Ciarán Ryan notebook

Both from Channel 4:

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/arts_entertainment/
art/what+now+for+the+national+trust/2314772

A report by Nicholas Glass - informal but smooth - it rolls along (it felt self-shot to me… but it’s not). Web page just seems to repeat the film script though - a pity.

And the programme after:

19:50	The Truth About Street Weapons
	The Code of Silence This film explores the culture of silence that grips on the Mancunian community in which 15-year-old Jesse James was murdered two years ago.

Good access - the community spoke.
Also no cutaways over the interview edits - jarring and effective with such a powerful subject… can’t seem to watch again on the website… who is the film maker?

Ages ago, I’m sure I heard Bill Cullen say, on Radio 4, that “good luck is when hard work and opportunity collide”

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/and-now-for-the-good-news-1379098.html

Today’s Sunday Times magazine was very strong - May 11 2008.

Follow up on disfigured soldier / photos from crushed Prague uprising - Josef Koudelka, photographer / and a piece about the subject of a forthcoming BBC documentary ‘Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go’ - on BBC4 on Thursday, May 22, at 9pm

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3886308.ece

“The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire – the subject of a film by Kim Longinotto to be shown later this month on BBC4 – looks after children who have been multiply excluded from mainstream primary schools. These are not yet the hooded teenagers of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company: the youngest is just 6, the oldest 12. All of them are thought to have suffered significant neglect in the first two years of life, which has a ruinous effect on brain development. Fundamentally they are still babies. The building blocks of their personalities are not joined. They are chaotic, unpredictable and unable to function in a group without disrupting. That’s the theory. “

** Is there proof that neglect effects brain development? It sounds convincing - and it seems to be becoming a popular view.

Also: “Children with attachment disorders don’t just rage and spit and climb up on roofs: they connect inappropriately to total strangers, looking for warmth.”

======

Also in the newspaper: Spaced learning

Monkseaton, which is a comprehensive in a deprived area, consistently wins high grades and has sent pupils to top British universities and Ivy League colleges in America.

Kelley’s technique, known as “spaced learning”, is based on the research of Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Baltimore. He has found that connections between developing brain cells form most effectively when they are allowed breaks from stimulation.

From Wikipedia: “Cameron Crowe suggests reaching out to the people around us is the key to professional as well as personal success. The famous “Show me the money!” scene, featuring Rod Tidwell demanding Jerry scream his “family motto” back to him over the phone, epitomizes the empty values of those around Jerry, yet somewhat paradoxically it is Rod who serves as a role-model for the family values and personal attention that Jerry seeks. Crowe’s point is that the pursuit of financial success need not be incompatible with family values or personal relationships, simply that it should take second place to them.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Maguire

Trevor Beattie on what focus groups lack: “it’s called conviction, passion, creativity, innovation, disrespect for the mundane”

1999

Tim Berners Lee talked about the semantic web to Tamsin Toddin - The Independent 17 May 1999.

Berners-Lee: “If the Web turns all the documents in the world into one big book, then the semantic web will turn all the databases in the world into one big database”

This allows inter-operability

Seven years on,  the BBC collaborated with Microsoft Live Labs. Photosynth  creates three- dimensional representations of some of the most dramatic buildings in Britain by combining hundreds of different photographs.

Using metadata.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/

A neuron can connect with 80,000 others. Human brain contains 20 billion neurons, capable of 100 trillion connections (does this include the brain gas-stuff used to make connections?).

So in 1999, Charles Jonscher in ‘Wired Life’ book said computers are nowhere near to brains.

And that knowledge is a state of being.

Information is transitive.

“We must not mistake gigabytes for wisdom”

The 2008 Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival will attract many top cartoonists to the Midlands in the UK for three days. Find out more here:

Shrewsbury cartoon festival 2008 preview - includes useful links

Also: there’s lots more information here:

The Bloghorn - The diary of the Professional Cartoonist’s Organisation.

Also: Thanks for leaving a comment Andy - I’ve admired your cartoons in Private Eye for many years.  I’d like to hold you to your offer of a caricature if I make it to Shrewsbury.

Find out more about Andy Davey’s cartoons here: http://www.andydavey.com

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

BBC chief warns of knowledge underclass - 6/4/98

John Birt: “At the heart of the public broadcasting tradition is universality - reaching out to every household in the land - the poor and the prosperous - offering enriching experience and information which extends understanding.”

“Television has become a mirror in which the public likes to recognize itself,” Pivot said. “The public either likes to see itself, or it likes something very far away, exoticism. Culture is neither of those.” Even when programs feature “popular” culture, rap musicians from the Paris suburbs, for example, the emphasis is not so much on what they perform as on how they got there, Pivot says, how they “made” it, so that the viewer can relate and dream how he might “make” it and be a celebrity too.

http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/04/02/pivot.t.php

A Cultural Icon Slams the Poverty of French TV

By Katherine Knorr

Published: THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 1998

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

Hockney on Art (Paperback)
by David Hockney (Author)

Perspective is tyranny  a renaissance invention ( but seen in photography)?

But perspective is the least truthful - cos humans don’t see images that way - human eye engages emotionally. It remembers what the back of the object looks like. Single viewpoint is not the best view. Eye circles and spends time with objects.

Only painting can recreate this real way of seeing - cubism etc

Tim Berners Lee - altruist?

Internet is cables and computer

Web is abstract space or body of knowledge that works on top

He guarded against web’s fracturing and dismantling by not claiming it - it is non-proprietary. He wants it to remain independent.

Its growth has depended on its independence. It not being owned?

He worked for something other than the bottom line - but Darwinian types explain this as being for his own good? Evolutionary advantage is not just wealth? Hmmm

See also: Nonzero: The logic of human destiny - by Rober Wright - evolutionary psychologist.

Information technology - better communication - is even fostered by wars and binds the globe together. The zero-sum game of you win (I lose) has been replaced by You win (I win) -nonzero sum game.

Because better communication means more invention and faster evolution.

Ken Richardson gave a talk at a symposium on the mind held at the Royal institution, London. 1999 (?)

“My argument is that the IQ test is not an objective, scientific instrument at all.

“… we end up with an external score without knowing what the internal quantity it’s supposed to represent really is.

“… it simply measures individuals’ proximity to a specific culture - that of the test designers, and of school learning.”

IQ scores have gone up - which corresponds with the growth of the middle class - would not be expected from an innate fixed power.

“The whole model is psychologically  vacuous and biologically highly naive.”