October 2010 Archives

Available on iTunes

This short series of podacsts appears to be a set of lectures supporting the History of Western Civilization course at the Northern Virginia Community College. There are 10 video podcasts, each recorded at 320×240 resolution. They range in length from 4 minutes (20 MB) to 33 minutes (152 MB). Other than the introduction podcasts, the only visual is of Professor Charles Evans at a lectern - even when discussing Renaissance art, no examples are shown. The production quality is ok (although there is a slight hiss on the audio). There is a course website.

The first 3 podcasts are introductions by the professor and serve little purpose other than to introduce him and show his office. The remaining 7 discuss the origins and nature of the Renaissance. There are lectures on the idea of the West, Islam, Byzantine, Charlemagne and the Renaissance itself. Despite the expansive title, the podcasts' scope is quite limited (looking at the syllabus it seems this is just a small part of the whole course), but provide some interesting tidbits along the way. For instance confession was often public and communal. Not really in my particular area of interest (classical studies), this series is only for those with lots of spare time.

I recently read Charlie Stross' novel Accelerando (available free online here). Accelerando is an episodic story about multiple generations of a family through a dark vision of the singularity. Like all good sci-fi it raises some interesting lines of thought, one of which resonated with me as I was pondering a similar question. What should the nature of companies be?

In Accelerando companies become self-sentient. That is they are vechicles for artificial intelligences, which use them for independence as there are no humans involved in running or owning these companies. It is the technological fulfillment of the modern legal concept that companies are people. In the novel this doesn't end quite the way biological humans might like - but read the book to see what happens. For now think about whether companies should legally be people. I think most people would find the idea silly, but most countries since the 19th century have made corporations legal personalities. Thus they are treated like people for the purposes of taxation, lawsuits and contracts, but not for things like voting, marrying or holding office. Recently, in the US companies even gained some free spech rights under a recent Supreme Court ruling (there is a discussion on the ruling here).

I can see the need for this in civil proceedings, contracts and the like. However, I'm not sure how it works with issues such as crime and responsibility. A company is ultimately controlled by humans (at least for the present, although they can already conduct business without human involvement), but liability is limited for these people in the case of any wrongdoing by the company. The worst that will happen is bad PR, a fine or maybe the company being wound up. While there have been large scale ethical lapses in the recent (current?) financial crisis, only a handful of people have been charged with any wrongdoing. There can be a disconnect between the way people would act if their actions were attributed solely to them and the way they act inside a company. Similarly, some people suggest that if corporations are people, they are pyschopaths. Others think that the corporations versus humans dynamic in Accelerando is already here.

I need to think about this further.

After trawling through today's 80 spam comments, I have decided to disable comments on this blog for an indefinite period.

When this blog started it would get a couple of spam messages a day. No big deal to clear out and easy to spot the occasional real comment. Now 50 spam comments is a good day. Some days have seen over 200 spam messages arrive. And that is with automatic filtering turned on. It is just too much to regularly go through. Also the spam is getting harder to spot. Before I could just scan them and it was clear what was real and what was not. Now there are at least half a dozen per day that need to be actually read properly to classify them correctly. It's too much. I need to work out a better way to automatically filter the comments.

Available on iTunes or OU Podcasts

Supporting the Open University course of the same name, and despite the title, this series of podcasts is focused entirely upon classical poetry. There are 11 podcasts along with transcripts. The shortest is 10 minutes and the longest 24 minutes. All the podcasts are audio only and have a high level of production quality. Various classical poems are recited in both the original Ancient Greek or Latin, as well as translated English.

The series starts with a couple of lectures on Homer's Odyssey. This is followed by a further two lectures on the issues in translating Homer and why the translations can never be an exact match for the original. The series then moves to Rome and Catullus, before finishing with Horace and the satires of Juvenal. Most of the lectures focus on the literary aspects of the works and not the historical context. For instance, the meter of classical poetry is quite different to modern English poetry. The rhythmic pattern of classical poetry is based on the length of syllables rather than the stress on syllables. Little time is given to the historical context of the works. One exception is the lecture on Catullus (which may need a little background knowledge on the late Roman Republic). Some of Catullus' work insulted important people of the age (in particular Clodius), and this may not have been the wisest course of action - although he was forgiven by Caesar after an apology.

Skippable, unless you have a particular interest in classical poetry.

There is a story told around the UWA Computer Science department I occasionally retell. Supposedly, in the early 90's someone at the national level discovered that a huge percentage of all internet traffic into Australia was going to UWA. After some investigation it was discovered that most of the traffic was overnight and into the CS department. Even further investigation demonstrated that the traffic was to a single desktop computer owned by one of the grad students. It was then found that this student was running a mirror of decoded images from the alt.binaries.erotica.* newsgroups with anonymous ftp access. Uh oh.