Recently in Info - Useful information Category

I was exploring teleprompting software for the Mac. This page seemed the most useful: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/12/856385

Prospective graduate students have been writing me for advice about doctoral and masters programs in visual anthropology. Since my previous entry on this topic is outdated, I've decided to update it to the best of my current knowledge.

M.A. Programs

• USA: San Francisco State University, MA in Visual Anthropology
  
• USA: University of Southern California - Masters in Visual Anthropology
  

Ph.D. Granting Institutions with Visual Anthropology Programs/Faculty

• USA: Harvard University - Sensory Ethnograph Lab and Secondary PhD in Film and Visual Studies
• USA: New York University - Profs. Faye Ginsburg, Tejaswini Ganti, Haidy Geismar, Noelle Stout. Also see Center for Media, Culture, and History
• USA: Temple University - faculty
• USA: U. of South Carolina - Ph.D. with research foci in visual anthropology
• USA: Yale University - Karen Nakamura*

* Italics = denotes junior faculty member who may or may not be taking on graduate students.

Note that the wikipedia entry on Visual Anthropology also has a very useful list of visual anthropology programs.

I'll keep updating this list, if you have any suggestions, additions, corrections, feel free to e-mail me or drop a comment below. Last updated: 2009/10/23

Along with the Canon 7D, the new Leica M9 now joins the ranks of things I want but sadly have absolutely no money to buy:

According to the Mirror, the M9:

Specs wise, we’re looking at an 18.2MP sensor on the Leica M9, plus reduced noise at high ISO settings, and an SD slot, and it could be out as soon as this week.

DPReview has an extensive hands-on with this new full-frame digital rangefinder: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0909/09090909leicam9.asp

Do you think if I put a paypal "Donate to Karen's M9" button on this website, I could collect enough for it? It's only around 5000 euros....

Upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6) and so far things are smooth with some exceptions:

• My favorite utility, QuickSilver would no longer launch. Finally figured out that I not only had to trash the preferences file in the ~/Library/Preferences folder, but also the entire application support folder in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Quicksilver.
  
• Dymo Label doesn't work and there's no driver until "the early Fall which is December in developer speak. Not good.
  
• 1Password doesn't work under Safari unless you get their secret beta version 3.
  
• VMWare Fusion also needs to be updated
  

And one of my buds had problems with Mail.app -- turned out that RSS feed prefs didn't transfer over well from 10.5. He trashed them and it started working again.

20th Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS) Conference

Call for Papers/Panels

14 – 16 March 2010, University of Texas at Austin

The organizing committee of the Japan Anthropology Workshop welcomes panel and paper proposals for the 2010 JAWS conference, which will be held in Austin, Texas. The conference theme is "Identity, Ritual, and Religion in Japan” although the organizers are open to all topics of anthropological interest related to Japan. The organizers call for panel and individual paper proposals that lay out Japanese contexts within the general scope of anthropological portrayal. Keynote speaker for the conference will be Satsuki Kawano, University of Guelph. Participation is open to scholars and students from all over the world. Please include the following items when submitting a proposal:

***Deadline for all abstracts: 1 December 2009***

The conference website is available at https://webspace.utexas.edu/jt27/www/JAWS2010/index.html. Registration information (including credit card payment options) will be available at the website after 1 May 2009. Information about accommodations and travel will also be available at the conference website. Early registration and hotel reservations are encouraged, as the conference will correspond with the early part of the South by Southwest Film and Music Festival in Austin.

One of the more interesting panels at the Association for Asian Studies meeting Chicago was the Japan Image Use Protocol Guide workshop. This was organized by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources.

Basically, the Image Use Protocol Guide is designed to help academic authors and publishers navigate the somewhat circuitous path to getting image use rights from Japanese copyright holders. The most useful portion for me is the Permission Request Templates that you can use to send to image rights holders (museums, publishers, etc.) asking for permission to reprint photographs in your papers and monographs.

The protocol guide is still in the beta stage and they are asking for comments:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ncc/imageuse/index.html

I buy a lot of DVDs from Japan, but unfortunately they are often region 2 restricted. In order to play them back on an American DVD player, I need to "rip" them and then burn them back as unrestricted (region 0) DVD-R.

The program I use on the Mac is MacTheRipper. Unfortunately, the program development on it seems to have stalled, and it isn't keeping pace with the latest encryption and anti-hacking technologies being used by some companies.

In these cases, I switch to my Windows XP operating system (under VMWare Fusion) and use a program callled DVDFab. It's commercial (i.e., costs money) but there isn't a DVD out there that it hasn't cracked. It works great under Fusion -- and it even writes the VIDEO_TS files out to a shared folder on my Mac OSX partition, so I can then write them out immediately using Toast, or use Handbrake to further compress them.

(You can compress to H.264 inside of DVD Fab but I think that Handbrake's algorithms are better and you have more control over the process).

Karen

I'm setting up a media server in the anthropology department using Mac OSX 10.5 Server. With the demise of the C-Labs service, I wanted a secure way to make streaming video available for in-class use. The Mac OS X Leopard Server was an obvious choice.

Right now, I'm just using flat files and the Mac OSX Server built-in Apache server. In order to restrict the streams to just Yale students, I wanted to limit the contents of certain directories to just Yale IP addresses.

This should be easily done using .htaccess files. However, the default configuration doesn't have .htaccess services turned on (since it is server / file system intensive to do so). However, I couldn't for the life of me to get the Apache server to recognize my modifications in the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file. ARGHH!!! It was almost as if it was ignoring it.

I swear that at the American Anthropological Meeting, at least one third of the anthropologists that I met had an iPhone. What a bunch of geeks!

In case you didn't know, AT&T will often give you discounted / corporate rates on their monthly service charge if you are an employee of some companies. And most larger schools have these negotiated rates for their students, faculty, staff, and other affiliates.

I should've done this when I signed up for my Jesus-phone but I didn't know until a few months later when a colleague told me. I went down to my local AT&T store and showed them my Yale ID card and they input the discount code in the computer.

Two months later, I'm saving about $12 a month on my service. Not a whole lot, but it adds up to $144 a year.

I was cleaning up my office today when I came across some old Kodak PhotoCDs from the late-paleolithic era (circa 2001). I put them in my Mac Book Pro to see what was on them but was surprised when neither the OSX 10.5 Leopard system (QuickLook or Preview.app) nor Photoshop CS3 could open them.

That's odd, I could've sworn Photoshop could handle PhotoCD .pcd files. A little googling reveals that Adobe abandoned that feature when they ported CS3 over to Intel and never bothered to carry the functionality over. I guess they decided Kodak and PhotoCD were good and dead.

Hmm... well, there's always GraphicConverter, right? It's the one application that can read practically everything. I launched it up and it read and converted the files from .pcd to .jpg just fine -- except for the 4 Base and 16 Base sizes. The Base size (512 x 768) displayed correctly but 4 Base and 16 Base came out indecipherably.

It looked like a bug in GraphicConverter, so I dashed off a bug report to them. I then had a couple of options according to the Google:

• Run Photoshop CS3 in Rosetta mode and use the old Kodak PhotoCD plugin
• Get Irfanview for the PC and do the conversion in that program, which just happened to have a very good batch function

Since I had VMWare Fusion running anyway, I downloaded Irfanview, installed the PhotoCD plugin, and ran the batch conversion. All done, all finished and my photos from a bygone era are now safely re-digitized as JPEGs.

The moral of the story is -- archival file formats aren't. Be safe and secure, save your files in something standard like JPEG* that isn't going to go anywhere as it isn't tied to one vendor.

* We'll want to revisit this in 10 years and see if JPEG is still around, but I'm pretty sure they'll still be JPEG importers even in 2018. I'm not so sure about JPEG2000, PNG, and Adobe DNG though!

One of my blog readers recently posed a question by e-mail:

I'm a Mac user with a disability who is debating whether to purchase the MacSpeech VRS. Though I know that Dragon Naturallyspeaking is still superior, I'd much prefer to use software supported on a Mac OS rather than have to switch to Windows. Like Karen I'm somebody who works with Japanese. I understand that MacSpeech does not yet suppose foreign text, particularly non-Roman alphabets. What I'd like to know is your experience writing Japanese names and terms in romanization. I also hear that MacSpeech does not yet have correct as you go or spelling functions. I should imagine this would be a big problem if a lot of the text you are dictating has foreign words in it. I hear that you can upload sample documents for it to analyze, but how useful or efficient is that?

I have to say that I'm disappointed with MacSpeech Dictate. After my initial installation problems (chronicled here), I tried using Dictate in my daily work.

It was fine for composing regular e-mail messages or blog entries such as this one that contained no technical language. However, it was useless for writing any scholarly material as I use Japanese words in my work. Without even the ability to spell out words (N-I-H-O-N-G-O), I'm stuck.

Trying to train it to learn words is an effort in futility, in my experience. There's no way to really train it specifically on your pronunciation so if it doesn't guess Hanako right on the first go, there's nothing you can do it to tell it that Hanako is Hanako.

There haven't been any updates recently and I've sort of lost hope on MacSpeech as a company. I think I'm going to just resort to running Dragon in Windows XP under VMWares Fusion.

"The Psychiatric Service Dog Society (PSDS) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to responsible Psychiatric Service Dog (PSD) education, advocacy, research and training facilitation. We provide essential information for persons disabled by severe mental illness, who wish to train a service dog to assist with the management of symptoms. We consult regularly with mental healthcare providers in their efforts to learn more about PSD. We also host an online community of service dog handlers veteran and new..."

http://www.psychdog.org/

WebMD cites a study from the recent issue of Molecular Psychiatry on the incidence of mental illness in American adults:

• 1.7% developed alcohol dependency
• 1.51% developed major depression
• 1.12% developed generalized anxiety disorder
• 1.02% developed alcohol abuse
• 0.62% developed any panic disorder
• 0.53% developed bipolar I disorder
• 0.44% developed a phobia
• 0.32% developed drug dependency
• 0.32% developed social phobia
• 0.28% developed drug abuse
• 0.21% developed bipolar II disorder

Although the rates seem low, the author points out that the risks are greater than those for lung cancer, stroke, or cardiovascular disease.

Read the article on WebMD.

AA sent me this tidbit:

ISEFF INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM FESTIVAL 2008
TWO DAYS OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM
HOSTED BY GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Constructing Bonds
The politics of relation in ethnographic representation

The festival focuses particularly upon the difficulties entailed by anthropological film production and dissemination â?? what is the â??useâ?? of ethnographic film? How and for whom is it being produced? We consider notions of the afterlife of the anthropological product â?? is it wrong for ethnographic data to be used as market research? Can other disciplines and areas of society benefit from this material? We encourage a diverse audience of anthropologists and non-anthropologists from academia and public realms, offering a community of discussion framed around a media source. Film screenings shall be accompanied by a panel discussion.

I recently bought MacSpeech Dictate in order to help with the writing of my next book, Crazy in Japan (working title). Unfortunately, the program crashed everytime I tried to setup a new profile.

A couple of hours of googling seemed to suggest that the problem was with the English Data Disk, but various attempts to get a clean data disk revealed that that was likely not the problem.

A post on MacFixitForums by yfried helped me narrow it down:

There are several possible causes for this error:
1) having FileVault turned on
2) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the name of the hard drive
3) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the userid used to login to the Macintosh
4) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the name of the voice profile (depending on when this error appears)
5) a network set up where the user's home folder is located on a server
6) having more than one hard drive installed in the Macintosh which has the same name (Apple ships multiple drive systems with all drives being the same name figuring that users will change the appropriate drive names)
from: http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum36&Number=853106&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1

In my case, I used Japanese characters in my full username in my login which screwed things up. Changing it from 中村かれん to Karen Nakamura fixed it and allowed me to set up my user profile.

This is very poor programming on MacSpeech's part, in my opinion. Mac OS X programs should be character set independent. It's 2008 for heaven's sake!

More on how MacSpeech Dictate actually is after I've used it for a while.