This and That

Combining waves can make for quite spectacular effects. The June edition of Physics Today has two interesting articles available for free describing such situations:

• In Probing stars with optical and near-IR interferometry, Theo ten Brummelaar, Michelle Creech-Eakman, and John Monnier explain how "new high-resolution data and images, derived from the light gathered by separated telescopes, are revealing that stars are not always as they seem." Now, the combination of radio telescopes to synthesize huge telescope apertures and gain the corresponding angular resolution is a well-established technique.
  But adding interferometrically the wave crests of visible light from a star collected in two separate telescopes is a more recent development. Performing some Fourier transforms results in images with an angular resolution of milli arcseconds - enough to see a human on the moon, or to resolve the size and shape of stars.
  
  
  Altair in the constellation Aquila, about twice as big as the Sun and 18 light years away, is rotating rapidly so that it is flattened. The image on the right has been created using interferometry with light waves. Credit: Ming Zhao (University of Michigan), from Imaging the Surface of Altair, John D. Monnier et al, arXiv:0706.0867v2.



• Ocean waves are generated by fluctuating wind pressure on the water surface. Due to the dispersion of the phase velocity (longer waves run faster) and a weak interaction between different waves transferring energy to longer waves, dominant waves are the bigger the stronger and longer the wind blows. Together with the effect of opposing ocean currents, very big waves can emerge. In Rogue waves, Chris Garrett and Johannes Gemmrich look at the "rich and challenging physics [...] behind the gigantic ocean waves that seem to appear without warning to damage ships or sweep people off rocky shores."
  
  
  Rogue wave in the Bay of Biscay, France. Credit: NOAA Photo Library, via Wikipedia.
  

---

6.6.: DJ Supermarkt @ Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf

It's really rare that i play my birth town, since the great UNIQUE club closed down and this time it looks like a cool party...

Come and have an Altbier with me!

How R&E networks can help small business

[Here is an excellent blog from the BCnet web site describing the benefits of transit exchanges for small businesses in British Columbia. BCnet and several other R&E networks such as KAREN in New Zealand operate transit and/or peering exchanges for the benefit of their research and education institutions. Not only do these facilities provide a valuable service to their members in terms of providing competitive access to multiple service providers locally, they also help small businesses and community networks to access a number of competitive commercial providers. BCnet has established a number of transit exchanges at several communities throughout British Columbia and operates them on the community’s behalf—BSA]

https://wiki.bc.net/atl-conf/display/BCNETPUBLIC/2009/05/27/Transit+Exchange+helps+Novus+Entertainment+Save+on+Internet+Costs+and+Improve+Performance

Transit Exchange helps Novus Entertainment Save on Internet Costs and Improve Performance
Novus Entertainment Inc., a Vancouver-based premier service provider for television, high speed Internet and digital phone, is claiming cost savings and improved performance by connecting to BCNET's Vancouver Transit Exchange.
Chris Burnes, Manager of ISP Operations with Novus Entertainment, is responsible for connecting Novus to the BCNET Transit Exchange. Burnes spoke to us about his experience, "We came into BCNET's Transit Exchange at Harbour Centre on a one month trial to test out the waters. During that first month, we immediately received customer feedback about the improved network performance. Particularly, we have a number of university students residents and they have found the network to be extremely fast when they are collaborating and sharing data with the universities in Vancouver.'' Novus Entertainment has been using the BCNET Transit Exchange for over two years.

Novus delivers advanced high speed Internet services to Metro Vancouver's high-rise residents. Their claim to fame is delivering the fastest residential service in Western Canada and having built their own state-of-the-art fibre optic network throughout downtown Vancouver. Their residential network boasts speeds of up to 50 Mbps without a modem.
Peering Delivers Cost Savings
Novus is directly peering with BCNET and over 40 different research and higher education organizations, as well as industry and government, at the Vancouver Transit Exchange. Burnes commented, "One of the biggest advantages to peering with BCNET and its members is that we are realizing large cost savings by reducing our data trafficking fees. We can siphon off a portion of our traffic through BCNET, rather than the traffic going to one of our upstream providers, which would incur a megabit per second fee. Through BCNET's Transit Exchange, we have the most direct access."
A Marketplace of Internet Services
In addition, the Exchange provides a marketplace to purchase network services from nine commercial Internet upstream providers. The advantage of having a "shopping mall" of service providers at one central location, according to Burnes, is the simplicity and low cost of switching providers. Burnes says, "If we want to get the most competitive transit fees, we can easily switch providers at the Vancouver Transit Exchange. It is as simple as getting a VLAN to a new provider."
Finally, Burnes has a larger vision for the future. He sees the growth potential of the Exchange and the opportunity to form new alliances with organizations that are connected to the Exchange, "Interconnecting opens up new possibilities for partnerships and collaborations with Vancouver organizations." Burnes is currently talking to a few Vancouver organizations that are peering at the Exchange about potential business ventures.

We Need Freedom

From the Associated Press:

As visiting journalists walked by, two of the inmates held up sketch pads on which they had scribbled "We need freedom." One of them shouted: "Is Obama communist or democrat?"

The protesters were Uighurs, Chinese Muslims swept up in the Bush administration's Afghanistan war, and their brief protest was indicative of the frustration building up in the Guantanamo Bay prison over the likelihood that freedom will take longer than they expected after Barack Obama became president and ordered the prison closed by January.

In Obama's less than five months in office, the U.S. military has opened communal spaces and started building a new classroom in the prison, and some cell blocks now have satellite television, DVDs and wireless headphones. But nearly half the detainees are still locked up alone for most of the day, and one of every eight prisoners is on hunger strike.

Shane Kadidal, who meets with detainees as an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said expectations for dramatic change have ebbed. He said prisoners know that only two prisoners have been released since Obama took office, compared with more than 500 under the administration of former President George W. Bush.

"They're saying, 'At least Bush sent some people home,'" he said.

Some inmates report an increase in hostilities as guards clash with inmates counting down the months to the January deadline.

"Oppression has increased," wrote Adnan Latif, a Yemeni detainee, in an April letter shortly before he slashed his wrist while meeting his attorney. "The best thing that I can hope for is death."

On Monday night a Yemeni detainee was found dead in his cell, an "apparent suicide," the military said.

aseigo.brain().idle();

Yesterday was "one of those days" for me where my brain just refused to kick into gear. This happens every so often. Think of it as a sort of Paris-in-my-mind where the workers just up and strike every so often refusing to let the creative juices get moving. Inconvenient, but then I push myself pretty hard at times so I'm just happy it doesn't happen more often. ;)

So I took care of boring and mundane things, the sort of things I can do without my creativity cap on. Today, however, the Parisian mob was back at work and my fingers are moving again. On the day after such events, I always feel compelled to try and work a bit harder to make up for time lost. I'm perhaps overly aware of my own mortality and that I have been given only so many days in this life to do the things I wish to do.

This didn't stop others from kicking ass and taking names in the wild worlds of Qt, KDE and Plasma, though.

The people behind KDE Latino have been organizing a great KDE presence for the Latinowarea event in October, and I think we may have found some additional resources to bring even more people to it and set up an actual KDE Developer Sprint in conjunction with the event. It's still in the early planning stages, but if it all goes down according to plan I think this will be the first developer sprint KDE e.V. will have helped fund in South America. Hopefully the first of many ...... :)

Then Jani Hautakangas showed up on the plasma-devel mailing list with this nugget:

Yes, that's Plasma running an S60 device. Jani had to craft a few patches for KDE's libraries to make it all go (hopefully we'll get those patches and upstream all the ones we can!), but when he was done it all worked on his S60 device. As is evident from the video, we still have some work to do, but it shows that KDE and Plasma are indeed in the right ballpark to run on today's mobile devices... even the smaller ones like phones, and even ones running operating systems other than Linux.

Marco also posted a blog entry showing what the Plasma Netbook interface looks like after ~1 week of work by two people (Artur being the other). Neither are paid (yet? :) to work on this stuff, and yet the results are already impressive. You can read Marco's blog to learn more about the newspaper-style widget layout, the Search and Launch full screen interface and what else is coming down the pipe. We are eschewing the desktop paradigm completely here: no home desktop, no taskbar (we use "present windows" for that instead, giving you an overview only when you need it) and an emphasis on full-screen usage. You can grab the .ogg file from Marco's blog, or preview it via Youtube here:

What could you make with one week and two people working on it as they can in their own time? No other primary user interface ("desktop" is one PUI paradigm) framework that I know of comes close to providing the tools to do what Marco and Artur have just done. They key is re-usability coupled with an intentional bias towards being able to re-purpose objects. (Oh, and props to the KWin devs for making the desktop effects rock so we can take advantage of them ... :)

We (the Plasma community) also did another round of design and API work on the remote Plasmoids and QtKinetic-based animations system projects. Along with the other SoC projects and our usual development frenzies, Plasma is set to take another major step forward and we'll be sure to share it all with you as it lands.

This is one of the things I love about Plasma development: we hit new plateaus with each release (one Tech Republic said Plasma is "widgets done right"), and it feels great; but then we go and best ourselves with the next release. I don't know how many releases in a row we can keep this up (one expects there is a limit to the sky somewhere out there, right? ;) but I'm absolutely loving how we are progressing.

We already know some of the important components that will be released with 4.4 in January 2010, so we can safely say that the roof on the sky not not yet have been reached even two years out after the first actual release of Plasma (which followed quite a bit of design and development prior to that).

We're able to do this because we have a clear design philosophy that permeates the entire project and which we do not allow ourselves to compromise on. In turn, a very "hooked in" community with a steady stream of new faces has evolved around this efforts. Clarity and community: they are two ingredients to a successful project that produces tangible results. Many of the people in our Plasma community go on to work on other parts of KDE and even Qt itself as well, so the effects are not limited to Plasma itself either.

(Example: one of the main developers working on Qt's animation framework started as one of Kevin's University students and got sucked into Plasma and eventually went to work as a Troll; many more go on to work on areas of KDE itself that needs more hands than Plasma does.)

NEW SONGS AND NEW ALBUM NAMED 89

The Bear Quartet

This is a bear quartet which has nothing to do with THE Bear Quartet.

Finally. My favourite band, The Bear Quartet, is back! With a new gig in Stockholm at Hornstull Strand, on the 10th of June. And a new record. Its name? 89. Ninety-nine like 1989, the year the Berlin wall fell, the year Internet was invented. Or maybe ninety-nine like 1789, the year of the French Revolution. Well, talking about revolution when you mention BQ does not really make sense : every album of theirs is a revolution compare to the previous one.

So how about their new sound? Just go there : thanks to their new label Adrian Recordings, you can listen to four of their new songs. It seems that 89 is gonna be more accessible, much more pop/rock than their two latest kind of experimental albums. The electro touch remains though, and according to those four songs, the sound of this record is more heterogeneous than their previous ones. The lyrics, as usual, are brilliant, like this obscure line "repeat the norm until it’s known by every heart sequence" which could be the anti-thesis of what BQ does. Oh, I forgot : their new songs are fucking great.

PS : time to reread the previous Mattias Alkberg and Calle Olsson (two BQ members) long interviews I did for Absolut Noise.


Pour mes compatriotes français

Finalement. Mon groupe préféré, le Bear Quartet est de retour ! Avec un nouveau concert à Stockholm le 10 juin. Et un nouveau disque. Son nom 89. Quatre-vingt neuf comme 1989, l'année de la chute du mur de Berlin, l'annéee où Internet a été inventé. Ou peut-être quatre-vingt neuf comme 1789 et la Révolution Française. Mais parler de révolution lorsqu'on évoque BQ est un peu ridicule : chacun de leur disque est une révolution par rapport au précédent.

Quoi de neuf niveau musical ? Allez donc voir vous-même : grâce à leur nouveau label Adrian Recordings, vous pouvez écouter quatre de leurs nouveaux titres. Il semblerait que 89 soit plus abordable, et beaucoup pus pop/rock, que leur deux dernières productions limites expérimentales. La touche électro demeure cependant et l'ensemble apparaît plus hétérogène qu'à l'accoutumé. Comme d'hab, les paroles dépotent, avec des phrases un peu obscures comme "repeat the norm until it’s known by every heart sequence" (="répéter la norme jusqu'à ce qu'elle soit assimilée par chacune des fréquences cardiaques") qui pourrait à elle-seule constituer l'anti-thèse de la philosophie de BQ. Ah j'oubliais : leurs nouvelles chansons sont carrément énormes.

PS : il est temps de lire à nouveau les longs interviews de Mattias Alkberg et Calle Olsson (deux des membres de BQ) que j'avais faits pour Absolut Noise.

Allergy-Friendly Restaurants, NYC

Welcome Allergic Living newsletter readers! Please, have a look around the Allergic Girl site, the Allergic Girl Recommends site; join us for a family Worry-free Dinners luncheon if you’re visiting NYC this summer (our next one is June 28th at 11:30am), join me on Twitter.com and please email me at allergicgirl@gmail.com if you have any questions.

In Södermalm on Svartensgatan: Emmy Andersson

blazer -- H & M

metallic "purse" -- she told me it was Marc by Marc Jacobs

jean shorts -- second hand

t-shirt -- Cheap Monday

Is Osama Bin Laden Alive or Dead?

A friend referred me to this link at Fox News of the 2001 report of Bin Laden's death. In addition, the late Benazir Bhutto said in an interview that Bin Laden was killed. Did she mean to say someone else? Arab TV has said that Cheney had ordered Bhutto killed. What?

Seems very odd, if you believe he's dead, that we're still getting reports of Bin Laden's "threats." Either the US gov and media are incompetent, some political insiders are secret friends of his, and/or he is being used as an imaginary "boogeyman."

A trip to Wikipedia has more about his reported death.

On the other hand, we couldn't find Eric Robert Rudolph in the mountains. This article on Bin Laden's #2 illustrates how good he could be at hiding.

Things that make you go Hmmm...

Novemberrejse by Krass Clement

Krass Clement is known for his great book Drum from 1996 but did you know that he is a seasoned book maker with 17 other publications under his belt? While at the Fotobook Festival in Kassel I was able to get a hold of two as well as see a few of the others and this larger exposure has me begging the question - Why is Krass Clement not more well known?

Krass's approach can seem traditional at first - it's black and white, small camera, etc - it uses a language which I think people immediately pigeon-hole as old-fashioned or not 'contemporary' and this is a shame because it merits much further attention than it obviously gets.

His book Drum was rumored to have been made with 'three rolls of film and five pints of Guinness' while in a small pub in Drum, Ireland. It is a book which on first glance looks very traditional in regard to its design and format until you start to follow the sequence. People have spoken of its filmic quality due to the repetition of images and concentration on a small amount of time (a few hours? an hour? 30 minutes?) as one character in the bar slowly moves off to drink alone and it is within these subtle (often very subtle) shifts in the pictures that minor changes in body language become all the more meaningful. What is most difficult, is that being filmic wouldn't be enough without each image standing on its own.

A few of Krass's books employ this implied sequential method and his newest book from Gyldendal, Novemberrejse does so beautifully.

The book opens with a prelude of sorts. We enter a town, it is dark and the air is hazy with fog, the interior of a barber shop shows signs of life and we watch from the window a few men finishing their days work. Quickly Clement establishes through just a few photos that we are looking through someone else's eyes. This is not photography as a fly on the wall omniscient observer, whoever this protagonist is, they're made of flesh and blood and like us, they are exploring unfamiliar territory.

Novemberrejse, or November Journey, is an implied narrative of a stranger visiting a small town (Rubjerg in Denmark). You get the feeling he is a stranger first from the general tenor which is a bit dark, lonely and melancholy but also because he (it seems like a man to me) doesn't seem to be able to connect with the natural rhythms of the town. He wanders observing and re-observing the lay of the land and some of the repetition of the images act as a way of establishing landmarks - familiar territory - tracing and re-tracing steps. The white building on the book's cover is seen within the sequence twice as if passed multiple times on the street.

He seems out of sync with life. The stores are mostly shuddered and for a short while the only human connection is observing a few people waiting at a bus stop across from his rooming-house window. When he is invited into the parlors or kitchens of the local's homes the warmth of new connections only lasts as far as the door's threshold before the mist and grey skies dampen spirits.



Towards the end of his stay he is met with different servants or guides; a man in a bowtie, the hotel staff, and finally a haunting image of a ferry worker directing us onto the ship. It is dark and after the implied stasis of the previous sequence, we may be entering a boat that will either provide escape or further loneliness. The tenor is not offering much in the way of promise.

As I mentioned before, the sequence alone would not hold water if it weren't for the prowess of the photographer in making great individual images. They are graceful and finely constructed frames, full of information and tonality that extends into the deep shadows.

Vertical in format, Novemberejse is fairly traditional in design but elegant none the less with fine choices of material. The printing is well done although perhaps the choice of a finer printing screen might have been wise on the part of the publisher. A very minor criticism for this book but I think a finer screen would better serve the grace of his print tonalities. I know I have already pointed out a few books which are my "best of's" for the year but Novemberrejse has secured a slot very high on the list. This is a new favorite. Perhaps because I find a connection in image making similar to my own or maybe simply because I like being within his photographs



Another of Krass's books I was able to get a hold of is Hvor Ingen Talte. This is an entire body of work shot on one day during a state funeral in Moscow on August 24, 1991.

Again, on first glance the 38 photographs that make up Hvor Ingen Talte will seem to follow in the traditions of a street documentary-style genre except the repetition of form to each image hints at an almost conceptual frame reigning over the whole body of work. Each image describes a few figures within the frame, some aware of the photographer and some not. Photographed from a relatively close distance, they are direct but not confrontational like Klein or Winogrand. These are calmer images that contain a grace common to Clement's images.

Whereas Weegee famously turned from the event towards the crowd for a more human expression of event, Clement keeps from providing much in the way of information regarding the significance of this event rather his are mostly unguarded moments fully implying a gauge of the inner thoughts of the individuals. Small gestures as simple as the clasp of hands or twist of the shoulders while leaning on a fence - the rewards of each image reveal themselves seductively.

The repetitive form invites perception of the pictures as an on-going train much like the long pan of a newsreel camera. In fact, the observant will notice individuals at the edge of one frame sometimes appear in the next. Only occasionally is this line broken with a vertical or an image that completely breaks from the rest through approach but all add up to a group portrait during a collective moment.

Hvor Ingen Talte isn't the best example of fine bookmaking as the materials and design are so ubiquitous of so many photobooks from the late 1980s early 90s it seems generic, which is a real missed opportunity. It isn't going to be the package that draws you to discover these pictures but take my word for it, it is a fine body of work that again amazes me that this was from one day's worth of film.

The Spray and Pray Pitch

Spray and Pray, Dialing for Dollars. Both are mass pitch approaches that show more desperation than strategy. We’ve seen the unfortunate results of these approaches when a Jewish Mommy Blogger is invited to attend an event during Passover or a vegan blogger gets pitched about barbecue.

We cringe, we shake our heads and either forward it like it’s hot or give thanks we didn’t make the misstep.

Today we received another bad pitch that exposes media list targeting so poor it suggests, at best, a complete lack of social insight.

----
From the Editor in Chief and Publisher of Gay List Daily:

I got this totally misdirected pitch this morning -- keep in mind Gay List Daily is a GAY publication (we're like DailyCandy for the gays). When we gays get it on, we don't worry about pregnancy and whether pulling out is more or less effective at stopping babies from showing up in our bellies than condoms.

Begin forwarded message:
Date: June 3, 2009 9:45:42 AM CDT

The "Pull Out" Method Rivals Condoms? Interview Opp
Hi [Editor in Chief’s Name],

A recent study published in the June issue of Contraception Magazine presents findings that the “Pull Out” method of birth control rivals the use of condoms. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/reprints/Contraception79-407-410.pdf

Published by sex researcher Rachel K. Jones and based on several studies and data from the Guttmacher Institute, the study indicates that “pulling out” before ejaculation is nearly effective as condoms in preventing pregnancy – calling the method “only slightly less effective” than condoms. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/28/health/main5045514.shtml

This study has clearly raised concerns amongst healthcare experts, with lively opinions and debate being expressed across the media. To speak with 20 year veteran on contraception, CLIENT, please contact me. CLIENT is an industry expert and can provide commentary and insight on the study, as well as answer relevant questions.

[SIG FILE]
----

The mind races with snark.

But lately people have given us a hard time when we vent about poor media list targeting that can turn any pitch into a bad pitch. Well it’s examples like the one above that fuel that fire and ultimately inspired this blog. ‘Nuff said.

Four days old... big smile :)

So, I think this might be "the" photo. I have been trying to decide on a photo to include in my thank-you cards, and I think this may be it :) I still have some photos to sort through, but I really like this one. It was taken when she was 4 days old. That was a really good day! Faith was just full of big smiles that day... from ear to ear. Looking back, I would say that was one of the happiest days of my life.

kiss

Manono, the adult male LOVES Claudine. he goes bonkers every time he sees her. Here he's giving her a smooch through the fence. no doubt if the fence wasn't there he would have leapt into her lap

Sculpties, Emails, Neighbours

Sculpty classes missed: 1 (bad); Discussion lists and SL groups spammed with notice about 4th June meeting: 10 (good: unless you got all 10 of them, I suppose); SLED post score: 28 (good, ish); Lucky chair dresses snagged by alt: 1 (yay!)
On Monday attended first Educators Coop chat for a while. Unfortunately had not been able to go to a making-sculpties class organised by Rx, which was shame as sounded v. good. Pic shows Rx and a cube he used with screenshots of how to do things. Also shows unflattering view of Bluewave typing, sorry about that, Bluewave.

Received notice about Educators Coop Retreat at end of month which sounds v.v. cool, so looking forward to that. Remember RL friend going on retreat where chocolate was forbidden and she had to sneak out to munch furtively on a kit-kat bar. Obvious advantage of virtual retreat is that can be indulging in all sorts of pleasures of flesh (within reason) whilst simultaneously taking part in retreat.

Have sent out oodles of emails and notices re the meeting tomorrow at noon SL time, in which (I hope) people will turn up with good ideas for developing the H1N1 (or, as I choose to call it in populist fashion, swine flu) information literacy build. At what point does this become spam? Hope someone will tell me if it does.

A SLEDer has analysed all the SLED posts for the last couple of years and posted a list of how many posts each person has sent. Rolig Loon came top, Graham also topped the 100 post mark, proving what a helpful person he is. I came in (as my RL alt) at 28 posts. Fear that most of those were announcements of meetings, as rarely contribute otherwise. On other hand, organising discussions is a contribution. They certainly aren't doing my career much good, anyway, so I hope someone is deriving benefit. (Hmm, must have had a glummer day than I thought)

On to more cheerful and even less impactful matters: have been zipping round moving the island from spring to summer, ripping out flowering cherries, bluebells and tulips, and putting in birch & aspen trees, garlic mustard and poppies, plus a couple of lavender bushes outside the Centre. As a finishing touch the sushi bar has been replaced by a retro barbecue (2nd pic): you can get wearable hamburgers, kebabs and - something else - is it sausages? I really mustn't go back in to SL just to find out.

Back on my own land, yet more new neighbours, these ones (last pic) with a rather more morbid tone than usual. Note the twin skeletons holding hands across their graves. However, was much cheered to get unsolicited IM from complete stranger just to say she'd wandered onto my land and liked it a lot.

P.S. Dimitrova finally got her free Pizzacato Poppies dress after a mere extra hour of waiting. It was almost worth it. But not quite.

Upcoming Conferences

I'll be traveling quite a bit  in the coming months. The next days I am in Boston at the SUSY '09. In July I'm at the FQXi conference in Ponta Delgada. I meant to go to the Marcel Grossman meeting in Paris, but they still haven't managed to let me know whether my talk was accepted. Meanwhile, there is no way I will ever get a hotel room around July 14th in Paris, so I won't be going. (If you are involved with the organization of that meeting, shame on you.) I'm considering to go to the "Quantum to Cosmos" meeting in Bremen, but haven't yet made up my mind, and later I'll be at the Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy in, oohm, Atlanta I guess. Besides that I will probably be busy with my upcoming move. 

For my recent trip to Denver I obviously forgot that visitors to the USA are now supposed to apply online for a "travel authorization." Thus, a dismayed officer left an url in my passport to remind me to fill out the webform in a timely manner for my next trip. After I figured the ESTA website doesn't load at all with Google Chrome, I indeed managed to submit the relevant data and hope to have a smooth trip.

Should our paths cross at any of these places, it is always nice to meet readers, so don't hesitate to say hello!

Ooops, just read the registration fees for the Bremen meeting, I'm not going.

Lazy Blogger in a Wrinkly Dress

I haven't exactly been in a mood for blogging lately, there's just been way too many things going on in my life.

Wish I had someone to iron my clothes and take my pictures for me.
Last Night Anna-Maria was kind enough to do the latter in a club's restroom at Deerhunter's gig.





Today I managed to get a new haircut and find our electric iron, so I guess I'm going to be in a much more presentable state soon. Perheps it's time to revive this blog as well.

..But not before I'm done watching Evil Dead 2!

“Two Ships Passing in the Night”: Missing Communication in Medical Practice

As I read the comments written to the threads on patient modesty, hysterectomy, “I hate doctors”, it seems to me that a basis for much of the tension and unhappiness with the medical profession is related specifically to a lack of communication between doctor and patient or the patient’s families. The patients fail to tell the doctor what are their goals and wishes and the doctor doesn’t ask and therefore may set goals or actions which appear appropriate to the clinical situation but in fact is not at all what the patient wants. It’s almost like two ships passing in the night, each going their own way, each with their own goals and experiences but not communicating with each other to warn, perhaps, about rough seas ahead or the conditions aboard ship.


This communication gap in medical practice, I think, is related to lack of time or simply ignorance or inattention on the part of the physician and the apparent power difference between the patient and doctor so that the patient may feel embarrassed, intimidated or unsure about the consequences of speaking out.


What are your ideas about the issue of doctor-patient communication? Don’t write about the specific views covered in the above threads, which can be more appropriately discussed by writing directly to those threads, but write here about your views of whether you see communication generally as a problem and what approaches you would offer to mitigate the problem. ..Maurice.

Graphic: Photograph by me of two snails passing and color modified by Picasa3.

LDN010

DVA "Bullet A'Go Fly ft Badness, Riko, Flowdan, Killa P (original and Dusk + Blackdown remix)" download available on Boomkat Digital now.

Vinyl and iTunes soon come. Check clips on YouTube here.

Next up on Keysound LDN011 Naptha "Soundclash 1 (Grievous Angel VIP)"/Grievous Angel "Harpy". And then following that...

The Pitch That Cried Wolf

There are only so many reporters and bloggers covering the field or industry you play in, whether it’s automotive technology, software, clothing, or architectural design. With time and experience, you will wind up speaking to them all one day—or their brethren. In a world of instant communication and shrinking inner circles, a PR person who cries wolf with a few off-the-mark pitches is blackballed in a hurry.



There’s nothing the media dislikes more than vapor (a non-story), so don’t pitch it. Click over to Business Wire, PR Web, or any of its ilk on a given day and you can count up hundreds of thousands of dollars spent propagating vapor news. “Small Company A Signs Agreement with About-to-Fold Company B” or “InterSliceTech.com Launches Bleeding-Edge Customer Tracking Functionality.” Find us a journalist who actually wants to write about topics like that (how do they affect anyone else besides the people who wrote the releases?) and we will tip our hats to that PR person (who has a reporter cousin, of course).

The danger in vapor is that it builds a name for you quickly. The wrong name. If you’re dabbling in handheld technology, say, and you pitch Jason Kincaid, well-known gadgetry guy from TechCrunch, on every software upgrade, he’s going to learn very rapidly not to take seriously any pitch you send his way. Who cares? The danger is that when you have real news, the kind that matters, such as the launch of your new device that makes the iPac shake in its boots, Jason will not pay attention because you’ve proven yourself to be a vapor merchant.

Before you blast out a cluster bomb of e-mails or send that release over the wire, consider long and hard what’s interesting about it. Is it fascinating just because you’ve spent three tireless months working on the content? Is it amazing because your latest noodling brings you one step closer to a competitor that no one’s ever heard of? If that’s the case, hold off and wait ’til you have something worthier of the presses; in other words, don’t believe your own story too much.

Larger public companies are especially guilty of pushing vapor into the press. There’s a theory out there, one we don’t subscribe to, that if you don’t have a steady, weekly stream of information crossing the wires—also known as “the machine”—your business’s progress has sunk to an uncompetitive pace. Remember that with public companies, their news unfortunately engenders an article or two (unfortunately, because it makes the firm think that what they put out is urgent, and so it compels them to keep the vapor machine oiled).

Yet when this non-urgent-news-pushing firm truly has something worth chatting about, the press may not bite. Everyone at the firm scratches their heads and wonders why. But reporters and analysts are glazed over from the hundreds of newsless missives shot through that PR cannon. And they are all too familiar with firms that cry wolf.

The take-away is that vapor works only rarely. For example, it did for the whole of Seinfeld. If what you desire is respected coverage continually, sit on the vapor (“CEO sneezed today!”), and don’t put it out. You’ll only numb the reporters who should care and who should notice that what you do is important. Being important is paramount.

For more topics like this, follow www.twitter.com/laermer

Anne McDonough's Turner Hall Decorate Your Own Cupcake Birthday Party!

The first Monday of each month we have a birthday party for our colleagues born in that month...this month Anne McDonough (smiley person on far left) was the only birthday person! Margaret and I decided it would be fun to make it an interactive birthday party and have everyone decorate their own cupcakes!


We each made two dozen cupcakes...vanilla and chocolate...and brought in canned frosting...vanilla and chocolate....and toppings galore...and little doodads like toppers, funny cupcake things and the like.



The party was a huge success...the men were a bit intimated by the hubbub...but they eventually came in an grabbed an unadorned cupcake to eat!


The decorators were so creative....








In case you can't tell: this is called "Ode to Kitty Litter"....Everything is better when it's sparkly!




This party was so much fun and everyone was chatting away...and eating cupcakes! Happy Birthday, Anne!

CQ will be visiting France next week....ooh lala! We'll see what kind of cupcakes we find there!

Rock On!