Friday, June 5, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Photojournalism...
Sculptor David Adickes worked on his large sculpture of President Barack Obama Tuesday at his Houston studio. The 18-foot-tall statue will be installed at President’s Park in South Dakota. (David J. Phillip/Associated Press)
From The Wall Street Journal Pictures of the Day....
http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2009/06/03/pictures-of-the-day-190/
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Race report...
Washington Trail Race 10K 2009
A report from the race in Durham on Memorial Day.... It was a road race with every kind of hill you could possibly imagine or hope for like
short, steep climbs, long difficult gradual climbs, one right out of the gate, undulating hills that kept on giving and even some great varieties of Downhills (not to be confused with the Bimbler known as DH herself!)
I arrived early as advised - but not early enough and I had to park at Perk on Main (crepes to die for) and then walk all the way to the High School through the parade crowds to get myself registered for the race.
"Cool", I thought as I am trying to pile on some 'work outs' to get ready for Nipmuck and I need the training. The skies were overcast and the people watching was awesome!!! After registering I watched the parade where The Durham High School Marching Band
was really giving an incredible performance - if their bodies weren't perfectly synchronized, their tunes surely were.... they were GREAT!! I spotted Trevor and Scoobie in the crowd and we prepared for the race which was to follow the parade.
These two women know how to have a good time - and I think the best part of the day was watching the Kids Fun Run where Charlie & Becky's son really ran with spirit and made us all so proud!! Not all the children participating were able to finish, but they were all passionate about their experiences!!!!
I was running on tired legs after a full weekend of training and just hoped to come into the finish under the one hour mark and without my ankle braces - "JOY!!". The cannon fired ....(something about President George Washington walking in Durham - really cool) and we were off.
I just tried to relax and find a comfortable rhythm - oh and I hoped to see some cows!! Hill after hill - I was running with some locals - everybody in the crowd seemed to know Jim.... lots of people had water for us and hoses were showering us with waterfalls of cooling water. The skies were clear now and it was very humid and very hot in the sun.
I took water at lots of aid stations - the youngest volunteer was about 4 years old and I gladly and humbly accepted his offer of water!! (The crowd loved it, so did I) I wanted to toughen up my feet for the road sections at Nipmuck by running the "Downhills" aggressively and somewhere around mile 4ish is just where out in the crowd
I see and hear Ultra - cheering me on - ....Go IGGY - he was biking and stopped by to cheer us. - Thank you Ultra - your pep talk was JUST what I needed as I was just running "telephone pole to telephone pole" trying to make to the next one....
10K is a little different than the 5 mile Brandford Road Race and I just kept telling myself - "you're at the Brooms now" just a little bit further.... I started that line of thinking WAY too soon into the race, but oh well. Long story - short... I managed to finish better than I thought I would, saw Diana (she needs a code name for the BS) M&M after the race too!
Scoobie won her division and Trevor took second place - just behind Scoobie and both brought home medals for a race that really challenged! I thought I had 2nd for my division - but no!! A computer error and I really won 3rd - so no medal but I did win a prize in the raffle!!!! Thank goodness I didn't win the watermelon as it was a long couple of miles back to the car after the awards, with some more hill repeats. I recommend this race, lots of local fun and prizes! Next up - NIPMUCKNIPMUCKNIPMUCK
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
From Why? to Why Not?
The era when a small set of professionals controlled media creation is over. Anyone can now say anything to anyone. Make no mistake, says Clay Shirky - the web is the biggest media revolution since the printing press
Clay Shirky
The Guardian, Monday 18 May 2009
Article history
The near future of the web is tied up with the logic of present media practice, and the logic of present media practice dates back to Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The problem Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was abundance: once typesetting was perfected, a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. Figuring out which books were worth reading, and which weren't, became one of the defining problems of the literate.
This abundance of new writing thus introduced a new risk as well: the risk of variable quality. A Bible was valuable, almost by definition. But a new work of fiction? Printing a book would incur considerable costs, but who knew if it would be appreciated until after the expense had been incurred? The tension between expensive production and the risk of failure led to a solution, provisional as all technological solutions are: let the people who own the means of production make the editorial judgments. There was no obvious link between the ability to operate a press and sound judgment about quality, but those two functions were nevertheless fused by economics.
Subsequent centuries saw further inventiveness in media. With the mechanised reproduction of images and sound, abundance became, a fortiori, the problem of all media consumers, and the 15th-century solution became the solution to all media. Just as book publishers had done, producers of music and movies, radio and TV would identify and then work with the good material while avoiding the bad. (This pattern was so strong we still make judgments based on production, as with calling someone a "published author", or describing publishers for hire as "vanity presses".)
Though there are obvious internal complexities in this - editing is a type of creation as well as filter - the division of labour was clear: professionals managed the creation and filtering of media, both selecting and improving it; amateurs consumed and discussed it.
That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.
The problem the web has introduced into intellectual life is also one of abundance, but an abundance of producers, not merely production. The speed and scale of this increase, occasioned by the internet and mobile phones and moving from under a million participants to more than a billion in less than a generation, make the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions, and the resulting amateurisation of media creation is still accelerating.
The internet is, in a way, the first thing to deserve the label "media". It is a general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.
The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.
Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.
Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"
This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use it.
• In 1984 Clay Shirky was a sophomore at Yale College, studying painting
Clay Shirky
The Guardian, Monday 18 May 2009
Article history
The near future of the web is tied up with the logic of present media practice, and the logic of present media practice dates back to Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The problem Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was abundance: once typesetting was perfected, a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. Figuring out which books were worth reading, and which weren't, became one of the defining problems of the literate.
This abundance of new writing thus introduced a new risk as well: the risk of variable quality. A Bible was valuable, almost by definition. But a new work of fiction? Printing a book would incur considerable costs, but who knew if it would be appreciated until after the expense had been incurred? The tension between expensive production and the risk of failure led to a solution, provisional as all technological solutions are: let the people who own the means of production make the editorial judgments. There was no obvious link between the ability to operate a press and sound judgment about quality, but those two functions were nevertheless fused by economics.
Subsequent centuries saw further inventiveness in media. With the mechanised reproduction of images and sound, abundance became, a fortiori, the problem of all media consumers, and the 15th-century solution became the solution to all media. Just as book publishers had done, producers of music and movies, radio and TV would identify and then work with the good material while avoiding the bad. (This pattern was so strong we still make judgments based on production, as with calling someone a "published author", or describing publishers for hire as "vanity presses".)
Though there are obvious internal complexities in this - editing is a type of creation as well as filter - the division of labour was clear: professionals managed the creation and filtering of media, both selecting and improving it; amateurs consumed and discussed it.
That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.
The problem the web has introduced into intellectual life is also one of abundance, but an abundance of producers, not merely production. The speed and scale of this increase, occasioned by the internet and mobile phones and moving from under a million participants to more than a billion in less than a generation, make the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions, and the resulting amateurisation of media creation is still accelerating.
The internet is, in a way, the first thing to deserve the label "media". It is a general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.
The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.
Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.
Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"
This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use it.
• In 1984 Clay Shirky was a sophomore at Yale College, studying painting
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