IBM 5100: First Portable Computer

The IBM 5100 computer from 1975 is apparently the first “portable” or personal computer. The 1981 PC from IBM was the 5150 model.

I learned from an improbably site – The Time Travel Tale of John Titor which provides posts from a purported time traveller from 2036 who came back looking for a 5100. (Thanks to Matt K for the link to this.)
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Virtual Cities

Future Cities: Virtual Cities is up! Future Cities is an off-site exhibit curated by Shirley Madill while the Art Gallery of Hamilton is closed for renovations. Virtual Cities is the web site extension created by a team of us at McMaster. This was my first community research learning projects – the web site and art online are by students and organized by students. Liss Platt (my colleague) and I facilitated (or whatever you would call it – perhaps curated) the online site. I hope this represents an ongoing engagement of the AGH and Multimedia.
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Problems with Open Source

Fundamental issues with open source software development is an essay in First Monday that lists 5 problems with many open source tools. The essay is by Michelle Levesque at U of T and is based on her experience with adapting an open source package. The problems are:
– Poor user interface design
– Poor documentation
– Feature-centric development
– Programed for the programmers
– Religious blindness
She points out how many of these problems also apply to commercial developments – the question is whether any of these are linked to the nature of open source development. She doesn’t quite complete the job of working from characteristics of OS development to the problems demonstrating the inherent strengths and weaknesses in the approach. That is perhaps for a further study.
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Who are the barbarians?

Denys Arcand’s movie Les Invasions barbares (2003) is a sequel to The Decline of the American Empire that nicely works through the clash of two generations, the 60s book-oriented intellectuals of the left and their 90s/00s children who play computer games and make money with computers.

Some of the same issues are posed by the essay in FrontPage The Magic of Images by Camille Paglia. Paglia believes that knowing images is more important than ever, but our postmodern approach to the visual prevalent in universities doesn’t work. It is a literary approach grounded in the theories of our generation not the practices of our children.

My take is that the humanities lost relevance when we abandoned creation for criticism. As important as criticism is, as a practice it is sold as the practice of the custodians of value. There are the struggling artists and programmers who make and the custodians (think Plato’s guardians) who decide what is good. Well … no one pays attention to our connesseurship, even when grounded in French theory. Popular culture passed us by when we detached creative practices from criticism. Students passed us by when we were no longer teaching people to contribute culture, which is what they want to do. While it is expensive to teach the arts, we need to reincoporate them into the humanities. To some extent Philosophy is the last humanities discipline where to study philosophy is still to do it.

Returning to Arcand’s film – who are the barbarians? Are the game playing ADD students that we complain about the barbarians or are we? (Yes, I do have a beard.)
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Lena and Imaging

Supervising a Ph.D. student in engineering who is working on imaging I came across (again) the Lena image that is used as a standard for image engineering. I must say that I thought the repeated use of that image distasteful, so I did some research and found The Rest of the Lenna Story. I’m not sure now what to think about the ongoing use of this. On the one hand it is now a standard of sorts which allows comparison among techniques. It has also become a part of the culture, for better or worse. On the other hand Playboy still owns copyright and students should be discouraged from using copyrighted materials, even when it is unlikely that they will be sued. Finally, it is distracting to have to look at images meant to titillate.

As with all these things, to complain would probably provoke the community into digging in its heels around censorship. Why doesn’t someone come up with a better image?

Knowledge Dissemination: Rewards

Optimizing the transformation of knowledge dissemination is a SSHRC commissioned study being conducted by a team connected with CARL. I have been asked to address their “consensus panel” (interesting idea) about Control, Creativity and Rewards. The web site has a lot of background information around research and research about research, especially in the Candian context. The question I am working on is around recognition and rewards in the academy, especially for digital research and dissemination. The issue has come up over and over in the SSHRC Transformation process – if SSHRC wants greater impact and dissemination, then universities need to reward activities of that sort like public lectures, essays in lay publications, blogs and so on.

For that matter, how would this blog be assessed if I put it down on my CV next year as a research contribution? Ha!

photoblox: image application

Laszlo PhotoBlox is an internet image viewing toy that lets you have a slide show on a page. Its available for free with instructions on how to integrate into a page or blog giving you a moving show. It is controlled by an XML file and has the capacity to include descriptive texts. I have to try it as an image/text experiment.
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