11550 items (9156 unread) in 89 feeds
Photos from chai wallah's contacts
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Fed by Birds
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Diary at the Centre of the Earth
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Architectures of Control in Design
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aviary.dk
Rogue Semiotics
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heyoka (slowlight)
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unlixes!
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baraquel
de vertalerin
blue cat
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max richter: blog
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static caravan
michael
Stephen Fry
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Times Online | Games & Puzzles | Polygon
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[london] smog
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et cetera
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dhammarati
The language of cities
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the national bibliographical society
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Speechification
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separated by a common language
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melinede [flickr]
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nicolasix [flickr]
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nicolasix: seventhirty - 365x2 [flickr]
Muxtape
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London Cycle Chic
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polysemic
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Spaghetti Junction Style
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stitches and hos
what was my name again !
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HEL LOOKS
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languagehat.com
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Moustaches
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cloudpilot
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Language Log
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Tim Johnson
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Homologue
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Holdings
My phonetic blog
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PONY AND PINK
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swords and dreams
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needled
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neat but not gaudy
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howies - brainfood
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Fighting Tiger
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A Simple Apology feed
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riks raks poks
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grammatolatry
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Things Of Interest
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BIG CHILL DIARY
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honkjazz - The Musical Allotment (a story by Herbert Westchester & Brazil Banks)
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Between things
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Phonology
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Kemp Folds
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ACE dance and music
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Archival Sounds
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One & Other / participants / sarra
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Making a Slow Revolution
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Bluestocking Blog
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Going Underground's Blog
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red deer club / Latest Releases
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Red Deer Club Recordings's MySpace Blog
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SEEING IS STEALING
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gathered.
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More Canals than Venice
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Thenewcomer's Weblog
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Sharon O'Dea
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The Event
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curatorcharlie
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my ideal novel
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Going Postal
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superuseless superpowers
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Militant Medical Nurse
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I first heard about police departments podcasting a while ago, and the Tulsa Police Department's "Street Stories" in particular, but when I had a look, the official Tulsa PD website hadn't been updated since last April, so I rather lost interest. Thank goodness for Crossing Continents then, who just reignited it with a whole half hour of absolute gems from Officer Jay Chiarito-Mazarrella.
"This midget Don King stuff happens all the time." Enjoy. [MP3]
A nice lady called Alison came up to the warehouse last week to buy a dress. We got chatting and turns out she’s an artist We all got an invite to her SuperOrganism exhibition deep in the woods of Snowdonia to discover the mysteries of Hairywood ants. So a few of us have decided to head up there and make a day of it. So if you fancied doing something different with your weekend and you’re in the area Sat 13 Feb then I’m sure it’ll be worth a look. Its from 6-8pm in the Coed y Brenin woods… see you there… we’ll post some pics for those of you who can’t make it.
Click here to view the embedded video.
here’s a taster of the Shared Interest lecture we had at the shop last week, there was some very interesting stuff about how a Fairtrade Co-operative really works.
information about our next talk will be up here shortly!
lolitanie posted a photo:
Jamie, Ålborg – mju II + xp2 – 2009/08
photos.lolitanie.com/2010/02/05/du-bout-de-ses-doigts-nus/
note: I'll soon post more and more pictures in AdobeRGB so if you care about all that, want to see the real contrast and real colors then choose Safari to browse.
Velorution is committed to good design which is why we stock a range of fashion items by local designers that give you another option to fluorescent.
Cyclodelic is London College of Fashion graduate and cycling campaigner Amy Fleuriot. Frustrated with the lack of products for female cyclists she began to focus her training on this gap in the market. Her designs combine thousands of miles of pedaling experience with the simple goal of creating beautiful clothing, accessories and events for women who don’t want to forfeit fashion over function when arriving by bike.
Dashing Tweeds is Britain’s latest tweed textile company. Opening up a contemporary arena for a classic quality fabric, Dashing Tweeds has created a range of tweeds for the 21st century, designed by photographer Guy Hills and weaver Kirsty McDougall. Whilst they also produce tailor-made suits, these guys have a knack for superb cycling style.
Capsule started a ball rolling the other week, talking about how to engage regional audiences. There’s a good discussion in the comments that’s worth (re)visiting.
Dunc from The Autumn Store (and various indiepop bands, I’ve slightly lost track tbh) has followed this with “Why Don’t People Come To My Gigs”: Some thoughts on audience categorisation. Which is very good and kinda in the vein of the guides to promoting gigs he wrote a while back (have a root through his site).
Following a couple of links, I stumbled across Scene Not Heard which seems to have started at the beginning of this year:
Scene Not Heard aims to be a portal for artists and fans alike to the massive great plethora of musical happenings going on in Birmingham
There’s also a discussion thread about Birmingham’s music scene on Drowned in Sound, but I think they tend to come round fairly frequently.
Which all adds up to a community of music people in Birmingham all wanting to make stuff happen (standard caveats about ‘music’ tending to refer to indie/rock only in these kinds of discussions).
One more thing to highlight in all of this is a line from Dunc’s post in which he refers to the original discussion on Capsule’s blog, the significance of which I leave to you to discern:
it’s off the back of an event discussing the ‘music industry’ which always makes me feel like I shouldn’t be part of the conversation
© chrisunitt for Created in Birmingham, 2010. | Add a comment |
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Apollo 440 Pain in Any Language (via Soleray)
One of the bleakest songs in my music collection: Billy Mackenzie guesting with Apollo 440. Came across the video for the first time today. Beautiful. Go full-screen and immerse yourself in its unsettling, minimal intensity.
Fela Kuti
Click here to view the embedded video.
Acid Mothers Temple
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Dick Dale and the Deltones
Click here to view the embedded video.
pmc posted a photo:
Pete Ashton posted a photo:
Details from around the Rea Garden art space on Floodgate Street.
Taken TTV style
They said he showed up at 11:30 in Moncton, last night, and didn’t take the stage until 12:30. In Montreal, he didn’t come on until 12:45, and then he was so hungover that he could barely sing the first songs and the audience sat in frigid politeness, until he remembered the words to “Welcome to the Jungle”, after which they clapped. His voice was raspy. Plus, he isn’t really Guns and Roses anyway- he’s just Axl Rose.
“We’re here only for the local band. They’re really good, I’ve been following the for fifteen years now, I don’t understand why they’re not as famous as Gun ‘n’ Roses. Anyway, he probably won’t come on until 1:00, and then just sing for ten minutes. Why are you wearing that funny red headband?” These comments from a typical Haligonian lady. The local band had an incredibly pretentious and pompous name, and they sounded like loud noise.
Just five minutes after the lady resigned herself to at least another hour of waiting before He arrived, the stadium plunged into darkness. By then, we weren’t really expecting Axl, and we thought the electricity had gone. People began screaming. Probably for their local band, we thought. Indoor fireworks began fizzing and spluttering, and in the flicker, the outlines of a whirling dervish emerged. We craned our necks. Is that Him? Really?
His sheer energy was remarkable. In fact, He reminded me of a much-loathed cousin who used to dance non-stop at weddings until dinner, and then non-stop after that. But he wouldn’t be scream-singing at the same time.
As an entertainer, He was unlike anything I have ever seen- (this was my first rock concert though, so I don’t have a huge basis for comparison). There was a pretty boy who looked a bit like his younger self, but channelling Slash with a top hat and a backward bend on his guitar-strumming, there were other guitarists, keyboardists, drummers. But He carried it through, with manic dancing and screaming for a non-stop two hours, changing his costumes and head gear for every song. And yes! He wore his red headband- just like me! What a coincidence!
Mr. Rose, you are a true professional. And you gave me value’s worth for my money. I salute you.
jpb posted a photo:
Suppose you had 100 digital recorders and 800 small languages, all in a country the size of California, but in one of the remotest parts of the planet. What would you do? What would it take to identify and train a small army of language workers? How could the recordings they collect be accessible to people who don't speak the language? My answer to this question is linked below - but spend a moment thinking how you might do this before looking. One inspiration for this work was Mark Liberman's talk The problems of scale in language documentation at the Texas Linguistics Society meeting in 2006, in a workshop on Computational Linguistics for Less-Studied Languages. Another inspiration was observing the enthusiasm of the remaining speakers of the Usarufa language to maintain their language (see this earlier post). About 9 months ago, I decided to ask Olympus if they would give me 100 of their latest model digital voice recorders. They did, and the BOLD:PNG Project starts next week. Please sign the guestbook on that site, or post a comment here, if you'd like to encourage the speakers of these languages who are getting involved in this new project.
In a fleeting fit of energy midway through last year, I proposed to some fellow bloggers that a symposium, hosted here at RSB, on Gabriel Josipovici's superb novella Everything Passes would be a jolly good thing. Well, as I've discussed (in my recent Hamlet and Lear pieces) it quickly became obvious to me that, last year, I didn't have the energy to organise anything. So, I owe a sincere apology to those friends who wrote some wonderful pieces (which will soon see the light of day here on the site -- hopefully, next week) expecting the symposium to go ahead.
Happily, several bloggers have posted the would-be symposium pieces on their own sites. Richard Crary, Dan Visel, Steve Mitchelmore and now Waggish have all written pieces that expand upon the review Paul Griffiths wrote for me a couple of years back.
Please do read these excellent contributions, and then I'll have a few more up for you here on RSB next week.
Via Sponge! (the new name for our friend Lee Rourke's Scarecrow blog) I note that Tom McCarthy has been writing in the LRB about Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint (more...)
More on this over at 3:AM too.
Here at the Bristol shop we have strong links with a local charity called Fairbridge West which works with some of the most disadvantaged and disengaged young people in Bristol and the West. Fairbridge West offer these young people a combination of 1-2-1 support, training and skills to help them realise their true potential and change their lives. You may remember that some of us had a box car challenge with Fairbridge last year.
They are inviting 50 people to take part in the Bristol Half Marathon on September 5th 2010 to raise money for their great cause. If it’s the time of year for you to dust of your running shoes, then the 13 miles harbour side to suspension bridge run would be fun to aim for and you have plenty of time to build up those muscles and get your time down.
The places are going to be available soon, cost £36 and we will be getting some leaflets in the shop with some more info. If you are interested, contact Ella at Fairbridge West on 0117 9425362 or email her at ella.pollock@fairbridge.org.uk
Click here to view the embedded video.
i just found out about this, anyone seen it yet?
Made in Queens is a short film that lifts the lid on an underground scene emerging in the outskirts of New York’s Queens borough. Directed by Nicolas Randall and Joe Stevens, the film looks at a small crew of Trinidadian teenagers, led by Nick Ragbir, who are obsessed with customising their bmx bikes with the fattest soundsystems they can possibly hook them up with.
Yup, it’s that magic word free again. This time Birmingham Royal Ballet are offering a free choreographics presentation with a drinks reception and an introduction by company director David Bintley.
It’s on Thursday 11 February at 7.30pm at Elmhurst School for Dance. Tickets are limited to two per person and seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. If you act fast you can get your tickets here.
© Ian Ravenscroft for Created in Birmingham, 2010. | Add a comment |
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Quiet Corners posted a photo:
Before radar, these experimental concrete sound mirrors were used to try and detect planes crossing the channel.
[What follows is a guest post reporting on a very disturbing situation at King's College London involving the sacking of senior computational linguists and others in a secretly planned, tragically stupid, and farcically implemented mass-purge. The author of the post is currently employed at KCL, and for obvious reasons must remain anonymous here.
Although it is clear that KCL is suffering from severe budgetary problems, the administration has reacted to the problems inappropriately and unconscionably: the administration is sacking some of KCL's most successful, academically productive and influential scholars, showing arbitrariness and short-sightedness in its decision making, and acting with extreme callousness in the manner by which the decisions have been imposed on the victims.
For those out of the field, I would note that I and other Language Loggers are intimately acquainted with the work of those under fire at KCL. It is among the most important work in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics, presenting ideas that many of us cite regularly and have absorbed into our own work, and which nobody in the field can ignore. - David Beaver]
Philosophers have been aghast at recent developments at King's College, London
where three senior philosophers, Prof Shalom Lappin, Dr Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Prof Charles Travis, have been targetted for redundancy as part of a restructuring plan for the KCL School of Arts and Humanities. The reason for targetting Lappin and Meyer-Viol has been explained to be that KCL is `disinvesting' from Computational Linguistics. One of the many puzzling aspects of this supposed explanation for targetting Lappin and Meyer-Viol is that there is no computational linguistics unit in Philosophy to disinvest from. (For detailed coverage see the Leiter Report here, here, and here, and these letters protesting the actions taken in the humanities.)
In contrast to the explicit targeting of the non-existent computational linguistics unit in the school of Humanities, in the sciences a more stealthy approach was adopted. Already last June Dr Jonathan Ginzburg, a senior lecturer in the Computer Science dept, whose research spans formal semantics, logic, and dialogue, was informed that computational linguistics would be omitted as a domain of research in the Informatics dept into which Computer Science was mutating. However, in contrast to what happened in the Humanities, in Computer Science the disappearance of computational linguistics was not explicitly proclaimed. It was an indirect speech act: the spec of the Applied Logic and Theory of Computation group simply omitted any mention of computational linguistics. By doing this, Ginzburg could be declared as not fitting the declared areas of research of the group, and more generally, the department.
And indeed in December, Ginzburg was informed that a panel comprised of Professors from the School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, including a number of Computer Scientists, as well as some external members, had decided not to select him for membership of the new department. There were no complaints about his productivity or standing in the field—his research was acknowledged to be of an international level (indeed his g-index of 42 was the 4th highest in a department numbering 25 permanent staff.). The grounds for non-selection were lack of `research fit'. Consequently, he is at risk of redundancy.
Luckily for Ginzburg, in a way, the panel contained not a single person from his own research group or anyone with competence in the area of NLP or formal semantics of NL. The panel's 'expert witness' was an expert in software engineering, Prof Paul Layzell of Sussex University (a university that pioneered the wholesale laying off of its academic staff; see here, here, and here for details). He, and his fellow panel members, were apparently entirely unaware that Ginzburg's research, centered on the formal analysis of dialogue interaction, actually fits the spec that had been drawn for the group of applied logic and theory of computing rather well. That, supported by expert testimony of a number of leading AI researchers, is the basis for his appeal against the decision, an appeal that is still pending.
The situation at King's is a worrying development for linguists of all stripes, but more generally for all academics in the UK—it seems clear that the moves by the KCL administration, far from being an aberration, will be aped by university administrators throughout the UK. In contrast to universities that have undergone similar budgetary pressures in the US (e.g. in the UC system), at KCL firing permanent staff has been the move of first resort. No attempt is being made to seriously explore alternative ways of reducing the College's budget deficit. Indeed, KCL has just announced it is in the process of buying a wing of the palatial Somerset House to the tune of > £20,000,000. No less ominously, these moves usher in an environment where administrators impose their quite arbitrary visions of what constitute acceptable areas of research. So while computationally-oriented linguistics is flourishing in academia in the US and Canada, with increasing numbers getting hired out of graduate schools, with both Google and Microsoft boasting big teams of researchers in this area. And while a significant number of successful graduates have emerged in this area from Philosophy and Computer Science, with its staff pioneering research in areas such as dialogue, logic, and language acquisition, the administration at King's has decided it has a different vision. Why? No reason has been given.
But why target linguists? Of course linguists are by no means the sole target of the various restructuring exercises. In the sciences at King's the entire division of Engineering was shut, whereas a host of other disciplines have been targeted in the humanities (including Classics, Paleography, and American Studies). Linguists at KCL are scattered across a number of depts, so are an easy target for slogans like `only units with critical mass will be retained.' There had been discussions several years back about forming a linguistics department from the dozen or so linguists spread across CS, Philosophy, Greek, German, Education etc, but the administration decided against it.
Still, it's probably true that the marginal position of the field (neither hardcore humanities, nor hardcore science, nor hardcore engineering) and the widespread lack of awareness of what linguists do or why is an important contributing factor. Mark Liberman has, with some justification, been castigating linguists for their part in this over the pages of this blog. How critical this problem is is illustrated by the current crisis, though alleviating it is of course a long term project.
In the short term, the situation at King's might still be reversed if the administration is reminded that its boast of being 'one of the top 25 universities in the world', proudly embossed on , will become an empty one if it gains a reputation for treating its staff with the disdain it has shown in the current crisis. (On how to remind them, see e.g., this page, which relates solely to the humanities restructuring, and this page for details concerning CS.)
[Note that by classifying the above guest post as "Linguistics in the news", what I mean is that it *should* be in the news. -David Beaver]
6 minutes of random things happening for some reason. It’s oddly satisfying. A film called “everything is everything” by koki tanaka (made in 2006)
People Doing Stuff (via zoffus)
I love the DIY aesthetic, which isn’t an aesthetic - it’s what she had to work with, and work with it she did.
It’s about damn time, right?
Just putting it out there that our latest follower is amazing. That’s all.
My baby cousin discovered I have a moustache blog. Now you, too, can enjoy his cuteness w/moustache.
Pete Ashton posted a photo:
Obelisk commemorating the wonderfully named Other Windsor in the Lickey Hills.
Taken TTV style.
