Inside View

Waiting to Be Found

I HAVE A TREASURE trove of artefacts waiting to be found. Some of those artefacts lie in a drawer in my home office, secreted inside mini discs, fat USB keys, 3.5" floppies and cassette tapes. Others sit unopened for years on the hard drives of old laptops. One of those laptops is a IBM Transnote, a touchscreen laptop with Windows 98. I'd like to restore its power supply and also pull records off it from 2002, my second year of blogging.

A little record-keeping exercise I started suggests I am carrying around a stash of stuff waiting to be found, like in the things I've snapped in the photo (above right). I have gigabytes of audio files, including years of interviews, ambient soundscapes, and mash-ups produced by creative multimedia students. They sit unarchived on my Sony ICD MX-20 and I have to do the right thing and harvest them immediately.

 

Found Track: Elektric

Three Minutes with Sunday Papers

CAUGHT BETWEEN CHOOSING a Sunday under clear blue skies and a Sunday with dead trees, I went for a short look at the Financial Times Weekend edition and made a Qik video: http://url.ie/76ag Fact is, many Irish journalists are on hoidays at the moment and if anything is under their bylines, it's rewarmed or reflective. I never expect more than silly news from Irish titles in August but here are some issues worth reflecting upon.

Accredited and Targeting Unemployed

TIPPERARY INSTITUTE offers free places for people who have been unemployed for at least three months. The places are funded by the Irish government on several accredited third level courses during the 2010/11 academic year. I hope we fill 10 seats in our first year multimedia programme with funding from the Labour Market Activation Fund--attracting people who are upskilling for another career. There are real advantages to completing accredited programmes in Ireland. As an external examiner and a member of several interview panels, I've seen questions arise when candidates present non-accredited certificates from training agencies, educational institutions or workplaces. If a reviewing authority can't validate the quality of a programme, it's hardly worth the effort of putting it on a CV for consideration when trying to gain an exemption or a wage review. The HETAC accreditation of the BSc in Creative Multimedia means the programme meets Irish higher education quality standards, that it undergoes rigorous peer reviews at least twice a year and that the overall programme has standing in the commercial market.

Still Reading Dead Trees

ALTHOUGH MUCH OF my life revolves around what I glean from screens, a review of my work practises shows I still read a lot of traditional newspapers, magazines and books. But since it appears that many in my electronic social networks don't inform their judgment in the same manner, I've resigned myself to being part of the near-pensionable class. That would be the 90 per cent of Americans aged 55-64 who don't use online social networks. Those same people have my reading habits, according to Pew Research. It's comforting to know where I actually fit in. Karlin Lillington, writing in the Irish Times about "putting manners on online tools," included comments from myself and from Simon McGarr, one of the most literate diarists I know. Both of us try to extract wisdom we find in a crowd of online voices and both of us think Flipboard completes the task elegantly. Nonetheless, I doubt even the supercool Flipboard could scrape mundane Irish television listings like the one above.

Technocratic Surveillance

IT'S EASY TO FIND discussion online about the legality of public photography and I knew I was being observed by at least two cameras when I snapped a shot above Dublin Airport's departure area (at left). The CCTV cameras that watched me were technocratic examples of the voyeurism that George Orwell and Michel Foucault described in the 20th century. CCTV has become much more pervasive since those two authors described a Panopticon. Photographer Erin Quinn's new show brings the surveillance society into sharp focus during a week-long show in Dublin. Her photographs drill home the manner in which we are watched, recorded and archived. She shot most of her subjects while perched above the crowd in the Dublin Airport, similar to the position I used for several images in my Flickr photostream. Her exhibition is worth visiting, especially for people who have never considered themselves through the iris of a closed circuit security camera.

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Surveillance is at the Centre for Creative Practises, 15 Pembroke Street Lower, Dublin 2, Ireland through 19 August 2010.

 

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Eureka Moment While Graveside

AS I RECORDED a short video at the Ryan family plot inside the walls of the Rock of Cashel, I was getting a signal from six GPS satellites onto five devices within three metres of where I was standing. The Nokia N86 made the short video that appears with this blog post and it dutifully recorded EXIF data onto the file. The other portable devices were triangulating and recording other information. The overall result counts as a major eureka moment. Too bad I can't explain exactly what that means. If you're interested in making better use of your smartphone's A-GPS capability, I recommend you set up my blog to auto-download several times a week. The eureka moment will reveal its worth in a few month's time.

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Musings from inside the Rock of Cashel, County Tipperary, Ireland.

 

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Rise of Social, Demise of Literary Reading

I AM PART OF A DIMINISHING SPECIES of people who like to hold, thumb, page, and read books. I am also part of an increasing species of people who are reading less from paper and more from screens. On my fortnightly pilgrimages to Dublin, I walk through Hodges and Figgis and see the evidence first-hand: fewer people are standing around the shelves and reading what they see in the shop. A few years ago, I read that back in the 14th century, Edward III swapped 80 oxen for one illustrated tome, thinking that he'd pulled off a royal deal. Just last semester, I smiled when a half dozen students bragged that they had never read a Sunday newspaper. As the next term starts, I don't expect to find any first year creative multimedia degree student who will admit to "literary reading" as a leisure activity. That part of Irish leisure is well and truly part of the old age pensioner's lifestyle.

I'm concerned at the demise of literary reading--the reading of fiction, poetry, or plays. It has declined among all specified ethnic groups, at all educational levels, among all age groups, and among both women and men. In US research, the "steepest decline in literary reading is in the youngest age groups". For example, the decline goes from 59.8 percent in 1982's 18-to-24 group to 42.8 percent in groups surveyed in 2002. The decline in literary reading correlates with increased participation in Facebook, Twitter, and discussion boards. Sociological research shows that when literary reading declines, so does an interest in cultural events. Participation in civic activities declines too because literary readers participate more actively than nonreaders in volunteer and charity work, and more frequently patronize performing-arts events, sports events, and museums.

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Carlin Romano -- "Who killed literary reading?" from the Chronicle Review, July 23, 2004.

Maureen Corrigan -- Leave Me Alone. I'm Reading. ISBN 978-0375709036

 

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Questions Arising in my Back Garden

IT'S THE END OF THE SUMMER and I have questions about bald spots, caterpillars, and green tomatoes. Fortunately, because my garden is directly connected to Ireland's leading gardening expert, I know help is at hand. So I'm listening for a response on Audioboo.

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Listen to me on Audioboo. Follow Donegan Gardens on Twitter.

Direct link to two-minute video.

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Recharging Batteries in Your Tumble Dryer

SEEING HANNAH HAYES' ground-breaking method of recharging batteries has me thinking about buying a tumble dryer. Hannah's a 16-year-old student from Midleton College in Cork. Her unique method uses a rotating ball placed inside a tumble dryer. The system works by harnessing the kinetic energy of a household appliance. According to the thesis I read at the 2010 Young Scientist Exhibition, her research involved both electrical and mechanical experimentation in the process of building her prototype. Along with fellow researcher Beth Wardle, she visited Shanghai with their "Kiwi 3" project and won one of the 13 major prizes during the 2010 Shanghai International New Science and Technology Expo. Well done!

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Direct link to YouTube video on "Tumble Charger at the BT Young Scientist 2010".

 

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Honeymoon Memories

THE SUMMER OF 1957 was a scorcher in Ireland. That's what I heard from Tony and Kitty Woodhouse as they recalled their honeymoon journey from Dublin to County Kerry just after they got married. My family in Pennsylvania was labouring through a typical humid summer season too. I enjoy flicking through wedding albums from family members as much as the Woodhouses did in the Parknasilla video (above). In the Big Smoke, working horses pulled milk drays every morning through South County Dublin through the 1950s. The roundsmen raced from house to house, arms laden with milk bottles, while the horses ambled steadily forwards. When they were replaced by electric vans, deliveries slowed down, as the vans could not keep up as the horses had done. Nor did they know which houses to stop at. And on the radio, Little Walter played Juke.

Juke

I'm thinking about all these things as my mom and aunt are well into their 80s, with fewer than 30 minutes of digital audio memories between them.

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Previously on Irish Typepad: "Melting Ice Cream Memories," August 20, 2003.

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