Hope that you all have a great Christmas!
Author: mklang
Photographic film and social change
While in Vienna I saw the surprising and nostalgic sight of two tourists helping each other to change a role of film in their camera. The development of film has been superseeded by digital cameras which themselves are losing to mobile phone cameras. Mobile phone cameras are digital cameras but the camera as an artefact is slowly disappearing. Another thing that happened in Vienna was that I browsed a collegues photographs of the art she had seen over the last year all stored in her mobile phone – no need for a camera here.
The demise of photographic film is a fascinating story beginning way back in 1876 when Hurter and Driffield experimetnted with light sensitivity of film. Naturally early photography did not use rolls of film which I have pangs of nostalgia for but the early daguerreotypes used tricky glass plates consisting of polished silver surfaces coated silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor (wikipedia).
Eastman Kodak changed all this in 1885 with the first flexible photographic film. This breakthrough made cameras cheaper, easier to use, lighter to carry and the era of snapshot photography was launched. Now the photographer could easily carry a camera and use it on people who did not have to be standing still. The privacy implications launched a major discussion into the nature of privacy in relation to technology. The seminal article in the privacy field is The Right to Privacy by Warren and Brandeis (1890), is still widely quoted.
The move from the heavy and complex equipment to the small, cheap and portable devices show how changes in base technology affect social change. The ubiquitous holiday snaps are a product of these developments. Now that this phase is going to its grave, being overtaken by digital photography, we see new developments. More photographs are being taken and (maybe) saved but there also seems to be an issue of accessibility and use.
If the pictures are not online do we ever look at them?
Too many cooks…
Sometimes academics collaborate in writing projects but this is probably the most example: The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, is an article that has over 2,900 authors. This makes an average of 0.15 pages per author…
Can there ever be too many academics?
Taking your toys with you
Unsurprisingly or surprisingly? (I don’t know which is worse in this case) many people want to be buried with their mobile devices, (MSNBC via Infocult)
It seems that everyone under 40 who dies takes their cell phone with them,” says Noelle Potvin, family service counselor for Hollywood Forever, a funeral home and cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. “It’s a trend with BlackBerrys, too. We even had one guy who was buried with his Game Boy.
So I would take my laptop if I could be sure that they had free wifi down under…
Counterfeiting in Vienna
Right now I am in Vienna, sitting in a project meeting on Counterfeiting as part of the EU project Counter which is a research project is designed to collect data, generate knowledge and disseminate findings on the European landscape for the consumption of counterfeit consumer goods. So today is full of interesting discussions with smart people in a beautiful city. More on the meeting later.
Vienna is a beautiful city and right now it is wearing a full set of Christmas deocrations and you cannot walk far before running into a Christmas market selling local wares, sweets and Gluwine. The only downside is the lack of stable Internet access so uploading photos will have to wait.
See dead people's books
LibraryThing is a fun site which allows users to put their libraries online which helps comparisons and recommendations based on users libraries. The new project launched by LibraryThing is really cool it puts online famous people’s libraries, the project is called I see dead people’s books.
Try it out and browse the libraries of Sylvia Plath, Mozart, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. Lots of new old libraries are on the way – this is a cool idea I like this bibliophile voyeurism.
For more information about the group involved:
I See Dead People’s BooksDescription: A group for those interested and involved in entering the personal libraries of famous readers into LibraryThing as Legacy Libraries.
If you’d like to join a Legacy project already underway, please use the contact information listed below, or contact jbd1.
If you’d like to start a new Legacy project, visit the Cataloging Guide and learn how to get started. Also see the wiki page for more info.
Questions? Comments? Additions? Contact jbd1.
NB: This is an LT standing group, so there’s no need to join. Just jump right in and participate!
Life according to the movies
After a friend quoted Braveheart to me I go to thinking about movie quotes and arrived at the realization that if something is worth saying it will be parodied in the movies.
So which movie quotes do you remember, or maybe just cannot get out of your mind. Classics like Scarface’s “Say hello to my little friend”, Rhett Butler: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” (Gone With the Wind) or most of the The Godfather tend to appear on people’s list of all time quotes – and for good reason. But when I think of movie quotes I end up with some of the more odd stuff like Ghostbusters – “Back off, I’m a scientist” (which another friend of mine wanted to have on the cover of his thesis but thought better of it – it seemed unnecessary to piss of the examination committee). Another cool one is “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” from Dr. Strangelove.
I am also fond of scenes when movies parody other movies. Here is the smoking man from the x-files “doing” Forrest Gump:
“Life…is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you’re stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there’s a peanut butter cup, or an english toffee, but they’re gone too fast, and the taste is…fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. And if you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you’ve got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers.”
But what about the quotes that are funny besides themselves like: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” from Jaws or “Soylent Green is people” from Soylent Green.
Or two quotes which can illustrate the demise of the writer in the movies: “When I’m good, I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better” Mae West as Tira in “I’m No Angel” compared to “Yo, Adrian” – Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky”. OK so this was maybe an unfair comparison 🙂
Whatever your tastes and needs a good movie quote is always good to have.
Waiting for deliveries
Ignorance and incompetence rule
Many might have seen this already but it was too good to let it pass without a comment. From the Austinist: A teacher in Texas saw a student demonstrating Linux and handing out free Linux operating systems on CD’s. The teacher was shocked, confiscated the discs and asked the student what he was doing. Upon hearing that he was handing out the discs in cooperation with a local Linux group the teacher sent a letter to the group’s contact:
Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.
These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.
This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer, and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all.
Ignorance and incompetence rule! Even if we give the teacher the friendly interpretation that she is totally ignorant of computers… even then her overreaction takes monster proportions. Not only in her confiscation of the discs but in her letter. I agree “children look up to adults for guidance and discipline” but it is really amazing that she sat down and wrote her letter without taking the trouble to question or learn anything about Linux. It is not enough that she was ignorant of Linux but she is also incompetent in that she could not take the trouble to learn the truth before spouting her opinions and threatening others.
Read the whole thing exchange between the teacher and Linux group here.
Fixing leaky legal systems
Too much of the Swedish legal education system is all about learning the law as it is. Attempting to develop a social consciousness about the way in which the law should be is almost frowned upon. This is important if the goal of law school is to produce skilled legal workers (in Swedish I would have used the word hantverkare). This however degrades the ability and importance of the law professional to the level of plumber, electrician or doctor. This last sentence is not meant in any way to degrade the knowledge necessary in these professions but refers to the way in which they approach and resolve problems.
The doctor, plumber, electrician and lawyer see a problem and apply the tools of the trade to fix it. And this is an important task in society. When your boiler is leaking it is important that you can call a plumber who arrives and resolves the issue without re-interpreting the way in which your house is built. But, (you knew that there would be at least one but…) between leaks the plumbers education should have encouraged him or her to think about how and why pipes, houses and people interact.
The ability to fix direct problems should not mean that these professions cannot evolve and challenge the established set of knowledge. The plumber, doctor and electrician all have the ability to change the way in which their professions understand their own work situation. The Swedish legal education system does not promote this kind of critical thinking.
For critical legal thought we must leave the cold Norse climate and look to the Anglo-American legal system. Sure, there are legal systems which promote critical thinking but not as much as the Anglo-American system. And sure, not all Anglo-American lawyers think critically – which is good since sometimes you need a lawyer to be, just a lawyer.
There are a multitude of examples, courses, books, scholars and whole schools of thought to promote critical legal thought or social legal theory. But one of the more enjoyable must be cross between law and literature which provides a mix of deep thought, social criticism and comic relief all in the academic format (not an easy task).
Take for example this article I just came across by Kimberlianne Podlas of the University of North Carolina: Homerus Lex: Investigating American Legal Culture Through the Lens of The Simpsons. (Seton Hall Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law 93, 2007). From the abstract:
The Simpsons is not merely the most successful cartoon in history (and seen in more than 70 countries), but a pop culture chronicle that uses satire to explore a variety of social issues. No subject is immune from its scrutiny, and the law is no different. Though not traditional law programming, The Simpsons includes some of television’s most profound depictions of the legal system, regularly referencing statutes, private settlements, and trials. Accordingly, it is important to understand what its legally-tinged themes communicate about the value of the legal system.
Embracing a socio-anthropological perspective, this paper studies the function, role, and ideology of law in Springfield, the hometown of the Simpson family. Rather than critiquing a few memorable episodes, it employs ethnographic analysis. Hence, it considers every episode of the first eight seasons, systematically recording each “instance” of law, organizing these into themes, and analyzing them with an eye toward understanding the values and operation of law.
Though politicians and media often present a pessimistic view of the legal system, where litigation is out of control and law impedes common sense justice, The Simpsons depicts a system that is just and beneficial to society. The Simpsons may satirize situations prompting legal action, it upholds the value of law in maintaining a civil society and being a tool that citizens use to right wrongs and make them whole.
This is not legal plumbing, this teaching in such a way as to encourge legal criticism and independent thought. No matter what the conclusions of the article, its very existance shows that law schools are capable of producing more than competent hantverkare who can be called to fix leaks.