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Sara Thompson

BubCap is the TUAW Best of 2011 iPad accessory | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog - 1 views

www.tuaw.com/...aw-best-of-2011-ipad-accessory

iPad gadgets bcuedtech

shared by Sara Thompson on 11 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • These inexpensive little Home button covers (4 for US$5) hide the iPad or iPhone Home button to keep your kids from switching to another app and doing something fun like deleting all of your contacts or calling your boss. Apparently, a lot of parents need and use BubCaps, as they topped the reader voting in our TUAW Best of 2011 iPad accessory category.
Sara Thompson

http://www.hiddenpeanuts.com/postfiles/The%20case%20for%20home-grown,%20sustainable%20n... - 0 views

www.hiddenpeanuts.com/...20nex%20-%20Chad%20Haefele.htm

libraries articles technology coll-dev ideasfile

shared by Sara Thompson on 27 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 27 Nov 11
     
      "Old models of library operation may disappear, but that does not mean they can't be replaced.  Academic libraries' central book model is temporarily insulated by high prices, but change will come just the same.  The time provided by this insulation should be used to explore sources of content like local special collections with clear ownership and distribution rights.  Without restrictions like those imposed by many third party vendors, special collections can provide a proving ground for next generation interfaces and services. This home-grown expertise within libraries can then be applied on a wider basis in the future.                 The examples and efforts discussed in this column share one thing at their core, and that is that they are services made by libraries, for libraries.  As a collective institution, libraries have great expertise in building sustainable preservation systems capable of lasting many years.  Third party vendors do not have a proven track record on building long term preservation systems for electronic resources at this point in time.  By placing our trust, funds, and collections in the hands of those third parties we turn libraries into middlemen.  For the short term gain of providing easy access to next generation library services, we risk disintermediation by those vendors and removal from the service equation entirely.  Libraries of all types and sizes can look inward and grow from our strengths.  Major publishers and content providers aren't likely to allow new services with the same scope libraries enjoyed in the past.  Fortunately, special collections and collaborative efforts are accessible to even the smallest library as perfect opportunities for gaining relevant experience and expertise.  By basing that experience and expertise on homegrown services built by and for libraries, they can ensure a sustainable future of next generation services."
Sara Thompson

Bring back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

productivity history business professional management people

shared by Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.
  • By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result.
  • One is that increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this. In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
  • After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them? The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.
  • Another is that overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus.
  • The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.
  • Wise managers who understand this will a) avoid requiring overtime crunches, because they’re acutely aware of the serious longer-term productivity hit that inevitably follows; b) keep the crunches as short as possible when they are necessary; and c) give their teams a few days off — one to two comp days per overtime week worked is about right — at the end of a hard sprint. This downtime enables them recuperate more quickly and completely. It’s much more productive to have them gone for the next week — and then back on the job, rested and ready to work — than have them at their workstations but too fried to get anything useful done for the next month.
  • The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”
  • And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.
  • For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.
  • Companies broadened their working hours, so programmers who came in at noon and worked through till midnight could make their own schedules. Dress codes were loosened; personal eccentricities were celebrated. HP famously brought in breakfast every morning so its engineers would remember to eat.
  • There were two problems with this. The first is that this “passion” ideal didn’t recognize that the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds — that these engineers didn’t have to nearly the same degree. The second was that most managers, lacking windows into their workers’ souls, decided to cut corners and measure passion with one easy-to-chart metric: “willingness to spend your entire life at the office.”
  • The unions — for 150 years, the guardians of the 40-hour week — were falling under a conservative onslaught; and in their place, the new cult of the entrepreneur was ascendant.
  • “working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. (Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.)
  • Within 15 years, everything America’s managers used to know about sustaining worker productivity was forgotten. Now, 30 years and a few economic meltdowns on, the cafeterias and child-care centers and gyms are mostly gone, along with the stock options and bonuses that were once held out as the potential reward for the long hours. All that remains of those heady, optimistic days is the mandatory 60-hour work-week. And, unless you’re an hourly worker — still entitled to time and a half by law — the only inducement employers currently offer in exchange for submitting yourself to this abuse is that you get to keep your job.
  • There are now whole industries and entire branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress, but the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help. The original short-work movement in 19th-century Britain demanded “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works.
  • Here’s why. By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.
  • But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done.
  • Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12
     
    Just in case we ever need more fodder for hiring...  "But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done."
Mark Lindner

LSE produces new Twitter guide for academics - 10 - 2011 - News archive - News - News a... - 0 views

www2.lse.ac.uk/...twitter_guide.aspx

Twitter academia

shared by Mark Lindner on 17 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 17 Dec 11
     
    How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are between 3,000-8,000 words long? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?
Sara Thompson

Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration - 0 views

dschool.stanford.edu/makespace

collaboration commons buildings design furniture home libraries

shared by Sara Thompson on 19 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 19 Jan 12
     
    book from d.school at Stanford University "Appropriate for designers charged with creating new spaces or anyone interested in revamping an existing space, this guide offers novel and non-obvious strategies for changing surroundings specifically to enhance the ways in which teams and individuals communicate, work, play-and innovate. This work is based on years of classes and programs at the d.school including countless prototypes and iterations with d.school students and spaces."
Sara Thompson

iPad Pilot Home - iPads in the Classroom - Guides at UPenn Libraries - 4 views

guides.library.upenn.edu/ipad

ipad libraries casestudy education bcuedtech

shared by Sara Thompson on 07 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 07 Nov 11
     
    A LibGuide created for an iPad Lending Program, with a reservation calendar and links to blog posts. 
Sara Thompson

10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha - How-To Geek - 0 views

www.howtogeek.com/...amazing-uses-for-wolfram-alpha

search webtools data research statistics

shared by Sara Thompson on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Enter two terms with a vs in between them and you’ll get a comparison. For example, you could compare websites to see the differences in traffic between them.
  • Enter a type of food and Wolfram Alpha will provide you with its nutrition information. You don’t have to stop at one — enter multiple types of food and Wolfram Alpha will compare them for you.
  • Ask where you are and Wolfram will use your IP address to track you down. You can also enter an IP address into the box and Wolfram will track that IP address down and tell you where it is.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Wolfram Alpha can come up with a random password and estimate how long it will take to crack. You can even tweak the rules used to generate the password.
  • Have you been drinking? Wolfram Alpha can estimate whether you can legally drive home. Ask it if you’re drunk and you’ll get a form asking for more information.
  • Enter a name and you can see how common it is, complete with a graph showing you how popular the name has been over time. Enter multiple names and Wolfram will compare how common they are.
  • Type body mass index and Wolfram will present you with another form. After you provide your weight and height, Wolfram Alpha will calculate your BMI and tell you whether you’re within the normal range.
  • Want to find words that begin with a certain letter, end with a certain combination of letters — or both? Just ask Wolfram Alpha in plain English.
Mark Lindner

Comparison - Unified Resource Discovery Comparison - 0 views

sites.google.com/...comparison

libraries search

shared by Mark Lindner on 09 Feb 12 - No Cached
Sara Thompson

Collaborative Environments Presentations - Readability - 2 views

www.readability.com/read

video bcushare collaboration ipad education buildings

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 01 Oct 11
     
    Presentations from U of Minnesota on variety of topics, including iPads in Classrooms, Active Learning Classrooms, and Collaborative Writing.
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