Dan Fogelberg - Go Down Easy

This is one of my favorite Fogelberg songs. I played it a lot late last year...and again today.

Plus I traversed some of the general area around where this was filmed when I was in Pagosa Springs during 2006. It's an unbelievably beautiful part of the world.

Pagosa Springs trip 2006 May and June.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

There are no words

I am a long time - in a good way it feels like forever - Dan Fogelberg fan. I've seen him in concert 11 times...the last concert I saw will have been his last public concert. I'm at a lose for words...it's like the sound track of my life has been silenced, something I knew was coming but still seems totally surreal.

My heart goes out to his family and friends for their lose.

YouTube has several videos of Fogelberg in concert. Check it out.

Previous prolurkr posts: Dan Fogelberg announces he has prostate cancer

To fully appreciate the scope of singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg's musical talents, dig out your copy of 1981's The Innocent Age and give it another listen. [Click image for a larger version] Dan Fogelberg

The two-disc set, which was released as the demise of disco made room for the nurturing of new wave, stands as the late Illinois native's artistic zenith. Mr. Fogelberg, who succumbed to prostate cancer on Sunday, spent his entire career based in folk music. But he then took his uncluttered melodies, storytelling lyrics and soothing voice into pop, rock, jazz and even country territories.

The Innocent Age, an ambitious 17-song cycle written and produced by Mr. Fogelberg, touched on romantic longing, familial reminiscing and ecological ruminating by tracing the varied stages of life, from birth to death.

Age will be best remembered for two of its four hits, "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne." Mr. Fogelberg's best writing breathes in "Lang Syne." The song's lovely yet melancholy melody provides the perfect cushion for the vivid words. Upon bumping into an old girlfriend at a grocery store, a conversation ensues. Time has brought them back together, but they aren't as they were when the fire first flickered inside them.

"She said she'd married her an architect," he sings, "Who kept her warm and safe and dry/She would have liked to say she loved the man/But she didn't like to lie/I said the years had been a friend to her/And that her eyes were still as blue/But in those eyes I wasn't sure if I saw/Doubt or gratitude."
Also Online

Through his successful run of studio albums from 1974 to the mid-1980s, rock critics unfairly maligned Mr. Fogelberg, deeming his sound too soft. Those critics failed to recognize the one-time Colorado-based artist's creative breadth.

He was considered part of the Southern California '70s pop-rock clique, primarily because he had a musical kinship with Joni Mitchell, Gram Parsons protégé Emmylou Harris and Eagles members Don Henley and Glenn Frey (all of whom were guests on The Innocent Age).

But with smooth-jazz flutist Tim Weisberg he recorded 1978's Twin Sons of Different Mothers, which had a largely jazz-focused bent. On 1985's gold-selling High Country Snows, Mr. Fogelberg ventured into country and bluegrass with such luminaries as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill and Chris Hillman. With 1987's ill-conceived Exiles, he ventured into generic '80s pop-rock, no doubt as a way to appease his label. By then, his commercial clout had waned.

His biggest pop hit remains 1979's "Longer," the folkie gem that appealed to a wide audience and still plays as warmly familiar nearly 20 years later. Before his cancer diagnosis in 2004, when Mr. Fogelberg was still touring regularly, "Longer" was his quintessential concert staple: the song to unite the young and the old, the impressionable and the jaded.

Phoenix, the album that houses "Longer," was the predecessor to The Innocent Age. Such a connection is notable since he was at his artistic and commercial peak then. Now, after his death at age 56, Mr. Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band," his ode to a dad whose musician ways rubbed off famously on his son, seems mighty bittersweet.

The song's hook could make you sigh. "I'm just a living legacy/To the leader of the band."

Sadly, he isn't anymore.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Social Linking Track at Hypertext 2008: the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext

Social Linking Track at Hypertext 2008: the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia

June 19th-21st 2008, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

*** Social Linking Track: Call for Papers (technical paper submission deadline: February 11th 2008)

The ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia is the acknowledged venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on linking. The web, the semantic web and the Web 2.0 are all manifestations of the success of the link. The Hypertext Conference provides the forum for research that considers links, their semantics, their presentation, the applications they have been put to, the knowledge that can be derived from their analysis and their effect of society. If information is connected, then the connection is called a link, and the Hypertext Conference is concerned with all research concerning links. HT08 will consist of four independent tracks, each with its own track committee. In particular, we want to call your attention to the exciting track on Social Linking, co-chaired by Filippo Menczer (Indiana University) and Ciro Cattuto (ISI Foundation).

One of the most exciting recent developments in Web science is the rise of social annotation, by which users can easily markup other authors' resources via collaborative mechanisms such as tagging, filtering, voting, editing, classification, and rating. These social processes lead to the emergence of many types of links between texts, users, concepts, pages, articles, media, and so on. We welcome submissions on design, analysis, and modeling of information systems driven by social linking. Topics of interest include:

* Design of collaborative annotation mechanisms
* Critical mass and incentives of social participation (e.g. games)
* User interfaces for collaborative annotation
* Applications to search, retrieval, recommendation, and navigation
* Explicit vs. inferred social links (e.g. mining query logs)
* Integration with content-based systems (e.g. linking in blogs)
* Socially induced measures of similarity, relatedness, or distance
* Co-evolution of social, information, and semantic networks
* Analysis of structure and dynamics of social information networks
* Behavioral patterns of social linking
* Linguistic analysis of social annotation spaces
* Formal and generative models of social annotation
* Unstructured vs. structured social knowledge representations
* Implementation and scalability of social link representations
* Automatic and user-based evaluation
* Robustness against spam and other forms of social abuse

All submissions should be formatted according to the official ACM SIG proceedings template (http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/ template.html). Accepted papers will appear in the formal Conference Proceedings, published by ACM. All material will be available through the ACM Digital Library. Details about submission will be soon available at the conference site (http:// www.ht2008.org/). You can also find information there about the other HT08 tracks: Information Linking and Organization, Applications of Hypertext, and Hypertext, Culture, and Communication.

*** Social Linking Senior Program Committee:

* Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Junghoo Cho, UCLA
* Lee Giles, PSU
* Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs
* Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
* Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research
* Luc Steels, Sony CSL Paris

*** Social Linking Program Committee:

* Lada Adamic, University of Michigan
* Ruj Akavipat, Indiana University
* Harith Alani, University of Southampton
* Andrea Baldassarri, Sapienza University of Rome
* Stefano Battiston, ETH Zurich
* Rik Belew, UCSD
* Dominik Benz, University of Kassel
* Johan Bollen, LANL
* Shannon Bradshaw, Drew University
* Andrea Capocci, Sapienza University of Rome
* Riley Crane, ETH Zurich
* Debora Donato, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Scott Golder, HP Labs
* Peter Hanappe, Sony CSL Paris
* Paul Heymann, Stanford University
* Bettina Hoser, University of Karlsruhe
* Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel
* Jeannette Janssen, Dalhousie University
* Pranam Kolari, Yahoo!
* Marc Light, The Thomson Corporation
* Bing Liu, UIC
* Vittorio Loreto, Sapienza University of Rome
* Ana Maguitman, Universidad Nacional del Sur
* Massimi Marchiori, University of Padova
* Ben Markines, ISI Foundation
* Paolo Massa, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
* Mark Meiss, Indiana University
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Evangelos Milios, Dalhousie University
* David Millen, IBM
* John Paolillo, Indiana University
* Filippo Radicchi, ISI Foundation
* Jacob Ratkiewicz, ISI Foundation
* Luis Rocha, Indiana University
* Heather Roinestad, Indiana University
* Vito D.P. Servedio, Sapienza University of Rome
* Frank Smadja, Toluna
* Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz
* Landau Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel
* Martin Svensson, Ericsson Research
* Eugenio Tisselli, Sony CSL
* Paris Roelof van Zwol, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Karin Verspoor, LANL
* Alan Wexelblat, HOVIR
* Le-Shin Wu, Indiana University

*** Technical Paper Stream

February 11th 2008 submission deadline
March 21st 2008 authors informed of results of reviewing
April 4th 2008 final Papers to ACM

Full Papers:
Full technical papers (10 pages) should present significant scientific advances that are at a mature stage of development. We are looking for full papers that present relevant contributions to research, development, and practice in the area of hypertext and hypermedia. We are also interested in survey papers which present an
authoritative and original perspective on an area of interest.

Short Papers:
Short papers (5 pages) should present interesting recent results or novel thought-provoking ideas that are not quite ready for a regular full-length paper, or where the research has limited scope or the results have lesser significance.

*** Posters and Demonstrations

March 28th 2008 submission deadline
April 9th 2008 committee decisions to authors
April 16th 2008 final copy to ACM

Poster presentations and demonstrations (2 pages in the proceedings) are solicited, which present new ideas, generate interest in a research area, or describe or demonstrate useful or interesting work that is not substantial enough for a technical paper presentation.

*** Organizaton

General Chair: Peter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh
Program Chair: Hugh Davis, University of Southampton, UK
LOC Chair: Stephen Hirtle, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Treasurer: Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Program Track Chairs

Information Linking and Organization
Paul de Bra, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Frank Shipman, Texas A&M University, USA

Social Linking
Filippo Menczer, Indiana University, USA
Ciro Cattuto, ISI foundation, Italy

Applications of Hypertext
Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Hypertext, Culture, and Communication
Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc., USA

Workshop Chair: David Millard, University of Southampton, UK
Hyperdrama Festival: Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc., USA

*** Location

ACM Hypertext 2008 will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ranked #1 Most Livable City in America. It is co-located and scheduled directly after ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (http://www.jcdl2008.org/). The two conferences will meet again in Pittsburgh, 10 years years after ACM Hypertext 1998 and ACM Digital
Libraries 1998 were last co-located there. In 2008, both conferences are being hosted by the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/). The Pittsburgh area is home to more than 25 colleges and universities, resulting in a vibrant and diverse community of learners and teachers. The region welcomes more than 10 million visitors each year, who enjoy amenities and cultural attractions including the world-class Carnegie Museums, the outstanding Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the decades-long tradition of major league sports! Pittsburgh is centrally located, being within 90 minutes flying time of the country's major metropolitan areas. While being challenged by the presentations at Hypertext 2008, don't miss an opportunity to sample the museums, the performing arts organizations and the city's charming and diverse neighborhoods.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rejoinging the money making world...at least minimually

Well I am rejoining the working world. I have accepted a GA positions with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program at IUB.   I will be working on a funded project that is looking at student generated learning aids generated in undergrad classes across campus.  More detail later, if they approve.

I start soon...not sure of the date yet.  But the principle investigators have big plans that may lead to a multi-year study, with a variety of written output. 

Life is good!

Posted by prolurkr at 01:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack