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February 22, 2013

Inconvenient Ideas

Whenever Darwin encountered a “published fact” or “new observation” that contradicted one of his beliefs, he forced himself to “make a memorandum of

June 30, 2011

Circles

In his review of Google+ Farhad Manjoo compares their “Circles” feature to arranging wedding seating charts. Having to sort people into lists before

December 12, 2008

RIP Donnell Library

I wrote my first serious research paper in high school; about ethnographic film. In 1988 the only way to see many classic ethnographic films was on

September 21, 2008

In Sync

Two years ago I wrote a post about the various complicated ways I kept my home and office computer synchronized. Because my office computer recently

April 25, 2008

Technologies of the Self

If you google the letters “GTD” you’ll get seven million hits back. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done,” a time management book, method and

January 19, 2008

Firefox Reloaded

After spending one week trying to use Safari as my default browser, I decided to go back to Firefox. I was able to find numerous substitutes for my

January 10, 2008

Firefox vs. Safari

Firefox is much more than a web browser — its a platform. Numerous applications run on Firefox’s XUL framework, mostly as plugins. This

December 16, 2007

Gabe & Max’s Internet Thing

I don’t normally accept advertising here on Keywords, but I think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing is too good a deal to pass up. I am constantly

December 16, 2007

Gabe & Max’s Internet Thing

I don’t normally accept advertising here on Keywords, but I think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing is too good a deal to pass up. I am constantly

December 9, 2007

High ISO

When I was telling people I wanted a compact camera which could perform well at a high ISO, I think many misunderstood. What I really should have

December 2, 2007

Taiwan 2.0

I wanted to announce two projects which I think should be useful for English speaking residents of the Taiwanese interweb: First is a Yahoo! Pipes

November 16, 2007

KUSO

If you walk around Taipei these days you’ll be sure to see the word KUSO written in big letters all over the place. For instance, this summer there

November 16, 2007

Viacom vs. Daily Show

Does the writer’s strike have you down? Miss The Daily Show? Here are some things you can do: Download Miro. Watch some classic Daily Show clips

November 3, 2007

Patients per Doctor

A map of the world showing the ratio of patients to doctors. {maps, tufte, inequality}

October 30, 2007

The Manhattan Project

Turns out there’s a reason they called it The Manhattan Project. In “The Manhattan Project” … Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s

October 28, 2007

Gmail IMAP

I am very excited about IMAP support on Gmail. Maybe it isn’t healthy for someone to be so excited about e-mail … but this is huge. Why? Especially

October 12, 2007

Camera Shopping

(Click here to see a side-by-side comparison of the cameras discussed in this post.) Buying a compact digital camera is always a trade-off. In such

October 9, 2007

Wisdom of the Crowd?

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki relates an anecdote about “Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately

October 3, 2007

Easement

iPhone owners are up in arms about the fact that Apple blocked third party applications. Personally I think these people should focus their wrath

October 2, 2007

Moon Map

Via How Design: “Moon Mapping from the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology Research Project.” {design, maps, moon, astronomy}

September 22, 2007

Tweets vs. Lifelog

As of now I will stop posting tweets to this blog. Once again this blog will become a space reserved for long-form blogging. You can continue to

August 27, 2007

Foreigner Friendly?

Every Taiwanese has a National ID Card 身分證 with its own unique number, not unlike a Social Security number in the US. The difference is that every

August 26, 2007

Treo Woes

The Palm Treo is a decent device, but it costs twice what it should and it hasn’t been significantly upgraded in years. Unfortunately, I need one. I

August 15, 2007

Wikitization

Back in the old days, when Wikipedia was new, there were just a handful of rules, and one of the key ones was “Ignore all rules.” Or, more

August 7, 2007

.mac vs. web 2.0

A year ago I wrote about various alternative services I use in lieu of Apple’s .Mac suite of online tools. With Apple’s recent upgrades to .Mac, I

June 28, 2007

Jesusphone

I don’t have an iPhone and won’t have one for at least a year or more because I live in Taiwan and iPhones are currently restricted to the worst US

June 20, 2007

GDP vs. US States

Via Strange Maps, a chart/map showing US States renamed with the names of countries where the GDP is similar to that of those states. {maps, GDP}

May 5, 2007

Web Forms

So you want me to give you all my personal data? Don’t make it any more difficult than it has to be. Don’t make me fill it out more than once.

April 7, 2007

Burrito Tunnel

Who knew that New York’s turn-of-the-century pneumatic tube system could be used to deliver burritos all the way to from San Francisco? The

April 1, 2007

Asynchronicity

I never liked team sports, I never liked playing the dozens, I never liked being put on the spot … Its not that I’m introverted — I’m not. I’m just

March 17, 2007

ze

I know I’m not the only one who will miss Ze, as he ends his one year video blog which rocked the interweb. I think the secret to Ze’s success is

March 8, 2007

WordPress CMS

I’ve recently gotten very good at using WordPress to power static websites. The reason being that recent changes to WordPress have made it really

March 1, 2007

Vanity

is having a dashboard widget (Mac OS X only) for all of your own web feeds. I doubt anyone out there, except perhaps my mother, will want to

January 9, 2007

ToDo

Why, after just a few days of use, would I switch from using a rock-solid piece of software I paid for and have used for years to a public beta

December 31, 2006

Y100

As noted here previously, Taiwan is 1911 years behind the rest of the world in counting years. 2007 is thus the year 96 in Taiwan. So I was

December 30, 2006

UrSatellite

I recently wrote about a great new Taiwan mapping service called UrMap, well now they’ve added satellite imagery far more detailed than Google

December 29, 2006

Edwards 2.0

Last election bloggers, many of whom had initially supported the tech-savvy Howard Dean campaign, felt that they had to drag the Kerry campaign into

December 22, 2006

Aura

In his classical work, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote that modern technology would free art from its

December 20, 2006

Deaf Video

Teresa at Making Light has a great post about how deaf people are using YouTube: Why did it not occur to me that the signing deaf would be using

December 15, 2006

Go Go Go! Good Good Good!

[Be sure to see updated links at bottom.] Even if you aren’t a foreigner who’s vainly attempted to book tickets online in Taiwan, the irony of the

December 15, 2006

East Asian Libraries and Archives Wiki

As someone who has run several wikis, I know all too well that they are only as good as their user-base, so because I would really, really, like to

December 13, 2006

Mouse Trap

Thinking of building a better mouse trap? Now with Google patent search you can instantly browse 576 previous mouse trap patents. [via Boing

December 1, 2006

Color

Via Language Hat, I discovered a revolutionary new approach to sorting one’s books: by color! The funny thing is that this is how I usually look for

November 27, 2006

ClaimID

Are you a social web junkie? Then you might want to gather all your online identities into one place. Even better, registering for a ClaimID account

November 26, 2006

Interlocals

True bilingualism is a rare thing. As we get flooded by more and more information, who has the time to painstakingly read through hundreds of blog

November 17, 2006

Pandora

Want to create your own radio station, one which plays music you like? Pandora is amazingly simple to use: you enter the name of an artist whose

November 13, 2006

Sunlight

Now that I live in the tropics* with a south-facing window, I no longer have much trouble waking up in the morning. The huge flood of natural

November 12, 2006

UrMap

Although Google has great satellite images of Taiwan, until recently I knew of no decent online maps of Taiwan. There seemed to be nothing

October 21, 2006

Plazes

Inspired by my friend Ilya, and because I’m going to three conferences in the next four weeks, I thought I’d give Plazes a try. So, if you want to

October 12, 2006

Transistors

Graduate Student Rashi Jain is running in a marathon to raise money for a program to set up Radio Schools for rural Adivasi communities in India.

October 6, 2006

Vocabulary

One of the hardest things about learning Chinese is the lack of good dictionaries. I have one of the best — the ABC dictionary with “over 10,000

October 5, 2006

New Link Blog

Since their recent upgrade, I’ve switched from using my desktop client, NetNews Wire, to using Google Reader online, something I was never willing

September 4, 2006

Auteur

I really have very little to say about the phenomenon known as lonelygirl15, except to point you to a few good articles, and this excellent video.

August 10, 2006

Synchronicity

The Wikipedia disambiguation page for “synchronicity” lists one of the meanings as “A goal or result of synchronization.” I mention this just so you

July 25, 2006

The User Elite

Wikipedia and Digg are both sites which supposedly aggregate the collective wisdom of the internet. However, in reading about recent controversies

July 20, 2006

Kaemi

Shashwati asks why I chose to work in one of the most earthquake and typhoon prone regions on the planet. One good reason is that they are much

July 17, 2006

Tooth Fairy

When I was a kid the tooth fairy only gave me a quarter, this site says the going rate is a dollar, but this news story has me thinking that

July 9, 2006

Joba

is a new exercise machine from Panasonic. It is a home version of those mechanical bull rides you find in bars out West (at least according to

June 30, 2006

地圖

Here is a map of where we live. I threw it together pretty quickly after discovering Quikmaps (thank’s Ish!), and will probably add more details to

June 26, 2006

Writely

Do any of my readers have a Writely account? I very much need an invitation for a project I am working on regarding using online tools for teaching.

June 23, 2006

Contract!

We are happy to announce some very exciting news … Today we signed a contract with Documentary Educational Resources (DER) to distribute two of our

June 23, 2006

Pando

I recently wrote about our attempts to find a simple, cheap, and effective way to send very large files over the web. One solution I found, Jungle

June 21, 2006

Jungle Disc

With my Luxsci IMAP account and lifetime web hosting from TextDrive, not to mention Flickr, I’ve never even considered a .Mac account from Apple,

June 8, 2006

MIT

In this part of the world, MIT stands for “Made in Taiwan.” Today I just learned (via Jason at Wandering to Tamshui) that one of Taiwan’s number one

May 30, 2006

BBS

One of my many summer projects (it currently seems like those precious two months are infinitely long) is to crack into the alternative online world

May 17, 2006

Indexicality

According to Wikipedia, one of the characteristics of indexicals is that “in order to successfully interpret them the hearer must know the

April 29, 2006

Wheee!

I feel a pain in my chest every time I see someone trying to do work in Internet Explorer. It is like watching someone try to walk with their

April 29, 2006

Murders

The NY Times has gotten into the whole Google Maps mashup craze with this map identifying every murder committed between 2003 and 2005. Between

April 6, 2006

Windows

The assumption out there seems to be that the only people who will really care about a system which can dual boot in both Windows and OS X are

March 26, 2006

Traffic

Not the first time I’ve been linked to by BoingBoing, so I know from experience that after the link disappears from the front page of BoingBoing few

March 22, 2006

MRT Blog

Now that I’m in Taiwan, I guess I should remove my listing from the NYC Bloggers subway map. Too bad I’m not living in Taipei, then I could be on

March 11, 2006

Budehan (Budhan in Chinese)

Dakxin Bajranage’s play, Budhan has been up on the web for some time. The wonderful thing about making art and literature freely available on the

March 1, 2006

Payments Received

It seems that one stamp is not enough. It is a little out of focus, but you can see they gave me a second stamp to use to sign all “Payments

February 23, 2006

Rubber Stamp

Believe it or not, I was actually given a rubber stamp so that I can rubber stamp all the ridiculous paperwork that we have to deal with. Some memos

January 27, 2006

Folding

How to fold a shirt (click to watch video): (via Lifehacker) {folding, hacks, lifehacks, shirt}

December 9, 2005

Fair Use

Guest post by tf The French government plans to introduce a draconian copyright law, the DADVSI, to be discussed in parliament on December 20th and

December 7, 2005

Skype Out

Guest post by tf Each French cabinet ministry has its own official responsible for the national defense related aspects of that ministry’s work. For

December 6, 2005

Tags

There are two models of tags in use on the web: tags-as-folders, and tags-as-meta-info. Gmail uses the first form, allowing you to store messages in

November 22, 2005

Dear Sir/Madam

I got this SPAM/virus/phishing scam e-mail which said: Dear Sir/Madam, we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

November 13, 2005

Bug Vote

Do you use Devanagari on a mac? Firefox? Then please vote for this bug. Firefox 1.5 is almost ready for release and they still haven’t fixed this.

November 9, 2005

Paperclip

What I want to know is, when Kyle gets his house, will he trade it to me for a red paperclip? (via BoingBoing) {barter, house, paperclip}

November 5, 2005

Privacy

I long ago discovered that the best way to reduce the amount of SPAM is to have two e-mail addresses, one private and one public. I use the private

November 2, 2005

Tab Mix Plus

is a Firefox Extensions which allows you to more easily manage your tabs: When tabs overflow the first line they wrap around and can

October 29, 2005

Body Count

A very well done and important story on This American Life: About a year ago, a study estimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It came

October 27, 2005

JustGive.org

Thanks to a friend I discovered JustGive.org, which allows you to donate to charities and non-profits online. This is great for us, because we’ve

October 26, 2005

Yesterday’s Weather

The way weather reports work is all wrong. They always tell you the next three-to-five days. What I want is just two days, and one of those days

October 18, 2005

Seeders

People are being really great about leaving their Acting Like a Thief BitTorrent files open after they finish downloading. That means right now

October 2, 2005

Passwords

This short film just changed my life. Really. More information here, here, here, here and here. (via Alex King) As I get ready for my trip to India

September 29, 2005

Don’t click that link!

If you’ve tried clicking on any links on any of my sites (my homepage, my wiki, or this blog), you will get a 404 error telling you that the page

September 22, 2005

iTunes vs. Phil Schaap

If you don’t know who Phil Schaap is, you don’t listen to jazz radio in New York City. But this post isn’t really about Phil Schaap the man, it is

September 19, 2005

Adieu Krugman!

I just learned via Crooked Timber that one now has to pay $50 a year to gain access to the New York Times Op-Ed page. I’ll occasionally read

September 14, 2005

Blog Tabloid

John Emerson’s concept of a blog tabloid is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but I know realize I was thinking about it all

August 24, 2005

Neuro Fuzzy

My brother, a computer-scientist, often jokes that my beloved Zojirushi rice cooker, which boasts “Advanced neuro fuzzy® logic technology,” is all

August 15, 2005

NPR Podcasts [Feeds]

After wasting an afternoon figuring out how to set up Audio Hijack to automatically record yesterday’s All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and

July 30, 2005

Farsighted

Could someone please explain to me how, when we can see all the way to other galaxies, we somehow missed a planet in our own solar system? Is it

July 11, 2005

Branded

This site, using Google maps to show the location of all convicted sex offenders in Utah has me really freaked out. On the one hand, having entered

July 10, 2005

Typosquatting

Last week Bill Poser of Language Log had a post about Leo Stoller, a Chicago businessman who claims not only to have copyright over the word

July 10, 2005

delicious for:you [feeds]

Have an interesting link you think I’d be interested in? Tag it in del.icio.us with the tag “for:kerim” and I’ll see it when I look at

July 9, 2005

Technical Help Needed

I’ve been dealing with my jet lag after returning from Taiwan by upgrading all the software on my web site. Its all gone pretty smoothly, except for

July 9, 2005

Subscribe via E-mail

In the early days, my blog was actually an e-mail list sent out to a group of friends and family members. Then I figured out how to post everything

July 4, 2005

Taiwan Bloggers

The most rewarding aspect of blogging for me has been all the other bloggers I’ve gotten to know. Unfortunately, it is only rarely I get to meet

June 20, 2005

ki-wi-ki

While we are speaking of etymologies, one of the most popular ones on the internet is that for “wiki.” As more or less everyone who’s worked with

June 5, 2005

Google Home

A large satellite image of home via Google Maps Wallpapers: Click for a larger view, with the train stops marked. Also, via the Map Room, the

May 30, 2005

Linguistlist RSS [Feeds]

The Linguistlist now offers RSS Feeds. These are really nicely done — you can get the most recent posts, or you can subscribe to individual

May 29, 2005

Number 2

I’m very upset to report that I’ve been demoted. In Google’s English edition Keywords is now only the number two result for “Kerim.” I am no longer

May 20, 2005

Coding

I am not a programmer. Except I am. What I mean is: I never sat down to study how to code, or ever wrote anything from scratch. However, at some

May 17, 2005

Savage Minds

Last September I wrote an article in Anthropology News encouraging my fellow anthropologists to get online. I was frustrated that while there are

May 10, 2005

Precondition Failed

Help! I’m suffering from a plague of web sites I am unable to access. I’ve listed all the offending sites here. Some of them are major sites — like

May 10, 2005

InfoFlags

A team of artists from Brazil and Portugal has produced this wonderful series of flags-as-infographics, discussing pressing social issues. Here is

May 6, 2005

Photoethnography

I’m just going to steal Lorenz’ entire blog post, because I have nothing to add, other than the fact I’m always happy to discover another

May 5, 2005

Podcasting Anthropology

Mark Auslander has an interesting post on how his students are using podcasting to create an audio tour for a campus exhibit: I first thought of

May 4, 2005

Anthropology Blogs

Are you an anthropology blogger? If you are, and you aren’t on this list, let me know! {anthropology, blogs}

May 3, 2005

Congrats!

Another anthropology blogger finishes his dissertation! Congrats Alex! {anthropology, Bloggers}

May 1, 2005

On Time

In his book Envisioning Information Edward Tufte discusses the graphical timetables used by the Japanse bullet train, or Shinkansen: Station stops

May 1, 2005

Folksonomy

My latest Anthropology News article is now online. It is a general introduction to “folksonomy.” I explain the concept by comparing folksonomies to

April 29, 2005

Tiger

From a thread on Slashdot: You know it is Apple related software when the review uses an entire page to comment on the look of the cardboard box.

April 25, 2005

Anthro Blogs

Alex alerts us to a few new Anthropology blogs. John Norvell has thrown his hat into the ring with anthroblogs.org, an MT install with a few blogs

April 22, 2005

Pyramid

$2.5 million for a pyramid that isn’t even a pyramid. {design, tufte, food pyramid}

April 17, 2005

PimpMySafari.com

First there was Pimp My Firefox (explanation here), now there is PimpMySafari.com. I’ve just gotten Firefox working the way I like, with all my

April 16, 2005

Sleeptracker

In the comments to a post I wrote about various devices designed to get you out of bed in the morning, Tim May directed my attention to the

April 13, 2005

iPot & Blendie

In graying Japan, more than one-third of households have members older than 65, and 4.8 million households are composed of elderly couples. An

April 13, 2005

iPot & Blendie

In graying Japan, more than one-third of households have members older than 65, and 4.8 million households are composed of elderly couples. An

April 12, 2005

Anthropology Journals via RSS [Feeds]

Very exciting. I just discovered via a discussion on Golublog that CiteULike provides RSS feeds for a number of anthropology journals, including The

April 11, 2005

Buzztracker

In a followup to my last post on efforts to map the news, comes a Slashdot post about Buzztracker. A neat project called Buzztracker.org has been

April 8, 2005

Taipei Bloggers

I’m heading to Taiwan this summer, and I’m looking forward to meeting some Taiwanese bloggers! (Besides Scott that is.) Although I doubt I’ll meet

April 7, 2005

Space Shuttle

A recent Business Week article about the sole surviving pinball machine manufacturer, Gary Stern, seems as good an excuse as any to write about my

April 6, 2005

Online Message Bulletin Board

I wasn’t surprised that the recent AAA member survey regarding the use of various forms of electronic messaging didn’t mention wikis, but I thought

April 4, 2005

Greasemonkey

If you thought Firefox was great because it allows users to “take back the web” from poorly written, intrusive, and annoying web sites, you ain’t

March 30, 2005

EOGEO

Years ago I had a vision of what my ideal world news web site would look like. Well, it still isn’t there, but several sites now come close enough

March 29, 2005

Makeover

I’ve given Shashwati’s blog a makeover. Check it out! It was a tougher theme to work with, since it uses images and not just straight CSS, but

March 27, 2005

France vs. Google

Why do the French hate Google? First the national French press agency is suing Google: Agence France Presse is suing Google for $17.5 million for

March 25, 2005

Snooze

Getting up is hard to do, and here is a gallery of some ingenious gadgets that are designed to get you out of bed: Tennis alarm clock This tennis

March 25, 2005

Minor Edit

Sheesh, make one small edit in a Wikipedia article, and spend the rest of your day justifying it! {wikipedia, photo}

March 21, 2005

Blogroll

I’ve redone my blogroll, which was getting helplessly long. Actually, it was so long that it wasn’t all showing on the site. Because it seems that I

March 20, 2005

Redesign

The upgrade redesign of Keywords is now complete. Like I said, the new system should allow me to change things even more in the future, and maybe

March 18, 2005

ISBN

When I travelled in mainland China in the late 80s there was a black market in currency, trading government issued currency specially printed for

March 17, 2005

General

I recently discovered, looking around my site’s stats, that many people are subscribed to the category feed “General.” This is a big mistake on my

March 14, 2005

Bloglet

Many people are still subscribed to receive e-mail updates of this blog via Bloglet. I urge all of you to sign up for a free bloglines.com account

March 5, 2005

Arash Sigarchi

Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) has a campaign to send letters on behalf of an imprisoned Iranian blogger:

March 3, 2005

Bookends

This is a review I posted for the Mac OS X citation management application Bookends. I tried to keep it short, so I didn’t even list all of the new

February 26, 2005

Google, the movie

Via Fables of the Reconstruction: Get movie listings on your cell phone or on your computer from Google. {google, movies, sms}

February 26, 2005

Help Desk

A new ad campaign from IBM “shows a young Chinese girl asking to join a virtual classroom because her village is too far from the nearest school.”

February 25, 2005

Googlism

Via Jonathan Benda I discovered Googlism, a site that “will find out what Google.com thinks of you” (at least circa 2004, at which point Google

February 16, 2005

Email Tips

There is a lot of discussion on the web about e-mail overload (here, here, and here). So I thought I’d share my tips. I’ve been using e-mail since

February 9, 2005

Naked

They say that on the internet nobody knows your naked, but one can feel quite naked after living one’s life online for some time. Unless you use a

February 8, 2005

Roundup

From around the web: Google Maps! (via the Map Room) How to fold a map. (Via 43 folders.) AppRocket — looks like Quicksilver for the mac, but for

February 2, 2005

Trackback

Unfortunately, the SPAMmers have won this round. I’ve had to disable trackback entirely. Although I had already subverted trackback SPAM by

February 2, 2005

Teaching

I know it has been relatively quiet here the past few weeks. There is a simple explanation for that: I’m teaching again! This semester I’m visiting

January 26, 2005

Blistering Barnacles

Since finishing my dissertation and getting back from our trip, I’ve been in “cleanup mode”: not only physically cleaning up my desk which looked

January 18, 2005

Roundup

Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas. (via Scott Sommers) How crazy

November 28, 2004

Listservs

I’m tired of listservs, but I am unfortunately unable to subscribe from many of the ones I belong to. I much prefer blogs, fourms, and wikis, each

November 27, 2004

Comment SPAM

One of the annoying things about managing a blog — the only one actually — is SPAM. For a long time I was able to block spam with a program which

November 24, 2004

Great Firewall

Dan Gillmor has an interesting piece on blogging in China. Blogging isn’t big business here, at least not yet. At least three blog software

November 23, 2004

Pseudo Fascism

No time to write much these days, but please take the time to read David Neiwert’s 7 part article on “The Rise of Pseudo Fascism.” Some

November 18, 2004

Lumix

Even though I’m not yet done with my thesis (three weeks to go!) I decided to reward myself for passing my oral defense by purchasing a Panasonic

November 18, 2004

Google Scholar

Wow, Google keeps popping out new services. The latest is Google Scholar. Here is a link to a search for “author:bourdieu, p“. So far it seems that

November 9, 2004

Firefox

The vast majority of people still visit this web site using Micro$oft Internet Explorer. Do yourself and the rest of the world a favor: Download

November 7, 2004

University Web Sites

If you are an academic department conducting a faculty search: Please either include all the necessary information in the job announcement itself,

November 6, 2004

1896

Following up on my recent post-election map post, here are two interesting historical maps. Look familiar? The 1896 election: And a map of free

November 4, 2004

Purple

Red vs. Blue have you down? Here are some other ways of looking at the results. By county (I don’t have time to make a picture of it, but I

October 22, 2004

folksonomy

Following Joi Ito, I am going to quote David Weinberger’s post in its entirety. I’ve really become interested in the way tagged meta data works (see

October 21, 2004

Gaydar

Two posts over at LanguageLog discuss research showing that “gaydar,” or the ability to detect who is gay and who is straight (in this case using

October 19, 2004

Sinclair

I haven’t been blogging about Sinclair since so many other people have been doing it better. But I think it is exciting to report that the

October 18, 2004

Mac vs. Windows

I generally try to respect the fact that the vast majority of my users visit this site using a PC, but I liked this comment from Brent Simmons,

October 16, 2004

Feedless

I’ve slowed down on posting regular updates about things you can do with RSS. This is partially because most people who are prone to trying out new

October 14, 2004

Icons

On MacOSX you can customize the icons for just about anything. Here are the custom icons for two of the folders I use most regularly

October 10, 2004

Iterability

Derrida (1930-2004) famously argued that writing preceded speech. By this I believe he meant that the “iterability” of language logically preceded

October 10, 2004

vidblogs

I guess it was just a matter of time. Photo blogs have been around for a long time already (I’ve even added one to my sidebar), as well as MP3

October 9, 2004

CMS

stands for “Content Management System” and refers to software which makes it easy to update and maintain a website. The content is usually

October 7, 2004

Cool Tools

Here are some very cool tools I’ve found recently: Peform Google queries using text messaging from your cell phone! Add a del.icio.us sidebar to

October 3, 2004

Bread-crumbs

I believe in trying to give credit where credit is due. Some bloggers always put a “thanks,””via,””by way of,” etc. credit in their posts, pointing

October 3, 2004

Books as Blogs

I recently posted about how the diaries of Samuel Pepys were being released as a blog. Well, today I discovered a bunch of other sites releasing

October 3, 2004

Student I.D.

Joi Ito just got his student I.D. card, and now he can access all those wonderful academic databases, like Lexis-Nexis. His thoughts on this are

October 3, 2004

Open Source Anthropology

My latest Anthropology News article, “Open Source Anthropology” is now available online as a fully editable wiki article. Please feel free to

October 2, 2004

Daisuke Inoue

Who is Daisuke Inoue? He’s only the guy who invented karaoke! Born in Osaka in 1940, he grew up in the same area where he now works, Nishinomiya,

September 29, 2004

Politeness Button

Reading this NY Times article about how parents and students have thwarted attempts by schools to ban cell phones reminded me of an incident in the

September 28, 2004

Translation

This doesn’t surprise me: “The Justice Department’s translation mess has become a chronic problem that has obvious implications for our national

September 28, 2004

Sell Out

As much as I love Billmon’s web site, I wasn’t going to comment on his silly op-ed about how the good-old-days of blogging are behind us. Of course

September 22, 2004

Pepysdiary.com

In my article on blogging, I commented on the links between contemporary blogging and diary writing in the seventeenth century: This is not unlike

September 17, 2004

Crackdown

Reporters Without Borders is outraged at this latest escalation in the government’s attempts to suppress the right to inform the public via the

September 13, 2004

blogging-lite

I’ve added a new feature for all those who simply can’t get enough of Keywords — a “side blog” or “link blog” of fun, interesting links that I like,

September 13, 2004

news.google.com.tw

A few days ago Munin posted about how Google was offering localized news in Japanese and Korean. At the time I was upset that there was no Taiwan

September 12, 2004

Essentials

Every once in a while a meme starts circulating from one blog to another. Either everyone is supposed to list sentences from random books on their

September 7, 2004

VoIP

With Skype’s SkypeOut service, internet telephony has truly arrived, but this brings with it a whole set of questions. Most importantly, will VoIP

September 5, 2004

Skype

I just read an article in the New York Times, and two minutes later I was speaking to a friend in Taiwan for €0.022 a minute! That’s right, less

September 4, 2004

Coral It!

I’ve created a handy bookmarklet you can use to instantly get the Coral version of a link. This should allow even the smallest of web content

September 4, 2004

Scale

Two excellent graphics I’ve recently come across which link size to frequency of word use (click on images for the original pages). The first is

September 3, 2004

Gmail

Free stuff! I have a bunch of Gmail invites to give away if anyone wants one. Gmail is Google’s new web based e-mail service, and they offer 1 GB of

September 3, 2004

Bouma

An excellent article about the various theories concerning how we recognize words can be found here. Rather than blogging it myself, I e-mailed the

September 2, 2004

Short Wave

So I’m in upstate New York last night and the power goes out. My satellite internet connection is down, so surfing the web is out. It is too dark to

September 1, 2004

The Great Firewall of China

while Google is accessible to Chinese users, not all of its functions are available; because of China’s content filtering technologies, users of

August 30, 2004

“Stop Yelling at the TV and Get Online!”

My article, for Anthropology News, “Stop Yelling at the TV and Get Online!” has just been published. This is the first of a series of articles I am

August 29, 2004

Freedom of Speech

From Boingboing.net, three stories on “freedom of speech” (1, 2, 3): First, a story from the ACLU, whose court filing was censored by the Justice

August 22, 2004

Move Complete!

A million thanks to Carthik!!! This blog is now running on WordPress instead of MovableType, but Carthik has helped do it in such a way that all the

August 20, 2004

Announcement: WordPress Migration on Saturday

I love WordPress. Not just because it is Open Source, but because it is written in the PHP coding language. (I like PHP because it is easy to

August 18, 2004

rhodolite demonstrable codfish

A poem I composed from today’s SPAM “subject” lines: rhodolite demonstrable codfish Re: Everything went giddy with Are you a loser? buddy,deal

August 15, 2004

Sudan

The Passion of the Present is “an independent, non-partisan, all-volunteer community initiative to stop the genocide in Sudan.” This link via

August 15, 2004

Talk to US

addresses a critical problem: US policies impact the whole world, but non-Americans have few ways to communicate directly with mainstream

August 12, 2004

BlogAfrica

I’ve long been reading the multilingual blog, Blogalization, so I was very interested to read this article by one of its founders, Ethan Zuckerman,

August 12, 2004

Calendar Feeds [Feeds]

Syndicate your schedule! I’ve long been using PHP iCalendar which allows me to sync my iCal Calendar without using an expensive .Mac account, and

August 9, 2004

WYSIWYG

It seems that we are still very far from a paperless world: WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. It doesn’t stand for What You See Is

August 5, 2004

Announcing wiki.oxus.net

I’m very happy to announce, that after much thought and preparation, I have finally launched my own personal wiki! It isn’t the first time I’ve run

July 18, 2004

Robots

It is now commonplace, thanks especially to the widespread popularity of the book Chaos, that a simple set of rules can produce complex results. But

June 28, 2004

Drive

Somebody’s set up a web site to coordinate voter-registration drives in swing-states. If you plan to take a trip this summer, maybe you could

June 26, 2004

Access

78% of South Koreans have broadband internet access. But none of them can access most blogs. Why? Because the government is trying to limit access

June 23, 2004

Winners!

The winners have been announced!!! Below are just some of the winning T-shirt designs from the Designs on the White House t-shirt contest. Support

June 14, 2004

Bugs

I just had to share this amazing picture of a Copepod from the Smithsonian’s web site: “The World of Copepods” I discovered via Mark Liberman’s

June 12, 2004

FeedBurner [Feeds]

One of the big problems with running a full-text newsfeed on your website is that it makes it difficult to keep track of how many people are reading

June 9, 2004

Satisfaction

I was contemplating purchasing a laser printer from a company called Legend Micro — until I read their return policy. Return Policy In order to

May 14, 2004

Usenet [Feeds]

Continuing my ongoing quest to document new and innovate uses for RSS feeds… Looks like Google is pushing Atom (a standard that “competes” with

May 14, 2004

TypeKey

I’m upgrading my blogging software to MovableType 3.0. (Note: It is hard to find the free version for download, but its still there.) This means

May 10, 2004

Blacked-out

The government is going to have to come up with new ways to block out information in public documents. Already there was a scandal when a sensitive

May 10, 2004

Blogger

For the longest time I’ve been telling people to use Typepad instead of Blogger, because Blogger didn’t seem to get it. Well, now they do. All those

May 6, 2004

DOTWHO

Hey, Designs on the White House got written up in the Boston Globe! Giving the lie to the notion that designers are obsessed with style over

May 3, 2004

Typographic Discrimination

In spite of advanced technology and the Unicode character convention, people are still in the habit of neglecting the diacritics of foreign

April 27, 2004

Taxonomy

For much of history, the science of biology was the science of classification. As can be seen by the text accompanying this image (from a web page

April 25, 2004

IMAP

What is IMAP? It is simply a way of accessing your e-mail. Right now, if you use Entourage, Outlook Express, Eudora, Apple Mail, or some other

April 25, 2004

Libraries

A while a go I wrote a post asking, why can’t academic research be more like blogging? Well, I’m happy to say that I am not the only one thinking

April 23, 2004

AlterSlash [Feeds]

For those who don’t know about Slashdot, here is the wikipedia entry: Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as “/.”) is a popular

April 15, 2004

Jew

If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew”

April 6, 2004

Viagra

Using standard spammer substitution-techniques on the word “viagra” yields 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 possibilities: Viagorea ViagDrHa V l a g r

April 5, 2004

Science Courts

Chris Mooney (who still doesn’t have an RSS feed) has an interesting post about how Republicans have undermined important public policy initiatives

April 3, 2004

Gnews2RSS [Feeds]

Gnews2RSS An experimental convertor that takes a Google News search and turns it into RSS Very cool. Although, it seems that Google doesn’t like

April 2, 2004

Publishing

A while back I wrote about how much better academic research would be if academic publishing was more like blogging. The catch, of course, is the

March 31, 2004

Jobs [Feeds]

Xeni Jardin of boingboing.net wrote the following: In an item about RSS for the current issue of Wired Magazine, I wrote: “Job seekers anxious

March 26, 2004

Foreigners

A few weeks ago I asked, in regards to US concerns about the offshoring of high-tech jobs, just how many American’s were doing these jobs to begin

March 25, 2004

Dissertation

It is possible to finish your dissertation and blog at the same time!!! Even more evidence of this in the comments over at Crooked Timber. Very

March 23, 2004

eBay [Feeds]

I’ve been very happy with my Amazon RSS Feed Generator. It has alerted me to quite a few new books coming out on topics that I’m interested in. The

March 17, 2004

Subway [Feeds]

This is a post for the New Yorkers out there. I’m sure there are similar services for other cities, and I hope people will write about them in the

March 17, 2004

Subvocal

This is an exciting technological development by NASA: they’ve found a way to detect “subvocal” speech! “A person using the subvocal system thinks

March 11, 2004

Thumbs

In an interesting post on Japanese cell-phone e-mailing (not instant messaging, it turns out), Mark Liberman said something which made my thumbs

March 8, 2004

Calpundit

Although I’ve had my disagreements with Kevin Drum (the biggest, of course, being that he has never linked to my blog!), there is no doubt that he

March 5, 2004

Feedster [Feeds]

Over the past year I’ve seen a lot of bloggers write that they wish there was a search engine that would search only the sites that they read every

March 4, 2004

Lens

Philips is getting a lot of attention for having invented a new kind of lens that might be used in cell phones and other small electronics that

March 3, 2004

Feeds

This is an exciting time here at Keywords. Just after announcing one new feature on this blog, I’m already announcing a new one! Announcing “Feeds.”

February 27, 2004

Sabotage

So it turns out that the biggest act of (terrorist?) sabotage this century was committed by the CIA: “In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply,

February 25, 2004

Citations

Scott Sommers discusses some of the shortcomings of the Social Science Citation Index. I would add that the problem goes beyond the fact that the

February 24, 2004

Kudos

Ampersand says this about Keywords: …a very smart lefty blog that I’ll definitely be checking in the future. You know, it doesn’t take much to

February 19, 2004

Science

Preeminent Scientists Protest Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science Nobel Laureates, National Medal of Science Recipients, and Other Leading

February 4, 2004

Apple

UPDATE: Apple has finally extended the Logic Repair Program to cover late 2001 iBooks!!! Took them long enough, but I’m glad they did the right

January 31, 2004

Better

I’ve been following stories about outsourcing to India, and while this one from Wired magazine is one of the least insightful I’ve read, it did have

January 30, 2004

Login

Tired of having to login to websites? Tired of making up information to be able to download something or read some news story? Try bugmenot.com!!!

January 24, 2004

Maps

I’ve been spending some time this morning looking at different ways of charting electoral votes: The traditional “red and blue” map, showing

January 15, 2004

Bloglines

It is hard to explain to people who aren’t computer savvy just what an RSS feed is, and why it is good for them to know. So, instead, I’ve set up a

January 12, 2004

Um

Though a bane to teachers of public speaking, people around the world fill pauses in their own languages as naturally as watermelons have seeds. In

January 5, 2004

iMovie

Nowadays, anyone with a Mac can easily make their own movie — even Lawrence Lessig. Tapping into the tremendous potential afforded by the widespread

December 29, 2003

Radio

Some interesting work being done in Afghanistan by a Canadian media organization: A Canadian organization is reaching out to women in Afghanistan,

December 22, 2003

Recherche

This chart shows the Languages Used to Access Google from March 2001 till November 2003. There isn’t much explanation of what this means, but I

December 19, 2003

Southern

The Black Commentator called this speech by Howard Dean “the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician

December 2, 2003

BookCrossing

When I was in college I took a year off and backpacked around Asia for a while. I’m glad I did it then, since it is a lot more expensive to travel

December 1, 2003

Bargains

The New York Times must have turned over a new leaf this holiday season. In just the past few days there have been four excellent Op-Ed

November 26, 2003

Permalinks

How to deal with institutions that simply don’t “get” the internet? In response to a call by Body and Soul, I wrote the L.A. Times and requested

November 16, 2003

RSS

Announcing RSS feeds for Amazon.com searches!!! That’s right — you can find out when a new book comes out on your favorite topic, or when that PDA

November 15, 2003

Strangelove

You know that scene in Dr. Strangelove when the Russian Ambassador is allowed into the war room? And General Turgidson says “But he’ll see

November 14, 2003

Fungus

Let me start with a personal revelation: I have toenail fungus. It is a very common problem, one that can easily be cured with a pill. The problem?

November 10, 2003

ERIC

In an e-mail discussion about Congress’ efforts to make funding for area studies conditional on “loyalty”, someone alerted me to a story from back

November 6, 2003

Re-regulation

A recent article in The Nation starts with an account of the grass-roots mobilization (from both the right and the left) against further

October 29, 2003

Flare

If your cell phone stopped working the other day, here is why: A massive solar flare erupted from the surface of the Sun at 9:51 UTC on October 28,

October 24, 2003

Ballpoint

I can’t remember when I received my first “Space Pen” — I used to love those things. The Astronauts used them! You could write upside down, on an

October 22, 2003

Disobedience

I haven’t written anything about the Diebold electronic voting scandal because Body and Soul has done such a good job, there seemed very little to

October 20, 2003

Google

is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google’s search options go beyond simple keywords, the

October 5, 2003

Lexmark

We got a “free” Lexmark printer with the purchase of one of our computers. Don’t ever fall for such a trick. It is like giving crack out for free.

August 31, 2003

Blogroll

No posts today because I spent my blogging-time trying to categorize all the blogs which have piled up in my “More blogs …” section. Eventually, I

August 29, 2003

Anonymity

On the one hand … our government is funding the internet service Anonymizer.com to protect Iranians from the prying eyes of their government. On the

August 27, 2003

Meetup

I was reading Daily Kos who reports that Clark is now second only to Dean on Meetup (although Dean is still way ahead). But what is Meetup? Meetup

August 13, 2003

Inspiration

One myth that never seems to go away is the “divine inspiration” of the artist. People refuse to believe that artists work hard, study, take notes,

August 6, 2003

SPAM

Taken from a Monty Python skit were vikings sing a tribute to the canned meat, the word is no inextricably tied to junk e-mail and even Hormel Foods

August 3, 2003

TypePad

Those of you who used to read my old blog have probably noticed that things are a little spiffier since I switched to my new site. Part of the

July 31, 2003

Gambling

The plan to establish a futures market in terrorism may have been quietly scrapped by the defense department, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still

July 3, 2003

Albums

It seems that some artists are boycotting the Apple Music Store because they won’t sell albums unless the artists also agree to let Apple sell the

June 29, 2003

Blog

The word “blog” is listed in the March 2003 draft of the OED. It is listed as both a noun and a verb. Both uses are first dated as appearing in