Babble

I stumbled upon this today. What a wonderful idea! Capture a fleeting moment in time by snapping your family on one day every year.

This article or a quote at least from it could find its way into the introduction of my thesis. Sam Taylor provides the background and motivation for his new novel, The Amnesiac, is published by Faber and Faber, £12.99

I particularly like the following paragraph from the article:

"Memory truly is evanescent, shadowy and ambiguous. Try to pin it down and it just dissolves or changes shape or conjures up an equally plausible (but false) alternative. As almost every scientific experiment into human memory has shown, no two people, in the same situation, ever recall precisely the same set of events and details; and, if you ask them again weeks, months or years later, those memories are just as liable to become (illogically) more detailed and certain, as they are to fade away or mutate completely. Memory, in other words, is as untrustworthy as a politician. Even more so, indeed, as we have no understanding of its motives or methods."

Yet memory is central to many of the things we do. When we ride a bike or make a cup of tea we use our "procedural" memories of how to perform these tasks. The decisions we make, stories we tell or events that we share with others rely on our "episodic" memories. Further, the language we use, the way we interact with objects and things, and the facts that we use in arguments all rely on our "semantic" memories.

So, our memories are really what makes us who we are - it governs our behaviour. This is the central premise of my work. I'm interested in the way people manage and re-find information and the role that memory plays in these processes. Despite memory being "shadowy, ambiguous and difficult to pin down" it is possible to find patterns in what we remember and analyse our behavour with respect to memories. I have shown that memory is central to these behaviours. We re-find based on what we remember and what we remember changes based on who we are, our work practices, the type of task and age of the information we are looking for ...

Roll up, roll up. Who wants to read my thesis.

Hi everyone,

For those of you who are not aware, I have been pretty ill for the last 10 months. I have since been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or M.E .

ME is a pretty controversial illness and there has been a lot of debate about the symptoms, the causes, and whether or not it actually exists. There is an awful lot of information available on ME, but it is scattered all over the place and much of the information is illinformed.

For this reason I have decided to start a new website that brings together the many resources of high quality that I have come across in my readings since being diagnosed. The aim is to create a quality resource for people who have ME and those close to them.

At the moment the website is only a blog, but I hope to improve on this as time goes on. I think a blog is important because one of the primary difficulties for people with this illness is the feeling of isolation, that nobody understands. The aim of the blog is to help with this. I want to share my experiences of living with ME to show that there are other people going through exactly the same thing.

Anyway, keep an eye on the website to see how it progresses.

Cheers,

Dave

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http://www.discoverteenergy.com/files/ScreenImage.java

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=577975&messageID=2905300

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=575977

This is a really interesting paper / talk. It has created a huge amount of debate.

I am going to be contraversial in my opinions. Firstly, I also have mixed feelings about the guy and his presentation. I agree he is a good, natural speaker, but he is arrogant and makes generalisations that are unlikely to be true - the aims of yahoo for instance.

One of the things I do agree with, and tell me if I'm wrong (I'm a computer scientist remember), is that although the intention of classification schemes is to organise knowledge, in libraries what they actually do is determine where books are stored. You cannot deny that correlated facts and ideas are scattered around different sections of libraries. It is physically impossible to map the organisation of a library's resources to the context of a user's search. This does not mean, however, that classification schemes are useless - far from it.

Another point I agree with him about is the transfer of understanding into digital environments by using metaphors. Metaphors, such as the shelve as Shirky puts it, give affordances about how a system works - fine! But they also have negative features. I think we can design efficient systems without them.

The paper can be found (here) and the talk (here)

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=650417

I read this article in the independent over lunch today. It turns out that I have a successful name :-D.

Here is a snippet about "David".

"The thing about the name David is that it doesn't have any negative connotations," says David Yelland, 42, a former editor of The Sun and now senior vice-chairman of the PR firm Weber Shandwick.

"It is classy but carries no social baggage. Unlike Piers or Quentin, which sound posh, or Kevin - at the other end of the scale - David gives no clues geographically or socially."

"It is serious without being pretentious, one of those names always on the top 10 list ... [and] is also quite a cool name so long as it's not shortened."

It is also a masculine-sounding name, useful for a man's image, he reckons: "The 'D' is quite a decisive consonant. It's not wet ... which is important if you're a guy."

• Ni mang ma - are you busy?
• Jin Tian ni mang ma - are you busy today?
• Ne zai zuo shen me - What are you doing?

• Xie Xie - Thanks
• Bu Yong Xie - You're Welcome
• Wo Jiao David - My name is David

• zhen mo yang - how are you doing?
• Hai Xing - not too bad!
• Ting Hao - it's good!
• Zai Jian - Good bye