I have long known one of the UN’s key prerequisites to help reach the target Millennium Development Goals is that developed countries should donate a paltry .7% of their GNP to aid projects (at present nearly all fall well short of this). I just found out (via the Economist) that there’s another even more ambitious but contrasting target. It seems that poor old NATO is suffering because most of its member nations are not spending up to the 2% of GDP target it has set for military expenditure. Would it be too much to ask that countries reach the .7% aid target first?

I thought Inception had the potential to be much more interesting than it was. Much has been made of its depth and complexity but (perhaps because it is after all a big budget Hollywood film) I seldom found myself working very hard to understand what was going on or why. None of the action sequences were at all engaging (at least for me) because there was no sense of reality and therefore of risk. Mind you I thought the scenes in the hotel corridor (which were not CGI as you may have already heard) were visually striking. I would recommend that if you are interested you go see Memento instead if you haven’t already.

Still, if it is successful and that success encourages mainstream Hollywood to be more ambitious in its storytelling that would be a good result.

I am working on a presentation for IAMCR 2010 about the need to adjust media literacy education to encompass new forms of online practice and I would value your help, fellow netizens and academics. I am looking for references to the potential benefits that can be derived by individuals from their social media use. So far I have come up with the following categories and key texts:

• Building and maintaining social capital (Steinfield, C., Ellison, N., & Lampe, C. (2008). Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites:A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29(6), 434-445.)
• Finding one’s voice politically (Rodríguez, C. (2001). Fissures in the mediascape: an international study of citizens’ media. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.) (maybe also Couldry’s new “Why Voice Matters”? though I have not had the chance to read it yet)
• Finding one’s voice culturally/creatively
• Having a space to reflect on one’s self-identity (Stern, S. (2008). Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (Vol. -, pp. 95-117). Chicago.
• Having the opportunity to reflect critically on media products through increased familiarity with media forms Jenkins, H. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
• Learning employment-related content creation skills

Are there any important categories I have missed? And what are the best empirical and theoretical references you would suggest that could relate to each of these themes?

I’ll add a link to my presentation here as soon as I upload it after the conference.

I read a profile of Lu Xun (魯迅) in the Guardian which describes him as “China’s Dickens and Joyce rolled into one”. Surrounded as I am at the moment by Chinese students I was keen to learn more but I thought there might be little available in English – at least not for free. In an article I wrote ten years ago for Salon – The US-Wide Web I bemoaned the fact that the internet appeared to be dominated by the English language and by American content. Of course a lot has changed since then but I was still surprised to find that a free creative commons audiobook in English of some of his stories is available as well as some English translations as text online. Hurray for Creative Commons, the public domain and the internet!

PS if you are Chinese please comment and tell me what you think about Lu Xun and how his work and his place in China today have been described in the Guardian…

I found this in a study of underprivileged kids given the internet: “more visits to the following categories of websites predicted better academic performance in mathematics: technology, music, corporate, web services, downloads, MSN/Yahoo, pornography, search engines and information. More visits to these categories of websites predicted better academic performance in reading; technology, download, MSN/Yahoo and pornography.” Surprisingly, they didn’t advocate more porn access in schools…

From Jackson, L. A., Samona, R., Moomaw, J., Ramsay, L., Murray, C., Smith, A., et al. (2007). What Children Do on the Internet: Domains Visited and Their Relationship to Socio-Demographic Characteristics and Academic Performance. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(2), 182-190.

I’ve been listening to the free Librivox audiobook of this for fun and I was surprised given that it was written in 1905 at how liberal its politics are – it contains often sympathetic references to most of the better known people’s revolts. I was also struck that although it was aimed at children it has in several places explanations of the Greek and Roman derivations of some of the vocabulary.

Finally as a late birthday present went to see Avatar with my other 1/2 – the first chance I had to see a movie with her in at least 4 years. I was not surprised or disappointed at the wooden acting in Avatar having read the reviews but I hadn’t realised that battle sequences would be quite as dominant a part of the film as they were – not really a very peace and love-y experience. And I thought from the reviews I would have a chance to see an alternative world beautifully realised but I found (perhaps again unsurprisingly) that the ‘alternative’ was only lightly alien-ized with faux horses, rhinoceroses and dragons rather than anything dramatically different.

It was my first experience of the ‘new’ 3D and while I wanted to like it I concur with Mark Kermode – when it was noticeable it was annoying, it seemed to encourage the director to play to it with lots of things exploding into my face and once I stopped noticing it I am convinced I had the same sense of depth as I would have had had I watched the film in 2D. The human brain does a lot of filling in by itself – that’s why it’s perfectly possible to enjoy a film on one’s iPod Touch.

Lastly, all the exploding gave my wife (who is more sensitive to noise and sitting in a chair for 2 3/4 hours) a splitting headache and thanks to living in one of the world’s most expensive cities the whole experience set us back in the neighbourhood of £50/$75 each. Next time I will just go to the opera…

Realtime UK train timetables have been around for a while but I have long wished the same were available for buses. Turns out that it has been for a while – Traveline NextBuses either gives you the next scheduled time or the next estimated time of arrival for buses near you across much of the UK. Excellent!

This article, “What is the Good of the ‘Examined Life’? Some Thoughts on the Apology and Liberal Education” is to my mind the essence of an academic article. It’s thought-provoking, on an important subject (perhaps, the author argues, the most important – the need for each of us not just to live ethically but to reflect on what it means to live ethically), it’s written clearly and concisely and it’s open access so anyone can read it. I wish there were some way to make it a required reading for what I teach…

Thanks to the ever excellent Book Forum blog for bringing it to my attention.

I thought I would check out the top 100 most popular free audiobooks downloaded via Books Should Be Free and alongside the Swiss Family Robinson and other likely suspects I noted this: