Founded
22 November 2002
The IEUC was established to engage in ongoing research and educational initiatives pursuing secure, simple, supple, and sophisticated systems to unlock our full human potential. It was established under New York State's not-for-profit corporation law and has been recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt public charity.
email: info@ieuc.org
News and Views from The Institute for End User Computing!
After many years of loyal service on The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.’s Board of Directors, Professor Kent L. Norman of The University of Maryland has stepped down due to time constraints, effective as of this date, to rotate out to The IEUC Advisory Board.
His input and research over the years has been and continues to be a source of inspiration for us all and we shall always consider him a treasured member of our IEUC family.
Over these last few winter months we have been making significant headway in retooling for the latest new web technologies. Given the scholarly nature of our work, one of the key features we are working to implement is a system of anchors and links that will make it possible to link to specific paragraphs and bullet items on our pages.
Such deep links are called “Purple Numbers” and they can trace their roots back to the famous Augment/NLS hypertext system developed by Douglas Engelbart.
In our implementation we will be providing stable Statement ID’s that can be preserved through round trip editing of previously published content even as page elements are reorganized.
A separate set of Hierarchical ID’s will reflect the dynamic outline structure of a page’s content making it possible to link to the most current version of a particular section in the outline.
We are also planning to offer a Verbatim ID that will link to an exact quote as it existed when bookmarked regardless of where it might appear in subsequent versions so long as it’s content remains unchanged.
Seasons Greetings!
We are delighted to wind down the year by adding several new reports and filings to our Online Archives. You may now follow these links to review:
The Minutes of our 2011 Annual Meeting are still in production and will be available soon.
If you are a resident of New York State, please consider sending a tax deductible donation in any amount to The Institute for End User Computing, Inc., Box 1717, Ossining, NY 10562 so we can continue to serve you!
All too often we think of End User Computing in service of entertainment or business needs. But as we approach the tenth anniversary of the barbaric attacks against the World Trade Center we can see how much more meaningful it can be.
Consider the example of life long New Yorker, Brian August, who came to the troubling realization that people’s memories of the Twin Towers were beginning to slowly fade with time. Rather than sit by and watch us drift down a road that might one day lead to 9/11 deniers questioning whether they had really been there, he seized upon the potential of modern cell phones and tablets to determine their location and orientation in space to create 110 Stories.
110 Stories is a social application of augmented reality that lets users within sight of where the Twin Towers once stood to see a composite of today’s skyline with a stark outline of exactly where the towers would appear had they not been destroyed on that dark day.
As users experience the poignancy of seeing just how tall and massive they had once been and realizing the true magnitude of our loss, they are then invited to capture a photo of their augmented perspective and share their thoughts and stories through a linked website in fifty words.
Mr. August created this touching tribute by assembling a solid team of collaborators backed with End User and corporate contributed financial support permitting the App to be offered to the public free of charge.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to him, his colleagues, and all of the supporters of his landmark project.
And as always, we shall never forget those who perished because of any of the attacks on 9/11, nor those whose lives were touched by their loss.
We hope you all had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend and a wonderful Summer as well.
Like you, we are most eager to kickoff the Fall Semester. Over the Summer we have been working towards a Mobile Friendly HTML5 revision of our web pages. But it may be some time before our new page templates are ready for production use. Making things as useable on a cell phone as a wide screen monitor is a serious design challenge that we are still grappling with.
There has been a lot of activity on the Public Policy front of late with a growing sense of urgency about the problem of Patent Trolls who are systematically targeting the engines of innovation in the computer industry, with attempts to use highly dubious Software Patents to go after corporate giants and solo developers alike.
At the IEUC we are closely monitoring this issue and will do our best to keep you informed.
On the Education front, we want to hear from students interested in learning to program and would very much like their thoughts on what works and what doesn’t in any programming courses they may be taking.
In terms of Research, our near term interests are tightly focused on End User Programming and finding ways to use multi-modal interfaces to make Computational Thinking easier to approach. We will probably be employing the latest generation of Web Browsers and/or Android as our research platform in this regard. So if you are a programmer and would like to help, please contact us!
Finally, we are always looking for volunteers and potential Board candidates to join our ranks.
As part of our ongoing educational and community outreach, we would like to hear from any students in Ossining, New York and the surrounding communities who are interested in learning to program computers and/or develop websites over the Summer.
Depending on the number of participants and their level of interest, instruction may be individualized via email correspondence or provided in person by having participants meet as a group somewhere in the community.
Instruction will be provided free of charge to suitably prepared students at the high school level and above. The Institute is happy to customize the material presented to best meet student needs from introductory level through advanced graduate topics.
We would also be happy to explore the possibility of providing similar services to any adults in the community who want to master such skills.
The IEUC would also like to work with any Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers who are currently teaching or would like to develop computer science course offerings for students in the area. We can help in identifying instructional materials and assist in curriculum development. If you are a teacher who wants to learn to program over the Summer so you can introduce your students to this exciting field in the Fall, one-on-one instruction can be provided.
We will also consider working with select students and teachers from other communities if we have sufficient time and resources to accommodate them.
2011 promises to be a banner year for the IEUC. We have a lot of new ideas in the works and look forward to serving our fellow End Users!
Stay tuned for more news as we ramp up for the Spring Semester.
The Hacker News highlights a mix of stories ranging from hard core technology postings, patent wars on the legal front, the occasional spot to technology related political commentary, and a healthy sampling of topics related to launching high tech startups. Periodic pointers to postings with advice for students will be of particular interest to many of our readers.
As the Fall Semester kicks off, we invite all of our volunteers to touch base and let us know about your plans for the academic year ahead.
Last week marked the un-official start of the Fall Semester with IBM’s Programming Languages Day.
As the summer draws to a close we will be getting back in touch with our volunteers. Then once the initial semester kick-off dust settles, we will be blogging and updating our website with more regularity.
Enjoy the lazy, hazy, crazy days of August.
It gives us great pleasure to report that with the start of Summer we are going live with a Public Beta of our latest website redesign. We have done some serious retooling of our infrastructure to simplify things and provide better hooks for future enhancements, like the versioning system that permits major revisions of our site to be accessed simultaneously as well the hooks we have in place to track version changes at the page level.
Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.
As you may have noticed, we are entering a brief hiatus in blogging while we deal with a couple of time-sensitive maters that require our full attention, foremost of which is a book chapter that our Executive Director is writing.
Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!
2009 saw the announcement of a number of new devices and 2010 should be a banner year for Nook and potentially an Apple Tablet if the legion of rumors dating back to the untimely demise of the Newton Message Pad 2100 are finally to be believed. Much is owed to Microsoft’s Tablet PC support, the Kindle & Sony Readers, and the multi-touch innovations of the iPhone & iPod Touch in making this space viable.
The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.
Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.
Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.
While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.
The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.
In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.
If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.
A lot has been going on behind the scenes here at the IEUC and we look forward to many exciting developments in 2010.
The next couple of weeks will be taken up with a writing project while we wait for any trailing 2009 donations to reach us so we can fully assess our financial position from the year past. Then as soon as the IRS release the 2009 990-EZ Form & Instructions we will be processing that paperwork and transferring the information in it to our next Annual Report. We are also actively looking to expand our Board of Directors, so if you’d like to be considered, do get in touch.
As time permits between all of these administrative tasks we will roll out our next major website update as soon as possible so we can begin to expand the site again. We need volunteer to help in this work too!
Research-wise, we are primarily focused on parsing quasi natural language for End User Programming and we are also looking at some Public Policy Issues related to Virtual Worlds.
We have a few other plans in the works, but don’t want to prematurely make any announcements at this time.
Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year!
If you would like to review our 2007 – 2009 Cumulative Annual report, please grab a copy of it at: http://www.ieuc.org/pdf-files/ieuc-2007-2009-cumulative-annual-report.pdf
If you would like to review our 2008 financials as submitted to the IRS with our latest Corporate Bylaw revisions, please grab a copy of it at: http://www.ieuc.org/pdf-files/ieuc-2008-990-ez.pdf
As the new Obama Administration takes the helm in Washington today, we wish them all the best, particularly in their desire to revitalize primary and secondary education.
We hope and trust that they will recognize the critical importance of information technology literacy at a much deeper level than mere button pushing to make things work.
Students need to understand what computing can and can’t do; they need to be able to recognize, anticipate, and minimize risks; to be able to make informed business and public policy decision about the implications of emerging technologies; and they need to be able to roll up their sleeves and delve into End User Programming lest they loose those opportunities to offshore outsourcing.
The IEUC stands ready to work hand in hand with all sectors to help bring about these vital changes.
2009 is shaping up to being a very exciting year for the IEUC.
As we noted last month, Rob Akscyn has now rotated out to our Advisory Board and Kirk St. Amant and Jeff Smith have joined our Board of Directors, restoring our Board to full strength for the challenging year ahead.
2008 was a bad year for the US economy and the nonprofit sector was particularly hard hit. With donors at both the institutional and individual level re-directing their giving to Social Safety Net causes, our donations were sharply off. Since, it is now clear that online fundraising for an organization with our profile generates far more regulatory compliance overhead than actual revenue, we stand ready to totally re-think our fundraising strategy going forward.
We will have more financial details on the year past as final bills and donations roll in over the weeks ahead.
While the financial outlook for 2009 is murky, our prospects have never been brighter on the Operations Side. Our new Directors are already exploring the feasibility of several potential Special Projects and last year’s complete online infrastructure overhaul has us well positioned to dramatically expand the range of content offered on our website. We are also preparing to share most of our back end code, which will let other sites leverage the thousands of hours of R&D that went into our website relaunch.
These are exciting times and scary times. The nonprofit sector remains in crisis and their is a very real risk that a number of charities will fail this year. However, the IEUC will not be one of them. With no paid staff, truly minimal overhead, and a mission that involves channeling IDEAS rather than DOLLARS we are here to stay.
So if your New Year’s Resolution is to volunteer some of your time or to share some of your financial good fortune with a worthy cause, we invite you to join us in Forging The Future.
The future is what we make it, so by supporting our work, you can choose economic recovery, increased freedom & security, and a new era of personal empowerment ushered in through the wonders of information technology!
On Friday, December 12th, we successfully concluded our 2008 Annual Meeting. The key business consisted of revising our Corporate Bylaws and naming Jeff Smith and Kirk St. Amant as Directors Elect. They will take office on January 1st as Rob Akscyn rotates off of our Board of Directors to take a seat on our Advisory Board with our other former Directors.
OpenID is the name for a single login scheme that is supposed to free us of the need to juggle multiple user names and passwords. Instead, with OpenID, the theory goes, that we use a single login and sites we want to visit will redirect us to the OpenID provider of our choice for us to verify our identity with that service which will then return us to the site we were originally trying to log into with a security token that will complete the login process.
Since the system consolidates all of your accounts into one, it is critical that you trust your OpenID provider even more than you would a single site, since someone with database access to the OpenID server could usurp your identity everywhere by resetting your password to a new one and then logging into any of your accounts elsewhere.
The logical way to minimize that risk is to host your own identity provider server, which is supposed to be quite painless and easy to do.
Be warned, it is not.
For the last few weeks we have been trying various OpenID servers and have yet to find one that can pass all of the OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests.
If you do want to experiment with this technology, we recommend indirectly specifying your OpenID End Point. This means that you should point any services requiring you to use OpenID to a web page that uses link tags in its headers to redirect them to your current OpenID provider of choice. Then you can, in theory, change OpenID providers without changing your OpenID Identity with respect to third party sites. However, different implementations may place restrictions on your account name choice which could foil your attempt to seamlessly swap servers.
If you can find a solution that reliably performs well in the real world, do let us know so we can share your good news. Until then, beware the hype and avoid diving in prematurely since this sort of experimentation can be a real time sink.
So in the meantime, if you must use OpenID, go with a large trusted “name” provider and if there isn’t one that you truly trust, consider establishing multiple OpenID’s for different accounts, even though doing this would of course defeat the point of the entire exercise.
Today, those of us in the US get to choose a new direction for our nation. It is one of those big choices that one hopes no one will take lightly.
But every day, we, as End Users, make countless little choices that in aggregate resonate far into the future. What operating system will we choose? What programs? Which websites and traditional publishers will we trust to inform us? Which vendors do we want to see grow and prosper? What user groups will we join and support?
It is so easy to dismiss the impact of these little choices but they give us far more leverage to steer the coarse of history.
At the IEUC we do a lot with very little, indeed for the cost of a single major network TV ad we could run our annual operations or pay down a big chunk of our startup debt.
So after you cast your vote in the political area, consider lending us a hand in the financial arena.
We will put your hard earned dollars to productive use.
We just wanted to take this opportunity to give you a progress report on our website relaunch efforts.
We have finalized our latest artwork and verified our new page template in A-Grade browsers.
Our only major dependency is active javascript support so we can accommodate Internet Explorer 6 and inject non-semantic markup to serve as scaffolding for style-sheet based visual effects like our translucent rounded corners.
In-page navigation will be handled by leveraging the Prototype and Scriptaculous javascript libraries to support our own animated user interface code. Retrofitting this new code to provide Explorer users with a comparable experience is proving to be a bit more daunting than we anticipated, so we can’t venture to say when everything will be good to go live, beyond our good faith estimate that we should be back up and running early in the Fall 2008 Academic Semester.
At that point we will be able to revise most of our old materials and consolidate them into a smaller number of content rich composite pages to dramatically reduce the navigational overhead of exploring our offerings. Until then, most of our legacy content is offline, but you can still find much of it through The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if you are so motivated.
The 2007 Cyberbullying Public Service Announcement
Presented by Sony Creative Software, the National Crime Prevention Council, and the Ad Council.
Sony Creative Software, the Ad Council, and the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC), are pleased to announce the winners of last fall’s public service announcement (PSA) development contest organized to raise awareness of the problem of cyberbullying.
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