Category Archives: Uncategorized

Know thy audience – What it means to speak at a TEDx event

  October 1, 2015

Over the course of the summer I had the great pleasure of speaking at a local TEDx conference in Vicenza, Italy. The theme of the conference was “Planting the Seeds” and the day consisted of 16 talks by speakers from various disciplines including agriculture, architecture, design, education, history, science, and technology. It was a truly marvelous event. It took place in the oldest, still standing roofed Renaissance theater, the Teatro Olimpico. The event was not only available as a live-stream online, but the team of organizers also set up an additional live-streaming location not far away from the theater. In my talk, I focused a lot on the research I am currently doing for my dissertation, in which I look at emerging practices of civic engagement on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In particular, I related the use of social media during the large scale protest events around the turn of the decade such as Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring to anti-corporate discourses that have been popping up frequently on Twitter over the course of the last couple of years. I am very happy about the talk I have given. However, developing that talk was easier said than done, and it really reminds me of the importance of audience awareness which I frequently emphasize to my students who have taken the classes I teach at Georgia State. The first thing to note is that a TEDx conference, despite featuring academic researchers as speakers, doesn’t really compare to … Continue reading

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Amazon vs. the Authors

  October 12, 2014

Amazon’s stranglehold over the ebook market has led to strong-arm practices. Initially, the online seller’s attempts to control (i.e., limit) sales of the publisher Hachette was seen as a problem for Hachette (and its writers) alone. Gradually, however, other authors began to wonder what would prevent Amazon from exercising its influence in more and more offensive ways, leading them consider whether the “Justice Department [ought] to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.” An article from the New York Times asks:  “What are the rights and responsibilities of a company that sells half the books in America and controls the dominant e-book platform?” By choosing to place certain books (on certain subjects) on sale, or to ship more quickly, Amazon is able to privilege some political views over others. Of course, merchants can always influence or express political views through their sales and product lines. The difference is that Amazon has a vast influence on book selling, particularly ebook selling. In Ursula k. LeGuin words: “Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.” The Times article in particular describes the coming together of a diverse group of authors, some amongst the most well-known in American letters, to form Authors United. A letter signed by the assembled group and sent to Amazon’s Board of Director’s  protested Amazon’s sanctioning of Hachette authors’ books, stating: … Continue reading

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Gettin things rollin…

  October 9, 2014

Cool, so we built our first “pre-viz” versions of the wiki, but it didn’t look like anything we wanted it to look like because the default wiki sandbox doesn’t have a css editing plugin. I tried other sandboxes, ways of editing a page, and even just straightforward code, but nothing really worked. I did find this app for Google Chrome called Stylish: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en. Pretty cool. It enables you to add your own css stuff right into the app so any page you look at is customized to your liking. I used that and our css profile to make wikipedia look different and show our design. Anyways, we decided to open a wikispace so that we could put in some content. We are not going to fiddle with it now, but we are creating separate blogs to try and create another brainstorm type thing. Once we figure out the how the info fits in to different slots, it’ll work out fine. ————————————————————————————- Three.js page for the SIF Sharepoint website is up which is AW3SOM3. Now, people will be able to look at different,cool things that can be used for other purpose other than different, cool things that just look different or cool. :/ Anyways, it’s a big step in things for that little side project/fun time thing. I’m trying to be straight up on my goals and perspectives for that…”thing” because I don’t want it to be a project or something, but more as a thing where SIFs can just drop … Continue reading

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Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

  October 9, 2014

When we think about communities and ethnicities, most of us would agree that we’re striving for diverse communities which value community. But new studies on communities and diversity are showing something different; that people tend to clump together based on race. According to recent study featured on the on The Atlantic’s City Lab, people tend to value diversity less when their neighborhood is actually diverse. Interestingly enough, people will value diversity more when their own neighborhood is less diverse, according to this study as well. It’s not to say that these are iron clad laws of diversity. It’s no secret that this evidence was collected via a computer model, and we don’t actually live in computer models. But the outlook of these findings isn’t meant to be bleak. It could just be that when we look really close up at the make up of our communities, we find that people tend to stick to what they know, gravitating towards neighbors that look like them. Zooming out a bit we may see our cities as more diverse city, despite having less diverse neighborhoods. So let’s put this to the test. How diverse are our cities really? To find out I pulled up this map at CURVE. The map shows a total of 308,745,538 color coded dots. Each dot represents one person in living in the U.S. according to 2010 census data. The results aren’t surprising if you know an area well. Atlanta, for example, has far more blue dots (white people) on the north … Continue reading

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What a Long and Great Week!

  October 9, 2014

Hello All! As you can probably tell–I’ve spent a great deal of time this week hacking my Edublogs WordPress CSS. It involved opening up the source code in Firefox’s debugger and figuring out all the various tags, <DIV>’s I could change around–it was surprisingly difficult and time-consuming. Often, simply targeting id’s or classes wouldn’t work on overriding the built in CSS and required strange workarounds. I still couldn’t find a way to change the background color that actually worked; I had to change it in the actual WordPress dashboard–which let’s me change the background color of 3 things–the background one of them. There are still a few issues I’m working through today–some unexpected side effects. The z-indices are breaking some of the <a> links(they’re hiding behind a layer that I’m still attempting to figure out). Hopefully it won’t take me too long today–but I want to get this finished today. Why? Because I need to work on other things that are more long-term important–like the 3D environment, which has seen some pretty good progress as well. Brennan, Alexandra, Thomas and I had a pretty great meeting earlier with Michael Page from Emory who is already working on a reconstruction of Atlanta in the 1930s on a much larger scale. It will be great to share resources with them, and our project will dovetail nicely, because as it turns out–we’re using the same engine, Unity, to build and environment. We figured out some obstacles and challenges in our discussion that I … Continue reading