Admin Toolbox

I gush easily for really cool electronic devices that exude simplicity. To this list, I offer the following:

NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

A light, efficient, slate that I can write on? For 100 bucks? Based solely upon the concept, I can’t click enough Like buttons to stop the soul-gripping urge to own this thing. Visit the site and drool.

One of the things that I’ve always loved about the Microsoft Office suite is that you have an amazing amount of control over the menus. I take pride in ripping useless stuff out of the ribbons so that I can keep focused on the small percentage of tools that I actually use.

I’ve been using the Office suite for what feels like decades. For example, I used the version of Word that was released for Windows 3.1. Then, as now, there is always something annoyingly non-configurable. There’s a reason, but it’s just not a good one.

This time, it’s because Microsoft desperately wants you to use their Office.com templates. They likely know that you have your own templates, they just don’t care. Take the following graphic:

You see that “Office.com Templates” section? Yeah, you can’t get rid of it. I’m sure there’s some obscure registry key that will allow you to blast it out, but that’s not exactly the user option approach. Also, I haven’t found it.

Me? I want all my highly specific templates to be listed there. Instead, I have to click on “My Templates”, then show in detail mode (because icon mode looks a mess), and then scroll down to what I need and double-click it.

Microsoft delivers the whole damned world in each of its releases, but – because of that – has always had the too many clicks problem. It takes two clicks to access stuff I hate, but four or five clicks to access the stuff I actually use.

I’m sure those built in templates are useful for small business owners, and individuals who aren’t using policy-driven template designs, but for the rest of us (I’ll say most, actually), it’s wasted space. I don’t click on the New option because I want to view forty large, ugly icons that lead to useless documents.

I want control. I have it damned near everywhere else, but I’ll probably have to wait for the next release to be able to modify it. Please, Microsoft, stop thinking for me. I have a brain that works pretty damned well, most of the time. If I want your extensive collection of painfully anti-Tufte forms, I’ll turn it on. At least let me turn it off.

Among my projects for this year is the creation of some templates for employing Tufte design standards. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here and I’ll bring you up to speed.

If you’re designing a book that makes use of extensive graphics and/or footnotes, the Tufte approach is an excellent method. Each page’s layout appears like a two-column document, save that the second column is narrower and used only for side notes. Side notes are a complete replacement for footnotes and references. The former always ends up below all the text and the latter typically appears in a list at the end of a chapter or book.

But, with side notes, data is not divorced from where it appears in the text, keeping relevant information together. When done properly, a printed work appears much cleaner and comprehensible, with no flipping back and forth required.

No LaTeX

Skillful designers use the LaTeX environment for this stuff. From what I understand, this is an immensely preferable method for book-creation techs. But, I am increasingly convinced that some kind of document or template system needs to be available for programs like Word and Publisher.

I can hear my fellow Tufte fans saying, no, no, no. It’s all well and good to say don’t use those – that may be a best-case scenario – but the reality is that many of we administrators are stuck with them. Frankly, I want to see more people using the approach. I’m going to skip the lecture. It’s just like PowerPoint.

To that end, I hope to have some kind of Publisher template constructed this year. It’d be something you can open and edit, allowing for cleaner design but without the headache of an obscure method.

I was thrilled to discover the following two PDF documents, found at this site, that serve as a good guide. I’ll report more as I get the time for my project.

• A Tufte Style Book
• A Tufte Style Handout

This is just a quick post to direct you to this video by Nancy Duarte. She has taken the time to analyze the structure and content of MLK’s iconic speech.

Last year, I pointed readers toward his letter to Birmingham Jail because it, too, is an example of magically constructed prose. In both these examples, the conveyance of ideas is so sharp and focused that they easily stand the test of time. It strikes me as remarkable that, all these years later, I still get chills at its delivery.

Over at the New York Times, John Collins Rudolf has written about a forthcoming game that I’ve heard not a peep about until today. It’s called Fate of the World, and it’s one of those games with a message, which means that I’m cautiously crossing my fingers.

From the NYT piece:

The game relies on climate prediction models supplied by Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford’s atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics department.

Change is achieved by applying policies, in the form of cards, to a dozen geographical regions, with each turn representing the passage of five years. Players can promote nuclear power and institute cap-and-trade schemes, or pin their hopes on untested technologies like fusion power or carbon capture and storage — so-called “clean coal.”

But the game does not stop there. Players can take an authoritarian route to save the world, by implementing population controls, like China’s one-child policy or banning the eating of meat. Yet these options can backfire, leading to local rebellions.

“You can dictate policy, but the regions might not like it,” Mr. Griffiths, the designer, said.

Far darker options are available for seriously unscrupulous planet savers. These include sending secret agents to overthrow recalcitrant governments and surreptitiously adding contraceptives to the water supplies of nations resistant to birth control. Those with apocalyptic leanings can even release a genetically engineered virus to crash the world population. (Rudolf)

The game developers have real-live-video-game experience, so I’m holding out hope. This is precisely the sort of game that I’m drawn to. Educational, system-focused, and potentially fun.

Hat Tip to Dave Gottlieb.

There’s some pretty wild stuff going on out there. In addition to all the gee-whiz gizmos our industries provide, university science departments regularly surprise me with the stuff they’re doing. Check this out:

This tickles me. I’m always searching for ways to make our complicated sciences more interesting. Using microscopic lifeforms to control a game seems to be a natural fit. Just wanted to share.

As a rule, when I am preparing a new document of any kind, I use Word’s Find & Replace tool to entirely remove any double spaces following a period.

Note the highlighted spaces. Just do this and click on Replace All. Problem solved.

I realize that we’ve all got in the habit of using double spaces, but the reasons for that habit are pretty hazy. Lifehacker recently pointed readers to this Slate piece by Farhad Manjoo, where he lifts the fog:

In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

There’s more, but it’s really about inertia. That’s a common enough feature of any bureaucracy, but trust me; you don’t have to do it. And it’s for the same reasons that you don’t use white-out to fix spelling errors or send telegrams via pneumatic tube.

You know you’re a writing-nerd when you encounter a notebook and think, “I have to have that.” Well, the Field Notes brand steno pads are a dream. They remind me of the drawing pads that my high-school art teacher had lying around. During this past Christmas season, I encountered a rack of these things at a specialty paper shop.

Sturdy. Durable. Beautiful. The paper-weight is very satisfying to touch. I think I prefer quality pads precisely because I do so much stuff online. When I’m offline I don’t want to muck about with 99 cent Target pads.

Let’s just say that a pad or two will be on the way shortly. Check out this great making of video. Writing-nerds, beware. Your wallet may get lighter.

Go shopping here.

Today, Paul Basken, at The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote about a potential dark side of favoring research over education.

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.

And, some faculty members are getting nervous. Plus, when NIH tightens its belt, many universities get concerned about where additional funding will come from.

And universities have been seeing even more dire budget scenarios at the state level, the traditional foundation of their governmental support. Those worries, and the hope among universities that the federal government might take up more of the load from the states, helped encourage the National Research Council, a private federally chartered institution, to form a study panel of 22 university and corporate leaders. The group, due to issue a report this spring, has been drafting arguments for why the federal government should recognize university science as a national asset deserving of more resources.

…

Mr. Mann said he saw a direct correlation between universities’ promoting and paying for those teaching skills, and improving the quality of science research. Among other problems, he said, universities rely heavily on the integrity of their faculty to produce trustworthy science. “As the pressures become higher for people to generate grant income to support their salaries and their enterprise,” he said, “then the pressure for the absence of integrity gets higher.”

The health of universities, and the overall U.S. economy, depends on finding that right balance, he said. “There’s a real risk at the present time to have a system that’s not stable.”

This is certainly worth paying attention to. As a buzzword, Sustainability means more than preventing farmland nutrient run-off. It applies to a whole host of economic and social institutions.

Hat tip to Nicholas Schiller

It doesn’t matter how often I help submit an NIH grant application, I forget some pretty routine stuff. That’s what notes are for. For instance, depending upon which of the three cycles we’re submitting to, there are different start/end dates. Now, I could go to this page, but look at the thing.

It contains useful information, but its organized horribly. Many institutions generate data useful for the end user, but it’s usually without an eye toward design. As a result, I appear to be subconsciously putting it out of my mind, and that’s not good.

So, why not create a solution? I’ve generated a graphic that should help in the future. The main thing to keep in mind is that I’ve kept only the data I care about. By paring things down to their very basics, clarity is greatly improved.

It’s very easy to adapt something like this for only the mechanisms or data that you are about. If you’d like to use this as a starting point, here’s the source XLSX file.