“The days of pilot projects are over. When people say we’d like to do 3 or 4000 in our country to see how it works, screw you go to the back of line and someone else’ll do it and then when you figure out this works, you can join as well.”
From a Ted Talk that isn't really worth watching.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuro-anatomist who suffered a stroke in 1996. As a scientist, she realized she had "ringside seats to her own stroke" and proceeded to pay close attention to the details of her trauma and recovery process. That attentiveness has led her to some profound insights about the way human thought and experience is organized, and how changes in our thinking could profoundly alter the way humans choose to live.
Here she is presenting her insights at TED:
I just came home form a meeting with my thesis adviser where I yet again, switched gears with my thesis. She actually pointed to a piece of paper on her board that had (one of) my original ideas pinned to it, and I think wanted to know if she could throw it in the garbage. I said sure thing; any idea that hadn't been mentioned in 6 months was as good as dead as far as I was concerned.
When I got home I turned on the radio and was starting to fry onions in preparation for Jen and I's "Get your drink on, it's Valentines" - dinner, when I heard this piece on the radio.
It's Awesome.
Just a general, kinda tired and cranky query to the general public but especially my pointy-headed friends in academia.
Do you guys ever get frustrated because you feel like if you have to be doing something so cutting edge and novel it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet?
I am just trying to write a project proposal and I feel so un-original, un-inspired and washed-up (and yes, I know, I haven't even written a fucking page of my thesis yet), that I feel like writing an opener like;
This morning, I was reading the first in a set of readings for my production class. The article is called "Principles of Community-Based Action Research" it's all upbeat and pro-active about research that "provides people with the means to take systemic action to resolve specific problems."
The professor or someone, had added a bunch of marginalia to the reading before it was copied for class, so there are little comments littered around the text.
On one page, directly under the sentence :
"These values and assumptions are built into a set of guiding principles that can facilitate a democratic, participatory, liberating, and life-enhancing approach to research."
it says;
"fuck-off"
Oookay, so I won't get my hopes up too much then.
When your incontinent-her-sleep doggie comes and takes a nap on the papers you are using to build arguments in the independent study due in 24 hrs.
I am risking my academic future if I don't take her to the park, she knows this.
Smart little bastard.
It's 12:30am and I just ate an excellent tasting bagel pizza and perhaps have just snacked my way past the point of no return.
So I might as well write a blog entry.
The big news...
I am changing my thesis topic from an exploration through practice of social software applications for non-profits and the volunteer sector. To a study through narrative, interviews and yes, theory, of labour, economics and gender in NEW New media. (ie; Web 2.0)
This stems from a conversation I had with Barb in NYC about Passion Dollars. The idea that in new media or technology one works for ones passion and the "money will follow" or so goes the theory. It's a little different than say, working for a good cause and taking a loss because you are doing the right thing.
I just stared at a patch of sunlight reflected on the floor until it became pulsing fist of light.
Lauryn Hill is singing that song that we have all listened to through at least one break-up if not more. Luckily once you hear it again, it's just a very good song.
Although I still dig up that feeling of walking aimlessly in this weather, though now some years ago, in the same fist of sunshine, down the canal. Headphones jammed so far into my ears it's like I want them to meet in the middle and eviscerate all the painful words echoing in my head.
Anyways, that was then. This is now, and now I have a research direction to explore.. Which is probably why I am becoming melancholic and distracted. For an ambitious person. I sure do hate to work.
So I am sitting here on a Saturday afternoon. I more or less missed the 1.5hrs of blazing sunlight earlier today. I stretched like a house-cat in the window and then got back to work.
I am doing some new research on the connection between technologies of text-reproduction and religious beliefs.
More specifically, and very much thanks to my professors help I am looking at some ideas put forward by Elizabeth Eisenstein that the printing press helped splinter religious practice and belief, juxtaposing that with present technological developments in Bible printing and translation like the Semantic Bible and OSIS.
I have been trying to go to a cafe to read papers for 2.5 hrs now, blame the email.
I just want to say that previous to beginning my MA, I had no idea I was so bad at negotiating power relations. Which is funny, 'cause all the theory I am reading relates to the dynamics of power in communications, and then I stupidly send emails to my professors saying things like:
"I forgot to mention after class yesterday, the paper i just handed in has undergone only one copy edit, mine (yikes). So I have handed it to a friend from the journalism department who knows how to edit and they will send it back to me.
Colophon Syndicate the feeling
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