Sunday, June 29, 2008

Wifi risks & benefits: What if?

What if we limit the use of wifi in public libraries and it turns out that the current evidence of linkage turns out not to be causative and as a result of limiting the use of wifi we have limited public access to information which allows the public to inform themselves about their own health issues and make well informed decisions?

And this:
There have been a large number of occupational studies over several decades, particularly on cancer, cardiovascular disease, adverse reproductive outcome, and cataract, in relation to RF exposure. More recently, there have been studies of residential exposure, mainly from radio and television transmitters, and especially focusing on leukemia. There have also been studies of mobile telephone users, particularly on brain tumors and less often on other cancers and on symptoms. Results of these studies to date give no consistent or convincing evidence of a causal relation between RF exposure and any adverse health effect. On the other hand, the studies have too many deficiencies to rule out an association.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

The Bible as a user-directed narrative

Highly linked.
That's what any literary criticism does: turn an author-directed narrative into a user-directed narrative.

Friday, June 27, 2008

History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph By George Bartlett Prescott

History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph By George Bartlett Prescott:
On Monday March 12th 1860 there were transmitted over one wire from Boston to New York 204 private messages containing 7,456 words and 600 words of press news and from New York to Boston over the same wire 253 messages containing 8,957 words making a total of 17,013 words The time occupied in transmitting this large number of words was nine hours The length of the circuit operated is 260 miles and the weather was rainy during the day The despatches were all printed in plain Roman letters by the Combination instrument and accurately punctuated Messrs Grace and Edwards were the operators at the Boston and New York termini of the line

Two more documents relating to wifi and health

  • Mobile Phones and Brain Tumours – A Public Health Concern - pdf - html
  • Analysis of Health and Environmental Effects of Proposed San Francisco Earthlink Wi-Fi Network - pdf - html

My original post on the topic is here.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Various Aspects of Narratives

  • Ira Glass on narrative
  • The national narrative
  • Lists as narrative
    • Robotwisdom
    • Harper's list
  • User-driven vs author-driven narratives
  • Linear vs non-linear
  • Lists as part of a prose narrative

User driven narrative -> author driven narrative

Says Jakob, "instead of an author-driven narrative, Web content becomes a user-driven narrative."

My user-driven narrative becomes an author-driven narrative when I tell you how I found something on the web. Which may very well bore you. But that's why I like via links. A memoir is a user-driven narrative transformed into and author-driven narrative. So are many first novels.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Wikipedia cf DocBook and DITA

Wikipedia has developed as an open community process sets of meta data reminiscent of DocBook's tags. Further, the Wikimedia blog is adding structured features which move it toward DocBook and DITA.