Research

I spent my flight to Montreal (which became much longer than I expected when I was rescheduled through Chicago) reading Trond Lossius’ report for the Fellowship in the arts program. He addresses a number of interesting topics: Commenting on the necessity for carrying out research for instead of on art, he discusses the concept of “art as code”: It is not only a question of developing tools. [..] Programming code becomes a meta-medium, and creating the program is creating the art work....

After reading Ola’s blog entry about content management, I decided to give MindManager a try. Except for the price tag (luckily they have educational discounts), I like it a lot. It is the first mindmapping software I find useful, and I particularly like the possibility to make notes on any entry. This makes it possible to really use it for mind mapping, and not only as a visualisation tool. Previously, I have tested NovaMind, which creates some fancy-looking mindmaps, but the GUI is much too clumsy for me, and it seems focused on creating printable mindmaps....

A comment on why university teachers should think critically about Word and .doc: Many of us teach cultural analysis and critical thinking in our writing classes. Our first year readers are full of cultural commentary, and we use these texts to teach our students to question the status quo and understand more deeply the implications of the choices they make in this consumer culture. Do writing teachers do the same when they tell students to submit their documents as ....

It is always difficult to categorise things, since it is always possible to think of other ways of doing it. But here I have tried to include some of the various fields that my work touch upon in my two-axes sketch: The idea is to include this in the introduction of my dissertation.

Georgia Tech has been hiring a young and interesting music tech faculty over the last years, and now they start a Master of Science program in music tech with a focus on the design and development of novel enabling music technologies. This is yet another truly interdisciplinary music tech program to appear over the last couple of years, and accepting students from a number of different backgrounds, including music, computing and engineering....

I am working on the introduction to my dissertation, and am trying to place my work in a context. Officially, I’m in a musicology program (Norwegian musicology ≈ science of music) in the Faculty of Humanities, but most of my interests are probably closer to psychology and computer science. Quite a lot of what I have been doing has also been used creatively (concerts and installations) although that is not really the focus of my current research....

PhD degrees are new in Norway. Until a couple of years ago, each faculty used to have their own degrees: dr.art., dr.ing. etc. Now, as Norwegian universities are awarding degrees entitled philosophie doctores, I have been used to reading and writing PhD as PhD. However, I just got to know that the official Norwegian abbreviation is ph.d. with dots, no spaces and uncapitalized letters.

As a member of the university’s research committee, I have been reading the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication (more popularly know as the Vancouver guidelines) as a basis for creating new and general guidelines for the university. I particularly find the section about authorship credit interesting. Authors of a paper should meet the following three criteria: Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data....

Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results In January 2006 the European Commission published the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. The Study resulted from a detailed analysis of the current scholarly journal publication market, together with extensive consultation with all the major stakeholders within the scholarly communication process (researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, research policymakers, etc.). The Study noted that ‘dissemination and access to research results is a pillar in the development of the European Research Area’ and it made a number of balanced and reasonable recommendations to improve the visibility and usefulness of European research outputs....

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am thrilled by the fact that various sensing technologies are getting so cheap that they are incorporated everywhere. As could be seen from the presentation of Apple’s new iPhone, it includes an accelerometer to sense tilt of the device (and also movement if they decide to use that for anything), a proximity sensor (ultrasound?) to turn off the display when the phone is put to the ear and a light sensor to change the brightness of the screen (?...