I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Eivind
This is probably the most annoying problem about CSS, and I often end up with wrapping the whole thing in a table, which is just terrible.
I wonder if CSS3 has anything in stock for fixing this problem..
Anders
The solution depends on the design you want. If you have two elements, a tall and a short, make the desired background colour for the short element the background colour for the whole page, and then set the background colour for the tall element specifically.
If you haven’t changed your mockup, I guess you are thinking about the blue at the bottom of the image. Make the page background blue and put the blog text in a that has a white background. I am pretty sure the blog part will always be as tall as the whole page, even if it isn’t in your mockup.
Anyway, I try to follow Jeff Veen’s HotWired principle: know your code, and make the limitations a design feature. Why do you need the column to have a single colour all the way? Isn’t there another way of getting the same effect? Check out this redesign suggestion for Jakob Nielsen’s site.
Nina Terese
Is this what you are trying to do? http://www.moronicbajebus.com/playground/cssplay/twocolumns/
Jill
Yes! This is more or it! And the solution is more or less the same as the other solutions I’ve seen, too – you seem to need that background image…
Jason
I actually ended up having to do a dual-color bg image (light gray and dark gray) while setting the bgcolor of the main content area to white. Yeah, it was tricky, and a pain (but I’m pretty sure it’s valid).
You can see what I mean if you look at my search result page, which I never really cleaned up:
http://www.wordherders.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=2&search=new+design
The third row of color (not green, not darkest gray, but the dual gray band) is actually my background image, which allows me to do the tri-color effect all the way down my main page.
Jill
Which reminds me, anyone know if there’s actually any way of making a template for the search results page in MT? My search pages seem to just choose a random style sheet from any of the blogs running on that installment, which isn’t terribly convenient.
matt
Far be it from me (whose cookie-cutter blog cuts no design ice) to carp, but on some little screens I think your infinitely long T-shirt is too costly, width-wise. Especially as one scroooolls down.