Another year of prolurker

I sat down on the evening of the 21st to start working on this post. Something about the solstice makes me reflective no matter what, and two days until the blog's anniversary just adds to the existing atmosphere. It seems to be appropriate to be playing Seasons of Love from Rent while I write this - 525, 600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?.... Of course the other interesting issue is that I am writing this while my blog is offline, having expended its monthly bandwidth allocation and awaiting a new transfusion to get us through moving to the new host.

During the last year the blog and I have grown in ways I may not know completely for some time. The blog is maybe the easiest to describe. Prolurker has been honored this year with nominations for design and has been used as required reading/viewing in classes ranging from online diary studies to new media design. I want to thank all of my colleagues who have found value here and have recommended the work to their students. There is no greater complement than to have my work become part of anothers classroom.

As for me personally, because of the blog I have been interviewed for a variety of theses and dissertations ranging from looks at academic blogging to discussions of gender in the blogosphere. From the perspective of one who didn't write a people-centric masters thesis - my thesis from my first masters is on commuter patterns between Indiana counties - and as one who has yet to begin their dissertation, it has been very interesting to watch these projects develop and to make note of aspects I want to use myself when I approach my dissertation.

In the 525,600 minutes…give or take…since I sat down to write my last annual review of the blog, the following points jump out at me from this year:

• Traffic on this site continues to grow. Thank you all, it is very rewarding to see so many new readers. Also thanks to Feedster for the Feed of the Day recognition, I'm very proud that the blog singled out as being interesting enough for this recognition.
• Because of the growth Prolurker is/has moved to a new host that can provide more bandwidth at a lower cost. This is great for the blog but will be a learning experience for me; I'm used to dealing with a sole-proprietorship rather than a huge company. Of course the change needed to happen, as I have discussed previously [link to post].
• This last year I had the good fortune to hire an excellent designer to redo the look of the site. The only credit I will take is in authorizing payment and giving final approval to the design, the actual credit goes to Julie. Check out her design firm at DigitalJaz.
• The last year has been one of many personal changes. Mostly I have found my personal center, something that was misplaced during my early years in doctoral studies. I don't think this is unusual; maybe my road is a bit different, but not totally off the charts. I can't even begin to say how much the blog and the readers have helped me find a comfortable place to view my work, and my time in graduate school. Thank you all.
• Finally this little blog I started to first give me a taste of the phenomena I was studying and then to give myself practice writing for an audience has morphed into some sort of marketing and publication venue that simply was not on my radar two years ago when I began this journey. It's been amazing…and now I measure my days by words written both in papers and on the blog. There are many worse ways to live a life.
• I don't think I will ever get over being amazed when I get email from students and professors all over the world, who have found my work through my blog writing. Usually I feel very much like the kid who gets to add a new stamp to her collection. "Look, look this one is from Malaysia!"

Last year's "Year in Review" post was heavy with numbers, and somehow this year I don't see the need for it. It probably doesn't hurt that as I update this post for publication on January 4, 2006 I have lost all of my previous user stats in the move to the new host. I was planning on adding a clip of the cPanel Webalizer panel but all of that is lost. It's a bummer since I all I will have for annual reports is the cummulative increase...oh well.

The future of professional-lurker is? You know, I have no idea. As for right now I think now that Prolurker is up and running on it's new hosts servers it is steady state and that is just fine by me.

525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.
525,600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife. In 525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?

Posted by prolurkr at 06:58 PM | TrackBack

Prolurker will be quiet for awhile

As I have mentioned prolurker is moving to a new host shortly. In preparation for that move the site will be quiet, and possibly even down for a day or so while all of the moves and realignments are going on. So before I go let me wish all of you happy hollydays, enjoy the dark of the year. I expect the site will be active again by the beginning of next week (12/26/05).

Posted by prolurkr at 11:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Bloglines is moving to bigger digs

Moving Data Centers

Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here's our planned schedule for tomorrow:

* 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items.

* 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account.

* 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account.

We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

Hopefully this will help.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:49 PM | TrackBack

Edublog 2005 Award Winners

I hope that next year they split up elementary ed, high school ed, and higher ed (or some such divisions) into separate sections. It was difficult to vote because the audiences were so disparate. If they don't maybe we will have to start our own higher ed awards. I have to admit I find it sad that none of the winners are blogs I read...and none of the blogs I read won, few were even made the final nomination cut.

The International Edublog Awards Winners 2005

* Most innovative edublogging project, service or programme 2005

James Farmer: Edublogs

"Sometimes when people win something and say "it wasn't me, it was the team" etc. you know they're really talking out of their arses and they do in fact entirely think it was them but feel compelled to say otherwise. However, this isn't always the case and I promise you that I am in no way talking out of my arse when I say that Elgg is an amazing and developing product that Dave & Ben have put together in an incredible way, Ed Tech Talk is another two-man stunning production and Stephen's Web must have had more man hours put into it than most decent sized buildings. Whereas all I've done is whack up a blogging service which a bunch of people seem to have found useful… So, seriously, and I promise you with no arse at all, this isn't for me, it's for the people who use edublogs.org"

* Best newcomer 2005

Konrad Glogowski: Blog of proximinal development

* Most influential post, resource or presentation 2005

George Siemens: Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation

* Best designed/most beautiful edublog 2005

D'Arcy Norman: D'Arcy Norman Dot Net

* Best library/librarian blog 2005

Joyce Valenza: Joyce Valenza's NeverEnding Search

* Best teacher blog, joint winners 2005

Konrad Glogowski: Blog of proximinal development

Anne Davis: Edublog Insights

* Best audio and/or visual blog 2005

Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow: Ed Tech Talk

* Best example/ case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning 2005

Thomas Hawke, Thomas Stiff, Susan Stiff, Diane Hammond (YES I Can! Science team): Polar Science

"Thank you very much! The Polar Science Project was developed and coordinated by the YES I Can! Science team - Dr. Thomas Stiff, Susan Stiff and Diane Hammond of McMaster University in Canada. The project blogs were one of many communication tools we used to give students the opportunity to interact with Canadian scientist Dr. Thomas Hawke, as he conducted research on the aerobic capacity of Weddell seals in Antarctica.

We would like to thank Dr. Hawke for his interesting and informative articles, and all of the students and their teachers for their insightful questions and observations."

* Best group blog 2005

Rudolf Amman, Aaron Campbell, Barbara Dieu: Dekita.org

* Best individual blog 2005

Stephen Downes: OLDaily

Posted by prolurkr at 04:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

loisscheidt.com...it’s getting there

I've been working on the finishing touches over at loisscheidt.com. I think I finally have the categories in place...at least for now since categories are a work in progress. Now I need to get the broken links working, which means uploading papers to the new site and changing the in-post links to match the new location. Then we just have to get the automated CV template worked out an in place. Things are moving along...and life is good.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:26 PM | TrackBack

Tim Berners-Lee now has a blog

Tim Berners-Lee now has a blog, check out timbl's blog and the 300+ comments to his first post. Must be fun to be an internet god with all those fans.

Posted by prolurkr at 03:58 PM | TrackBack

What can I add that isn’t being said much better than I can say it?

I've been thinking today how I could add anything meaningful to the discourse on this week's revelations about the Bush Regime, I'm never big on just adding my two-cents to the crowd. Then I read Jenny S-G's post at Pomegranate Thoughts and I knew the best I could do is pass on the link so others can read what she has to say. Political discourse is Jen's thing so I will leave it to her. But of course that is easy when I agree with her point of view.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:23 PM | TrackBack

A Friday Night meme

You are The High Priestess

Posted by prolurkr at 08:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Oh dear I HAVE to put this in the syllabus for next semester

Do students cell phones ring while you are giving a lecture? Well it has happened more than a few times in my class and I even begin each PowerPoint presentation with a request that they be shut off for the duration. Well next semester I'm adding this Cell Phone Policy as well as adding a point deduction.

The dedicated readers who have persisted through the horrific recent lack of blogginess on my part, will recall that at the start of the semester, I told my students that if their cell phone rang in class, I would answer it and cause them some slight embarrassment that they may wish to avoid.

Well, Friday, I got the chance to put my money where my mouth was.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

CFP - THE CURRENT STATE OF LITERARY SEMIOTICS

THE CURRENT STATE OF LITERARY SEMIOTICS
Imatra, Finland, June 10-13, 2006
Organizer: International Semiotics Institute (ISI)

Call for papers

During the past 10 years, literary semiotics has entered into a new phase of development. The pragmatic theory of semiotics based on Charles Peirce's writings is increasingly applied to the analysis of literary texts, thus giving shape to new forms of research and to a new theory of how literature should be understood. At the same time, important interdisciplinary approaches such as research on iconicity, queer studies, performance theory, and cognitive studies focus on questions of signification and sign, shedding a new light on semiotic processes in literature. There is, however, also continuity in this renewal since a great part of the analytical concepts and research methods currently in use are derived from (post)structural research.

The time is thus ripe for a reflection on the current state of literary semiotics. Are we witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm? If yes, what kind of research does it produce? Is it time to transcend earlier divisions between competing paradigms and to look for a synthesis in literary semiotics? Which elements in (post)structural research are still valuable? We invite all scholars interested in literary semiotics to reflect on the current state of the art according to the lines of inquiry proposed by these and related questions. The issues can be addressed from a theoretical or a methodological point of view. Readings and interpretations of individual texts that exemplify different paradigms are also welcome.

Invited lecturers: Jørgen Dines Johansen (University of Southern Denmark, Odense), Christina Ljungberg (University of Zürich) and Louis Armand (Charles University, Prague). Director: Harri Veivo (University of Helsinki/Finnish Network University of Semiotics)

The seminar is part of the annual International Summer School for Semiotic and Structural Studies organised by the International Semiotics Institute (ISI), which takes place on June 10-15, 2006.

Categories of Participation and Conditions of Admission:
There are two categories of participation:
1) Active: Participant presenting a paper in the seminar.
2) Passive: Participant following the seminar without presenting a paper.

An active participant must send a short curriculum vitae and a one page abstract of his/her paper together with the registration form to the ISI (address given below). Registration forms can be filled in electronic form at the ISI website (www.isisemiotics.fi) or ordered from the ISI. Abstract, cv and registration form should reach the organizers no later than March 31, 2006. The abstracts will be published as a booklet and should be sent both as a Word-document (email attachment or on diskette) and in hard copy.

A passive participant must send the registration form by April 30, 2006. Participation Fee: 125 EUR (the fee covers lunch and two coffees a day from 11.-15.6. and an elegant evening reception and buffet on June 10th). Payment of fees must be made before April 30 by bank transfer to the ISI bank account with Sampo Bank. The bank identifier code is: PSPBFIHH. The international bank account number is: FI8780001802071697. In Finland, the bank account number is Sampo 800018-2071697.

You are also encouraged to visit the ISI Internet website (www.isisemiotics.fi) for the most up to date information as it becomes available.

For further information, please contact:
Harri Veivo, harri.veivo@helsinki.fi

For registration, please contact:
International Semiotics Institute, Virastokatu 1, 55100 Imatra, Finland
tel. +358-5-681 6639, fax +358-5-681 6696
e-mail: Maija.Rossi@isisemiotics.fi, Anna.Mennola@isisemiotics.fi

Posted by prolurkr at 07:13 PM | TrackBack

Gonzo teaching at it’s best

I just love this concept...how can I use it next semester? Welcome to Class. Just a snip follows:

On the class wiki I have provided a set of 250 homework problems of varying complexity and difficulty. These are your assignments for the semester. These problems are what you are graded on.

Some of these problems can be answered with a quick and simple Google search and some writing. Some would make good Masters Thesis projects. Some have one right answer; some have no right answer; some have many. Some require explanation, some require programming, some require mathematics, some require historical background, some require number crunching, some require experimentation, some require intuition, some require asking the right person, some require advanced domain skills from outside our department. Some are trick questions; some are so obvious you'll imagine they're trick questions; some are inherently time-consuming; some have hard and easy ways to solve them. Many are ill-posed, and need clarification. Some are problems you should already know how to answer. Some are problems you might not be able to answer by yourself when we arrive at the final exam.

All of them are important. None are throwaway, or filler, or make-work. I want you to answer each and every one of them.

No, not smiling now. Buck up. It's not that bad.

You yourself -- the individual you -- you are not responsible for doing any problem at all. Frankly I don't care if you do no work whatsoever, as long as you show up for class. You do need to come to class.

I will not grade your personal contribution to any answer, ever. Indeed, no matter how the questions get answered, I personally will not care one whit whether you, Jane Q Student, did the lion's share of the work, or looked it up and copied it out of the encyclopedia, or took that week off and went to Florida.

But some of the problems must be answered, on the website. On time. Correctly.

I see there are 30 of you in the class today. There are what? Twelve weeks in the semester? 250 questions, worth I believe a total of 7200 points. And then the final exam.

You see, that's a lot of problems.

Every Thursday at noon I will select the problems that are most important for you to complete in the next week. I'll publish this list on the wiki.

In Friday's class we will spend the entire session negotiating the assignment. I will stand up here and tell you I want all of it done, and why. And then you will sit there and (because you've prepared for the class ahead of time) tell me it's impossible for you to do all that in one week. And you'll ask me questions about what I'm looking for, and you will talk to each other, and you will propose which problems you think can be done by the noon the next Thursday. I may have some problems I really want you to answer that week, and I may try to force them onto your list by cajoling you, or by teaching you cool stuff, or by giving you hints, or by making them worth more points. I may even add new questions to the main list, and delete questions from the main list, now and then.

By the end of class each Friday, we will have finalized what problems need to be done, and how many points they're worth. You will have, collectively, promised that you'll try to get them done.

In order for the problems we choose to be answered correctly, you will have to "cheat". You are not only allowed to search the Internet, you'll have to. You are not "encouraged to work in teams", you'll have to. You will have to ask professors in other classes, and students who took the class before, and go to the library, and talk to each other, and share notes, and make reports, and read things in foreign languages, and write simulations. You will need to do background reading, and express your opinion to one another. You'll need to edit each other's writing, and depend on each other's authority.

These are the things that are prohibited in your other classes. Some of them are even explicitly prohibited by the "honor code", that rag we use to mask our educational laziness and our own unquestioning buy-in of the status quo. If you prefer the other approach, then I suggest you withdraw from this class early on and go back to the status quo, before it makes your head hurt.

One hard and fast rule: your answers cannot include any plagiarized material. In case you do not know what plagiarism is by now, I have provided a handy and very explicit definition on the class wiki. If any answer on any of a week's problem set is plagiarized from an outside source, the score for the entire problem set is zero, and that week's questions will appear on your final exam. You may, however, cite the work of others all you want. You may even quote it, so long as fair credit is given where it's due.

You may (by whatever mechanism you want to work out) decide not to answer some of the questions that week. For each answer, there is a "commit" button, and only when a majority of the class members have pushed that button will the answer count for the week's assignment. Whenever a substantive change is made to the answer, the "commitment" is reset, though the people who pressed it before will get an email alert. All your (committed) answers must be posted in the class wiki in order to be graded. At exactly noon on Thursday, an archive of the Answers section for that week will be saved for grading. The committed answers will be graded; the rest of the problems will return to the pool to be attempted again later.

Some of these questions are very hard, and some are off-topic. Given a cogent argument to that effect, provided as a committed answer, I will consider eliminating such questions from the roster before the final exam comes around. Such arguments to dismiss work will have to be robust and skilled, not petulant or confrontational. That said, even such questions will be considered answered, and your argument will be graded like any answer would, on all five scales. It may appear on the midterms, too.

So. How will you coordinate? How will you divide up the problems? How will you check each other's work? How will you find out who knows what? How will you compose your answers?

Posted by prolurkr at 06:55 PM | TrackBack

But can I use the data?

Christina left the following comment to my post CFP - 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem and I think it needs more public response than can be done in a response comment.

As a new student -- would using this data get me in trouble with the IRB (obviously not and answerable question in the specific sense, but in general)? They scraped this stuff off the web w/out permission? Obviously no anonymizing if they include what they say... Thoughts?

First any comment I make needs to be double checked with your universities policies. While there are national, and here I mean U.S. based, guidelines individual schools may exceed these regulations to tailor their requirements to their campus. Obviously anything I say does not apply to non-U.S. based scholars, the U.S. is not the trend setter in these issues.

Now let's parse this out a bit.

The data that has been scraped and loaded on the available DVD is publicly available, or we can assume that to be so from the information the conference committee has presented to date. The issue of publicaly available data and CMC has been much debated - public nature of communication vs. expectation of privacy in public, etc. I respect everyones point of view on this as I don't really think there is a right answer to the conundrum. I can tell you how I look at it - if it's public than it's public. Now one of the unique things about the "public" part of this discussion is that permission is not required, in essence they gave their permission when they hit "submit." My analogy for blog posts is letters to the editor in your local newspaper, granted it's an imperfect analogy but it is not a bad one.

Will you get in trouble with your IRB if you use the data? Well yeah if you present or publish from this dataset without going through your local IRB you should get in trouble. An application to the IRB to use this dataset would be fairly straight forward under the "existing dataset" clause. I separated out presenting and publishing from classroom work because many universities have "student" policies that allow for work to be done in the classroom that is exempt from the overall application process. This is done because "classroom" work is teaching and learning based not really research. Where this falls apart is for grad and particularly doctoral students, if you do the research without IRB approval you can never present or publish the work...yes I said NEVER. You can do, as I have done, the classroom work as preliminary research, than apply to the IRB, use the methodology and research questions on a new dataset and than present and publish your results. I should note that research with special populations is never exempt, well not in my experience at least, so all of my classroom work with teens went through the IRB process irregardless of my intent to present or publish.

Finally the issue of anonymizing is really a subset of participant protection. Most medical studies use anonymization to protect subjects in their studies. But for us social science types one of the first questions we must struggle with when looking at our research is do we believe in privacy above all else or in tempered privacy? This is no small discussion and really forces one to tear into your personal underlying ethical framework. For me I don't think the discussion will ever be over but I have come to a functional truce with myself.

I don't believe in blanket anonymization. I don't usually do research that has a more than everyday level of harm as an outcome. When I can't decide on the level of possible harm, I stray on the side of protection and have anonymized. That's my history. So for my blog research, even that which has been done looking at teen sites, I don't anonymize. The data is public, I'm not shining a brighter light on their work than exists previously. It's out there, it's alreasy searchable so it's open to all.

Two side issues I have with anonymizing are 1) by changing names to anonymize a site I may be protecting my subject but may also be inadvertently highlighting a non-participant who uses the anonymous name I select for my participant. I think this is a big issue that is rarely addressed when people talk about anonymizing public data. Second, as a qualitative researcher, anonymizing lowers the replicability of my study, now sometimes the need for privacy supersedes this preference...but it must be reviewed in the process of making decisions on methodology.

One question I asked myself when I posted the original call, is has any IRB reviewed this process up to this point? University of Washington may have done so since Eytan Adar is a student there. But BlogPulse wouldn't need IRB approval to pull data from their proprietary sources, they can do that at any time. Either way individual researchers will need to apply with their university IRB to use this existing dataset.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

CFP - Fibreculture Journal 2006

:: fibreculture:: has established itself as Australasia's leading forum for discussion of internet theory, criticism, and research. The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. Themes of recent issues of the journal have included: Contagion and the Diseases of Information; Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour; and Mobility, New Social Intensities and the Coordinates of Digital Networks. Issues currently in process are: Distributed Aesthetics (to be launched December 2005); Games Networks; and New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies.

Papers are other relevant works are invited for a General Issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to be published in the second half of 2006. Proposed contributions should fall within the ambit of the Fibreculture Journal=92s interests, as below.

There are guidelines for the format and submission of contributions at . These guidelines need to be followed in all cases. Contributions should be sent electronically, as attachments, to Andrew Murphie at a.murphie@unsw.edu.au. Articles not conforming to the Fibreculture Journal's style guide may not be considered. It is also the case that, although the Fibreculture Journal editors will often work to edit manuscripts, we are not always able to publish articles that require extensive editing in order to conform to the standards of the journal.

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2006.

The Fibreculture Journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of:

:: information and creative industries
:: national strategies for innovation, research and development
:: education
:: media and culture, and
:: new media arts

The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.

Posted by prolurkr at 05:51 PM | TrackBack

Lots of higher ed reading today and a few giggles

One of the links from a post has me laughing - Severus Snape: One teacher's hero. First it's funny because in every other role, ok most every other role, I think Alan Rickman is a hottie, ok an over 50 hottie...but I'd be like Ron and the buggart picturing Snape as the scariest thing I could imagine.

I think this article appeals to me because on some level I know that what makes me a good teacher is the level of humanity and caring I bring to a classroom, though like most educators I wish my heart got broken a lot less. Snape's heart is unbreakable...or at least hermetically sealed. Well I don't really want that but well you know...I know you know...we all know.

Posted by prolurkr at 05:07 PM | TrackBack

CFP - 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem

We are happy to announce the public availability of a substantial collection of blog data for research purposes. The data is being made available by Intelliseek/BlogPulse in conjunction with the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem. A DVD containing full text from nearly 1 million blogs can be requested by filling out the form at the workshop homepage: http://www.blogpulse.com/www2006-workshop/

The release comprises a complete set of weblog posts for three weeks in July 2005 (on the order of 10M posts from 1M weblogs). This data set has been selected as it spans a period of time during which an event of global significance occurred, namely the London bombings. The data set includes the full content of the posts plus metadata in an easy to parse XML format. The metadata fields include: date of posting, time of posting, author name, title of the post, weblog url, permalink, tags/categories, and outlinks classified by type.

Much of the interest in research relating to weblogs involves the analysis of large quantities of data. As part of this workshop, we are very excited to provide a data set to the research community. The aim is to encourage the use of this data to focus the various views and analyses of the blogosphere over a common space. This will provide a unique opportunity to compare different views of the blogosphere and to stimulate interesting discussion and collaboration.

Researchers are welcome to concentrate on whatever aspects of the data they are interested in. Possible topics include:
- Topic detection and tracking
- Relation of blog data to other media
- Social network analysis
- Qualitative analysis of small scale interactions
- Sentiment detection
- Search tools
- Detection of spam blogs
- Correlation of weblog events to "real-world" data (e.g. the stock market)
- Clustering and ontology creation
- Measures of influence
- Visualization and mapping of the blogosphere

Please note that we welcome any submissions to the workshop, not just those making use of the data. Feel free to contact the committee with any questions you may have.
Eytan Adar, University of Washington
Natalie Glance, Intelliseek & BlogPulse
Matthew Hurst, Intelliseek & BlogPulse

Posted by prolurkr at 03:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

New Orleans as an open architectural salvage site. Some people are just too low.

Some folks just have no consciences...to kick folks when they are already down. From WSJ Online, Architectural Theft Adds Insult, by Christopher Cooper.

Professional photographer Keith Calhoun is resigned to the hurricane that destroyed his studio. And he has even reconciled himself to the pilfering of negatives he had stored there. But what has him spitting nails is the recent looting of the fat cypress beams that had kept his Victorian-era building standing -- and that would be key to putting it back together.

The beams -- or joists -- long pieces of dense, 19th-century timber that support roofs and floors and are virtually impossible to purchase new, fetch about $10 a running foot at a salvage yard, Mr. Calhoun says. He reckons he lost a truckload of antique wood.

Mr. Calhoun suspects that common thieves working his neighborhood wouldn't be going after antique building materials such as joists, mantels and Victorian shutters unless they were being directed to by someone in the know. The value, he says, is only clear to renovators and aficionados of historic design.

"Not even the cops know this stuff's valuable -- they all live out in the suburbs," Mr. Calhoun says.

Three months after Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans is still without electricity, and miles of its historic neighborhoods are virtually deserted. Tens of thousands of unoccupied homes, their doors kicked in by rescue teams, are standing unsecured in thinly patrolled neighborhoods.

In this environment, police say they have begun to see evidence of architectural pilfering, and they suspect out-of-state work crews are the source of much of the looting. At a recent community meeting, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said police have begun keeping careful watch on contractor trucks driving through the empty parts of town.

In an area known as Uptown New Orleans, one resident says he returned to find that over a two-day period, a crew had stripped his home of its asbestos shingle roof -- an easily damaged building material unavailable new and hard to obtain at wrecking yards. "They salvaged what they could and what they broke they threw in the front yard," says Michael Sewell, an employee of a shipping firm here.

Collins Phillips, a retired fireman who lives in a tattered Victorian house a few blocks from Mr. Calhoun, says he returned from exile in Atlanta recently to discover that someone had tried unsuccessfully to wrench a stained-glass transom out of its casement over his front door.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:00 PM | TrackBack

CFP - SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY

SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY

McGill University, Montreal Canada 9-10 June 2006

http://www.Technology-Conference.com

The symposium will take a broad and cross-disciplinary approach to technology in society. Participants will include researchers, teachers and practitioners whose interests are either technical or humanistic, or whose work crosses over between the applied technological and social sciences.

A special theme of this symposium will be the complex relations between Technology and Citizenship. Technology is deeply implicated in the organisation and distribution of social, political and economic power. Technological artefacts, systems and practices arise from particular historical situations, and they condition subsequent social, political and economic identities, practices and relationships. In short, industrial technology, transportation technology, information and communication technology, learning technology, bio and genetic technology, nanotechnology, etc.-is a matter in which citizenship is at stake. This symposium is dedicated to exploring the various ways in which technology and citizenship bear upon each other historically, and in the present context.

We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the symposium call for papers. The symposium will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations. Papers submitted by participants will be peer-refereed and published, if accepted by the referees, in print and electronic formats in the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society. If you are unable to attend the symposium in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic journal, as well as access to the electronic version of the journal (including all historical material). The deadline for the first round of the call for papers is 15 JANUARY 2006. Proposals are reviewed within four weeks of submission.

Full details of the symposium, including an online call for papers form, are to be found at the symposium website - http://www.Technology-Conference.com.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:49 PM | TrackBack

A itty bitty shaker on the New Madrid fault

Magnitude 1.6 - SOUTHEASTERN MISSOURI 2005 December 16 07:51:55 UTC. A note to make for next semesters class on Informatics and Disaster.

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