Floating Ecopolis for Displaced People

April 17, 2010 – 2:02 pm

Yet another interesting concept, the floating ecopolis:

There are very few urban design solutions that address housing the inevitable tide of displaced people that could arise as oceans swell under global warming. Certainly none are as spectacular as this one. The Lilypad, by Vincent Callebaut, is a concept for a completely self-sufficient floating city intended to provide shelter for future climate change refugees. The intent of the concept itself is laudable, but it is Callebaut’s phenomenal design that has captured our imagination.

By Steve :: Posted in Space :: Comments (0)

Transit Solutions

April 17, 2010 – 1:46 pm

An interesting projection that might be fun to consider for cities like Hartford:

The “Community Transit” system would also enable local shipping from business to business with cargo cells, which have the same size openings as a shipping container. As Owsen says, “Cargo cells create incentive for small business peer-to-peer shipping that stimulates local business cooperation.” The windows of each cell feature an organic dye developed by researchers at MIT that concentrates light to the window’s edge, where it is converted to electricity by solar cells bordering the surface. (links in original)

By Steve :: Posted in Space :: Comments (0)

On Why I Suck and Don’t Suck at 24 Hr Marathons

April 11, 2010 – 1:21 pm

The first reason I suck at 24 hr Marathons is because I get 7 hours of sleep a day. I go to sleep about 11PM and wake every morning at 6am. If I don’t do this, my eating and work schedule is thrown out of narrative and I get cranky.

The second reason is that I write in seclusion and have built a space for this writing. It doesn’t mean the writing is any good, but it is an issue of comfort zones. Point: I can’t write in hotel rooms, conference halls, or outside.

The third reason is that my diet is heavily controlled. Not because I might die because I eat a slice of pizza but because I like routines and don’t like to think about what to eat. I don;t like to drag around hummus jars.

The fourth reason I suck at marathons is that I hate people. Just kidding.

The first reason I really don’t suck at marathons is that I generated crap out of it which isn’t such a bad thing, but now that I think about it, I can reflect upon what I did do, work on it some more and keep working on it, as I solved some real problems and had the time to work on them at the marathon. 24 hours of work doesn’t translate into 24 hours of work as the eyes begin to flame out after 14 hours of screen time. I really had to squint, but, interestingly, I didn’t solve the real problems until 3:30 AM, when I started to drag and say, “Oh my god it’s only 3:30.” It was at this time that I should have gone into the new media lab and cranked up HL2 on the PS3 system and chilled some. Next year I’ll be better prepared.

I know now how Wally’s wife dies. I now know the structure of the novel’s narrative. Call and response. But what I still don’t know what really gets Wally running across the country, as this is a nuanced question, not really a brute force problem, although . . . now that I think about it, he could do something that forces the question, but . . .

I really respect all the students and other participants for toughing things out and generating very interesting work. Susan Gibb is a great writing companion. Abbot’s intellectual energy is quite a thing to behold. I still think he’s a genius at improve. And I hope Trent solved his issues with character, POV, and narrative.

PS: I’ve gotten into the habit of hitting the ; key instead of the ‘ key.

By Steve :: Posted in Media Space :: Comments (0)

New Media is Hard

April 5, 2010 – 4:58 pm

New Media is hard. New Media people (ideally) can express and understand ideas in symbolic language

$(‘a’).hover(function() {$this.append( . . . )}); and |a horn | a plug |

in a design framework, say a word processor, and interpret ideas in an expressive environment, say a billboard or a smart phone or a novel.

The three together are difficult to teach, to learn, and to master.

By Steve :: Posted in New Media :: Comments (0)

The Future of Health Applications

April 4, 2010 – 6:16 pm

I had an interesting conversation with my med student daughter in law today. I proposed the question: what if your hospital had the opportunity to order everything it needed to meet the needs of everyone it serves? We wondered how much boost to economic ecology such an order would create. Twenty thousand jobs perhaps. We didn’t know. Of course, the problem is that hospitals are not self-sustaining (they could never be). Or is this incorrect?

I’ve had my fill of health care over the last few months. The care was fantastic. But I have excellent coverage and don’t really worry about how to pay, as I’ve been paying into my coverage for almost 15 years month after month, month after month. I’ve had to tell several stories over and over to incredibly intelligent strangers: medical histories, drug reactions, aches and pains, habits (how much a wine?). With the relevant and appropriate application, a technician or nurse could click a button and answer a question. If something comes up, that same person could add to the identity of the patient and somewhere along the way things would flesh themselves out with the right notifications. We need to get over privacy and legal roadblocks.

When will my PCP learn about a concerning polyp? I could call him tomorrow and tell him. But he’d have questions I couldn’t answer. We conclude this: good care is about good information and even better systems for users. This should be a guide for health applications, iPad or no iPad.

New Media project: let’s build care applications.

By Steve :: Posted in New Media :: Comments (0)

On Aftermaths

March 24, 2010 – 7:17 pm

The lead-up to the health care initiative was an interesting narrative that calls for some reflection on a few phases of media coverage. Days after the Obama election, the press went on a spree about the death of the Republican Party and the demise of conservative ideas in general (analysis here). A year later it was the demise of Obama’s various initiatives and a conservative resurgence. Months before, Congress’ attempts were sinking.

These narratives are shaped by power, chance, and incident, of course, and, I would argue, the irony of the ineffectualness of conservative ideas, which aren’t traditionally conservative, as the “less government” meme is a farce and has been since the Civil War. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman are Obama’s ironic doubles. If this is the face of the current Republican party, then those with seats should start another path.

Given the news of the last few days and today’s talk about revolution and reactionism (this mean to go back to the way things were), we can get our crystal balls out again. In my mind, Obama is well aware of these trends, but no matter. Senate hearings have been shut down, bricks are flying, and idiotic maneuvers continue (some of those maneuvers perhaps would have been legit if the party had played ball rather than walking off the court), all of which point to the effectiveness of Barack Obama and the seriousness with which the opposition now takes him. Okay. I’m pretty impressed by the narrative. I told S a few days back that if any health care bill passed, I’d consider Obama a genius. And so things stand.

I’ve read the bill. Some of it I could understand. Much of it is written in the legal discipline language of legislative bills, which really needs a dose of hypertext to provide clarity, and can only be understood in association to precedent and several other texts. (Maybe this could be a student project or a job for Emberlight.) In general the bill is a set of compromises and comes with very little of what I’d want. But no one wants what I want. Non-monetized health care is a crazy ideal. But non-monetized health care isn’t the same as socialized medicine (don’t bother disagreeing with this: I know what the arguments are; go read Aristotle instead). This bill is neither. In any event, perception will be shaped by what people see as a direct benefit, like eye glasses in the 19th century.

One lesson here has to do with the image of fleas: that’s a riddle.

By Steve :: Posted in Politics :: Comments (10)

Back to Multiplatform Publishing: Question for Writers and Developers

March 18, 2010 – 4:58 pm

One of the qualms of instruction is that often you must depart an ongoing project and return to it asking, “What was I doing? What had I planned?”

This is why persistent weblog use is a good thing. (And Literary Arts journals. I thank Jesse Abbot for the use of that term in order to tank the term “creative writing”). In any event I’ll be digging back into the frameworks issue by creating templates in Tinderbox for output across the publishing ecology and considering the validity of Objective C in the project and available XML Android adaptation. Then there’s jQuery.

The big question is this and if you have suggestions I’d love to hear them. Let’s say you’re a writer or a developer and you want to make your project available to readers and users of multiple devices:

1. Is the solution to build on the web?
2. Is the solution to build on the device specific paradigm?
3. What’s the essential question as it would seem that application developing appears to be crunching toward androgyny?

By Steve :: Posted in New Media :: Comments (2)

On Building a Better Teacher

March 13, 2010 – 7:49 pm

I finally finished Elizabeth Green’s article in NY Magazine titled Building a Better Teacher, which describes Doug Lemov’s methodology and M.K.T. as examples of innovation. It’s a good piece. A basic idea in Green’s article is that money isn’t enough. Better teacher instruction is a good way to go in improving student performance but hasn’t empirically shown improvements where high pay has played a role as incentive. But teacher instruction is easer said than done.

Nearly 80 percent of classroom teachers received their bachelor’s degrees in education, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet a 2006 report written by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, the esteemed institution at Columbia University, assessed the state of teacher education this way: “Today, the teacher-education curriculum is a confusing patchwork. Academic instruction and clinical instruction are disconnected. Graduates are insufficiently prepared for the classroom.” By emphasizing broad theories of learning rather than the particular work of the teacher, methods classes and the rest of the future teacher’s coursework often become what the historian Diane Ravitch called “the contentless curriculum.”

Of Lemov’s plans:

Lemov is interested in offering teachers what he describes as an incentive just as powerful as cash: the chance to get better. “If it’s just a big pie, then it’s just a question of who’s getting the good teachers,” Lemov told me. “The really good question is, can you get people to improve really fast and at scale?”

Good pay, good teachers, and solid instruction and practice in the art of teaching. While Green does a good job describing methods as solutions, she rarely touches on the why’s of teaching beyond the problem of “scope” and “poor performance.” It’s never wrong to ask why schools “should” exist in their present form. The United States has millions of children to teach and thus requires millions of teachers. An additional issue has to do with the problem of educating the educators who educate the educators and how large of an issue this is. Another issue with the article is its emphasis on managing the classroom and holding the attention of students “in school.” Green and her subjects know there’s more to the problem but the examples invariably always come to the simple notion of attending to the teacher and to content. Fine. All one has to do here is examine TV to understand that the most basic attention skill is the ability to perform with a persona. Ultimately, questions about improving the performance of the entire system will come down to asking questions about the metaphors we use, such as classroom, student, teacher, school, schooling, and test, and whether schools frame a humane and ethical dimension of the life we want people to have in the future.

I never really understood the content of M.K.T. tests, but found this interesting:

Inspired by Ball, other researchers have been busily excavating parallel sets of knowledge for other subject areas. A Stanford professor named Pam Grossman is now trying to articulate a similar body of knowledge for English teachers, discerning what kinds of questions to ask about literature and how to lead a group discussion about a book.

I don’t understand what this means or the implications and context, other than it points to general abilities teachers should demonstrate informed discipline to discipline. What are the knowledge sets, which are going to be critical ten years from now when students heading out of schools in the future enter schools of education?

By Steve :: Posted in Teaching :: Comments (0)

Corporation Impact Trillions on the Environment

March 5, 2010 – 8:40 am

How do large corporations impact the environment

A study conducted by Trucost, a London-based consulting group, recently assessed the environmental use, damage, and loss by 3,000 of the world’s largest corporations.

The study draws conclusions and information from eight years of study, and was commissioned by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment and the United Nations Environment Programme. The report is the result of increasing concern for major companies not being held accountable for a level of corporate social responsibility in regards to environmental impact.

As policy remains in limbo, government and environmental officials continue to quarrel over abolishing the practice of subsidizing and replacing it with instating a cost for damage, and the stakes increase. Fresh water, fisheries, fertile farming soil, and human quality of life is being negatively effected each year as a result of negligent business practice.

The companies assessed by the report are from the UK-FTSE and 100 other major markets, including all 500 companies on the Standard & Poor’s list of the largest traded companies in the United States (Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble, Apple, Exxon Mobil, etc).

The report, which will officially be published in May, assessed the price tag on the estimated combined corporate damage at $2.2 trillion a year — more than the national economies of all but seven of the world’s countries in 2008.

By Steve :: Posted in Space :: Comments (0)

Marie Bjerede on Phones in the Classroom

March 4, 2010 – 8:04 pm

Practically speaking, I’m finding verification and term and concept searching in the classroom quite handy. I encourage laptop and smart device use. Today we had to look up some questionable statists in an article from a student paper, finding interesting issues to spring from. The laptops and the cell phones are an interesting addition to student participation as this technology is much more ergonomic than a big screen at the front of the room. The inclusion issue, which is still questionable, I think, also augments realtime discussion: So this at O’Reilly:

A final observation is that having a digitally mediated component to the learning environment can be surprisingly inclusive. As teachers in Project K-Nect began to experiment with using the blogs and instant messaging for discussing math in the classroom, an unexpected (to us) dynamic emerged. It turns out that many kids who don’t like speaking up in class are completely comfortable speaking up online. Students who don’t like to raise their hands use the devices to ask questions or participate in collaborative problem solving. There appears to be something democratizing about having a “back channel” as part of the learning environment.

I find it interesting that not one of my Contemporary Fiction students has brought a laptop to class.

By Steve :: Posted in New Media :: Comments (4)

Health Care and Narrative

February 26, 2010 – 6:51 pm

This is a typical (real) story. S goes to the PCP for Ailment A and Ailment A proves too much for the PCP (Primary Care Physician). So the PCP refers S to a Specialist. Maybe it’s a hernia, maybe some strange growth inside or out. S goes to the Specialist and must tell the story from start to finish, with all the inaccuracies and hearsay (I say what I heard) this portends, as what’s really being conveyed (and this is the important part) are the observations of the PCP through the medium of the patient.

S wonders (not, where are the hypertexts) but where are the records and why weren’t they provided to all the people who need to know or should know.

The PCP’s Observations
The PCP knows the story and the narrative. The PCP has seen the evidence and has worked through a diagnosis. Diagnosis (Greek) means to discern, distinguish, and, more specifically, to take something apart for the purposes of knowing (gnosis). It implies, in medical application, lots of work and responsibility in the form of a narrative. It’s not conjecture, which is a toss, or interpretation, which is a specific kind of structured utterance, which is what patient’s bring the PCP in the first place, like a driver pushing their auto into the shop and sounding out the problem to the mechanic and the mechanic responding with nods.

The Patient’s Observations
The patient doesn’t really observe anything, as Ailment A is inside and can’t be seen.

The Solution
The PCP clicks a button and shoots “the narrative” to the Specialist with “backstory” in tow, so that simple questions, such as “what are you allergic to,” are ready at hand on the reading machine.

We don’t need to strive for efficiency. We just need to think with a healthy dose of theory, practicality, and humanism, and use the tools we have.

Disagreements?

By Steve :: Posted in Media Space, New Media :: Comments (0)

A New View of hypertext Cadif/Juanita in Tinderbox 502

February 13, 2010 – 9:42 am

Here’s a view of my hypertext fiction Life for Cadif, Life for Juanita, which is being readied for reading across multiple devices, primarily the iPhone:

cadifjuanitasmall.jpg

A larger view

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry :: Comments (1)

Bolaño and the linked text(s)

February 9, 2010 – 5:50 pm

Matthew Hunte via Twitter provides me this interesting examination of Roberto Bolaño oeuvre.

It was brilliant. I couldn’t stop laughing. It was a game but also a joke, a humongous joke. I felt gratified. I was anxious to read more from him. I needed a new hit, so I went to the library and took one of his first books at random, Llamadas telefónicas, a short story collection, and it didn’t suprise me at all when in one of the stories I met Arturo Belano once again. He looked younger but he was exactly the same. He was living at that time in Spain, near Barcelona. He was hiding, writing, and working as a watchman of a tedious camping club in the Costa Brava. He seemed unaware of what was waiting for him.

Thanks, Matt.

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry :: Comments (0)

Multiplatform Publishing

February 2, 2010 – 7:44 pm

This semester (as time for me is broken into semesters) I’ll be working on taking a few documents through a multiplatform publishing work flow. The first objective will be take all the Leon stories from the 100 Days project and make them available on mobile, e-reader, and standard screen.

The core technologies are HTML, XML, CSS3, and javascript, with some dipping into Objective C for experiments with applications. I have mixed feelings about building device-specific apps but working with Xcode is fairly straightforward and the time spent won’t be wasted.

I was a little surprised at the ease with which EPUB handled html documents. Tinderbox, therefore, will play a key role in producing hypertext content. The content will then be tailored for mobile, iPad, web, and other reading devices. The territory looks pretty interesting at the moment.

By Steve :: Posted in General Literature, Hypertext, New Media :: Comments (1)

Clay Shirky on how has the internet changed thinking

January 12, 2010 – 8:22 am

Clay Shirky writes

As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research. And so on.

The beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity, whether academics or politicians, reporters or doctors, will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere.

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

By Steve :: Posted in New Media :: Comments (0)