Friday, February 23, 2007

Case against Landis may be in jeopardy

I'm not a lab tech, but I found the initial news coverage of Floyd Landis alleged doping poor. Now the LA Times is reporting the serious errors may have been made and the case may be dismissed. And where did I hear it? Near the end of a sports show, almost as an afterthought. I hope if this case really is dismissed that the news editors give it as much time as they did the charge.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Kids Are Not The Same

I'm constantly reminded that kids are not the same. Well, maybe on sitcoms all the kids are the same. And maybe we assume that all kids in a classroom are the same. But they are not and we should expect them not to be the same. Nor can we make policy as if they are the same. In the real world kids are different. Karen Olsson writes in NYT about Her Autistic Brothers. The difficulty in raising kids is fully exposed and wonderfully detailed. What a challenge these brothers pose for not just the parents but also for the siblings. And the article just brushes what a challenge our society faces finding how to find productive lives for these young adults. Almost a year ago Gretchen Cook wrote about Siblings of Disabled Have Their Own Problems. This story uses an estimate from Arc of the United States that there are 7 million siblings of children with disablilities. If you ask around I'm certain that you'll find someone else who knows about this problem first hand. Read these two articles and you'll have a better understanding.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Site Navigation Becoming Less Important

Chris Anderson at the FASTforward07 Conference provided some hard numbers to backup how differently Wired magazine treats the hardcopy edition from the web. The print version is entirely about "what's new", the current issue. On the web "what's new" is losing ground. 40 percent read the archives and that number is rising. Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired. On the web only a minority (22%) of visitors use the navigation to get to an article. 23% use the site search and 28% found content from external search or links from blogs. Links from the home page account for 27%. Anderson's and Wired's conclusions are to mine the archives, to completely forget any notion of being a portal and to foster links from blogs.
Great explanation of the web versus text.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Superbowl XLI Ads on Squidoo

I had not create a Squidoo Lens in a long time, but I just finished Superbowl XLI Ads for this year. Last year's was a big hit, but I did not get to it early enough this year. Still, I think you'll like it. A lot more video choices this year.