Science vs. Norse Mythology
Interesting curriculum.

ABC News: Podcasting Spurs a Media ‘Land Grab’
The main insight in this piece, and the reason it was mentioned in a page about WordPress support for podcasting, is that podcasting can expand greatly if mechanisms for obtaining rights to music broadcasting are facilitated. Thing is, there might be wishful thinking involved as the recording industry has been very reluctant to see the long-term possibilities in changes to their practices.

Playlist: Yahoo! Audio Search: It’s a start
We’re pretty much agreed. Will probably not find much use for this search engine in its current form but the concept isn’t completely ill-advised. We need good search engines for sound recordings. It might also show that sound files have become quite commonplace outside of unauthorized file sharing.
Surprising there’s no similar tool in Google Labs…

Le Festival de la parole stimule l’intérêt envers l’expression orale
Not that it’s necessarily unique but it seems to be targeted at a wide audience. A “Speech Festival” bringing verbal art and oral folklore to the fore.

Ceci n’est pas une pub
Situation légèrement touffue au sujet de l’utilisation non-autorisée d’une image de Magritte pour une publicité. On pourrait se demander ce que Magritte lui-même penserait de tout ça.

Two studies in Psychological Science on disambiguation and related phenomena in speech communication.

Which it is it?

Say again?

Much work has also been done in relation to Sperber and Wilson’s “Relevance Theory” which brings together cognition and communication to a broad frame. Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance also helps situate some classic research in pragmatics.

For those of us who work on the more creative/expressive uses of language, there’s this possibility of turning all of these ideas upside-down: ambiguity is a powerful feature of semiotic systems that creators can use to generate heightened significance. In other words, a rapper or a politician may consciously utter ambiguous statements in order to create a more complex “image” in the minds of audience members. And, as per the garden path theory, ambiguous statements require more effort to be understood which, in the case of artful uses of language, might be quite appropriate.

Of course, researchers who seek to understand how listeners can make sense of ambiguous messages may treat us as heretic. But, hey, who’s afraid of the Spanish Inquisition?

Two unrelated studies.

Study finds obesity has effect on disability, not life expectancy, for adults 70

Novel technique offers new look at ancient diet dogma

Educational Weblogs: Podcasting for Education
Some educational uses for podcasting. For anyone whose work relates to sound (through music, speech, natural sounds…), podcasting can become a very elegant delivery method. Interviews, which are quite important for ethnographers, are a very wide domain in and of themselves. For lectures, it might be interesting in some cases to use methods to artificially accelerate the speech rate for some people who have better concentration this way. Of course, many instructors would disagree with exclusive use of recorded lectures yet the idea might be that students come to class after listening to the lectures and use class time for deeper discussions. In some cases, it might just work.
Again, podcasting is only the convergence of existing technologies, each of which being rather commonplace. It’s an interesting intersection of syndication (which may help realize the dreams of ’90s “push” technology), compressed audio (especially MP3), “logs” (blogs, etc.), radio (for overall structure), and asynchronous downloads (as opposed to streaming). Some instructors have already made use of podcasting and there’s room for exploration. Universities’ available bandwidth (especially on-campus) and the pre-targeted content make the most difficult aspects of podcasting relatively unimportant.

Policy DevCenter: Will Congress Ban Municipal WiFi?
Some of this is US-specific and much is happening in the US and elsewhere in terms of municipalities taking their destinies in their own hands.
At this point, it does seem clear that broadband access is almost as important as landline telephone access and postal service. Of course, broadband access may greatly benefit remote areas because telecommuting is possible for a number of people. In fact, this can apply, to a certain extent, to some parts of Africa. Broadband wireless (or wired) brings the local to the global.

Think Glocal!

[Yup! The term’s ugly but the concept’s neat.]

Policy DevCenter: Will Congress Ban Municipal WiFi?
Some of this is US-specific and much is happening in the US and elsewhere in terms of municipalities taking their destinies in their own hands.
At this point, it does seem clear that broadband access is almost as important as landline telephone access and postal service. Of course, broadband access may greatly benefit remote areas because telecommuting is possible for a number of people. In fact, this can apply, to a certain extent, to some parts of Africa. Broadband wireless (or wired) brings the local to the global.

Think Glocal!

[Yup! The term’s ugly but the concept’s neat.]