Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: user interface

  • Racial Profiling

    Walking home from the bus in high school, I saw police cars and officers in front of my house. Their presence made me extremely apprehensive. The only little assurance was my father talking to the officers. Someone broke into the house and stole some of our stuff. We felt violated. Our own home was unsafe.…

  • Cosmological Constants

    Guess I am pretty dense. As many books and TV shows as I have read or seen about Einstein, physics, and cosmology, I just understood something for the first time since it was extremely plainly laid out for me. An ever expanding universe requires one or more forces to push matter further apart: cosmological constant. Forces attract…

  • TED Talk: Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education

    About this talk from the TED site: Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.…

  • TED Talk: Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library

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    I’ve heard the Library of Congress analogy previously. The question I had then was, “What about the diagrams and pictures which make the books useful. Books are not just letters, numbers, and symbols.”

  • Feedback Loops

    Remakes don’t scare me. Some are good. Some are bad.  The thing to remember is, “Its just a movie.” The world won’t end over a poor movie. There’s always another one in a few weeks to either like or hate. If it stands up to the test of time, then you’ll buy the Blue-ray and…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

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    The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim: The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from…

  • VistaSWAT

    Do you run one of these versions of the former WebCT products? CE4.x CE6.x CE8.x Vista 3.x Vista 4.x Vista 8.x If so, then you should join us for the next Vista SWAT web conference call Thursday, May 14th (and every other Thursday). We help each other solve issues and better understand how to use / run the product.…

  • The Twitter Timesink

    Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?” I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value. My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve…

  • Am I Suspicious Now?

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    Surely the GBI isn’t looking for anyone about 6’3″. That is a lot of folks out there…. Even me. Maybe my only saving grace is not looking like I weigh 240. Hopefully Bankhead’s quote was taken out of context?  While Zinkhan could have changed his appearance, [Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman John] Bankhead advised people to…