A couple of weeks ago I went to Paris for a meeting and was able to visit the new (see my Flickr set on the Bibliothèque Nationale). It is hard to tell from one short visit how it is as a library, but it is a stunning building to walk around. It spoke to me of exclusion – a cave (or inferno) of knowledge that you get progressive access to. The deepest levels are reserved for the true scholars (not tourists like me.)
I have often been amazed by the steps taken to prevent people from smoking and I have found two gadgets to keep people from the habit quite fascinating: A year’s worth of tar and Smoking Sue.
It now seems that the Danish government wants to play hardball. For quite some time smokers have been used to having warning signs on packages stating that cigarettes are dangerous and potentially deadly. I find it surprising to what extent even the size and font of the letters of the warning are regulated by law. Here’s a quote from § 10:”The general warning […] must cover 30 pct. of the surface of the relevant side.” And a bit further down in § 11, part 1: “Printed in black, bold characters in font Helvetia on white background.” Here taken from the Danish law regulating tobacco.
There is just something fascinating about public health in the language of bureaucrats. One can imagine how the fight over the exact percentage has been waged and a compromise made.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the Danish government has just proposed putting images on cigarette packages. Pictures that show what smoking will do to you. And they are quite nasty as one can see from this article in the Danish newspaper Politiken. I know that this is practised in other countries also (take a look at these from Brazil but be warned – they are really disgusting), but I’m really in doubt as to the effect of these images. Do they really work?
I wrote recently about KOMO news’ roll out of 43 hyperlocal sites in the Seattle area. Fisher, the parent of KOMO news, has now rolled out 38 more sites – 28 in the Portland market and 10 in the Eugene market (via Earth Times).
The Portland sites are hosted at KATU.com and cover the City of Portland, Eastside Suburbs, Westside Suburbs and Southwest Washington. The Eugene sites are hosted at KVAL.com.
The complete list of communities:
City of PortlandDSpace Reaches 700 Instances Worldwide — The DuraSpace blog is reporting that there are now more than 700 instances of DSpace. DuraSpace was founded earlier this year to support DSpace and Fedora, two leading open source digital repository packages.
Brewster Kahle Calls on Google to Abandon Private Settlement, Support Orphan Works Legislation — The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle has called on Google to give up its private settlement of the orphan works issue with the authors and publishers and instead throw its support behind orphan works legislation, which until recently was making its way through Congress. Responding to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments that if opponents don’t like the terms of the Google Books settlement, they should “propose an alternative to solve the problem,” Kahle writes, “There is an alternative, and they know it — orphan works legislation….”
Amendment Would Kill NSF Funding for Political Science — An appropriations amendment proposed by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) would eliminate National Science Foundation support for political science. The National Humanities Alliance, the American Political Science Association, the National Coalition for History are urging members and friends to contact their representatives to ask them to vote against the amendment.
Google Apps Adoption: The Slow Track — A study by Forrester Research seems to suggest “a long road ahead” for Google Apps adoption in the enterprise market, according to the New York Times. The study showed only ten percent of workers using Microsoft Outlook would want to make the switch to Gmail or another web-based solution. The numbers are surely higher among students, but probably similar among college and university staff.
Sorry, I know it’s not politically correct to use the “C” word and I know it’s not yet Halloween, but you need to know that I am crazy for Christmas. Not crazy that I have decorations up all year around or toilet-paper holders that play carols. I am just a connoisseur of holiday music and films. Yesterday, at the Cleveland Public Library (one of the best in the country–go www.cpl.org ) I ran across a collection of films in a volume called “A Christmas Past.” These are all short, black and white films, created between 1900-1925 (most of them created in Thomas Edison’s studios). They are all silent films accompanied by an original score by Al Kryszak and all are taken from the original 35mm films from the Killiam Collection (http://www.kino.com/killiam/).
Although the soundtrack has a tendency to annoy after about 90 minutes–these films are fantastic if you want to get a sense of early 20th century attitudes towards Christmas. One movie is simply entitled ”Santa Claus,” produced in 1925 it is filmed in Alaska and has fantastic views of reindeer herds, Nome in 1925, and–perhaps, all though I am not sure, an actual Eskimo family. [note: must write Herminia Din about this one, and before you yell at me my research tells me it is okay to use the word Eskimo and it is preferable in many cases to Innuit since I am not being specific]
The nine films also provide an interesting survey of a range of special effects from 1900-1925–reindeer flying, Santa Claus appearing and disappearing. My favorite perhaps is Charles Dicken’s “Christmas Carol” with brief inter-titles which condenses the familiar story into 10 minutes–and does it beautifully. The inter-titles remind one of the scenes and, my brain provided all the appropriate dialogue bits. I know they were appropriate, I checked.
This blog was really just an excuse to make a reading suggestion for museum professionals. If you haven’t read it yet, you ought to read Larry Levine’s “Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America” That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Share:THIS image by Dominik Paquet of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich is one of the winners of the 2009 Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition. It's a confocal fluoresence microscopy image of zebrafish larvae expressing a mutant form of human Tau protein, which forms the neurofibrillary tangles that are a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease. The work is described in this recent paper.
Below are two more images from the competition.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia is working on a new plugin for Omeka that would connect an Omeka frontend to a Fedora repository backend. An early version of the code can be downloaded from the Omeka SVN repository. Any questions or comments on the plugin should be directed to the Omeka Dev list. We’re very grateful for the hard work of our friends at UVA, especially Wayne Graham, the Scholars’ Lab’s head of research. We hope this comes as further demonstration of the growing strength of Omeka’s open source community and the flexibility of its technology.
The four-year ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, is closing down this autumn. Most of the junior staff have left for other jobs. The external steering group has approved the evaluation report (with acclamation). Here’s an updated publication list from the project.
This week I was at the Peking/York Symposium organized by the Faculty of Arts at York University. See my conference notes are at philosophi.ca : York Symposium. The symposium focused mostly on the development of new media programmes and research in arts in the comprehensive university. There were representatives from major Canadian universities with art faculties and two Chinese universities. The challenges in a comprehensive university include how to work with other disciplines like computer science and engineering as computing is woven in. The arts have issues very similar to humanities computing – issues of labs, recruiting faculty, maintaining infrastructure, developing interdisciplinary programmes and fostering interdisciplinary research. While it is easy to call for interdisciplinarity it is harder to develop real structures that support appropriate clusters.
Setback for GPO Digitization Program — Via DigitalKoans, the United States Government Printing Office (GPO) has announced on its listserv that it has been unable to make an award for its 2008 RFP to digitize “all retrospective Federal publications back to the earliest days of the Federal Government.” The announcement does not explain why the GPO was unable to make the award, but simply says it is “currently developing new digitization alternatives.”
Slow on the Uptake? DOJ Launches I.B.M. Antitrust Investigation — The New York Times is reporting that the United States Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation of I.B.M. and its dominance of the mainframe computer market. Is it me, or does this headline seem more 1979 than 2009?
SECOND LIFE is an online "virtual world" which enables users to create a customised avatar, or digital persona, with which they can interact with each other. It has become incredibly popular since its launch just over 6 years ago, with millions of "residents" now using it regularly to meet others, socialize and even to have virtual sex. Second Life is now filled with virtual communities and institutions - it has businesses and universities, and its own virtual economy.
Now, imagine a futuristic version of Second Life, in which avatars can transfer sensations to the bodies of their users. Such a scenario may seem far-fetched, but a team of European researchers has just taken us one step closer it. They demonstrate a perceptual illusion in which a computer-generated virtual body can be made to feel like one's real body, so that one can feel sensations from it and respond to it as if it were real.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Thanks to Willard, I’m reading Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin’s Romance of the Machine, a defense of American materialism, science and engineering. He identifies 3 sets of technologies that have consolidated the Union – the telephone, the vacuum-tube oscillator (radio), and the gas-engine (auto and airplane.) He weaves a consciously idealistic story about engineering mirroring the machines of nature and weaving peace.
The machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature. (p. 29)
It looks like an act of providence that the telephone was born when the consolidation of our Union needed it most; the vacuum-tube oscillator arrived in time to lend its aid in the consolidation of this nation with the other nations of the world. Many an enthusiast believes that these two machines are messengers sent from heaven to aid in the guidance of the destiny of this nation, and of the whole world. This enthusiasm is not surprising. (p. 92)
There is a very interesting chapter (”Romance of the Telephone”, III) where Pupin argues that the telephone provided two important innovations – first the communications network and second a model democratic industry.
There is another epoch-making service which the telephone
rendered to this nation. This service was the creation of a great
American telephone industry, which in many respects serves to-day as a model to other big American industries. (p. 67)
His argument is that ATT is too big to be owned by wealthy families. Instead it is owned by the middle class – people like its employees. He further sees the management as coming from the same middle class and being professionals. He sees a shift from political democracy to economic democracy which benefits all. Whatever happened to that idealism?
Our telephone industry and the other large American industries encourage us in the belief that we are much nearer to the ideal of economic democracy than we are to Lincoln’s ideal of political democracy. The first is developed by scientists and engineers, the second is <pb> in the hands of politicians. (p. 77 – 78)
One thing that happened is a loss of faith in the technocracy. The second thing was a shift in business towards management who saw their mandate narrowly as being only to increase investor value.
Some more quotes:
There will be no place for barbarism, like war, in a world in
which the two American machines, the telephone and the vacuum-tube oscillator, are afforded every opportunity to develop their latent powers for the enlightenment of the world.
Here are two.machines which the American machine civilization has produced, and thus laid the foundation of the radio art, the most subtle and refined of all the technical arts ever conceived by the human mind. No trace of materialism can be detected in their history. On the contrary, their achievements represent them as messengers from heaven sent to earth to rid the world of barbarous notions and raise it to a higher level of civilization.(p. 94)
The telephone, the telegraph, the vacuum-tube oscillator, the aeroplane, and the automobile, will certainly bring the peoples of the world closer to each other and establish between them bonds of friendship, just as they are establishing them between the peoples of our States. That is the highest mission of these machines. (p. 103)
The book ends by talking about “The Great American Experiment” and how this political experiment inspired engineers and scientists to develop technologies to consolidate the Union so that “The designers, the builders, and the machines employed by them are the inseparable parts of the American machine civilization.” (p. 111)
Bibliographic Reference: Michael Pupin, Romance of the Machine (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).
Too often during the last couple of years, when I believe I’ve come up with something new and creative with respect to museums, it turns out that Nina Simon has already been there. I feel like professor Otto Lidenbrock in Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth: “Arne Saknussemm, always Arne Saknussemm!”.
Take for example the idea of ‘the slow museum’. A good idea that came to me last night. About exhibits that don’t address all five senses simultaneously. That don’t pack the rooms with 1001 artefacts. With few, but exquisite objects for contemplation. No unnecessary distractions. No excessive spotlights. Keeping the accompanying text down to a minimum. And no interactives, please!
Well, of course Nina has thought in terms of the ’slow museum’ too — in a tweet from 30 January.
On the other hand, her tweet is only a phrase-drop, she doesn’t include any analysis, no examples. So it’s time to roll out the idea of the slow museum. Hang on!
Deadline Set for Google Books Settlement — Judge Chin has set a deadline of November 9, 2009 for a revised settlement agreement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The New York Times has the Authors Guild saying, “the core agreement is going to stay the same.”
Denver for WebWise 2010-11 — According to a press release on its website, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded the contract to host the 2010 and 2011 WebWise conferences to the University of Denver and the Denver Art Museum. The Colorado institutions will host the event in Denver in March 2010 and in Washington, DC in 2011. As part of its two-year stewardship of WebWise, the group will produce a permanent collection of oral histories with leading figures in the world of digital libraries and museums.
Barcode Birthday — Some old fashioned found history this morning. Today Google is sporting a new “doodle” to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the invention of the barcode. Visitors to Google will find a barcode encoding the word “Google” in place of the company’s usual logo.
Wolfram|Alpha launches "Homework Day" — The experimental computational search engine, Wolfram|Alpha has announced a new offering for students and teachers called Homework Day. Beginning on October 21, 2009, the creators of Wolfram|Alpha will host scheduled events for educators and students of all levels to help them complete homework assignments using the company’s search tools. The program (including even the design of its website) seems to mark a new popular focus for the company, whose tools have until now have been positioned, intentionally or not, at more professional, scientific or engineering research interests.
$20 Million to Johns Hopkins for "Data Curation" — Open Access News reports that Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries have been awarded $20 Million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build a multi-institutional “Data Conservancy” to house and manage engineering and science data created in the course of research and teaching. Also awarded to Hopkins was a smaller grant to study the prospect of developing an open access repository for articles stemming from research funded by NSF, i.e. something along the lines of PubMedCentral, the open access repository for NIH investigators. See also, the full Hopkins press release.
This one made the rounds of Twitter earlier today thanks to Jo Guldi. This month Wired Magazine tells a cautionary tale for those following the progress of Google Books. Entitled “Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles,” the article reminds readers of Google’s 2001 acquisition of a Usenet archive of more than 700 million articles from more than 35,000 newsgroups. Incorporated today into Google Groups, the Wired article contends the archival Usenet material is poorly indexed and hardly searchable, rendering much of it practically inaccessible. The article concludes, “In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.” Something to remember when considering the Google Books settlement and its implications.
VISION is now well known to modulate the senses of touch and pain. Various studies have shown that looking at oneself being touched can enhance tactile acuity, so that one can discriminate between two pinpoints which would otherwise feel like a single sensation. And last year, researchers from the University of Oxford showed that using binoculars to make a limb look larger or smaller than it actually is can respectively enhance and diminish painful sensations.
These phenomena occur because the brain fuses stimuli from different sensory systems to generate a coherent experience of bodily sensations. The precise mechanisms are unknown, and it is also unclear whether these effects depend upon specific visual stimuli. But according to a new study from University College London, the general "context" of vison is enough to modulate pain. In the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, they report that merely looking at one's hand can affect the perception of laser-induced pain, and how it is processed in the cerebral cortex. Together with earlier work, these findings point to a simple method for managing acute pain.
Ideum is featured in latest issue of Santa Fe’s Trend Magazine. ”Trend explores and celebrates the unique and fascinating intermingling of cultural influences, tradition, and innovation in art, architecture, and design—in Santa Fe, the Southwest, and beyond.” We are in the Business Profiles section and the article talks about our multitouch table and other interactive exhibits. You can see the article here.
I first joined Twitter in 2007. In fact, if www.whendidyoujointwitter.com is correct, I joined on 20th February 2007.
My first account was @dmje. I tweeted in that way that everyone seems to first tweet – a sporadic few “just what the hell is this Twitter thing all about?” followed by a long gap, followed by a re-emergence as more people I knew found themselves on it. I also, of course, blogged (“All Noise, No Signal“) and have been slowly eating my words (some of them, not all) ever since.
For a long time, my @dmje account worked well. But after a while, I started to become very aware that the person that I am (opinionated, personal, direct, a little bit sweary..) was different from the person I either *should* be or was somehow expected to be (professional, supportive, focused).
At that point in time – in fact, prompted by a slightly sweaty moment in which I tweeted a few bits and bobs which I probably shouldn’t have from a professional perspective – I decided to make @dmje a private account and create a new public persona, @m1ke_ellis. Again, according to whendidyoujointwitter, this happened on 22nd May 2009.
I went through a fairly painful process of moving across *some* contacts to my m1ke_ellis account but leaving others at @dmje. My criteria? Very, very loose, but broadly based around: “If we’ve met and drunk a beer together then @dmje, otherwise @m1ke_ellis…”. There are exceptions to this rule, though. Obviously
I’m now maybe 5 months down the line, and I’m still not entirely happy with the outcome; although each time I think about the possible alternatives I always come back to what I’ve done as being the best way, albeit far from perfect.
Here’s the thinking:
The good:
The bad:
There is a deeper point to all this: Embracing social media requires a fairly complex understanding of personality and tone of voice. I might be a more professional me over at @m1ke_ellis, but how is that me different to the me at @dmje? You’re not likely to hear about my kids, my wife, my life, my hangovers, the gig I just went to, the #bus14 journey I nearly got killed on.
But there again, if you’re listening to the professional me then you probably don’t want to hear that anyway, right? Or do you? How real is the me who just talks about work? Not very, in one sense, because my family and that other stuff is (obviously) waaaay more important than my working life. And it’s not like I can effectively split my interests in that way. I live and breathe web stuff – this is far from being a day job for me.
Actually, I think the most successful social media people and companies manage to balance this rather better than I have. Take @andypowe11 for example. He’s public and not only tweets about metadata and work stuff but also rants on occasion, too. He’s got better self control than me (he’s as rude, but swears less..), but still.
I don’t like Twitter as broadcast mechanism, and I think naturally once you pass a level of followers/followees that is what it becomes, unless you’re on top of it all of the time. Personally I dislike it when I “@” someone and they don’t reply; clearly someone with thousands of followers is unlikely to respond all of the time. Twitter then moves from being a conversation to being something different, a something which I feel doesn’t carry the personality which social media perhaps should.
Posted in community, museum, web2.0 Tagged: blogging, corporate, identity, social media, twitter, voiceWhen I was a student, announcement boards — with flyers for conferences, graduate courses, seminars, new books etc. — were centrepieces in the hallways of Academia.
In many departments they still are. Like this well-groomed one in the Dept of Philosophy at the University of Leeds (where I visited to give two talks last May).
But with all these emerging new social web media, will the academic announcement board have a future?
Well, maybe not if you think in terms of the board above. Seen without people in front of it, it could as well be substituted with a Facebook dashboard. But what about this:
(from here)
This image (from the University of Kaunas, Lithuania) illustrates the fact that a physical announcement board allows you to touch the news of the academic world, even touch them together. Touching news together (even if it’s news in text and image format) is an entirely different social experience than viewing the news on a screen.
