thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

French indie mp3s

Point d'ecoute (listening post) is a downloadable mix CD from the editors of La Blogothèque, a French mp3 blog. Some of the artists are understandably unsigned (like the woman covering Madonna's "Like a Prayer" on a ukelele, or the off-key mess that is "Don't Let Us Die in Texas"). But otherwise, several of the songs are catchy, particularly:

• Hey Now Now (The Cloud Room)
  Somewhere between Lou Reed and the Shins
• The World Called Today, They Sounded Pissed (Mayapple Weather)
  Lemonheads circa 1992
• On and On (Hocus Pocus)
  Chipper rap/hip hop

From Boing Boing.

Historical social stigma of female-authored articles

A librarian trying to find current biographical information on a group of physical anthropologists just remarked to me that the women appear to be much harder to find than the men. The group consists of researchers who published articles in the last 5-20 years, and while many of the men (and some of the women) now hold positions at various universities, a lot of the women seem to have vanished from the digital record. Some may have been wives who co-authored articles with their more famous husbands, others may have left academia to care for families. Most frustrating is that many used their first initials, even for journals that otherwise printed full first names. (A practice that has moved away from the scientific community but increased in the phone book, at least for women living alone.) Even if women do not face as many academic publishing hurdles now, we've still lost valuable information about those who did, just in the last two decades.

Classical banjo

Did you hear Bela Fleck on Performance Today Thanksgiving morning? He and Edgar Meyer played a striking Bach two-part invention on banjo and bass. (Samples available on their CD at Amazon.) They also performed an original canon, composed by Meyer, who admitted, "I can't wake up in the morning and sneeze without being influenced by Bach."

Giving thanks for textured vegetable protein

Had I realized that Tofurkey was invented in Forest Grove (a half hour drive from my house), I may not have eschewed it for so many years. Not that I was ever a big turkey fan before becoming vegetarian, but something about products with specially-constructed "gluten matrices" really bothered me. And my phonetically-plagued conscience just couldn't let me eat seitan products on a day when we're supposed to be giving thanks. So, my holiday menu usually consisted of a squash or artichoke prepared in some Martha way. This year, I'm actually doing Quorn cutlets. Next year, Tofurkey.

They're going to be mad at me for posting this

I share an office with three reference librarians, and two of them are currently frowning and making worried noises and occasionally muttering "Google Scholar."

Beaverton gets a little Queer Eye

Carson Kressley will be signing books at Powell's in Beaverton (!) on December 7. I'd think the Hawthorne store would be more appropriate, but I suppose if anyone needs an hour in Carson's presence, it's the suburban men in their pleated Dockers.

Reasons for radio silence

Not that you're holding your breath, but I still apologize for the dearth of posts here lately. It seems like every spare moment has been dedicated to organizing fellowship applications, taking the GRE, writing research proposals, and even cleaning up my portfolio (which will make its tidier debut here shortly). Thanks to the person who sent me the Likert shirt; pink is a good stress reliever. Regularly scheduled blather will resume in the near future.

Foxy finding

My favorite feature of Firefox 1.0 (happy birthday, you groovy browser, you) is the Find bar. No longer a pop-up box that requires you to type in the whole word and hit "Find," Firefox's Find sits tidily in the bottom of the browser and starts to search for the word after you type the first letter. (Am I the only one who revels at one less mouse click?)

From the "take that, semantic web" department

That's Not a Picture 2.0 converts images into HTML tables. Each pixel is translated into a table cell with that background color. Because who wanted to properly mark-up pages anyway? (Thanks, Andy!)

Citation happy

Just found out that some of my undergraduate research on visual attention was cited in:

J. Riegelsberger, M. A. Sasse & J. McCarthy (2002). Eye-Catcher or Blind Spot? The Effect of Photographs of Faces on E-Commerce Sites. 2nd IFIP Conference on e-commerce, e-business, e-government (i3e), Oct 7-9, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 383 - 398. (223K PDF).

The author, Jens Riegelsberger, is a doctoral student at University College London, and he investigates trust issues on the web. Whether photos of "smiling ladies" increase trust on e-commerce sites or not, there's a potential cost to task performance. Here, Riegelsberger uses eye-tracking to see whether these photos attract visual attention. His results are consistent with ours; the photos do not interfere with task performance.

Apathetic design

Ann Landers for the HCI set, Don Norman answers questions over at OK/Cancel. When asked, "Is it a hopeless crusade to convince users that they should care [about usability]?" he replies:

Are we not in the profession of satisfying users? If users don't care, then it is our solemn duty to deliver upon that absence of care.

Food lethargy

I'm having one of those Supersize Me moments where I'm feeling terribly affected by the food I just consumed. I left my lunch on the kitchen counter today, so had a cheesy potato breakfast wrap from the cafeteria instead. Now I can barely keep my head off my desk. I'm about to impale myself with my VOTE! pin. The worst part is that I'm still hungry.