I only want to point out the bravery with which Roger Ebert has face, and discussed publicly, his medical problems.

 

 

 

All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend

 

Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It’s easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And you know how to make them absolutely incandescent with rage? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and keep it a surprise until it happens. Which, as it happens, is exactly what Amazon did. As a result: Angry, angry authors. Oh so very angry.

Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery. 

So, that Clay Shirky piece about how ladies don’t self-promote so much! Perhaps you have heard about it? Because I sure have. I have, in fact, been writing around that very piece for a while now, trying to explain how I feel about it. Because Lord knows no conversation is complete until we have all HEARD ABOUT MY FEELINGS.

The thing is, I am actually not the most impartial commenter on this particular piece for any number of reasons. For one thing, I need to do the FULL DISCLOSURE thing, here, and tell you that I like Clay and consider him a friend. He is a very nice man, that Clay Shirky! And I’m not trying to say that my having a good opinion on the writer of the piece means that I have the Best Perspective Ever on this particular topic. I’m just saying that I do have a perspective on it, which I need to acknowledge. Because here is maybe the reason I am the least objective and impartial about it: I have had conversations with Clay Shirky which demonstrate, exactly, the particular dynamic he is talking about. These conversations, they have gone like this:

“I, Clay Shirky, believe you to be capable of more than you are doing right now! Allow me to offer you some advice on this particular front.”

“Oh, my goodness, NO! I believe you to be severely deluded as to my capabilities! Allow me to present you with a list of reasons why I would not be qualified for doing anything, ever, in the entire world.”

FIVE HOURS LATER:

“And so, Clay, those are the reasons that I suck. I can provide you with further proofs of my sucking, drawn from personal history reaching back as far as kindergarten! But I think you have the basics. You see why you must rescind your advice and belief in me as a person, as clearly I would only bring shame upon you. I am but an idiot child, who spills things frequently upon my wretched frame. How did I even get dressed this morning? I don’t know! It is a fluke, clearly.”

“Um, okay. But I was trying to help…?”

“CEASE THIS FUTILE CRUSADE AT ONCE! I must go now, and mortify my flesh, perhaps with whippings. As I do so, I shall review my sub-standard grades from middle school, that I might never aspire above my due station. Thanks for coffee!”

 

 

 

The best response I've seen to Clay Shirky's rant about women. Not because I agree, necessarily, but because I believe in Sady Doyle, and I believe in her awe-inspiring ability to leverage language to persuade.

"I was really worried about coming out as transgender to anyone else because I knew there weren’t any policies. I was so afraid that my school would ban me from my sport and that was the only thing I had at the time. I finally decided to come out my senior year of college because I was going down a slippery slope and I didn't think I could pull myself out if I didn't come out."

--A transgender former college athlete

Many transgender athletes relate similar experiences that make their participation on college teams painful and frustrating: An athlete is called "she/he" and "it" by opposing players during a game. An athlete stops playing sports in college because it becomes too uncomfortable to use the locker room. An athlete has to change clothes in a utility closet separate from the rest of the team. An athlete quits the team because it becomes too painful to keep reminding coaches and teammates about the athlete's preferred pronouns. None of the institutions or athletic conferences in which these athletes compete have a policy governing the inclusion of transgender student-athletes on sports teams.

These descriptions and many others like them characterize the experiences of many young people who identify as transgender and want to play on their colleges' athletic teams. Transgender is a broad term used to describe the experiences of people whose gender identity and expression do not match the sex they were assigned at birth. Some people transition to live as their preferred gender by changing their names and the pronouns they use to refer to themselves. They express their preferred gender through choice of clothes, hairstyles and other manifestations of gender expression and identity. Some transgender people undergo reconstructive surgery or take hormones to make their bodies more congruent with their internal sense of themselves. Others do not.

Since the increased visibility of a transgender rights movement in the 1980s and a school-based LGBT "safe schools" movement in the 1990s, more young people have the language and information they need to identify the gender dissonance they experience between the sex they were assigned at birth and the gender identity that they know to be true for them. They are increasingly identifying themselves as transgender and they are doing it at earlier ages. In addition, parents are much more likely to support their transgender children and advocate for them in schools. As more states add "gender identity and expression" to non-discrimination legislation and as these legal protections are applied to schools, transgender students and their parents have increased leverage to ensure that educational institutions address their needs. K-12 school and college educators find themselves playing catch up as they learn to accommodate the educational needs of trans-identified students and protect them from bullying and harassment in school or at college.

Many of these young people want to play on their schools' or colleges' sports teams. As a result, athletic directors and coaches increasingly find themselves unprepared to make decisions about what team a transgender student is eligible to play for. As the number of transgender students who want to play on school sports teams increases, school athletic leaders must identify effective and fair policies to ensure their right to participate. Though the issue of accommodating the needs of transgender students, staff and faculty in higher education has received attention, it has not been adequately addressed in athletics. Many colleges have changed policies on access to bathrooms, residence halls or face controversy because they have not done so. In athletics, conversations about accommodating transgender students have only recently begun.

For the most part, athletic teams at high schools and colleges are segregated by sex and divided into men’s and women’s teams. For transgender students, determining on which gender’s team, if any, they will be allowed to play can be a difficult process fraught with misconceptions, ignorance and discrimination. Few high school or collegiate athletic programs, administrators or coaches are prepared to address a transgender student’s interest in participating in athletics in a systematic, fair and effective manner. Few athletes have been given the information that would prepare them to participate on a team with a teammate whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.

The vast majority of school athletic programs have no policy governing the inclusion of transgender athletes and athletic staff have no idea how to accommodate a transgender student who wants to play on a college sports team. Even basic accommodations can be confusing, such as what pronouns or name to use to refer to that student, where that student should change clothes for practice or competition, what bathroom that student should use, or how to apply team dress codes.

Washington is the only state that has a policy identifying the process for enabling transgender students to participate in high school athletics. The National Collegiate Athletic Association does not prohibit transgender students from participating in NCAA sponsored events, but recommends that NCAA member institutions use a student’s official identity documents (birth certificate, driver’s license or passport) to determine whether a student-athlete is eligible to compete on the men’s or women’s team. Because of wide variations in state requirements for changing identity documents, however, the NCAA recommendation unintentionally creates an inequitable situation depending on where the student is enrolled.

Applying the 2004 International Olympic Committee policy governing the participation of transsexual athletes in IOC sanctioned events to collegiate athletics is problematic for a number of reasons. The IOC policy, though pioneering, is criticized by knowledgeable medical experts and transgender advocates for requiring genital reconstructive surgery as a criterion for eligibility. Moreover, applying the IOC policy to collegiate sports does not take into account the eligibility limits placed on individual athletes or the age and developmental needs of this age group.

After a number of informal discussions with collegiate athletic leaders and transgender students who want to participate in sports, the National Center for Lesbian Rights Sports Project and the Women’s Sports Foundation initiative, It Takes A Team! joined forces to organize a national meeting on these topics in the fall. Two of the guiding principles for the discussion were 1) Participation in interscholastic and intercollegiate athletics is a valuable part of the education experience for all students and 2) Transgender student-athletes should have equal opportunity to participate in sports.

The 40 participants, including representatives from the NCAA and Interscholastic High School Athletic Association leaders, were an impressive group of experts from a range of disciplines — law, medicine, sports, advocacy, and athletics — all of whom share an interest in transgender issues. The goals were to identify best practices and develop model policies for high school and collegiate athletic leaders to ensure the full inclusion of transgender student-athletes. A report will be issued in 2010 outlining specific recommendations for high school and collegiate athletic programs.

Specific issues discussed included:

• From a medical perspective, what are the salient factors that should be used to determine for which team (women’s or men’s) a transgender student is eligible to participate?
• From a policy and school regulation perspective, how can we develop policies governing the participation of transgender students in athletics that adhere to state and federal laws protecting students from discrimination based on gender identity and expression?
• From an athletic perspective, how can we address concerns about "competitive equity" or "unfair advantage" while acknowledging the broad diversity of performance already exhibited within both women’s and men’s sports?
• From an education perspective, how can we ensure that athletic administrators, staff, parents of athletes and student-athletes have access to sound and effective education related to the participation of transgender students in athletics?

In our forthcoming report, we provide recommendations to address each of these questions.

The most powerful information came from the transgender student-athletes in attendance, who detailed their challenges and triumphs and the importance of high school and collegiate sport participation. Their stories reinforced the necessity of developing sound policies and practices that enable transgender student-athletes to play the sports they love in an environment where their gender identity and expression are accepted as one more aspect of the diversity typical of school and college sports teams.

learned a lot this weekend, and more than anything I learned about what really motivates folks: it's stuff we "can't" do, but nonetheless figure out how to do. And for eight guys who sweat and labored over anvils for a weekend in January, we figured out that you learn by doing and do by learning.

Understanding CSS Positioning part 1

CSS & (X)HTML, 5 May 2008, 69 comments

Without a doubt, positioning, or the layout, is the hardest part of CSS. Not only because it ever so often varies between browsers, but also because CSS has a lot of ways to position an element, all with various (dis) advantages. This series of articles will thrive to explain the possibilities you have in positioning. It doesn’t only cover positioning, but also properties that define layout such as display and float, and a preview of the new CSS3 layout modules.

This part will introduce the positioning and display property. Part two, which will be published next week, will go more in-depth with the display attribute and delve into the float property. The last part, published the week thereafter will be a preview to the new CSS3 layout modules.

Display:hehwha?;

Before we start, it is worth noting that there are basically two types of ways to display an element in CSS: block and inline.

Display:block;

Block can be, quite literally, seen as a block. It has a specified width and height, optionally controlled by its content, but dimensions set by CSS have prevalence. Another property of elements with display:block is that they do not allow elements on the same “line” as their own. So while an element might have a small width, The next element will always be placed under it. So two simple divs with display block look like this:

Display:inline;

Display:inline is somewhat the opposite. Elements with display:inline always take their width and height from the contents, and will ignore any dimensions specified in the CSS. (Internet Explorer will, incorrectly, let you do this. Thanks NatalieMac!) Another opposite is that, as the name suggest, these elements are displayed in-line, so they will always be next to the preceding element, providing that the preceding element is inline as well and that there is enough width left. If the width of the “line” is filled, an element with display:inline will wrap to the next line. That looks like this:

That leaves display:none, which is really easy for me to explain: it doesn’t display. Which looks like…no I’m sorry, I’m not going to display images of nothing.

There is a multitude of other display: properties such as table and inline-block. I’ll talk about them in the second article, next week.

Flow

With positioning, the elusive “Flow” of CSS positioning comes into play. The flow in CSS is the logical way in which elements get placed on your screen. For example, when you turn off the CSS on this page, you see the HTML in its original order. That order is the flow, and dictates which element gets rendered and placed where. It’s very simple: the flow of a page is from the top of the HTML to the bottom of it.

Positioning.

One of the most misunderstood properties of CSS. This is partially because the display differs to wildly in different browsers, but also because the property is, in my opinion, misnamed. It’s not so much the position you declare, but in what way the element should interact with the elements around it.

Positioning also differs when you use the display property with it. The way positioning and display interact is a bit tricky: position:static and position:relative can be both display:block and display:inline, while position:absolute and position:fixed (and floats, more on that in the next article) will always be displayed as block elements.

We’ll start with the most simple positioning value, static.

Position:static;

This is the basic positioning of an element and also the most simple one. An element with position:static fills the space its contents need. whether that is display:block or display:inline depends on the element’s standard display (for example, a <div> has display:block, while a <span> has display:inline) or on what you specify in your CSS.

Offsetting (using top, bottom, left and right) doesn’t do anything.

Position:relative;

This value is very similar to position:static, with one vital difference: While a rendered element does get the width and height of the element, it doesn’t have to occupy the space designated for it. The properties top, right, bottom and left allow you to shift it away from that space. The offset here are the borders of the designated space. So for example, an element with position:relative and top:20px and left:20px; looks like this:

Where the grey part is the designated space.

The elements next to it in flow use the designated space as the “real” place of the element. So when you place a div right under the element pictured above, it looks like this:

See how the positioned element sits above the one below it?

Position:absolute;

Absolutely positioned elements are a very different beast altogether. The biggest difference is that an absolutely positioned element gets taken out of the flow. This means that it doesn’t interact with other elements around it. The elements around it pretend that the element just simply doesn’t exist.

The top, right, bottom and left properties do something vitally different as well: The control the offset from the first parent element that is positioned relatively or absolutely. Unless you have elements in your CSS with position:relative, position:fixed or position:absolute, this is the root element, which is <html>. In the specifications, this is called the “initial containing block“.

So an absolutely positioned element with top:20px and left:20px within a relatively positioned element looks like this:

There are some problems with positioning absolutely, this article by paul’OB describes them quite well.

A fun trick with position:absolute is defining top and bottom or left and right without defining, respectively, a height or width. Since the standard value of those is auto, the element will size to fill the space. Unfortunately this does not work in Internet Explorer.

Position:fixed;

Fixed is somewhat of an unknown value, mostly because Internet Explorer 6 (thanks Laura!)does not support it. Fixed does essentially the same as position:absolute with one vital difference: It doesn’t take its offset from a parent element, but always from the viewport, your browser window. This essentially means that, when you scroll, the element stays visible and doesn’t move with the rest of the page. Forever taunting your efforts from it’s fixed positioning, smirking as your futile attempts to move it continue to fail…Sorry, I got carried away there. Anyway,

Z-index

Another property coming into play with positioning is Z-index. This property allows you control which absolutely, fixed or relatively positioned element is placed on top. Z-index on any element without position:absolute, position:fixed or position:relative does nothing.

To understand Z-index, one bit of the specifications is rather important:

In CSS 2.1, each box has a position in three dimensions. In addition to their horizontal and vertical positions, boxes lie along a “z-axis” and are formatted one on top of the other.

The specifications

This is called “Stacking”, and a number of elements stacked on top of each other is called a “stacking context”. I suggest you try not read the specifications on this, they are very technical and difficult to follow.

Worth noting though, is that every time you declare a Z-index, you create a new “stacking context”. This essentially means that any element within the current element will use the parent’s Z-index as a starting point. This is better explained with the following example. Using this CSS:

.relativeblock1 {
        position:relative;
        width:200px;
        height:80px;
        z-index:51;
}
.absoluteblock1 {
        position:absolute;
        left:10px;
        top:90px;
        width:40px;
        height:40px;
        z-index:1;
}
.relativeblock2 {
        position:relative;
        width:200px;
        height:80px;
        z-index:50;
}

And this HTML:

<div class="relativeblock1">
        <div class="absoluteblock1"></div>
</div>
<div class="relativeblock2"></div>

Then those two combined will give this image:

Can you see how, even though .relativeblock2 had a much higher z-index (50), it is below .absoluteblock1, which only has a z-index of 1? This is because .relativeblock1, with a z-index of 51, made a new stacking context where the z-index of .absoluteblock1 can be seen as “51.1″. For a more thorough explanation, read this article on stacking in CSS by Tim Kadlec or check Krijn Hoetmer’s test case.

This concludes the first part of the series. The next article in this series will be about floating and some of the more advanced uses of display. See you next week!

Update: part two of Understanding CSS positioning is posted, check it out!

In a pilot program announced at FETC 2010 in Orlando, 12 schools in the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) system will replace traditional textbooks with digital content from Discovery Education. The program also includes curriculum alignment services, professional development, and hardware. The company's curriculum alignment team analyzed the IPS district pacing guides and chose the digital content that it determined was most appropriate for IPS, including audio and video segments, images, articles, games, and interactive resources. "Across the country, school systems are learning that textbooks are not the way to go, but that technology is the way to go," said Gene White, superintendent of IPS.  "To date, we are very pleased with this pilot.  The powerful resources from Discovery Education have brought alive our social studies curriculum in a new way, and we look forward to tracking the results of this effort." As part of the program, the company is also providing IPS with access to its MediaShare content sharing system, which allows teacher collaboration using uploads, file sharing, and distributing both user-created and licensed content. The system also includes access to Discovery Media Servers, which allows users to access content with consuming external bandwidth.

I only worry that this is a bit too, er, corporate sponsor-y. Also that it's adopting technology for technology's sake.

The ways in which we live, work, play and learn have been transformed by technologies. People access, use, and create information very differently from the way they did in previous decades. Citizens and workers of the 21st century need new skills and education has an important role in developing them. This project is focused on the initial tasks of defining those skills and developing ways to measure them using technology. It will also address the pedagogical implications and provide evidence on how the skills can best be developed in education.

The difference between me and David Hampton isn’t that he’s a con artist and I’m not; the difference is that I only told lies I could live up to, and I knew when to stop. That’s not a different type of behavior, it’s just a different amount.

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

 

There's something in American culture in particular which values the pushy and the determined, but we've all worked with people whose confidence massively outstrips their abilities, who cannot work together with other people because they think they're superior to everyone else. And we've also met a whole bunch of people in the industry who do nothing but self-promote, working day and night to sell themselves, and achieve positions massively disproportionate to their tangible abilities. There are people in our industry in positions of substantial power whose reputation is built upon the way in which they present themselves as being visionaries and experts. Some of them have found that it's simply more efficient for them to spend their days building that reputation through PR and self-promotion than it is to demonstrate it through the things that they make, the value that they create.

just who is the self-proclaimed "queen of twitter" identified in the comments below?

Comments are one thing, but sometimes people take it a step further and send me an e-mail saying things that are pretty shocking. When I politely respond to these e-mails and apologize for offending enough to incite such bitter retort, every single time, without fail, I get a response that says something similar to, “Oh, I’m sorry, I feel bad now, I didn’t realize anyone would actually read this.” Yes. A human being reads it.

Perplexingly, people resonate with things Jarod Lanier writes.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Don't be evil, indeed.

Off-line, the post office does not send someone to burn your correspondence after an obituary appears in the paper. The deed and title company does not send a crew to tear down your home. But online, under the agreements that users accept, that can be the default setting.

“When you have a real, tangible sword or gold coin, you can have an exclusive right to that object and the law can recognize that,” said Greg Lastowka, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who is writing a book on property rights and virtual goods. “But when you have the mediation of the network software and the owner of the virtual environment, they have an interest as well. They’re caught in the middle.”

By their very names — MySpace, YouTube — companies promote a sense of ownership about content that users create. But control of digital assets is often disputed, and the mediators — whether they provide e-mail services, social networking or virtual real estate — have a big say.

“Access and control are the two big levers,” said Deven R. Desai, a visiting fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University in New Jersey and professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in California. “Assuming it’s yours, can you access it, and how easy is it to move it around?”

Virtual property rights!

We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.

HO LEE CRAP Facebook is evil.

NEED to describe a hand-held mathematical calculator? Try “buggy whip.” A typewriter? A VCR? They’ve been called buggy whips, too. Even newspapers have received that label. (That one hurts.)

Collection of Studebaker National Museum, South Bend, Ind.

Those who disparage buggies as a dead end forget Studebaker switched from carriages to cars.

Buggy whips, used to prod the horses harnessed to wagons and carriages, started to become obsolete when automobiles appeared in the late 19th century. Today, any line of business facing the life-or-death challenge of a digital age will be described, sooner or later, as a contemporary buggy whip maker.

We don't make reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world, even as we purport to give it voice, to speak of its ills through critical esoterics no public ear could ever grasp. Instead we colonize that world—all in the name of liberation, of course—in order to return its spoils to our fetid den of Lacanian self-denial. We masticate on culture for the pleasure of praising our own steaming shit.

We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists' clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.

If there is one reason things "digital" might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

This is a must-read for all humanities scholars.

Key lesson learned: plan smaller.

The struggle, of course, is between presenting something that will catch the eye a funding agency like the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative and identifying a project that's small enough to be feasible.