Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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Politics, Pageantry, and Palin in the Media: Does the 1st female Republican nominee help or hinder feminist advancement?
This year’s election season has been chock-full of historical moments. Hillary Clinton won more primaries and delegates than any other female presidential candidate in American history. Barack Obama is the first African American to be nominated by a major political party for president. And Sarah Palin, Alaska’s first female governor, is the first female Republican vice-presidential nominee.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Creative Blogs to Survive By
We are in that part of the semester where we could use some levity. The past week has been hard for many of us, but rather than get stressed out, I thought I would share some of my favorite creative blogs that never fail to make me think and smile. Consider this my list of "Blogs to Survive By." (And by all means, add your own!)
This blog is genius. By carefully cropping Garfield out of each of Jim Davis’ comic strips, we are left with "the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Weekly Roundup: Blog Picks for October 3, 2008
blockquote {
padding-left: 30px;
}This week’s blog heroes, consider virtual worlds
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Morgan Ames, over at Accretions, shares her recent experience at Burning Man and considers the similarities to Second Life:
"I was thinking about the interviews I did last spring on Second Life
and on my research interests in the role of fantasy worlds in our lives
more generally.Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Thesis Blog: Approaching Open Culture
Writing a thesis on a topic like "Open Culture" is a risky proposition. At best, it’s a cloudy term, subject to misinterpretation and demanding a precise explanation. Since my primary interest is in open source software, I could have written a narrower thesis on copyright vs. copyleft. I certainly considered it.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Technology-Enabled Development Hourglass: Micro-Finance Case Study
(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog – How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Ni Una Mas
Since 1993, almost 400 women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua,
Mexico, a town on the U.S./Mexico border, have been violently murdered
without reason or explanation (Amnesty International). For the most
part, they all fit a certain description; pretty, petite, dark haired,
and extremely poor (Teresa Rodriguez 2007). There are several theories
as to who is behind the killings, ranging from cults, to drug dealers,
to police themselves, however the cases remain unsolved.Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Weekly Roundup: Blog Picks for September 26, 2008
This week’s blog heroes, doing good one click at a time
- In honor of their 10 year anniversary, Google announced their Project 10^100 , a contest based on the idea that “helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.” They are committing $10 million dollars to fund a winning proposal that “will help as many people as possible.”
- Gaurav Mishra, the Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet critiques the cliché of “using technology to do good” and proposes a framework to help think systemically and strategically about the possibilities of communication technologies to “create disruptive models of social change.”
- Might the Planned Parenthood/Sarah Palin (subversive) fundraising campaign that Ashley Bowen blogs about be an example of the kind of disruptive model of social change that Gaurav refers to? She explains: “This campaign combines the two actions campaign organizers are always begging for: donate some cash and/or write a letter. Now, in just a few clicks you can do both.”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Viral Fundraising
Lately, I’ve been very interested in the role online/e-mail rumors play in elections. I heard an "On the Media" segment last week about how hard it is for political campaigns to beat back the false assertions made in fwd email.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Cult of the Political Celebrity
In the now (in)famous TV commercial, McCain’s ‘celebrity’ ad against Obama portrayed Obama as an over-hyped spectacle. However you may feel about this ad or McCain’s campaign strategies – his criticism is reflected in the images we find in the media. Consider these examples –
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Falsifying my Paradigms
Did you know that 80-90% of all scientific discovery has been accomplished in the last 100 years? Apparently if we calculate the percentage of scientists who are still alive from the total number of scientists that have ever lived, we will get just about the same number: 80-90% (Sismondo, 2004).These two numbers popped out of my readings this week for my Science and Technology Studies course taught by Dr. Ribes. This semester we have already produced a variety of answers to the question I posed several weeks ago: "How does one produce truth?" The production of knowledge deserves lifetimes of attention, for sure, but today I am perplexed with a different question: What if we’ve got it all wrong? Or more importantly, how would we even know?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Morgan Ames, over at Accretions, shares her recent experience at Burning Man and considers the similarities to Second Life: