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The Craft of Science Fiction
Joe Haldeman provides a sneak preview of an upcoming novel whose story plays out in MIT’s past, present and distant future. In his conversation with Henry Jenkins, Haldeman admits that he has “a lot of fun with the sociology of being in this joint.” He also discusses the history of his genre, and his own literary approa
Two More Things to Worry About
In customary, loose-limbed form, Arnold Barnett reprises two of his favorite themes: improvements to the U.S. Electoral College, and aviation safety.
First up, Barnett’s suggested fix for national elections, which through the “fun-house mirror” of the Electoral College, permit winner-take-all results. His
History of Boston Transportation
1630-1990
Fred Salvucci ponders the role of contingency in history, and in the evolution of Boston and its transportation system. He starts from the time the glaciers pulled back from Boston, leaving a soggy near-island and a river for the first white settlers to contend with. “The reason the city is here because
Prime Time in Transition
Fear not, fans of character-based TV fiction: reality shows will not obliterate tales featuring “transactions between human beings – the Jane Austen end of things,” as John Romano puts it. This veteran of some of TV’s finest cop dramas (including Hill Street Blues and Monk) sees wrenching changes in
The Medium Religion
Noted philosopher, critic and essayist Boris Groys, who has previously delved into the Soviet post-modernist and Russian avant-garde art scene, turns his attention now to the recent and dangerous marriage of religion and digital media. In a talk based on his paper, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Groys
2 River flow
Water is arguably the most important physical resource as it is the one that is essential to human survival. Understanding the global water cycle and how we use water is essential to planning a sustainable source of water for the future. In the UK there area areas where water supplies are limited, shown by recent droughts. Globally, there are many areas that do not have enought water to support the currently population adequately. Decisions will have to be made on the best way to use water in a
Global Media
Just as digital technology has expanded the means of producing media, so has it increased the geographic range new media may travel. Locally generated content can zip around the world in a heartbeat. But, says moderator Henry Jenkins, “as a society we’re in a contradictory state in terms of having greater access to glob
Knowledge Technologies
Knowledge Technologies - Nicholas Gibbins
Keywords:expert systems
The OpenCourseWare Initiative: A New Model for Sharing
Since making its “proof of concept” debut in the Fall of 2003, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) Initiative has racked up some impressive numbers. This project makes
course materials used in MIT undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. So far, OCW has translated for the w
Introduction to macroeconomics
This is a module framework. It can be viewed online or downloaded as a zip file. As taught in Spring Semester 2010. This module provides an introduction to modern macroeconomic analysis. Macroeconomics is concerned with some of the most pressing and fundamental questions economists can ask, such as: What determines economic growth? Why do economies exhibit expansions ('booms') and contractions ('busts') in output? What drives employment and wages, saving and investment? What causes inflation and
National park service archeology program
This website provides access to the archaeology and ethnography program of the U.S. National Park service. It is a portal to the many projects across America and American legislation on archaeological matters. The projects are accessible via a map or textual hyperlinks from the "sites and collections" section. A special section of the site examines the Antiquities Act. The section entitled "peoples and cultures" presents instead all the ethnographic projects. Another special section worth lookin
Climate change : carbon literacy briefing
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) website has provided a free online copy of the first edition of the RIBA carbon literacy briefing document, together with the carbon literacy executive summary. These documents have been published by the RIBA to encourage architects to engage with the issue of climate change by building low carbon new buildings, or to consider low carbon refurbishment of existing buildings. The eight-page summary and 16-page briefing documents (available as PDF f
Bill Palmer home page
Bill Palmer is a member of the Surrey Morphology Group and is currently working on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project concerning the use of possessive morphology to index subject on verbs in languages of the Northwest Solomonic branch of Oceanic (Austronesian). His homepage contains links to published and draft papers; a bibliography with links to some dictionaries of various languages; his PhD-thesis and masters thesis; and information about his field researc
Early cinema and the diasporic imagination : the Irish in America 1890-1930
This PDF document briefly summarises an AHRC-funded research network into “the role and representation of Irish immigrants within US cinema”, drawing new ideas of the role of audience taste on the shaping of early cinema and “the contradictory dynamic between ethnic assertion and cultural assimilation faced by the immigrant communities within the US”. The network was conceived as very much a multinational one, with academics from the UK, US and Ireland contributing, and w
Res gestae Divi Augusti : fotogrammetria
This Italian website focusing on the Latin and Greek inscription known as "Res gestae Divi Augusti" (part of the "Monumentum Ancyranum") publishes a full catalogue of high definition pictures with some tools to improve readability. As part of the project, two sets of pictures separated by a decade will be published in an attempt to determine the degrade of the monumental inscription. Although entirely in Italian, the website is mainly a collection of pictures that can be easily browsed. The "Res
Classics at Leeds : Malcolm Heath
This online resource is the homepage of Malcolm Heath, a professor of Greek Language and Literature at Leeds University, who is responsible for a number of major studies on Greek literature and rhetoric since the late 1980s. His website provides a full list of his publications, with abstracts and, where available, links to full-text versions online. Topics covered include: Aristotle; Aristophanes; Thucydides; ancient literary criticism (including ancient interpretations of Homer); Hesiod; and Pi
Kitabkhana
Kitabkhana is a literary blog site which, while it has a fairly strong South Asian focus, also looks at publishing in English generally. The site is quite idiosyncratic - it is light hearted and humourous, but nonetheless gives an interesting critique of many modern works of fiction and on bodies of work. The South Asian bias of the site can be seen in the number of Indian authors that feature on it, as well as in the references to South Asian phenomena and trends in the reviews of other works.
Banipal
The website for Banipal, a literary magazine for contemporary Arab literature in English translation, gives access to selected content from current and back issues. The magazine's three issues a year present established and new authors and poets from around the Arab world through translations of poems, short stories or excerpts from novels. The site publishes selections of poetry and fiction from each issue as well as the table of contents, contributor profiles, book reviews and events listings.
