donkeymonkey

week 8 @h-ha : Trust Busters

lheian — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:10:14 +0000

I work with attorneys who quote wikipedia regularly for legal reference.

I never really directly considered how the quality of site formatting, navigation, and design would lend themselves to user ‘trust’ about the site, but now that I think about it, it’s alarmingly obvious. As human animals, we make perceptions by appearance…with the web, in a way, the most discriminate social forum ever to come about. If a site looks amateur and has jagged mapping and layout, we infer it was created by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. which is, most likely, a true inference.

the Online Trust studies statistical findings came across as being gauged off a proprietary meter – I just found the tables very difficult to assess. The questions of the study, I found, were very interesting however…in that I expect there’s a large percentage of online users who may never bother to stop and consider several of them. The Information Age bombards us with information. Verifying your sources becomes tedious and exhausting in a short amount of time. I know for myself, the only item I ever tend to inspect are privacy policies for mailing lists, shareware, and to see if the lockbox appears on a page when I’m providing credit card info. In terms of data, I think we, as researchers, need to open our minds to the concept that there’s a wealth of information out there that is not academic or professional but may be the only information available.

Relating this discussion of credibility to online health sources, the subject could even be said to be life-threatening. I don’t know of anyone who’s sought out medical advice in a chat room, but then again, it’s probably not the type of activity someone would readily admit to. The danger here is the selectibility of information, online sources with varying info allow users to essentially choose whatever diagnosis they like, rather than having it made for them as it ideally should be. Someone with a lump in their breast, afraid to find out the worst, could very easily go to a chat room and hear someone else’s story that theirs was benign, and decide that this must also be the case for her.

Q’s :

-How do we determine credibility of online information if it’s being provided by a sole author?

- What is the advantage of ‘non-traditional’ sources of information (i.e. sources that can’t verify their authenticity)?

-The more online-active we are, do we become less trusting or more trusting of visited sites?

individual project_audio story transcript

lheian — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:32:45 +0000

“The Ave and the Have-Nots” Audio Story Transcript

NARRATOR : Something strange happens when a street gets a nickname. It becomes human. A living, breathing functioning member of that community with a personality, history, and future entirely its own.
Seattle has over a hundred and fifty avenues running through the city limits. But there’s only one “Ave”. If the Ave were quite literally human – let’s feminize it for tradition’s sake – she would be quite the force to be reckoned with. She’d be a short woman, slightly inclined, highly educated and globally enlighted but with a mysterious past involving drugs, alcohol, and assorted crimes. In recent years, she would’ve recently cleaned up her act and sought out a career in the commercial sector. And in that endeavor, she’d be largely successful. But her troubled past would never totally go away.

This is the Ave. It’s a highway of bars, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese restaurants, sandwich shops, print shops, cafes, book stores, and second hand music stores, all in the progressive shadow of theUniversity of
Washington. It is a bastion of small business, rivaling Capitol Hill’s Broadway as the most concentrated collection of non-corporate enterprises within a single street in
Seattle proper. Bruce Lee opened his first kung fu school here. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Alice in Chain’s Layne Staley each held apartments here at one point.

The namesake nickname comes from its ancient days as merely

14^thAve NE

, a moniker that was changed to

University Way

in 1919 after a student contest held at UW. Its abbreviated handle, however, has been known as such for nearly ninety years. The turn of the millenium marked an increase in violence on The Ave. In 2000, The Ave’s crime rate per 10,000 people was more than twice that of
Seattle’s median. That same year,
Seattle passed the first in a series of anti-aggressive panhandling initiatives, specifically designed to improve the commercial viability of such districts as The Ave.

But things on The Ave would only get worse. On Tuesday, April 9^th2002, motorist Demetri Andrews was struck in the head with a skateboard by Timothy R. Strano. Strano was described by the city’s deputy prosecutor as a young man who’s led “led a rootless and itinerant life,” seeming to fit the profile of the nickname also given to those making their daily lives on The Ave, “Ave Rats”. The gruseome nature of the attack brought city-wide attention to the state of affairs on The Ave. The following year, in 2003,
Seattle mayor Greg Nichols launched The Ave Revitalization Project : an urban improvement initiative widening sidewalks, installing lighting, public art…an initiative bent on beating down the public image of The Ave as a seedy

Peter works as executive director with a non-profit organization housed within theLutheran
Center on The Ave. He’s been in the building for twenty years and has seen The Ave evolve tremendously over that time. As far as he’s concerned, the Revitalization Project did what it set out to do.

PETER : As far as the revitalization, it appears to me that [the Ave has] cleaned up dramatically. Primarily from youth homeless. You will still have the occasional addictive personality : drugs, alcohol, whatever, that are homeless and find refuge on The Ave. But as far as the largest change I see is in the youth homeless.

NARRATOR : But the Ave Rat is finding a new place amidst the Starbucks and Chipotle’s and American Apparels on The Ave. They’re getting comfortable being there again.

Geno Amenta Morah has been living around The Ave for just a year and three months. So he represents the new guard. Among other things, Geno is iconic. He’s tall. He’s bald, but still manages to sport striking, matted dreadlocks on the other three sides of his head. He wears a long, raggedy trench coat : possibly white in a past life. You can usually catch him lounging against a black grate fence fronting a Japanese diner, bumming smokes or spare change off the stream of students passing him by.

At fifty-four, Geno entertains a knack for vocabulary and oratory that burst out of him when asked even a single question. When asked of “his story”, he lets loose all sorts of answers. He’s from
Fresno. He did a stint in a
California state prison. He was moved to the
Pacific Northwest by his big sister, who seemed to think the move would be good for him somehow. He lived on Capitol Hill previously, but an eviction from his apartment there led to his migration to the U District, where a guardian of his found him an apartment. So he’s not homeless. He just panhandles. And he philosophizes. That philosophical side explains how he’s treated on The Ave.

GENO : Well, I get objection and opposition. React, respond. Or treat me unfairly or unjustly…or don’t treat me right. Usually how I’m treated is that I get objection or rejection-…objection or opposition. -I’m a Pisces and I do have a fear of objection and opposition. NARRATOR : His reasons for liking the neighborhood are as good as a lot of students.

GENO : What it is I like about this part of town the most is the availability of sometimes – since I like to smoke marijuana – whites give me marijuana, sell me twenty dollars worth for four dollars. And they seem to do it freely and willingly. This is interesting to take in. The rampant availability of drugs on the Ave

Some members of the old guard are still around.

SUNNY : I’m Sunny. I’m fifty-four. And I’ve been on The Ave for about four years. NARRATOR : Sunny is known to more students than Geno. He’s known for sporting sunglasses, a nearly all-black wardrobe, and his infamous pitch of “spare change” that’s cast in a very polite, nearly whispered drawl. Sunny also bears an uncanny resemblance to Lou Piniella.

He doesn’t speak much, even when engaged. His likes things short and simple. He takes home about $7 on an average day. Sunny, however, remembers the Revitalization Project but doesn’t seem to think it’s changed The Ave much. He’s a
Seattle native, having lived here all his life. LUKE : Why do you prefer to panhandle in this part of town, as opposed to some other neighborhoods? SUNNY : Oh, I enjoy the people. I think they’re an interesting group to be with…more than some other places. LUKE : Has The Ave changed much since the Revitalization Project? SUNNY : Not that I know of.

NARRATOR : It’s about as simple an observation anyone can give. The Revitalization Project and anti-panhandling legislation certainly hasn’t gotten in his way. Chances are Sunny and Geno will never escape. They’ll always be Ave Rats, no matter what neighborhood they happen to move to. They would certainly like to have more money and a better place to stay. But there’s no sign that either of them is immediately horrified . This is their lifestyle. This is what they do in the universe, and they know the rules of it.

week 7 @h-h@ : The superpower with the weenie connection

lheian — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:22:50 +0000

A somewhat random aside, not but a few days ago, we ran into a Gb connection issue at work wherein expert witnesses for cases were encountering sluggish performance with their web access to one of our hi volume databases. Turned out it was a 100Mb connection on our server. That insufficient byte transfer rate essentially cost us tens of thousands of dollars in the meantime in lost productivity – something that highlighted to me how invaluable it is to have an optimal connection and how direct + tangible the impact can be on your business.

Most aspects of digital infrastructure repeatedly re-inforce the idea of catering to the lowest common denominator. My Flash instructor always tells us to publish projects one version lower than what is on the market. Web designers in general are routinely assessing their weakest links in their connectivity chain and designing accordingly. Is it that same idea – of catering to the common denominator – that has kept byte connections from advancing where they should be? The paper advocates that there is a ‘golden connection speed’ of 200 kbps + …and the authors advocate this as the new ideal connection standard, echoing a call for similar legislation regarding television definition standards of a few years before. What crystalized the most for me is that we have the world’s strongest economy, but our broadband infrastructure is disproportionate to support it. however, with Moore’s Law in the back of all our minds, how long could Gb connectivity really make a lasting difference? I imagine the point at which a robust, nationwide wifi network is implemented, connectivity upgrades would be far easier to implement rather than being handicapped by lain lines.

The Ave & the Have-Nots: how homelessness survived a U District renovation

lheian — Tue, 08 May 2007 11:34:46 +0000

Like some other lude institutions, you know it when you see it. Poverty accounts for approximately eight thousand homeless needing a place to sleep on any given night within Seattle city limits. While the problem permeates all neighborhoods, University District has housed the street life counterculture for more years than you might think, with University Way serving as the very street to be lived upon. University Way, or “The Ave” as it is far better known, has remained the non-academic custodian of University District culture for the better part of a century. To this day, small business represents the vast majority of commercial activity there, with a wealth of book stores, coffee shops, restaurants, boutiques, and record stores inhabiting the nine-block stretch from 41^st to 50^th. But with the unique culture that grew up there came too something much more ulterior. Heroin deals in alleyways. Graffiti. Late night stabbings and drunken brawls. Rampant homelessness in doorways and stairwells. The local nickname for those representing the phenomenon was “Ave Rat”.

The Ave Rat was defined by his or her gape-toothed grins, raggedy dress, unkept hair, loud vocal projections, and a callous attitude that did not go well with any hopes for a pleasant shopping experience local entrepreneurs were entertaining. They came in a wide array of ages, but largely were only available in the form of panhandlers, drug dealers, loiterers, and general vandals. They either screamed at you for spare change or else screamed at you for no reason whatsoever. Home to the homeless, University Way was fast becoming less and less a shopping and dining destination for students. And with the rise of University Village down the hill, the effect culminated into a severe business drop on The Ave in the late 90′s that prompted drastic attentions toward solving the Ave Rat dilemma.

In 2002, Mayor Greg Nichols spearheaded The Ave Revitalization Plan: an urban improvement project installing wider sidewalks, bus lanes, benches, lighting, artwork, and even “donation meters” to curb aggressive panhandling on The Ave. Blocks were shut down for several weeks at a time to accommodate major construction overhauls, working up from 41^st to

50^th Ave NE

over the course of two years. While a number of small businesses did not survive the interruptions in foot traffic, those that did emerged as residents of a totally revamped thoroughfare. Business gradually began working its way back, along with the customers. And while homeless rates city-wide may have not dropped, you are still scarce to find the Ave Rat on The Ave these days…certainly at least in the capacity he/she was available before. Today’s Ave Rat mostly only comes out at night. And even then, only occasionally. The Ave still maintains a vibrant, progressive undertone. But it is undeniably more commercial now, particularly in such shadows as those of Starbucks and Chipotle Grill. The Ave is at least desperately trying to be conventional. Whatever it is doing, it is enough to keep most of the old crew out of sight. There are a few, however, that have kept their place here, and haven’t moved. Some for as many years as anyone can remember. But how do they survive? How has The Ave changed for them? Did they benefit from the revitalization? John Doe has been panhandling on the Ave for nearly __ years. He speaks in a low drawl that barely reaches your ears when you pass, with the trademark whisper of “spare change” that starts on a rolling high tone and ends on a low. He is outfitted with a pair of sunglasses that rarely escapes his face, a curious black wardrobe, and an even more curious resemblance to Lou Piniella. He doesn’t live here though. After 5:00, he closes shop and takes the bus to __________, after pocketing anywhere between $50-$80 on the average day. But he has been a staple on The Ave throughout the student careers of thousands of students.

He is not an aggressive panhandler and never has been, which is maybe the only reason why he hasn’t been enforced under the anti-panhandling policies enacted in 2000. When asked how things have changed for him personally since The Ave’s renovations, he answers that his daily take is actually better than before. Maybe one in thirty will drop him a little something, as opposed to one in fifty of a few years before. He explains that there is less competition – and that the surge in foottraffic on The Ave has, more or less, allowed him to corner a robust market…largely on the block between 41st and 42nd in front of Schultzy’s Sausages.

Jim Smith is another such staple, and you will remember only three things about him. He has a long, brown beard. He pulls a red cart with a silver garbage tin. And he is never without his radio. He is rare to actually ask for any money, and it is a wonder to several students what his daily occupation is otherwise. You will spot him occasionally in one of the several cafe’s, sipping on an espresso that looks as if it’s a weekly ritual of some kind. He seems less phased of any changes than any Ave resident.

He explains that since the revitalization, students are more polite. But they also pay less attention to him. Which he says is just fine, but can’t be if he brought it up int he first place. He observes that there is less of a line to wait for coffee, and that he can pass his days with much more peace than before. But he still doesn’t seem to approve of it all. Despite being a staple, the ground has shifted beneath his feet, and he can only try to belong there.

In the end, neither is an Ave Rat anymore, really. John and Jim are anomalies, but even they have become more conventional somehow. The counterculture of The Ave now is one of healthy enterprise, highlighted with bouts of twenty-one runs and the occasional public disturbance. But it is in the hands of the students again. It remains to be seen how long this administration will keep control however.

week 6 @h-ha@ – elements of good storytelling

lheian — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:30:44 +0000

no matter how much a writer tries to fight it, this is true : you can’t write a story that hasn’t been told before. i got bludgeoned with that horrible idea in a UW certificate writing course taught by the screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause, and to take him at his word meant to accept the most daunting bit of wisdom i’d ever gotten. All stories are built with the same constructs. But the little bits of writing i’ve done since then have taught me that writing is about finding new ways to tell people stories that they’ve already heard a million times.

I would argue that good writing is to know the rules and to understand how and why they work but also when it is to the best advantage to break them. But Appelcine isn’t really prescribing rules. She’s assessing elements that are always there, no matter how radical a plot you think you may have come up with. We invest ourselves in stories the exact same way we invest ourselves in people’s lives, and this is why storytelling always navigates on the foundations of plot, character, setting, backstory, & detail, because these are the first things we try to find out when we come out of the womb, so to speak. Underneath it all, it goes right straight to the human condition.

While the elementals are eternal, I like to think that storytelling STYLES have changed drastically in a short amount of time. We are a cynical and a sarcastic audience. (Hemmingway would never be published if he were just getting his start today.) and authors have reacted by taking a very roundabout path in the plots and character arcs they are trying to deliver. Little details, I think, are tenfold more important now, because they secretly bipass information to an audience who can’t help but to automatically try to classify/stereotype any story they come across.

Week 5 @h-h@

lheian — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:17:13 +0000

I suppose it’s odd hearing what I’d argue to be design ‘instincts’ prescribed as techniques. One might argue design IS, at its heart, instinctive, and it goes against the grain to assess any kind of patterns as such. But then I remember all our talks about designers not paying any attention to usability and suddenly it makes sense why observing visual arrangement trends is so necessary, albeit very weird from a design perspective.

Many of Vanderdockt’s visual technique formats, I had a hard time relating them to websites I’ve come across – moreover had a hard time imagining them as effective (“intricacy” and “fragmentation” for example). It’s easier to imagine these as Flash-based formats, but to visualize HTML text going into some of these more ‘radical’ layouts is a bit challenging.

RE: Physical techniques, it seems more and more that the concept of ’symmetry’ and perfect arrangement are the old ideology and that to have any design cred, asymmetry, imbalance, misalignment, and disproportion are increasingly being explored. More minimalist techniques such as understatement and economy are taking place of complexity, but it all depends on the type of audience you’re dealing with and the type of site you’re employing.

Week 4 Reading @h-h@ : DRM and Managing Digital Assets

lheian — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:25:20 +0000

Couldn’t find the Executive Guide on CIO. Hope I didn’t miss an email. But of ’Manage, Don’t Manage, Your Digital Assets’, David Coursey, in one of his ten prescriptions, notes that ppl are less inclined to pay for electronic content, without it being particularly special, and are more inclined to pay for the same content if it is hardcopy. My @h-h@ is that I can relate to this on a daily basis. At my law firm, we have attorneys spend hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars on paper printouts of documents despite the fact that we have top of the line e-databases which allow for quicker and easier access of the same content without charge. Bottom line is, they just like the feel of it and are willing to pay for old prejudices.

This got me thinking about the way electronic vs. classic production methods of not only data but other creative works are compared in the mind’s eye of the general public. So long as traditional media remains a standard to be compared to, electronic content will always have the prejudice against it that it is intangible, less legitimate…despite it being faster, easier, + more convenient. I suspect this more or less goes to the human concept that anything electronic is “temporary” and impermanent. This same mindset will keep the electric guitar from ever being considered a classical instrument. It keeps digital film FX from being considered quality, artistic creative works.

Does this leave the concept of getting paid for the actual content you provide in the dust? Will all content providers essentially be offering their works for free and relying nearly totally on advertising or sponsorship revenue for their livelihoods? I suppose I don’t want to be dependent on banner ads for putting food on my table, but if it’s more motivation to do better work, so be it.

Week 3 @h-h@ : Bearing down on Berenstein

lheian — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:38:23 +0000

Berenstein argues that the structure of hypertext stories is not chaotic – it is that we lack the linguistic constructs to sufficiently assess their flows. In terms of language and storytelling, this sounds like and is a very dynamic concept in many ways. I’ll have to take the naysayer’s route on this one though…which I guess is a little more fun in this situation. What is confusing to me is that Berenstein and probably most other neo-journalists consider all components of hyperlinked stories as part of a grandeose, nonlinear narrative. But this makes little sense to me, considering (the vast majority of the time), they are not written in concert and the authors do not intend for stories to be linked to specific sources from the beginning. Hyperlinks are commodities. Extremely useful commodities, absolutely! But their utility is parasitic, not creative, and ultimately are employed retroactively and by means of contextual happenstance. An author cannot logically conclude that a separate story he/she links to within their own is an “extension” of his/her original work. There is an a logic to associating hyperlinks, obviously. You want to link appropriate and relevant information. But that is a matter of information management, not creative license. I suppose those who would disagree would conclude you can get to New England on I-5, since I-90 is a logical extension of it. I suspect, though, that I am missing something, so I am looking forward to class discussion to see if I am missing something that changes my mind completely.

Week2 Readings @h-h@.

lheian — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:05:04 +0000

Per Kasbekar’s anecdote on the rigidity of old metal platings making ’Inverted Pyramids’ a necessity in print, it begs the question of whether that style would’ve emerged had the editors of the day not been prompted to do so out of need. I have always found it odd that newspapers seem to get skimmed more than magazines or most any other kind of publication – the difference being the more literary the work, the more investment is demanded of the reader. Newspapers are not literary. Are they merely just functional devices for information? With the web, online newspapers now have the capacity to present individual stories without intersecting advertisements, without close spacial proximity to other stories. Kathy may disagree, but I suspect the future trend for online news will be to move away from inverted pyramid and become more literary, since factual tidbits can be more efficiently dispersed through dynamic multimedia over text. And text stories will need to offer something more than just the facts. They will need to offer style.

Hello world!

lheian — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:53:47 +0000

i had a psychic girlfriend, but she left me before we met…