Author: vdebolt

Review: World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet


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World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet by Michael Chorost is published by Free Press (2011).

The title of this book is a good summary of what it’s about. It’s not about web design or web education, it’s about how the human brain could connect with other human minds through the Internet.

Chorost describes the book as a thought experiment about things that are conceptually plausible, though not yet in practice. He gives many examples of how his ideas about the future are based in technology that is already in use. There are chapters on the technology that is used to detect brain activity, chapters on nanowires and optogenetics – both mechanisms that can read and write brain activity, chapters on communications protocols for sending perceptions and memories from one brain to another, chapters on examples of what might result from linking humans to the Internet, and chapters on a possible future collective mind. The writing style is accessible and clear. In an age when people talk about neural pathways over the dinner table, the science discussions in the book are open and written for the average informed person.

Woven in with all this science reporting and speculation, is a personal narrative about Chorost’s already wired brain – he has chochlear implants. He also uses stories about his personal life and relationships to introduce concepts about how the human mind works. The book is a surprisingly easy read.

Some of Chorost’s examples are part of pop culture. He talks about The Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example. He doesn’t mention Dollhouse, but I think it contains the best example of hive mind as he describes it. I don’t mean the plot line in Dollhouse where new personalities are injected into people electronically and they can suddenly be doctors or kick boxing experts. Chorost’s says that brains can’t learn that way. But there is a particular episode of Dollhouse where the character Victor is linked to a group of soldiers, who all act with awareness of what the other soldiers are doing. Yet Victor can use his own will and thinking, even while being aware of what the others he’s linked to are doing and thinking.

That Dollhouse episode is an example of Chorost’s vision of the collective awareness that would come with linking the human brain to the Internet: an awareness, a perception, but not an abandonment of one’s own thinking, one’s own self. He thinks this would be a good thing.

The ways of making that a reality involve wiring the brain with tiny wires and/or devices, or possibly using genetically modified genes that are triggered into action with light (optogenetics). The part of the process that he accepts without comment is that people would be willing to step forward and allow these things to be done to their brains. That seems like a pretty big sticking point to me.

The book has notes, a bibliography, and an index for those who want to explore in depth.

Summary: Theoretical and speculative, but fascinating.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of World Wide Mind (rating: 3 stars)

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Useful links: Internet kill switch, IE6 kill switch, SXSWi greetings

In Search of the Internet Kill Switch by Jon Orlin is important reading if you are interested in what the U.S. government is considering doing to potentially shut down the Internet whenever they want.

Microsoft is ending support for IE6. Here’s one announcement of that fact.

It’s not often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for #IE6, we’ll make an exception: http://bit.ly/g0wt4mFri Mar 04 19:24:18 via webMicrosoft
Microsoft

I’ll be at SXSW Interactive again this year. If you’d like to say hello, I’d love to meet you. I’m easy to spot at tech events because I’m the one in the white haired fright wig. And I’ll be wearing a white shirt every day this year. White hair & white shirt surrounded by a sea of young people in tee shirts: you’ll see me.

HTML/Text editor recommendations

I got this email the other day:

I have a rather odd request to ask. I am trying to learn how to write web pages for fun and maybe more down the road. At present I have several different editors to choose from, and was wondering if you could give me some advice as to which one I should use as my primary editor. I have: Dreamweaver CS4, Notpad++(sic), TopStyle Pro 4.0.0.85 and UEStudio ’10 as my potential editors. The thing is I really want to learn hand coding from the ground up. I have both of your books, Intergraded (sic) HTML and CSS and Mastering Intergraded (sic) HTML and CSS for my learning the basics. I also have PDF books on learning JavaScript and HTML5, more books than I know what to do with.

I haven’t seen anyone talking about editors on a blog for a long time. Because of that, I thought I’d give a rather lengthy answer. And a lengthy answer sounds like a blog post, does it not? Here’s how I answered the email.

Each of those tools has its own pros and cons. If you are serious about hand coding, you might find UEStudio, with its excellent HTML text editor UltraEdit as a good choice. Coupling that with TopStyle Pro for help with writing CSS and you have the basics covered.

UltraEdit beats out Notepad in my book because you have color coding, search and replace, FTP, and much more that isn’t available with Notepad.

Dreamweaver – which can be used as a text editor in Code View – adds another dimension you don’t get from other tools. If you aren’t great at typing or spelling, which your email hints might be the case, using Code View in Dreamweaver to type code is pretty typo-proof. There are many site management tools in Dreamweaver: link management, validation tools, site-wide search and replace, built in JavaScripts, FTP, CSS tools, image editing and more. Plus you have the WYSIWYG view if you want it.

Any one of these tools can get the job done. Which do you feel most comfortable working in? Which one makes the most sense to you? That one is probably the right choice for you.

I have dozens and dozens of web design books at my house, too. I’ve read them all. I’ve given away sacks and sacks of them to Freecycle folks. There are more books to come. In this field, there’s always something new, always something more to learn. Get the basic building blocks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript under control and that gives you the foundation to build on.

Syntax Style for HTML5 Markup: some best practice recommendations

The people involved in the WaSP InterACT Curriculum are organizing to do some updates to the free online course materials the curriculum provides to web educators (and self-taught learners). This is part of an ongoing effort to keep the InterACT web standards based curriculum up to date.

In preparing to update the Web Design 1 course to bring in some material about HTML5, I surveyed the members of the WaSP education task force and others involved in InterACT as to what style of syntax we should recommend as a best practice for HTML5.

As you may know, the options for syntax style in HTML5 are wide open. Tags can be upper case, lower case, or camel case. Attribute values can be quoted, or not quoted. Empty elements can have a closing forward slash, or not. Other elements can be closed, or not.

I didn’t want to add modules for HTML5 to the Web Design 1 curriculum that simply said, “Do whatever you feel like in terms of syntax,” although that is pretty much what HTML5 allows. And I didn’t want to write something that was merely “Virginia’s ideas on HTML5 syntax.”

So, the survey of the WaSP education task force members went out. Consensus was reached. Here are the recommendations for HTML5 syntax. This is how we think it should be taught and written.

  • Use lower case for tags
  • Quote attribute values
  • Don’t use the XML style trailing forward slash on empty elements (e.g., <br> not <br />
  • Close all non-empty elements (e.g., <p></p> and <li></li> etc.)

What we’re advocating as a best practice is using syntax associated with strict doctypes in past iterations of (X)HTML. However, HTML5 is not XHTML, so there’s no need to retain the trailing forward slash on empty elements.

Here’s your chance to add your voice to the mix. Are there any reasons why this style of syntax should not be used as a best practice for HTML5? Can you add anything else that you think is important that hasn’t been included?

WebAIM’s Screen Reader User Survey

You can see the full set of results of the WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #3. I hope you’ll study them with interest.

I want to highlight a few of their findings here.

ARIA Landmarks

Chart showing usage of ARIA landmarks

ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) introduces something called landmarks. These provide quick access to page areas, such as navigation, search, and main content. Which of the following best describes your use of landmarks?
Response # of Respondents % of Respondents
I didn’t know this functionality existed 342 30.9%
I do not use landmarks for navigation 287 25.9%
I sometimes use landmarks for navigation 277 25.0%
I use landmarks for navigation whenever they are present 161 14.5%
My screen reader does not support landmarks 40 3.6%

Awareness of landmarks has increased – 42% were unaware of this functionality in October 2009. However, these data continue to show mixed levels of usage.

In spite of that finding, I think its important to teach people how to use ARIA roles, particularly in HTML5. In HTML5, we’re still dealing with levels of support for various new elements, and any help that a front-end developer can add to the code is a good thing.

Other findings important to front-end developers:

  • JAWS is still the primary tool, although others are increasing in number
  • Almost 95% of users have JavaScript enabled
  • A majority of users are using a screen reader on a mobile device, too
  • The main method for navigating a page is using headings
  • The use of “skip links” and access keys is decreasing
  • The heading structure found most useful by a big majority of screen reader users: Two first level headings, one for the site name and one for the document title
  • Users indicate strong usefulness of the longdesc attribute, which may not make it into HTML5