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Sometimes it’s the juxtaposition that amuses me:

Tweetie

Jill Gengler: I love being able to save someone’s bacon.

Tom Coates: The great slab of fatty prok that I pretned to call a brain is almost totally recumbent this morning. Come on piggy!

We’re making progress at archiving individual streams, I think. But the overall conversation, “what was I seeing then”, and the links between things? Needs work, at least chez moi!

Your brain builds something from whatever mental flotsam and jetsam is in your head. Perhaps it’s a useful thing, an answer to a question you didn’t know you needed. Perhaps it’s just an interesting combination of thoughts put into a story. It’s dreaming, but you’re awake.

-[Rands]

…when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention – you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

-[Richard Hamming]

Metaresearch?

I’m moving from “getting settled” to “getting down to work”. Photosharing isn’t a priority (in part because I’m shy of that kind of social networking: photos always reveal more than you think they do).

Shawn Micallef from Spacing Toronto has a lovely photoessay about Galway. I think he captures the city well. It gives a flavor of the place, from a North American perspective:

Geese at Galway Bay by Shawn Micallef

Go read/see the whole thing.

The litl is a $695 ‘webbook’ with a 2-year money-back guarantee. via Scott Janousek¹

cc licensed flickr photo shared by litl

The company is selling the litl as the no-fuss way to get online at home. It reminds me of the olpc more than anything I’ve seen:

• “practically sunlight readable” screen
• explicitly social (more below)
• has a handle
• converts to an easel
• its own new, linux-based Litl OS
• keyboard changes and simplification: “We’ve eliminated the inscrutable function keys and buttons with weird symbols. We also took out the cap locks key, which everyone uses only by mistake.” They’ve also added a ‘Litl button’ to get back to the home screen.
• everything is always full screen²
• 3 pounds
• sturdy: only moving part is a small fan

It’s also something of an ambient information device, with focus on viewing rather than typing, and ‘distracted interaction’.

Like the chumby, litl is

• invites others to build widgets
• advertises itself as a clock
• has channels (which can be synced with the other lidls)
• unusual navigation (in litl’s case: a roller-wheel and remote control)
• has upgraded packaging

Marketing is snazzy, with a lot of thought into packaging, including card illustrations by David Macaulay (flickr) (company blog post).

cc licensed flickr photo shared by litl

Litl has a strong social media presence. For instance, they advertise their minimalist packaging with a company-made unboxing video:

litl webbook unboxing from litl on Vimeo.

Aside from the company website, the most detailed information is from Wade Roush’s xconomy Boston review.

In place of a desktop, the Webbook has a home screen that displays up to 12 boxes that Chuang calls “Web cards.” Some represent Web pages, others represent RSS feeds, and still others represent widgets or “channels” that are the Webbook’s closest thing to native applications—for example, there’s an egg timer widget for use in the kitchen and a Weather Channel widget that shows the temperature outdoors.

The litl is explicitly social: “By linking multiple litls, you can synchronize channels automatically.”
A ’share’ button also pushes the current content to another Litl.

Convenience features

• cloud-computing
  • synch multiple litls (whole machine or only certain channels)
• pulls in images (e.g. from flickr and Shutterfly)
• TV-integration: “What if we could combine the limitless amount of content on the web with the ‘lean back’ experience of the TV?”
  • HDMI port
  • has an optional remote control

1. Scott is a Boston-based flash developer I first discovered when following the chumby. Scott has started his own blog devoted to the litl, which, like the chumby, uses widgets. More details from his regular blog. [↩]
2. well, except that you get 12 widgets on the homescreen [↩]

I’ve been arguing with Jim Pitman about how abstracts are different from summaries. The audience, I think, determines whether a text is suitable to be used as a summary.

This seems like a good example:

Lumley, J., Gimson, R., & Rees, O. (2007). Endless documents: a publication as a continual function. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Document engineering (pp. 174-176). Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: ACM. doi: 10.1145/1284420.1284463

Variable data can be considered as functions of their bindings to values. The Document Description Framework (DDF) treats documents in this manner, using XSLT semantics to describe document functionality and a variety of related mechanisms to support layout, reference and so forth. But the result of evaluation of a function could itself be a function: can variable data documents behave likewise? We show that documents can be treated as simple continuations within that framework with minor modifications. We demonstrate this on a perpetual diary.

This is a really interesting article from a team at HP Bristol (UK). They seem to be talking about the benefit of publishing as you go along (i.e. blogs or medical records). They call these “continual documents”.

I picked it up¹ because the abstract seemed bizarre, but the topic seemed interesting. “Continual documents” struck me as “continual functions”. And the mention of XSLT hinted at transforming a document using its underlying structure.

Surely, I thought, this abstract couldn’t describe its contents. After glancing through it, I’m not sure: This abstract may well summarize the contents of the article. But for me, the abstract really didn’t serve as a summary: I don’t know the field, so the terminology (e.g. document engineering, Document Description Framework²) didn’t clue me in.

This difference gets at what AcaWiki is trying to do: provide a place for people to discuss/summarize research articles, in the way that Wikipedia is a place to discuss/summarize topics. Neither is a place for research but both are places for experts to share knowledge, for would-be-experts to describe what they know, and for non-experts to glean a deeper sense of the world than they might have had otherwise.

1. I came across a conference on ‘document engineering’ [ACM digital library, may have a paywall] while sifting through articles for my literature review. ‘Document engineering’ includes lots of stuff that’s out of scope. Some material, on structural markup,may be relevant to online argumentation. [↩]
2. One interesting line stands out: “In DDF documents most program elements are <xslt:template/> trees.” [↩]

Sure, you expect photos of lush green landscapes (and you might get some out of me eventually).

But first, a more practical sign that I’d arrived:

Today is my last day at Appalachian State University.

Monday I begin a new adventure as community organizer, helping launch Acawiki, a “wiki for academic research”. The brainchild of Neeru Paharia, Acawiki strives to make research papers easier to access and understand. Go write your own summary!

The next month will find me living in Massachusetts, my adult home, while preparing for a move to Ireland!

In October, I’ll be joining the Social Software Unit at DERI for a fellowship. The group does fascinating work on social software and the semantic web. This is a 3(or 4)-year Ph.D. project, where I’ll be working on modeling online discussions/arguments. More about that soon!

I’m looking for practical advice of all sorts—about community organizing, about moving to Ireland and living abroad, about success in Ph.D. studies. Consider this your personal solicitation for tips, tricks, and advice!

Apollo 11 makes me think of Hope Eyrie.

Hope Eyrie is a lovely commemoration of the Apollo landing. It’s probably the best known and most celebrated filk song.

I love the lyrics, especially the chorus:
“But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won’t drive us down to dust again.”

This video (a tad cheesy in places) is captioned with the lyrics:

Each of these videos features the music of Hope Eyrie, written by Leslie Fish & performed by Julia Ecklar. Thanks to the generosity of Prometheus Music, you can download an mp3 from http://www.totouchthestars.com (a fun space-related album from a great filk label).