Junior Scholars Network Announces the Final Call for Papers

for the IAMCR 2003 Conference at Taipei, Taiwan: “Information Society and
Glocalization: What's Next? ”

SUBMISSIONS DUE:
FEBRUARY 1ST, 2003

SUBMIT VIA E-MAIL TO:
ROSA LESLIE MIKEAL
RGROSS@ASC.UPENN.EDU

The Junior Scholars Network (JSN) is an inclusive section of the
International Association of Media & Communication Research (IAMCR) focusing
on the academic and personal needs of graduate students, new professors and
other developing researchers.Ê We hope to facilitate broad participation in
the IAMCR and the wider academic community in the field of communication
studies.

The JSN especially welcomes work in progress and papers for future
publication.Ê Our panels aim to serve as valuable feedback sessions where
you will have an opportunity to examine your project and continue its
development in a group setting.

Unlike other sections, the JSN has no official academic topic of focus, but
each year follows the conference theme in submission review.Ê We welcome
submissions in a wide range of topics in communication, from new
technologies, cultural studies or community communication, to political
communication, health communication, and political economy.

For more information on JSN and the 2003 Taipei Conference, please see our
website at,
http://www.tu-dresden.de/gsn_iamcr/.

Or, contact our Chair, Rosa Leslie Mikeal, at:
RGross@asc.upenn.edu.

CONFERENCE DATES AND DEADLINES
1 February, 2003: Deadline for Abstract
31 March, 2003: Submission Results Announced
10 April, 2003: Grant Application Deadline
1 May, 2003: Early Registration Deadline
1 June, 2003: Deadline for Hotel and Tour Bookings
1 July, 2003: Full Paper Due
4 July, 2003: Registration Deadline for the Late Period

CONFERENCE SUBMISSION RULES
- The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 1 February 2003. The
section heads will inform authors of the results before 31 March 2003.
- Each participant can only submit one abstract, and accepted papers can
only be presented in one section.
- Abstracts are to be sent directly to Section Heads for consideration.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE:
http://iamcr2003.org.tw/

The way of Snood. Snood is one of those little Tetris-like games that eat up hours of my time when I succumb to my nastiest addiction. The high I get off of such games weakens each time, but I still fell pretty hard for Snood. Greg Costikyan explains why Snood and its ilk get no respect:

“It is far harder to design a good simple game than a good complicated one. It's very hard to make a tightly-constrained game … [kottke.org]

snood, to me it sounds like a battle cry bellowed at full tilt while running with a mop, though i guess i have a tendency toward strange humor

the forgotten executioners

Gštz Aly and Susanne Heim reveal the crucial role of academics and civil
servants in their meticulous history of the men behind the Holocaust,
Architects of Annihilation

Peter Preston
Sunday January 12, 2003
The Observer

Architects of Annihilation
by Gštz Aly and Susanne Heim
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £25, pp514

How, 60 years on, can there be anything fresh left to think, write or research
about the Holocaust? No scar on the human psyche has been more exhaustively
probed, no wound more constantly exposed. Yet this new work, from a couple of
young German historians, is still a revelation. It sidelines Hitler, Himmler
and the hateful rest, and looks beyond – at the civil servants who devised the
policy and the academics who gave it credibility.

Here was the underpinning of annihilation, these doctors and professors its
true architects, learned men and women who, after 1945, simply went back to
their university desks and carried on, as though million upon million of
murdered Jews, gypsies and Russians had nothing to do with them.

And the really chilling conclusion is that they were not zealots, madmen or
uniquely evil. They didn't turn on the taps in the gas chambers. They wrote dry
reports and analyses. They were, for the most part, demographers, town
planners, economists; respected chaps from respected institutions. Many of them
didn't dream of joining the Nazi party. They valued their 'academic
independence' too highly.

you have to know where you come from to realize where you are going, most of knowledge seems ahistorical, which is extremely problematice, because all moral positions rely on historical context.

Dazzled by the science

Biologists who dress up hi-tech eugenics as a new art form are dangerously
deluded

Jeremy Rifkin
Tuesday January 14, 2003
The Guardian

Recently, J Craig Venter, the gene scientist whose company, Celera Genomics,
led the race to map the human genome, announced a plan to create the first
artificial life form in a laboratory dish. Venter, who has teamed up with the
Nobel laureate biologist Hamilton Smith, says he hopes to use a $3m US
government grant to create partially man-made organisms that could produce
hydrogen for fuel or break down carbon dioxide from power plant emissions.
Other scientists worry that Venter's creation could wreak havoc on natural
ecosystems or be used to create new kinds of biological weapons.

Venter is among a new genre of biologists who see themselves less as engineers
and more as creative artists – designers and architects of what they envision
as a “second genesis” – this one inspired not by divine guidance or by the
forces of evolution, but by the human imagination. Ironically, this subtle
shift in the focus of the biological sciences from “engineering” to “art” is
being mirrored in the art community, raising the question of whether a new
social gestalt is being readied to make acceptable this radical new
manipulation of nature.

just makes you want to say skytrance instead of science…. the ideological embeddedness of many scientists seems transparent, until it kills people.

John Palfrey Is A Blogger.

John Palfrey Is A Blogger

Don't you just love all the new bloggers coming online? John's part of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and is up and running on his blog. He's a great guy, so stop by and say hello. Watch his blogroll grow ….

Today he asks about whether blogs will help create more community at Harvard. I say yes, yes, yes and about time. At the excellent conference he and his colleagues threw in November, Digital ID @ Harvard, we all kept being stunned by how many terrific people were there from a wide range of departments at Harvard — and here's the bad part — and that we really didn't know one another.

The event let us see up close that the potential for community-building here at Harvard was gigantic and at that point, was NOT being exploited. All that was lacking was the leadership. With John getting Dave Winer on board over there, I think John Palfrey and his co-director, Charles Nesson will lead a little revolution in that respect. Bravo! [Halley's Comment]

someone has to blog, glad its not me….

free to be freaky.. attention georgia citizens. you will be pleased to know that you are now free to fornicate at will. that's right! for the first time in 120 years, it is no longer illegal in the great peach state to get to know your neighbor in that special way. [MetaFilter]

liberalism 120 years too late…

The art of gaming
My old friend (old as in long term: we were high school classmates, and attended many a science-fiction convention together) Greg Costikyan, the veteran game designer who has written some fine pieces for Salon about gaming, has started a blog of his own. “I want to talk about games, and game design, as art,” he says. Anything he has to say on the subject should be worth reading. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

mmm, no rss feed, for those that don't follow such things, http://www.digra.org is the game researchers group. I like it.

BlogFodder launches. pb's launched his newest creation, BlogFodder, “A daily micro-mail that contains a word, phrase, link, or image that could spark an idea that could lead to a train of thought that might someday become the seed of a weblog post.” It will be interesting to see how many people actually post on the topic, and how similar the results end up being. One of my all-time favorite writing activities was a high school creative writing class where everyone had to write a story with the same title (”The Greatest Meal”). The diversity of stories was fascinating, (mine ended up being about an anorexic girl). I wonder if BlogFodder will spark something similar? [megnut]

this could be cool….

from nettime.org by way of Heiko Recktenwald

ITU To Propose Intl Cyberspace Treaty At Information Summit
279 words
14 November 2002
Nikkei Report
English
(c) 2002 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. All Rights Reserved. TOKYO
(Nikkei)–The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will propose
at the World Summit on the Information Society in December 2003 the
creation of an international cyberspace treaty to set forth basic rules
on Internet taxation, copyright protection and crime prevention,
according to Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi.

In an interview with The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Utsumi said the ITU, a
United Nations agency, believes that different rules among countries
will hamper cross-border e-commerce and lead to more Internet crimes.
The ITU announced a basic plan for the treaty at a preparatory meeting
for the summit held in Europe in early November. It will seek
cooperation from the Japanese government at a preparatory meeting in
Asia in January. The union hopes to incorporate plans to sign the treaty
in an actionprogram to be compiled at the world summit, which will be
attended by heads of state. The treaty will cover taxation of
international e-commerce; copyright protection for content; prevention
of Internet crimes, such as cyberterrorism and release of offensive
material; security measures such as prevention of illegal access and
data tampering; and privacy protection. It will set forth uniform
domestic and international guidelines to handle problems that occur. If
countries have different rules, some countries will gain a commercial
advantage over others, fair competition will be hindered due to the
spread of illegal products, and countries without rules could become a
hotbed of crime, according to Utsumi. The ITU believes the international
rules will be helpful for developing countries in Africa and Asia when
they draw up their information technology policies.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Thursday morning edition)

Cue the balloons – I just found out that The Shifted Librarian is one year old today!  I want to wish Jenny Levine a very heartfelt congratulations.  Even more, I want to thank her for encouraging me when I started this blog.  I started this blog as a half-assed experiment, mostly to see what weblogs were all about.  I had no intention of keeping it going past the 30 day free trial period, but Jenny's encouragement (along with a few others that I'll thank on the one year anniversary of this blog) was gold.  Thanks Jenny, and congratulations!  You're the best! [Ernie the Attorney]

shifted-l is one of the reasons i started blogging. i wanted a forum to read and respond, and this is it, sure i could do it on their pages, but really following my friend barry, that is a pita, and should be avoided. so i started a blog to rant and rave and actually talk rationally on occasion…