The University of Kansas today announced it would revamp its school of fine arts. The move creates a new school of music as a standalone unit but pushes the remaining departments into a new School of the Arts…..ok, the words ‘shuffle’, ‘deckchair’ and ‘Titanic’ might come to mind but I suspect there is a little more to this than meets the eye. The leadership at UK impresses me from past experience and I doubt this move is just a simple reorganization of units to ease budgetary controls. The push for arts education in more majors, if nothing else, will increase the appreciation of creativity and exploration in problem solving and might help future citizens develop a tolerance lacking in business education, oh, just to pick an example. That said, the press release does remind me of that line from Deep Purple’s Made in Japan (1973!!!!) where Ian Gillan asks the soundman, “Can we have everything louder than everything else?”
The fluidity of disciplines
Or at least departments of some disciplines….the University of North Dakota announced the likely break-up of the School of Communication there due to faculty upheaval, student disquiet and all-round lack of shared purpose. The temptation to apply these criteria to many other information-related disciplines is hard to resist, but I shall. I read about this the same day I learned of a gee-whiz scheme from local Acton University MBA which promises your >$50k tuition will be paid by someone else if you actually graduate. One imagines many things….
If it’s replica watches or hot blondes you want…..
Don’t blame me but I have become a victim of outscatter (so I’m told) whereby my email address is used to spam loads of people, largely (thankfully) in Russia and Japan, offering them links to such er…resources. It’s one thing to spam anonymous people with pornography and have their filters bounce rejections back to you, but really….replica watches? Moi?
AAA goes open access– in a crappy sort of way
Various news outlets in academia are reporting that the American Anthropological Association has set a new policy of providing open access to their research articles. The odd aspect of the decision was the limiting of this to records only more than 35 years old, nothing more recent. Under the guise of protecting the research interests of contemporary scholars, this decision has met with derision in some quarters and I love this quote, from our own Pat Galloway here in the iSchool who described the new policy as ‘just crap’. Couldn’t have said it better myself!
Ensuring trust on the web
Tim Berners-Lee spoke with the BBC about the creation of a new group to deal with trust mechanisms for websites. In this words: “On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable,” he said. “A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.”
Most interesting in this is the recognition that one simple index won’t work and that a variety of brandings may be required. Broadening out from trust, the World Wide Web Foundation will explore ways of making the web more accessible to people, particularly through mobile phones, likely to be the easiest ramp on for many countries. I think it’s vital that this type of activity is encouraged. The web needs to be shaped by more than commercial or political interests, though it remains to be seen how socially-focused this new foundation is over time.
Music and the soul of information
Richard Wright of Pink Floyd died today of cancer. This is not truly an information concern, I suppose, but it is hard for me to forget the power to transform my existence as a teenager that came from listening to this band’s music. I remember playing Wish You Were Here (an LP of course) on my crappy one-speaker broken ‘stereophone’ and being unable to stop myself playing it again and again, night after night, quoting the lyrics in school, discussing with the few (very few!) fanatics I could find in my school who had a copy and who had seen those pictures on the sleeve. Floyd become known for the lyrics and songs of Waters with the guitar of Gilmour, and both were crucial, but Wright gave the band that floaty, ethereal quality that set them apart from other bands. I have taken Floyd’s music with me everywhere I have since moved to, and Shine on You Crazy Diamond is playing on my far better stereo now as I type this. I don’t care for rock stars or the BS that passes for celebrity status today, but I do care for the creative power of great music and Richard Wright was part of some of the greatest music of the era. No matter what Floyd have become with the departure of Waters ( I have my views, I know I am in a minority), there is a series of recordings this band made in the 1970s that are impossible to categorize or dismiss. Radiohead as pioneers? Don’t make me laugh — Floyd put the very British crowning touch on a form that sprang to existence in the blues and country music of the US decades earlier and merged it with the theatrics of technology. Everything since is a re-hash. Welcome to the machine.
Ike passes Austin by….no hurrication here
Thankfully…..no major problems here, a little wind, some limbs down, and sadly no rain. Sadder for some here, Ike’s arrival on the weekend meant no time off work, or as one colleague put it, no ‘hurrication’ this time, even if UT canceled the football game but allowed classes to go on. The media seemed to outdo themselves to show they could have people on the ground in Galveston and Houston so you could view the event like a live sports contest, man v. nature, complete with live scores on wind speed, wave height and power outs. Galveston and Houston both took a battering and the damage estimates, as much as one can believe them, speak of $100bn, and we’re told to anticipate a jump in gas prices immediately. Colleagues in other countries emailed me regularly to say they were watching the news and following the trackers from as far away as Switzerland and Canada, global village that it is we all live in now. For all the coverage, it is proving difficult to know how many people died or were injured, but then, how many of you know the cost in lives of Katrina? All that info and sometimes so little data…….
Criticism, speech and death: the case of Magomed Yevloyev
This just in and a sharp reminder of the cost of speaking openly and critically in some parts of the world. Magomed Yevloyed, owner of a website critical of the Kremlin found himself arrested — bad enough, but his arrest led to his death under suspicious circumstances. See http://ingushetiya.wordpress.com/
According to the BBC, Yevloyev was a thorn in the side of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general. His website reported on alleged Russian security force brutality in Ingushetia, an impoverished province of some half a million people, mostly Muslims, which is now more turbulent than neighbouring Chechnya. -more to follow
Guantanamo interrogation video released on BBC
You can view the video of Canadian officials interviewing a 16 year old and draw your own conclusions. It’s fairly dull viewing and the quality is very mixed. It was supposedly captured by a camera hidden in an air duct. His lawyers have released it now but in this age of data overload, one wonders how more of this type of tape has never found it’s way out.
Reading as harassment?
Imagine you take a book out of a library, a local history piece that outlines how a group of students stood up to a bunch of racists, and when seen reading this book, you are reported to your employer for racial harassment. Couldn’t happen? Try this and this for size. The book is Notre Dame vs the Klan. How the Fighting Irish defeated the Ku Klux Klan, cracking read no doubt for this Jesuit-educated Irish lad and clearly an anti-Klan text to anyone who spends more than a millisecond reading the cover, but really, this is happening on a university campus? Is there more to this than meets the eye? Charges made, charges dropped, now unspecific allegations are hinted. You could not make this stuff up!
Oddly, I was reading Vol 1 of Ian Kershaw’s excellent bio of Hitler while on vacation and come to think of it, some people did give me the evil eye (more than usual), as if to imply that somehow I might be an admirer or worse. I foresee a wonderful new age where you are what you appear to read. So, go click on that link and see what happens — someone is bound to enter your space at just the moment old Adolf’s ugly mug pops up and you will be known for spending your time surfing and worse, you’re a Nazi! Be warned.