links for 2009-06-15

"Short sentences; active voice; keep the audience in mind; draw clear diagrams; minimize jargon; use paragraphs; spell correctly; conjugate verbs; employ diacritics properly; use metric; resist idiomatic speech; avoid overusing semicolons; write in English. All very helpful tips that I’ve gathered over the years, if you want to totally ensure that no one will ever want to read what you write. I think it behooves writers to make technical documentation fun by embedding a few surprises here and there for the unsuspecting reader. "

"[T]ake the question, “how did Africans think about or understand colonialism? How important was it to them? What social and political developments in African societies were primarily a response to or critique of colonial authority?” It’s a question that runs across the whole of modern Africanist historiography, but good luck just searching for compressed, focused treatments of it using either web-wide or authoritative catalogs. "

"My friend and colleague Hal Roberts is one of the internet’s top censorship and filtering researchers. When Chinese authorities announced that a client-based piece of filtering software called GreenDam would be required for installation on new PCs, Hal downloaded the software and spent a good chunk of this week trying to understand how it works. He and colleagues released a report earlier today that demonstrates that GreenDam is incredibly ambitious and invasive to user privacy, but also badly broken and virtually unusable.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this fact is the video Hal put together earlier today and posted on his blog. It shows GreenDam slowly realizing that it wants to block a Falun Gong site… then blocking any other sites that begin with the letter “f”, due to the way Internet Explorer handles autocompletion and GreenDam blocks content."

"In contrast [to the tv news networks], note that print reporters (newspapers, wire services, magazines, and center-left blogs) had fantastic coverage of Iranian developments throughout the day and night. I’ve found the New York Times’ coverage to be especially strong.

The wrong part of the media industry is in trouble."

"It is indeed true that you would be “lifted” out of your seats [on the Tower of Terror ride], but I am not sure this is what you would expect. If the elevator is free falling, wouldn’t you just float in your seat but not be lifted up?"

"Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.) I gave Dorothy a disappointed look and said, “That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.”"