I’ve been protesting pennies for a long time by not using them, but how is it we might actually get rid of them? There are so many things like this that should be altered on a Federal level that I have no ability to influence. A short and unfinished list:
The buttons to raise and lower the windows are pretty strange in my car. Notice the 4 of them, spread around the gear shift.
No one can ever find these when they want to put the windows down… and you can’t easily press more than one at once. I don’t even think they look all that pretty in the center console like this. Pah!
A repost from a neat PRI snippet I heard today – using a market and algorithms to create music:
http://www.theworld.org/2012/06/musical-evolution-darwin-tunes/
The premise is neat, but are all of the people listening and voting just the types who like electronic music?? I’m not clear on the sample.
Most people know me as a blatant and outgoing extrovert, and, well, I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes become concerned about the impressions others have of me. I’ve found out the hard way a few times over the past few years just how much age and optimism can affect me professionally.
I love social features on websites such as ‘like’ buttons, but I also know they come with a sort of tax. Sure ad robots will track my every move to sell me widgets, but I’m really not all that worried about that. It’s more that if I post a picture on Facebook or let it be known I read a certain article I generally have to assume professors, students and friends of all levels are likely able to see what I’m doing. Take today – I have an old volleyball injury that comes back to bug my knee from time to time. I went to go find some videos on post-injury knee exercises and found a guy who did a great series. He clearly put a lot of time and effort into these videos, and I want to thank him and help promote him with a like. But, GASP, if I like it others will see. Suddenly it’s clear I’m not doing my dissertation, I’m not being a normal scholar (academics don’t exercise, how dare!) and people might suddenly get worried about my knee health when they ought not to.
Now, I know what you’re all thinking: just don’t be friends with some people, or manage your contacts into privacy groups. Yes, while that works for those of you with just a few close friends it doesn’t suit my personality – I want to remember all the people I meet and I want to be broadly accessible and friendly! I want to keep track of 1300 some people on Facebook but I don’t want to have to manage each one in terms of exposure risk.
What I would enjoy, instead of complicated and time-intensive policy controls, is the ability to like, read, download or promote something anonymously. Yes, take a walk back to the 1990’s internet, but with a twist.
Why this feature is frequently unavailable seems obvious at first – scam robots would love to inflate like counts and marketers can’t make money off of such general data… BUT:
What if it was just on the public-people side? The marketers can still know I’m liking whatever it is, fine. They already have a gagillion tons of data about me. The sysadmins can block spammer scammers by only allowing you to anonymously like something once when logged in (and therefore only once per account). Just make it a drop-down or check box, simple as that. In the user interface experience people would see that some number of others liked whatever their item was, but just not be able to see who for those who chose to like it anonymously. Anyone else with me?
I imagine not, most of you aren’t sold on the part where the marketers get your data. I just figure we’ve already lost that battle. Ahhh well, happy Monday everyone!
I’d like to make a comparison. Lego’s new Friends series, the robot workshop:
And “engineer” Barbie:
Back in 1998 I discovered Word 97’s Symbols font and went totally wild with what I thought could be an excellent secret code. Using font sets as arrays of icons or images is nothing particularly new:
But I’ve discovered some more interesting/innovative uses of fonts lately:
Braille dots - good for a materials printer!
Musical notes - one octave only?
Letter gestures for touch interfaces
For long-form sign-language
Make a picture of a key you type
Most feminists who have played or seen videogames have noticed the frequent lack of diversity in available character body types. Typically characters in games take on super-human forms, for men this means huge muscles and for women this means big boobs and impossibly thin waists. Instead of ragging on about this I thought I’d point out Blizzard’s Diablo 3 has some unusual elements of body diversity:
Here we have a female barbarian, who is quite muscular and without ‘perfect’ hair and…
also here is witch doctor class who is a little overweight, hunched over and is also a person of color. The male monk (not pictured) might also be similar to someone of middle eastern ethnic decent.
Now this is not to say we can’t find some of the typical body forms within their array of characters (the super tall & thin Demon Hunter female, for instance), but I think it’s a small step forward.
I should also point out that the witch doctor stereotype is potentially problematic. I’d argue it furthers the ‘othering’ of non-whiteness, continuing with the racist tradition of relegating people of color to “primitive” archetypes and associations. It’s no coincidence that the female wizard isn’t black or male barbarian isn’t Asian.
So more work ahead of us, but evidence of progress, in my opinion.
One of my favorite sociologists-in-disguise is MovieBob. A while back he released a video that I’ve been using in my classes to point out sexism in videogames as it occurs in the way that female characters are physically posed (a notably different critique than the usual “they all have giant boobs and skinny abs routine” that makes the bros think again):
I absolutely love this kind of intelligent and insightful commentary, though I also appreciate his willingness to reach out to the more thick-skulled males out there.
The other day my dear Dellington found a perfect example of what he’s talking about here. Observe, the sexualized mostly-male Avengers:
Picture borrowed from elephantjournal.com.
I’m working with the CU Community Fab Lab this summer (oooh, I should post on that!) and we’re working on redoing their website to make it a more rich portrayal of the Fab Lab experience and spirit. In other words their current website is overly complex and lacking in pictures. So I’ve been tinkering with Drupal installs lately… and my conclusion is that the wonderboy CMS somehow manages to offer an overwhelming number of options and yet simultaneously lack the most needed information interfaces.
Say you want to setup Drupal, and like most people, want to check out what it could potentially look like before you do. You Google Drupal Themes and find their theme page:
Note the amazing amount of themes available, with a huge amount of documentation available about each… and NO PICTURES. WHAT? I know many people think that having a wealth of text content and metadata is efficient, but I would argue that in this case the most efficient (functional, effective, enjoyable, usable) way to search for website appearance options is with visual displays of data in the form of pictures.
So I thought, “Well, while that makes it very hard to browse through maybe I can see what they look like individually.” TURNS OUT NO:
Most of the themes have thumbnails that don’t actually show they they look like live. Those that do have pictures typically have very small ones.
I am completely baffled at how such a widely-known and well-supported open source project like Drupal could lack such a basic functionality. I ought not complain too much though, I could personally go through and take screen shots of all of the thousand or so themes on a XAMPP install and send them to their web team. Or, they could do the smart thing, which would be to require all theme authors to post a picture of their theme in action. Distributed work FTW. I don’t brandish enough geek-clout to convince them to do this, sadly.
Luckily, WordPress comes to our rescue:
And on the zoom:
Note the ratings, integrated user support, metadata and the at-this-point beautiful preview button.
Next time I’ll have to compare the two for speed, a contest where Drupal wins hands-down.
