Xiao Yisheng has created a handy means to employ Google’s interface to present user-supplied content in an elegant Beta at maplib.net. I tried it out with an old aerial photograph from Nova Scotia, adding a few markers. I anticipate that the app’s features will expand to allow more annotation and maybe even hyperlinks. I also tried it out as a way to annotate a photograph, but I’m not so sure that’s a success. It’s better at flickr:
Category Archives: Uncategorized
links for 2006-11-05
-
quickly find coordinates on Google Maps
-
thanks to the genius of Chirag Mehta
Logfiles and Blogs
I’ve been playing around with the SIMILE Timeline widget some more, this time exploring more than 8 years of my own activities, as recorded in the logfiles I generated as I pinballed around academia as Science Librarian and Allround Busybody. The fine details are surely Baby Hippopotamuses (only their mother could luvvum), but the general phenomenon of heuristic visualization is clear to even the cursory glance: topics wax and wane, and projects overlap. I’ve also included the oook blog archive in the chronology.
Kathy Sierra nails it
and not just for Engineering/Math/Science Education:
I got to this (as I often get to stuff…) via Stephen Downes. The original Typepad posting is really worth a look for more detail.
Squirmist
I have the faint hope of being the FIRST to blog this puissant word, which may or may not have been coined by Anthony Lane in his review of Borat and Volver in this week’s New Yorker. Lane’s use of the term comes close to being its instantiation (on the evidence of Google, which points to two other uses, one an obvious misspelling of ‘squirmiest’), but I digress… The money quote:
He [Sacha Baron Cohen] is a squirmist: a master of SECS, or Socio-Ethnophobic Comic Simulations, in which he adopts fictional personae and then marches briskly into the real world with a mission to embarrass its inhabitants. (New Yorker November 6, pg. 106)
It’s an illuminating, even scintillating review of both movies and (more important) of the sociocultural stuff that underlies them. Catch this bit of lambent skewerage:
So why send his characters here? Because America, to any filmmaker, is where the money is, but also because, to the connoisseur of hurt pride, it is where the sore spots are. (pg. 109)
Didja miss Ali G [Sacha Baron Cohen] does Chomsky?
WhereWhen timeline
Several hours of messing around with XML and examples from David Huynh’s Timeline has produced a fairly basic personal chronology, to which I may eventually add more items, links, images. See dinosaurs and External Uses (2/3 of the way down that page) for some varied examples of features and general utility, especially the Itinerary of King John (not a Good Man, as we recall…)
links for 2006-11-02
-
brainchild of David Huynh http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/
links for 2006-11-01
-
“Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.”
links for 2006-10-31
Will this work?
The World Changing blog has a scheme (Help us Hack the Publishing System) to raise the profile of their new book Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century [by Alex Steffen, Al Gore (Foreword), Bruce Sterling (Introduction)], involving a mob purchase at Amazon at 11:11 (PST) on 1 November. I was havering about purchase myself, but this plot brings me to the brink. $22.50 to stick it to …erm… the publishing world? Probably worth it for the warm fuzzy feeling, and who knows? Maybe the blurb is right:
Worldchanging is poised to be the Whole Earth Catalog for this millennium. Written by leading new thinkers who believe that the means for building a better future lie all around us, Worldchanging is packed with the information, resources, reviews, and ideas that give readers the tools they need to make a difference…