I’m back after a wonderful three days in Dublin (thanks to Mike and the gang at UCD!). JOCP but there’s a lot of e-mail that piled up while I’m away, and my head is full to bursting with research ideas. It’s going to be tough to prioritize and focus here in the next few weeks.
I’ll try to sift through my photos over the weekend and get some of them posted.
Tags: Dublin, my photography, Research, travel
This morning I’m off for Dublin! With scheduled entries broken, however, so there could well be a yawning silence for a few days. I’m not taking a laptop (gasp!), so unless my B&B has a a computer out for their guests I’ll just have to cut you all loose for a few days.
Consider it a holiday gift from me. :-)
The photo? It’s from the Prairie Pioneer Days parade in Morris in July, 2006. Gotta love the glasses on that one young lady.
Tags: Dublin, invited talk, Research, Sabbatical, travel
Tuesday morning (4 Dec 07) I set off from our happy home for a few days in Dublin. To quote myself (how pathetic is that?)
At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.
Giovanni (my office mate) pointed out the helpfully obvious today, namely that I could probably get a tour guide to Dublin from our city library. Duh. I’d looked at some in shops, but spending £10 for a book seemed a bit daft when I’ll only have one solid day of touring to do. Checking one out from the library, however…
I’m hoping for some nice weather so I can spend a lot of time just walking around and taking photographs. The aforementioned walking tours are really nice and have me quite pumped. We are talking December in Ireland, however, so I’m not holding my breath. Happily, there are lots of cool indoor things that I also want to visit. Chief among these is Trinity College Library, as they have many wondrous things including the magnificent Book of Kells.
I’ll also be flying Ryanair for the first time. The flight is incredibly cheap, to the point that it seems fundamentally wrong. The true cost (including pollution and other environmental impacts) just has to be more than the £40 or so I’m paying round trip.
Thanks to Del Amitri for the cool photo, which I discovered using Flickr’s nifty “Places” feature. Being able to quickly sift through some very cool photos of Dublin has both given me some ideas of things I’d like to see and photograph, while also pointing out some clichéd shots I may want to try to avoid. (I’ll probably fail, since I’m a total sucker for a pretty cliché shot, but I can try.)
Tags: Computing, Dublin, invited talk, Ireland, podcast, Research, Sabbatical, travel
There’s been much written and said about Radiohead’s decision to let punters name their price when downloading their new In rainbows album. While some of this heat and noise as been quite sensible, much has been predictable tripe about how stupid and naive the band has been. There is some evidence, however, that the band wasn’t so daft, and that their monetary take may have indeed been not to far from what they (as the band) would have seen through traditional marketing channels.
More importantly, though, I think most of this blather totally fails to grasp the more central question: Most bands (artists, writers, open source programmers, etc., etc.) aren’t in it for the money. If you take out the handful that make a fortune (can we please take out the reformed Spice Girls? please?), most people who do this sort of thing aren’t looking to get rich, and many don’t even expect to pay the bills (hence the term “day job”). For them, the value is often much more in being heard (or read or whatever).
As a concrete example, Bill Langdon, Riccardo Poli, and I are considering expanding a chapter we’ve (in fairness, mostly they’ve) written on genetic programming into a full on book. The traditional model would be to find a (science) publisher (which we could easily do), and then have them produce and market the thing. It would sell a few copies, and we’d make a few bucks along the way. That kind of book is never gonna sell 10M copies, however, and we know going in that we’ll never make very much monetarily. But that’s not why most academics write papers and books; if it was we’d be the daftest lot on the planet. (No, don’t go there…)
What we’re after is, in a crude sense, references. Since we’re not going to get rich, we’ll settle for famous (at least in our circles). So we want as many people to read, use, and reference our book as possible, for that’s really the currency of the realm where we live. (And, in truth, that currency converts back to hard cash in complex and indirect ways, through pay raises, increased odds on grant applications, invitations to give talks and tutorials, etc., etc.)
So our intention is to follow a model not so far removed from Radiohead’s (although we’ll probably not get nearly as much press). Our tentative plan is to self-publish using one of the many print-on-demand sites, so there will be a printed, bound copy people can buy; we’ll keep the price low, because we’re more interested in volume than immediate profit. We’ll also give the book away, probably in HTML and PDF formats, to encourage people to check it out, use it, and refer to it, regardless of whether they ever actually buy a copy. We might have a PayPal donation button, sort of like Radiohead’s download for free and pay us what you think makes sense. Or we might not; that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there. We’ll do most of the marketing, taking copies to conferences, getting it mentioned on the relevant web sites and discussion groups, and hopefully picking up a fair bit of word of mouth along the way.
I don’t expect we’ll ever see much money on this deal, but I’m quite optimistic that the three of us can put together a book that’ll get used, and that’s the point for us. Similarly, Radiohead’s made enough money on their music that I doubt they’re deeply concerned about a few dollars here or there. They want to be heard and talked about, and they are. Hopefully we can have a somewhat similar experience.
I should also be clear that just because people like Radiohead (or struggling new bands) choose to give away their music, we shouldn’t just write them off as fools and rip them off at every opportunity. We all benefit from their passion, and it’s in our collective interest to support that when we can. That’s part of why I do my darndest to avoid giving money to bands that are already making a ton - they don’t need my support. I prefer instead to spend my money on the zillions of cool, but virtually anonymous, acts that can really benefit from a few bucks.
Tags: academia, Art, intellectual property, media distribution, Music, open source, Research, Science, Writing
My sister (and co-author) is visiting Linköping University in Sweden this week both as an external examiner on a PhD defense, and giving a talk as part of a seminar entitled “Conservation biology in animals — behavior, genetics, welfare”. The first half of her talk is on work we did together, using computer simulations to better understand the impact of changes in selection pressure on genetic and phenotypic diversity of populations. This will (I think) be the first public airing of these results, so this is pretty exciting stuff.
I actually made the mistake of peeking a bit at what a flight would cost to join her, and we got all excited when the early results were actually very promising. Unfortunately further examination made it clear that “zipping over to Sweden for a few days” would in fact run close to $1K, which is money we really don’t have at the moment.
Sigh.
I’d never been to Scandinavia before, and it would have been really cool to hear the talks (especially hers) and meet the other biologists at the seminar. But such is life.
At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.
Thanks to Dead Man … Walking for the photo. Gotta love all those bikes, eh?
Tags: biology, Family, Ireland, Research, Science, Sweden, travel
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