cr Valery Gergiev & Le sacre du printemps / director, Peter Rump ; a Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Monarda Arts & NPS TV co-production By library.mit.edu Published On :: Sun, 22 Jan 2017 06:45:33 EST Browsery DVD MT100.S968.V3 2016 Full Article
cr Herbert von Karajan, maestro for the screen / a film by Georg Wübbolt By library.mit.edu Published On :: Sun, 15 Apr 2018 06:23:51 EDT Browsery DVD ML422.K37 H473 2016 Full Article
cr Frankenstein / choreography, Liam Scarlett ; music, Lowell Liebermann ; designer, John Macfarlane ; lighting designer, David Finn ; executive producer, Tony Followell ; directed for the screen by Ross MacGibbon ; co-production between the Royal Ballet an By library.mit.edu Published On :: Sun, 12 Aug 2018 07:11:17 EDT Browsery DVD GV1790.F736 2016 Full Article
cr Chasing Trane: the John Coltrane documentary / Meteor 17 in association with Crew Neck Productions presents ; a film by John Scheinfeld ; produced by Spencer Proffer, John Beug, Scott Pascucci, Dave Harding ; written and directed by John Scheinfeld By library.mit.edu Published On :: Sun, 21 Oct 2018 07:04:58 EDT Browsery DVD ML419.C645 C43 2017 Full Article
cr American epic / a production of BBC Arena, Lo-Max Films Ltd., Wildwood Enterprises, and Thirteen Productions LLC for WNET ; directed by Bernard MacMahon ; story by Bernard MacMahon & Allison McGourty & Duke Erikson ; telescript by William Morgan By library.mit.edu Published On :: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 07:08:05 EDT Browsery DVD ML3790.A44 2017 Full Article
cr Akram Khan's Giselle / English National Ballet ; direction and choreography, Akram Khan ; directed for the screen by Ross MacGibbon By library.mit.edu Published On :: Sun, 8 Dec 2019 06:10:59 EST Browsery DVD GV1790.G5 2019 Full Article
cr [ASAP] 100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: Macromolecular Materials for Additive Manufacturing By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Wed, 15 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00200 Full Article
cr [ASAP] 100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: Recent Advances and Opportunities for Mixed Ion and Charge Conducting Polymers By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00037 Full Article
cr [ASAP] 100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: Modeling and Simulation of Macromolecules with Hydrogen Bonds: Challenges, Successes, and Opportunities By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00134 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Chirality Control of Screw-Sense in Aib-Polymers: Synthesis and Helicity of Amino Acid Functionalized Polymers By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00218 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Facile Synthesis and Study of Microporous Catalytic Arene-Norbornene Annulation–Tröger’s Base Ladder Polymers for Membrane Air Separation By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00135 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization of Acrylic and Methacrylic Acids: Preparation of Acidic Polymers with Various Architectures By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Mon, 27 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00246 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Synergy of Macrocycles and Macromolecular Topologies: An Efficient [3<sub><italic toggle="yes">4</italic></sub>]Triazolophane-Based Synthesis of Cage-Shaped Polymers By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00248 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Lead Halide Perovskite Nanocrystals as Photocatalysts for PET-RAFT Polymerization under Visible and Near-Infrared Irradiation By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 01 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00232 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Scavenging One of the Liquids versus Emulsion Stabilization by Microgels in a Mixture of Two Immiscible Liquids By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Mon, 04 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00191 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Catalytic Control of Plastic Flow in Siloxane-Based Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Networks By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00265 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Direct Observation of Micelle Fragmentation via In Situ Liquid-Phase Transmission Electron Microscopy By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00273 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Crack-Tip Strain Field in Supershear Crack of Elastomers By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 08 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00213 Full Article
cr [ASAP] Aggregation-Induced Emission Active Polyacrylates via Cu-Mediated Reversible Deactivation Radical Polymerization with Bioimaging Applications By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 08 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS Macro LettersDOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.0c00281 Full Article
cr FONS SIGNATUS ... SEU VII. LYTANIAE DE VENERABILI, ET AUGUSTISSIMO ALTARIS SACRAMENTO Quarum primae quinque Solenniores, Ultimae Duae minùs Solennes, Omnes tamen non nimis longae, Per Annum secundùm consuetudinem locorum, ... Unà cum Cantic By reader.digitale-sammlungen.de Published On :: Mon, 27 Apr 2020 13:12:02 +0100 Autor: Münster, Joseph Joachim Benedikt, 1694-1751 Erschienen 1751 BSB-Signatur 4 Mus.pr. 44603 URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11148808-2 URL: http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11148808_00001.html/ Full Article
cr On-chip electrocatalytic microdevice: an emerging platform for expanding the insight into electrochemical processes By feeds.rsc.org Published On :: Chem. Soc. Rev., 2020, Advance ArticleDOI: 10.1039/C9CS00601J, Review ArticleHuan Yang, Qiyuan He, Youwen Liu, Huiqiao Li, Hua Zhang, Tianyou ZhaiThis comprehensive summary of on-chip electrocatalytic microdevices will expand the insight into electrochemical processes, ranging from dynamic exploration to performance optimization.To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry Full Article
cr Coordinated behaviors of artificial micro/nanomachines: from mutual interactions to interactions with the environment By feeds.rsc.org Published On :: Chem. Soc. Rev., 2020, Advance ArticleDOI: 10.1039/C9CS00877B, Review ArticleHong Wang, Martin PumeraThe interactions leading to coordinated behaviors of artificial micro/nanomachines are reviewed.To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry Full Article
cr Visualization of materials using the confocal laser scanning microscopy technique By feeds.rsc.org Published On :: Chem. Soc. Rev., 2020, 49,2408-2425DOI: 10.1039/C8CS00061A, Review ArticleXu Teng, Feng Li, Chao LuThis review summarizes the recent applications of confocal laser scanning microscopy in materials science.The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry Full Article
cr Electrochemically active sites inside crystalline porous materials for energy storage and conversion By feeds.rsc.org Published On :: Chem. Soc. Rev., 2020, 49,2378-2407DOI: 10.1039/C9CS00880B, Review ArticleLingjun Kong, Ming Zhong, Wei Shuang, Yunhua Xu, Xian-He BuThis review provides references for the preparation of electroactive CPMs via rational design and modulation of active sites and the space around them, and their application in electrochemical energy storage and conversion systems.The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry Full Article
cr If I had a million (1932) / directed by James Cruze, H. Bruce Humberstone, Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Taurog, Stephen Roberts, Norman McLeod, William A. Seiter [DVD]. By encore.st-andrews.ac.uk Published On :: Saint Augustine, Florida : Gozillaflix, 2015. Full Article
cr Friday Night Lights. The first season (2006) / created, written and directed by Peter Berg [DVD]. By encore.st-andrews.ac.uk Published On :: [U.K.] : Universal Studios Home Entertainment, [2019] Full Article
cr Crime and punishment (2007) / directed by Liang Zhao [DVD]. By encore.st-andrews.ac.uk Published On :: [France] : Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), [2010] Full Article
cr The sensible stage : staging and the moving image / edited by Bridget Crone By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Full Article
cr Audio processes : musical analysis, modification, synthesis, and control / David Creasey By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Creasey, D. J. (David J.), author Full Article
cr The aging body in dance : a cross-cultural perspective / edited by Nanako Nakajima and Gabriele Brandstetter By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Full Article
cr Roadies : the secret history of Australian rock 'n' roll / Stuart Coupe By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Coupe, Stuart, 1956- author Full Article
cr Musical emotions explained : unlocking the secrets of musical affect / Patrik N. Juslin By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Juslin, Patrik N., author Full Article
cr The art of producing : how to create great audio projects / David Gibson and Maestro B. Curtis By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Gibson, David, 1957- author Full Article
cr Remembered presences : responses to theatre / Alison Croggon By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Croggon, Alison, 1962- author Full Article
cr The film and media creators' guide to music / Vasco Hexel (Royal College of Music, London) By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Hexel, Vasco, 1980- author Full Article
cr Musical imaginations : multidisciplinary perspectives on creativity, performance, and perception / edited by David J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, Raymond A.R. MacDonald By prospero.murdoch.edu.au Published On :: Full Article
cr U.S. Copyright Office, Subscriber Notice By www.copyright.gov Published On :: Wed, 04 Sep 2019 15:18:18 -0500 Subscriber Notice You are receiving this notice because you subscribe to NewsNet or one of our other email or RSS bulletins. Beginning tomorrow, your subscription will be migrated to a separate U.S. Copyright Office account. You will receive another bulletin after your subscription has been migrated. You do not need to take any action, but please be aware that if you wish to change or cancel your subscription, you will do so through this page. If you subscribe to other newsletters from the Library of Congress, you can continue to manage those subscriptions through this page.You may wish to check your spam folder to be sure you are continuing to receive these bulletins. Thank you for your continued interest in news and information from the U.S. Copyright Office. Full Article
cr Responsible JavaScript: Part III By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: 2019-11-14T14:30:42+00:00 You’ve done everything you thought was possible to address your website’s JavaScript problem. You relied on the web platform where you could. You sidestepped Babel and found smaller framework alternatives. You whittled your application code down to its most streamlined form possible. Yet, things are just not fast enough. When websites fail to perform the way we as designers and developers expect them to, we inevitably turn on ourselves: “What are we failing to do?” “What can we do with the code we have written?” “Which parts of our architecture are failing us?” These are valid inquiries, as a fair share of performance woes do originate from our own code. Yet, assigning blame solely to ourselves blinds us to the unvarnished truth that a sizable onslaught of our performance problems comes from the outside. When the third wheel crashes the party Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it. JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations. But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces. If a third-party provider adds features to their product, you bear the brunt. If they change their infrastructure, you will feel the effects of it. Those who use your site will become frustrated, and they aren’t going to bother grappling with an intolerable user experience. You can mitigate some of the symptoms of third parties, but you can’t cure the ailment unless you remove the solutions altogether—and that’s not always practical or possible. In this installment of Responsible JavaScript, we’ll take a slightly less technical approach than in the previous installment. We are going to talk more about the human side of third parties. Then, we’ll go down some of the technical avenues for how you might go about tackling the problem. Hindered by convenience When we talk about the sorry state of the web today, some of us are quick to point out the role of developer convenience in contributing to the problem. While I share the view that developer convenience has a tendency to harm the user experience, they’re not the only kind of convenience that can turn a website into a sluggish, janky mess. Operational conveniences can become precursors to a very thorny sort of technical debt. These conveniences are what we reach for when we can’t solve a pervasive problem on our own. They represent third-party solutions that address problems in the absence of architectural flexibility and/or adequate development resources. Whenever an inconvenience arises, that is the time to have the discussion around how to tackle it in a way that’s comprehensive. So let’s talk about what it looks like to tackle that sort of scenario from a more human angle. The problem is pain The reason third parties come into play in the first place is pain. When a decision maker in an organization has felt enough pain around a certain problem, they’re going to do a very human thing, which is to find the fastest way to make that pain go away. Markets will always find ways to address these pain points, even if the way they do so isn’t sustainable or even remotely helpful. Web accessibility overlays—third-party scripts that purport to automatically fix accessibility issues—are among the worst offenders. First, you fork over your money for a fix that doesn’t fix anything. Then you pay a wholly different sort of price when that “fix” harms the usability of your website. This is not a screed to discredit the usefulness of the tools some third-party vendors provide, but to illustrate how the adoption of third-party solutions happens, even those that are objectively awful A Chrome performance trace of a long task kicked off by a third party’s web accessibility overlay script. The task occupies the main thread for roughly 600 ms on a 2017 Retina MacBook. So when a vendor rolls up and promises to solve the very painful problem we’re having, there’s a good chance someone is going to nibble. If that someone is high enough in the hierarchy, they’ll exert downward pressure on others to buy in—if not circumvent them entirely in the decision-making process. Conversely, adoption of a third-party solution can also occur when those in the trenches are under pressure and lack sufficient resources to create the necessary features themselves. Whatever the catalyst, it pays to gather your colleagues and collectively form a plan for navigating and mitigating the problems you’re facing. Create a mitigation plan Once people in an organization have latched onto a third-party solution, however ill-advised, the difficulty you’ll encounter in forcing a course change will depend on how urgent a need that solution serves. In fact, you shouldn’t try to convince proponents of the solution that their decision was wrong. Such efforts almost always backfire and can make people feel attacked and more resistant to what you’re telling them. Even worse, those efforts could create acrimony where people stop listening to each other completely, and that is a breeding ground for far worse problems to develop. Grouse and commiserate amongst your peers if you must—as I myself have often done—but put your grievances aside and come up with a mitigation plan to guide your colleagues toward better outcomes. The nooks and crannies of your specific approach will depend on the third parties themselves and the structure of the organization, but the bones of it could look like the following series of questions. What problem does this solution address? There’s a reason why a third-party solution was selected, and this question will help you suss out whether the rationale for its adoption is sound. Remember, there are times decisions are made when all the necessary people are not in the room. You might be in a position where you have to react to the aftermath of that decision, but the answer to this question will lead you to a natural follow-up. How long do we intend to use the solution? This question will help you identify the solution’s shelf life. Was it introduced as a bandage, with the intent to remove it once the underlying problem has been addressed, such as in the case of an accessibility overlay? Or is the need more long-term, such as the data provided by an A/B testing suite? The other possibility is that the solution can never be effectively removed because it serves a crucial purpose, as in the case of analytics scripts. It’s like throwing a mattress in a swimming pool: it’s easy to throw in, but nigh impossible to drag back out. In any case, you can’t know if a third-party script is here to stay if you don’t ask. Indeed, if you find out the solution is temporary, you can form a plan to eventually remove it from your site once the underlying problem it addresses has been resolved. Who’s the point of contact if issues arise? When a third-party solution is put into place, someone must be the point of contact for when—not if—issues arise. I’ve seen what happens (far too often) when a third-party script gets out of control. For example, when a tag manager or an A/B testing framework’s JavaScript grows slowly and insidiously because marketers aren’t cleaning out old tags or completed A/B tests. It’s for precisely these reasons that responsibility needs to be attached to a specific person in your organization for third-party solutions currently in use on your site. What that responsibility entails will differ in every situation, but could include: periodic monitoring of the third-party script’s footprint;maintenance to ensure the third-party script doesn’t grow out of control;occasional meetings to discuss the future of that vendor’s relationship with your organization;identification of overlaps of functionality between multiple third parties, and if potential redundancies can be removed;and ongoing research, especially to identify speedier alternatives that may act as better replacements for slow third-party scripts. The idea of responsibility in this context should never be an onerous, draconian obligation you yoke your teammates with, but rather an exercise in encouraging mindfulness in your colleagues. Because without mindfulness, a third-party script’s ill effects on your website will be overlooked until it becomes a grumbling ogre in the room that can no longer be ignored. Assigning responsibility for third parties can help to prevent that from happening. Ensuring responsible usage of third-party solutions If you can put together a mitigation plan and get everyone on board, the work of ensuring the responsible use of third-party solutions can begin. Luckily for you, the actual technical work will be easier than trying to wrangle people. So if you’ve made it this far, all it will take to get results is time and persistence. Load only what’s necessary It may seem obvious, but load only what’s necessary. Judging by the amount of unused first-party JavaScript I see loaded—let alone third-party JavaScript—it’s clearly a problem. It’s like trying to clean your house by stuffing clutter into the closets. Regardless of whether they’re actually needed, it’s not uncommon for third-party scripts to be loaded on every single page, so refer to your point of contact to figure out which pages need which third-party scripts. As an example, one of my past clients used a popular third-party tool across multiple brand sites to get a list of retailers for a given product. It demonstrated clear value, but that script only needed to be on a site’s product detail page. In reality, it was frequently loaded on every page. Culling this script from pages where it didn’t belong significantly boosted performance for non-product pages, which ostensibly reduced the friction on the conversion path. Figuring out which pages need which third-party scripts requires you to do some decidedly untechnical work. You’ll actually have to get up from your desk and talk to the person who has been assigned responsibility for the third-party solution you’re grappling with. This is very difficult work for me, but it’s rewarding when good-faith collaboration happens, and good outcomes are realized as a result. Self-host your third-party scripts This advice isn’t a secret by any stretch. I even touched on it in the previous installment of this series, but it needs to be shouted from the rooftops at every opportunity: you should self-host as many third-party resources as possible. Whether this is feasible depends on the third-party script in question. Is it some framework you’re grabbing from Google’s hosted libraries, cdnjs, or other similar provider? Self-host that sucker right now. Casper found a way to self-host their Optimizely script and significantly reduced their start render time for their trouble. It really drives home the point that a major detriment of third-party resources is the fact that their mere existence on other servers is one of the worst performance bottlenecks we encounter. If you’re looking to self-host an analytics solution or a similar sort of script, there’s a higher level of difficulty to contend with to self-host it. You may find that some third-party scripts simply can’t be self-hosted, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the trouble to find out. If you find that self-hosting isn’t an option for a third-party script, don’t fret. There are other mitigations you can try. Mask latency of cross-origin connections If you can’t self-host your third-party scripts, the next best thing is to preconnect to servers that host them. WebPageTest’s Connection View does a fantastic job of showing you which servers your site gathers resources from, as well as the latency involved in establishing connections to them. WebPageTest’s Connection View shows all the different servers a page requests resources from during load. Preconnections are effective because they establish connections to third-party servers before the browser would otherwise discover them in due course. Parsing HTML takes time, and parsers are often blocked by stylesheets and other scripts. Wherever you can’t self-host third-party scripts, preconnections make perfect sense. Maybe don’t preload third-party scripts Preloading resources is one of those things that sounds fantastic at first—until you consider its potential to backfire, as Andy Davies points out. If you’re unfamiliar with preloading, it’s similar to preconnecting but goes a step further by instructing the browser to fetch a particular resource far sooner than it ordinarily would. The drawback of preloading is that while it’s great for ensuring a resource gets loaded as soon as possible, it changes the discovery order of that resource. Whenever we do this, we’re implicitly saying that other resources are less important—including resources crucial to rendering or even core functionality. It’s probably a safe bet that most of your third-party code is not as crucial to the functionality of your site as your own code. That said, if you must preload a third-party resource, ensure you’re only doing so for third-party scripts that are critical to page rendering. If you do find yourself in a position where your site’s initial rendering depends on a third-party script, refer to your mitigation plan to see what you can do to eliminate or ameliorate your dependence on it. Depending on a third party for core functionality is never a good position to be in, as you’re relinquishing a lot of control to others who might not have your best interests in mind. Lazy load non-essential third-party scripts The best request is no request. If you have a third-party script that doesn’t need to be loaded right away, consider lazy loading it with an Intersection Observer. Here’s what it might look like to lazy load a Facebook Like button when it’s scrolled into the viewport: let loadedFbScript = false; const intersectionListener = new IntersectionObserver(entries => { entries.forEach(entry => { if ((entry.isIntersecting || entry.intersectionRatio) && !loadedFbScript) { const scriptEl = document.createElement("script"); scriptEl.defer = true; scriptEl.crossOrigin = "anonymous"; scriptEl.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0"; scriptEl.onload = () => { loadedFbScript = true; }; document.body.append(scriptEl); } }); }); intersectionListener.observe(document.querySelector(".fb-like")); In the above snippet, we first set a variable to track whether we’ve loaded the Facebook SDK JavaScript. After that, an IntersectionListener is created that checks whether the observed element is in the viewport, and whether the Facebook SDK has been loaded. If the SDK JavaScript hasn’t been loaded, a reference to it is injected into the DOM, which will kick off a request for it. You’re not going to be able to lazy load every third-party script. Some of them simply need to do their work at page load time, or otherwise can’t be deferred. Regardless, do the detective work to see if it’s possible to lazy load at least some of your third-party JavaScript. One of the common concerns I hear from coworkers when I suggest lazy loading third-party scripts is how it can delay whatever interactions the third party provides. That’s a reasonable concern, because when you lazy load anything, a noticeable delay may occur as the resource loads. You can get around this to some extent with resource prefetching. This is different than preloading, which we discussed earlier. Prefetching consumes a comparable amount of data, yes, but prefetched resources are given lower priority and are less likely to contend for bandwidth with critical resources. Staying on top of the problem Keeping an eye on your third-party JavaScript requires mindfulness bordering on hypervigilance. When you recognize poor performance for the technical debt that it truly is, you’ll naturally slip into a frame of mind where you’ll recognize and address it as you would any other kind of technical debt. Staying on top of third parties is refactoring—a sort that requires you to periodically perform tasks such as cleaning up tag managers and A/B tests, consolidating third-party solutions, eliminating any that are no longer needed, and applying the coding techniques discussed above. Moreover, you’ll need to work with your team to address this technical debt on a cyclical basis. This kind of work can’t be automated, so yes, you’ll need to knuckle down and have face-to-face, synchronous conversations with actual people. If you’re already in the habit of scheduling “cleanup sprints” on some interval, then that is the time and space for you to address performance-related technical debt, regardless of whether it involves third- or first-party code. There’s a time for feature development, but that time should not comprise the whole of your working hours. Development shops that focus only on feature development are destined to be wholly consumed by the technical debt that will inevitably result. So it will come to pass that in the fourth and final installment of this series we’ll discuss what it means to do the hard work of using JavaScript responsibly in the context of process. Therein, we’ll explore what it takes to unite your organization under the banner of making your website faster and more accessible, and therefore more usable for everyone, everywhere. Full Article
cr Cross-Cultural Design By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: 2020-02-27T15:30:00+00:00 When I first traveled to Japan as an exchange student in 2001, I lived in northern Kyoto, a block from the Kitayama subway station. My first time using the train to get to my university was almost a disaster, even though it was only two subway stops away. I thought I had everything I needed to successfully make the trip. I double- and triple-checked that I had the correct change in one pocket and a computer printout of where I was supposed to go in the other. I was able to make it down into the station, but then I just stood at a ticket machine, dumbfounded, looking at all the flashing lights, buttons, and maps above my head (Fig 5.1). Everything was so impenetrable. I was overwhelmed by the architecture, the sounds, the signs, and the language. Fig 5.1: Kyoto subway ticket machines—with many line maps and bilingual station names—can seem complicated, especially to newcomers. My eyes craved something familiar—and there it was. The ticket machine had a small button that said English! I pushed it but became even more lost: the instructions were poorly translated, and anyway, they explained a system that I couldn’t use in the first place. Guess what saved me? Two little old Japanese ladies. As they bought tickets, I casually looked over their shoulders to see how they were using the machines. First, they looked up at the map to find their desired destination. Then, they noted the fare written next to the station. Finally, they put some money into the machine, pushed the button that lit up with their correct fare, and out popped the tickets! Wow! I tried it myself after they left. And after a few tense moments, I got my ticket and headed through the gates to the train platform. I pride myself on being a third-culture kid, meaning I was raised in a culture other than the country named on my passport. But even with a cultural upbringing in both Nigeria and the US, it was one of the first times I ever had to guess my way through a task with no previous reference points. And I did it! Unfortunately, the same guesswork happens online a million times a day. People visit sites that offer them no cultural mental models or visual framework to fall back on, and they end up stumbling through links and pages. Effective visual systems can help eliminate that guesswork and uncertainty by creating layered sets of cues in the design and interface. Let’s look at a few core parts of these design systems and tease out how we can make them more culturally responsive and multifaceted. Typography If you work on the web, you deal with typography all the time. This isn’t a book about typography—others have written far more eloquently and technically on the subject. What I would like to do, however, is examine some of the ways culture and identity influence our perception of type and what typographic choices designers can make to help create rich cross-cultural experiences. Stereotypography I came across the word stereotypography a few years ago. Being African, I’m well aware of the way my continent is portrayed in Western media—a dirt-poor, rural monoculture with little in the way of technology, education, or urbanization. In the West, one of the most recognizable graphic markers for things African, tribal, or uncivilized (and no, they are not the same thing) is the typeface Neuland. Rob Giampietro calls it “the New Black Face,” a clever play on words. In an essay, he asks an important question: How did [Neuland and Lithos] come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them? (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-01/) From its release in 1923 and continued use through the 1940s in African-American-focused advertising, Neuland has carried heavy connotations and stereotypes of cheapness, ugliness, tribalism, and roughness. You see this even today. Neuland is used in posters for movies like Tarzan, Jurassic Park, and Jumanji—movies that are about jungles, wildness, and scary beasts lurking in the bush, all Western symbolism for the continent of Africa. Even MyFonts’ download page for Neuland (Fig 5.2) includes tags for “Africa,” “jungle fever,” and “primitive”—tags unconnected to anything else in the product besides that racist history. Fig 5.2: On MyFonts, the Neuland typeface is tagged with “Africa”, “jungle fever”, and “primitive”, perpetuating an old and irrelevant typographic stereotype (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-02/). Don’t make, use, or sell fonts this way. Here are some tips on how to avoid stereotypography when defining your digital experiences: Be immediately suspicious of any typeface that “looks like” a culture or country. For example, so-called “wonton” or “chop-suey” fonts, whose visual style is thought to express “Asianness” or to suggest Chinese calligraphy, have long appeared on food cartons, signs, campaign websites, and even Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts with racist caricatures of Asians (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-03/). Monotype’s website, where you can buy a version called Mandarin Regular (US$35), cringingly describes the typeface’s story as “an interpretation of artistically drawn Asian brush calligraphy” (Fig 5.3). Whether or not you immediately know its history, run away from any typeface that purports to represent an entire culture. Fig 5.3: Fonts.com sells a typeface called Mandarin Regular with the following description: “The stylized Asian atmosphere is not created only by the forms of the figures but also by the very name of the typeface. A mandarin was a high official of the ancient Chinese empire” (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-04/). Support type designers who are from the culture you are designing for. This might seem like it’s a difficult task, but the internet is a big place. I have found that, for clients who are sensitive to cultural issues, the inclusion of type designers’ names and backgrounds can be a powerful differentiator, even making its way into their branding packages as a point of pride. The world wide webfont Another common design tool you should consider is webfonts—fonts specifically designed for use on websites and apps. One of the main selling points of webfonts is that instead of putting text in images, clients can use live text on their sites, which is better for SEO and accessibility. They are simple to implement these days, a matter of adding a line of code or checking a box on a templating engine. The easiest way to get them on your site is by using a service like Google Fonts, Fontstand, or Adobe Fonts. Or is it? That assumes those services are actually available to your users. Google Fonts (and every other service using Google’s Developer API) is blocked in mainland China, which means that any of those nice free fonts you chose would simply not load (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-05/). You can work around this, but it also helps to have a fallback font—that’s what they’re for. When you’re building your design system, why not take a few extra steps to define some webfonts that are visible in places with content blocks? Justfont is one of the first services focused on offering a wide range of Chinese webfonts (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-06/). They have both free and paid tiers of service, similar to Western font services. After setting up an account, you can grab whatever CSS and font-family information you need. Multiple script systems When your design work requires more than one script—for instance, a Korean typeface and a Latin typeface—your choices get much more difficult. Designs that incorporate more than one are called multiple script systems (multiscript systems for short). Combining them is an interesting design challenge, one that requires extra typographic sensitivity. Luckily, your multiscript choices will rarely appear on the same page together; you will usually be choosing fonts that work across the brand, not that work well next to one another visually. Let’s take a look at an example of effective multiscript use. SurveyMonkey, an online survey and questionnaire tool, has their site localized into a variety of different languages (Fig 5.4). Take note of the headers, the structure of the text in the menu and buttons, and how both fonts feel like part of the same brand. Fig 5.4: Compare the typographic choices in the Korean (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-07/) and US English (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-08/) versions of SurveyMonkey’s Take a Tour page. Do the header type and spacing retain the spirit of the brand while still accounting for typographic needs? Some tips as you attempt to choose multiscript fonts for your project: Inspect the overall weight and contrast level of the scripts. Take the time to examine how weight and contrast are used in the scripts you’re using. Find weights and sizes that give you a similar feel and give the page the right balance, regardless of the script. Keep an eye on awkward script features. Character x-heights, descenders, ascenders, and spacing can throw off the overall brand effect. For instance, Japanese characters are always positioned within a grid with all characters designed to fit in squares of equal height and width. Standard Japanese typefaces also contain Latin characters, called romaji. Those Latin characters will, by default, be kerned according to that same grid pattern, often leaving their spacing awkward and ill-formed. Take the extra time to find a typeface that doesn’t have features that are awkward to work with.Don’t automatically choose scripts based on superficial similarity. Initial impressions don’t always mean a typeface is the right one for your project. In an interview in the book Bi-Scriptual, Jeongmin Kwon, a typeface designer based in France, offers an example (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-09/). Nanum Myeongjo, a contemporary Hangul typeface, might at first glance look really similar to a seventeenth-century Latin old-style typeface—for instance, they both have angled serifs. However, Nanum Myeongjo was designed in 2008 with refined, modern strokes, whereas old-style typefaces were originally created centuries ago and echo handwritten letterforms (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-10/). Looking at the Google Fonts page for Nanum Myeongjo, though, none of that is clear (Fig 5.5). The page automatically generates a Latin Nn glyph in the top left of the page, instead of a more representative Hangul character sample. If I based my multiscript font choices on my initial reactions to that page, my pairings wouldn’t accurately capture the history and design of each typeface. Fig 5.5: The Google Fonts page for Nanum Myeongjo shows a Latin character sample in the top left, rather than a more representative character sample. Visual density CSS can help you control visual density—how much text, image, and other content there is relative to the negative space on your page. As you read on, keep cultural variables in mind: different cultures value different levels of visual density. Let’s compare what are commonly called CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) alphabets and Latin (English, French, Italian, etc.) alphabets. CJK alphabets have more complex characters, with shapes that are generally squarer than Latin letterforms. The glyphs also tend to be more detailed than Latin ones, resulting in a higher visual density. Your instinct might be to create custom type sizes and line heights for each of your localized pages. That is a perfectly acceptable option, and if you are a typophile, it may drive you crazy not to do it. But I’m here to tell you that when adding CJK languages to a design system, you can update it to account for their visual density without ripping out a lot of your original CSS: Choose a font size that is slightly larger for CJK characters, because of their density. Choose a line height that gives you ample vertical space between each line of text (referred to as line-height in CSS). Look at your Latin text in the same sizes and see if it still works. Tweak them together to find a size that works well with both scripts. The 2017 site for Typojanchi, the Korean Typography Biennale, follows this methodology (Fig 5.6). Both the English and Korean texts have a font-size of 1.25em, and a line-height of 1.5. The result? The English text takes up more space vertically, and the block of Korean text is visually denser, but both are readable and sit comfortably within the overall page design. It is useful to compare translated websites like this to see how CSS styling can be standardized across Latin and CJK pages. Fig 5.6: The 2017 site for Typojanchi, the Korean Typography Biennale, shows differing visual density in action. It is useful to compare translated websites like this to see how CSS styling can be standardized across Latin and CJK pages (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-11/). Text expansion factors Expansion factors calculate how long strings of text will be in different languages. They use either a decimal (1.8) or a percentage (180%) to calculate the length of a text string in English versus a different language. Of course, letter-spacing depends on the actual word or phrase, but think of them as a very rough way to anticipate space for text when it gets translated. Using expansion factors is best when planning for microcopy, calls to action, and menus, rather than long-form content like articles or blog posts that can freely expand down the page. The Salesforce Lightning Design System offers a detailed expansion-factor table to help designers roughly calculate space requirements for other languages in a UI (Fig 5.7). Fig 5.7: This expansion-factor table from Salesforce lets designers and developers estimate the amount of text that will exist in different languages. Though dependent on the actual words, such calculations can give you a benchmark to design with content in mind (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-12/). But wait! Like everything in cross-cultural design, nothing is ever that simple. Japanese, for example, has three scripts: Kanji, for characters of Chinese origin, hiragana, for words and sounds that are not represented in kanji, and katakana, for words borrowed from other languages. The follow button is a core part of the Twitter experience. It has six characters in English (“Follow”) and four in Japanese (フォロー), but the Japanese version is twenty percent longer because it is in katakana, and those characters take up more space than kanji (Fig 5.8). Expansion tables can struggle to accommodate the complex diversity of human scripts and languages, so don’t look to them as a one-stop or infallible solution. Fig 5.8: On Twitter, expansion is clearly visible: the English “Follow” button text comes in at about 47 pixels wide, while the Japanese text comes in at 60 pixels wide. Here are a few things you can do keep expansion factors in mind as you design: Generate dummy text in different languages for your design comps. Of course, you should make sure your text doesn’t contain any unintentional swearwords or improper language, but tools like Foreign Ipsum are a good place to start getting your head around expansion factors (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-13/).Leave extra space around buttons, menu items, and other microcopy. As well as being general good practice in responsive design, this allows you to account for how text in your target languages expands.Make sure your components are expandable. Stay away from assigning a fixed width to your UI elements unless it’s unavoidable.Let longer text strings wrap to a second line. Just ensure that text is aligned correctly and is easy to scan. Full Article
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