October 2005

I was looking up some things on the Waikato University web site today and saw this. A brief news article on the front page on the downloadable Greenstone digital library software developed there being used by various organizations around the world for things like aid and development work.

For a list of various projects and organizations using it go to the New Zealand Digital Library Project as well as Ian Witten’s paper “Examples of Practical Digital Libraries: Collections Built Internationally Using Greenstone.”

Greenstone can be downloaded from: www.greenstone.org

See also:

• My post from a year ago Greenflame: Digital libraries and society.
• The paper Greenstone: Open-Source Digital Library Software.
• DL Consulting - NZ company providing commercial Greenstone-based services.
• IDG : Library software gets world recognition.
• Interesting articles from the National Digital Forum.

PBS in the US start a series in the religion and ethics section exploring the relationship between faith and family by surveying five different families. See Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . SPECIAL SERIES . Faith and Family in America, Part One: Beliefs and Behavior . October 28, 2005 | PBS.

The term “family” is an interesting one. I sometimes ask people if they can define what the biblical view of (a) “family” is, or at least to see if they can defend (incl. biblically) their idea of family. Good to get them engaging with the range of ways family is used in the biblical text and what it means also to be, in the Johannine sense, “to become children of God” (Jn 1).

Definition of “family” also determines, I believe, your social ethics. If it’s wide enough to embrace the inclusion of “widows and orphans”, extended family members, others who are dependent upon you (employees?), and your neighbours into your family then that’s quite a different thing to a definition that sees it as hospitable only to its most immediate members. (Walsh and Bouma-Prediger’s article “With and Without Boundaries: Christian Homemaking Amidst Postmodern Homelessness” (PDF) springs to mind as an approach to overcoming exclusivity through hospitality).

Mary Hess has some thoughts on Bono’s recent interview in Rolling Stone (Tensegrities: Bono on the influence of God in U2’s music) as well as links through to the podcast of the interview.

Nice online resource for testing your own Bible knowledge and also for grabbing a few questions for your students. I always like looking at exams I don’t have to sit myself. See Presbyterian Bible Content Exam - Learning Tool.

Via AKMA’s Random Thoughts : Should I Mention This?

A couple of short term exhibits put on by the Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington, NZ)

• The Genetic Revolution. (3 September 2005 - 23 January 2006, Wellington)
• The Biotechnology Roadshow. (13 October 2005 - 01 April 2006, various locations in NZ)

Anyone know if they are worth going to?

Hmm. Good questions raised by both on a similar topic. I wonder what the NZ statistics are?

Rebel Without A Pew: Today’s worry and nakedreligion » Blog Archive » Why Young Pastors Leave the Ministry.

A new computer game teaches the strategies of non-violent resistance/conflict. Intriguing. From the web site “A Force More Powerful : The Game of Nonviolent Strategy“,

Can a computer game teach players how to defeat real-world adversaries – dictators, military occupiers, and corrupt rulers – by bypassing laser rays and AK47s and choosing instead a non-military strategy and nonviolent weapons?

See Wired News: Sir, the Gamers Are Revolting! for an article on it.

In a similar vein newsgaming.com has a couple of flash-based games.

I’ve been skimming Tensegrities (Mary Hess’ blog) tonight. A while back Tim said I could borrow her recent book “Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Cant Leave Behind” off him but I’d forgotten about it until I saw a link to her blog the other day.

Her posting on her “Proactive Ministry in a Media Culture” course with respect to Powerpoint and design looks like serious fun, along with the range of links off that page. There’s also a link (via her institution home page) through to her “Religious Education and the Challenge of Media Culture” project.

As well she links to the www.theory.org.uk web site (Social theory for fans of popular culture. Popular culture for fans of social theory) which continues the recent trend of trading cards and Lego representations of significant figures in a field.

For other trading card and Lego equivalents see:

• The Disseminary’s The Theology Game, theology cards and The Polycarp Project (Lego and cards).
• The Brick Testament

Great article on one man’s quest to hear music again through his cochlear implant. I’d definitely agree that going beyond mere utility into extra research to improve the overall quality of life is worth it. I can’t imagine a world without music myself. See Wired 13.11: My Bionic Quest for Boléro.

Via Ernesto’s blog some comments on Anne Rice’s (vampire author etc.) switch in genres. See Ernesto Burden | Anne Rice, Catholic Writer. More at Rice’s official web site.

I think I’ll add it to my reserve list at the local library and have a look when it hits the shelves.

Well the Apple iTMS is up and going in Australia. I wonder if the Apple Australia Store login I already have works with it? New Zealanders who want to buy Apple software and licences for things like Quicktime have to create an Apple Australian account with the NZ city as part of New South Wales. (Which I did when I bought the QT MPEG-2 component a while back). For the purposes of both Apple and music companies I think NZ is just treated as part of Australia. Hmmm.

Great headline just made for B-grade movies. Work done by researchers in NZ on spiders intentionally seeking out female mosquitoes that have feed on human blood as their primary food source. I’ve been working on writing a mini-history of artificial intelligence for the thesis and this sort of thing raises some of the ongoing issues as to what exactly intelligence is. The spider identifies its prey (good eyesight, biochemical receptors) and develops a “plan” to hunt and capture it. If we saw that sort of behaviour in a human we’d probably call it “intelligent”.

Anyway see, African Spider Craves Human Blood, Scientists Find.

Update: Remembered I’d heard Mark Wm. Worthing talk on this a while back. Here’s an essay of his related to the topic.

Worthing, Mark Wm. “Human and Animal Intelligence : A Difference in Degree or Kind.” In God, Life, Intelligence and the Universe, eds. Terence J. Kelly and Hilary D. Regan, 85-110. Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2002.

Tripped into the city on Saturday to Armageddon and had an enjoyable half-day there. Avoided the long queue to get in by having prepaid for a ticket and spent a few hours looking around before heading to the panel with Mark Waid (Wikipedia). The bottom couple of levels of the Aotea Centre had things like Pro-wrestling and booths for computer/video gaming (mostly displays by Microsoft, Sony and EA) which wasn’t what I was interested in so I headed upstairs to where the comics and sci-fi stuff was.

Managed to restrict spending to a couple of DC trade paperbacks (including one of the Golden Age Green Lantern - Alan Scott) and a poster. (TVNZ had a spot on Close Up about setting the show up on Friday - Windows Media Player links 56K | 128K)

Anyway, I loved the panel with Mark Waid. There were only about 20-25 of us there so everyone got time to ask their questions and interact with him over the hour. Some really interesting questions asked and I made some notes of his replies to them. (I also got to ask a question about religion/spirituality and comic books that’s related to an article on eschatology and comics that’s rattling around inside my head at the moment.) Anyway here were some of the interesting things:

• Comic book writing is ultimately a collaborative process between the writer(s), artist, letterer and others. At the end of the day the character(s) being portrayed and story being told should take precedence over the egos of the creative team. (Not that that always happens harmoniously).
• Some interesting comments about how do you write comic books in a culture currently shaped by the “War of Terror”. Waid noted that the Superman slogan “Look! Up in the sky…” has taken on an element of fear post-9/11. Who is Superman in this world rather than the more optimistic worlds of the past?
• Waid made time to listen to and answer the questions of the children and teenagers there. He didn’t ignore them or patronise them. There was also some discussion over whether the current superhero comic writing, while in a style for adolescents, could be considered as “appropriate” for children and young adults as it once was.
• Waid argued that he thinks all comic book stories should have a moral voice. They are one of the few places left, he asserted, where you can learn morality (of a sort), consider issues of good and evil, and ethical action given the abdication of that in the wider media. This would fit with my earlier posting here Greenflame: On new morality plays.

Good stuff to think about with potential for religious/spiritual engagement.

BTW - There’s an RealAudio interview with Waid back in 2002 that covers some of this stuff.

In the last few days I received in the mail a couple of things from the Families Commission - Komihana a Whanau. One is a summary of their Focus on Families report which is a “study set out to improve understanding of successful outcomes for families with dependent children and the things that help and hinder family wellbeing, as described by the families themselves.” Both summary and full report are available at the link above and from skimming the summary looks to have some useful information in it (including what sort of things they think are relevant to the discussion). Media release here.

I’ll be interested to see whether the report gets used by Christian groups. The setting up of the Families Commission was claimed as a big win by the United Future party prior to the election and UF was one of the parties conservative Christians were “encouraged” to vote for. Whether those same conservatives bother to use the results of the commission, or see them as “tainted” by the State, will be interesting to see.

Also in the mail was their new newsletter “Family Voice” available here (as a PDF file). Apparently you can subscribe to getting it electronically but the web site isn’t clear on how to do that. I guess send them an email and ask how to do it.

Whether or not you agree with the government and its various bodies I figure its always a good idea to read things like this. Sometimes you see things to support and other times things to disagree with, but you’ll be informed. Also pretty much everyone will send you multiple copies for free and often there are “discussion” documents.

A few years back we got a whole lot of stuff from the then National government on their “Code of Social and Family Responsibility” (1998) which we discussed in house group and then made our own submission. Excellent material for working out some of our perceptions of the gospel and its outworking in the real world (as well as how to maintain unity in the face of internal disagreement).

Ticket purchased to go to Armageddon (no, the other one) tomorrow. Will probably post about it on Sunday post-preaching at church.

For those of you possessing back issues of the excellent (though now defunct) Reality Magazine check out Stephen May’s “Media Watch” column from Issue 34 (Aug/Sept 1999) where he comments upon his pilgrimage to the same event. (Not online unfortunately)

After (possibly) sitting in a Parisian café for a month Jonathan Finley (AKA un californien à paris) returns to stretch us mentally, impressionisticly and linguisticly. Go to un californien à paris: (un)mediated experience and take up the challenge.

Well I tried the live stream this morning and it seems like its all up and going. See SansBlogue : Bible broadcast and podcasts start today.

There’s another advanced screening of Serenity on this Sunday at Village Cinemas on Queen Street (Auckland). Tie in with the Pulp Culture festival also on at the Aotea Centre.

See: Serenity - Special Advanced Screening - 23 Oct.

Also, Serenity interviews here and the River Tam viral marketing campaign for Serenity here.

Well, Radio New Zealand has revamped its internet presence with a relaunched web site. Now there are live audio streams, archives of some programs for seven days and RSS feeds (text only) for news and programming (National & ConcertFM). No podcasting explicitly and it’s still a few steps behind larger media providers like ABC radio in Australia and the BBC in Britain. Still a significant step in the right direction.

Live audio streams are available as Windows Media only (boo hiss!) which means having an extra program running on my iBook, instead of just leaving iTunes running for both radio and local files. But if you click the “Audio” button on the main page the pop-up window has a link to allow you to change the default from Window Media to MP3. Then the programmes come down the wire/wireless as pseudo-streamed MP3s.

Good things about the site - they’ve divided up some of National Radio’s flagship programmes intelligently. So no longer do you only get “Nine to Noon” in 1 hour streamed chunks but now its divide up into segments (say by interview or topic slot). Nice to see the 7 day archive as opposed to the 24 hour one previously. And the site worked well on my Mac and they’re dipping their feet in the RSS waters. Plus recipes and details about books and music talked about are there now.

Not so good - No podcasting (including no RSS feed for audio) - Can’t set my Mac to grab “Morning Report” to listen to at 9am after the kids have gone to school. Many of the programs I like - e.g. At the Movies, The Sampler, Touchstone, Spiritual Outlook, Home Grown aren’t available and possibly won’t be because it often explicitly deals with non-Radio NZ copyrighted material (see their disclaimer “Not all audio is available due to copyright restrictions”). See Enz game by Russell Brown | New Zealand Listener for the farce here. I’d like to get my music and movie reviews and “thinking” programmes etc. with a NZ slant but at the moment my iTunes points offshore for all of that.

So I’d give it about 6/10 (up from the 2/10 it had before). Good progress but still a long way to go.

Even though I’ve been a Mac person since 1986, as well as a UNIX programmer and sysadmin, there’s always something new to learn. Like this tip from the Apple web site. I was wondering how to click on a file on the desktop in OS X and then print it (printing used to be on the Finder’s File menu). Now I know. See Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Printing from the Desktop (Without a Desktop Printer).

Also has the tip on setting up a drag-and-drop desktop printer if you need one of those (they can go in the dock too.)

While Tim’s getting ready for this weekend’s internet reading of an English Bible text over at podbible.com here’s a site that does that for the Hebrew scriptures. See Hebrew - English Bible / Mechon-Mamre where there are MP3 files of the texts being read in Hebrew.

I’ve made some changes to the layout of the site - primarily to fix some Windows IE problems and to tidy things up. All the posts, RSS feeds etc. should still have the same URLs. Some of the old documents from the original Blogger based site are missing for the moment.

If it looks bizarre/broken try refreshing the browser to reload the stylesheet.

Other minor changes will be made over the next few weeks. Spent a while thinking about where the links in the entries should be underlined. Couldn’t make up my mind to I’m trying no underlining at the moment to improve readability.

In the end I decided to tinker with the existing Movable Type 2.6 set up that did everything I needed rather than move over to MT3.2 or WordPress. If I was starting a new project that would probably be WordPress-based.

You can see the first 11 minutes of Serenity as an video stream here.

Tony Long (The Luddite) in his column at Wired writes on reducing the hype around technology. See Wired News: Dark Underbelly of Technology.

And that’s the reason for this column: to lend a contrarian perspective to a world besotted with technology and all its bright, glittery appeal. This is not, as some of my colleagues have characterized it, an “anti-technology” column. I’m not, strictly speaking, anti-technology. I just don’t treat it like a freaking religion. So this is a “perspective” column.

The NZ Police release a guide to religious diversity. See NZ Police News : Police launch Religious Diversity Book. From the release,

‘A Practical Reference to Religious Diversity’ covers seven major religious faiths including Maori spirituality, Buddhist Faith, Christian Faith, Hindu Faith, Islamic Faith, Jewish Faith, and the Sikh Faith.

The book provides information to help police gain basic awareness and understanding of religious diversity. It also explains how religious beliefs and customs may impact on their role as police officers when they are carrying out their duties.

You can also download the entire book as a PDF file from: www.police.govt.nz/resources/2005/religious-diversity/religious-diversity.pdf

Dave Zimmerman over at Strangely Dim linked through to a podcast interview he did with Andy Rau over at Think Christian » Blog Archive » Holy podcasts, Batman! Talking about God and superheroes with Dave Zimmerman. It’s a fairly large MP3 (50+ Mb) but I found it interesting. Particularly the last 20-30 minutes where the interview moved toward more of a discussion of how the genre might intersect with things like teaching ethics.

Then having listened to the podcast I saw Jason had blogged jason clark: THE ANGEL IS A CLOWN: FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL BASED ON A GOSPEL pointing to the Marked graphic novel. It’s the gospel of Mark retold using the graphic novel genre and from looking at a few of the sample pages looks like it’s addressing some of the things I raised back in Greenflame: Constantine and comics revisited and Greenflame: Holy Warrior Nuns, Batman!. For a starter it looks like it’s been done by someone who knows that the current target audience of the graphic novel is the 25-40 age range and writes accordingly. Also looks to have captured some of the contemporary political edge to the gospel that gets lost much of the time. Will try and get hold of a copy.

Zimmerman managed to get to be chaplain at the Wizard World Chicago comic book convention back in August (See Strangely Dim: Get Your Geek On). Hmmm, Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo is over Labour Weekend in Auckland. I’m sure the preaching roster could be rejigged so I could attend longer than the one day I’m hoping to get to. It’s be good to hear someone like Mark Waid talk.

Paul has a posting over at Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog: Australian Missiology Conference 2005 to (strangely enough) the Australian Missiology Conference. He notes that our mutual friend, Andrew Shepherd, has his paper “An Algerian and Aotearoa: Global ‘Aliens and Strangers’ and the Ethic of Hospitality” up on the conference web site for the rest of the month. I’m about halfway through it - if you’re interested in globalization, Ahmed Zaoui, Miroslav Volf’s “exclusion and embrace” motifs, with a kiwi slant on things then have a look. Paul has some more comments on the conference as a whole on his page but you can get straight to the paper here (PDF).

Main conference web site here: www.missionstudies.org/au/

Following up on yesterday’s posting some more links and comment. If you were listening to “Nine-to-Noon” yesterday on Radio NZ National Radio after the 10am news you would have heard Linda Clark’s interview with Angus Kinnaird, one of the figures behind some of the recent Australian church and parachurch marketing campaigns. In that interview he was primarily focusing on the Anglican church in Australia. Radio NZ had the interview up for their standard 24 hours as a WMA stream so unfortunately it’s unavailable now. (Boo! Hiss!) But here are some other related links that fill in some of those details:

• The Australian: The atheist who’s Selling Jesus [September 20, 2005]
• Church Marketing Sucks: Australia’s “Jesus: All About Life” Campaign
• Jesus. All About Life
• All About Life - TV ads
• Triple-J MP3 podcast on marketing Jesus (Doesn’t have the extra stuff of yesterday’s link)

In that last link it’s interesting to see that people think that marketing a belief system is wrong or at least not really a good thing. That marketing is inherently deceptive and religion shouldn’t be doing it. Some of them don’t seem to realize that marketing is all about selling a belief system, a plausibility structure that uses products, slogans, ideas and communities to shape people’s perception of what is important and meaningful in the world.

Paul continues his ABC marketing campaign over at Slashing through the Information Jungle: Marketing Jesus pointing to a podcast on a youth-focused station which does an expose on the Bible Society’s marketing strategy. Podcast for Triple J 30 September can be found here (10.3Mb). From the blurb,

Tonight on Hack we take calls on the drugs, nightclubs and sex. Ronan Sharkey has been looking at how the Cowboys have been getting the rugby league message out to indigenous communities in far north Queensland, Elise Potaka investigates marketing Jesus and Kaitlyn Sawrey flukes a multiple choice exam.

Paul over at Slashing through the Information Jungle is now world-famous in Shepparton having made it onto Australian national radio over the weekend. The transcript can be found at Encounter: 2 October  2005  - Big Brother and Alternative Realities

Florence Spurling opens Encounter’s 40th anniversary month with a program examining the inescapable questions which one of the icons of popular culture - television’s Big Brother series - pose for modernity and religious tradition on issues of values, community and authority.

You can find the Real Audio stream here (no MP3 podcast for this program though which means you’ll have to be online to listen unless you have software for downloading a Real Audio stream)

Just got round to listening to the podcast Open Source » Blog Archive » Google Sociology. Downloaded it a while back but never got around to listening to it. So I left it playing while working on some AI stuff and tuned in when things caught my interest.

Google is changing the way we understand knowledge and the world. And this show we’re asking what we can learn about ourselves by understanding what we’re looking for.

A discussion with John Battelle and David Weinberger.

Dropped by Suspension of Disbelief today after many months away and some how ended up at the following interview Time did recently with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon. Gaiman (who’s a Brit) had this interesting thing to say about writing scripts in the US aimed at family viewing,

But then, I get fascinated because, in America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn’t want to do that. I like the idea of family as something where a seven-year-old would see a film and get stuff out of it, and a fifteen-year-old would get something else out of it, and a 25-year-old would get a different thing out of it.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about recently as I’ve been watching things with my kids. I like material that treats my children seriously. Not that it doesn’t pitch things at their level but creatively introduces them to ideas and beginning critical reflection upon them. Like understanding and participating in narrative without someone spelling out for them what the moral is. Or letting them make connections between different things and stimulating them to follow up on things later on - drawing, reading, conversations, games etc.

Full interview at: TIME.com: Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon.

BTW - Gaiman claims a readership of his blog of 1.2 million! No pressure.

With Serenity officially out now in the wider world the reviews are out too. See:

• Wired News: Serenity’s a Smarter Space Opera
• Serenity - Film Reviews - Film - Entertainment - theage.com.au
• BBC - Movies - review - Serenity
• Serenity (2005) - Hollywood Jesus
• Telegraph | Arts | From Buffy to blockbuster of the year
• Serenity - Reviews - Film - Entertainment - smh.com.au