This revision is from 2010/10/13 00:04. You can Restore it.
Languages(Edit)
Commo Systems To Know - CW, Finger-spelling, etc.
Constructed Languages - Like Esperanto, Lojban. Just a curiosity.
Theory(Edit)
Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication - "The mother of all models"
- referential (= contextual information)
- aesthetic (= auto-reflection)
- emotive (= self-expression)
- conative (= vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
- phatic (= checking channel working)
- metalingual (= checking code working)
- One Cannot Not Communicate
- All communication includes, apart from the plain meaning of words, more information
- Both the talker and the receiver of information structure the communication flow differently and therefore interpret their own behaviour during communicating as merely a reaction on the other's behaviour ... Human communication cannot be desolved into plain causation and reaction strings, communication rather appears to be cyclic.
- Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: Communication does not involve the merely spoken words (digital communication), but non-verbal and analog-verbal communication as well.
- Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is based on differences or rity. (?)
Narrowband Communication - Sprawls, but looks worthwhile
"Magnetic Headlines" - Thesis: Every sentence is to get you to read the next one until you get to the call to action.
Breaking it Down(Edit)
Problem(Edit)
Communicating requires picking the audience. Too basic and you bore the advanced. Too hard and you lose everyone else. Bridging the gap is a mystery.
Solution(s)?(Edit)
I guess you need to explain it first at the basic level, then move on with that as a foundation. If you have a chain of those explanations, you can give advanced users a path to bypass the "easy" sections, and ensuring there is nothing essential in the skippable parts. (I have seen some books do this, saying, "If you are already familiar with X, feel free to skip chapters 2--5.")
Examples(Edit)
As much as I like Wikipedia, I find that when a page is about a technical topic, they tend to get very terse and require a huge amount of background knowledge. Here is an example of explanations that take you from basic to intermediate in an efficient way:
- Fourier Transforms - vs Wikipedia's version
- Cantor's diagonal argument - Compare against Wikipedia's version
Fixipedia(Edit)
Wikipedia has a project called the "Simple English Wikipedia". It is for people who do not speak English well. You can get to it either by changing the "Language" on the left bar:
=c http://panoptic.com/rking/file/up/simple-wikipedia.png
Or by manually changing the "en" in "en.wikipedia.org" to "simple" (which is what you have to do if no "Simple" page already exists. Notice that the "Simple English" entry may be nestled between the Cyrillic sounds for "R" and "S". Ha!
My idea is to take the difficult pages and make sure they have a clean explanation on the "simple" side. If there isn't already one, I'll do the work to figure out the topic and then boil it down on the simple page.
Here is my list of pages that need help:
- p-n junction - simple
- ...hundreds more.
If you join me on this project please let me know.