jill/txt

Did you ever think of playing oboe when you were a child? Probably not; in fact, it’s pretty much impossible for a child to play a standard oboe, with its complicated mechanics and steep lung requirements. My sister is an oboist in Kristiansand symfoniorkester, and on a crusade to recruit new oboists - because orchestras of the world struggle to find them. Marion’s found tiger oboes, oboes specially designed so children as young as six can play them, and she’s just starting up the first ever kids’ oboe class at the Kristiansand kulturskole. Being a performer and story-teller at heart, Marion has decided the black and yellow striped kids’ oboes are clearly relatives of tigers - and so she’s written a story about how the oboe got its stripes, and has even struck a deal with the zoo where the young oboists get to play music for the tigers and visit the zoo regularly.

So far there are no hits on google for tiger oboe, but if Marion has her way that will definitely change. Here she is in on NRK Sørlandet at the launch - at the zoo, playing for a tiger, of course!

Every book I’ve read about baby sleep - apart from Gina Ford who already has the perfect schedule worked out for you - recommends keeping track of when your baby sleeps for a few days or a week so you can see the patterns and figure out a schedule that meets your baby’s needs and natural inclinations. But tracking sleep on paper is a total pain, even with printable charts. Thank goodness, we live in the age of the web, and there’s a web 2.0 style webbased service that can help: Trixietracker.com.

I’ve been tracking Jessica’s sleep, food and nappies for twenty-four hours, and the little graph is starting to fill up most satisfyingly. When I’ve tracked a full week, it will start showing me averages - how many hours a day does she sleep? When is she most likely to be awake? How does she compare to the other children whose parents are tracking them?

I’m certainly a sucker for feeding in a few numbers and seeing them transformed into pretty graphs - or, in this case, clicking a button on my computer or iPod touch when I put Jessica down for a nap and when she wakes up - but the real value of such a service is in the aggregation of all the data. Nicole at Taking Care of Baby writes that with a whole year of data on her baby, she can find answers to whole new questions:

[B]ecause it is so quick and easy to enter information into the computer, the data points accumulate, and fascinating patterns emerge. Then it becomes possible to answer these kinds of questions: does an earlier bedtime make for a longer night’s sleep? What time has he been going down for his nap lately? If he nurses longer during the day, is he less likely to wake up at night? Should we move from having two naps to a single nap? Are we less tired now than we were a year ago?

In another post, she writes about how she realised from looking at her baby’s sleep charts that he never sleeps more than twelve hours in a 24 hour period, which Trixietracker also shows her is below the average for children his age. So if he naps for a long time, there’s no point in having bedtime at the regular hour. The creator of Trixietracker, Ben MacNeill, has even created different kinds of visualisation to help show different kinds of pattern - such as the sleep scatterplot.

The author of Parentonomics (a book by an economist who apparently tried applying economic theory to his parenting - how do incentives work, for instance?) called this kind of analysis data-driven parenting.

I think it’s unlikely I’ll keep tracking Jessica for a whole year or even a whole month. And to be honest, parents have always noticed this kind of pattern without a year’s worth of exact bookkeeping of their child’s habits. But I’m definitely going to do it until I get my first seven day averages. And perhaps I’ll make a habit of tracking Jessica for a few days every month or two. Looking back, I really can’t remember how my twelve-year-old slept when she was four months. In retrospect, I wish I’d saved some record of that to look back at. SoJessica may well end up with printouts of her Trixietracker data in her baby journal.

Virginia Heffernan wrote about (video-based) web serials for the New York Times recently; she follows up on her blog with a list of recommended serials to try. She’s not been impressed by web serials after lonelygirl15, but continues to be eager to follow the form: “I just suspect that Web video is better — so far — for painterly productions than for narrative ones. So far.”

If I could watch these on my iPod Touch (while nursing) I’d probably watch ‘em all. Unfortunately the iPod doesn’t have speakers, so I’d need those finnickly little headphone things which are a total pain, especially while nursing. I suppose it’s bizarre that I never listen to music on my iPod any more - but you don’t want to wear headphones when you’re with a baby. At least, I don’t. So for me, the iPod is now purely a reading machine.

I’m officially on maternity leave again and doing even less blogging - but I’ve been reading blogs more than I was. I’ve found that my iPod touch is a fabulous blog-reading tool for motherhood: it’s small and light enough to be easy to read while nursing, even when I’m lying down and have the lights off trying to convince Jessica that it’s time to sleep. And Google’s RSS reader works beautifully on the iPod, rendering the images and text of most blogs very clearly on the small screen. And while it’s very hard to blog myself while nursing, it’s easy to click the little “share this post” button in the Google reader - so if you want to see some of the blog posts I’ve particularly enjoyed, you can check out (or even subscribe to) my shared blog reading.

I love this photo of Jessica I took this morning - despite the focus being on that cute tuft of hair instead of her face, and the framing being wonky. She’s four months old now, and absolutely wonderful. We’ve got to know each other so well I can almost always tell when she’s sleepy now, and put her down just as she wants to go to sleep, which is fabulous. Unfortunately that doesn’t work at bedtime, which is a bit of a mess, still. She’s just started reaching for things, very, very slowly - you can really see her brain working so hard to tell those hands to grab something. She’s smiley and laughs sometimes, she can roll a Bergen RRRRR right at the back of her mouth, she’s remarkably calm and can spend 20-30 minutes on a mat on the floor amusing herself just looking at things or with her baby gym. She used to roll from her tummy to her back but hasn’t in a few weeks. The other day she rolled from her back to her tummy, but hasn’t repeated that. And I’m absolutely loving having a baby.

Sveip is a television show on NRK 2 that deals with the web and what’s going on online. Siv Helberg, one of the anchors, called me yesterday and asked whether I’d be interested in doing some pieces on blogging with them, sort of based on my book - starting with the elementary sides - what is it, how do you do it, how many people blog, where do you find blogs - and moving on to other issues like blogs in politics and so on. I think it sounds like a lot of fun - especially the idea of doing a short series, which would mean more time to actually delve into things instead of always starting at the beginning.

The journalist asked me what topics I thought would be good, and I thought I’d turn the question to you: what are the most interesting developments in blogging these days? What specifically Norwegian things should we look at?

I’d love to hear your opinions!!

Alex Halavais just blogged the unsyllabus for a class he’s teaching this semester on communication, media and society. I take it the idea of an unsyllabus is taken from the unconference concept, where participants brainstorm topics and organise discussions instead of listening to predetermined speakers neatly orgranised in a fixed order. I attended an unconference last May; the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum in New York was set up that way, and it worked pretty well, really. I imagine a course with a student-built syllabus could also work really well, though as Alex notes in the syllabus, it’s not going to be less work for the teacher.

Alex has a history of innovative teaching - and grading. Back in 2002 he had students give each other’s contributions karma points, much as Slashdot and other discussion boards allow. This didn’t entirely work, as he explained in this blog post, but, well, don’t you love people that not only try out interesting ideas like that but also blog about them so the rest of us can see how it worked, and what worked, and what didn’t work?

The tyranny of digital distance is most often experienced by people outside of the United States, who are expected to wait a season to watch the next episodes of a TV series they’re interested in, who are blocked out of online content because the advertising sales haven’t been worked out for their country, or are banned from buying videos or certain songs on iTunes because intellectual property rights have only been cleared for the US. It’s immensely frustrating to be refused access to cultural works that you know are only being blocked for legal or commercial reasons - and there are many ways around the artificial blockages, as we all know: illegal downloads, buying a US gift card to iTunes (on ebay, for instance) and faking a US billing address, or using a proxy server so that the US website thinks your computer is in the US and gives you access to the content.

US residents face these problems less often - but Friday’s opening ceremony was an example. NBC has exclusive rights to broadcasting the Olympics in the US, and because of the time difference, they chose to delay broadcasting the opening ceremony for 12 hours. Of course, lots of people wanted to watch the ceremony live - and despite NBC’s hounding YouTube and various other sites into deleting the many uploaded videos, a lot of people found international video feeds. The New York Times quotes one watcher who watched a Brazilian feed:

“It wasn’t the best quality,” Ms. Neary said of the video feed, “and I’m sure it will be better on TV, but to watch that flame go up at the same time as the rest of the world was a beautiful, moving thing.”

I’m not that crazy about the Olympics, to be honest, but I do think that the internet makes us more aware of the whole of our planet - and as Ms Neary says, knowing that you’re watching something at the same time as everyone else is important to our sense of being part of the same world.

Another aspect of these cultural blockades where being outside of the US has been an advantage is baseball. In the US, if you’ve moved away from where the team you support is based you often won’t be able to watch their games because the local television stations won’t broadcast them. So MLB.tv lets you subscribe to watch all baseball games - except local ones, because the local television stations have exclusive rights to them. If you live outside of the US, you have no local games - so you can watch every baseball game live, no holds barred.

And watching television through your computer every bit as good as watching them on television if you have your computer hooked up to the TV, like we do. There’s no noticeable difference, so long as you have a good quality feed or download - except you have more control over what you watch and when you watch it.

I would love to go to the Academic Barcamp that’s being held in Urbino in Italy the week before Festival dei blog - I’m not sure how much of it will be in English, but I’m sure some of it will be. (via Luca Rossi)

I don’t think I’ll be doing much conferencing while I have such a small baby, though. I know Lilia’s been to a conference with her baby and her husband, and it mostly worked out pretty well, but I honestly think I’d feel miserably stuck, not able to give my baby the attention she needs or focus properly on the discussions and ideas at the conference. When I try to blend work and family I usually end up miserable.