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Napple
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2 min read
I just taught a class to some designers visiting from Samsung Korea. As my first experience with an interpreter, I couldn’t help but laugh at the process a few times. Usually my sentence would result in a Korean sentence that was a little longer. But once in a while it was five times as long,…
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Scient and SBI
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1 min read
Scient was acquired by SBI/filed for bankruptcy. I’m not sure how to read that financial transaction, how it should feel to clients, or what it means strategically for the company. I just hope folks don’t lose their jobs. Word around town is that real estate liabilities hurt the bottom line (which means they had too…
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Job Search at Michigan SI
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1 min read
Peter points to this great job search engine at Michigan’s School of Information.
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BlogSpam
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1 min read
Spotted! Well, not exactly the BlogSpam I referred to. But crazy random posts on the topic of air-conditioning and mold appeared on Molly’s blog here and here. Is it someone’s idea of a joke? Do you wish you thought of it first?
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Hamza El Din at Lincoln Center
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1 min read
New York music lovers could do worse than check out Hamza El Din this Thursday at Lincoln Center. Here’s an older piece, an excerpt from ‘Manami‘ (850K), in what amounts to late 70’s Egyptian pop music. The tempo and rhythm shifts just floor me.
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Introduction to Ontologies from McGuinness
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1 min read
Deborah L. McGuinness, ontology goddess, released Ontologies Come of Age, a chapter to an upcoming book. A relatively gentle introduction, along the way she illustrates the difference between controlled vocabularies and ontologies: the former have implicit is-a relationships and the latter have explicit is-a relationships (e.g. in a taxonomy a Merlot is a narrower term…
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German Reference Tools
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1 min read
It’s a good thing the Germans know how complex their language is. They’ve invented two powerful tools to help learn it:The LEO English/German Dictionary can translate in either direction and the default setting is bi-directional, so you can type in either an English or German word and it’ll find the translation. This is only undesirable…
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Tire Swing Cartoon
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1 min read
If a digital design team designed a tire swing. Excellent. Link courtesy of xblog.
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Insights From LIS – Marcia Bates
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1 min read
Marcia Bates’ After the Dot Bomb reveals a few methods those of us without information science educations should know about. It’s a bit finger-wavey (you web design whipper snappers you!) but it’s worth reading. Also, she’s way off the mark regarding ontologies, but that’s a rant for another day. Eric unearths a related link, The…
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Pastina
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1 min read
Did anyone else have an Italian grandmother that would cook them Pastina? An earliest food memory for me, I recently picked up a box in the market, along with all the ingredients in the chicken-soup-with-pastina recipe on the side. Mmmmmmm, comfort food. And good for you. What’s the earliest food you can remember eating?
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Spam-Proof?
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1 min read
We have email spam and IM spam. Today I received a spam text message on my mobile phone (either Sprint sold my number or the spammers haven’t even bothered to harvest numbers, simply sending them out in numerical order because it’s so inexpensive). Oh joy. Next I predict – and I probably shouldn’t say this…
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Design Early, Design Often
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1 min read
In the latest issue of New Architect Alan Cooper espouses his usual philosophy: ‘Simply put, there is no downside to designing before coding.’ In the same issue, a member of the Mozilla QA team advises, ‘Release early, release often, and let your customers bang on it.’ Certainly two different approaches, but both valid I think.…
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Tendency to Subway
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1 min read
I was just trying to explain to Nick why I usually ride the subway. It’s economical, yes, that’s a big part of it. He asked, ‘The community?‘ and yes, but really no. It’s not as if people socialize down there. It is the people though, the great Walt Whitman celebration of the democratic city (‘Leaning…
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IBM Make IT Easy 2002
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1 min read
The papers and presentations from IBM’s Make IT Easy conference are up. Among them are presentations by Marti Hearst, Nathan Shedroff, and Clifford Nass. When I see reports like this wonderful study on the LCDs in the Space Shuttle, I want to abandon all this blathering web work, get my Ph.D, and be state of…
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iPod Design
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1 min read
This iPod design article is an interesting look at the hardware challenges Apple faced. From a user interface perspective there’s only this: ‘ “First and foremost, the product was elegantly designed in classic Apple fashion,” says David Carey, president of Portelligent. “They did product design from the outside in.” Carey says the company had a…