Scanning a famous Moon map

Birmingham’s landmark building is focus of an exhibition

Moon on your mobile

David Carson’s new book

How to keep it simple

And, for heaven’s sake,
Cormac McCarthy?

Central atrium with services drives interaction.

We are still eliminating Macs…

Time we upgraded – it works.

Not really

Brass corners on your tables to make them last longer

Quotes from construction workers

Contestability games

Free CD from Tasmin Little makes it possible for younger students to hear some of it!

Asymmetrical design

This has to apply to teaching somehow…

Keep them simple!

Food labelling – traffic lights or the full data?

Small Linux based Eee

Time passes

Where do you cut the map?

Not for long though…

The audio recorded legacy

Don Norman has it wrong for adult students

Microsoft foobar

“I find it very liberating to have a format that allows you to store a few years worth of work in a single shoebox.”

I used to be able to carry a couple of years work around on two sides of A4. These days, I need shelves full of lever arch files and [...]

Enrolment is when we advise thousands of people about courses…

Getting organised

Two diverse examples

Just some history

I was amazed to find how many of these I have used

Unusual stability in English weather

Are there patterns to learning in Maths? Are these different in different subjects?

Dialog box in video titling application warns against over used typeface

“After all, most users don’t know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do.”
From Apple Mac Plus vs AMD Dual Core by [...]

The flickr photos were meant to provide a resource for use in blogs, on Web pages, and as PowerPoint backgrounds, they are not meant for paper reproduction especially.

I’ve just been asked via the comments (now back on moderation thanks to those nice people in Romania) about printing onto paper.

As Flickr is a resourced published to [...]

Leave a comment if you read this blog

The bridget theme will return when I have solved an annoying compatibility problem. Until then, I am falling back on the simple and clean White as Milk theme by Azeem Azeez.

Note added Monday 28th Actually, I’m trying out a modified version of John Pozadzides’ Rapid Access theme, which turns out to be broken on MS [...]

David Weinberger’s 49 minutes on his new book, with some questions.

We develop ideas about things through ‘prototypes’ that we refine; a sparrow is perhaps a better example of a bird than a penguin is, but both fit the prototype ‘bird’
Digital objects can be in more than one category, a certain thing could have [...]

Testing the ScribeFire blog tool, a plugin for Firefox. You can post to blog directly from Firefox, and you can upload pictures using the WordPress image upload script.

The HTML produced by the rich text editor is familiar to Firefox and Mozilla users, full of line break tags. At present, there appears to be no [...]

Some free books and a film of Douglas Engelbart using a five button mouse.

Why ‘understanding’ isn’t a good word to use in learning outcomes or criteria, and the problem with Bloom’s taxonomy.

Chill zone

It is after 12 noon in my time zone so it is safe to venture out.

Stephen King’s most important lesson – cut!

We can organise our own peer network, surely?

Fear of colours in modernism?

Some drawings available online

A planetary event that is actually visible in England!

Being a little subtle can pay off, and not just with IT support

Abolishionist documentary not available for download!

Michael Wesch and students producing remarkable stuff

Vasyl Y. Choliy’s replacement for the AA.

List inbound and outbound links by link type

The packaging has longer protection than the sound.

this is not a blog

Sky Map now available for Linux. There is even a .deb package!

There is life in the medium yet…

Download a spreadsheet that will calculate the date and time of the solstices.

Les the cleaner won’t appear unless you watch the trailer

The full title is “How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly“. Stephen Downes explains his system for planning a piece of writing as you write it.

The first batch of 1000 minimal laptops has apparently been delivered. The machine runs on less than 2 watts of power, and the display is visible in sunlight.

UK Journalists no longer have a trade paper. Teachers have the TES, which seems to carry on driven by job adverts.

Josie Fraser has posted about BECTa’s advice to schools and the way that advice may be failing to give open source products a fair chance. John Pugh MP is tabling an early day motion in support of some acceptance of open source software and we were asked to write to our MPs. I have used the ‘write to them’ service to post the following letter to my MP…

Auctioning the fold for charity. These people will write your name on toast, then photograph it and then put the toast and a link to a site you nominate on their page. The rounds of toast are listed in descending order of contribution. All proceeds go to charity. They are auctioning the space above the fold – well neat.

Intellectual property rights may damage innovation and split markets. Lessig explains using the Google Book Search as an example, through the medium of a presentation with sound track.

Cambridge University and the Darwin family have presented all of Darwin’s writings on a Web site. Text is searchable. Superb resource, and perhaps the way forward for history?

Press Gang is a 300,000 word history of national newspapers in the UK from 1945, with a bias towards the London newspapers. Roy Greenslade has written a brick of a book coming in around 300,000 words. The Birmingham Rep is producing Pravda by Howard Brenton and David Hare and we have tickets for this Friday.

Seth has hit it on the nail again: for new students the college has just started… This is going to get printed in 24pt and put on the notice board. It means we can’t make assumptions about what adult students know about the educational process. It also means that I have to explain the learning process. Otherwise they fall back on the last model they had – and that didn’t work too well, otherwise adult students would not be taking level 2 qualifications.

In previous years, we have used a collective blog for journalism students with the tutor acting as editor. Perhaps it is now time to encourage NCTJ students to set up their own blogs on blogger or similar and self-publish (with safeguards for the College).

Download a 34 page handout that describes the various ways in which a teacher in an FE College in the UK might support students using various ICT/ILT/e-learning facilities. This is a draft, and I’m starting with the text and then adding photos, screen grabs and Web addresses later. Some of my colleagues will actually scan a handout like this and read parts that attract their attention.

Orange / Wandadoo / Freedom to Surf worries again

A camera that takes pictures, a laptop that does e-mail and browsing and some Office tasks…

Crowds of people once a year

The cognition and affect project at Birmingham University is researching aspects of AI

...four addresses and at least two online courses for general sale

Learning through play

Creativity and Maths – a hostile witness

Reliable connection to the Internet is all I ask for

Jinpow exhibition with a nice Flash site

How to stop customers paying you more

Hypertext and set theory

Hog Bay software provide a small app that turns your iBook or MacBook into an Alphasmart with built in hand heater

Harry Kroto speaks at Oxford about the Internet and takes part in a radio program about carbon

Mythical Man Month mauls Microsoft

A tale of two wordprocessors

Imagine living in a flat that was 100 square feet in size. Communal toilets and showers I suppose, but what about the cooking? They seem to have flasks but no stoves so perhaps there is a communal kitchen. No sign of ‘a room of one’s own’ here.

Michael Wolf is showing us part of the living [...]

Black rust form mould grows in concentric circles

Current reading: Biography of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana places the performer in a social and historical context.

Is it possible to upload a flash movie through WordPress?

To remove blank lines from a text file in Textwrangler, you have to run search and replace, tick the ‘use Grep’ option and then search on the pattern ^r. Replace with nowt and the effect is magic. A boon to the ‘everything in one big text file’ advocates.

The pattern < /?[^>]> can be used to [...]

Use a special theme to export posts!

According to the BBC News quoting research by doctors in London and Shrewsbury, there may be a link between migraine with aura and a hole in the heart. Their figures (quoted from the BBC article) are as follows…
“The latest study screened 432 migraine with aura patients, and found 24% had a moderate [or] large PFO [...]

Metropolitan Police officers have apparently received ‘guidance’ about blogging that includes the following phrase; “consider the impact of expressing views and opinions that…bring the organisation into disrepute”.

What is, exactly, a blog? Perhaps an online notebook where you list links, tips, ideas, common experience (like the blog you are now reading) or sometimes a place where [...]

I once heard the Beaufort Scale rendered as epic poetry. The reader started in a quiet conversational tone, speaking fairly quickly. As he ascended the scale, the voice grew louder and the pace slowed. The word ‘HURRICANE’ was bellowed at considerable volume.

The table below was copied from a notebook entry made one foul day in [...]

Just storing a draft in a convenient location

A recent post to the Real Climate blog details recent work on satellite images of Greenland showing the volume of ice flow into the sea from the glaciers that surround the coast.

The numbers are large – 220 cubic km of ice per year is currently flowing from the glaciers into the sea. That apparently corresponds [...]

On an overgrown path is an example of a personal blog that a classical music fan updates daily. The blog is produced using Blogger and uses one of the built-in blogger templates – anyone can use these simple tools to publish a blog. The articles provoke thought and the comments are very illuminating and mostly [...]

I have re-arranged the way bodmas.org works, and this wordpress blog is back in the bodmas.org/blog subdirectory. I decided I wanted a static page upfront to allow for a wider range of non-blog content arriving over the summer.

All I have to do now is work out how to customise the 404 error messages incase my [...]

New link to useful resource

Links to ‘rules’ and checklists for writing and revising the writing

“Sometimes I wish there were no such thing as binary code, and that programs were written and sold in source form in the same way magazine articles, short stories, nonfiction books, and novels are sold: by being offered to publishers. Human readability would be as important as machine parsability. Code would be copyrighted, but never [...]

A description of a state

Up to 2.01 and then down to 1.51 in one day…

A Monk and Two Peas

Freeware stats package for Mac OS X, Linux, Windows

Psyllium husk is a source of fibre – personally I’ll stick to the porridge – but the packaging looks sound.

Vincent Cable and George Galloway

All about pencils

Read all about it coursework: a useful list

Expecting nice pictures from freeware astronomy package

Current mapping and arithmetic lead to predictions of colder climate

Multitasking doesn’t work very well

Some projects in Southern Africa aim to reduce the impact of the digital divide

David Edgar re-translates and prunes the German theatre classic: Music and a stark stage, more space for the theologians

Minimal instant on keyboard usable on trains and allows capture of text in meetings and in odd corners of time.

Tinderbox – soon for Windows – is worth the money, deep software

Use a spreadsheet to write each idea in a cell with a heading….

MS PowerPoint can help you plan writing – forces focus on structure

Good old fashioned museum in Oxford has a range of objects

Amateur page on monochrome photography with small 35mm cameras

Teletubbies alive and well and living in Korea

Nicolas Negroponte’s $100 laptop takes a step nearer

Moodle runs OK under Mac OS X apache with MySQL 4.0.2x- just needs graphics library

Gossamer-Threads forum is free to non-profit organisations and has good user management but without bulk upload. Discus Pro costs about 70 but has user creation by spreadsheet.

Mambo works locally under Mac OS X with mySQL 4.o.27

How to remove things from the System Preferences panel in Panther and how to get a LAMP platform working on Mac OS X Panther

Simple iterated map generates a strange attractor that can provide a model for the rings of Saturn

Tanniemola B. Liverpool’s home page with quotes – the book features diaries of 10 scientists

“One key point is that a half of all people under the age of 24 have no friends over 70, and vice versa” – survey on ageism

General information on Saturn’s ring system
BBC News article on the spokes – gravitational effect of a moon

The Cassini probe has allowed astronomers to infer something about the dynamics and structure of the particles that make up Saturn’s rings, and solve a puzzle about the ‘spokes’ seen moving around the rings on a previous flyby.

The ring [...]

Most people born abroad live in the South of England – especially London. New statistical analysis decouples immigration from ethnicity.

This goes for chemical reactions in the brain of a baby being born with a shortage of oxygen. A ‘cooling cap’ slows the build up of damaging chemicals and allows time for remedial action.

The RSPB devised an innovative technique for estimating insect populations – count the splats on the numberplate as you drive in the country. How did the methodology stack up?

Temperature records kept from 1659 to present day allow trends to be identified

Broadband connectivity is shared amongst users – Fair Use policies need to cap bandwidth hogs

Seabird sightings low as breeding and migration patterns change

Amazon deforestation rate has ‘halved’ – so that’s OK then?

Chemical is found to be present in all dead animals… and plants…. linked with cancer…

Tinderbox allows a quick and dirty HTML export template and the construction of a course web site in a very short time

Industrial archaeology in the cyber age? We need to preserve the appearance of the older user interfaces and this site does it well.

Some links on learning theory

Silly picture for the bank holiday with link to Chicago based design company doing magazine layouts on Web pages

Nice clipart GIF of TGIF spelt out in child’s blocks

It was Brian Eno that composed ‘that chime’ – he did 84 separate pieces

Testing the links in the module guide

Strange geometrical pattern found in 1840s building

Left Hand, Right Hand, Chris McManus, Phoenix, 2003, ISBN 0-75381-355-6

Whale watching and statistics

Stafford and Worcester trips

Limit the number of items on a to do list to three. Knock out some quality work. Then go home.

Richard Long is an artist who walks and makes small changes to places as he passes through

Not around for a bit

Becky – the 15 year old school refuser – came out with a tirade against surveillance and CCTV, eyes everywhere. She may have had a point.

A spreadsheet uses simplified low precision formulas to calculate the altitude of the Sun and the Moon for each hour of a given day. Change the latitude to see the effect of moving into the arctic circle. Change the date to see the effect of slipping towards Winter.

Where did Arial come from? The history of a computer font as told by a typographer.

“We live in a world where instant gratification is not fast enough, in a world of not only speed dating, but even of speed yoga, said Mr Honor?.”

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the new Bodmas design is borrowed from Jakob Nielsen’s personal site at http://useit.com/

128 kb/s
13 for 24 hours connection time
I could be using this for heavy downloading
iBook needed the wireless card replacing as well as the combo drive but it is behaving now