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METAFORIX MAIL

ON MY MIND: "The Chaos of the Web" vs. "The Drudgery of the Library"
IN THE MEDIA: Wearable Computers
INFORMATICON: Mark Hurst on "bit literacy"
CYBERSPEAK: The meaning of "URL"
SITE OF THE DAY: A Tale of Two Cities

Last week, "Circuits" -- the weekly computer technology section of the New York Times -- published an article by Lori Leibovich on how high school and college students use the Internet to do research. Students' research preferences are aptly summarized in the article's subtitle: "Many Students Prefer the Chaos of the Web to the Drudgery of the Library."

Teachers and academics interviewed for the article articulated three basic viewpoints:

- The decline in decline in traditional library research encourages lazy study habits, lack of focus, and uncritical quests for a quick fix. It's a disaster.

 - Because Web information is instantly available and contacts with experts are easy to initiate, students pursue topics further than they might in a library. Web research, on balance, is a wonderful thing.

- Regardless of how we feel about it, students are rapidly abandoning the library for the Internet. So, let's teach students simple techniques for improving their Web research results.

Apparently, many readers responded strongly to the article. One librarian quoted his lengthy unpublished response, in full, in his daily e-letter.

The Times chose to publish three letters on the subject. One writer was "appalled" at the article's "underlying assumption" that libraries still consist only of card catalogs and print media. The second writer was "flabbergasted" at the suggestion that students could not be expected to learn basic Boolean search logic (that is, how to use the search-engine concepts of AND, OR, and NOT). The third writer joined with those who bemoan the current state of affairs.

I'm not sure how long Leibovich's article will remain freely available online (it and the letters were both on the "Circuits" channel this morning, but the Times has a habit of archiving articles very quickly and charging $2.50 a pop to retrieve them). In any case, next week, I'll share my own (unpublished) letter to the Times about the article.

Cordially,

Lois C. Ambash, Editor
editor@metaforix.com

"Pret-a-Portable: How Computers Will Keep You Competitive"
Jesse Berst, ZDNet Anchor Desk, 8/18/00

This piece is a brief introduction to the wearable computers available today, as well as what's on the horizon. In addition to defining wearable computing -- briefly, "anything that is always with you and is as unobtrusive and as comfortable as clothing" -- this piece explains why and how you might wear your computer and provides links to the relevant pages at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. And to think, we were just learning how to program a cell phone.

To read the full article, go to http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/0,10738,2616868,00.html.

"The age of the bit infinity is now beginning, in which users will increasingly demand some way to help sift through the bits [of information] that deluge them. E-mails, voice mails, IMs [instant messages], and other bitstreams are just the beginning .... As bits increase in users' lives, users need to take more personal responsibility for their bits -- using good software, yes, but not by ceding responsibility to the software. The awareness of and responsibility for one's own bits is what I call 'bit literacy'....

"You can't simplify technology by adding yet more technology.... Users will have a simple bit experience only when they become bit literate. My goal is to help users find that path, and it doesn't require more complex software."

Mark Hurst, President, Creative Good
goodexperience.com newsletter, 7/18/00

URL: The URL, or "uniform resource locator," is the address of a location on the Web. You may have heard this acronym pronounced EARL, but the preferred pronunciation is U-R-L (just the letters, ma'am).

URLs consist of at least two parts: the method of accessing the location -- what I think of as the directions for getting there -- and its specific address. For example, in the address http://www.metaforix.com, "http" indicates the language to use if you want to access the site. "www.metaforix.com" is the place where the Web site resides, a specific location on a specific computer.

Sometimes URLs are very long, because they include a reference at the end to an individual page on the Web site. Look at the link to the article on wearable computers, above, for an example. Generally, if a page is part of a large Web site, it is more likely to be very long. Fortunately, you can save the addresses of pages you want to go back to by adding them to your list of "bookmarks" or "favorites," so you don't have to remember them or risk transcription errors in writing them down.

Sources consulted: Wired Style (1999) and NetLingo.

A Tale of Two Cities: Yahoo!'s City Comparisons

If you're choosing between two jobs, two possible locations for a new business, or two places you might like to retire to, Yahoo! has a wonderful resource for you.

Pick any two U.S. cities from a list of several hundred and you can retrieve a side-by-side comparison of key aspects ranging from property values to crime rates to car insurance premiums. Alternatively, you can select a quality of particular importance to you and generate a ranked list of all the cities in the database.

For example, I hate hot weather. So, I generated a ranking of cities according to the average high temperature in July. Now I know why I left my heart in San Francisco!

To visit this site, go to http://verticals.yahoo.com/cities/.

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