Typepad's editor now supports markdown as a text input system. This is a markup language that is more expressive than plain text, and easier to type than html.

The minimum to learn to use it is bold goes in asterisks.

When I get to a real computer I will link to the reference docs.

via the SI weekly list:

National Press Club Forum:
"The First Amendment, Freedom of the Press and the Future of Journalism"
7:30 PM
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
1000 Beal Ave.

The National Press Club, the world's leading professional organization for journalists, is teaming up with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library to look at where the news business is going and how to protect its core values. Panelists will be Jonathan Wolman, editor and publisher of the "Detroit News"; Omari Gardner, news editor/digital media at the "Detroit Free Press"; Marla Drutz, vice president and general manager, WDIV-TV, Detroit; and Vincent Duffy, news director, Michigan Public Radio. Gil Klein, a veteran national correspondent, former National Press Club president, and director of the club's Centennial Forums program, will moderate. Library Director Elaine Didier commented that "President Ford had such a wonderful history with the National Press Club, it seemed only fitting that we would host the forum in Ann Arbor at his Presidential Library." The event will begin with a preview of the club's centennial documentary, "The National Press Club: A Century of Headlines," which follows the history of American journalism through the lens of one of its leading institutions. Everyone who attends this free forum will get a copy of the documentary. The preview will be followed by a short presentation by Richard Ryan, a longtime "Detroit News" Washington correspondent and past club president, about the relationship between Ford and the news media. This forum is part of a nationwide conversation the National Press Club is holding during its 100th anniversary to look at where the news business is going and what news consumers should be demanding. The NPC Centennial Forums program is sponsored by Aviva USA. For information, call (734) 205-0567.

Ami Arnault reminds me of the Futurtech conference happening this week at the U of Michigan - December 5, 2008 at the Michigan Union.  A bio of the afternoon keynote speaker:

Here's the schedule of panels:

It's winter, your hands see cold so you are wearing gloves, but you need at least a few fingers free for your mobile phone. What designs work? The gloves I am wearing now have a flap to expose a sort of fingerless Mitten, and if I fold things right I can expose just two index fingers. I could imagine thumbs free gloves too.

I'm writing this from my mobile phone, using typepad mobile to post with. As a blog post interface it works pretty well.

There is one key piece that is missing to make it more helpful: a search function. I don't see a way to easily search through my past posts from the phone to go back and update and edit one of them. It is easy to get to the last 5 posts but the next option is to list all 1900 entries, no thanks.

As a small corollary to that, I don't see an easy way to add a comment to a post either; in some cases a comment is better that an edit.

Look for more posts from the bus.

NOTES afterward:

The default edit mode is HTML, which explains why the first iteration of this post didn't have paragraph breaks. Fixed in post-production.

The application I actually used was the web-based iPhone Typepad interface, which works fine on the Blackberry. There is a Blackberry native interface which I haven't tried yet.

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

From the Ann Arbor City Charter and Ordinances, published 1908

books.google.com/books?id=00k4AAAAMAAJ

Ann Arbor has many, many years to develop a superior breed of squirrels.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/video/031507/milk.html

Ever wondered how to milk a spider? In this video, Dr. Greta Binford, a researcher at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, extracts venom from a sleeping spider's fangs.

http://www.kgw.com/news/specialreports/stories//kgw_042707_special_news_spider_woman.146f5fbf.html

Greta Binford, however, has slightly less cooperative subjects. Binford collects venom from the world's most dangerous spiders.

Binford jokes she has "the dream job of most 8-year-old boys. I sit and watch spiders catch bugs."

She specializes in the brown recluse spider and its 100 relatives. Currently, her lab at Lewis & Clark College houses 600 spiders collected in the U.S., Africa, Peru and elsewhere. 

Venomix, Inc.
www.venomix.net
Other Lifescience
Novel insecticide development based upon spider venom peptides - Venomix, Inc. is a high growth company with an extensive core technology platform that allows the rapid development of innovative agbio insecticide products that address significant and currently unmet market and regulatory needs.

Ten of us met for lunch at Kai Garden on Friday, Nov 21 to help plan Arbcamp, which is coming up the evening of December 18, 2008 in Ann Arbor.  I had the Mongolian beef and egg drop soup; Dug ordered a round of scallion pancakes.

Here's a summary (or not).

Dug Song summed up the discussion at the end including:

Schedule: how the event will be structured, how much time we have, how many parallel tracks can happen, how to accomodate both short "lightning" style talks and longer sessions, how to wrap up at the end.  Conflicts and issues with UM end of term and students leaving town.

Resources: space, projectors, white boards, sticky notes, flip charts, markers, and other kinds of writing materials; name badges; food, a venue for an afterparty, give aways, etc.

Sponsorship: event budget, who is the fiduciary (if any), what actually costs money to get done, what kind of money would help, how to acknowledge non-money sponsors, etc.

Public relations: continuity with previous Arbcamp event, getting the word out among personal networks, media relations, blog relations, mailing lists for outreach, connections outside the immediate area.

Contingency planning; with 40 registered attendees already for an event in a venue that houses 100, what are reasonable ways to deal with the case where more people want to come than there's space for them?

Goals, explicit and implicit: number of attendees, whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, looking ahead to future events (an a2b3 conference, a publishing focused event, another arbcamp, Library Camp, Ignite!, etc), community organizing.

Who was there, clockwise:

Dug Song - founder of a2geeks, vp engineering at Zattoo
Jonathan Duty - SW engineer, Zattoo
Marshall Weir - UM student, intern at Zattoo
Matt Pizzimenti - Coffee House Coders
Zach Steindler - Coffee House Coders
Edward Vielmetti - "I organize lunch", a2b3, organizer of first Library Camp
Jonathan Cohen - research scientist, NVIDIA; computer graphics Academy Award winner
Kevin Dangoor - python developer
Mark Ramm - python developer

Other resources mentioned w/links to Arborwiki or direct as appropriate:

Zattoo
Mark Maynard interview of Dug Song
Hathaway's Hideaway
Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation
a2geeks
Coffee House Coders
a2b3
Library Camp

Next planning lunch in two weeks: Friday, December 5, 2008, Kai Garden.

You're at a meeting, somewhere, and you want to quietly and unobtrusively take meeting notes or some other record of the meeting while it's happening, and you have a mobile phone but nothing else.

What tool or application do you use?

Mobile twitter.  Twitter your short notes out to the world, or use a direct message to some bot of some kind that collects and gathers the notes for you.   Twitter's mobile interface is fast, simple, and reasonably complete.  Down side: no easy way to look up something about the person who just introduced themselves.

Mobile Facebook.  Write on the wall of people (or your own wall) as notes come up, and then somehow reconstruct it afterwards.  The people search tool is very handy for looking folks up on the fly, and you can send someone a followup about some question while you're still at the event.  Down side: Slow enough that if people are moving fast you don't keep up.

Mobile wiki (Socialtext Miki).  Keep notes on a scratch pad on a wiki that you edit on your mobile device. A perfectly good text input box and it makes refining your notes into something longer very easy (and you can go back and figure out more about what you missed).    Down side: no lookup on the fly, so if you fumble someone's name you can't look it up.

Other mobile contact network and social network managers - both Plaxo and LinkedIn have mobile versions, and I haven't tried to figure out how to use those while standing up and listening to be a bit more informed.

Notable here is that there isn't a single Google mobile tool in the arsenal.  The Blackberry native mail client is better than the Google Mail java client, and almost anyone can have a text box open, but if there's a mobile Orkut then my world of people doesn't use it.

If I had two hands free to do this I probably would have used delicious as a part of the process - I've gone to a bunch of lecture or seminar type events where my pattern is to google what the speaker says and delicious the results, and if the net is fast enough where that is you can almost do that in close enough to real time to keep up.   But that's too much and too rude to do in anything other than a lecture situation.

Paper has some tremendous uses here - one recent event I went to I used some of Dave Gray's visual thinking skills that he's taught and put into his new book and did things like sketch what the speakers were wearing in addition to taking notes on what they were saying.   I have a much clearer visual memory of that event, but I don't remember anyone's names.

A work in process to be sure.  There were 11 tables full of people, and I got almost everyone's names, and didn't quite catch everything I hoped to catch; thanks everyone for lunch.  The conclusion of the question at the table - would you buy a car from a bankrupt auto company? - is that most people would be worried about service and availability of maintenance and parts, and that a Cuban mechanic would be someone to keep in your rolodex, and that if the worst happens at least we can look forward to an expanded orphan car show in Ypsi.

Once upon a time a long time ago I used The Brain, an innovative and distinctive mind and idea mapping tool.  I hit a wall at some point in my use of it, switched my desktop to a platform that it didn't support, and unfocused from it.

There's now a copy of The Brain for the Mac, and I pulled it down this afternoon to help someone work on a presentation where they need to make sense of a whole semester's worth of interconnected ideas.  We'll see how it goes - I'm looking forward to using it for exploratory work again.

Achieving Extraordinary Organizational Performance Through Diversity
Professor Scott Page, University of Michigan
Friday, November 21, 1-2:15 p.m.
Founders Room, Alumni Center
200 Fletcher

Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? How does diversity improve an organization's predictions, decisions, and problem-solving capabilities? Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, Scott Page discusses why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory, and why diversity trumps ability. Come and learn why progress depends as much on our collective differences as it does on our individual IQ scores! No registration required for this public lecture.

For more information about Professor Scott Page, see http://www.leighbureau.com/speakers/spage/page.pdf (PDF).

The Difference:
How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
Scott E. Page

Cloth | 2007 | $27.95 / £16.95
448 pp. | 6 x 9 | 49 line illus. 66 tables.

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents
Prologue [HTML] or [PDF]
A Q&A with author Scott E. Page

This is part of the Wiki Wednesday and coincidentally also part of the Web Analytics Wednesday series.

UPDATE: changed throughout, some spots still not filled in, I am promising some graphs; want to work in the RichmondWiki blog notes as well.

UPDATE2: analytics for wiki edit failure

Google Analytics has a bunch of new features.  Mediawiki, the code that runs Arborwiki, has Google Analytics installed and is tracking user behavior to help improve the quality and relevance of the content that's there.  Here's some applications of the new features.

1.  Segmentation by geography.

Arborwiki covers information about Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and the surrounding Washtenaw County area.  One reasonable segmentation of the readership and contributor base is to see how people from inside the area behave compared to people from outside the area.

...

(graph)

We'll break down usage for specific pages and see how they differ.  First, look at traffic coming from Wikipedia - how does it compare to everything else?

(graph)

Next, look at the most popular page, the "birthday deals" page, who is seeing that?

(graph)

A further refinement will look at how much birthday deal traffic is coming from surrounding suburbs, e.g. Oakland County. 

2.   Conversion tracking: who edits a page.

We have set up the idea that a page edit is a success criterion and a conversion goal.  More page edits, the better.  Please contribute.

There are at least two end states: a page is edited that didn't exist before, or a person edits a page (because they linked to something that wasn't there) and it was abandoned.  That's a failure condition and a sign that the wiki is incomplete in that specific area.  So we set up reports to look for pages where people are editing the page but it shows up as the exit page, which implies that someone left the page in mid-edit

The method:

• segment by page includes "action=edit"
• top content report (or perhaps
• show "exit rate"
• the higher the exit rate for edits, the more people bailed out; look to improve anything that's red?

(graph)

(report)

3.  ...

...

(quote from Avinash)
(quote from ...)

...

You can overthink a civic wiki; until there's a critical mass of content, report generation is not that much good.  So don't stare at your metrics until you have some idea that there's enough there to work from - a map of the holiday light shows (Richmond Wiki), the great places to go for a birthday dinner (Arborwiki), [your favorite civic wiki's favorite page].

----

More on this topic:

Web Analytics Wednesday meets worldwide: ...
Wiki Wednesday meets worldwide ...
Other civic wikis: RichmondWiki

I'm hoping that a project shows up that lets me do this, more or less, as documented in the readme file for the postcard project I've started:

postcard
 
this is a project to create postcards for mailing.
 
mostly this is a wishlist kind of thing, but as a stake
in the ground here's something like a structure for it.
 
the main application is the command line app:
 
postcard -to mom -photo cute-kids.jpg -message "they get so big so fast! love ed"
 
which should generate a job at some print service to
send a postcard in the mail with that text on it to
that address.
 
which suggests several helper/helpful requirements:
 
address/
 
tools for address management, manipulation, databases etc
 
image/
 
tools for managing and maintaining photographs and other art
 
text/
 
tools for turning text into lovely text for the text side of
the screen
 
printer/
 
the printer side of this world, including job queuing and other
outsourced printing options

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

a2geeks.org/display/geek/ArbCamp+08

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

Photo credit: Justin Fox, Tripdavon www.tripdavon.com Used with permission.

Taken from the top of Ladera Lane.

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

Jason Fox, Seattle WA, sent me this photo:

My brother is a musician and lives less than 2 miles south of the fire , he has lost power here is a picture he just took beforehand , feel free to post it on your blog, or to fwd it to news agencies , his name is Justin Fox, of the band Tripdavon.

www.tripdavon.com/

Much more about the fire here

vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/11/santa-barbara-and-mo...

with photos, maps, news links, radio, television, newspaper, and blog coverage

(Special topic seminar) Psych 808-007  Winter 2009

Instructor: Prof. Nick Ellis (ncellis@umich.edu <mailto:ncellis@umich.edu>)

Offices English Language Institute, Rm 1011, 500 E. Washington Street.

Times: 10:00-11:30 TuTh          
We consider Language as a Complex Adaptive System. Recent research across a variety of disciplines in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use determine how language is acquired, is structured, is processed, and changes over time. However, there is mounting evidence that processes of language acquisition, use and change are not independent from one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system. A conference on this theme at UMich in November 2008 brought together international scholars active in their recognition of complexity in their respective areas, ranging from language usage, structure, and change, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, anthropology, language evolution, complex systems, first language acquisition, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language processing, language education, individual differences, and language testing. For details see http://elicorpora.info/LLC.

Each week as a class we (i) view the podcast recording of their presentation, (ii) read their associated journal article, and (iii) discuss this theme.

This course crosses different branches of psychology, linguistics, education, complex systems, and cognitive science, and we welcome students of these and related perspectives.

Students will be expected to read and participate in the discussion of all topics, write a term paper on one of these topics discussed with the instructor (either a literature review or a research proposal with some pilot work), and present the work from their term paper at the end of the course.

Readings and resources:

Podcast recordings of the presentations (see http://elicorpora.info/LLC/schedule) <http://elicorpora.info/LLC/schedule%29>, electronically distributed papers being finalized for a Language Learning special issue on this theme.

Nick Ellis
Professor of Psychology
Research Scientist, English Language Institute
University of Michigan
Rm. 1011, 500 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor
MI 48104-2028
USA

e-mail: ncellis@umich.edu <mailto:ncellis@umich.edu>
home:   Ellis
work 734-647-0454
work fax 734-763-0369

Marquette, MI – Matt Johnson, director of the Governor’s Office for the Upper Peninsula, has resigned from his post and now works for Rio Tinto, the parent company of Kennecott Minerals. The company has an office in Ishpeming, MI, and is seeking to develop a nickel-copper mine on the Yellow Dog Plains, in addition to other mineral projects in the area.

To sleep, perchance to dream.
Aye, there's the rub. - Hamlet

what does he mean by that? simply that when you're ready to sleep, you rub your eyes.

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

He's been just enough under the weather not to go to preschool, but not under the weather enough to stay in bed, so we had some good cafe time together.