After many years of blogging, and consistent with my desire to move toward retirement, we have ended the Insights blog. Thanks to Doug Bedell for his years of blog support.

‘Crowdsourcing’ – the New, Bigger Water Cooler

Posted on August 28, 2011
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Infographics take specialized skill to design and execute, but when they’re done well, are they helpful! Here’s an example from The Content Wrangler site: an infographic on crowdsourcing.
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Technical Writers Who Speak, Too

Posted on July 30, 2011
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Technical writers may be able to get more mileage, and income, from their knowledge if they can speak it, as well as write it. The notion of speaking about technology to an audience may make some writers queasy, but Sarah Maddox found that it can go surprisingly well.

Sara is a technical writer in Australia who does “ffeathers – a technical writer’s blog.” “You could have blown me down with a feather duster if you’d told me that I would speak at a conference,” she writes. “Then I met Joe Welinske and started blabbing about my love of documentation wikis. There was probably a lot of arm waving and even a bit of in-place leaping about. Joe quickly suggested that I speak at the next WritersUA conference. I remember silence. I probably went pale. But I must have said yes, because within a few months I found myself on stage.

“To my absolute astonishment,” Sarah continues, “my presentation went reasonably well. Since then I’ve presented sessions at a few conferences, and I enjoy the experience more each time.”
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Another Bookish Aim for the Ages – Digital This Time

Posted on June 14, 2011
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It won’t come close to matching the great Royal Library of Alexandria in elegance, and doesn’t care to. But the just-launched Physical Archive of the Internet in Richmond, CA, already has over 300,000 books on hand, well on its way to bettering the 400,000 to 700,000 parchment scrolls that were stored at Alexandria, Egypt in ancient times.

The Physical Archive of the Internet is aiming to digitalize and preserve for long-term storage “one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire” – 10 million or more items. This is a critical time for launching such an ambitious project, the archive notes, because “books are being thrown away, or sometimes packed away, as digitized versions become more available.”
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Amazon Numbering Its Electronic Pages

Posted on February 8, 2011
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You’ve got to hand it to Amazon.com, one of the most relational – if not the most relational – of the high-tech web companies. They pioneered in reader reviews and comments, allow you to buy books at lower prices from associated bookstores and have a great Kindle electronic book reader. Now they’re adding page numbers to the pages of Kindle books that will match those of the paper editions.

Why? “Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read along side others in a book club or class,” Amazon said in a statement.
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A (Computer) Manual for the Ages

Posted on January 13, 2011
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The New Yorker recently had an article on the Vatican Library and about how, among many other treasures,  it houses a 1,461-year-old book (from 550 AD) by the Byzantine historian Procopius that contained a “devastating new portrait” of Justinian, the last great Roman emperor. Read more

128 Years of Christmas Tree Lights

Posted on December 22, 2010
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Here’s a technology brushup for this holiday time – clarification of the confusion (in case you’ve shared it) of who invented the first electrically lighted Christmas tree.

The gentleman was Edward H. Johnson and he lit his first tree in 1882, three years after his associate, Thomas A. Edison, invented the light bulb. Read more

Ralph Lauren’s Alternative Reality

Posted on November 12, 2010
Filed Under Business, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Wd don’t attempt to keep up with events in the fashion world, but when one of those events incorporates advances in visual technology – fusing movies, 3D projection and fashion – it gets our attention. That’s what Ralph Lauren’s “4D” shows did this week at their New York and London stores. Read more

Titantic Being Visited as Her Centennial Approaches

Posted on August 17, 2010
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She is a monument to technological genius and chutzpah as well. RMS Titanic has been resting, half buried, on the ocean bottom for 98 years now. Scientists are becoming concerned about how much longer she can withstand the corrosive, or naturalizing, forces that are turning her into a mired denizen of the sea.

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On August 22, RMS Titanic, Inc., Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a host of other partners will conduct a new dive to the Titanic, the first in six years, to ascertain further how she has been “aging” on the seabed. This visit will be uniquely available to the public, photographed with the latest in undersea 3DHD and 2D cameras. A 3D rendering of the wreck will be created.

We came upon this fabulous mission by stopping at the  Creativity-online website. You need to be a paid subscriber to see all that’s available on the Titanic there, but we got some tantalizing glimpses by nosing around before the “paid?” screen took over. Maybe, you, too, will be so fortunate.

We can understand why this work needs support; much has been learned to benefit oceanography and nautical history and engineering from past visits to the site 2.5 miles below the Atlantic’s surface. See what you can find here, and join Creativity for more, if it suits your interests.

We’ll soon be hearing about the Titanic Centennial, and this dive, it appears, will be its herald. There will be coverage on YouTube and Facebook, and who knows what other forms of modern media. Marconi wireless radio brought the news that the unthinkable was happening in 1912. – Doug Bedell

Memory’s a Dance, Says Dr. Day

Posted on July 30, 2010
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Permit us to introduce you to Ruth S. Day, a cognitive scientist at Duke University. Why? Because Dr. Day is doing intensive study of memory, and memory is large where everything begins, in technical writing as well as other fields, not to mention life itself.

Dr. Day has been studying how professional dancers remember their routines. Have you ever thought about that? A modern dance company doesn’t have classical terms for movements, like ballet companies do. So  some, like Pilobolus, make up names for the shapes they get their dancer’s bodies into – like “shooting seagulls” or “fat gnomes.”  Others, like The Merce Cunningham company, feel that labeling dance moves with words is limiting.

Memory itself is sort of a dance of associations. Pick your own associations.

“There’s no right or wrong strategy,” Day says, “but certain strategies work better in certain situations and the more memory tools a dancer has, the better. The end goal is not memory in and of itself, but to get past the learning and worrying about it – to do the movement well and enjoy it.”

It all seems to come down to identification and intentionality – identifying what you want to accomplish via a technique or gimmick – anything that works for you – and being intentional about that process.

We’re trying, for instance, to improve our quick recognition of jazz piano passages. And we’re finding that looking at the notes as parts of chords is helpful – that’s  a structural approach, rather than a strictly visual one. But what the heck, since it seems to have potential, we’ll try to develop it.

“Whatever works for you,” seems to be a decent memory slogan. The need is to get serious about remembering, and pick your own cues.

Dr. Day has more insights into this subject – What subject was that ? Oh yes, memory – at physorg.com and some further encouragement. We’re glad we’ve met her via the web, and suspect you will be as well. – Doug Bedell

South From Alaska (Sarah’s Song)

Posted on March 2, 2010
Filed Under The Writing Life | 1 Comment

Sarah Palin…what thoughts does that name invoke?  Obviously, that depends on your politics.  But in a just world her name would invoke much more than an unthinking reaction based on her— and your — place on the political continuum.  Politics aside, she should be respected for her quite remarkable accomplishments.  Athlete (cross-country and Alaska state championship basketball team), beauty pageant winner, sports reporter (TV and print), city mayor, governor of Alaska (first woman and youngest at 42), candidate for vice president, best-selling author, television commentator, self-made millionaire.  If you dismiss that record of accomplishment based on politics, it says much more about you than it does about her.

With these thoughts rolling around in my head, my iPod shuffle offered up Johnny Horton’s North to Alaska.  So here, with apologies to Johnny, is:

South from Alaska

Sarah left Wasilla, with important work to do
The first woman and the youngest, state governor at forty-two
She traveled south to Juneau, to try things new and bold
She fought for all Alaskans
And her years up there were gold

Sarah crossed Alaska’s mountains, to St. Paul she was bound
With husband Todd and children, the newest face around
She spoke about her family, and the need to set things right
The hockey mom from Alaska, brought down the house that night

CHORUS
The country is fallin’
The people are callin’
South from Alaska
Go south to lead the charge
South from Alaska
Go south to lead the charge

This country needs a leader, who loves this blessed land
Who with heart and soul believes it is, the last best hope of man
Who will stand proud and proclaim it, over land and air and seas
Our principles are simple, and those principles are these

I am my brother’s keeper, you can leave that up to me
Those who seek to harm us, will soon the eagle see
The wealth of this great nation, must be in the people’s hands
There’s peace on earth before us, if one with God we’ll stand

CHORUS (end)

Well that’s my modest contribution to the Sarah Palin story.  It is modest indeed, and there are a number of lines that are weak and just don’t click. Send me your markups (info@EncoreTechResources.com) and we’ll beef up the lyrics together (giving you credit of course), and Insights will publish our much improved version of Sarah’s song.

By the way, as pro-Palin as this posting sounds, I personally don’t think she should run.  I see her role as a conservative gadfly, prodding the next Republican administration to hew to its libertarian principles. — Dennis Owen

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