Gnodal Journal

* BP Center for Visualization; a new research Center at the University of Colorado.
* Cal3d, a skeletal based 3d character animation library. (Boy, I sure wish I had /this/ 6 years ago! Imagine building a human frame from scratch. Now imagine adding a really complex node structure for each and every joint you want to animate. Hint: nothing works well if you cut corners; give up, and put in /all/ the joints. Believe me, there really are just as many joints as you imagine!)

*Good luck, Carmien!*

* Here’s what I’ve bothered *sigh* falsely signing onto this network to post: Information Growth & Diffusion Simulator. Ooooh!
A rather handsome statement of principle

I lurched when I came across the term “community of practice” while looking through resources on community development.

OMG, some folkz are finally shaking their heads.
Earlier this evening I found myself with tears running down my face …

This, ”Switching from PHP to Zope/Python”, might be significant; despite my horrid experiences with Zope, the concept continues to attract.
Something about granularity?

John Willinsky at UBC, author of “If Only We Knew; Increasing the public value of social science research”
(NB: this is not “If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice” by Carla S. O’Dell, Nilly Essaides, C. Jackson, Jr., which I only just discovered this very moment!¹)

Excerpts from “If Only We Knew …” and a review from the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand [PDF].

Willinsky also wrote “Technologies of Knowing : A Proposal for the Human Sciences” (excerpts)

---

Amazon sez folk who bought “Technologies …” also bought:
* Teachers in Nomadic Spaces: Deleuze and Curriculum (Complicated Conversation, Vol. 5) by Kaustuv Roy, William F. Pinar (Editor)
* Introducing Cultural Studies, 2nd Edition by Ziauddin Sardar, et al
* In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music by Angela McRobbie
* The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books) by Lev Manovich (Author)
* The Sign of the Burger: McDonald’s and the Culture of Power (Labor in Crisis) by Joe L. Kincheloe

Amazon suggests that customers who bought titles by John Willinsky also bought titles by these authors:
* William E. Doll
* Simon Winchester
* Brian Goldfarb
* Kaustuv Roy
* Ziauddin Sardar

Amazon also supplies a very interesting display of related books.

---

From Library Journal
In this remarkably thoughtful book, Willinsky (education, Univ. of British Columbia) explores how the wider dissemination to the general public of research results in the social sciences might lead to marked quality-of-life improvements. Widespread use of the Internet, the author observes, provides an excellent opportunity for social scientists to make their knowledge a public resource to enhance decision making, risk assessment, and democratic participation and, generally, to “help people make greater sense of the world and act on that world.” Practicing what he preaches, Willensky (Technologies of Knowing) uses footnotes capably to enhance the reader’s engagement in and appreciation of the scholarly process. Chapters on public knowledge, housing knowledge, the social-science ethos, and the risks of knowing, among others, substantiate Willinsky’s arguments in this volume, which is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.
DEllen Gilbert, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Info
(Routledge) For both researchers and the public, this text argues the need for a social science research to be used as a public resource. Inspires the public to demand more from research and shows the researcher how to deliver more valuable knowledge to the public. Softcover, also available in hardcover edition. DLC: Communication in the Social Sciences–Technical Innovations.

Book Description
In If Only We Knew John Willinsky uses current social issues and historical precedents to demonstrate that the social sciences can and should contribute far more to public knowledge than they have in the past. We have the technologies, Willinsky demonstrates, and need only the determination to create a public resource out of social research that can extend democratic participation and self-determination, as well as improve research’s focus and public support. If Only We Knew offers examples of why and how this is not only possible but necessary, in the face of knowledge-based economies and a withering public sector. This book inspires the public to demand far more of research; it also shows researchers how to deliver far more of knowledge’s value to the public.

---

---

---

¹ – This afternoon, talking about “the psychology of human well-being”, I made the point that it’s unrealistic to want absolute confidence concerning our knowledge, but that it was more reasonable to want to know what we don’t know. This pleased me, though it left my interlocutor in a flap! (She was pressing to use “more certain” and “less certain” as well as / on top of “more or less confident”; I pressed back to have certainty be absolute with confidence being relative, and then walloped her with the notion that I was certain of my subjectivity … not what she had been expecting! *grin*

Amazon tells us that customers who bought “… What We Knew” also bought:
* The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knowledge Management by Melissie Clemmons Rumizen
* Books from The Harvard Business Review Paperback Series.
* Knowledge Management Toolkit, The: Practical Techniques for Building a Knowledge Management System by Amrit Tiwana
* Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, et al
* Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know by Nancy M. Dixon
See Excerpts.

< hr width="45%">

* Weblog Tools Compendium

• BlogBuddy
• Chronicle Lite – The blog client for all platforms.
• MonauralJerk
• MozBlog
• very large set of IE ‘marklets

Of interest: Vanilla … written in rebol (see also rebol.net).

* DocBookAuthoringTools at DocBookWiki
* SemanticPlanet – a blog

---

NB: How dumb is the web? Dig: I recall how, back hen I first began blogging, it took about 3 minutes to find and install a bookmarklet. I just wasted over 20 minutes on that little project … with no luck.
Friggin’ phoneys are screwing up the whole world. (Ok, so back then it took me 20 minutes to find a whole selection … so sue me for exaggerating! Point stands.)

---

Ripped off from McGee’s Musings:

“”The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.”
– Dorothy Parker

!Whoot whoot!
Since I wrote this item at supper time, all evening, (even during the talk by the Cuban Ambassador … sheesch!) I kept thinking “Structuration … like, we affect what we use by what we do? How would I go about incorporating that into a content-integration project?!” … and just now, I tripped over this quote at the technicity.net site:

“You affect the world by what you browse.” –Tim Berners Lee

---

---

---

“‘Structuration’ is an unlovely term at best, although it is less inelegant in the Gallic context from which it came.” … no disagreement here!
That line is from extracts and annotations of Giddens’ “The Constitution of Society”

“Anthony Giddens: The theory of structuration” (at theory.org.uk) reads in part:

“Giddens’s theory of structuration notes that social life is more than random individual acts, but is not merely determined by social forces. To put it another way, it’s not merely a mass of ‘micro’-level activity – but on the other hand, you can’t study it by only looking for ‘macro’-level explanations. Instead, Giddens suggests, human agency and social structure are in a relationship with each other, and it is the repetition of the acts of individual agents which reproduces the structure. “