Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

Check out this website I found at wordle.net

Buddhist Wisdom

He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings,
and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an
impartial eye.

Gomes on Powerpoint

PORTALS By LEE GOMES

PowerPoint Turns 20,?As Its Creators Ponder?A Dark Side to Success?June 20, 2007; Page B1

One of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers is 20 years old. There won’t be a lot of birthday celebrations for PowerPoint; the program is one the world loves to mock almost as much as it loves to use.
While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.
As it happens, what might be called the downside of the culture of PowerPoint is something that bemuses, concerns and occasionally appalls PowerPoint’s two creators as much as it does everyone else.
Robert Gaskins was the visionary entrepreneur who in the mid-1980s realized that the huge but largely invisible market for preparing business slides was a perfect match for the coming generation of graphics-oriented computers. Scores of venture capitalists disagreed, insisting that text-based DOS machines would never go away.
With major programming done by Dennis Austin, an old chum, PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs came out in 1987. Later that year, Microsoft bought the company for $14 million, its first acquisition, and three years later a Windows version followed.
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Are you a PowerPoint user? Share your tales of PowerPoint uses and abuses.
Mr. Gaskins and Mr. Austin, now 63 and 60, respectively, reflected on PowerPoint’s creation and its current omnipresence in an interview last week. They are intensely proud of their technical and strategic successes. But to a striking degree, they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint. In fact, the best single source of PowerPoint commentary, both pro and con, (including a rich vein of Dilbert cartoons) can be found at RobertGaskins.com, his personal home page.
Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software “elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.
No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: “All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”
Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.
Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”
One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which is was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.
Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.
Still, the men don’t appreciate PowerPoint being blamed for crimes it didn’t commit. Mr. Gaskins studied a vast collection of presentations before designing the program. Bullet points, he says, existed long before PowerPoint.
While the two certainly know how to use PowerPoint, neither consider themselves true power users. They don’t even know many of the advanced features it has come to sport. They also have no patience with cubicle warriors who, in the guise of doing actual work, spend endless hours fiddling with fonts. And they like telling the joke that the best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and, thus, contaminate its decision making, something some analysts say has happened at the Pentagon.
Both left Microsoft in the 1990s and now pursue personal projects. Mr. Austin attended every day of last week’s Apple developer conference, keeping up with the kids. While the two agree there is probably room for a PowerPoint-like program for building high-end Web sites, neither has any desire to create it.
Not being the self-promoting type, neither of the men are particularly bothered about being much less famous than their creation. Whenever they do tell a stranger what they did in life, they usually hear how much the person can’t live without the program.
If they have a lament, it’s that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. “It’s just like the printing press,” says Mr. Austin. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
As Mr. Gaskins puts it: “If they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.”
? Email me at Lee.Gomes@wsj.com.
 

white lilies

white lilies

Originally uploaded by dmarsters.

I am hungry to see the signs of spring (which this is not except that they remind me of easter lilies) emerging from the deep snows we enjoyed here in the Green Mountains.

Will the real culprit please……

What a way to use a beautiful post-Thanksgiving vacation morning! Following a smooth, frigid run in beautiful new snow, I sit down to breakfast with the new “Atlantic Monthly” and read the first commentary. As my brain usually does, it took the ball and ran with it following a very zigzaggy and circuitous route with a variety of stops along the way. At one of these stops my mind says “You should write this down, not because it is earthshaking but because it is the only way you will get it over with!”

This first part is VERY SECRET because I would hate to announce this too prematurely and peak early but I think I might run for President-yes of the USA. Actually I probably won’t but it is a convenient vehicle for thinking about how to get heard in this divisive, mad, beautiful world in which we are raising our kids. (oh, maybe this started this morning when, with my first cup of tea, I was reading in “Wired” about the internet phenomenon of Neopets and how glibly the CEO of this very successful internet phenomenon target little kids (yes, the under-five demographic-half a million users under 8- and others) with ads masquerading as games for the very products that we know lead to the childhod obesity epidemic we are watching in our children.) I envision a little home-grown Vermont-born campaign in which I would have an audience, albeit small, to spout off with.

Well, this Atlantic article by Clive Crook outlines the ways in which our economy is in trouble, the risk it places on our children, and the unlikeliness of any of our current “leaders” reversing this potentially dangerous direction. At the end I was considering why this can happen without any serious political opposition. As usual, I retreated to the familiar-to me-world of education for an analogy.

Last week, some of my students came into my “learning center” excited about the fight between two girls that they just witnessed in the lobby. They had all the lurid details topped off by the observation that a teacher almost “got clocked” for standing in the way. Their main message to me was that I missed out by not seeing this. Of course I responded with all the approriate reprisals and we ended with the usual question about what action they might have taken to prevent or stop the fight. Of course they look at me like I just spoke in Swahili or some other foreign tongue. Perhaps I should clarify that about 60 percent “my kids” are students who live in the fringes and margins of our local educational juggernaut. They have struggled through school, often hate it, but have not quite given up yet. They are brave souls, resilient and highly vulnerable and challenged by skills many of us take for granted.

They got me thinking about why a fight such as the aforementioned one presents them with such entertainment. I also wondered why my ideal of their intervention to stop the fight seemed so foreign to them. And this is where the connection to politics comes in. This fight is our fight in a metaphorical sense. That is we, the few of us who vote and really follow politics, are like my students. We are observers who do not know how to enter the fray. We watch as the wrong-doing continues but sit aside without any clear sense of how to intervene. We complain and moan and groan while waiting for someone to show. I despise the fact that in my school, many students are apathetic or worse. I am totally confused by the failure of the opposition to hold the current in-power politicos to any standard.

So in my campaign-remember it is secret- the name George Bush will not cross our lips. I believe he has done great damage to our country economically, socially and internationlly but we have been largely complicit. So my campaign will focus on our collective responsibility to not stand by but to leap into the fray. My campaign will not be against another candidate as much as it will be against letting others do it. We are now like a sports team playing without an opponent and the right wing is on the field, in uniform, and playing without opposition. As my wise brother-in-law quoted to me from someone else, the politicians have never stopped campaigning so there has been no time for thoughtful, inventive, and visionary legislating.

We need to stop the endless campaign and move to time limited campaigns. I will look into this and get back to you. We need to restore the notion of the “loyal opposition” and in doing so eliminate the divisive and manipulative big dollar power brokers who have forgotten, or never knew, what what the essence of democracy is. So my political career to date-school board for many years, selectman, town moderator for decades and justice of the peace might be a good starting point from which to launch my campaign. On the other hand, it is probably fodder for the Swiftboat Veterans when they go looking for a campaign to corrupt.

Not sure whether this fits….

Here is a blog on naming babbies with some data-great use of data-regarding masculine and feminine names.
http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/2005/04/boyish-and-girlish.html

Resources

An important book……with a great cover!