Sunday, March 07, 2010

ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

Question for the hivemind. [Adventures in Ethics and Science]

Posted: 06 Mar 2010 07:05 PM PST

Which has a larger carbon footprint:

An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper?

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Dr. Isis Enters the Year 2003... [On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess]

Posted: 06 Mar 2010 10:26 AM PST

...or something like that.

Last night as on the way home, as a bit of "something for Mommy" after several night of middle of the night albuterol for Little Isis, I went and bought myself an iPhone.

Now, you have to understand what a big step this is for me. I have been carrying a 4 year old, pirated Go Phone that did pretty much nothing but make calls.  I had pretty much convinced myself that I didn't need no stinkin' interwebz on my phone.

Now, get offa my lawn!

But something in the last two days has come over me and I have become convinced, for no apparent reason, that I needed an iPhone.  I didn't have iPhone envy.  I did have a little bit of "can't find my little tiny phone" frustration.  What was the first thing I did with my iPhone?  I took  a picture of some Cadbury Creme Eggs I had bought earlier in the day.  Those little things are my favorite.

cabduries.jpgI then called my friend and lamented to her that I secretly wished our Lord and Savior had been crucified several times throughout the year so that I could get Creme Eggs all year long.  She accused me of blasphemy.  She's probably right.

Then I read one of my new favorite blogs, The Problem With Young People Today Is...  Seriously, this dude is hilarious.  In a recent post, he described the things things that old better are better at than young people. Here's my favorites from the list:


Serve in the U.S. Senate

When was the last time you saw a damned teenager serving in the U.S. Senate? I'll tell you when - never! And that's because everyone with a lick of sense knows that if you want to run a decent society you need to populate your governing bodies with nothing but really old white men.

Bake

My old mom could take two wormy apples, some turned lard, a handful of spice, a ball of knotted twine and an old newspaper and turn it into the most delicious homemade pie you've ever tasted. Young people? If it involves anything more complicated then combining cake mix with cannabis and then stuffing it in an Easy Bake oven, they'd burn the house down.

Write a letter of Complaint

Young people today lack the vocabulary, backbone and brains to write anything more than an inarticulate, half-assed flaming outburst in a moronic chat room. A decent letter of complaint is a powerful tool and one that requires mental agility, discipline and liberal use of phrases like "road apples" "balderdash" "hooey" and "gumption."


Select Appropriate Pets

Iguanas, ferrets, snakes and rats aren't pets - they're vermin.  In my day people didn't invite them into our homes and make them a part of the god damned family - we clubbed them with sticks, pelted them with rocks and used them as ingredients in our delicious homemade pies.

I trust I've made my point, damn it.


This guy is one seriously funny, cranky old dude.  And, I can tell that this iPhone is going to get a lot of use for things like taking picture of random shit that you all don't really want to see, and reading hilarious blogs.  Huzzah for technology!




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Sometimes it’s hard to remember that some very smart people just don’t know how the web and browsers work [Christina's LIS Rant]

Posted: 06 Mar 2010 07:19 AM PST

Back when I was working at the public library, I used to do the "introduction to the internet" classes. These were typically at 9 - before the library opened- and so attracted stay at home moms and retirees. Attendees usually picked things up pretty quickly. For one thing, they admitted not knowing how anything worked so would listen and take notes and then stay to practice on the public systems. We assume that "kids today" and indeed all educated adults are fluent in the use of browsers and the web. Not so. There is a strange example recently that demonstrates this point.  I assumed everyone had heard about it, but chatting with people, it make sense to reiterate here.

Read/Write Web is a popular blog that covers all versions of social media. It's been around for a long time as these things go. Recently, they did a post - like any of their others - on how AIM would integrate your Facebook friends as contacts. This is part of Facebook Connect and works on the basis that people didn't want to go around locating all of their contacts in each new service, but just keep them up to date in Facebook and go from there. The post was fairly ordinary - useful analysis showing a depth of knowledge about social media - but typical for the site.  This is when things got strange.

Through some twist of search engine optimization, this post got ranked first for Google searches on facebook (or perhaps facebook login). Hundreds if not thousands of people showed up, thinking they were on facebook. They left comments that they didn't like the new site design and that their login didn't work. They were mad that someone had messed up their facebook and demanded it back. Some of these people have their pictures in their comments - they're representative of the users of facebook:  mostly  younger, but some middle aged and some older.

People mistake the search box on the page for the address bar - or actually don't know that there is an address bar. They then click on whatever comes up first (eek the information security implications!). This is one reason that an intranet search without spotlighting fails - the first result by typical relevance ranking isn't what people want.

Actually, I've seen a family member with a masters degree who is very savvy about information and communication not know to open the browser to go online. She types what she wants into the search block in Outlook, and when Outlook doesn't know what to do with it, it passes the search to Bing and opens the browser to show the results!  I was flabbergasted. Others don't know about bookmarks, so copy the links into e-mails to themselves.  Admittedly, this works better than browser bookmarks when you're changing machines from home to work, but there have been solutions for that for years. Over the phone, I desperately tried to walk someone through getting to our website - it's got a shortcut so all you have to type in the address bar is library. Unfortunately, many can't find the address block. If they've got the default home page the IT department loads, they can at least search and find us. Sigh.

So when we're designing library tools, are we assuming that if they've even made it to our site at all they can probably figure out how to work it? Do we need Google ads for anyone coming from our ip ranges so if they click the first thing, they'll get to library resources? Would that be a better use of our money than some expensive research databases that are little used? Should organizations divert web searches and frame them or something with local results? Provide Google results in the middle of the page, but somewhere provide spotlighted organization things? Maybe that would come across as evil.

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Posted by at 5:24 AM

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