Another Option for Recording Telephone Interviews: Grand Central

Again, thanks to Cool Tools:

Grand Central from Google. It does a variety of things, but what’s of interest for researchers is that it can record calls:

GrandCentral lets you save all or parts of a call. Just press the number 4 to turn on and off recording – both parties will hear an announcement notifying callers that call recording has been initiated or stopped. Listen to your recording in your GrandCentral inbox or by phone when you check your voicemail. …You can forward recorded messages just like you do voicemail forwarding.

And it’s free, at least for now.

My postings on related tools: cellphone diary studies, a microphone type device and another web-based service, and another microphone device that works with a phone.

 

Berkeley Center for New Media Gets Chair Endowed by Craigslist

The University of California, Berkeley, today (Thursday, Jan. 17) announced plans to establish the first endowed faculty chair at the Berkeley Center for New Media with a donation of $1.6 million from craigslist, one of the most popular Web sites in the world.The donation, which will support research, symposia and lectures, will be matched with $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a total of $3.1 million. The matching funds come from the foundation’s landmark challenge grant, announced last September, that it gave to UC Berkeley to create 100 new endowed chairs. The new chairs are designed to help the public research university compete with private institutions.

More.

Digtal Cameras, Cameraphones “Ruin” Booksignings

NY Times Sunday Jan 6:

The British novelist/actor/comedian/poetry tutor Stephen Fry is quoted as saying of booksignings– in the past someone wanting a picture “would go behind the signing table to put an arm round me or a hand on my shoulder as I signed the book with a flourish while looking up into the lens grinning soupily. Of course B wouldn’t be acquainted with A’s particular make of camera. Today everyone has a camera. They have a dedicated digital machine or something built into their mobile phone. As a result of this ubiquity the signing queue has become such a living hell that I don’t do them anymore. All the pleasure has been sucked out.”

US News Best Careers: Usability/User Experience and Librarian

For what it’s worth – US News & World Reports list Usability/User Experience and Librarian among their 31 careers with the bright futures.

Gloria Steinem on Gender and the Presidential Race

If you missed this in the NY Times, it’s well worth reading:
Women Are Never Front-Runners by Gloria Steinem.

By the way, most of audio/video reports on Hillary’s emotional moment in New Hampshire stop after the first few seconds and don’t play her whole response.

Excerpts from Steinam op/ed:

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together….

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system…

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

Best TV

While I’m on a jag of updating this neglected blog, I’ll throw in some kudos for, yes, TV shows. What I’ve discovered is that, if I’m going to have TV, I have to have cable, because the only things I like are on cable.

My currently favorite is Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. In each episode, Mike Rowe takes on several very dirty jobs. Usually literally dirty, where he ends up covered with mud, or soot, or much more unpleasant coatings. And dirty in the sense of hard work, jobs that most would think are unpleasant.

The jobs are interesting and presented fully and graphically, and intelligently (shoeing horses, artificially inseminating horses (more complex than you may have thought), checking wild geese in Alaska for bird flu, retrieving golf balls from the water traps in a golf course, scrubbing out the inside of a steam boiler on an antique ship, getting made up as a zombie by a movie special-effects person, herding buffalo in Montana). Rowe jumps right in and does what needs to be done (but not always without whining).

Mike Rowe has a droll sense of humor. And he easily befriends whomever he is working with. (He lives in SF and I keep hoping I’ll run into him somewhere and see if he’s really as nice and interesting as he seems on TV.) I can’t remember any of his good lines off-hand, so here are some quoted on the website:

• “I have mud in places no man should.”
  “If my mother sees this, she’ll hunt you down.” (I saw this one — he was on a fishing boat having to inch his way out on a very dangerous-looking spar– if that’s what they call those things).
• “We’re just a couple of guys squeezing the poo out of chickens …” (He talks a lot about poo.)
• “I can’t finish my thought because I have to put my finger in this alligator’s bottom.” Update 1/8/pm: this evening they re-ran this episode. It seems that the way to sex an alligator is to stick a finger into his or her (undetermined at this point, obviously) rectum to feel the genitalia — not visible from the outside. He was getting 4-foot-long alligators tossed to him, and he had to grab each one behind the head, fast (before they could think about it and bite him, he was told) , sex them, and pass them on. So he was trying to say something but got an alligator tossed to him. Oh, and he didn’t say “bottom” — they bleeped it.

The show, and Rowe, have a lot of respect for the people who are hosting him and his crew, and for the work that they do.

He also has respect for his crew. He doesn’t pretend that somehow it’s just him and us. So we often see – and he talks about — the crew, too, especially when they’re all crammed into some small space, or traipsing around in difficult conditions outside. When a cameraman slipped in knee-deep muck in Alaska, we saw it. When Rowe was crammed into the small, cannister-like, soot-covered boiler of the ship, trying to scrub it when he could barely move, he turned his tiny camera on the cameraman crammed into an even smaller, more joint-challenging adjoining space filming him. Recently he helped some abalone farmers in Monterey Bay and they ended by sauteeing some abalone; he went around giving bites to all the crew who were filming it.

Conference Blogging

One of my favorite blogs — in fact, one of the very few that I read regularly — is Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. Recently he reviewed something of potential interest to a lot of the lurkers who read this:

Tips for Conference Bloggers
By Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman
2007, 6 pages
Free
Available as a PDF from here

It’s short — not much text on each page. And the advice is good.

What it lacks that I’d like to see is more about the content; this is mostly about process.  My frequent beef with conference blogging is that the blogger interjects his/her own uninformed reactions.  A straight report without reaction, or with reaction/evaluation at the end, can be useful.  An informed colloquy can be useful.  But what’s most annoying is when the blogger doesn’t understand the speaker, the content, or the context, but writes in a way that is intended to demonstrate the blogger’s superiority to the speaker.

Alternative Word Processors

NY Times Magazine article yesterday:
“An Interface of One’s Own” by Virginia Heffernan

She describes several wordprocessing programs designed for writers, including Scriverner, Nisus Writer, and others. I plan to try at least a couple.

UPDATE: They’re all for Mac.  Sigh.

What Do “Regular” People Do? Technology Frustrations

Why is it that computer technology manufacturers get away with a level of incompetence and callousness that we would not tolerate from other participants in the marketplace? The only answer I can think of is that they ALL do it. Which means it’s easy for someone to have a competitive edge: be usable!

[Yes, I'm thinking about switching to Mac. I have so much invested in hardware, software, and especially in learning how to do things in Windows...But...If switching means not having these problems...]

I currently have open trouble tickets with 3 different hard/software manufacturers:

• I upgraded Reference Manager fro 10 to 11 and now a crucial function doesn’t work
• I upgraded Atlas ti from 5 to 5.2+ and it failed completely. After much back and forth, including several uninstalls/reinstalls, they sent me a file that seems to have solved the problem. I’m waiting to see if it keeps working.
  • Tech support chided me for not installing the additional updates — but when I installed the first update it failed completely, barring me from further upgrades.
  • My Netgear wifi router, which I bought in October and which worked for a while, has more or less failed. The signal strength, even with my laptop literally right next to the router, shows 2 out or 5 bars, and neither laptop nor cellphone can connect to it (so it’s not the laptop that’s failing, it’s the router).
    • To get tech support from Netgear, I had to register the device. Several times, I put in the serial # and it told me that the number was a dupe (had I already registered it?), but it didn’t recognize any of my three email addresses (so no, I wasn’t in the system). I had to put in several variations on the serial #, capitalizing the letters and alternating between zeros and ohs, and with and without the asterisk at the end of the number. Now I’m not sure which combination of these finally worked. Same thing happened with the password they sent me. How hard can it be to create unambiguous serial numbers and passwords?
    • Ironically, the form that asked me how hard the device was to install offered a dropdown list of several 4 digit numbers — something like 1046, 1047, and 1048. So their usability questionnaire was unusable.

  And I’m actually more technically able than most of my friends and relatives outside of the iSchool. And I have built-in tech support from the iSchool staff and our students. I can’t imagine what most of my friends would do with this level of failure.

  As it is, I’ve spent much of my time over break troubleshooting and working around these problems. I suspect I’ve spent almost as much time on the technical problems as on the work this technology is supposed to support: analyzing my data (Atlas ti) and writing several articles (Ref Mgr).

  And that’s not counting the effort that went into connecting a new 2nd monitor — which worked, but it took a while to get the resolution right. At least I knew that the problem was the resolution — again, what would someone with no tech skills do when they brought home a new monitor and found the image was wonky? Again, I’m not that technically sophisticated, but more so than most of my non-iSchool friends.

  As long as there continue to be such usability problems with hardware and software — including those as completely pointless and unnecessary as the serial number problem — computer technology will come nowhere near the level of adoption that it could have. Not to mention the amount of annoyance and frustration that it generates.

Software Failures – Never Update Working Software!

My new rule: if it’s running, don’t update it!

If you are running Atlas ti, do not, do not, DO NOT update it to 5.2. It has failed on both my machines (home desktop and home laptop) and the fix that tech support sent doesn’t work. SoI’m trying to finish two articles over the break using my Atlas ti coding and I can’t get into my data.

Similarly, if you are running Reference Manager, DO NOT update from 10 to 11. It only works partially, and exactly the update that I wanted (to no longer have to key in over again the text to search on when inserting refs into an article, e.g., the author’s name) — that’s exactly what doesn’t work, and it broke the entire function. So I CAN’T key in the name and search on it from within a document. I have to leave the document, go to RM, find the reference, select it, and go back to the document to insert it. Again, tech support has been unable to fix this.

So time that I should be spending on my research is being wasted trying to fix broken software.