Free online DIY instruction

Instructables is a place where artists, bicyclists, crafters, engineers, modders, cooks, tinkerers, and techies gather to share advice and ideas freely, and post thousands of their fantastic projects. The "Best of Instructables" is now available at the link. It's a great introduction to the incredible variety of what you can make and do, and will hopefully inspire you to get started on great projects of your own. Subjects covered include computers, photography, Food, Home & Garden and much more!

2008 Survey of People Who Make Websites

"As we did in 2007, A List Apart and you teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going?"

"In 2008, 30,055 readers took part in the A List Apart Survey. Once more, data analysts Alan Brickman and Larry Yu crunched numbers this way and that. With a global recession in full swing as of December 2007, we were particularly interested to find out how financially and professionally secure web people felt, and whether there were discernible differences in the way people responded to questions about satisfaction and security in 2008, compared with 2007."

Results are here.

Brainy Quote

Brainy Quote lists thousands of quotes - familiar and obscure - from thousands of imminently quoatable (and not so much) individuals and it is sorted by author, genre, nationality, keyword and alphabetically. You can also add a widget to your web page or blog that will deliver a "quote of the day" and there is a trivia quiz. Very cool.

Also here is a great source for mathematics quotes - more interesting than you would think!

Interesting very early take on space travel

Over at Boing Boing I stumbled across this entertaining and innocent look at the future of space travel. I have no idea what propulsion system they are referencing or where the image came from, but it is fun, nonetheless. Take a full-sized look here.

The Launch of a Journalistic Experiment: The Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo

Today at the Virtual Journalism Conference at the Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University (WSU), Dancing Ink Productions (DIP) is proud to premiere our latest documentary: "Virtual Journalism: Inside the Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo." The documentary is part of an ongoing project in collaboration with Lawrence Pintak the director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism and Research to explore the transformation of the business and culture of journalism in a global context. It was produced in conjunction with Ill Clan Animation studios. It describes a news conference in Second Life organized by DIP and AUC which brought together James K. Glassman who was then US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and a group of eight Egyptian bloggers.

All of 2009 WebTrends on One Map

For the past three years Information Architects has produced a map of the year's Web trends and it generally includes EVERYTHING. Kinda complicated to decypher, but pour a cup and browse the larger image available by clicking here.

Included are the 333 most influential web domains and 111 people, as measured by referral traffic; the height of each entry represents revenue and traffic while the width records "stability."

Tone Matrix music generator

Tone Matrix is a sine wave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer designed by Andre Michelle. Select squares within the matrix to generate Brian Eno-like waves of tones that can be almost infinitely varied. Much fun! Just press "space bar" to reset.

Learning 2008 Wisdom

Eleven minutes of absolutely brilliant insight in the form of brief snippets from presenters at "Learning 2008" - Elliot Masie's amazing symposium. Every one is a jewel and well worth your time.

As a designer, my favorite quote is from Penn State's Henry May: "You can't fix by analysis what you bungled by design". Enjoy!


Find more videos like this on LearningTown!

Most annoying song ever.

An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever.

Komar & Melamid and David Soldier's list of undesirable elements included holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children's chorus and the concept of children in general (really?), Wal-Mart, cowboys, political jingoism, George Stephanopoulos, Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjo ferocity, harp glissandos, oompah-ing tubas and much, much more. It's actually a fascinating listen, worthwhile for the opera rapping alone.

Play the stream:



Found at Wired

Master list of free on-line language lessons.

Open Culture has a comprehensive list of totally free resources for anyone looking to learn a language though audio files. From Arabic to Yiddish, you'll find a free feed here.

Organized alphabetically by language, Open Culture's list of free foreign language lessons includes links to each lesson series' iTunes site, podcast RSS feed, or basic web site to get you downloading and e-nun-ci-a-ting immediately. It covers a whole lot of languages you might have no idea there were freely-available tutors for, and the variety of lesson types is intriguing. If straight-up repeat-after-me audio lessons get tiresome, many language areas also have humorous amateurs offering some local color, or the language's mother nation's news, read extra slowly to help with vocabulary and comprehension.

Found at: LifeHacker.

Find your best username.

Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites. Find the best username with namechk.

Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure

A new study from the University of Melbourne shows that workers who spend less than 20 percent of their office time to take "short and unobtrusive breaks" to surf personal, less productive sites were 9 percent more productive than those who tried to tirelessly keep their nose to the grindstone. We've long been keen on buckling down for a productive dash, followed by a little break, so an 80/20 split seems pretty reasonable. Maybe the best part of this study, though, is the coining of the acronym WILB, for "Workplace internet leisure browsing."

And it looks like they are doing it:

"According to the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in WILB. Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about products, reading online news sites. Playing online games was the fifth most popular, while watching YouTube movies was seventh.

Anecdotally, at my former place of employment - an internet dot com - we actually wrote into the policy manual that employees were required to browse the web at least an hour a day. The logic? If you are a web-based enterprise how are you going to keep pace with innovation if someone isn't looking out for it. We also didn't want employees to feel guilty about or hide their exploration and they were invited to share their discoveries with co-workers.

Visionaire: More than a fashion magazine.

Visionaire is more than a fashion magazine: Concieved as a limited edition "album" of fashion and art, each issue is an art object itself, pushing the boundaries of the book form. New issues cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars; the back issues fetch many times more, if you can wangle a copy from Karl Lagerfeld or Tom Ford or whomever else owns a copy. They've just revealed their 55th issue, and they've outdone themselves, conceiving the entire thing as a pop-up book and collaborating with art-world luminaries such as Andres Gursky, Sophie Calle, and Cai Guo-Qiang. If you can't buy one for a cool $750, then at least you can watch this slick video of the issue that they produced:

Found at Fast Company

Robot Contributes Scientific Knowledge

Gizmodo reports that a robot, Adam, has made a hypothesis, planned, and carried out experiments about the genomics of a yeast. The more complete report about the robot at Aberystwyth University is available at labspaces. It seems every story about this event has an image of a random robot. Since the story says Adam is just a prototype and more is expected of Eve, this photo from techfresh seems appropriate.

10 Provocative Statements about Libraries

John DuPuis overat Confessions of a Science Librarian has made a very thought provoking post regarding the Taiga Forum: A Community of AULs and ADs released their TAIGA 2009 Provocative Statements. The statements, some perhaps not meant to be taken seriously but to provoke conversation and thought are listed here. John has line by line commentary at his site.

Within five years...

1. ... all librarians will be expected to take personal responsibility for their own professional development; each of us will evolve or die. Budget pressures will force administrators to confront the "psychological shadow" cast by tenure and pseudo-tenure that has inhibited them from performing meaningful evaluations and taking necessary personnel actions. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired.

2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

3. ... Google will meet virtually all information needs for both students and researchers. Publishers will use Google as a portal to an increasing array of content and services that disintermediate libraries. All bibliographic data, excepting what libraries create for local special collections, will be produced and consumed at the network level.

4. ... knowledge management will be identified as a critical need on campus and will be defined much more broadly than libraries have defined it. The front door for all information inquiries will be at the university level. Libraries will have a small information service role.

5. ... libraries will have given up on the "outreach librarian" model after faculty persistently show no interest in it. Successful libraries will have identified shared goals with teaching faculty and adapted themselves to work at the intersection of librarianship, information technology and instructional technology.

6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation, instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.

7. ... libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions.

8. ... library buildings will no longer house collections and will become campus community centers that function as part of the student services sector. Campus business offices will manage license and acquisition of digital content. These changes will lead campus administrators to align libraries with the administrative rather than the academic side of the organization.

9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.

10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.

Watch, Listen and Learn!

The Adam Smith Academy is dedicated to producing original audio-VISUAL educational content, and distributing it through the latest technology, such as, iPods, iPhones, DVDs and online streaming videos. By creating short, narrated and illustrated “movies” of classic literature, history, economics and philosophy, parents and teachers can increase interest, comprehension and retention of difficult subject matter by delivering it to students in their favored formats.

From the site:

Place a book, an iPod, a cellphone (with video capability), a DVD, and a computer with streaming video in front of 10 students with the exact same content, and maybe, just maybe, one would pick up the book.

Taking the previous example a step further, ask any student for a memorable quote, and see if any are from a book. Most likely, 99-out-of-100 students would quote you something from their favorite, or even the last movie, they saw.

Put simply, the current educational system is antiquated. But, it’s not the content. It’s not the teachers. It’s not for a lack of money, or the age of school's buildings or grounds. It doesn’t need another bond, or smaller classes sizes, or a more conservative or liberal approach. The problem with the system lies in its distribution.

What may have worked 10, 20, even centuries ago, isn't the best option with today's current technology. And, while Thomas Jefferson and John Adams might still choose to curl up with a good book (if they were alive today), we can guarantee you Ben Franklin would be surfing the Internet for the lastest scientific information out of MIT or CalTech, and Alexander Hamilton would be scrolling through the latest stock quotes on his new iPhone.

The truth is, while parents, teachers and politicians argue over why “Little Johnny” isn’t learning in school, Johnny’s up in his room listening to his iPod, watching a DVD, and/or playing video games on the Internet. If only someone had noticed that “Little Johnny’s” book bag was lying in the corner collecting dust, perhaps the seemingly endless arguments and finger-pointing over what's wrong in education might have been averted, along with the waste of a lot of the taxpayer's money.

We believe that by presenting educational content in an entertaining fashion and on a “cool” format, students may not even know that they’re learning.

Here is an example - The Occurance at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce:

Electronic books with musty book smell launched

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An electronic textbook Web site is launching a smelly e-book after finding college students like to be able to smell their books.

A survey of 600 college students conducted by pollster Zogby International found that 43 percent of students identified smell, either a new or old smell, as the quality they most liked about books as physical objects.

Six out of 10 students also preferred buying used textbooks over new or electronic textbooks even though e-books are generally a third less expensive. E-books sales have been slow to take off.

In an attempt to persuade college students to try e-textbooks, Web site CafeScribe.com (http://cafescribe.com on Wednesday said it was launching "the world's first smelly e-book."

CafeScribe Chief Executive Bryce Johnson said that from September the company will send every e-textbook purchaser a scratch and sniff sticker with a musty "old book" smell.

The survey, conducted between August 15 and 21, found three out of 10 of students associated "mustiness" with the books they most loved, although 16 percent associated best-loved books with the smell of "freshly-ground coffee."

"By placing these stickers on their computers they can give their e-books the same musty book smell they know and love from used textbooks -- without any of the residual DNA you often find stuck to the pages of used textbooks," Johnson said in a statement.

Google Classic. Search by mail...

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next?

Writing in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey argues that both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. and may be subject to the same market moves.

Newspapers are fading away – the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and the San Francisco Chronicle may not last the year. The New York Times’ debt has been downgraded to junk. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Universities today are as confident as newspapers were ten years ago, and the confidence by some may be justified. Says Carey, “Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.”

However, regional public universities, by contrast - the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper - may be in real danger. To survive and prosper, says Carey, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of reduced tuition.

Students understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process. When an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy, the writing is in the wall.

Super Searcher shares 25 Search Techniques

This is from a CIL 2009 presentation titled, Super Searcher shares 25 Search Techniques. I haven't tried them all, but those I have tried are interesting. Here's an image from Viewzi. Viewzi shows a thumbnail on mouse over. It wants to turn my site search from blah to bling. Some of the others are interesting too. I like Highlighter. Not sure when I'm going to use it, but it's a good concept. The link to the whole list is here from Mary Ellen Bates of Bates Information Service. It took quite a while to load for me, but maybe my timing was bad. Thanks to David Lee King for the tip. Cool stuff!