Posts from — June 2003

Graduate School Culture. And if I waved a magic wand and fixed all those problems, that would leave… oh, most of the people I went to school with. Some of them quit partway through, feeling like failures; some are still at it; some… [Invisible Adjunct]
avoid it if you can, get a job while you are going to grad school, get someone else to pay, break the mold, etc. but read the post over on invisible adjunct nonethless, the comments are good also.

Games That Should Be Remade [Dungeons And Dreamers]

i agree with many on this list, especially darklands. i hope to be able to play darklands soon because i am getting a dos simulator for os x shortly.

R.I.P., Bernard Williams.

Chris is cataloging obits.

• Guardian
• Times
• Telegraph

[A blog doesn't need a clever name]

Williams was a touchstone for me in my undergraduate work in ethics and philosophy, works like Ethics and the Limit of Philosophy and his work on moral luck, came to me as virtue theory alongside Alasdaire MacIntyre, and others. He provided a model for a publicly engaged iconoclastic philosopher, able to find real problems in philosophy and explain their historical development and implications for contemporary thinking. In short, thoughts and philosophy don't arise outside of historical context and maintain that context to the current day as explanatory device. But if you've not read the any Williams, i recommend it.

I was away at Brian and Julie's Erbe' wedding in richmond, i was in the wedding party(i'm not much for weddings otherwise). It was a nice wedding, lots of family were there. Now I'm back, and I'll post a bit more today.

On his last day in office as Director of the OMB, …. On his last day in office as Director of the OMB, Mitch Daniels gave up on his attempt to let federal agencies outsource their printing jobs and bypass the Government Printing Office (GPO). This is a victory for open access to government documents, since many agencies wanted to bypass the GPO precisely in order to bypass its open-access and library deposit policies. More coverage. [FOS News]

This is good news for continuing easy access to our documents. When the government wants to make it more difficult to read what it is doing, we should be afraid. I would not be surprised to see this reintroduced. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

yes, it would have been a tragedy of the public domain if precisely what we pay to have produced was then outside of the public domain, but wait, isn't this what happens with research in higher education…. we pay, they privatize… we keep paying, business ultimately keep the money.

Pissed Off.

With the world a it is and education – (thanks Dave – I don't know how to link to Blogger)

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Why do some people express their anger so eloquently and others just resort to expletives? Who are you more likely to listen to? [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

i am more apt to listen to anyone that backs up their argument with some substance.

Color Me Creeped Out.

Researchers Can Track Our Every Media Move

“Technology is hurtling along, offering a wide assortment of Orwellian options to gauge viewing and listening preferences. As with medicine, however, those advances are coming faster than we can sort out their implications and decide how much information we all want our corporate big brothers to possess.

So enter, in a closely monitored test under way in Philadelphia, the 'portable people meter,' or PPM. It's a device the size of a pager that people carry around with them, picking up encoded signals in the media they consume. The individuals need do nothing, with the PPM automatically identifying what the users are watching or what radio station they're listening to.

Creepy, you say? Not so, says Arbitron, which is conducting the trial with the cooperation of Nielsen. After all, the current TV ratings sometimes require letting people install boxes in their bedrooms, and the radio version, almost Jurassic by today's standards, asks you to keep a diary of your listening habits.

'What we're asking people to do is less invasive than allowing meters in their homes,' said Roberta McConochie, Arbitron's director of client relations for the venture, who recently briefed research executives in L.A….

Nevertheless, I felt a chill drift up my spin when McConochie cited the device's ability to track which “retail environments” people patronize — using the same silent code to cross-reference what stores they shop in with their viewing patterns — or perform a similar trick linking TV viewing and movie attendance. Without being paranoid, it all sounds a little like 'The Matrix,' minus the slow-motion….

Yet whether you dread or embrace it, the day is coming when media consumption will be indexed with buying patterns to form one vast database — all in the name of conveying more precise targeting data to those who see the public as a commodity to be bought and sold. That's terrific news for advertisers but a bit scary to anyone inclined to question if Rupert Murdoch and other guardians of pipelines into the home can be trusted not to abuse the privilege.” [Chicago Tribune]

[The Shifted Librarian]

yup, i was telling people that i could pretty much do this now with some software that i have, and they nod along….

Similarity. At the back of the conference are some round tables at which people are sitting, laptops sprawling. They're doing what the rest of us are doing: listening but also IM'ing, checking email from time to time, looking up links. Somehow it reminds me being at a drive-in: there's a movie playing at the front, but attending to it is a social event…. [Joho the Blog]

I'm usually one of these people, in the back either with a video camera(it's faster than notes) or my computer, but i'm usually alone or with one or two other people. I think this is because most academic conferences have different expectations than the current set of software conferences that are occuring.

Intellectually turned on. Few things in life give me greater joy than witnessing (if only from afar) another's intellectual excitement and imagination.Matt Webb is currently reading D&G's A Thousand Plateaus and taking good notes.I'm on a journey to the centre of my world . [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

deleuze and guattari, great material, one of my favorites also, though my notes are indecipherable to others because they tend to be highly referential to other works. I'm not as much of a fan of 1000 plateaus as I am of the combined books and guattari's own work. In Genosko's book on Guattari, there is an interesting bit on transdisciplinarity that is very similar to the disciplinary heretics bit found on purselipsquarejaw. Guattari is much more the social/organizational side of the d&g construct, which plays well against the deleuzian ontological philosophy of actuality and virtuality, though in recent book Delanda disputes Badiou's take on multiplicity, but that's a whole different set of topics, but ramble ramble. Guattari's work alone should be investigated if you really like 1000 plateaus, it is worth the effort. I suggest getting Genosko's book Guattari: An Abberant Introduction, i reviewed it on amazon.. beyond that, nab Chaosmosis, Chaosophy and Soft Subversions. And lets not forget that nearly the whole archive of the journal Chimeras is available online too! nifty..

When terrorism was cool. As a new film about the Weather Underground opens, former '60s revolutionary Mark Rudd wonders whatever possessed him — and America. [Salon.com] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

hmm, terrorism wasn't cool, but sometimes when the wheels of the machine become odious, and there is no other option, one has to insert themself unto them, and prevent their operation.