OII Blog

Not a very serious post, but it doesn’t happen very often: 
I am guessing, from what Wikipedia has to report on igloos, that this represents the smallest of the three main types, that is: “a temporary shelter, usually only used for one or two nights. These were built and used during hunting trips, often on open sea [...]

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Through the miracle of technology and a bicycle, we proudly present: the snow commute! Watch, watch as our brave cyclist bears gamely down through the frozen morning wastes of north Oxford to the Oxford Internet Institute.

Snow! Snow on St Giles! Struggle! Despair!

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So, the ‘Internet, Politics, Policy 2010‘ Conference call is out, with a nice blue photograph on the OII home page (below).
And so I got to thinking: ‘would people like to know something about the work that goes into the home page photographs?’ I suppose if you want to maintain the magic that our homepage photos ‘just [...]

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Her Majesty The Queen visited Oxford this morning to officially open the new Ashmolean Museum. The Queen also visited Brasenose College, who are currently celebrating their Quincentenary. Which is all incredibly exciting.
The OII people were prepared, ie made the 30 yards across the road to the Ashmolean Museum to watch proceedings. And it was filmed! [...]

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About a year ago I wandered into the Ashmolean and said (a propos the top floor, which seemed to be closed) ‘Hi er .. the modern art?’ And they said (I paraphrase) ‘Sorry. Modern art’s off. For a year’. And I sort of groaned. It was the start of the Ashmolean’s £61m redevelopment programme. 
But it [...]

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Somewhere between totally unrealistic fake humans (eg C3PO) and totally realistic ones it seems that we suddenly get creeped out. Basically, we don’t like synthetic people that almost (but don’t quite) match human expressiveness.
This ‘uncanny valley‘ may explain why some films (Beowulf, The Polar Express) have attracted criticism (as being soul-less / dead eyed / [...]

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Just been forwarded an excellent comparative analysis of various Internet Institutes’ coffee mugs as blogged by Christian Sandvig: Institutional Dynamics of Internet Studies as Revealed by Coffee Mugs. And we actually come out fine, I think? In his photograph our mug does look about the size of a thimble, but that might be the perspective.
Soooo … [...]

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Andrei Molodkin presents a multi-media installation of two hollow glass sculptures, silhouettes, representing Nike of Samothrace, the symbol of victory. One sculpture is filled with pulsing black liquid – oil, the other with red – blood. Video cameras are directed at the sculptures. The projection on the screen combines the two images so that streams [...]

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Today is the meeting of the OII’s Advisory Board (Eli Noam will be talking about the Internet and the future of  broadcast later today) and over lunch some of the important early founders and supporters of the OII gave a fascinating talk about how we came to be. I thought it would be nice to dig [...]

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