Photoethnography.com

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

So maybe there are jobs in visual anthro after all?

Assistant Professor New Media Studies

Tenure-track assistant professor in New Media Studies. The Syracuse University English Department is continuing to expand its focus in Film and Visual Culture. Ph. D. must be in hand at time of appointment. Send detailed letter, CV, and names of three references to Professor Erin Mackie, Chair, English Department, 401 Hall of Languages, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1170. Applications should be postmarked by 16 November 2009. Syracuse University is an EO/AA employer. An offer will be made contingent upon the availability of funds in the FY 2011 budget.

Hope this helps someone.

NYT has a good editorial on how the new Obama administration is taking action on disability issues:

Justice for the Mentally Disabled
After eight years of the Bush administration using the power of the Justice Department to undermine civil rights laws, it is good to see the department applying one of those laws, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. It has started a timely new initiative aimed at full enforcement of that law, which forbids unjustified isolation of the mentally disabled and requires that they be integrated into the wider community where appropriate.

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 Since my previous entry on this topic is outdated, I've decided to update it to the best of my current knowledge.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

My buddy Nate sent me the following link:

http://www.iphoneography.com/

You've probably seen this, but just in case!
Jarvis has a neat set of iphone photo apps and filters for the iPhone that mimic polaroids, 1974 gelatin, etc.

Hadn't seen it. Quite cool. I want an iphone app that manufactures SX70 film (the real stuff, not virtual), though.

In March 2005, Fairleigh Dickinson University fired Jacques Pluss, a popular and outwardly tolerant professor who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in medieval history. It was reported that Pluss was a neo-Nazi..... read more at
HNN (http://hnn.us/articles/36411.html)

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.

Hot off the press: "Canon has today announced the EOS 7D digital SLR. It boasts a new 18MP APS-C CMOS sensor, Dual DIGIC 4 processors, ISO range expandable to 12800, continuous shooting at 8 fps and full HD video recording. It also incorporates a new viewfinder with 1.0x magnification and 100% coverage and a 3 inch LCD with 920k dot resolution."

Read more at DPReview.com

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.

It certainly helps to have such a beautiful view. Alas, I do not have an iPhone 3GS, which some say should have been called the iPhone 3GV, for video.

Via Gizmodo.

Related: Time Lapse Photography with CHDK.

You know when you're procrastinating when you find out the only good anagram for your name is "Ran a Karma Nuke."

How many anthropologists suffer from dromomania?

A potential grad student wrote to me asking about which faculty at Yale worked on queer anthropological topics. Here are the faculty who are interested in, or supportive of, topics regarding gender and sexuality:

• Jafari Allen (Cuba; Carribean; USA; Black consciousness)
• Sean Brotherton (Cuba; HIV; biomedicine)
• Kate Dudley (USA; poverty; South)
• Karen Nakamura (Japan; disability; identity)

In addition, Prof. Marcia Inhorn does work on gender, health, and reproductive technologies.

I just received my new copy of MacSpeech Dictate, version 1.5. I have to say that I'm impressed. Although I was not happy about the $50 upgrade fee, the accuracy of the speech recognition is much improved. You can guess of course, that I am typing this using the speech recognition software. So far there have been no errors in recognition.

Yes, this is how it should have been from the very beginning. Now, you can spell out names using the international radio alphabet (foxtrot alpha!). However, I found that this doesn't work perfectly, for example I have to type f-o-x-t-r-o-t a-l-p-h-a because I could not get MacSpeech to recognize when I wanted letters and when I wanted words.

Also, training new words,isn't as easy as Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can't just say "correct that." You have to train new words individually in a separate panel. Also because there is no "correct that" command, it can be frustrating when the speech recognition does actually make a mistake.

The overall verdict so far after my short time testing it is that the basic speech recognition is improved greatly. The ability to add the words is fantastic, although he should have been in the original release. However the inability to correct words on the fly is a huge impediment and limits the ultimate usability of this program.

Overall, I'm glad to see some improvement being made in it, and I hope that they continue to work on further. Perhaps one more release and it will be at the level where Dragon Naturally Speaking was five years ago.