Lee Iverson

In Lowering Barriers to Participation, Bradley Horowitz points out how tagging lowers the barriers to participation and thus allows ordinary users to create useful metadata. I think he's right on here. Especially on a system such as del.icio.us, the ease of use and triviality of creating tags allows pretty much anyone to create "personally useful" metadata. As an aide memoire, that is exactly what it should allow.

Is it authoritative? Is it useful for others? That's for someone else to decide. It's easy and useful for me, and if there are natural concordances with others, I can take advantage of those. That should be enough, and is.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My favourite little cafe is a place called "The Beanery" on the UBC campus in the middle of the Fairview residences. Sonny and Sonya, who run the place, are two wonderful friendly hosts, the atmosphere is great, and UBC wireless is usually available. It's my second office.

It's located inside the Fairview residences. The entrance to the residences is at the intersection of Fairview Ave. and Western Parkway. There's a sign there for the Beanery, but it is actually all the way in the back of the residence complex, near Pearkes Lane.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Lee Iverson at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Intermediation, REST & Bookmarking" »

Posted by Lee Iverson at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Hunter S Thompson and Qualitative Research" »

Posted by Lee Iverson at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Lee Iverson at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Praxis101 on Attention" »

Posted by Lee Iverson at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Note in particular his emphasis on coding skills and ability to express yourself. A big part of the reason I structure my courses the way I do (e.g Computer Graphics) is so that students can marry the theory/models with practical application development in a context that simulates real-world work practices. Thus I emphasize group product development and good report writing skills.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm just trying out TinderBox from Eastgate Systems. It is a very visual outliner with lots of tools for visual and attribute-based information organization. I'm going to try it to organize some notes for a current project I'm working on and get back to you all about how I find it.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Lee Iverson at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In responding to my comments on her use of the Dewey Decimal System for he blog, Lisa Williams points out one good reason for using the DDC for her weblog. It gives her a fairly clear view of just how wide her interests and writings are.

I also discover what the shape of my own head is. By using a set of categories that I did not create myself, and one that covers a very broad variety of topics, I�m finding out what my weblog is about.

That's actually a pretty solid insight. Shared categorization systems do provide a touchstone for sharing and situating information, especially when you can spatialize them. But you get this from using any common categorization system. Note that I didn't say anything about not sharing categorization systems, just that universal schemes become less useful the more granular and contextual the content.

Oh, and about the "multiple categories per-post" issue. All well and good, but then let's use a scheme that takes that as one of its design parameters. Faceted schemes are much more capable and natural in that regard.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is always interesting to watch someone who you respect make mistakes that clear up any illusions you might have had about the possibility of anyone being intellectually honest about all subjects. Margaret Somerville is a very intelligent woman and an almost always astute and observant analyst on issues of ethics and moral behaviour but on the issue of gay marriage she seems to have been blinded by some religious or moral dogma that doesn't allow her to examine the logic of her own arguments.

In asserting that marriage is "inherently procreative" and thus should be inaccessible to gay couples she clearly exposes a bias that would logically suggest (as others have pointed out) that infertile heterosexual couples should likewise be banned from marrying. More interesting though is to examine what underlies that assertion. Clearly it can't be just about bearing children, since that activity happens outside of marriage with spectacular frequency. In reality, the claim seems to be that society has a fundamental interest in providing stable family settings for raising children and that marriage provides that setting. That seems like a really good reason for protecting marriage.

But wait: gay couples routinely adopt children and certainly seem to be capable of raising them to adulthood. And lesbian couples often actually bear and raise their own children. If protecting the "inherently procreative" aspect of marriage is so important then that would seem to constitute a really good, logical argument for actually encouraging these kinds of unions whenever children are involved, independent of the genders of the parents. I'd be really curious to see what the divorce rates of gay couples raising children will be a few years down the line and how that will compare with that of heterosexual couples. My bet would definitely be on the side of greater stability in those child-rearing relationships in which the couple had to make a substantial effort to actually have a child in the first place: the gay marriages.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My plans are to use this site for the benefit of myself and my collaborators. I plan to write about whatever I need to as a kind of public aide-memoire. So expect anything here. Browse the categories that I've put together for some idea of the range of potential topics I'm planning to cover.

In general as a teacher, researcher and software engineer, I'll write mostly about issues surrounding my courses, software development, collaboration systems and digital libraries. I plan to include my own personalized reviews of papers and articles as well as thoughts on the progress and direction of my own projects. And of course, the obligatory updates on family life and events.

I do hope that there is some sort of audience out there for this, but then again it won't bother me if there isn't.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 10:54 AM | Permalink