December 30, 2006

links for 2006-12-30

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December 28, 2006

links for 2006-12-28

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December 27, 2006

links for 2006-12-27

  • "...past predictions of a rapid decline in the overall prevalence of consanguineous unions have proved to be largely incorrect. In fact, the recorded numbers of consanguineous unions appear to have grown at least in step with increasing national and regio
Posted by oook at 02:18 AM

December 23, 2006

links for 2006-12-23

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December 19, 2006

links for 2006-12-19

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December 18, 2006

Natural enemies?

This one's been haunting me ever since I found the negative (yesterday) and digitized it:
whatever
Teachers will recognize the uphill-all-the-way vibe, I suspect, though this picture was taken 33 years ago, just before I started what I recall as a very energetic class on photography-as-anthropology, in my first year of teaching. I remember some of the people quite clearly, though I can only retrieve one name (Ginger Joyce, over on the left). The stimulus materials are some I'd still use today: Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye, Hanns Reich's The World from Above (a wonderful collection of aerial images), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson... and just think how far we've come since the days of the epidiascope!

Posted by oook at 08:05 PM | Comments (2)

December 17, 2006

links for 2006-12-17

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December 16, 2006

links for 2006-12-16

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December 14, 2006

links for 2006-12-14

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December 11, 2006

déjà vu rules, O.K.

The phrase "tribal areas" keeps showing up as a trope in reportage on Afganistan and Pakistan, in areas that the British knew as the [ungovernable] North-Western Frontier. A quick glance at Mad Mullahs and Wily Pathans will remind readers of the broader context. Here are some bits quarried from today's NYTimes Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan:

“It is the lesson from Afghanistan in the ’90s,” he added. “Ungoverned spaces are a problem. The whole tribal area is a problem.”...

In recent weeks, Afghan officials say they have uncovered alarming signs of large-scale indoctrination and preparation of suicide bombers in the tribal areas, and the Pakistani minister of the interior, Aftab Khan Sherpao, publicly acknowledged for the first time that training of suicide bombers was occurring in the tribal areas...

Pakistani intelligence agencies have long nurtured militants in the tribal areas to pressure the rival government in Afghanistan...

“There are clearly very substantial training facilities that are still operating in Waziristan, both north and south, and other parts of FATA and Baluchistan,” said a diplomat in Kabul, referring to the region by the acronym for its formal name, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas...


Javed Iqbal, the newly appointed Pakistani secretary of the tribal areas, defended the North Waziristan accord as an effort to return to the traditional way of running the tribal areas, through the tribal chiefs. That system, employed by the British and Pakistani rulers alike, was eroded during the military campaigns of the last few years...

“In South Waziristan the government does not even pretend to have a remit that runs outside of its compounds.”

Like so much else in today's conflicts, it seems that this story has unreeled before. My fingers itch to peruse some of the materials reviewed and written (JSTOR tells me 190+ items) by Malcolm Yapp (Emeritus Professor of the Modern History of Western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, such as The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia 1828-1834 by Edward Ingram.

Posted by oook at 08:18 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2006

links for 2006-12-10

Posted by oook at 02:17 AM

December 09, 2006

Department of Tangled Webs

Sometimes it's good to savor the branching pathways that one follows while scanning the day's blogs. Today's case in point is a Language Log posting on Words of the Year: Another year of truthiness, which notes that "Webster's New World College Dictionary went with Crackberry...", a term that showed up in a link I harvested and delicious'd yesterday. Sez the Webster's story:

Whether on BlackBerries -- the PDA's that spawned this latest appellation -- or cellphones, or other handheld devices, people hunched over these tools are a common sight. That devout-looking hunch itself, note Webster's New World editors, is called the Crackberry prayer, homage to this latest obsession...
I was reminded of the existence of a Japanese term for those who live this life, and a quick Google search retrieved oyayubizoku, via wordspy.com. I then remembered that I'd pointed to this a couple of years ago, and another quick resort to blessed Google retrieved a page summarizing some investigations on Electronic East Asia from mid-November 2004 (a lot of the links are 404 now...). And at the bottom of that page are links to two novel things I was playing with at that time: a first podcast On Musical Variety (20+ minutes, a pilot for the Cross-Cultural Studies in Music course I taught in Winter 2005) and a screencast on de.licio.us [alas, hafta use IE to view it] when it was a new service that most of my colleagues didn't know about.
...and that all connects somehow to this Gem from the Past, christened "Bad Hair Derby 1966":
Bad Hair Derby 1966

Posted by oook at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2006-12-09

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December 08, 2006

links for 2006-12-08

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December 06, 2006

links for 2006-12-06

Posted by oook at 02:17 AM

December 04, 2006

links for 2006-12-04

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December 03, 2006

CALI is the bomb-digg[e/i]ty

Readers of this blog will know that I find Language Log a perennial source of toothsome things. Today's Mark Liberman posting hits several targets at once. He's pointing to a screencast about some Digital Commons possibilities for legal education.

There are details in the presentation [a 23:14 Camtasia creation] that I'd quibble with, or formulate differently, and I care not a whit about legal education... but the screencast is worth 23 minutes of your time as an example of ...well,
(1) what to do when weather keeps you from getting to the conference at which you're supposed to speak [really what happened to the author, John Mayer of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction],
(2) what's just over the horizon in education generally, and
(3) an elegant and efficient summary of relevant technologies to inflict upon colleagues who don't get it yet.

Mayer's other presentations from a [Carnegie Mellon] workshop on "approaches to the analysis of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments" are also worth your attention: his Introduction to the work of CALI [15:08] and something on their Fantasy Supreme Court project [8:39].

Posted by oook at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2006

links for 2006-12-02

  • "a portal to the language variety known as Scots, used in Lowland Scotland, Ulster, Orkney and the Shetland Islands by an estimated 1.6 million people and familiar to at least as many again."
Posted by oook at 02:17 AM