Building Markets

Just revised and resubmitted a paper I wrote on Eclipse Aviation. Looks like one of their bigger customers, DayJet, has been profiled by the AP and picked up by the major news outlets.

It will be interesting to see how Eclipse Aviation's ethos appeals change as their industry matures. Eclipse started with the "closed world" Cold War appeals Paul Edwards outlines in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. They depicted Eclipse Aviation's engine as a type of magic icon that would save the company. When that failed, they switched their marketing ethos strategy to a more transparent "convergence of innovation" model, similar to what Carolyn Miller describes as a "Ciceronian ethos of sympathy" in her article“Expertise and Agency: Transformations of Ethos in Human-Computer Interaction.” Now that they have received certification, Eclipse Aviation has started to scale back the transparency and prepare for a more mature proprietary market to emerge.

Back in Fargo

A few of you are wondering if Sport and I are back in Fargo.

Indeed we are, and today we decided to get into our summer ritual.

We started with a five-mile run (unfortunately the Red River is still flooding, so we ran to and around NDSU).

After a quick shower, we were off to Nichole's for some breakfast:


In case you are wondering what you are looking at, those are two coffee beverages the color of Capucin monks' robes, an almond croissant right out of the oven, and an apricot cherry scone.

Next, we stopped by the first farmer's market of the season:

Unfortunately, there were only root vegetables available, so we got some spring onions to take to our colleagues' farewell party.

Finally, we stopped by Zandbroz and Funky Junque to look for a couple of "thank you" gifts before we walked back home.

It's good to be home in Fargo.

ListServs Aren't ALWAYS Terrible

Recently, the attw listserv has been having several good discussions on usability class materials and culture of technology class materials. One of the most fascinating things about this listserv is the heterogeneity of technical writing. We have our classical rhetoric wonks, our technogeeks, pedagogy experts, newbies, composition junkies, and assorted other groups. One nugget I expecially appreciated was someone pointing me to a nice WIRED story on the development of the iPod. As a technical writing teacher, I try to get my writing students to appreciate the effectiveness of prototypes, especially in engineering cultures. This single picture of the iPod prototype will hopefully convince a few of my students to go along with the process, rather than prejudging the effectiveness of a process before they try it in a work enviroment.

Thanks Jarin!

Our surf instructor.

His rig.

Surf Camp, Day Four

The waves were about as big as ever. Unfortunately, I was too pooped to both catch the waves AND pop up on my board. Sport was able to battle into the surf with quite a bit of invective. It was a worthwhile week that left me with a few nuggets:

• Surfing, like just about anything else, is very incremental.
  
• Despite this inchworm nature, there are a few moments where you feel the rush of progress (when you catch a wave; when you hold your balance; when you have a long ride).
  
• Surfing seems to be a practice that is handed down orally and visually. Literate practices seem pretty inconsequential to most of surfing (probably a big reason that neo-tribal references abound in surf culture).
  
• It is much more brutal than skiing. Sport and I are still finding mysterious bruises in places we didn't think were possible to bruise.
  

Surf Camp, Day Three

Conditions were a tiny bit better. I had a very hard time getting past the first break in the morning. In fact, I didn't. So, even though I caught one wave, I wasn't able to get up on my board. Fortunately, our surf instructor was nice enough to help me out in the afternoon. I finally caught a wave long enough to get a feel for the wave.

Oh, I ripped up my foot pretty nicely this morning. That picture above is the duct-tape makeshift bandage that Jarin helped me craft. Kept me in the water long enough to get up on the board.

LKQ, the instructor brought us sponges (kind of--they had fiberglass bottoms) today. You called it!

Surf Camp, Day Two

Conditions weren't that great. Only 2-3 foot waves and wind, wind, wind.

Sport got up on her board twice and I only managed to do it once. I tried to get past the initial break and out to the bigger waves, but I kept getting beat back. Paddling is pretty brutal work.

Surf Camp, Day One

Waves were between 2-4 feet. Spent quite a bit of time on the Indo Boards,

BUT...

I did get up on the board and even rode a few in. Sport caught the hang of it quicker (heck, she grew up in the surf), but I managed to find my footing. Tomorrow, paddling. I'm hoping that I can start on turning before the week is over.

FYI, the new Banana Boat spray and O'Neill rashie works well to keep away the burn. Thanks for the advice, LKQ!

It's Here

Women Aren't Faulty Men

Even though my title seems like a no-brainer, people have been making this assumption since forever (don't believe me? Go read about it in Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals, Book II).

All of this is to get you to read Joss Whedon's (of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly fame) blog post on the disturbing trend of openly promoting rapacious and homicidal misogyny as spectacle. Go read it. Seriously.

Electrate Monkeys

The New York Times has a well-written and in-depth story about Jonathan Coulton's (and other artists') use of social media to create a music career (free registration required). The "reveal" of the article is that Fame2.0 requires an immense amount of personal interaction with the fans who create music mashups, fan videos, and other assorted types of letters and fanfic.


Of course, those who have crafted a career in any of the performing arts can tell you the majority of their work as an artist looks less like people would think of as "art" and more of what a lot of people consider "management."

The article includes some of the more sinister complications of extimacy, including a good "coachspeak" analogy:

*snip*

There’s something particularly weird, the band members have also found, about living with fans who can now trade information — and misinformation — about them. All celebrities are accustomed to dealing with reporters; but fans represent a new, wild-card form of journalism. Franz Nicolay, the Hold Steady’s nattily-dressed keyboardist, told me that he now becomes slightly paranoid while drinking with fans after a show, because he’s never sure if what he says will wind up on someone’s blog. After a recent gig in Britain, Nicolay idly mentioned to a fan that he had heard that Bruce Springsteen liked the Hold Steady. Whoops: the next day, that factoid was published on a fan blog, “and it had, like, 25 comments!” Nicolay said. So now he carefully polices what he says in casual conversation, which he thinks is a weird thing for a rock star to do. “You can’t be the drunken guy who just got offstage anymore,” he said with a sigh. “You start acting like a pro athlete, saying all these banal things after you get off the field.” For Nicolay, the intimacy of the Internet has made postshow interactions less intimate and more guarded.

/*snip*

Money quote:

All the artists I spoke to made a point of saying they would never simply pander to their fans’ desires. But many of them also said that staying artistically “pure” now requires the mental discipline of a ninja.

If You Are in New York City Right Now

If you are in New York City right now, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum is having an intersting exhibit--DESIGN FOR THE OTHER 90%.

Those of you reading this blog know that I have been tracking the Nicholas Negroponte's 100 dollar laptop (it's official name is the the One Laptop Per Child [olpc] iniative). That effort will be highlighted along with inexpensive homeless shelters, cheap hand water pumps that can irrigate multiple acres, and a bicycle designed to carry more than 100 pounds of cargo.

It's Different Up Here

We had an April snowstorm a few weeks ago. Our local paper, the Fargo Forum published this picture.

And now? Seventy degrees and sunny.

Go figure...

Semiotics of Power: Part 3

Instead of touching this electrified chain of signification, I think I'll just send ya'll down the rabbit hole.

John Swift has an interesting parodic take on a conservative comic using racist imagery to attack Hillary Clinton. Semiotics of power meets the reproducing signification of XML.

datacloud formations

Information Engineer
Salary range: $70,000-$120,000

Experience/skills: Data analytics, network administrator experience, writing skills

Perks: Stock options, free food

Who's hiring? PayPal, Slide, and other Web 2.0 startups unable to stay on top of the data

Every Sunday the three 20-something founders of Meebo, an instant-messaging startup based in San Francisco, meet to talk strategy and almost always end up wanting new data before making any decision. "We'd walk away wanting to know things like where is our churn rate the greatest, or how are the users in Brazil different from those in India with regard to how they navigate the site," says CEO Seth Sternberg.

So Sternberg created a new position--"information engineer"--dedicated exclusively to digging up the answers. The first person to fill it: Bob Lee, 34, a former network engineer at Apple, who now sits in front of three monitors poring over an estimated 200 gigabytes of data every day from more than 5 million users. It's Lee's job, using a combination of networking chops and statistical analysis, to point out trends, explain network hiccups, and reveal what new features are hits or duds.

Other Web 2.0 companies, like PayPal and Slide, have begun adding similar positions to answer queries that off-the-shelf analytics tools can't handle, such as calculating churn rates. "There's all this data available to help make decisions," Sternberg says. "But it takes someone really focusing on it to get the benefit."

De-Cloaking

I know I have a lot of lurkers (from many continents, actually) out there. While this blog surrpetitiously approves of lurking at this particular surf spot, I have a favor to ask.

One of my former colleagues at Bowling Green just sent me this:

A little off-topic, and I apologize. But your friends at BGSu's English Dept have a new blog; it's in the beta testing stage right now, but check it out and let us know what you think. Suggestions always welcome.

http://greatexpectationsenglishbg.blogspot.com/

While I personally think it is a fabulous idea, the cool folks at BG would benefit MORE from you lurkers going over there and giving them your perspecives. So, paddle on over and see how the surf conditions are over at "Great Expectations" (how Dickensian!).

Heroic Professors and Students

Thank you to Pandagon for this roundup.

From Ohio’s Chronicle-Telegram:

Kevin P. Granata, a professor of biomechanics, was working in his office, where he had developed some the country’s most advanced thinking on movement dynamics and cerebral palsy. And down on the first floor, his brother-in-law, Michael Diersing, whose wife was the identical twin sister of Granata’s wife, was chatting and checking e-mail alongside Granata’s doctoral assistant, Gregory Slota… Granata had heard the commotion in his third-floor office and ran downstairs. He was a military veteran, very protective of his students. He was gunned down trying to confront the shooter.

From the Indy Star:

Paul Granata said details are still fuzzy, but family members who traveled to the school were told Kevin Granata went to his office early to work on research and heard the shots being fired. He had an office near the shooting rampage.
“I was told he came out of his office to see what was going on and he was trying to help people,” Paul Granata said. “Unfortunately, in the process of trying to help people, he was shot.”

From the Washington Post:

[W]hen the gunshots rang out on the second floor, Granata, a military veteran, was in his office on the third floor. He walked out and across the hall to a classroom, where 20 frightened students were wondering what to do. He directed them into his office, where he ushered them to safety — in close quarters but behind the locked doors. Then, aware that other students might be in danger on the second floor, he and another professor, Wally Grant, went downstairs to investigate, Slota said.

Cho spotted them and shot them both. Grant was wounded but survived; Granata was killed. If the students in the classroom had tried to run out, they would have confronted the killer, too, Slota said.

“All those in that class, they all made it,” Slota said. “They were locked up until the police came. [Granata] couldn’t sit around and do nothing. He had to help out, find out what was going on.”

And then of course there’s the gallantry of Engineering professor Liviu Librescu, already much noted in the media coverage, but here’s a little detail I hadn’t seen before, from the Gulf News:

With bursts of gunfire rattling through the second floor of Norris Hall, Librescu, 76, closed his classroom door and urged his students to escape out the windows, recalled senior Caroline Merrey of Baltimore, the third student to jump.

As they fled, Librescu held the door shut with his body as the gunman, 23-year-old senior Cho Seung-Hui, tried to force his way in. Moments after the last student leapt to safety, Cho apparently succeeded in forcing the door open and shot Librescu to death.

With the Graves Not Even Cold

We've got some real ghouls on the right fringe. I hope that the Hokies collectively see these pundits for the cowards they are.

Boortz, others blame VA Tech victims for not fighting back.

In the April 18 edition of his daily program notes, called Nealz Nuze and posted on his website, nationally syndicated radio host Neal Boortz asked: "How far have we advanced in the wussification of America?" Boortz was responding to criticism of comments he made on the April 17 broadcast of his radio show regarding the mass shooting at Virginia Tech. During that broadcast, Boortz asked: "How the hell do 25 students allow themselves to be lined up against the wall in a classroom and picked off one by one? How does that happen, when they could have rushed the gunman, the shooter, and most of them would have survived?" In his April 18 program notes, Boortz added: "It seems that standing in terror waiting for your turn to be executed was the right thing to do, and any questions as to why 25 students didn't try to rush and overpower Cho Seung-Hui are just examples of right wing maniacal bias. Surrender -- comply -- adjust. The doctrine of the left. ... Even the suggestion that young adults should actually engage in an act of self defense brings howls of protest."

In the April 17 edition of his program notes, Boortz had similarly asked: "Why didn't some of these students fight back? How in the hell do you line students up against a wall (if that's the way it played out) and start picking them off one by one without the students turning on you? You have a choice. Try to rush the killer and get his gun, or stand there and wait to be shot. I would love to hear from some of you who have insight into situations such as this. Was there just not enough time to react? Were they paralyzed with fear? Were they waiting for someone else to take action? Sorry ... I just don't understand."

In questioning the actions of Virginia Tech students involved in the April 16 incident, Boortz joined the ranks of various commentators, including National Review Online contributor John Derbyshire, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn, who also writes for the National Review, and right-wing pundit and Fox News analyst Michelle Malkin.

In an April 17 weblog post on National Review Online's The Corner, Derbyshire asked: "Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake -- one of them reportedly a .22." Time.com Washington editor Ana Marie Cox criticized Derbyshire in an April 17 post on Time magazine's political weblog, Swampland.

Steyn and Malkin have made similar statements. In her April 18 syndicated column, Malkin wrote: "Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance. And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense." In his April 18 National Review column, Steyn suggested that Virginia Tech students were guilty of an "awful corrosive passivity" that is "an existential threat to a functioning society."

Thirty-two people were killed in the Virginia Tech shooting, described by the Associated Press as "the worst mass shooting in U.S. history."

From the April 17 broadcast of Cox Radio Syndication's The Neal Boortz Show:

BOORTZ: There are several questions about the Virginia Tech situation yesterday. One of them is the blame game. The other one is gun control. The other one is -- and this is one that I've been reading up on a little bit this morning and have gained some insight, and I'm hoping -- I would love to get some psychological or somebody in the business that can answer this question: How the hell do 25 students allow themselves to be lined up against the wall in a classroom and picked off one by one? How does that happen, when they could have rushed the gunman, the shooter, and most of them would have survived?

A Tragedy

My prayers are with the victims and families of the victims at Virginia Tech. Period. This is a sad, terrible, no-good, tragic day.

Don't Forget...