Noise Between Stations

December 2003

  • Purple Dancing Hippo Sumo Wrestler

    •

    1 min read

    Oh how I wish I could dance like that.

  • Are there polar bears in space?

    •

    1 min read

    SpSt 515: Human Factors in Space, 3 Credits: A review of the major stresses experienced by humans on entering the new and alien environment of space. Examples will be taken from the psychological and physiological impacts experienced by U.S. and Soviet crews with emphasis on longer flights. How to avoid and/or overcome these stresses will…

  • Review of SchemaLogic

    •

    1 min read

    Update to the post below, Anca has a review of SchemaLogic. ‘The primary use for SchemaServer right now seems to focus on Controlled Vocabulary Management….Changes to a vocabulary can be made through an automated voting process.‘ Hmmmm, people across the enterprise voting on the vocab, I wonder what LIS people think of that? Link courtesy…

  • And how does that make you feel?

    •

    1 min read

    OK-Cancel, very funny. Link courtesy of Challis.

  • Navigate in Place

    •

    1 min read

    Check out the Dialtastic over at youngpup. It’s an example of the interaction design school of navigation.

  • Layer of Abstration

    •

    2 min read

    OK, you’ve got a taxonomy full of info you want a whole bunch of distributed, internal, business users to manage and a website that displays that taxonomy, but in a very particular way crafted to the needs of customers and controlled by a centralized web group because you don’t want to simply display the raw…

  • IA Education

    •

    0 min read

  • Bella at St. Johns

    •

    1 min read

    If you live in the New York City area and are looking to learn more about IA and classification schemes, you might like Bella Hass Weinberg’s class at St. Johns University. This Spring it’s offered on Thursdays, 7-9pm. Bella is a world-class expert on indexing and thesaurus design. She can tell tales of the oddest…

  • Taxonomy Dance Instructor

    •

    1 min read

    Having only recently contemplated the taxonomy dance, I’m now building a user interface to do it within a content management system. It’s nothing new, I see all the thesaurus software let’s you map categories to other categories. But some of those interfaces are soooooo bad, asking you to assign categories a number which corresponds to…

  • Research-A-Palooza

    •

    1 min read

    As Tanya recently pointed out, sometimes you have to go down a research path just to find out if the path is of interest to you, sometimes having to backtrack. The UT School of Info had a little seminar which addressed this, at least on a community level. The Research-A-Palooza: Each person gets 90 seconds…

  • Habitual Applications

    •

    1 min read

    Stowe Boyd on the challenges new Internet applications face being on the out rather than the in: ‘The final barrier I see to the productive application of social networking systems is that they are…being developed as standalone systems, divorced from the information technologies that businesses are already using to manage business relationships or relationship-related information.…

  • Sneaky User Testing

    •

    1 min read

    What happens when you unleash Paul Ford’s design and technology skills on a 150 year old magazine of literature, politics and culture? Harpers.org. Paul also found a clever way to prototype the site: ‘It’s been noted that Harpers.org looks like Ftrain. It’s actually the other way around: Ftrain looks like Harpers.org. I’ve been using you,…

  • Preservation is Relative

    •

    1 min read

    Fran Lebowitz on Lever House: “If you live here for more than five years, they’re going to tear down something you like. The invariable rule of thumb is that what they will put up is worse than what they tore down, even if what they tore down is terrible. I mean, I was once with…