Ramblings & ephemera
From Russell L. Ackoff & Daniel Greenberg’s Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (2008):
A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in [...]
Posted on September 18th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science, true stories | No Comments »
From Federico Biancuzzi’s “Phishing with Rachna Dhamija” (SecurityFocus: 19 June 2006):
We discovered that existing security cues are ineffective, for three reasons:
1. The indicators are ignored (23% of participants in our study did not look at the address bar, status bar, or any SSL indicators).
2. The indicators are misunderstood. For example, one regular Firefox user told [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, science, technology | Comments Off
From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:
From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.
It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, history, science | Comments Off
From “Good Architecture“:
In ‘building architecture’, for comparison, we have the 3 classic Vitruvian qualities to which ‘GoodArchitecture’ aspires:
‘Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas’ (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ‘The Ten Books of Architecture’ 1st C AD).
These qualities may be translated as: ‘Technology, Function and Form’ (C St J Wilson ‘ArchitecturalReflections?; Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture’ 1992 [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, history, technology | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:
The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, technology | Comments Off
From Technology Review’s “Keeping Tabs“:
Starting in the late 14th century, scribes began to leave pieces of leather at the edges of manuscripts for ready reference. But with the introduction of page numbering in the Renaissance, they went out of fashion.
The modern tab was an improvement on a momentous 19th-century innovation, the index card. Libraries had [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, history | Comments Off
From Adam Fields’s blog post, "Unthrilled with the Office 12 UI":
Over many years of designing custom content management interfaces for lots of people to use, it became crystal clear that there’s a huge difference between a “tool” and a “task”. A tool is a function that lets the user do something, but a task [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, technology | Comments Off
Bookmarked 2 links
Added a product to their wishlist:
Saw the original Dawn of the Dead last night. Still an all-time horror/zombie classic. Gore, humor, satire, thrills, & more.
Setting up Amazon EC2, EBS, S3, & much much more, and it's incredibly fun & interesting.
Sitting with a sleeping baby nestled up next to your side is sure peaceful and pleasant. Especially when he gently squeezes your fingers. :)