Castro’s Succession?

Castro’s announcement that he is temporarily turning over power to his brother Raul coincides with my reading of the New Yorker’s article in the July 31 issue by Jon Lee Anderson, about the speculation in Cuba about Castro’s plans for succession and about the US’ plans.

Anderson reports that the Bush administration has appointed Caleb McCarry as the “Cuba transition coordinator,” who describes his job as to be “the senior US official in charge of planning and supporting a genuine democractic transition in Cuba, and to work on it now” (p. 54). Anderson calls him “in effect, the Paul Bremer designate of Cuba.” McCarry says that they are trying to learn from Iraq — that, for example, a governmental structure should remain in place. McCarry is quoted as saying that the accession of Raul would not be satisfactory. “We will continue to offer support for a real transition.”

Stupid Software Tricks

Looked back and saw that WordPress had inserted 8) [I turned off the default conversion to smileys] a smiley face in my posting about Dragon — ?!?! It seems that it automatically translates certain combos of characters to smiley faces. Horrors! So my parenthetical comment about version 8 close parens became a smiley. Blth. I’ve never used emoticons even made with punctuation marks, and no way I would want to be inserting smiley faces into my postings.

In my teaching I often talk about configuring users, meaning either or both of two things: the construct of their users that designers agree to among themselves; and/or the capabilities and responsibilities delegated or denied to users (often combined with their delegation to the system). WordPress has both constructed its users as people who not only use emoticons, but want to substitute cutesy images for them; and arrogated to their software the right to substitute smiley faces for certain combinations of characters, forcing users to wrestle with the software to avoid them — in my case, forcing me to insert a space where it doesn’t belong so that I can write “(version 8 )” instead of it appearing as “version [smiley].”

How to Get A Degree, Painlessly

Today’s NYTimes has an article about online diploma mills — the ones that advertise a college degree instantly for as little as $500. The Times called the advertised phone numbers. The companies are quite up front about how this works — to do otherwise would be fraud. If you want to use their degree fraudulently, well, that’s not their problem.

Excerpts from the article, from what the company said:

“[W]we will take your word on your qualifications, and we will base your degree on what you tell us…you will receive, within 7 to 10 business days, a bachelor’s degree, an M.B.A., a master’s degree or even a Ph.D. The degree will be made to your specifications. [Students pick their GPA]…you can graduate summa cum laude…..You are allowed to assume any titles that come with your degree. If you are to get a Ph.D., you could legally call yourself doctor. And when we receive an inquiry from a prospective employer we will verify your degree and send off certified copies of the transcript…With a bachelor’s, you get a four-year transcript; with a master’s you get a three-year transcript. Each class is listed, graded, and the transcript conforms to standards in your major…Q. You don’t have any classes, even online? A. No, but our Web site makes it look like we do…The diploma comes with two letters of recommendation…[Accreditation?] Accreditation is only really an issue in the academic world.”

Voice Recognition Software

I’m a moderate fan of Dragon Naturally Speaking — not a BIG fan, I don’t use it a lot, but I do use it. (I only have it on my home desktop machine — I would use it more if I installed it on my laptop.) I’m a very fast typist, so it’s slower than I am. But — I started using it when I was having repetitive stress problems, and it does help save one’s arms. And I find it particularly useful when I want to make detailed notes on something I’m reading, so I don’t have to go back and forth between reading and making notes. I should be able to have the reading open next to my keyboard, but, in practice, I find that it’s easier to sit back in my chair and read excerpts aloud and make comments.

The reviews for the new version 9 are enthusiastic, though NYTime’s Pogue says that, if you have 8, it’s not worth upgrading to 9 (thank goodness, since I just upgraded to 8 ). I was impressed when I started version 8 and it got “Foucault” right. But every dictation that I have done with it does require some error correction, slowing down the process. What I’ve found works best is to dictate a whole paragraph, then stop to review the paragraph and correct mistakes. (You don’t want to wait too long to correct mistakes, and you do want to do them within Dragon, not from the keyboard — Dragon learns as it goes along, so an uncorrected mistake will recur.)

Version 9, they say, doesn’t require that you train it — with older versions, you read a prepared text into it for a while. But no doubt it still uses — and benefits from — another kind of training: you have it scan a bunch of your documents, so it learns your vocabularly. Which is probably why version 8 knew “Foucault.”

It does make some hilarious mistakes…

An aside: Pogue has written about Dragon before, because he uses it, but I was surprised at the NPR review — how has Dragon managed to get all this publicity?

Print Media Access for the Vision Impaired: Lacking!

Researching large type magazines for my father, who is vision-impaired, is discouraging. Two problems: there aren’t many out there; and they’re hard to locate and order.

The first Google result was a site from a library that listed only Reader’s Digest and the New York Times. The NYT link took me to their store (not subscription orders) where a search turned up nothing. Nothing on the subscriptions page. Only persistence and a Google search of the NYT site turned up the information that yes, there is a large type weekly — you have to find a different page from the daily home delivery subscriptions, from a tiny link on the ‘manage your account’ page.

The Library of Congress site turned up a longer list — heavy on religious magazines, and those about living with disabilities. There are more periodicals available in recorded format, which is nice but, well, there are times when you really want PRINT.

It’ll be interesting to see how this changes as baby boomers age.

Two Good Books for Aspiring Academics (and for Actual Ones, Too)

1. Robert Boice, Professors as Writers: a Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing

2. Ellen Daniel, Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists

1. Professors as Writers describes itself as “a self-help manual for colleagues who want to write more productively, painlessly, and successfully.” Based on his many years of working with writers (academic and otherwise) and his own painless, stress-free writing, Boice presents practical advice that goes well beyond (although it does include) strategies for overcoming procrastination.He says that one of the dirty secrets of academia is that many find writing hard and unpleasant but believe that they’re the only ones. (I was much relieved when I read in Ann Patchett’s memoir Truth and Beauty — Patchett’s novel Bel Canto is breathtakingly good — that every writer she knew found writing hard and painful.) Boice presents a 4-step program:

1. Practice automaticity – or generative writing. Just write. Put off the internal editors, critics, etc. Not all the time, but it’s often useful for getting started or unstuck.
2. Externality – external controls that ensure writing. Make writing a high priority, recurrent activity by scheduling it in, as a priority. Rearrange your environment and writing habits in ways that help you work regularly and productively. work in small, regular amounts. Plan your writing sessions so that you’re working on a specific, finishable unit in each session. DON’T write for long periods of time — set limits. PLAN your work, “planfulness.”
3. Self-control: monitor your internal self-talk; figure out what’s adaptive and what’s not; interrupt the maladaptive thoughts; and reward yourself.
4. sociality – solicit comments on work in progress; prepare for negative criticism; develop a sense of audience; build social networks.
5. (Yeah, it’s a 4-step program but he has a 5th suggestion): Keep track — of time, pages, and progress toward completion. whatever.

Reading this over it seems sort of obvious, which I guess it is — what’s different about this book is the detailed reasons, examples, suggestions, and his understanding of the wide variety of reasons academics (specifically) have trouble writing.

He has another, longer, denser, excellent but hard-to-find book for all kinds of writers, based on his years of counselling writers: How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure.

My major complaint with both these books is, oddly, how disorganized they are. He says lots of useful things, but when I go back to try to find points or to understand the structure of the book, I find they both tend to wander. But I only noticed this when I went back to try to find things I remembered reading.

2. Every Other Thursday is about a group of scientists, mostly academics, and eventually all women (though it wasn’t intended that way) who met over a period of 25 years to discuss professional concerns, act as a sounding board for one another but also to help one another act, providing information, support, advice, and encouragement. The book is both about the group process and the sorts of things they’ve learned. For a new academic, in particular, there’s a lot that I wish I had known earlier.

I particularly liked the discussion of process. At the beginning of the evening, each member asks for a set amount of time from the group, and everyone has an opportunity to raise an issue. When I participated in such a group many years ago, the first person to shift the conversation from the general to raise a specific issue got the group’s attention for the entire evening — and since the group met monthly, this meant that it was often hard to get the group’s help.

New Pew Internet Study Report on Blogging: Mostly Personal Expression

The Pew Internet Project has a new report on Bloggers, available from: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp.

Excerpts:
A new, national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers…

The blog population has grown to about 12 million American adults, or about 8% of adult internet users and that the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.

* 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else;
* 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30.
* Women represent 46% of bloggers and men 54%.
* 76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others.
* When asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is “my life and experiences.”

Bloggers are also heavy users of the nternet in general. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material
they find online – like songs, text, or images – and remixed it into their own artistic creation…. A whopping 77% of bloggers have shared something online that they created themselves, like their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos. By comparison, 26% of internet users have done this.

“[T] this survey shows that most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression,” said Lenhart. “Blogs make it easy to document individual experiences, share practical knowledge, or just keep in touch with friends and family.”

* 87% of bloggers allow comments on their blog.
* 72% of bloggers post photos to their blog.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has created an online version of the Blogger Callback telephone survey and invites participation from the general public. The resulting answers will not be a representative sample, but the online survey will give observers a chance to see the questions in context and to comment on some specific aspects of blogging. The survey is online at the following address:
http://www.psra.com/PewBloggerSurvey.html

Comment: for people interested in survey research and studies of technology use, this is very useful — SEE the survey, and take it yourself.

Needed: Tivo for Radio

One of the many things I like about Tivo is that I can be only half paying attention and only half-hear something, or be paying attention but not catch a crucial word, or suddenly realize that something was more important than I thought — and do an instant rewind.

I listen to NPR a lot, and they have a lot that’s worth paying attention to — but of course not everything is equally worthy of attention, and I don’t just sit still and listen. Since I’ve had Tivo, I sometimes find myself grabbing the remote control for my radio to replay something, and then remember that I can’t.

So – when is someone going to come out with a Digital Radio Recorder? Not to mention the convenience of being able to time-shift radio prgrams. I know, there’s Radio Shark but it has to be connected to a PC. I can set my mp3 player to record radio on a timer. And I could go online and listen to many NPR programs. But I want the instant, easy funtionality of Tivo.

UPDATE: It occurred to me to search and see if there is such a thing, and I turned up Radio Your Way — for$200.  Pricey. And it’s a portable, requiring headphones.  And while it does do time-shifting, it doesn’t seem to do the instant replay.  What I need is a kitchen radio for when I’m eating breakfast, reading the paper, and half-listening to NPR…

Ethical Travel

Something I’ve been musing about since my March trip to Viet Nam is the influence of travelers on the countries we visit, especially developing countries like Viet Nam — and how to travel ethically. Indeed, is it possible for these encounters across culture to be ethical, that is, for us to be able to encounter one another with respect and for the influx of “wealthy” Western tourists to be a predominantly positive (or neutral) inflluence on the country visited.

I don’t expect the countries visited to remain the same — though some travelers would, I’m sure, like countries like Viet Nam to remain quaint, third-world theme parks for first-world tourists. But can the changes be beneficial rather than deleterious?

Last week I learned about Ethical Traveler, an nonprofit concerned about such issues.

In Viet Nam, I was often uncomfortable about being there as a traveler, and have seriously wondered whether to continue to visit developing countries. I was uncomfortable for at least two reasons: how I felt, being there as a tourist — how I behaved and how I was treated — and tourism’s influence on the country and people, both good and bad.

Visiting the Mekong Delta with a tour, as most visitors do, felt like Disney’s jungle ride, as we motored along narrow waterways surrounded by jungle, peering at the locals, with barely enough room to pass the boatloads of tourists coming the other way. One woman held out a conical straw hat as we passed, chanting, “Money? Money?” At a rest stop we tasted (and bought) banana wine that no one really wanted and were entertained by musicians playing and singing traditional music with which the group was clearly bored.

Motoring through the floating markets of the Mekong in another boatload of tourists, I envisioned a clutch of extra-terrestrials traveling through downtown Fresno, exclaiming to one another and pointing cameras at the people on the sidewalks, visiting a grocery store and crowding the aisles without buying anything.

Greed was a strong operating force, on both sides. The Vietnamese treated us as walking ATMs. As I posted on my former blog, the selling was obnoxiously aggressive, with women often grabbing my arm as I walked by, the items on offer monotonously the same, and the fraud rampant. In Sapa, the relatively-new mandatory stop on the tourist route, the local ethnic women now spend their time making fabrics to sell and aggressively chasing the tourists, disrupting the former routines of daily life.

But of course a major reason for the pervasive selling is the presence of buyers. For Westerners, Viet Nam is a cheap country. The average daily wage is $1. A good hotel room is $30 — adequate rooms can be $15. I had a raw silk jacket tailor-made, with repeated fittings, for $65. And we buy junk. For tourists, there’s often a frenzy of buying, in the grip of a clutching greed.

Tourism and foreign trade have visibly raised the standard of living in Viet Nam, where many people, young as well as old, show the physical effects of the famines suffered as recently as the mid-80s. The government remains repressive, and the people relatively unconcerned with politics (from my limited experience, and conversations with returning overseas Vietnamese) — but the young people, despite being unable to travel, are learning English and using the internet.

At the workshop I wrote about yesterday I met Jeff Greenwald, a long-time traveler and travel writer, and executive director of Ethical Traveler, a nonprofit that seeks to both inform travelers who are concerned about ethical travel, and to leverage the economic influence of travelers in human rights and environmental campaigns. I encourage readers to visit this site and see what this group is up to.

Selling to tourists Ethnic minority women selling fabric, surrounding a rough cafe with tourists eating lunch.

Originally uploaded by NVH.

Digital Storytelling

Spent three days in a workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling. Three days of concentrated work resulted in a 2.5 minute video story with images, soundtrack, and music, done with Photoshop and Adobe Premier Pro. Of course, this sort of work goes faster as one learns, but still — while I’m impressed with what can be done, I found the software surprisingly unusable. Plus there were numerous hardware problems of various sorts.

Although the participants in these workshops are varied, many are K-12 teachers. Our group was unusually small and diverse: a teacher, a new journalist, an experienced travel writer, and me. The instructor said that they get some people who barely know how to use computers. The group of us were, for the most part, pretty computer savvy and it was not easy. We were half Mac and half PC users, so please don’t tell me about how much easier Mac is. One of the experienced Mac users said that iMovie is useful but limited.

In sum, I would say that the rumors of multimedia, user-created content are greatly exaggerated. Yes, we could produce work that amateurs like us could not have, until quite recently — but the learning curve was steep, I’ve far from mastered the software, and it’s complex and non-intuitive enough that I know that in another week I’ll no longer remember how to do some of what I did today.

I am, however, quite pleased with myself and my piece. And it was interesting to see how much I know about visual media just from being a consumer of such, in this era.

And I now feel that I can muddle through with the software, and I can — inefficiently, and with frustration — do media production that’s orders of magnitude beyond what I could do a few days ago. If I were to do it regularly, with knowledgeable people around, I’m sure I would find the technology amazingly powerful. But I know that I’m not going to put in the kind of time, on a regular basis, needed to master this.

But I’m glad I did it and I will use some of what I learned.