“She’s Geeky” conference in Bay Area – and call for volunteers

From the “She’s Geeky” organizers:

Dear She’s Geeky Women,

We are really pleased to announce that Early Bird Registration is open for:

DC – November 13-14, 2009  Friday – Saturday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/annoucing-shes-geeky-dc-nov-13-14/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekydc.eventbrite.com/

Bay Area – January 29-31, 2010  Friday – Sunday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/shes-geeky-bay-area-3/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekybayarea3.eventbrite.com/

We are looking for Bay Area “Host/Organizing Team Members” – if you live in the Bay Area and would like to/are able to volunteer some time (up to several hours a week over the 12 weeks leading up to the event) to help us with outreach, marketing/PR, or event production please contact us at info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org and we’ll get back to you.

To make our vision of making it to at least 10 cities next year our goal is to raise $200,000 by the end of the year.  We have plans to meet with several dozen successful women in tech to ask them to contribute to this vision. If you know of any successful women you think might be interested in supporting the growth of She’s Geeky please let us know. We will also be launching a Grassroots Campaign and we are designing a special edition She’s Geeky T-Shirt that will be for this event.

Some things are new this year for our events:

• You can bring your daughters / young women you know. We have a special low price for young women so please take advantage of it and bring your daughters, nieces and young friends.   We currently don’t have the capacity to offer child care but are considering our options for providing this.

• We are now offering a Personal Brand Sponsorship Level at $50.  This rate is on top of the ticket you choose to purchase  and for this contribution your personal brand/blog name will be listed and linked to on our Event Announcement Pages for the event & your logo will be printed out and on display at the conference.

• Community Sponsorships of $250 and $500 are also available through registration.  The $250 level includes one full event ticket (all the days of the unConference) and the $500 level includes two full event tickets. These are for small companies and firms who want to support the event or for an individual if they choose.

Corporate Sponsorship is available for both events contact us to learn more – info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org

Thank you for your continued support and interest in She’s Geeky!

She’s Geeky convenes to inspire women technologists for the future and advance systemic change in tech culture, providing a space to create enduring communities that foster collaboration and innovation among women professional women working in Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
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Kindle Review

Update 10/1/09: Amazon has quietly raised the price of most new books to $15.  They are, more or less, a monopoly provider, so they can and no doubt will raise the price of books as they gain market share.

There has recently been  discussion about using Kindle for student textbooks. I got a Kindle 2 this summer and have been using it.  Here’s my review of the Kindle, with special attention to its potential for textbooks.  (The Kindle DX has a larger screen, but not so much larger that my points below don’t apply.)

IN SUMMARY:

What I like about the Kindle:

• portability, the ability to carry a lot of text with me and read whenever, wherever;
• syncing with iPhone, so that I have my Kindle books with me on the phone — e.g., waiting at the vet today I read some of the novel I’m reading, on the iPhone;
• string searching within the text (but with problems — see below);
• the ability to change text size: e.g., I use it on cardio machines at the gym and make the text large enough to see whatever the distance;
• built-in dictionary: highlight a word and the definition pops up. For specialized vocabularly such as used in a scholarly book or textbook, however, it’s not very useful;
• And price: $10 for most books from Amazon.  But this varies: Routledge has started putting out scholarly books on Kindle an the prices range from $15 to $30 and more.

There are limits on what’s available.  For my upcoming trip to Burma, of the fiction and non-fiction books about Burma that I’m trying read. only one, a novel, is available in Kindle edition.  I’d really like a couple of the more important non-fiction books on the Kindle: easier to carry; easier to search for place names; and less likely to incite the interest of authorities who might confiscate those books as I enter the country.

What I find most difficult for textbook-like or scholarly reading:

• the decontextualization of the content, and
• the near-impossibility of highlighting and annotating in a meaningful way.

For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction.    I would not use it for professional reading that I want to understand, annotate, and go back to. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only those I will read and delete.

——-

For those who want to read more:

The Kindle is, like a computer screen, a small window on the text, considerably less than a page, even of a small book; and suffers from the computer screen’s lack of context.  It’s hard to see how a topic is related to others; to flip through a lot of pages quickly; to know where you are in the text; or see how long a section is.  The Kindle has a progress bar on the bottom of the screen and the text locations are numbered, but it doesn’t give the intuitive sense of location that a book does.  If I’m 70% of the way through my book – that doesn’t tell me whether it’s a big book or a small one, and how many pages that represents.  It’s even harder to know how many pages until a chapter break or the end of a section.

It does offer the option of looking at a table of contents, and searching for text strings, and you can page through the text, but, again, it’s more like moving through an online document, although a little slower than on a computer.  It doesn’t scroll, it pages.  It’s quite fast enough for reading, but not for skimming or thumbing.

Although text can be highlighted or annotated, it’s slow and tedious. The Kindle control for highlighting text is a tiny button.  The highlight itself is merely a light gray underline. I use a variety of kinds of highlights to mark my own texts, to distinguish major and minor points, outline the author’s argument, or number the topics or points made; not possible on Kindle.

Adding a note requires several steps: (1) hit menu key (2) use small button to scroll down to “add a note or highlight” (3) click (4) move cursor on page of text to where note should be (5) type on the tiny keyboard (I’m a fast, touch typist and this is slow) (6)  scroll to “save note” on screen and (7) click. Once you’ve added a note, it looks like a linked endnote, a superscript number.  You have to click on the superscript to see the note. Nowhere near as easy or as visible as, say, adding a virtual sticky to a PDF document, let alone writing in the margin.

String searching is useful, but is like using a book indexed by an obsessive-compulsive indexer. You have to (1) hit menu key; (2) scroll to search; (3) click; (4) type the term on small keyboard; (5) click “find.”  The result is a series of 2-line quotes for every use of that term.  if you can’t tell by that snippet whether a section is the one you want versus, say, a passing mention, and the term or phrase is used often, this could be a very long, tedious process.

Finally, a minor point but one that is getting more important as I have more books.  Books on the Kindle are listed by auathor and title.  Again, the lack of physical cues can be a problem: which is the skinny red book you used for X? The big textbook from Prof. B’s course?  This may seem minor, but I find some of my Kindle books sinking into an undifferentiated list — especially the ones I haven’t read yet.  The thumbnails of covers that Amazon uses on its site would be very helpful.  For example, one of my unread books  is “The Glass Palace”:  is this a current novel I just read a good review of?   No,  it’s an older novel set in the Burma of the British occupation. (That phrase has significance in Burma.)

For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction.   I would NOT use it for professional reading that I want to understand, go back to, and re-use. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only books I want to read and delete.

Kindle, cont.

The other day I wrote a brief post about getting a Kindle.  Here I want to expand on the effect of the Kindle on my reading and book-buying habits.

I love it that I could pre-order a book that was about to be published and have it appear on my Kindle.  I love being able to take it to the gym.  I have some long flights coming up, and traveling around, and it’ll be great.

BUT — I miss real books. And won’t give them up.  But won’t be buying as many, which is real dilemma — I want and NEED bookstores to stay open. And Berkeley, which was once a great bookstore town, is now impoverished, with both Cody’s and Black Oak gone.

As I said in the last post, the Kindle doesn’t work for professional reading. And for books I want to keep and refer back to — professional or other — I’ll want a physical volume.

For leisure reading: the Kindle doesn’t remind me that I’m in the middle of a book, or that I’m getting near the end and so will read more to find out how it turns out.  It doesn’t sit around visibly calling to me the way a book does.  I find myself looking for a newspaper or magazine when, say, I sit down to eat, and not thinking of the Kindle.  It’s taking me a lot longer to read my current book (Netherland) than it normally would, for such a book — I just don’t think about it. Even though it’s a wonderful, superbly-written book.

I was telling someone about Netherland and I had no idea who the author is (Joseph O’Neill) — and I didn’t recognize the book online when I went looking to see if the author had a new book out. I don’t ever see the cover.

I don’t have a pile of books reminding me of what I have yet to read, or what I’m in the middle of — serious books for some moods; light novels (sci fi, of late) for other moods.

I went into Pegasus books looking for something for a gift and felt a longing for REAL books.  I bought a new paperback by a sci fi author I like (Joe Haldeman; The Forever War is a sci fi classic, and rightly so) — I rationalized that it was less than $10 so the savings on the Kindle would be minimal.  But, since that’s the sort of book I read on the cardio machines at the gym, it would be more convenient to have it on the Kindle. But — not the same.

I felt guilty toward Pegasus — that I’ll buy fewer books from them. (This was before I learned that Black Oak had closed — more guilt.)  And I need bookstores around to (1) browse for books to buy in the Kindle (more guilt), and (2) buy books that I want or need in paper.  Yet this means I’ll be buying less and their sales will go down a little more.

We need a business model that both acknowledges the digital reality AND allows us to have local outlets — like bookstores — where we can browse, preview books, and get physical as well as digital copies.  One possibility is that Amazon share its Kindle revenue with bookstores –e.g., I go to Pegasus and “buy” a book for my Kindle (at the same price — else we’d all just go home and order).  Also, I’m still waiting for print-on-demand, which would allow my local bookstore to have a huge inventory without the downsides of physical inventory and the impossibility of perfectly anticipating demand.

Kindle Report

I’ve had a Kindle 2 for a couple of weeks now, and have some reflections.

It is incredibly convenient.  I take it to the gym, enlarge the text, prop it on the reading stand on the cardio machines, and off I go.  It turns pages quite fast enough.

The $10 or so per book is great.  I’ve bought books out only in hardcover that I wouldn’t have.  And can more easily buy a book when I read a review, rather than make a note of it and try to remember to find it later.

I do like the ability to search text, though I’ve used it mostly for novels so that’s not a big need.  Also like the built-in dictionary, though I’ve used it only to demo, not for real.

I’m glad I didn’t get the DX — this one is large and heavy enough, and easy to slip into a purse or backpack, or just carry in its own case, such as into a restaurant.  (Also, the DX is half again as much — way too expensive.)

The downsides? I would NOT use it for professional reading.  There’s talk of having students buy textbooks this way — TERRIBLE idea.  It’s a small window onto the text, gives little sense of context, and doesn’t allow easy rifling through the pages which would show more info, in context, with a sense of where in the text something resides, where it fits with other topics.  Just too little a window and untethered from the rest of the text.

On a plane recently I had my brand new iPhone out (in plane mode) fiddling with it, learning how to use it; my MacBook Air out, editing photos; and my Kindle, reading a novel.  What we need now, obviously, is to be able to collapse all those into one.  The most dispensible would probably be the Kindle; keep the biggest and smallest of these and lose the mid-size device.

But not yet.  I can read Kindle books on the iPhone, but I wouldn’t choose to if I didn’t have to.  And my laptop battery doesn’t last as long as I would like.  But soon…

“She’s Geeky” conference coming up

The She’s Geeky conference will be in Mountain View January 30-31 with a no-host pre-conf dinner on the 29th.

Registration  lasts only until January 24th, so if you think you might want to go, time to do it.  Two days – $118 Saturday or Friday only $69.  

Their site says: “We are committed to making this event accessible — if you are unemployed or a student or have some other circumstance — e-mail us at info@shesgeeky.org to get a scholarship code.”

I’ve never gone and am  not  going this time, either, but I think it’s a terrific idea and want to be sure women who might be interested know about it.  

She’s Geeky events are neutral, face-to-face gathering spaces for women who like to geek out. Attendees include women involved in all aspects of technology, including those who like to use geeky tools, not just coders, programmers and engineers. You don’t even have to be from the computer industry. You just have to be a woman who identifies as a geek.

If you’re any of these things, you’re invited to come to She’s Geeky to:

1. Exchange skills and learn from women in different fields of technology.
2. Provide a forum for discussion of issues affecting women in technical fields.
3. Connect the generations of women working in or interested in technology, from those in middle school to the pioneers of the industry who may be elders in their 70’s.
4. Connect women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical or “geeky” field.

I212 Syllabus Posted

I’ve posted a tentative syllabus for I212, Information in Society: Critical Technology Studies: Science and Technology Studies and Reflective HCI.

UPDATE 11/12: that link is now live.

We’ll read some key work in STS and related areas (including distributed cognition and activity theory), and pair those readings with others where authors at least claim to be applying these theoretical approaches to problems related to design, information and information systems, and other areas of interest to students in the class (e.g., probably ICTD).

We’re fiddling with scheduling to try to make this course accessible to the people who want take it (rather than my just picking a time and crossing my fingers that people can show up), so if you’re interested, email me and let me know (vanhouse @ ischool).

Change and Persistence in Digital Media

I recently bought my first Mac, an iMac, after using Windows forever.  And I still have Windows machines for my home and office desktops.  And I’m facing more than ever the dilemma of new versus enduring in digital media.

My Mac has a newer version of Word than my old machines (so I have to remember to save docs in the compatible format — which one of my older machines still won’t open).

On the Mac, I’m trying out EverNote — I’m always looking for something better than a simple wordprocessor for managing research and ideas.  I tried OneNote on my Windows laptop, but I found it clunky.  I was always having trouble getting things to format correctly.

I’ve long used Reference Manager for citation management, but haven’t been able to upgrade from RM 10 to 11 on my desktop, for reasons no one, including the RM tech support team, can figure out.  Now, not only is there not a Mac version, but it’s clear that the company is putting its creative energy into another product, EndNote (EndNote and RM used to be competitors, but one company now owns them both).  (Yes, I can migrate the db from RM to EndNote.  And yes, I KNOW I can run windows on the Mac, if I’m willing to give up the memory and deal with all the complexities.)

I’ve used TiddlyWiki for notes which are saved as HTML files– but Safari can’t save those files.  I have to use Firefox.

I’ve used Picasa, Photoshop Album, and Lightroom to manage photos.  When I moved images from Picasa to Photoshop Album to Lightroom, and then moved Lightroom images from my desktop to my external hard drive, each time I lost all the metadata. Either it can’t be done, or the correct way to do so is obscure — and I only learned this by losing my data.  (I haven’t used iPhoto for much yet.)

I have an archive of several hundred — maybe thousands — of historically important files — not mine — created in Wordperfect 5.0.  The only way I’ve found to convert them to current Wordperfect and/or RTF files is to open them one by one, and save them in a new format.  One of those jobs I keep thinking I should do, but have barely made a dent.

The last time I upgraded my mobile phone — within the same brand — I thought I had successfully transferred my contacts. When the new phone asked, “Do you want to update [sic] your contacts now?” I answered “no,” meaning, “I’ll do it later.” And when I went to install my contacts on the new phone, they were gone. I had missed my one and only opportunity.  (The time before that, I managed to transfer them but the metadata was lost — for each contact, the labels for mobile, home, and office numbers were gone.)

The point is:

• I need to be able to access data consistently over time; and I need to be able to use newer and better tools as they become available.
  
• I need to migrate data across systems: easily, with formatting and metadata preserved.
  
• I need to update software and hardware without losing my previous work.
• When software or hardware becomes obsolete, I still need to access those files.
• And this all needs to be seamless, or at least low effort.

Until we accomplish this, our personal and collective digital memories are at considerable risk.  But clearly this is not the companies’ priority — just want to sell us the newest stuff. But how can they expect us to keep buying the new when it means that we lose our digital memories?

Query: Failed Host Sites, Lost Photos?

I’ve searched a little and not found anything — but maybe my faithful readers know.

I’m looking for an example of a failed web service of some sort where people lost data when the site went under.  I’m SURE I’ve heard of one, but…not remembering, not finding it.  Preferably, I want an example of a site where people lost their personal photos, but any site where people lost personal data would do.

Anybody?

Multimodal Publishing

I’ve recently been introduced to Sophie, software for creating “books” that incorporate text, images, video, and audio:

Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins….Funded by grants from the Mellon and Macarthur foundations and the University of Southern California, Sophie is free and entirely open-source.

So far, I’ve only played with it a little. Friday I’m going to see the products of an archeology class that has used it — will write more then. The most serious limitation is that it requires its own reader, so it cannot (at this point, anyway) be used to produce “papers” on the web. But it looks intriguing. Well worth checking out.

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.