Jacques Rancière and Peter Sloterdijkare are offering an iTunes U podcast course called ” Aesthetics and Modernity” through the University of Warwick.  The first one just got posted, and you can subscribe at:

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/warwick.ac.uk.1718112101.01718112106

The Townsend Humanities Lab offers a community-driven suite of digital tools to support interdisciplinary research and collaboration among Berkeley scholars and their affiliates. Driven by a powerful content-management system, and hosted by new “cloud” computing services, the Lab provides project space and a suite of Web 2.0 resources to all Berkeley scholars with interests in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

The Lab offers tools for project organization and communication (event listings, file sharing, news broadcasts, and RSS feeds), as well as newer collaborative tools for text annotation, image annotation, visualizations, mapping, and collaborative authoring. Images, documents, audio and video files can be uploaded, shared, and placed in circulation among designated project groups within the Lab. Furthermore, all content on the site can be tagged by keywords to facilitate project organization and to enhance the interaction across diverse interest groups.

The Lab is open to all Berkeley scholars. To participate in the Lab, please create an “account,” and then proceed to join an existing project or initiate a new one.

via Townsend Humanities Lab | building interdisciplinary collaboration.

“The Gonzales Cantata is a reaction to the drama and politics of events leading up to the resignation of disgraced US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2007.During his hearings before the often brutal Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales became a modern-day Orpheus, alone and defenseless, facing the terrifying Furies in the Underworld. The doomed Orpheus in this tale, however, lacks the noble cause or incredible talent of the mythical Orpheus, and he has even had a hand in the poisoning of his Eurydice – the country he serves. This is the account of a man who has risen to the level of his own incompetence and must face the terrible consequences without hope of escape or redemption.In protest of male domination of American politics, the genders of theperformers have been reversed in relation to the characters they portray.”– Melissa Dunphy, January 20, 2009.

See also:

• http://www.gonzalescantata.com/
• http://melissadunphy.bandcamp.com/album/the-gonzales-cantata

Economist John Duffy of University of Pittsburgh went to an experimental lab in Second Life and came away unconvinced. Some thoughts:

* The virtual lab he visited was a replication of a real-world lab. We’ve learned, however, that using virtual world technology to simply replicate a real-world thing is usually counter-productive. The utility of virtual worlds does not lie in their ability to re-do, in virtual form, what we do in the real world.

* He carries with him some honored norms about what an economics experiment must be. Participants must not know what the experiment is about, for example, so you ought to ask every participant “Are you an experimental economist?” and exclude them if they are. Otherwise they’ll recognize that they are in a test of backwards induction or whatever. Duffy did not face that kind of question, nor anything that would allow the screening of participants based on expertise. There were other issues, other ways in which an attempt to replicate a real-world econ experiment, in traditional form, simply breaks when placed in a virtual environment.

* He properly noted that the incentives (couple hundred Lindens) are very low in terms of cash value. Why would anyone think hard in return for a quarter? However, this raises a debate about the utility of the Linden dollar. Some people seem highly invested in the state of their virtual things, despite low real-world values. This in turn raises big questions in economics about how things, utility, and happiness relate. Punt.

* He was able to lie about his age, a problem for the internet at large.

via Terra Nova: Duffy: How Not to Experiment in Virtual Worlds.

Watch this, and wait for his commentary onwhat my friend Hayden calls “Sarkozy and the ‘gothic hi-tech’”

Warren Ellis » Bruce Sterling At Reboot 2009.

Biological Events – A Flu Film
Meg Stalcup & Lyle Fearnley

Found footage from the Prelinger Archives on archive.org

• History in the making for Hezbollah
• Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, Depressed?

–Nietzsche, ”On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” Untimely Meditations p. 111, Cambridge: 1983, R.J. Hollingdale, trans.

(No emoticon suffices.)