Alexia Blogs

Musical interests of a fourteen year old girl ought not to typically centre on the core of mid-twentieth Century composer of sweet Americana, but it did for me. When I was fourteen, a singular musical mind could not touch Aaron Copland. Fanfare for the Common Man, his most celebrated piece, was not for me. Instead, I favoured the pastoral reflections of Appalachian Spring.

Tracing back an affinity with the classics, I find my fifth class teacher. In a dose of rare foresight and cultural hawkishness, on of one those anonymous Winter days, most probably a Tuesday, he strode into our emerald green classroom and announced that today we’d be introduced to 1812. The 1812 Overture to be exact.

Classical music is not part of the daily diet of eleven year olds and we expelled old sighs and furrowed our brows. Expectations of the very worst flitted through our little heads. We’d probably have jumped at another Irish lesson over an hour of listening to dumb music cadged together by some dead Russian. Some dead Russian - what a way to think of Tchaikovsky.

Turning on the double tape deck, we were suddenly picking our sides. Would we deadwalk with clipped paces on the well-worn path of Napoleon’s troops ploughing scar across snowy expanses? Or would we prefer to face our eminent doom and sit amongst the Russians, painfully aware the world’s greatest military machine was slowly inching itoom way closer, ready to obliterate us all? We donned our costumes and took our places. All the while, every movement was book-ended by our teacher booming over violin waves, telling us the story of overture.

The single greatest attribute of the 1812 Overture is its ability to jump from scene to scene. Painting in a very real way the fire fights and volleys of the Battle of Borodino. The music switches from Franco march to Russian Cossack dance themes and back again, to denote the switching of contexts. The pace is almost maddening at times. We are gifted an all too teary interlude.

French and Russian, we stand beside them as they sigh in a low air and be brave. We walk in their deep, frozen footprints. And hold their bloodied hands. By the end of the piece we feel for the failure of the proud French and dance with the jubilant Russians. Bells peel so brightly and cannons boom with prickly defiance to signal the Russians success.

Tchaikovsky never loved the 1812 Overture. He believed that it was a showy and brassy piece. And it is. It’s a balls-out celebration of the brass section. It strides out into the open, and shouts in your face. As an introduction to kids to classical music, it succeeds admirably. Its rich lyrical movements tell kids a story. It’s a tale of blood, guts, suffering, agony and glory. Kids love violence. Dress it up in classical garb and you’ll unlock kids’ curiosity. Plant a seed that may grow into a natural appreciation of classical music.?A secret we learned that day. Classical music always tells a story. It’s the pop music of the past. Roll up Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Madonna and whatever else you are having, transport it back into through the centuries and what do have? You have the Grand Masters of the Art. Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Shostakovich. For those of you keeping facts, Copland wrote Spring in 1944 and won the Pulitzer Prize for it the following year.

When I listen back to Appalachian Spring, it’s tinted with teenage memories. I can remember the way I listen to it. Sometimes the pieces I listened before and after it. I hear the American pioneers striking out for place to live in Pennsylvania. Newlyweds filled with hope and trepidation. Is there anything more timely for a teenage ear? Some say that music is mere mathematics. Theorems on a great scale. Intonations that breed wonderful patterns. Is there anything else as sweet to listen to? I believe not.

In a gesture of community spirit and an effort to identify the subjects of it’s photograph collection, the US Library of Congress is opening its vaults and pushing pictures up to Flickr. The Library is depositing some 3,000 photographs on Flickr’s site as part of this pilot project. If it succeeds, you can expect a significant chunk of the Library’s 14 million images being uploaded onto Flickr for the world to name and view.

It will be exciting to see how see how people tag these photos and what level of verification is employed to ensure that identification of people and places is correct and complete. Some of these images are copyright free, so fair gain to the community. This is the exciting part of the project for me.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Irish photographic, art and sound archives that exist in public collection be pushed into our collective digital memory? Surely these could be initiated as part of the national arts strategy pushed by Seamus Brennan, as part of his Arts, Culture and Gaeltacht remit and partnered with Mary Hannafin, as the Minister for Education. Think of how the rich strokes of non-copyrighted early 20th Century audio and photographs could add the existing consciousness of the Irish cultural soul.

Damn Twenty. He beat me to a rant on the ‘emergency handbook’ that is being produced by the Government and supplied to every household in the country. Twenty lists the important ones. For the rest, I’m still banking on my iodine tablets saving me.

Another cool Microsoft Virtualisation blog, Justin Zarb’s Virtual World.

Robin looks at the sociability of SMS Sharing.

Can AIR and .NET live happily ever after? We’ll see after this proof of concept.

Furry friend or food?

Ask Bill a question.

Loving Fanny Waters’ deft touch.?He was quick off the draw, there. I’m wondering if he’s drafting the posts long hand and getting Dervish to knock them up for him.

Don’t forget Blogger Coffee this Saturday morning. We’ll meet in the foyer of the Marriott at about 11 and go for coffee there for a bit. Looking forward to it.

The Limerick Blogger has published recommendations that the Limerick Chronicle printed about a vision document on the regeneration of parts of Limerick. It all seems to be about tracking people, knocking houses and rebuilding. It’s going to take more than tagging, bagging and rebuilding to change troubled parts of the city. Are the think-tankers serious?

First, it’s going to take more than a bunch of houses and parks to improve some areas of the cities.?The leaked recommendations are?mostly?about worldly?things like property. Just depending on tracking young people so they don’t fall into the cracks of society is a negative way to help improve the lot of those living in these blackspots. What? So, nurturing community involvement at current levels is seen as sufficient? I’m awaiting the report to dig into this further.

Second, assuming the correct policies and funding are in place, the push to improve areas of the city will most likely take decades. Decades. Regenerating these areas is not like doing a Lego project. People need to grow into their surrounds. Respect their living space?and neighbours. And more importantly, propagate these values onto their?kids.

There is much to do. Looking forward to reading the detail in the forthcoming report.

Some people should have a sense of humour when?talking about social media. They should?do it just like Shel.??

The Irish Blog Awards still needs sponsors for Best News/Current Affairs Blog, Best Food/Drink Blog and Best Group Blog.

Forget about renting that bedsit for 1000/month, do something like Mark did. This may involve trips to and from the North.

Zaniac takes us around the ‘Sleep of Reason’ exhibit in the Crawford Open 2007, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Nice video too.

Macworld ate it.

…is a barbaric process. Pounding flour, breaking eggs, skinning and chopping apples. Not to mind the skewing the pie and throwing it into a hot oven for?about 30 minutes. But, doesn’t it taste nice?

Walking past hoards of fair-weather, killer-heeled Leinster fans on their way to the RDS arena took some of the wind out of my sails. I knew my trip to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition (YSE) 2008 would involve a touch of zoology, but I was quite unprepared for the exotic creatures with colourful plumage and Li-Lo bangs along the way. Thankfully, a handful of seconds after entering the YSE, I was refreshed, nay, enthused.

The first thing that hits you when you enter the YSE hall, is the vast array of projects on show. Some five hundred projects were on show last Saturday. More than double that figure and you’ll get the number of entries for the 2008 finals. Amazing. The projects were grouped by category, meaning that projects were clustered together within Biology, Technology etc. Another interesting fact, is that girls out ranked boys this year to the tune of a ratio 2:1. It’s an interesting figure. Especially, since some fields of science and technology are crying out for female participants. On the ground, it’s the same old story. Girls dominate the life sciences, boys the technology.

Since my area of interest is technology, I spent most of my time walking this section of the floor. Two particular projects jumped out and I was lucky enough to video interview their presenters. First up was ‘Web Browser for the Colour Blind’ by Conor Scully and Adam Keilthy from Sutton Park School. I like this project as it highlighted how changing the approach to interpreting web content can benefit those who have problems using the web. Improving the accessibility of the web and computer interaction for those that suffer comprehension problems with vanilla browser offerings is a noble goal. And the fact that Conor and Adam executed on their research with informed designs implemented in C#, shows expertise and knowledge beyond their years.

Next up came, Ben McRedmond and Patrick O’Doherty from Gonzaga College with ‘HiPPstr: Social Network Redefined’. Social networks have really been the hot Web 2.0 topic over the past 18 months or so. I was impressed that the guys recognised this readily and decided they wanted a cut of it, by developing HiPPstr. They have interesting ideas re: where they see social networking going. More impressive was the fact that they are planning to push it live in the next couple months. I’d like to get a Beta invite and play with it. I also loved their passion, readiness to engage on hot social networking issues and drive.

These four guys will go far. Keep an eye out for them. And this is just a small piece of puzzle. All of the participants in the YSE represent the future of Ireland’s science, engineering and technology sector. In the past, the mythical post-doctoral, fourth-level of education has been touted as the main breeding ground for Ireland’s indigenous IP. An engine to power the future of Ireland’s technology industry. The fourth-level, and third-level for that matter, will starve without sufficent, sustained funding in resources that support the teaching of science and technology in the first and second levels. Am I the only person who sees this? I doubt it.

Video: BT Young Scientist Exhibition: Walkabout

The BT World of Science and Technology room was a treasure trove of gadgets and demonstrations: An Garda Síochana, RTÉ, Intel, Analog Devices and BT - just to name a few. If kids ever needed to be convinced that science, engineering and technology were fun, the proof was in this room. Robots, light-up pianos like in ‘Big’, computer games, dedicated Youtube areas where they could access videos, skulls of long-dead animals and much, much more.

Oh, I kept on seeing Eddie Hobbs there. Weirdness. No, not imagining him. The real Eddie Hobbs was in the house. Being nerdy. I was star struck.For all of the nerdy goodness that the YSE serve on a platter to me, I was reminded twice that kids will be kids. And that’s a good thing. A vanguard of young teenage girls hogged mirror space in the ladies bathroom, all crusading to apply that last little bit of eyeliner. The second alarm call was a proud mum that sat respendent by her son’s project. I engaged in a quick to-and-fro with her. After the niceties, I said I thought it was a great idea that kids get involved in science and technology so young, as it opened a world of possibilities for them. Yes, she agreed, and with a twinkle in her eye she quipped, “and there’s lots of girls here too.” Scientists are teenagers too, it seems.

I was at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition last Saturday and here are a pair of video interviews I did with students from Sutton Park School and Gonzaga College, Ranelagh on their projects.

And here are Ben McRedmond and Patrick O’Doherty with their project HiPPstr: A Social Network Redefined’. It was developed in PHP and mySQL. They competed in the Intermediate Group category and were judged to be first for Technology.

Warm congratulations to everyone that competed this year. And a very special thank you to the guys for presenting their projects to me and giving me some time to interview them. I’m sure they repeated the same spiel a billion times over the past couple days. So, thanks. A full review of the event to follow.