Know your knowns

As I am on holidays, I'm catching up with the long list of 'things I've been meaning to blog about forever'. Today: Donald Rumsfeld.

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

- Donald Rumsfeld, 12 February 2002.

I hate to find myself defending the man, but this makes total sense - and it is a very powerful tool for knowledge management.

Let''s break this down. There are only two variables:

• Known
• Unknown

These two variables can be combined in only four ways:

• Known Known
• Known Unknown

• Unknown Known
• Unknown Unknown

Consider the potential applications as they relate to the knowledge held by a single person about "Bronywn's birthday"

• Known known
  "It's Bronwyn's birthday tomorrow"

• Known unknown
  "When is Bronwyn's birthday again?"

• Unknown known
  "Crap! I forgot Bronwyn's birthday!"

• Unknown unknown
  Bronwyn is actually a cylon, and therefore does not have a birthday.

...that's one person, but the same can apply to an organisation where knowledge is distributed across multiple brains - such as, for example, James Bond's nemesis organisation SPECTRE:

• Known known
  (Everyone in the organisation knows what's going on)
  "Tomorrow we will hold the UN to ransom with our incredible Death Ray."

• Known unknown
  (One+ person doesn't known something, but they know that someone else does know)
  "I can't find the keys to the Death Ray. Who has the keys? Come on, one of you guys has the keys..."

• Unknown known
  (One person knows something, another person doesn't, but they don't know there's a disconnect)
  "The infra-dinfra-super-destructo setting isn't working, why isn't it working? Is it broken? I think it's broken." (It's not broken, the lead engineer turned it off on purpose because it was badly implemented and likely to explode/destroy the entire Headquarters.)

• Unknown unknown
  Henchman #5 is actually James Bond. He has stolen the keys, invisibly set the infra-dinfra-super-desctructo setting to blow up in five minutes time, and is currently riding to freedom on the back of a robot dolphin.

Copyright in higher education is annoying

I'm going to go on ahead and pirate my own comments from Nicolas Steenhout's blog. I should point out here, however, that his post is better than mine - read it at http://accessibility.net.nz/blog/copyright-universities-course-content/

***************************************

It seems to me that there's actually a schism at the heart of copyright in HE lecture content. It goes like this:

1. The point of lectures is to communicate information to a large group of people

2. The thing that lecturers want least is to communicate information to a large group of people

The difference between the two is what constitutes the 'group' - in 1, it's students, in 2, it's everybody. The only truly efficient (current) mechanism for identifying students is 'people who are physically in the room when I talk', which is basically not good enough because it doesn't accommodate the bits of the lecture that aren't talking - handouts, slides, reading lists.

When it comes to the handouts/slides/reading lists, there's no group identification mechanism, so the lecturer relies on making accessing the content really, really annoying. Physically picking up printed copies of notes at the door of the lecture theatre, for example.

Making access annoying is exactly the opposite of making access accessible.

This is not a surface level problem - it's in the roots. I'm not at all sure what can be done to fix it, but if it does get fixed, it will have to be in the roots too.

***************************************

I wrote this about accessibility, but following a quiet mull, I don't think this is an accessibility problem - or rather, I don't think it's *only* an accessibility problem. The VLE was supposed to sort the access-for-students-only problem out, but it hasn't - VLEs are still barely useable environments that most lecturers don't like or - worse - understand.

That's not good. That's bad.

Very, very tentatively, could I maybe suggest that maybe, just maybe, HE should just loosen up a little about IP?

Irritant

You know when you're looking for something, or you just found something you were looking for, someone always says 'it's always in the last place you look'?

That's because once you've found what you're looking for, you stop looking.

Let's all never use that phrase again, shall we?

coda: I should point out that 30 hour journeys with 11 hour time differences make me irritable. Apologies.

Memexer by request

Unbelievably, today I have had *two* people actually ask me to blog about stuff I've said on twitter. This is akin to saying 'that's very interesting' to a lawyer - you shouldn't do it, because they WILL TELL YOU MORE. And nobody wants that.

With that in mind...

The question of job titles for knowledge workers came up today. Everyone in (or near) the field know that this is sticky territory. The titles themselves are often meaningless, or so industry-specific/ambiguous you can't say what you do at a dinner party without sounding ridiculous. The language, sub-sets, actual fields of practice, they're all very amorphous both within and outside the knowledge worker community - about the only widely recognised job title in the bunch is 'librarian', and there aren't that many of them. It's useful in some ways, but there is enough ambiguity that charlatans (hello, 'social media experts') can creep into the system without raising any red flags. What is it, exactly, that we do? What is it called? What's the difference between my job and your job?

An analogy: Chronic fatigue syndrome.

There's definitely something going on with CFS. There are really real people who have terrible symptoms of constant fatigue ('syndrome' being 'a collection of symptoms'), who have been told by their Doctors that they have CFS. The thing the doctors call CFS can be life destroying.

...and then there are these other people who say they have CFS, some of whom have been diagnosed by doctors, others not so much, who are basically fine.

Here's my little point - no-one knows what CFS actually is.

Here's my big point - no-one knows how many things CFS actually is.

CFS is currently used as a blanket term for what is emerging as a whole spectrum of disorders. We have to use it as a definition, because there's no other more meaningful set of definitions available.

Talking about CFS under the current definition is like talking about 'headache', and assuming that 'headache' is a sufficiently good term to cover 'headache', 'migraine', 'hangover', 'brain cancer', and 'stroke'. But it isn't, which is why we have the terms 'headache', 'migraine', 'hangover', 'brain cancer', and 'stroke'. (Yes I know most brain cancers and strokes don't hurt, that's part of my point. Did you know there are no pain-receptor nerves in the brain? Surgery for Parkinsons is done under a local. Amazing. I digress.)

Here's what the NHS has to say about CFS:

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) causes long-term tiredness (fatigue) that affects everyday life. It does not go away with sleep or rest.

CFS is also known as ME, which stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis. Myalgia means muscle pain and encephalomyelitis means inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. Both terms are commonly used.

There is no cure for CFS, so treatment tends to focus on easing the symptoms. These include muscle pain and headaches.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome/pages/introduction.aspx

Ambiguous, no?

That stretches from 'I get tired more and faster than other people' to 'I'm lazy but I'm down with blaming that on something other than myself' to 'I can't get out of my bed' (follow @stroopwaffle for someone facing this circumstance with dignity).

Clearly these people have different things going on. Clearly, some of them are suffering terribly, some a little, and some are self-deluding.But they all carry the same name. They all have - or say they have - CFS.

That means there's something wrong with the term 'CFS'.

But as of right now, the term CFS (along with it's sister-diagnosis ME) is still the best we have. And until something better comes along, it's still useful. For describing true sufferers, it's better than 'lazy', 'tired all the time', and 'sick', which are the only other options on the table.

We're finding out more about the conditions currently aggregated as CFS all the time - and the more we find out, the more it will get broken into useable, recognisable, identifiable chunks, things sufferers, doctors, and the public can understand and communicate with each other about. The better the definitions, the easier it will be to explain (not cure, unfortunately) and the less wiggle-room will be available for the charlatans.

The same goes for job titles when you're a knowledge worker. There's only one real difference: we don't have doctors. Doctors are experts in their field. We're the experts in our field. We're the doctors.

Knowledge work is not well-defined yet, and it's facets haven't been teased out. But if anyone is going to define us, if anyone is going to identify and communicate the different things that we are, it's probably going to be us.

Found it!

So I am, boringly, obsessed by search.

Not in an existential, meaning-of-life type of way, just finding stuff. On the internet. How it's organised, how the algorithms work, what filters are available and are they the right ones. That kind of thing.

The thing is, there was this movie. The premise of the movie is as follows: the electricity stops working. All of it. The tv, the radio, the cash machines, the cash registers. Phones. Boilers. Torches. Everything.

I saw it - most of it- as an undergrad, but I went to bed before the end.

Bad decision.

Ever since, I have wondered how that movie ended. And since then (I was an undergrad 1999 - 2002, including honours), search technology has gotten better and better. It's hard to think back that far - yahoo! may well have been the search leader at the time, I don't know. I've decided not to look it up, mostly to prove a point, though I'm not yet sure which point.

All I know about the movie is the premise, and something about a kid with an earache. No actors. No title. No idea when it was made.

I have literally (that's the literal definition of literally, by the way) been avoiding searching for this movie for years. Basically out of fear. Not the fear that I won't find the movie, more the fear that I can't find the movie. That either my search skills, or the search mechanisms, will be deficient. That, having started to look, I'll get sucked into a horrible vortex of either a) failing and giving up or b) (more likely) becoming obsessed and losing hours of my otherwise productive time to a fruitless enterprise of scooting around the internet, finding search mechanisms and typing variants on 'that one movie where the electricity stopped working and the kid got an earache and I think there was a gun'.

So tonight I finally tried to find it.

It took seven minutes.

I got there - unexpectedly - by searching 'electricity' on www.findanymovie.com, and clicking through to (only!) the second page. Then I checked the checked the potential title-match against www.imdb.com. (The search functionality on imdb is awful, by the way, although the summaries are good once you've found what you want.)

The movie is called "the Trigger effect". I have no idea if I recommend it or not.

But now that I've found it, I'm going to find out.

Very niche hilarity

The wonderful Pat Lockley of the University of Nottingham (that's @patlockley, tweeps) made this extraordinary video about 'the Plight of Metadata':

http://vimeo.com/16908120

It's twenty minutes worth of pure gold, with a caveat - it's only funny if you know about standards-based metadata.

That's quite a niche. Personally, I made my colleagues fear for my mental health by watching this at work - I couldn't stop laughing.

I love the video, but on the broader scale, I love that the Miracle of the Internet can actually make it viable to create a film like this. Before the internet, I doubt this video would ever have been made, because there was no way to distribute it to the (admittedly small) number of people who would actually enjoy it and benefit from it.

Then again, before the internet there would be no need for the Dublin Core metadata profile either - so there you go.

Absolutely not.

RIGHT.

You. You know who you are. Yes, you.

Professional contact is making you feel uncomfortable? You can't quite put your finger on it, but it all seems a bit... off? Overly personal questions? Funny suggestions? Is it maybe just you, you're reading it all wrong?

I have heard this story too many times and I'm sick of it.

The answer is no.

Here is how these men work. It is not complicated. They knock you off guard, but just by a bit. Nothing that could be pegged down, nothing specifically identifiable. The goal is to confuse you, and, success, you're confused.

And when you're confused, you look for whatever social indicators are available to work out if this is/is not OK.

And, if you're like 98% of all the ladies in all the world, the first social indicators you will check will be from him. Do not do this. Do not allow the terms to be set by this man.

If you read the email twice to see if you were just being silly, he wins.

If you re-read your email to him twice, to check if there's anything in it that could give the wrong impression, he wins.

If any part of your brainspace is populated with worrying about the situation and you can't stop it, he wins.

These men are not good men. Do not follow terms set by these men.

These men are better at this than you think. Do not use subtle social indicators, they can twist them better than you can. And then they're setting the terms again. That's the goal. However it's framed, the goal of these men is to get power. Power over what happens in your head. If you try to get rid of him subtly, it won't work. And he'll twist it and twist it and then he's deeper than he was before.

He's not playing by fair social rules. Those who don't play by fair rules always have the upper hand over those who do.

So, you must tell the man to stop.

And when you do, he will act baffled, and hurt, and this will make you feel terrible, which is what it's supposed to do. He's hoping it will make you feel bad enough that you back down - at which point, he gets to start again, but with deeper hooks this time.

In the nicest possible way,

and with all the grace you can muster,

tell him to fuck off.

Academic journals vs. public good vs. money

Fizzing. Fizzing with ideas!

I'm just back from an excellent Arcadia seminar on "Re-engineering the scholarly journal", by Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science.

If you haven't seen PLoS, check it out, it's awesome. Just look at what they've done with their metadata - look at it! Lovely. https://www.plos.org/

Short version - PLoS is (among other things) an open access academic journal repository for science. That means two things:

1. The content is free

2. You can do whatever you like with the content, as long as you attribute it.

Now I have many things to say about open access academic content (nutshell: I think it's great). But I'm going to talk about business models. Something I don't like about journal publishing is the trajectory of cash.

There are Four players:

• Funding body
• Researcher
• Publisher
• Reader

The sequence goes like this:

1. Funding body given funding usually/often out of public funds (see also: the drug industry)
2. Grant request submitted by researcher
3. Grant request approved by funding body
4. Money handed over by funding body
5. Research done
6. Research submitted for publication to publisher
7. Publisher accepts for peer review
8. Peer review
9. Publisher publishes
10. Library (usually university affiliated) pays for subscription to content
11. Reader with library membership accesses content

OR (for the last two steps)

10. Reader pays for one-off access

11. Reader accesses content

Now this does my head in because of where the money changes hands. We start with public money (or, often enough that it counts), but we end with something that is not accessible to the public. Including the author!

The public can't use what they paid to create? That can't be right.

PLoS isn't like that, because PLoS doesn't charge for content. In PLoS, the public *can* use what they paid to create. But PLoS isn't a money sponge, it pays for itself - they're in 'surplus' (that's not-for-profit speak for 'profit') right now. How?

No really, how? How do you get in profit from not charging for content?

Well, they do it like this.

Consider those four players, in chronological reverse order this time:

• Reader
• Publisher
• Researcher
• Funding body

...now, who of these players have the most to gain from a single, individual piece of research hitting eyeballs? Who is the most fussed?

• Reader: Seriously not fussed, just wants good content
• Publisher: Semi-fussed, but only really cares about the aggregated eyeballs, not the individual articles
• Researcher: Moderately fussed, but is probably more fussed about the name of the journal (a rant for another day - this is not a sufficient value metric)
• Funding body: Pretty damn fussed.

Why is the funding body pretty damn fussed? Because the point of funding research is to have people read it. Without readers, the funding money is wasted. Results that are poorly disseminated may as well not exist.

What PLoS does is, they charge in accordance with fussedness. They charge the funding body.

Funding bodies pay for content to be published in PLoS. The cash-burden is thus neatly transferred from the end-user to the initiator. I'm not sure what it costs, but I do know that the funding bodies fork out. That means that the publisher can still generate a surplus/profit for their entirely necessary (and damn difficult) value-adding process of filtering, reviewing, aggregating, disseminating, and archiving, while the end-user can access what they did, after all, pay for, thereby increasing the sum total of knowledge in the universe.

What a great idea. Well done, PLoS. May you have many imitators.

JISC transcoder

If you don't deal with SCORM, this post is not for you.

If you DO deal with SCORM, and you deal with packages that have to be deployed in multiple VLEs, today is your lucky day! Behold - the JISC transcoder!

Does what it says on the tin. It will convert your SCORM objects (including 1.2) to SCORM 2004, Common Cartridge 1.0, and IMS CP 1.1.4.

To the best of my knowledge, it's the only thing on the market like it - but it's not actually on the market, because it's free.

Enjoy!

Information and truth and information and truth

I'm not going to give you his name.

My husband and I were having lunch with a friend on the weekend, and the topic turned to business. My husband works in International law, and so does our friend, but at the sharp end. Specifically, our friend prosecutes war crimes.

'Before we go on,' he says, 'there's something I should probably tell you. I'm currently the subject of a criminal investigation.'

And the crime, as it turned out, was torture.

Now strange things happen in the world, and I'm cautious of any statement that reads 'I know X and he would never' (I've seen at least three stalkers - who really were stalkers - defended that way). But frankly, the odds against this being true would give the infinite improbability drive a run for it's money. The idea that some particularly knuckle-headed defendants tried a last-ditch move to get off the charges against them, on the other hand, is running at 1:1.0000000001 odds on the being-true front. But still.

If you google my friend, you'll find an article in a reputable UK newspaper with his name and the charges. I'm not linking to it, because no way am I going to push it up the google ranks. But it's turned me to thinking about the social impacts of truth.

True statement:

Friend has been accused of torture.

Totally legitimate newsworthiness:

High.

Highly-unlikely-to-be-true statement:

Friend committed the crime of torture.

Totally legitimate newsworthiness:

Absolutely none.

That's not a 'oh shame on you media' statement, it's a point of necessity: Probability statements aren't news, nor should they be (apart from op ed blarney). 'Bad accusation made against good dude who almost certainly did no such thing' is not legitimate news, because there's no fact content in it. 'He probably didn't' is not reportable, and if it was, a lot more bad people would get away with a lot more bad things.

And yet, and yet, and yet... there's also social truth. And longevity. Especially longevity.

Flash forward to the hasn't-happened-yet end of the criminal proceedings:

True statement:

Friend has been cleared of torture accusations.

True statement:

Friend did not commit torture.

Totally legitimate newsworthiness:

Middling.

Middling because nothing really happened. An allegation was disproved. That means the basic system of the world didn't *actually* change - a falsehood came up and was knocked down. Nothing actually new about the world was revealed, just a slight blip in the great long list of Things People Have Said - a list that does not have a 1:1 correlation with Things That Happened.

Again, this is not an 'I blame the media' statement - it's just that 'someone didn't do something' is, in most circumstances, far less interesting/useful knowledge than 'someone might have done something'.

(Some of you will know that I've done my time with journos, and I don't actually like the news media very much at all. So I am trying Extra Hard to be Totally Objective here.)

Flash forward two (hypothetical) years, and let's imagine two (I'm being optimistic here, there may be more) articles in reputable newspapers about this case exist online.

One contains time-sensitive true statement 1: 'X is accused of torture.'

The other contains non-time-sensitive true statement 2: 'X has been acquitted of torture.'

...Which of these will have the higher google ranking?

Which will more people see?

Given that both are true, which will the most people know to be true?

And of those that see only the first, how many will interpret 'accused of' as 'did'?

I don't have answers to this, and never in a million years would I say the first article should be taken down. I just worry about my friend, that a malicious move by bad people could follow him around for the rest of his life because the technology for 'true' doesn't meet the world's real requirements for 'true'.

But then again, he's seen worse.

Cheap wins

(As inspired by Plain English for corporate intranet content by @Luke_Oatham, and Technical communication and inclusion by @kmdk)

Pop quiz! What's the difference between these two statements:

1. For information about fish, click here

2. Click here for information about fish

Answer: If you're blind/vision impaired and using a screen reader (which reads the page aloud), and you opt for the handy/commonly used 'read me all the links on this page, please' option, they respectively read like this:

1. click here

2. information about fish

...out of those two, option one doesn't mean anything and option two does. That has to be about the simplest way to improve accessibility ever. (And it sounds better, too.)

e-learning and e-learning standards

I've finally done an annotated version of my Technical Communications UK conference presentation - and here it is:

e-learning and e-learning standards presentation

(Warning: contains lots and lots of SCORM.)

24 hour comic: Done.

I am Never Doing This Again.

I had a specific plan in doing a 24 hour comic (http://www.24hourcomicsday.com/) - specifically, challenging myself to do bad work. Completion over quality!

Why?

Because when I fall, I fall at the first hurdle, that's why.

There are a lot of benefits to planning projects properly (my go-to position). You get to Get It Right The First Time. You also Save Time in the Long Run. But if you can't get the plan sorted properly... splat! Down goes the whole thing - that's the first hurdle. That bit that comes after the plan. The doing-bit.

So I did a 24 hour comic to see if I could finish something with no plan at all - not just drawing it, but tracking it, uploading it, the works. And I did! And guess what? The comic is really pretty bad. But it's done! Yay!

Here it is: http://bit.ly/acHpxB

Things I learned from doing this

1. Set-up times still exist when you're working at high speed.

As a setting-up fan I always figured they were somehow optional/something I could not do if I chose, but no - turns out, even at break-neck speed there's still times involved here.

2. Pre-existing knowledge counts. A lot.

This would be impossible if I couldn't draw a bit first, but *equally* if I hadn't messed around with Tumblr before.

3. The urge to fiddle with things gets stronger the closer the finishing line is

I think this might be because the finishing line is scary - as long as it's incomplete, it can be fixed. Once it's out there, no chance - it will be it's own fairly poor thing. Submitting is *hard*, even when the goal is poor work.

4. I can drag a theme out of thin air if I have to

Surprise talent! I didn't script a word of the comic - just made it up page by page. But my buddy tells me it *looks* scripted, so, I'm happy with that.

5. Maudlin is really hard to avoid actually

I really hate the page where the two figments tease me. It is so twee & saccharine (but I couldn't use a replacement page, so I'm stuck with it). I did it because it was easy - twee is totally easy.

6. Everything takes longer than you think

The comic took ages. So did this post, actually. I keep editing it.

7. Stopping and not editing any more is hard

But, as a skill, it *can* be learned. I'll show you, ready?

It's like this:

24 hour comics day

It's 24 hour comics day, and I am IN.

The deal is - 24 pages in 24 hours. That's it.

I've chosen to heighten the stakes a little - 24 pieces of paper (no spares), and really really bad pencils. Because I can't find my pencil case. (Great start, hey?)

Follow it all here:

www.zoedoesa24hourcomic.blogspot.com

Non-text search is hard...

As far as I can see, there are basically two types of searchable object:

1. Text objects - such as a web page

2. Non-text objects - such as an image

These two require two different search functions:

1. Text-based search - searches the object itself

2. Metadata search - searches descriptive metadata

In my opinion, all content *should* have descriptive metadata (date written, author, so on). But only non-text objects actually require it - you can't search for 'picture of a horse' unless someone has actively tagged a picture with the word 'horse'.

The problem lies in the subjective nature of descriptive metadata, because tagging/taxonomy-ing/controlled vocabulary-ing is HARD. Really hard. And collecting that data is even harder, and utilising that data is harder again.

Case in point: I have a bunch of hobbies. One of them is perfumes.

If ever there was a set of content that didn't meet with text-based search criteria, it's scent. English doesn't even have scent words, or flavour words - we rely on 'smells like' and 'tastes like' because, outside of sweet/salt/bitter/sour/umami, there are no words (and 'umami', a taste-enhancement molecule found in MSG and parmesan cheese, is stolen from Japanese anyhow).

Because of this, perfumes are the perfect place to examine the efficacy of non-text search. How can I, as a perfume enthusiast and buyer, find new scents?

With difficulty.

Here are some comparisons of my favourite perfumes (I stress: despite what you're about to read, I love these scents), compared against their marketing blurbs.

Hermes Eau de Merveilles

They say:

An enchanting fragrance that encapsulates the spirit of wood, the memory of oceans and the sparkle of a constellation.

I say:

Smells like cake, only sexy. Exactly like I think spice would smell like. (Gentlemen: this is the one you want to buy your lady. You will love this so much.)

Guerlain Samsara

They say:

It was in China and Tibet that Jean-Paul Guerlain sought the inspiration necessary to create Samsara.
Samsara is a Sanskrit word that has its roots in Hinduism. It signifies the cycle of birth and rebirth, the perpetual voyage from one existence to the next, the wheel of life that keeps on turning.

Samsara is an invitation to serenity and harmony, with oneself and with the world. It is a voyage between East and West, Orient and Occident, an homage to the woman who is ever in search of serenity.

I say:

Smells like sand. No organic content, apart from one element - it's sexy (more civet than musk). Exactly like what I think Arrakis would smell like.

Shiseido Zen

They say:

Something to do with amber and 'wood breath'.

I say:

I only bought it because it has space rose in it. Not sexy.

Hermes Kelly Caleche

They say:

The unexpected caress of leather among flowers. Mimosa, iris, tuberose, and climbing rose. A floral perfume touched by leather.

I say:

A wood fire that just went out, and someone dropped some fresh/wet herbs on it. And some booze. Probably gin. Not sexy.

Jardin sur le Nil

They say:

A perfume of light and life, generous and sparkling. A bottle reflecting the shimmering green and ochre tints of the banks of the Nile River appreciated by women and men alike.

I say:

Smells like orange peel and mud, on a very hot day. Not sexy.

Chanel No 5

They say:

Femininity is timeless

I say:

Smells like perfume. Ur-perfume. Super-sexy.

The thing is, I would never search 'orange peel' when looking for a new scent, but neither would I search 'femininity is timeless' or 'cycle of birth and rebirth'. And I know that the results from using a frangrance wheel (yes, that's a Thing) are mid-lame to very-lame.

If I looked for a 'sexy' perfume I would get something vile and musk-ridden (don't fret, it's all synthetic now) with a celebrity branding attached, not something that smelled like cake. Similarly, a search for 'not-sexy perfumes' wouldn't take me to the best not-sexy perfume sources - Japanese houses like Shiseido and Kenzuo and Issey Miyake. (The cultural reasons for this are extensive and, for this post, irrelevant. But Japanese perfumes are amazing.)

Scents - they just don't translate to text.

And yet, a little part of me thinks - hopes - that this is a solvable problem. There will be a way to search for scent. One day.

...and to be honest, pretty much this whole post is to announce how thrilled I am to see that Hermes' new Eau Claire des Merveilles is now out.

Mmmmmmm... fresh cake. Delicious.

I am so glad this exists: Monocle

I found out about this over a week ago (thank you for making it *and* telling me about it, @josephpearson), so it's about time I posted a synopsis about this potentially excellent new ebook tool.

I haven't played with it yet, but I like the sound of it: it's the Monocle ebook reader. http://inventivelabs.com.au/weblog/post/announcing-monocle/

Monocle is a new - and in my opinion, overdue - development in ebookery. It could be revolutionary, for one reason: it works in browsers. Which is to say, you access your eBook content through the internet.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to access content using machines:

1. Content lives on the user's own device. This is a download-based model.

Example: iTunes.

2. Content lives on external servers which are accessed by the user's device. This is a web-based model.

Example: Spotfiy.

There's a user-facing difference between the two, and a difference in the deployment of IP. In both cases I think the no-download (like Monocle) model will eventually have the upper hand.

For content publishers, the download model is terrifying for a simple reason - once the file is downloaded, it's fate is entirely out of your hands. No matter how much DRM it's wrapped in, someone, someday, will crack it. It will always have the opportunity to go wild, and when it does, there go (some of) the profits.

Similarly, once a file is downloaded, you can't track the usage well. Is it popular? Do people actually use it after they've bought it? It's hard to say (unless the content is software dependant, like iTunes, and that's not much fun).

For content users, the download model is the more annoying option, because it's tethered to a device. We hear people grumble all the time about iTunes, but never about spoftify - spotify is a smoother experience, because there's no fiddling (or protecting) downloaded files to get in the way of accessing the music.

To (shamelessly) use my husband as an example: he works from home some days, from the office others, but he does the same job in both locations. He's an academic, so he uses professionally published academic book content a *lot*.

At work and at home, he uses different machines. They're powerful desktops, so physically lugging them about is not a good option. Because of this, Aadevice-tethered eBook is no use to him.

But he always has an internet connection. He can always log on to a website.

There's a developing trend of people using multiple machines to access their content, instead of the trusty old family PC. My household isn't unusual - it has two people, a desktop, two laptops, an ipad, and an iphone. Matching that trend on the other side, we can also see internet access growing exponentially - it's quite likely (if not inevitable) that ubiquity is just around the corner.

Which is more likely? A future where people use the same device all the time, or a future where people have internet access all the time?

In choosing between browser-based and download-based content models, these respective trends point to an access-it-through-the-internet model as being where the smart money is.

A browser-based service naturally has to rely on a logon. This for me is a double-bonus, because (unless I've misinterpreted) Monocle can support the standard university logon services such as Raven and Shibboleth. That's great for universities, because that opens up the ability for a university library to buy browser-based eBooks and make them accesssible to all staff and faculty using their own, normal logon - no mess, no fuss, all access.

Monocle is also (hooray!) completely open source. I hope it does really, really well.

Vroom vroom iPad!

Last week, my husband caved. I knew it was going to be one of us, but to be honest, I always thought it would be me.

He bought an iPad.

It became part of our day-to-day immediately - I love the sweet little thing (especially 'Plants vs Zombies'). It's so easy! So fast! So many cute little apps, look at them, they're adorable!

I was reminded of an analogy I thought of months ago, but didn't realise was true until now (because I was busy *talking* about iPads rather than *using them and learning about them properly*, naturally):

• Desktop (and laptop) computers are like geared cars.
• iPads (and their tablety kin) are like automatics.

Here's the thinking behind that:

• Desktops give you more control, but they're harder to use
• Tablets give you less control, but they're easier to use

I prefer PCs myself (stop laughing), and I'm quite happy to wander off into the more bewildering realms of 'My Computer' and tinker with what I find. Sometimes I mess things up terribly, and often I get confused. It's hard territory in there, and sometimes, when the task is boring or fiddly (installing new software for example) I'd really rather not. But I do have a huge amount of control - if I want to have a poke around the program files, I can.

With a tablet, you don't have to know much about anything to make them work, and nothing is boring or fiddly or a chore. It's all smooth. What you give up is the ability to wander around places like 'My Computer', because there isn't one - or at least, not one you can ever find to access.

I think, in a couple of years' time, the current (but starting to fade) idea that all computer users - from the highly skilled to the I-just-want-it-to-work types - should use the same machines will emerge as having been a bad call. The same machines that bewilder the less-skilled irritate the life out of the highly-skilled, so why should they be the same? No happy middle-ground has emerged (yes, pipe down Mac users) and the odds are good that that's because there isn't one. The two groups have different needs, why should they use the same machines?

We have different tools for different tasks for different users in almost all fields of life, and I can't see why computers should be any different - or how they've stayed different for so long.

And until the division becomes clearer, I'm just going to keep playing 'Plants vs. Zombies'.

Explaining the structure of XML

I thought of a good way to explain the structure of XML to someone who hadn't seen it before today:

XML is like Russian dolls.

Each doll has two halves, just like each XML element has two tags.

Each doll needs both halves to match up to be complete.

The dolls have to match up in order - the littler ones must always go inside the bigger ones.

(NB. I haven't managed to stretch this out to schemas yet, but I'm working on it...)

Inception: I think I've cracked it

Ok. I could be wrong, but I *think* I've worked out Inception. Which is to say - there is an answer, and this might just be it. Naturally, the following contains spoilers.

If you can prove me wrong, please do.


Here we go...

1. Cobb is dreaming for the entire movie.

2. Cobb is not the protagonist. Mal is.

3. Because we are watching Cobb's dream, we never actually meet Mal. This is a movie where we never meet the main character.

4. All the characters but Cobb - including Cobb's version of Mal - are dreamed by Cobb. All the things that happen are events dreamed by Cobb. Consequently - the entire movie is a McGuffin.

5. No, all of it. It's all a McGuffin.

6. It's a McGuffin because it's the story Cobb's unconscious has made up to protect itself. But one real thing did happen -

7. Cobb and Mal were indeed stuck in limbo together.

8. She got out.

9. He didn't - he's still there.

10. (Brace yourselves)

11. He didn't plant the suicide idea in her. She planted it in him. She did the inception.

11.5 Consider - on whose word do we have it that Cobb did the inception? Cobb's. We see them both reciting the lines about waiting for a train, but we never see anyone say it for the first time.

12. It didn't work.

13. Because inception doesn't work.

14. It's because Cobb's drive to be the protagonist was so strong that he couldn't accept the incepted idea, or with it, the truth that she was right the whole time, and that he was the one living in the not-real world. The story was made up by his subconscious as a way to protect him from the idea that he wasn't the protagonist.

15. That drive - to be the protagonist - was, in the story-pattern used by mainstream movies, masculine.

16. The movie was pulling an act of inception on you - planting the idea that the woman might be the agent, the protagonist. Female agents do not happen in our mainstream movies, our stories. The movie is a story about our stories and our stories are gendered. The story world were the men are always the protagonists, that is a not-real world. Those stories are not good for us. They're keeping us stuck in not-real thinking. We need better stories now.

17. It won't work.

18. Because inception doesn't work.

Embedded learning materials

Here is an example of how common cartridge materials can embed in websites like blogs.

This quiz material (it's QTI 1.2, standards fans) is actually hosted on cloud.icodeon.com by the good people at Icodeon, who are the only folk who are making a non-VLE-dependent Common Cartridge player at the moment (if you know of another, please let me know!)

It's embedded here the same way that a youtube video embeds - the content isn't present on this site at all.

It looks pretty shmick, but the key point here is that the content isn't present on this site. Publishing people I know you've spotted this already - that means it can't be copied, which means in turn, it can't be pirated.

Sweet, eh?

(Common Cartridge is a new educational content packaging standard by IMS global. More about Common Cartridge can be found here.)

The Real Problem

I like problems. Fixing problems is fun, but working out *exactly* what the problem is is funner (and usually three quarters of fixing the problem, but I digress).

I've been thinking about that phrase, where people say 'the real problem is...' Increasingly, I think that's not a useful phrase. Consider this scenario - which is the 'real' problem?

1. My car is making a terrible noise

2. I might need to take the car for a service, but honestly, I'm just not sure

3. Why do things like this always happen to me?

Answer (in my opinion): They're all the real problem. They're all problems, and they're all real. But here's the kicker: None of them are actually solvable. None of them contain enough information to make itself solved. They contain enough information to identify what information might be needed to solve them, but they don't contain enough information in themselves.

So let's add real problem number four:

5. My car's timing belt is about to break

Now *that* is solvable. The solution is: Go to the mechanics and get the timing belt replaced. That will solve problems 1 and 2, but not 3, which is still a pretty good run. Point being -

The problem that has a possible solution is the real real problem.

(Unfortunately, 'I don't know enough about cars to realise that the timing belt needs to be replaced' is a real problem unto itself... but that's for another day.)

How to manage your reading list

I stumble across a million Interesting Things to read every single day. This terrific, but it's also problematic, because they do tend to get tangled up. Here are the problems my Interesting Things used to cause:

1. I would wind up with so many open tabs that I couldn't actually see what they are any more, creating a navigation problem.

2. I would get to the end of the day, close the browser, and poof! All that good and useful stuff would disappear, never to be found again.

3. It interrupted my workflow - I would take time to read an article about UX that could have been spent actually working on UX, just so I wouldn't lose it.

I've now worked out a process that has fixed these three problems. It uses two tools:

Instapaper is 'a simple tool to save webpages for reading later'.

Evernote is a souped-up bookmarking service, which lets you store pretty much anything you need to remember.

Here's the process:

1. Find an Interesting Thing to read

2. Add it to my instapaper account

3. When I have time to get some reading done, choose an Interesting Thing from my instapaper

4. Once I've read the Interesting thing, save it to my evernote account.

So - I always know what Interesting Things I have/haven't read, I can keep a tagged & searchable record of all the Interesting Things I've read, and I don't lose time trying to keep up with my Interesting Things when I have other things to do.

Commerce and tolerance: A lesson from Gothdom

This weekend we were in Goathshead, just outside Whitby, for a wedding.

Whitby is a great place. It's a beautiful harbour town in Yorkshire, full of ice cream stands and fish and chips shops. But it's not all sweetness, not by any means.

Have you ever read Dracula? Remember that bit where the boat sails into harbour and all the crew are dead? And a huge black dog (Dracula) leaps from the boat, and runs off up the cliffside to the ruined abbey looming above? That's Whitby. Bram Stoker wrote the whole book there. Which makes sleepy, pleasant Whitby a mecca for Goths.

There are goths everywhere, and goth-oriented shops on every corner. It's bizarre, and fascinating - how does this quiet little town feel about being colonised by these strange people with their eye-liner and Wiccan tendencies and big stompy boots?

A lady in a jewellery shop gave some insights. Apparently, the town gets along with the goths quite well. 'We do have some people who make trouble,' she said. 'But they're outsiders. Not Whitby people. Whitby people wouldn't do that.'

The goths have events, Bazaars, and festivals all year round. There is even - no joke - an annual football match, where the goths play the staff of the Whitby Gazette. The goths are good for business, too - usually they come into the jewellery shop looking for jet (no surprise there).

The worst problem she sees facing the goths? Weather. 'It is a shame when it rains - they do take ever so much care with their hair and makeup, you know.'

All this makes me think of the incredible power of contact. Put two people - or two groups of people - into contact, and they're almost invariably going to come to the conclusion that the other group are just people. That's because most people are just people.

One of the oldest and simplest forms of contact between different groups is trade. This is not a question of one person being falsely nice to another person from a group they don't like in order to take their money (although that does happen). It's more that it's almost impossible to define someone by their membership of a group when you're actually talking to them. And when trading, you have to talk.

'How much is that?'

'Ten pounds.'

'It's nice, isn't it?'

'Yes, I think so.'

Or:

'Can I have a serve of fish and chips and a tango please?'

'Sure.'

It might not seem like much, but cumulatively, little transactions like those can erode barriers between groups that would not otherwise come into contact at all. I like to think Whitby is a bit like that - a place where people who on the surface have little in common have had enough contact, at least part of it through trade, that everyone has basically become accustomed to everyone else. Like I said before, Whitby is a great place.

After I'd bought myself some nice jet earrings, we went back to Goathshead to see Kirsty and Sally get married. It was a beautiful wedding, and the staff at the hotel where the whole thing was held were just terrific.

Versioning

A couple of people liked the 'inbox zero' post, so, here is my next red-hot productivity tip: Versioning!

I work on specs all day, so I need to know which one is the most up-to-date (and which one is likely to be out-of-date). But sometimes I get things Terribly Wrong, and I need to go back to an earlier version (the 'previous saved game' manoeuvre). To achieve both these things, I use a single naming protocol in every filename I ever write:

yyyy-mm-dd human readable file name.xxx

Or, as an example in a more human form,

2010-05-05 Versioning blog post.doc

The advantage of this approach is simple: You can keep all versions of the file in the same folder, irrespective of operating system, and they can always be displayed in the exact order in which they were written.

My idea...

Two years ago, when I was living in a flat with no garden, I put a sign on our local notice board. It said - in politer language than this -

'I don't know anything about gardening, and I don't have my own garden, but I want to learn and I have a young strong back. If you know lots about gardening but can't lift compost the way you used to, I will swap you my labour for your knowledge. Please call me.'

And a local man did. And I helped him. And that's how I got my allotment.

And as of last week, I've given it up.

I have a real house and my own backyard now, and I didn't think it was fair to keep it knowing how many people are waiting for allotments out there. In some places, the waiting list has gone up to 40 years (or had, as of June last year): http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jun/02/allotments-shortage-waiting-lists

But it gave me an idea. I've been kicking it around for a few months, and here it is:

1) There are a lot of people out there who want allotments.

2) There are a lot of people out there who have unused space in their backyards.

3) Some of (2) are old people who can't use the land themselves.

4) These people can be matched.

A lot - not all, but a lot - of old people are socially isolated. Handing over a chunk of backyard would give them a contact in the community, increased security from knowing someone would be around regularly, and - extra good - access to free, good quality food (that would be a share of the vegetables). The veg growers would get an obvious benefit: Access to the plot they've been waiting for so long.

I don't know how to kick this off, but I suspect it's got legs. And if anyone has a good contact among the senior citizens of the Cambridge community, please let me know.

How embarrassing.

I had lunch with a lovely new friend yesterday, and he said he'd read my blog.

I was mortified. The blog hasn't updated *forever*. The reason being, I decided months ago to move to Wordpress, and that as an incentive to get the job done, I was not going to post until the task was finished. I've got some server space and picked a theme (thesis), but I haven't finished setting it up. So I haven't posted anything.

It now occurs to me that this plan was Dumb.

I'm updating the blog again, as of now. And maybe, eventually, it will move to a new home.

Inbox Zero is the best thing in the whole world ever

I'm into my third week of inbox zero. It. Is. Wonderful.

I've converted my husband, too - he swore it couldn't be done, and now here he is - inbox zeroing like a trooper.

You can read about inbox zero here: www.inboxzero.com. Basically, the idea is to keep your inbox at zero. That's it.

At the mud-map level, here's how I go about it.

All the emails I receive can be divided into one of three types:

1) Things I have to respond to

2) Things someone else has to respond to (and I have to know when they do)

3) Things that are information > no-one has to respond to them

Here's what I do with them:

1) Things I have to respond to, I respond to, then file

2) Things someone else has to respond to, I put a 'star' on (using gmail), then file

3) Things that are information, I read, then file

It takes discipline, but for me at least, it can be done.