Tag: user interface


  • This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation. Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature.…

  • Back when I was Catholic, the two masses I enjoyed the most were Christmas and Easter. I listen to Christmas music throughout the year. Birth and death are a fascinating duality of life. A material death is simple… The Second Law of Thermodynamics represents the scattering of the particles of which we are composed. Life…

  • Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved daily according to Luis von Ahn (on Wired Science on PBS). His technology project reCAPTHCA will use unknown words in these challenges for solving the unknown words in OCR digitalizing books to solve these words in an a quasi-automated sort of way. I wonder though. Even if reCAPTCHA a)…

  • What is the American fascination with Tutankhamun? Personally, I favor Ramses II. Actually, Ramses II was one of my first obsessions. I knew everything there was to know about him at seven years old. Decades later, I’ve forgotten most of what I knew. We share the phoneme “Ra”. Ra was an Egyptian sun god probably…

  • Is the Internet really a bad invention? According to Doris Lessing, yes. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing,…

  • Its funny. Apparently its time consuming for companies to conduct brand analysis (just know what is being said about them). So a niche has been filled by Scout Labs and others. (Hopefully Scout is paying attention and is reading this. Maybe Umbria will also comment their product is better. :D) On the one hand, I…

  •   The B.S. in Professional Studies online program will enable students to acquire expertise in significant areas of contemporary professional life, and is equally relevant in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Coursework for the major is constructed around five areas of study – social science (understanding people in a diverse world), critical thinking, creativity,…

  • Back in mid August I switched to Pidgin as my IM client. I even found plugins like Guifications and Encryption to add back functionality. Starting now, I am going back to Trillian. The painful behavior I cannot stand is Pidgin removing my accounts without any visual notice. What is the use of an IM client…

  • Found this quote interesting. I’d guess the same is true for most college graduates. Tell me, what’s the point of spending 60-80 hours a week learning things that you immediately forget? Why I regret getting straight A’s in college College is about developing a love of life long learning. Hopefully, after four years of intensive…