Clippings

Saqueos are contagious

August 17th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
The impact of last weeks riots in London will be long lasting. And after the outpouri9ng of reaction from the propertied and privileged classes slowly more sane voices are emerging.

This is an excerpt from an excellent column in today’s Guardian newspaper.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

Cameron’s response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.
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Developing mulimedia in history

July 26th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
I have been thinking a lot lately about how new technologies will change the practice of traditional disciplines such as history. And this new web site is showings some of the possibilities of using media in history.
clipped from www.ahrc.ac.uk

Hundreds of interviews with former activists from the 1968 revolutions which shook Europe have been analysed and put online by an international research team led by historians at Oxford University and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Nearly 500 activists from more than 100 activist networks in 14 European countries have been recorded discussing how they became involved in activism, their experiences in 1968 and what they now think about their activist past.

The interviews have been put into an online database called ‘Around 1968’: Activism, Networks, Trajectories’, which has been launched at Oxford University, thanks to funding from the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust.

The website can be accessed at https://around1968.modhist.ox.ac.uk/

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New ways of research and learning

July 1st, 2011 by Graham Attwell
This is interesting. We are slowly moving beyond using the web merely to replicate previous paradigms of learning – or i9n this case research – to find new and innovative approaches to collaborative emploration.
Incidentally the experiment below found that until Kaggle showed up “the best science to date had a prediction rate of 70% – a feat that had taken years to achieve. In 90 days contributors to the contest were able to achieve a prediction rate of 77%. A 10% improvement. I’m told that achieving an similar increment had previously taken something close to a decade.”
clipped from eaves.ca

So first, what is Kaggle? They’re a company that helps companies and organizations post their data and run competitions with the goal of having it scrutinized by the world’s best data scientists towards some specific goal. Perhaps the most powerful example of a Kaggle competition to date was their HIV prediction competition, in which they asked contestants to use a data set to find markers in the HIV sequence which predict a change in the severity of the infection (as measured by viral load and CD4 counts).
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Greece is standing up to EU neocolonialism

June 27th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
At last – a sensible article in the popular press about what is happening in Greece.
As the article points out the rates of interest being charged are akin to lean shark rates. Furthermore these loans are not to pay Greek civil servants or maintain the standard of living in Greece. they are going to the banks – predominantly in Germany and France. So Greek people are being asked to pay high interest rates and to sell off their economy to support bad loans made by banks around the world.
What is happening is a scandal and will rightly be regarded by history as such. But where are all those commentators who welcomed the Arab spring – now that the struggle is on their doorsteps.
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

After months of attacks on the supposedly feckless Greeks, the western media, intellectuals such Amartya Sen and Jürgen Habermas and the United Nations have finally woken up to the fact that the catastrophic austerity imposed on Greece is unsustainable. It was about time. This is an unprecedented and morally odious type of collective punishment imposed on a majority of Greeks, who did not see a penny from the profligacy of their rulers and who live close to the poverty line.

Syntagma has become Tahrir Square in slow motion. It is a peaceful, democratic revolt that was easier to start because the fear of brutal repression is smaller, but will be harder to complete as it faces the enormous might of the European Union and global finance capital. Now that the indignant have changed the rules of the political game, it is perhaps time to revisit some basic facts that have been seriously misrepresented.
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Libraries are still important

June 25th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
A passionate defence of libraries by Patrick Ness. Read it in full!
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk
But how brilliant!  How fantastic that young readers are so passionate about books!  BOOKS! 
And I am amazed at how people – press and politicians, both – continue to find this surprising.  If they talked to pretty much any child rather than just reading press clippings, they’d find out pretty quickly.  Kids read.  They just DO.  They always have.
And where do they get these books for the shadowing groups, where do they get all the other books that they love to read?
They get them from libraries.  Public libraries.  School libraries.  School library services.  They get them from the advice and on the recommendations of teachers and librarians who know not only them but know all the books that might be perfect for them. 
Again, here is a government that shouts so loudly that it wants young people to read, while at the same time cutting the very things that have proven, time and time again, to do just that.
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Using BuddyPress in education

June 17th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
This is a useful introduction to the use of BuddyPress in education, written by Mathew Gold, the founding Director of the Cuny Academic Commons.
clipped from learningthroughdigitalmedia.net

In 2009, developers released BuddyPress,[7] a series of plug-ins that promised to add “social networking in a box” to WordPress multisite installations. In practice, this meant that in addition to creating blogs, site members could create profile pages, add friends, write status updates, post notes on one another’s profile pages, send private messages, create groups, use discussion forums, and track member activity across the installation. If WordPress created a network of connected blogs, BuddyPress created a social ecosystem around that network.
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