Free from Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond ALT Text, Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities, a report on web design for users with disabilities. “Seventy-five best practices for design of websites and intranets, based on usability studies with people who use assistive technology” According to the blog post, usability is three times better for non-disabled users.

A Pentagon commissioned $400,000 RAND study, Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, concludes “the ‘force’ brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands.”

Army, iraq, show of force, brand, identity, RAND, report, military operations

I’d never heard of the New Media Consortium before, but they claim a mission to “advocate and stimulate the use of new learning and creative technologies in higher education.” Anyway, their 2006 Horizon Report identifies the following trends among those shaping the role of technology in education:

• Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.
   
• Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.
   
• Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.
   
• Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope.
   

The above is largely a confirmation of the incredible growth in internet use/communications dependency that that we’ve seen in the past couple years, but they do follow it up with some more detail (and if you read the PDF, a few examples):

• Social Computing. The application of computer technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration, a practice known as social computing, is happening all around us. Replacing face-to-face meetings with virtual collaboration tools, working on a daily basis with colleagues a thousand miles away, or attending a conference held entirely online is no longer unusual. An interesting aspect of social computing is the development of shared taxonomies — folksonomies — that emerge organically from like-minded groups.
   
• Personal Broadcasting. With roots in text-based media (personal websites and blogs), personal broadcasting of audio and video material is a natural outgrowth of a popular trend made possible by increasingly more capable portable tools. From podcasting to video blogging (vlogging), personal broadcasting is already impacting campuses and museum audiences significantly.
   
• The Phones in Their Pockets. A little further out on the horizon, but rapidly approaching, the delivery of educational content and services to cell phones is just around the corner. Among the keys that will unlock the true potential of this technology are improved network speeds, Flash Lite, and video: as new features that take advantage of the capabilities of these appear in phones, barriers to delivery of educational content will vanish.
   
• Educational Gaming. A recent surge in interest in educational gaming has led to increased research into gaming and engagement theory, the effect of using games in practice, and the structure of cooperation in gameplay. The serious implications of gaming are still unfolding, but we are not far away from seeing what games can really teach us.
   
• Augmented Reality and Enhanced Visualization. Currently in use in disciplines such as medicine, engineering, and archaeology, these technologies for bringing large data sets to life have the potential to literally change the way we see the world by creating three-dimensional representations of abstract data.
   
• Context-Aware Environments and Devices. Advancements in context-aware computing are giving rise to devices and rooms that respond to voice, motion, or other subtle signals. In the ultimate application of these technologies, the “computing” part simply disappears, leaving an environment transparently responsive to its human occupants.
   

nmc, New Media Consortium, 2006 horizon report, report, tech horizons, internet use, technology in education, education, new tech

Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample of America (choosing a new sample each year).

This year, researchers found: “Over half of those who used Wi-fi had used it in the bathroom.”

Gizmodo is going a little farther than I’d initially care to by asking readers to comment on their behavior, but I found this gem that reminds us that this may just reflect the evolution of our media: “The laptop in the john is the new newspaper for the millennium.”

I apparently have too many neatnik issues to go down that path, but rather than devolve the discussion, I’d like to point out that this Center for the Digital Future report appears to be a good complement to OCLC’s latest report and the regular stream of reports from the Pew Internet Project.

Now back to the funny: RSStroom Reader.

restroom, bathroom, rss, media, newspaper, report, Center for the Digital Future, wifi, in the bathroom, technology, computer use, behavior, research, on the throne, in the can

This should be no surprise — especially to those who’ve been appropriately concerned about electronic voting machines: Lyn Davis Lear is reporting on a GAO report that concluded the 2004 election was fraudulent and a Diebold insider is blowing the whistle (via Engadget).

What does the report confirm? Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman summarize:

1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.
    
2. “It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
    
3. “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
    
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a “widespread conspiracy” but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
    
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
    
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
    
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
    
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

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So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.

Here’s the quesiton:

Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by Total Respondents

Based on the most recent search you conducted through [search engine used most recently],how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a search engine.

Based on your most recent experience seeking assistance from a librarian for help with a search or locating information,how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a librarian.

It appears on page 22 of part two.

Sadly, search engines beat libraries on all four points: volume, quality, speed, and overall experience. These numbers are alarming, and many will see this wrongly. The correct way to see this is how much value search engines can bring to the library experience.

compare, future, google, google economy, internet, libraries, library, library 2.0, library20, oclc, oclc report, perception, perceptions, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), report, search engine, search engines, user behavior

According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

tags: google, google vs. the opac, libraries, library, library catalog, opac, pew internet, pew internet and american life project, report, search engine, search engines

As much as I like the bstat functionality of bsuite, I never intended it to be a replacement for a full server log-based stats application. That’s why I’m happy my hosting provider offers AWStats. The reports suggested ways to optimize my pages so that I could control my bandwidth consumption — up to 3.7GB/day before optimization, now 1.8GB/day.

But today I found an AWStat feature that got me excited enough to email the university sysadmin about it: email stats. He once claimed that I received the most email of any user on campus, but he had to do the kind of command-line gymnastics that sysadmins are expected to do to figure it out. AWStats makes it easy and pretty, the kind of thing you show the CIO so s/he can bookmark it and know how hard you’re working.

tags: awstat, awstats, bandwidth consumption, email, http, log files, mail stats, optimize, report, reports, server log, web stats

Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like a mind numbing PowerPoint presentation (also PDF). So, what about it?

For nearly four years – steadily, seriously, and with the unsentimental rigor for which we love them – civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons. And it turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do.

Wolf talks about news coming in via cell phone and Blackberry, people making informed decisions that contradicted the authorities, and doing so calmly and efficiently.

We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as “the rainbow of doom” is a national joke. Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we’ll be in terrible shape. But in a networked era, we have increasing opportunities to help ourselves. This is the real source of homeland security: not authoritarian schemes of surveillance and punishment, but multichannel networks of advice, information, and mutual aid.

As wolf says, “question authorities.”

Thanks to DefenseTech for the link.

Technorati Tags: authorities, authority, blackberries, civil engineers, communications, defense, disaster, disobey, egress, elevators, emergency, evacuees, question, question authority, report, review, security, smartmob