what I thought, and how I still feel.
It is strange to feel (relatively) free to wander around and explore these things, now that so many outside forces and pressures I’ve dealt with for so long have been… dampened. My parents aren’t pressuring me to do this. I don’t need to do it to keep up with academics. My classmates, friends, colleagues, and teachers already see me as a bright and capable person. I’ve accomplished enough that other markers have become salient and my deafness has become a dim background note – nobody points me out as “the kid with the hearing aids” any more. Instead, I’m Mel, who researches open source and education. Or Mel, who cooks a fantastic quinoa salad. Or Mel, who proofread my conference paper, or set up my website, or finished her German final project on week 5 of the semester (that was fun – I’m systematically going through my classes and finishing all the work for the semester, one by one, so that by the end of term I only need to relax, proofread, and do some minor formatting).
And there’s some interesting stuff out there. Look, look, a hearing aid that can stand up to dust and water! One of the (many) reasons I didn’t wear hearing aids was because I’m a very spontaneous person, and I do things like running out into the rain in glee, jumping in the ocean in New Zealand on a whim, drilling 2x4s for a play set and getting sawdust everywhere… and assistive devices and services add these subtle bits of inertia to your life that sometimes make you feel a bit less free. Ironic, when the real end goal of assistive services is to give you more independence and freedom.
As announced earlier KDE will apply to become a mentoring org again for Google Summer of Code in 2012. We decided to focus on accessibility this round should KDE be accepted again. To make this happen KDE’s mentors need help. Most of the mentors do not have the knowledge needed to make good decisions when it comes to making our applications more accessible. We are therefor looking for co-mentors who can help them – people who either have a disability that requires changes in KDE’s software to make their life easier or people who are otherwise knowledgeable in the area. These co-mentors would not have to do any of the mentoring on the coding side but instead advice the student and main mentor on non-coding parts. Does that sound like something you can help with? Then please send an email to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org and introduce yourself and how you could help. Please also pass this on to anyone you think might be a good fit.
In January I attended the annual Australian Linux and Open Source conference (LCA). But since I was sick all of January and had a lot to catch up on, I never got around to sharing all the talks that I gave during that time.
It started with a talk at Drupal Down Under, which happened the weekend before LCA. I gave a talk titled “HTML5 video specifications” (video, slides).
I spoke about the video and audio element in HTML5, how to provide fallback content, how to encode content, how to control them from JavaScript, and briefly about Drupal video modules, though the next presentation provided much more insight into those. I explained how to make the HTML5 media elements accessible, including accessible controls, captions, audio descriptions, and the new WebVTT file format. I ran out of time to introduce the last section of my slides which are on WebRTC.
On the first day of LCA I gave a talk both in the Multimedia Miniconf and the Browser Miniconf.
In the Browser Miniconf I talked about “Web Standardisation – how browser vendors collaborate, or not” (slides). Maybe the most interesting part about this was that I tried out a new slide “deck” tool called impress.js. I’m not yet sure if I like it but it worked well for this talk, in which I explained how the HTML5 spec is authored and who has input.
I also sat on a panel of browser developers in the Browser Miniconf (more as a standards than as a browser developer, but that’s close enough). We were asked about all kinds of latest developments in HTML5, CSS3, and media standards in the browser.
In the Multimedia Miniconf I gave a “HTML5 media accessibility update” (slides). I talked about the accessibility problems of Flash, how native HTML5 video players will be better, about accessible video controls, captions, navigation chapters, audio descriptions, and WebVTT. I also provided a demo of how to synchronize multiple video elements using a polyfill for the multitrack API.
I also provided an update on HTTP adaptive streaming APIs as a lightning talk in the Multimedia Miniconf. I used an extract of the Drupal conference slides for it.
Finally, and most importantly, Alice Boxhall and myself gave a talk in the main linux.conf.au titled “Developing Accessible Web Apps – how hard can it be?” (video, slides). I spoke about a process that you can follow to make your Web applications accessible. I’m writing a separate blog post to explain this in more detail. In her part, Alice dug below the surface of browsers to explain how the accessibility markup that Web developers provide is transformed into data structures that are handed to accessibility technologies.
Update 2/20/2012 – after further discussion with EuCa folks, I’ve updated and expanded the responses below. Thanks to everyone who chimed in!
As the Eucalyptus community picks up steam, more and more folks who aren’t Eucalyptus employees are giving talks about EuCa at various events around the world – which is fantastic. How do we get everyone the information they need to give a successful talk? Ah, that’s the fun challenge.
Sometimes we just fill in gaps as we go along. For instance, Shaon’s talk, “Next generation cloud deployment: Self help is the best help!” just got accepted to SoftExpo 2012. Subsequently, a few of us had a spontaneous discussion on how to field a couple tricky questions when giving EuCa talks – the post below is based on these meeting logs. (Disclaimer: these represent individual opinions and don’t speak for Eucalyptus as a company, etc.)
Why is Eucalyptus using the Amazon API?
Because AWS is way farther ahead than the others, and we believe it to be the most worthy of focus. We may support other APIs in the future, but we prefer to focus now on the best API, and that’s AWS. See this post by Mark Shuttleworth for reference – it’s about OpenStack, but makes the same point.
Comments from Eucalpytus folks: “AWS is by far the most popular public cloud out there. I.e. it’s not just best, it is also the most common.
How much does Eucalyptus support cost?
Varies widely. Contact Eucalyptus for details.
I originally posted this without a number because I know companies are often hesitant to post that sort of pricing information on the web. After asking around within Eucalyptus, I found out they actually wanted to give a public answer – awesome! Therefore: if we change the question to “subscription” (not “support”), the answer is “It starts at $2,000 per server per year.”
What third party apps are available for Eucalyptus management?
There are a few options for apps that run on Eucalyptus and provide Amazon-RDS-like support. Three popular ones:
Providers of IaaS services need a usage monitoring tool. What does Eucalyptus offer?
There are hooks in Euca 3.0 for reporting usage; this is a new feature. We don’t have [public] details yet, but they will be in the docs when we release them (which will hopefully be soon).
In Euca 2.0, instances cannot be recovered once the node goes down. Is there any solution?
Boot from EBS is a new feature in Euca 3, and may be able to help with that problem somewhat. However, redundancy (multiple instances running at all times) is the way to survive instance failures. If you have multiple zones, start instances on all zones.
Instances are supposed to be spendible. HA (High Availability) is for the infrastructure: the app will still need to be designed with the cloud in mind to be fully HA. EBS and Walrus are the persistent storages to be used to keep the states and backup.
Wait, wouldn’t EBS and Walrus use more resources? I thought cloud was supposed to minimize resource usage.
Yep. HA wastes resources by design.
A Eucalyptus employee commented with a clarification here: I wouldn’t say that HA “wastes” resources. It of course uses more resources, but for a good and intended purpose. So it’s not a waste. I would say something like “there is nothing such as a free lunch. To have HA, you need redundancy, and redundancy requires its own resources.”
What are the alternatives to Eucalyptus, and why would someone choose Eucalyptus over them?
That’s all we had time for — what other questions would you ask, and how would you answer these?
This is a guest post by Holly Pervocracy. Holly Pervocracy is a kinky, geeky feminist sexblogger. She writes essays on her experiences as a member of the BDSM and polyamory communities, editorials from a sex-positive feminist perspective, advice on sexuality and kink, and humorous critiques of sexism online and in the media.
This post originally appeared at Holly Pervocracy’s blog.
Note from the GF mods: links from this post may lead to sexually explicit writing or images. In addition, Holly Pervocracy’s original entry has some anti-feminist comments, so ‘ware for that if you head over to her site. (Comments made here are expected to adhere to our comment policy.)
xkcd #592: Drama (by Randall Munroe, CC BY-NC)
With all apologies to the original, which all geeks should read…
I think geek sexuality is an awesome thing. God knows it’s the only sexuality I’ve ever known. Geeks are tinkerers who constantly try to improve and innovate, and geeks are not bound by many mainstream social rules, and these two things combine to create some fucking hot sex. Also for some semi-mysterious reason the overlap between “geek” and “kinkster” is, like, 90% of both groups.
But geeks also are prone to weird social thinking, some of it a reaction to the ungeeky mainstream, some of it their very own invention. Here’s some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex.
GSFS 1: People can voluntarily control their emotions about sex.
This manifests a couple different ways:
“We’ve agreed this is casual sex, so as long as we decide not to develop feelings, we won’t.”
“Sex is just a physical activity, so adding it to our dating/friendship won’t change our relationship.”
“My partner promised not to feel jealous because I’m not monogamous, but they’re betraying me by feeling jealousy anyway!” (Note that in this example both partners are apparently carriers of this fallacy.)
Pretending you can just decide whether you’ll feel any emotions at all is a geek fallacy stemming from the idea that you should be able to optimize your own brain to not do anything unproductive or unintended. But geeks ought to know better, because come on, you can’t even get a computer to do that. This stuff comes on you, it gets you by the heart and the gut, and it doesn’t ask you “pardon me, I’m an emotion, are you okay with experiencing me?” first.
What you can and should voluntarily control is how you express your emotions. It’s okay to feel strong emotions; it’s not okay to attack people or break promises and use “I was emotional” as an excuse. This is when it’s time to tell your partner “hey, we need to talk, I’m feeling an emotion!” Solving the problem may involve changing your relationship boundaries, it may just involve talking it out, or it may mean you have to end the relationship. But the solution is never “that is an incorrect emotion, please stop experiencing it.”
GSFS 2: The weirder your sex, the more enlightened you are.
I’ve done a whole post on this, so go there if you want extended pontification. The short of it is: geeks have a tendency to mistake “less mainstream” for “better,” and to conclude that sex that least resembles the mainstream is both the sexiest and the most virtuous. So polyamory gets seen as more enlightened than monogamy, kink gets seen as sexier than vanilla, and monogamous vanilla geeks get a big steaming pile of “I guess you’re just not very open-minded.”
I think polyamory and kink have great things to offer geeks of all sorts, but “having sex with multiple people” and “having ouchy sex” aren’t those things. Those are just neutral activities, things to do if you like and not if you don’t. The real takeaways are conscious and explicit communication. That’s what makes us cooler than the squares.
GSFS 3: Cool chicks don’t worry about sexism.
This isn’t exactly a sex thing but God does it plague some geek circles. I know because I’ve been the cool chick. I’ve played the “don’t worry, I’m not like those other girls, I’m not into gossip and drama” card; I’ve played the “well, you have my permission to objectify me, because I take it as a compliment” card; I’ve even played the “that mean lady was such an uptight no-funster for having boundaries” card.
Those cards are the fuck out of my deck now. And I’ve paid the social price for that. There’s definitely some people in my circles who’ve put me in their “uptight no-funster” mental box since then, or who deliberately bait me about “watch out, Holly, I’m going to patriarchally oppress you!” because ahahaha she’s an angry little lady isn’t that cute.
I don’t blame a woman who sees this go on, decides she wants friends more than she wants to start fights about some abstract problem that doesn’t seem to affect her personally, and starts telling her male friends not to worry, they can be sexist around her, she’s cool. The problem isn’t her. The problem is all the people who made it so much easier and more pleasant for her to be a “cool chick” than a woman who gives a damn how people think of her gender.
GSFS 4: Drama is always worse than the thing the drama is about.
I guess the xkcd comic has a little bit of this one. Drama’s never fun, but it beats the fuck out of suppressing real issues. In my time in geek circles, I’ve seen reports of sexual harassment and even outright assault silenced with “well, I don’t want to make drama” or “but whatever, that’s just drama.” A woman in the group is a sexual predator? Gosh, I don’t spread gossip. A man needs to be disinvited from parties because he’s repeatedly threatened people at them? No, kicking him out would make a scene, it would make drama.
In geek sexual communities, the illusion of smooth functioning and of everyone being bestest friends with everyone can supersede people’s needs for comfort and safety. A lot of this has to do with the “Ostracizers are Evil” non-sex GSF, but it gets worse when you add sex to the mix, because defensiveness about our non-traditional sexuality suppresses important issues even further. Like, if you admit that people violate boundaries in BDSM circles, then you’re admitting that BDSM isn’t a perfect haven of consent and negotiation, and that’s just going to play right into the mainstream idea that BDSM is abusive! So we end up defending abusers to prove BDSM isn’t abusive.
“Drama” is a trivializing word. Let’s try “conflict,” instead. ”I don’t want to treat him any differently just because he gets a little handsy with women, that would cause conflict.” It doesn’t sound so superior and level-headed now, does it?
GSFS 5: Sex should be no big deal.
This is related to GSFS 1, but even nastier. This is the idea that since sex is just a super simple physical act–you rub some bits together, it feels good, the end–that there shouldn’t be anything complicated or difficult about sex. That casual sex should be easy for everyone, that having multiple partners should be as simple as “it’s like having a sexual partner, but more than one of them,” that everyone who makes sex into a big complex issue is being dramatic (GSFS 4) or no-fun (GSFS 3) or narrow-minded (GSFS 2).
Sex is complicated as fuck, and if you think understanding sex is easy, you don’t understand sex. I’ve written 1300 posts on sex and I’ve already changed my mind about roughly half of them. It amazes me that the same people who admit that games about rolling dice can hide deep complexity and meaning will go on and claim that sex is just some squishy bits coming together. It’s not. Sex is two (or more) people interacting in a huge diversity of ways, and while it can be great, it’s never simple.
I love geek sex. I love the way we’re endlessly willing to rethink and improve and break stereotypes about sex. But we gotta stop buying into this crap. We’re geeks; we oughta be smarter than that.
As our adventures in radically transparent engineering education research continue, we find ourselves staring at IRB and going “well, all right, how is that going to work?”
Well, here’s how it’s going to work.
Or at least that’s the plan as of now. If we need to adjust, we’ll adjust. But if this all works, we’ll have an open data set that can be used by any future Purdue researchers for any future research without any further IRB approval – it basically places it in the same league as, say, publicly available census data.
Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem for other institutions. But Purdue has a pretty good reputation as a research university, so if we post the notice that Purdue’s IRB is ok with it, it makes it easier for other schools to go “well, if Purdue says it’s ok, we guess it’s ok here too.”
It’s been interesting to hear everyone’s reflections as we continue our journey towards radical realtime transparency. I’ve asked Robin for permission to share some of her thoughts on that and on the progress of our little research project. Here they are in full, emphasis mine.
I should be clear about my bias. I feel the change idea is so undertheorized and that we only look at the people in that process as objects (they do or don’t adopt something) – but don’t look at them as learners. Those theories we do throw around (e.g., get administrative support, don’t do this until you’re tenured) seem to be a very limited view that creates barriers to change – and yet there are so many examples of people doing this stuff regardless of all the barriers…which suggests “there must be something else going on”.
The “change knowledge” idea gives me a set of lenses to explore “the other bits” – that perhaps there is a lot of knowledge out there but that we don’t give it full recognition perhaps because it runs counter to other ideas or because we have a limited view on “change” (e.g., it doesn’t count as a change if you don’t fully adopt someone else’s idea yet a change happened). So… my bias… the developmental piece of change – and the transformative theory work seems to be a useful way to think about this.
As I was writing that last email I was thinking “how to get this in the public space” and out of “email space” so – yes – let’s move it into the public space…do you think a blog is the way to go? what is something that captures our history (like a journal) but keeps the timeline/conversational bits (like a threaded conversation)? Oh – and it has to be something that is low motivation threshhold – in other words, super easy to naturally do.
And… people need to feel comfortable with it – or at least feel comfortable with being on the periphery until they feel comfortable joining in. It may be that we need to define “public” – e.g., it is in a public space but unless someone is doing a specific search to find us, [they] won’t find us – so it is sort of protected in a “we don’t know about you” place.
A thought that bubbled up in my mind (for a conversation down the road) – is if we think of this as a model – what would it mean if we invited teachers into something like this (or mentors?) who typically don’t have access to data about people talking about their experiences. Would this be a new model for linking research and practice – a form of participatory research in which educators would help researchers see the important themes through their eyes and would gain a better understanding of how this kind of research can help them?
So yeah, this is what we sound like in each other’s inboxes, long before anything gets formatted as a shiny journal paper – and this is the sort of conversations we’re hoping to expose and make available to others. We will someday have an open mailing list… but first we need to get that data public, because “we have discussions regarding non-public data” is one of the biggest reasons it’s a closed list right now.
Taleist is running a self-publishing survey to get some more information on how (and what) the community is doing, so if you are a self-published author no matter how early in your career you are, do go over and fill it in. This is their first year running this survey so some of the questions need a bit of polish, but they’re very interested in feedback so leave a comment on their blog post if you see issues with the questions or want to make a suggestion.
I had been considering doing a survey like this myself, because it’s only through gathering and sharing data that independent publishers and self-publishers will gain insight into how this new market is shaping up. I am very curious to see how this survey shapes up!
In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on NFL.com, for example, you’re an “active user” of Facebook. Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You’re an active Facebook user. If you’ve logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site — and your comment was automatically shared on Facebook — you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.
“Think of what this means in terms of monetizing their ‘daily users,’ ” Barry Ritholtz, the chief executive and director for equity research for Fusion IQ, wrote on his blog. “If they click a ‘like’ button but do not go to Facebook that day, they cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services. All they did was take advantage of FB’s extensive infrastructure to tell their FB friends (who may or may not see what they did) that they liked something online. Period.”
The big question is how Facebook can put all of its “active,” er, engaged users in front of advertising?
Debbie Chachra was brave enough to volunteer as the first faculty subject for my “let’s get everyone’s stuff open access! project on Olin’s institutional repository!” Thank you, Debbie. I finally got all her journal publications from her time at Olin into the repository; it took about an hour per publication. (Now that I understand how to work the software better, it’s down to 15min/publication. Still labor-intensive, though.)
This means all the works are listed online – but not everything is open access and available online. I’ve been doing some copyright checking, and things fall into 3 categories:
Category 1: The publisher already makes the full text of your paper available freely online (i.e. “they are already open access, so let’s just link to them”). We’re done, no action needed.
Category 2: The publisher doesn’t have your paper freely accessible online, but is ok with you putting it up there yourself. Specifically, these publishers allow us to upload postprints (the edited document after reviewer comments – what it looked like before they formatted it with all the journal branding) without asking for further permission. I asked Debbie to send me postprint pdfs for these; once I have them, I’ll upload them, and that’ll be done too.
Category 3: Some publishers don’t grant you anything at all, so need to specifically request permission to make anything available to anyone. So I’ve asked Debbie to decide what version she wants to try to open up (preprint, postprint, etc) and send that version to me so I can prepare a letter to the publisher asking for permissions just for that specific document. As soon as they say ‘yes,’ we’ll be able to post that too; it’s just that the road is a bit longer.
Some things I’m learning as I go through this process:
It’s like scholarly housekeeping. I tell myself it’ll make a giant difference when I go up to defend my dissertation someday, years down the road – and when (and if) I apply for postdocs and faculty positions, and when… the list goes on and on. I gotta keep this somewhere, and it’s best to start when your career is young.
I’m in the process of planning my next Kickstarter project, which I’m hoping to have up early in March. This time, I’m trying to make sure that I really nail down my costs before I settle on my reward levels but this is proving to be trickier than anticipated! I want this time to offer a leather-bound version of the novelette, but in talking to various bookbinders, the answer to “How much does this cost?” appears to be “How much have you got?”.
The wide variation in options means that we can go from a very basic leather binding with nothing much more than a label on the spine to say what the book is and who wrote it, right the way up to complex bindings with inlays, gold tooling or gold-edged pages and everything in between. Before I can really know the price, I need to know what the design is but I won’t start the design work until I know that the project is going ahead. That creates a bit of a catch-22 situation as I need my costings to be as accurate as I can get them to ensure that I don’t end up under-budgeting.
Now, I have bound in leather once before and was chuffed as a small horse to hear from one of the bookbinders I met yesterday that my work is of a professional standard. Indeed, I was told that if I pitched up at this particular bindery with that as an example of my work, I’d be offered a job pretty much on the spot. It’s hard to express just how happy that made me as I obviously want to do as good a job as possible for my supporters!
At the moment (and for the foreseeable future), I don’t have the equipment needed to bind in leather. Once you start doing case bindings with a rounded spine, you start to need presses and other equipment that I both can’t afford and don’t have space for. But there is another option: to find a bindery that will allow me to hire space and provide a mentor under whose tutelage I can work so that I can make sure I don’t do anything wrong. That’s something I’ll be looking into over the next week or so, and it is my preferred solution. I adore making books, and working with leather is just a delight, not least because of the fabulous smell! And it would be a fantastic opportunity to hone my skills, so I am hoping that someone, somewhere does indeed go for a leather-bound hardback once the project is up online!
If you want to be amongst the very first people to know when Queen of the May goes live, join my mailing list and you’ll find out before anyone else!
Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, some photos of the leather-bound journal I made:
"However, many people felt that this would have been an admission that something in the OSI world was actually done right, a statement considered Politically Incorrect in Internet circles."
... "some modicum of security was required to prevent fun-loving students from spoofing routers by sending them false routing information."
At FOSDEM it was announced that Google will run Google Summer of Code again in 2012. Wohooooooo! KDE will apply as a mentoring organisation again. Here are the next steps to prepare:
For students:
For mentors:
I’ve been sort of invisible online for a few weeks. Sunday night we finally got moved out of our old, beat-up house. By “beat-up” I mean foundation damage, and water and silt flowing into the downstairs rooms, making them uninhabitable. It’s a wreck, but it’s big. So we had a decade of stuff crammed into a zillion storage spaces. I though getting ourselves moved into the temporary living spot during remodeling was the big job, but then my husband started pulling stuff out from the truly hidden storage spots, and that took another week of evenings and weekends to finish up.
Now we’re living in a space about 1/3 the size, with tons of stuff in storage (do we even want it back)? and am back to the normal focus on Mozilla, online life, etc. Funny have the luxury of a stable life well above subsistence level leads to the accumulation of so much stuff that seems meaningful at first but then becomes a burden.
More shortly.
I’m sure Whitman meant a different East, but it seemed appropriate anyway while I read this today in Taipei.
A PROMISE to California,
Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon:
Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain,
to teach robust American love;
For I know very well that I and robust love belong among you, inland,
and along the Western Sea;
For These States tend inland, and toward the Western Sea–and I will also.Walt Whitman
Last October I left California for China, of which I knew basically nothing at the time, to start a project with a good friend. There are three of us now, and we’ve been working really hard. I’m looking forward to announcing more about that here soon.
I still consider San Francisco my home, but China has its draws and we have our reasons for being here, which we will be until at least mid-June. I am looking forward to my next return to the States.
taken somewhere over the Pacific, flying Shanghai to San Francisco
From USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of Shakespeare Undead, comes the gripping follow-up story about vampire William Shakespeare and his Dark Lady who are stranded on a mystical island.
Fresh from a triumphant battle over the zombie horde that invaded London, Will concocts a plot to rid the love of his life from the encumbrance of her husband. Will plans to give his “dark lady,” Katherine Dymond, a potion that will make her sleep the sleep of the dead. Once she is entombed, Will can sneak in, wait for her to awaken, then spirit her away. After her husband returns to his plantation in America, Kate can return to London under a different name and assume a new identity. No one will believe that the dead Katherine and the live Kate are the same woman. Of course, as is often the case with true love, all does not go as smoothly as planned. When the two of them are shipwrecked on an island ruled by a wizard and a nymph, as well as infested by zombies, Will and Kate must stop an even larger plot afoot—one that leads all the way to the royal palaces of Queen Elizabeth.
.I’ve been running Kubuntu ever since I decided to switch to Linux on my computers. Kubuntu is what got me hooked on KDE’s software. I was on it’s council for 2 years. It has a special place in my Free Software world.
At FOSDEM I had a long chat with Jonathan. He told me that he’ll no longer be able to work full-time on Kubuntu soon. This was sad news because I know how much it means to him. For more details read his blog. While this is sad it is also good news. It clarifies Canonical’s position and gives the team behind Kubuntu more power.
I’d like to thank Canonical for sponsoring Jonathan for the past years. It was important for Kubuntu and for KDE. Kubuntu is important for KDE because a diverse distro eco-system is vital for us. Let this be a much-needed wake-up call and take it into our hands.
Hop over to #kubuntu-devel on freenode and see where you can help out for the next cycle.
In a change from your scheduled programming, I bring you these two awe-inspiring videos created by StoryMonoroch showing first the earthquakes over M3 experienced by Japan during 2011, and then worldwide earthquakes over M4.5, to put things in a little perspective. The two videos will leave you in no doubt as to the astonishing power of the T?hoku earthquake.
It’s well worth putting both these videos on full-screen.
For my latest product, Grove, I wanted to allow users to quickly log in or sign up with an existing account, such as Twitter or Facebook.
A while back I collected some data to determine how many people were using Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID to log in to TypePad. It was fairly obvious to me that people liked logging in using existing accounts.
My new product, Grove, provides hosted IRC servers for teams. Since IRC appeals mainly to developers, I thought it would be great to allow people to sign up and login with GitHub.
So our team created both GitHub and Twitter log in buttons.
With TypePad, the most popular service for logging in was Facebook. However, I purposely didn't add a Facebook log in button because I felt that our target audience (developers) wouldn't be as likely to use it. In fact, they might actually find a Facebook button a turn-off.
Our team isn't collecting much data yet, but we do know how many accounts total are connected via GitHub or Twitter.
Users who have connected their account:
Twitter: 13.96 %
GitHub: 20.41 %
Wow. This means that 1 in 5 users have probably logged in with GitHub while only 1 in 7 have logged in with Twitter.
I guess I don't need to add that Facebook button any time soon.
I don’t usually post (1) short snippets or (2) about current sporting events, but Robyn Bergeron’s note was impossible to pass up:
I have decided that the POSSE owl should be named Superb Owl. So that he can have one day a year dedicated to him.
(Note that the POSSE owl is not necessarily a male owl, and that my posting of Robyn’s quote does not constitute my endorsement of such a name for said owl. Still, it made me stammer incoherently for a moment. Thank you, Robyn.)
That is all. Have a very good evening, and may your nacho overdoses be miraculously healed with a good night’s sleep.
40 years ago, some folks at Stanford conducted an interesting experiment with preschoolers:
A marshmallow was offered to each child. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow, he was promised two instead of one. The scientists analyzed how long each child resisted the temptation of eating the marshmallow, and whether or not doing so had an effect on their future success. (Source: Wikipedia)
Short answer: yes.
Greg and I were talking about the difference between production and production capacity a few days ago, and the importance of balancing the two. It’s not a hard concept; we do this all the time when we play video games. When you play Monopoly, you build houses and hotels because you know that’s going to give you the strong resource and financial base you need to wipe the board with everyone else at the end; when you sit down for Settlers of Catan, you build cities – you don’t just start hurtling roads out there, right? You want that grain, that ore, those bricks. You want that power at your fingertips, so you Do The Marshmallow – you focus on building that power, even if it means not using all the little bits of power you have right then. Less shiny now, more shiny later.
What does this have to do with FOSS? Well, I’m reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment every time I see something like this:
“Linux geeks not caring about noobs is the main reason Windows is so popular.” –Chris Watkins
That’s my friend Chris, from Appropedia. Chris is a technical guy who loves the Free world; he’s an engineer working on disseminating open-licensed appropriate technology information to grassroots communities of hackers in the developing world using an entirely open-source software stack to do so. His statement reads to me like a bug report on FOSS’s ability to build production capacity in its communities. (We’ve gotten better, thanks to tons of long, hard work by many different groups and people – but there’s still a long way to go.)
I am also reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment every time I see something like this:
I just think it’s bizarre. “We need more people! Lets try to recruit those with this particular type of sex organs!” –from a GNOME Women comment thread
Dude. Do you want to curse the darkness? Or do you want to light some candles? Because what you did right there is called “cursing the people who are lighting candles.” When you see someone trying to improve the capacity of a community you care about, try helping them. Constructive criticism is helpful; however, the above comment is a good example of destructive criticism. Here’s how to tell the difference.
These comments are, in different ways, both about building production capacity in FOSS communities. In a world where software is considered obsolete after a year or two, where 6-month releases are built in no small part upon the outputs of 48-hour hackfests, where there are so many compelling reasons to focus on the now – what does your project do to look into the future? (Does it?) Could you see those two scenarios above applying to the communities you work within?
This past weekend I caught up a bit on comic books. I went to Midtown Comics, my usual haunt, and got the most recent trades of DMZ and The Unwritten. The staff weren’t that helpful in my explorations, though — for example, when I asked about what Alison Bechdel’s been up to, I got basically a shrug.
The next day, I visited Forbidden Planet south of Union Square, and the staff seemed far more helpful and sympathetic. When I got up the nerve to ask, “What comics have people who look like me?” they were actually interested in figuring it out and loading up my arms. “OMG you haven’t read Love And Rockets?!”
(Doesn’t it suck that so much of the Virgin India line is just crap?)
So, since it’s on my mind, some comics that feature women of color as interesting characters:
Amar Chitra Katha panel:
The Rakshasi opened her mouth wide as Hanuman
was drawn into her jaws by a mysterious force.
I don’t much care about superhero comics so I’m leaving out Storm from X-Men, etc. Should I read Frank Miller’s Martha Washington stuff? I should also sweep through my household’s shelves, especially our three binders of indie stuff we’ve bought at MoCCA, to find more recommendation-worthy books and one-offs, especially by women and people of color.
(Random shout-out: Mel Chua’s engineering education comics “What is Engineering?” and “What is Education?”)
Welcome to the world of Whitelabel goods. What’s that, you ask? Well, have you ever noticed how every hip California startup has a branded steel water bottle, without having had to go design a steel water bottle and figure out how to get someone to produce it, someone to supply the steel, someone to check the quality (and on and on)?
That’s because someone else has figured all of that stuff out, leaving only the selection of What Particular Things for the carrier or distributor – or whomever is going to slap a brand on and resell it.
I got to tour a whitelabel gallery (can’t say when, can’t say where) while out and about in China, and it’s positively creepy. Everything is incredibly.. familiar. And thus you realize that everything you’ve known and loved that formed the background and setting of your life was made in one place, waited here for someone to strike a deal and order in volume, then sent to the four corners of the earth for you to keep in your home. It’s also doubly disturbing to not find a brand anywhere — and to realize you are reflexively looking for them. Here’s a short video:
I have been passionate about Free Software for a long time now. My contributions have always revolved around helping people make amazing things happen and realize what they are really capable of. I’ve shown many people that small niche that just fits them perfectly and seen them grow from there and make a difference.
Along the way I’ve always come accross two problems:
I’ve done a lot of things to overcome this but it wasn’t ever enough somehow. Today I am at FOSDEM presenting a book, that will be another step towards fixing these problems. Today I am releasing Open Advice.
Open Advice is the result of the collaboration of more than 50 people from all across Free Software. It is a collection of short essays about key things the authors wished they had known when they started contributing to Free Software. It’ll give a headstart to everyone who wants to contribute. It’ll also be useful for existing contributors who want to know a bit more about other projects and areas of contribution.
The book is available as a paperback and free PDF and is licensed under CC-BY-SA.
What are you waiting for? Download the PDF version today or order a printed version.
Additional goodies: The LaTeX source is available and a bug tracker exists as well.
A year ago I started working on this project and today it is reality. If you’re at FOSDEM I’m sure you can see me bouncing around with joy 
From Katie, regarding admissions – she’s talking specifically about our alma mater, Olin, but I think it applies to any school (or company) that wants to chart their own path.
I’m afraid that if we publicize ourselves as seeking to select the “best” students for admission, we will get… more box-tickers. Fewer lifelong learners. More obedient queuers. Fewer spontaneous beekeepers. More people aiming to graduate and be named “exceptional” for doing so. Fewer people aiming to shape the school that will (sometimes just barely) graduate them, and who actually do all the revolutionary rule-breaking that “exceptional” implies. (emphasis mine)
To this I say amen.
This weekend will be devoted to getting my life in order for the storm of travel that is to come between next week and the beginning of April. Once I get on my first plane, I believe there will be a grand total of 5 days where I’m not traveling. Amazingly enough, I managed to arrange my schedule so I’ll miss a grand total of one class – which is having an exam that day that I’ll simply take early.
Time management for this semester has not been perfect (it never will be), but it’s been amazingly good. The secret? Waking up early. Very, very, very early. And sleeping early – and adequately – and eating well, which sometimes for me means not guilting out over spending $3.50 on a large soup for lunch when I forget to pack the homemade meal I made the night before. Doing work at the office and being focused about it, and trying not to bring work home.
And that is how I juggle 4 graduate classes plus an independent study plus research on three days a week – I do that Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and freelance and do my own reading (and some of my own research) Thursday-Friday. I have breaks, I take walks, I hang out with classmates, I spend entire days doing things other than work; I sleep, I eat, I go to random movie showings and talks and other campus events, I audit German 201 when I can and work my way through my grammar book when I can’t, and I spend time doing things like “let’s explore the hearing thing!” (read: go see audiologist, drive back and forth across town figuring out how Vocational Rehabilitation state services work, etc.)
It helps a lot that grad school classes for me have been heavily reading-based so far, and I’m a fast reader; one professor dumps about 300 pages of dense developmental psychology on us every week, and I usually read it after dinner on the evening it’s assigned. In fact, I try to do all my work for a class on the day of that class – a week before it’s due, that is, not the morning-of. And I do all of my meeting/workgroup followup immediately after the meeting (if I can) or that same day (if I can’t). This means I have some very, very long Mondays – 3 of my 4 classes meet on Mondays – but I know that when I’m done, I’m really done. It’s amazing how wonderful it feels to know it’s not possible for you to be forgetting something.
Again, it’s not perfect. I slip. I slip a lot. But it feels like I’m using my time more effectively this semester than I have in… any other semester I have ever been at school, so something’s working. And I’m letting myself do that – I’m trying hard things, it’s ok if I fail, I recalibrate and get back on track and readjust the track instead of beating myself up… which takes a lot of willpower, because it’s the intellectual-rational part of my brain that needs to keep on shouting “IT’S OKAY DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP” when I… beat myself up. (Instinct! It’s hard to fight that habit!) But progress is being made!
It helps to have something you really want to do. And it helps to make yourself focus on several things you want to do, and to turn down stuff, or keep extra stuff optional, so you don’t end up with towering piles of obligation. I suppose I would summarize my strategy this term as “when you take on an obligation, do it immediately, thus acquiring no obligation backlog whatsoever.”
I’d like to get better at regular exercise, which is something I’m still experimenting with – none of my lifehack attempts so far have gotten me to exercise regularly this semester, so I’ve decided that I’ll take advantage of Purdue’s cheap ($45 for the semester!) group fitness classes. Sure, maybe I should be able to do pushups on the floor of my own apartment. But I’m still new enough to the whole “fitness” thing that having structure, company, and people to nag me about my form is not a bad idea – and then maybe I’ll do pushups at home to practice outside of class. Who knows?
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Last updated:
February 22, 2012 06:12 PM
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