I’m just back from the senior dinner in honor of the majors in Art History, Studio Art, and Architectural Studies. This year’s student show was especially strong in studio. I bought 2 things for the first time – pictures and rationale to follow.
Congratulations to the Classes of 2013!
Last Friday was the first day of warm. It’s still spring, it’s not summer yet – but it was warm enough to walk on the shady side of Main Street on my way home! I was reminded because this morning my apartment seems a little warm at 71, a temperature I would have longed for at coffee-time in February. So I opened a window to let some cooler air in. Aren’t people funny?
Governor Cuomo is mining New York’s state budget to fund a nearly $140 million ad campaign to attract business to the Empire state. The ad campaign—entitled “New York State Open for Business”—has been funded by siphoning tens of millions of dollars from the state’s Power Authority and Energy Research and Development Authority, and another $40 million from the federal aid package the state received to help rebuild after Hurricane Sandy.
Taking money from real things to pay for advertising? Not good.
I didn’t get a lot accomplished this weekend – but I’m on sabbatical, damn it!
Today I did get 2 light bulbs changed and a set of miniblinds back up in the kitchen window. They fell into my arms sometime this winter when I was trying to adjust them and I really preferred the kitchen flooded with light, so I put them in the closet. The weather is already warm enough that the sunlight partly cooked a bunch of bananas as they sat on the kitchen counter, so I picked up a new bracket today and got them back up.
Since I have 12 foot ceilings and live alone I always put in a safety call to a neighbor. If I don’t call her back by a certain time she’s supposed to come check on me. This was a successful outing for the ladder – I was able to call her back with 10 minutes to spell.
Read and see how you can track malaria in Africa, or:
A powerful demonstration of how useful data from cheap phones can be came after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 200,000 people. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute obtained data from Digicel, Haiti’s largest mobile carrier. They mined the daily movement data from two million phones—from 42 days before the earthquake to 158 days after—and concluded that 630,000 people who had been in Port-au-Prince on the day of the earthquake had left the city within three weeks. They also demonstrated that they could do such calculations in close to real time. They showed—within 12 hours of receiving the data—how many people had fled an area affected by a cholera outbreak, and where they went.
via Professor Reynolds.
When you can’t fit the first bottle of limoncello of the summer in there.
My department searched two positions this year – for a tenure track assistant professor of Architectural Studies and for a one-year replacement faculty member in New Media/Video. The first position has been offered and accepted and the second position – well, I hope the committee decided this afternoon on their recommendation!
Once again, I’m glad not to be chair any more!
This seems like a really interesting experiment!
Q: In Light Without Fire, you draw comparisons between Zaytuna — which aspires to combine intensive study of Arabic and the Koran with a liberal arts curriculum loosely based on the Great Books — and other, mostly Christian, religious colleges. Does Zaytuna aim to eventually model itself after evangelical colleges, most of which aim to educate those who share the faith of the colleges’ leaders? Or does it plan to follow the path of some Roman Catholic colleges, which consider their faith a key part of their identity but enroll many non-Catholic students? In other words, would Zaytuna rather be the Georgetown University or the Wheaton College of Islam?
A: In the early days of the school, Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid often tried to describe the school — and their ideas about its founding — in an American historical context, reminding their audiences at the school’s convocation, during fund-raising events, and in radio interviews, that Yale and Harvard were both founded as religious colleges. It’s difficult at this point to see Zaytuna in the model of these Ivies, and it’s not their vision at the moment to expand the school much beyond a total population of 200 students. That size alone to me suggests appealing almost exclusively to Muslim students. And while Islam will likely remain a part of each class the students take, I think the hope of the school will be to appeal to Muslims of all stripes — and even the rare case of a non-Muslim student who finds incredibly appealing the school’s vision of creating morally committed individuals.
This in an interview with Scott Korb, author of Light without Fire, a book observing the start-up of Zaytuna College. I just ordered the book – I’ll tell you what I think.
from Inside Higher Ed
The president undermines that chance when he struggles through a news conference with no apparent theme or overarching purpose other than to catalog his grievances and complain about the lack of cooperation from the other side.
This may well have been the opposite impression from what the president and his people hoped to convey this week. But it happened anyway. Well into his fifth year in the White House, this president still seems ill at ease in the news conference format. He is driven by the energy and conflict of the encounter, rather than the other way around.
This lack of mastery stands in striking contrast to his renown for holding throngs in thrall, at home and abroad. Even in the informality of a Washington dinner (such as the White House Correspondents’ Association gala last weekend), Obama is a gifted presenter, holding forth with the timing and wit of a professional comedian and then turning reflective and serious. Addressing an audience, he is nearly always on.
But in the unscripted free fall of an on-camera news conference, that mastery is notably missing. Early in his first term, the president gave long, professorial answers to every question. When he and his inner circle were dismayed by the distractions and tangential stories that came from these sessions, they came to rely more on one-on-one interviews. Those were more productive from the president’s point of view, but they did not address the underlying fault.
via Instapundit.
The early 17th Century Plaza Mayor in Madrid is really something – quite austere buildings around a huge open square. What surprised me was the approaches – you always enter through a thickness of buildings from another street, and often at something other than perpendicular to the interior geometry. Interesting!
I just changed the gas burner in my grill. I’m marinating some chicken thighs now!
Please go look at Amy Welborn’s photo essay on the whole new pope business. Unless, like my father, you won’t get any of the pop culture jokes because you don’t watch those shows. And even he will get the point about “Did you NEVER read a freakin’ GOSPEL before March 13?” without knowing the setting.
Houghton House is ringing with the sound of the Student Art Show going up – and the campus Café is full, at 9:35 a.m., of students working.
