March 6th, 2006
There seemed to be quite a bit of focus at the Oscars on the advantages of watching a movie on the big screen (that is, in a theater, not your big screen TV at home). There were several references to this point, including comments by the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the host of the Oscars. We got to see a clip illustrating the importance of the big screen. The clip had scenes from various big action movies such as The Ten Commandments (Moses parts the sea) and Star Wars (some starship scene).
I certainly understand the upside of seeing movies on the big screen (and not just from the profit-oriented point-of-view, but also from the viewer’s perspective). However, I don’t understand how it helps to make this argument in a situation where most of the people watching your clips are viewing them through their TV sets at home. Was the point to show us scenes that would look particularly unimpressive on the small screen, but remind us how impressive they would be on a big one? They were well-known scenes that we know are impressive so how is this supposed to get us to run out and watch movies in theaters?
Posted in Arts & Culture, Crooked Timber | 7 Comments »
March 6th, 2006
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March 5th, 2006
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March 4th, 2006
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March 3rd, 2006
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create your own virtual dancer, very cool
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includes helpful videos of basic steps
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for shelter
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organizer (calendar, to-do lists, etc.) for a family.. or it seems a small group of people whatever their affiliation
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dealing with missed deadlines in academia
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another media cataloging service (I have too many accounts at this point so I didn’t even bother creating one)
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be careful (read the comments), but it does work if done carefully
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track comments
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“the social guide to beer” – I personally don’t care for beer, but those who do may find this of interest
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Posted in Del.icio.us Links | Comments Off on Links for 2006-03-03
March 2nd, 2006
I started playing ping pong again a few weeks ago so I may appreciate this more than most, but I don’t think you have to be a practitioner for it to be worth a look.
While we’re on the topic of ping pong, check out this massively multiplayer online pong game. It’s not so much that it’s hours of fun (it’s not), what’s intriguing is that people come up with and create these things.
If all this has gotten you in the mood for some pong then try king pong [requires Shockwave]. It’s a pretty good version of a game that probably has hundreds if not thousands of variants.
I guess at this point I should probably include this here: 
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Thanks to Geeked for the Ping pong link and Waxy for the MMOP link. I found King Pong all by myself (well, with a little help from a search engine).
Posted in Audio/Video, Creativity | Comments Off on Ping pong reloaded
March 2nd, 2006
A propos gender, I wanted to say a few words about some recent photo interests. A few months ago I decided to start taking pictures of gender signs. The most obvious location for these is restroom doors. I haven’t encountered any awkward situations yet running around public bathrooms snapping photos, but I can imagine eventually I may get some curious glances.
The purpose of this exercise is to see what are the core essential elements that the designers of such signs decide will be enough to distinguish between men and women. We are all used to the stick figures, with and without the skirt (or would that be a dress?). But how about the more innovative approaches? In the Hungarian Parliament, the emphasis on the signs seems to be on differences in hairdo while the signs in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences emphasize some facial feature variation (lips vs moustache) in addition to hairdo distinctions and some differences in clothing. (It would be interesting to know the date of these two pairs of signs, I guess I didn’t do adequate research.) In other cases, the focus is on how men vs women tend to go about their business, but sometimes the distinctions are not completely obvious (these tend to be some of the most intriguing cases).
I have compiled my photos on the topic into a set on Flickr. More interestingly, I also started a public group on Flickr (a pool of pictures to which any other Flickr member can contribute), which has led to the addition of some great photos from others, for example: this Ken and Barbie pair at the Shirn museum in Frankfurt.
The rule for the photo pool is simple: post images that have both the male and female symbol (either in one or two pictures) and give some description of where the signs are located in case others want to find them. I welcome contributions! Join the trend, don’t be shy to whip out your camera next time you spot a pair of gender signs.
Eventually, I could see this project leading to.. well, perhaps not a coffee table book, but maybe a bathroom book?
Posted in Arts & Culture, Creativity, Crooked Timber, Photos | 5 Comments »
March 2nd, 2006
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March 1st, 2006
I live in such a beautiful place.:) (And yes, I know I posted an entry with the same title a year and a half ago. What can I say, the beauty remains.)
Posted in Chicagoland, Photos | Comments Off on Evanston sunrise
March 1st, 2006
I blogged this over on Crooked Timber yesterday. It got tons of comments (over 80 as I write this) many of which are very interesting so I recommend checking that out. Kevin Drum picked it up – and added an interesting comment about how sports commentators refer to tennis players – so you may want to check that out as well (in addition to Kevin’s point, some of the 130+ comments there are also an interesting read).
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On occasion, I get emails in which people address me as Mrs. Hargittai. I’m not suggesting that people need know my personal history or preferences. However, if you are going to contact someone in a professional context and they have a Ph.D. and they teach at a university (both of which are very clear on their homepage where you probably got their email address in the first place), wouldn’t you opt for Dr. or Professor?
Most of the time when someone contacts me and says “Dear Dr. Hargittai” or “Dear Professor Hargittai” the first line of my response is: “Dear X, please call me Eszter.” So the status marker that comes with these is not what’s of interest to me. Rather, I’m intrigued by how gender ties into all this and would love to hear how male junior faculty get addressed in such situations.
Today, I received a message that had an interesting additional component:
Dear Mrs. Hargittai,
Professor Name-of-one-of-my-senior-male-colleagues recommended that I get in touch with you.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Academia | 9 Comments »
March 1st, 2006
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February 28th, 2006
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February 27th, 2006
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guide for creating a composite image of shots of the same person in Photoshop
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leaflets (in different languages) for parents about P2P, file-sharing and music downloading
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Posted in Del.icio.us Links | Comments Off on Links for 2006-02-27
February 26th, 2006
I decided to submit this photo to the Photo Friday pool where this week’s challenge is “masculine”.
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February 26th, 2006
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a call on sociologists to do more computer and Internet-related work
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university buildings remixed into “monsters”
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National Archives videos on Google Video
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Launch Web sites from the desktop
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interesting article from a reporter who went undercover as a car salesman
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like Digg, but for financial news
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Posted in Del.icio.us Links | 4 Comments »
February 24th, 2006
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February 22nd, 2006
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February 20th, 2006
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February 19th, 2006
Create your own light installation! The Hayward Gallery is hosting Dan Flavin: A Retrospective (this seems to be the one that was at Chicago’s MCA recently) and has a fun interactive site to go along with it. You can create your own light installation dedications and add them to the pool. You can view other people’s here.
If you send yourself a copy of the image you create then you’ll have a URL to it like the one for the image above. Feel free to post a link to your creations in the comments.
Posted in Arts & Culture, Creativity | 3 Comments »
February 19th, 2006
As you could probably tell from my last non-links post – or from viewing my photos – I have been on the road recently.
I used two helpful Web sites in planning the second part of the trip, the part that required that I make hotel reservations. I browsed and reserved hotels through Hotel Club – http://www.hotelclub.net/guest.asp?id=2485304. (I get referral credit if you use this link so it would be great if you did.:) The site has listings for numerous countries and supplies quite a bit of helpful information about the options (e.g. ranking by price, photos, ratings by users) . It also has what seem like very competitive rates. Moreover, every time you use them, you accrue credit toward future reservations, which seems like a nice plus. I recommend it.
To get an idea of where the various hotels are, I recommend the Mappy site. It has the drag option that is so helpful in Google Maps, but it has maps for many many more locations (over two dozen countries to be precise) than GMaps.
With these two sites, I was able to get rooms – with immediate confirmation – very quickly. You do need to have a printed voucher so it’s best to do it when near a printer.
If you haven’t seen my trip photos yet, I have a set for Germany and for Switzerland (I’m still adding to the latter).
Posted in Products/Services, Travel | Comments Off on Travel logistics
