I'm pleased to note that my diet category now is available in a Romanian translation. The translation is courtesy of Alexander Ovsov, and although it is not the first (I've approved some Spanish translations of a few pages), I hope that I can encourage more translations. If you are interested in doing one, just let me know and we can probably work something out.
This morning I read a notice from our Division of Continuing Studies, pointing to how their online resource library had received more than one million visits so far this year ("Vast distance education online resource open to all").
With more than one million page visits to the UW-Madison Continuing Studies online Distance Education Resource Library so far in 2011, no one can dispute that interest in online education is flourishing.
That is definitely something for the university to be proud of. But in breadth of outreach, I have a lot more impact writing alone here than the Distance Education Resource Library. Since the first of this year, my logs show 2.7 million visits here on this blog.
Naturally, the audiences are not the same, and total visits is a misleading comparison, since our sites have traffic with a long tail of one-time readers, and a small cadre of repeat visitors. Thanks to every one of you!
I don't track statistics like these to argue that one model is superior to another; they have different (and complementary) goals. Comparing the numbers is essential, though, because the comparison gives them perspective.
Traffic is one way to quantify a website's importance, but it is most useful to compare traffic among sites with similar missions. Saying that "I had XXX visits," may sound very impressive, but showing how that number compares between credible and well-known web resources makes the number into useful information. A blog can do spectacularly well relative to a fully resourced education outreach project.
MIT OpenCourseWare receives 1.5 million visits a month ("OCW Site Statistics"). Their offerings are uneven in quality, but they provide a unique service by archiving lectures as they are created.
I am investigating the technology to offer substantial open course elements here on my blog. This semester I began offering our laboratories from a section of this website, and my lecture slides have moved to Prezi, making them easily sharable. After a semester to try out the new format, I think we may be ready to move onward with a full scale open courseware approach.
So keep watching here over the next month, as I lay the groundwork for my spring course.
I have heard from a number of Canadian readers who wondered whether they could use my Amazon affiliate links. I didn't fully understand the localization -- as Amazon keeps opening new Kindle stores around the world, this is changing the way I end up shopping through them.
At any rate, I now have affiliate status with Amazon.ca as well as my classic U.S. and U.K. links. I'll look into more countries also, but for now I'm just happy I've got this working properly. A click on the Canadian Amazon links puts you right out to the right place.
Just a reminder -- if you haven't found everything on your shopping list, you can use my links to Amazon, which will put some money in my server account without costing you a single extra penny. Plus, there are no lines of crazy people.
If you're going to check out a Kindle Fire anyway, you can use my link, which gives me 6 percent of the purchase, with no additional cost to you. I love my Kindle and I'm going to investigate this new version very closely.
Kindle Fire, Full Color 7" Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi
While I'm at it, I should point out that the base Kindle now starts at $79:
Kindle, Wi-Fi, 6" E Ink Display - includes Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers
And an updated version with a touch interface and no-cost 3G access everywhere in the world, (including inside Denisova Cave!) is only $149:
I'd like to get more of these into peoples' hands, so that there will be some folks to buy e-books when I release them...
Re: "The new look".
Dear Professor Hawks,
I am distraught you have trashed your own website. The internal links are gone. You provide no search routine. Your mail bag is gone. The Neanderthal data plots are gone. Your art is gone. Your Neanderthal child looks like every child in my family. For that I am pleased.
I have touted your website. After the remake I cannot forward the link with pride. I wish you the time to make redress. Pity those who contributed to your original website in vain.
Conversion from an internet PC format to a cell phone wireless format is reminiscent of the transformation from Neanderthal culture to Sapiens culture. The distinction in my mind is between high volume information processing and pablum.
I do apologize about search; this has proved to be a serious problem as my site has scaled up and all the viable solutions involve learning a new system. And I can no longer guarantee that the layout will look right on older (non-CSS compliant) browsers; if you are using an older version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, you may be seeing something very different from most people.
As for the rest -- everything is still where it was, including the mailbag:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/mailbag
Believe me, the links within the site are so important that they're taking more time than any other aspect of the remodel. The links were actually very bad at directing people into the site and allowing them to discover things. So I'm revisiting them, counting clicks and programming a new linking system to direct people more intelligently.
Surely you don't imagine that I would undertake such a difficult course of action on a mere whim. I have to change these things, because in the next few months the site will be initiating four new projects, each of which will have its own distinct flavor.
Please let me share with you something I'll be introducing as a new area of the website next week:
[And here I sent something extremely interesting...]
I've spent the last week or two updating my system and reorganizing the database underlying the site. You'll find a new look here that offers many advantages and some aesthetic differences compared to the old site.
If you've gotten comfortable with the old look, I hope you'll stick around and get a feel for the new site. I have some very exciting additions coming in the next few weeks that will take full advantage of the new enhancements.
I've been incredibly fortunate to travel around the world during the last year and meet lots of new friends. Some of them have been long-time readers. Many of them were actually shocked and dismayed to discover that I am not a Neandertal.
I didn't really understand this at first. Over time, a few people noted that I look nothing like the picture on my website. You'll have to try to imagine my feelings, having all these people who think they know me as a smiling, virile, red-headed Neandertal character...
Clearly I had only two choices: Change the picture, or enlist Talia Shire as my therapist.
That's my new Neandertal. As you can see, it's not so easy to make a child Neandertal look different from an ordinary human, although he's a bit more browridgy. I thought it was good and retro to represent a blond, light-eyed Neandertal kid, although there's not any direct genetic evidence of that yet.
Don't see the boy Neandertal? You're looking at the site at its smaller size, which is now tuned to your actual browser and screen size.
I'll rotate that art a bit more often. And you'll see different themes appearing as different parts of the site go live in the next few weeks.
Keep watching. I have some very exciting content coming, including two open science initiatives that are completely unprecedented in paleoanthropology.
I'm still fine-tuning the site. Some of the links are broken, I expect that most of these will be fixed within the month as I continue to cycle through links myself.
A few of the RSS feed links have been permanently changed; if you've been following a topic-specific feed, you may need to change the bookmark for that. If you've linked deep into the site, it is possible that some of the links are broken, but most should be working normally. Unless you've linked deeply into the bibliography database, which has been totally reordered.
I've turned off searching the bibliography at the moment. I'll be working on putting this back online during the next two weeks. My upgrade comes with some very nice potential for expanding the bibliography and I'll be taking full advantage of the new features. Meanwhile the search index for the entire site has been reset and it will take some time to rebuild completely.
When I was in Siberia, lucky to access the internet only through my Kindle, I found some obvious drawbacks to sites that are not optimized for mobile devices. Posting new content from the Kindle was just not possible in any but the smallest scale. I've noticed during the last few months, as I access the site more often using a phone or tablet, that usability on those smaller devices is lacking. As my travel schedule has accelerated, I need the ability to use my online resources more often in a smaller format.
This was a serious challenge. My custom CSS was state-of-the-art in 2007, but web design has advanced greatly in response to the changing device environment. Until this year, it really wasn't possible for me to incorporate both mobile and desktop layouts in a single scalable design. This last year has seen the innovation of "responsive layout", a system that allows a single standards-compliant theme to provide content to a range of devices at different sizes, within a single resizable page.
If you resize this window down to a minimum width on a modern CSS-compliant browser, you'll see the mobile potential of the new system. If you browse the site on your iPad, you'll see it seamlessly resize from landscape to portrait layout width when you turn the device 90 degrees. The art on the site resizes seamlessly with the theme. If you use your iPhone or Android device, you'll get a readable design with text size and layout appropriate to the handheld form.
Keeping with my priorities from the beginning of the site, all of the new theme is screen-reader compatible for readers with disabilities or other challenges, to the maximum degree possible. I know that a lot of blogs don't think much about accessibility, but it's important to me to use technology to make the site visually advanced at the same time that it remains accessible. Scale the site down to phone-size, and you'll see the most basic layout: site title immediately followed by front-page content. You can even read the site using lynx, in plain text on a console! And if you want to turn off the styling altogether, the full-text RSS feed is still there, at the same address as before.
I cannot test this on every conceivable platform, and in particular if you're using an older version of Internet Explorer, you'll find some elements of the site degrade. I've shaved as many kilobytes off each page as I can, but the new redesign is more picture-heavy than the old. On a mobile device or dialup, the site will retain its shape and readability with the graphics turned off.
It has taken me two weeks of concerted work to get the site upgraded, and I'm sure that I've missed some things. It's not so easy to move a site with 15,000 nodes, and in fact I did most of the moving by scripting from old to new database tables. The bibliography is a fresh import from my CiteULike records, which has fixed some errors but introduced a few others. Actually bringing the site online caused the usual number of unexpected problems, as many readers probably noticed.
I am still making decisions about which elements will appear on which pages in the site, and how I can optimize internal navigation. I'm building out several new areas within the site that will be integrated with the main blog.
So please be patient as I sand off the rough edges. If you see error messages, I apologize but I'm on it -- some of the site's features are still under development. I hope you enjoy the new functionality and look forward to seeing more in the next month.
On July 3, around 20 scientists left Novosibirsk by van to drive out to the permanent field camp at Denisova Cave in the low Altai mountains. The place is 520 km from Novosibirsk, which turned into a total travel time of around 9 hours. I'm posting compilations of my tweets along with some description and photos.
Novosibirsk airport: tweeting via Kindle free wireless. Yea, Amazon! Looks like Kansas out there.
This is a running joke for me: Everywhere looks like Kansas. Here's a shot of the south Siberian plain, looking out from atop the first foothills.
What do you think?
Kansas actually has a historical link to Siberia: during and even before the Dust Bowl, people were introducing many Siberian-derived trees and plants into Kansas to try to stabilize the soil and form windbreaks. So the texture of the area around Novosibirsk is actually a lot like my hometown in Western Kansas -- even down to the fading brick buildings.
Of course, Kansas does lack Soviet-era engineering projects, and the fields are a whole lot smaller.
Rest stop. Every road sign in Cyrillic is a puzzle for me to find cognates.
...Like the very strange looking word with the exotic letters that just turned out to be plain "cement"...
OK, "cement" isn't all that strange, I guess, but it does start with an exotic-looking letter. Many words are much more fun to work out. As I pointed out later, the fact that "Hawks" becomes "XOKC" caused me endless delight.
If you see a white Mercedes van rolling toward Biysk blaring Europop..well there must be fifty of those..but one has me in the back.
The restaurant in Biysk was fun: Cafe "Siberian Hunt"!
Debating whether to count it as a chicken fried steak or not. At lunch with good borscht I'm starting to really like this country.
Those who know me well will appreciate this. Or, for that matter, those who don't know me so well but happen to live in cities with seriously good chicken fried steak options (hello, Austinites!). Now, if I can just get my friends in San Antonio to invite me down there (hint).
I really shouldn't count this Russian one at all, since it was ground meat. Probably more like a salisbury steak without the gravy. But hey, it was my birthday after all!
Kindle wireless still going strong, now on gravel ascending into the Altai. Starting to look like Neandertal country.
Once we got into the Altai foothills I began to realize that the wireless just wasn't going away!
What an incredible thing. In fact, I had wireless access for the entire trip using my Kindle 3G and phone coverage when I needed it. The Kindle is not a very good device for e-mail (and the Wisconsin webmail client didn't work at all). But it is perfectly suited for Twitter.
Also, as you can see, the Altai doesn't look much like Kansas. More like Montana.
The low Altai are really not very high, but they are rugged. The traditional log or wood Russian homes (pictured here) begin to give way to an Altai style, with decorated sills and a round yurt-like "summer house" in each yard.
Just loved the green rolling hills. Much horse country in these parts.
We've arrived at Denisova base camp. Beautiful cabins and river nearby. Window view: sheer 300 foot cliffs.
This is the most luxe archaeological camp I've ever seen. Part is used for conferences by other institutes in Novosibirsk.
I can't really say enough about the facilities at Denisova. The Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography has put a lot into the area, and the cabins are quite modern with hot water and electricity.
No wifi, unfortunately. But the mess hall served very good food, never duplicating a main dish of Russian fare.
Nice steady rain, lovely conversation, only one shot of vodka. Tomorrow we get some first-hand stratigraphy.
By the miracle of Amazon, I have been using my Kindle 3G to tweet from the Altai. It is far from an ideal blogging tool, so I will keep this to a short update. The device is perfectly matched to mobile Twitter, with free Whispernet coverage. I have to say I am really liking this device.
This morning I was tweeting live from inside the south gallery of Denisova Cave. At present I am bouncing in the back of a military surplus truck on the way to Okladnikov Cave. You can follow me on Twitter at @johnhawks.
And let me say, constructing tha link on a chiclet keyboard with no symbols is more than I can take. So don't expect more blogging! I will keep tweeting for the duration.
I have now reached Novosibirsk and will be offline for a bit more than a week. In the interim, this may be interesting: "ScienceOnline2011 – interview with John Hawks"
The web has made it possible to share data on a wide scale — as we see today in genetics, astronomy, and other data-intensive fields. The human fossil record is a drop in the bucket compared to the data that will be collected every night by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. And those astronomical data will all be open. What is stopping us from making the human fossil record available to schoolkids all over the world?
