Posts from — April 2003

Innovation. This semester I'm involved in team teaching a third year subject which is known as Advanced Media Production. This is a subject we introduced a few years ago to bring together television and radio students in their final year to collaborate, and to provide them with the space to explore new ideas through the development of projects that would have an audio, televisual, and web outcome. Students have to prepare a project to present to groups for peer review and shortlisting, the project needed to be innovative, creative, able to be done (with the resources available and with the skills available) and have three media outcomes. In general the projects presented lacked all of these qualities. It is not the students fault. At no point in their undergraduate career have they actually been taught, shown, or allowed to be, innovative. Hence innovation gets confused with creativity and treated as the… [vog blog::vlog 2.0]

Teaching innovation is not an easy thing, because you have to teach something beyond creativity, you have to teach architecture and rigor, not everyone is prepared for that type of work.

What is DAC?. I'm currently the chair of this years DAC conference, and there's a ton of stuff I'm trying to achieve with the conference, and a ton of stuff (well, a few kilo's anyway) that i've learnt along the way, and I really need to start documenting some of this. For me, for others, and also so people get some idea of what the conference is actually on about. So, here goes. DAC is digital arts and culture and it is a conference series that was initiated by Espen Aarseth in 1998. This one is the fifth and the first one without external funding, so this is the one that probably makes or breaks the conference as an ongoing series. I want the conference to be serious about being a collaborative and interdisciplinary event where the papers are intended to be precursors to serious conversation. DAC specifically seeks to bring together a… [vog blog::vlog 2.0]

I wish i was going, this is a great conference.

Miss Fembot to you

The erotic futurist art of Bill Reichardt. Link – Xeni

[the reverse cowgirl's blog]

hmm, not only is xeni blogging this, but it reminds me somewhat of the film 'crash' in which she looks somewhat like the one character. anyway, j.g. ballard's books are must reads. as is reverse cowgirl

The New Chosen. The New Chosen. After reading about six Congressmen living in unbelievably cheap housing owned by a religious organization called “The Fellowship Foundation” (or “The Fellowship” or “The Foundation”) (via Fark), I became curious about the group. They sponsor the National Prayer Breakfast, but they'd rather you didn't know that – they go to great pains to give the impression that it's an official government function. (President Bush's remarks from 2002, and Rev. Rob Schenck's take on missing the same breakfast.) In March, Harper's Magazine ran Jeffrey Sharlet's first-person account on being a Fellowship neonate, in which he describes the group's organizational structure (which takes its clues from terrorists, Hitler, and the Mafia). In 2002 the Los Angeles Times published an examination of the Foundation's political activities (hosted at toobeautiful.org, which recounts an interesting episode in which three Congressmen, all Fellowship members, take the opportunity to proselytize to a foreign head of state while on official government business. [more inside] [MetaFilter]

i find this extremely worrisome. sure there are always rumors of christian conspiracies, but most people think they are pretty dead topics, but then you start see them underwriting people's lives and actions, and then you have problems….

Boing Boing is blogging ETCon, and O'Reilly is covering as well. Alan Kay, Howard Rheingold, Megnut and a bunch of other smart, interesting people… also on IRC chat… [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

nifty, now if someone would tell me what the irc server and channel is….

Job-Creation Arithmetic. Paul Krugman writes, The average American worker earns only about $40,000 per year; why does the administration, even on its… [EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty]

Statistics are why economics is called the dismal science. You can find some sort of number to justify totally opposite actions. ALthough the inaccuracy detailed here is pretty obvious, the difficulty for most of us is that the numbers usually are not so. Discussing averages when medians should be used. Saying things like “The top 1% will receive 90% of the money”, etc. just serve to obfuscate the issue. I feel like I am listening to a phone ad where they make everything so confusing that you just give up and do not try to change anything. If there was ever a place for Emergent Democracy, dealing with the spin of economics is it. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

interesting post about how this set of tax cuts could work… rich get richer, poor well, due to inflation and everythign else get poorer.

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill that wo …. The Ohio legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit state agencies from publishing any electronic information that is provided by two or more commercial publishers, even if the information was generated with taxpayer support and even if (or perhaps I should say, especially if) the commercial publishers charge fees for accessing the information and the state agencies provide it free of charge. The bill has nine co-sponsors, all Republicans. According to Mary Alice Baish of the American Association of Law Libraries, the bill was drafted by the Americal Legislative Exchange Council, a national organization of conservative state legislators. Similar bills have been introduced in a handful of other states but so far defeated in each one. I quote, and second, these words of Baish: “This bill threatens the right of residents in Ohio from accessing state government information, created with their tax dollars, at no cost through the Internet. It is an abhorrent model that must be stopped short. Please get involved, especially if you have members in Ohio who can respond immediately to this serious threat.” (Thanks to Scholcomm and C-FIT.) [FOS News]

neo-liberalism gone mad.

Ridiculously Easy Thought Sharing.

Alf Eaton: “Thinkbot is an easy way to find other people who are thinking about the same things as you. I call it Ridiculously Easy Thought Sharing. I hope it works.”

If I'm not mistaken, this is “The modified Reed's Law meets Jabber“. Here are precursor and follow-up posts on this new ridiculously easy service.

[Seb's Open Research]

this is a good idea, but now if we could tie in other tools into jabber bots….

Scholar vs Blogger. Matt Yglesias worries that my blog might prevent me from getting tenure by making it look as though I’m not… [Kieran Healy's Weblog]

looking at this vita, i doubt it will even be a question.

Helping Graduates Outwit Hard Times. Trudy Steinfeld tells thousands of N.Y.U. graduates each year that it is not hard to land a job so long as they take a shrewd approach to their search. By Steven Greenhouse. [New York Times: Education]

second paragraph from the bottom, it's all about money.