Universities are being overloaded with disparate tasks

'An academic has warned that universities are being overloaded with disparate tasks by policymakers who view education as a “cure-all” for problems in almost every realm.'

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407912&c=1

Situvis

One of mine and Simon's students (well Simons really!), Adrian Clear, has put up a site about Situvis, the tool he's implemented for his PhD work. It helps with the design and analysis of pervasive systems by letting designers explore the relationships between imprecise sensor data and the identification of situations.

You can read about it in our percom paper here. "Situvis: a visual tool for modeling a user's behaviour patterns in a pervasive environment" by Adrian K. Clear, Ross Shannon, Thomas Holland, Simon Dobson, Aaron Quigley and Paddy Nixon. Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2009).

TiddlyWiki

Simon (my new professorially endowed friend) put me onto this a while back. TiddlyWiki is a single html file which has all the characteristics of a wiki - including all of the content, the functionality (including editing, saving, tagging and searching) and the style sheet. Because it's a single file, it's very portable - you can email it, put it on a web server or share it via a USB stick.

Its cool and I have been using it for days. I have a GtD tool and personal research notebook up and running in an afternoon. I plan to play with this over the next few weeks and focus on using to actually manage my GtD workspace. I'll write up how that works soon.