Oscar the cat can predict when nursing home patients will die

I like cats. But this is one I wouldn't particularly welcome...

From The Guardian: "The nursing home cat that 'predicts' death

Oscar the rescue cat is not simply a welcome feline companion at the Steere nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a new report in a medical journal he has a remarkable, morbid talent - predicting when patients will die.
When the two-year-old grey and white cat curls up next to an elderly resident, staff now realise, this means they are likely to die in the next few hours.

Such is Oscar's apparent accuracy - 25 consecutive cases so far - that nurses at the US home now warn family members to rush to a patient's beside as soon as the cat takes up residence there.

'He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,' said Dr. David Dosa, an expert in geriatric care who described the phenomenon in the New England Journal of Medicine.
'Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one,' Dr Dosa added.

According to staff at the nursing home, Oscar began patrolling the wards around six months after he was adopted as a kitten, observing and sniffing at residents before occasionally choosing someone to sit by.

Oscar appeared to take the task seriously and was otherwise quite aloof, Dr Dosa said: 'This is not a cat that's friendly to people.'

The Steere home is a dementia centre which cares for people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other ailments.

Another doctor who works at the centre, Joan Teno of Brown University, based in Providence, said she became convinced of Oscar's talent after he appeared to make a mistake.

Observing one patient, Dr Teno said she saw the woman was not eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

However, Oscar would not stay inside the woman's room and Dr Teno thought this meant his correct streak had been broken. Instead, it turned out her prediction was about 10 hours too early, and during the patient's final two hours Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

Scientists remain uncertain whether there is any predictive basis for Oscar's talent, or if there are other factors at work, for example, an attraction to the warm blankets often placed on seriously ill residents."

Now is it just me or are people missing something here? If I walked up to people who then mysteriously died I wouldn't be lauded as some sort of psychic, but hauled off for questioning. This is one evil, and probably very rich, cat. Someone should look under its bedding...

Prisoner found guilty of masturbating in his cell

From The Guardian:

"It is a verdict likely to cause great consternation to lonely prisoners throughout the US penal system. A prisoner in Florida has been found guilty of indecent exposure for masturbating alone in his cell.

Terry Lee Alexander, 20, of Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, was sentenced to a further 60 days in jail on top of the 10-year term he is currently serving for armed robbery, the Miami Herald reported yesterday."

It's worth reading the rest of the story and asking yourself if there aren't better ways to spend taxpayers' money and if forbidding indecent exposure in an 'open' cell that is being actively watched by a female prison officer isn't asking too much.

But for me the funniest part is this:

"Ms McHugh (the defendant's lawyer) asked the 17 prospective jurors who among them had never masturbated. No hands went up."

Why? What were they doing?

Level 60 at last!

Ah, another of life's little milestones has passed...

I can't believe I've been playing World of Warcraft for nearly two years now, and it's taken me all that time to get my main character to level 60.
If I'd done it before the expansion that would have been pretty much the end of the game but now I have another ten levels to go...

Although it's been two years, I noted that it actually took 14 days, 17 hours and 20 minutes to reach level 60 which is pretty crap, compared to some people who clearly have no lives. I also haven't done any raids so have no epic gear, and I lost the plot with my talent tree so seem to be a 'Ret Paladin' which I recently found out was quite lame... I'm such a noob.

If you don't know what I'm talking about then well done. However, I heartily recommend trying out the demo from Blizzard then you too can experience the agony pleasure.

Here's my 'armoury' specs, courtesy of MMO Guildsites's new Armoury widget thingy:

Everything has its uses

A clever ad, with a pay-off that you have to think about... worth the effort!

London buses

In my last post I mentioned it would be more cost effective to park a bus outside a few agencies than go to New Blood (the D&AD annual show of graphics graduates).

Well it turns out Loughborough University did both. (Ooh I nearly applied for a job there once! Isn't Loughborough where the pork pies come from?)

Nikesh left a comment and I used my detective skills (i.e. followed a link) to see his/her blog. Fairly positive on the whole, I think, though there were some negative responses... Worth checking out.

Student shows in London. What's the point?

This post will get me in to trouble with colleagues but here goes...

Noisy Decent Graphics on D&AD's New Blood show: "I always feel so sorry for the students at these shows. It's just a really shit way of displaying work. You can never see all the work, you can never see the work properly and you don't get a feel for what a student is really like."

Many moons ago, when programme leader for a graphics degree, I found out that the D&AD show was happening earlier than had been anticipated. This caused major problems as, like just about every other course, we geared our year around the show and even devoted an entire module to it (something I thought was completely bizarre, but there you go).
Making a jokey comment I said 'maybe we should think again about going to this and spend the money on a piss up instead' or something.

Well you'd think I'd declared war or something. My comment was immediately transmitted to the rest of the team as a decision I'd made (it wasn't) and over the course of the next few weeks it kept coming up (Them: 'we think it's a bad idea not to go to D&AD' Me: 'We are going, I never said we weren't' Them: 'We're going to the Dean' Me: 'About what?' I learnt a lot about the power of office gossip then, I can tell you).

So anyway, it did lead to a big pow wow in the board room, despite the fact that all the time we were going to do the bloody D&AD show.

Later, however, I began to wonder if it was the right decision. Maybe we should stand up to the tradition. After all, the show's a commercial venture and it's in the organisers' interests to get a packed hall. But what do we, and students, get out of it?

Let's look at the arguments for going that always get put forward:

It gets our students 'out there'.

True, but alongside every other bloody student too. My marketing background tells me that if you're selling baked beans you don't see any point in simply being on the shelf next to all the other baked beans. No, you need to differentiate yourself. The leading brands of beans (bear with me on this analogy!) advertise to create a sense of personality and trust, and pay supermarkets to go at eye level or at the aisle end.
At D&AD you're put whereever, and even worse every stand basically looks the same because all the students show off the same bloody D&AD competition briefs!

It gets students jobs

Correction: it gets some students jobs. The vast majority leave with nothing except an (even bigger) overdraft from the expense of being there in the first place.
I mentioned this to a group of students recently and one replied "well I got an offer of work" which sort of made my point. One student out of twenty got an offer of work which actually meant a work placement - unpaid except for expenses. (This practice is, incidentally, one that should be stamped out. I've known graduates who've spent 18 months or more on nothing but 'placements', not because they aren't any good but because it's becoming the standard method of employment in the design industry. This is the same industry that campaigns against 'free pitching' to clients...)

Let's look at the maths. It costs a few thousand pounds to have a stand at D&AD's show. Each student needs to pay for travel and accommodation unless they happen to be local. Let's say that's an average of £500 each. Then there's the cost of putting the show together, the printing, the mounting, the business cards. Let's conservatively put that at £150 each.

I work that out at just under £1000 per student. Even if I've overestimated by a massive amount, it's still a lot of money but I reckon my grand's a pretty safe bet, when all is said and done. If this were a commercial operation I'd factor in the students' time too and then it would really start to sting.

So for a student to say it was all worth while because they, out of twenty students on the same stand, got an offer of work, and unpaid work at that, really makes you wonder...

Someone needs to do a cost-benefit analysis here. Compare the cost of going to a show like this with printing off some postcards, boxing them up and sending them off to targetted employers, or even just mailing some good CVs in envelopes (which most do anyway) and I think the whole 'it gets students jobs' argument collapses under the weight of simple maths. (It'd be cheaper to rent a double decker bus and park the bloody thing outside a different agency every few hours.)

To repeat: it gets some students jobs, most of those unpaid and on a trial basis and at a cost of several thousand pounds per lucky student...

It's good publicity for the course

Funny how I've never met a student who cited a show like New Blood as the reason they applied for their course...

I'd like to see a proper survey done of how influential London shows are in course choice. I bet it's minimal.
Of course, if any of the 'suits' at colleges started asking for analyses like this they'd be accused of 'managerialism' but let's face facts: if a business spent a lot of money going to a trade show and found that they'd lost cash in the process, they'd think very carefully about going again.
The same is true of the London shows. A lot of design firms go to have a look round, but if you're not in the market to recruit and you're not local anyway, you'd weigh up whether it was worth your time and money going just to be nosey. If visitors make that sort of informed decision, why don't courses?

Everybody else goes

Stop being sheep.

 

 

 

 

There are advantages if courses are clever. At one university I worked at the students paid for everything and raised money through organising parties at local clubs, art sales and so on. In the process, they undoubtedly learnt a lot of business skills, teamwork skills and more. Mind you, this was a student initiative, not one from the course, and so all those good things were pretty much accidental and unassessed.

I also wonder how courses who make students pay to go to shows can then use the 'it promotes the course' argument without a pang of guilt.

My main complaint about the show mentality however remains an educational one. The briefs that are associated with the awards are often quite poor, and the awards themselves are usually given for art direction not learning, which sets up major contradictions back in the classroom because we should be rewarding process, not product. I'm not convinced, from what I've been told by a couple of judges, that the same is true when they make their decisions.

I also can't see what advantage a graduate has when showing their portfolio to potential employers when the poor bugger they're talking to has to look at the hundredth bit of packaging for this year's trendy energy drink.

But mostly, it's down to the pressure on other parts of the course. Try getting students in their final year to focus on their dissertation when the deadline for getting work sent off to D&AD is approaching. In fact, try to get them to focus on anything. Some courses even stop teaching (across all years) to focus on the bloody thing. I know one course that chooses the most likely 'winners' and essentially sends everyone else home while all the staff art direct the lucky few to completion. I think that's not uncommon and it would be interesting for judges to look into this as it creates an unlevel playing field (I know a guy who was recruited by a course simply to work on getting entries to competition-winning standard - could we be seeing the start of 'rainmaker' appointments focussed not on good teaching but on winning awards?)

The stress is unwelcome too. Don't pretend that it's 'realistic' or a 'taste of what happens in industry' - it isn't at all. I've done trade shows and I've done student shows and believe me, I'd take a trade show anyday.

And if a show like D&AD or Free Range or New Designers happens to be a bit early one year, it can have a huge knock on effect on courses that already truncate their teaching year to get their own local degree shows ready.

I think the whole student show thing needs to be looked at carefully. Organisers need to look at the timing of the events and the costs involved, especially for those students who don't live in or near London. They need to be non-profit making or at least put any profits into some sort of bursary scheme to help those least able to pay to go. (Anyone who visits a show thinking they're seeing the best students rather than just the ones who could afford to go is kidding themselves - think of the ones you're missing if you only look at the produce on show).

They also need to be educational by putting on workshops and guest talks (but not the sort of 'portfolio surgery' thing that sees students queuing for hours to be patronised by a Dragon's Den wannabe, or a talk from a famous designer who might as well be talking to a mirror - no, these need to be good, educational talks by educators, not egotists. Given that, for example, students don't pay attention to talks on business skills while at university, a show like this might be a good time to address that).

They also need to justify the whole London thing. Smaller regional shows would be a better bet, unless you really are arguing that the reason the shows are in London is because that's where the industry is predominantly based. In that case, why isn't the industry paying for them instead of students? Student debt is already bad enough without it being made worse for the privelege of being paraded in front of bored designers for a week. And given the fact that the creative industries themselves acknowledge that the London bias is damaging us, and that we are recruiting far too few ethinic minorities or people from poorer backgrounds, it seems odd that these shows simply reinforce the problem.

Many of these shows sell themselves on the idea that they are 'supporting new talent'. So not making money or benefitting from some great publicity. If the design industry really wants to put students through that process it should be prepared to dip into its pockets.

But, if you'll excuse the cliche, at the end of the day we really need to ask ourselves, what is the point of these shows? It's not to get students jobs, or to find employees as there are far better ways of doing that. It's not to get publicity for courses as few potential students go along.
If, in the final analysis, it's really just a jolly good opportunity for a piss-up and a social then why not stop pretending and just call it that?

Ultimately, however, I think students and courses need to think a bit more creatively and list all the things they think they get out of going to a show in London. Then they need to ask themselves if there are better ways, and cheaper, less stressful ways, of achieving the same ends. It's ironic, given the industry we're related to, that we don't do this. If going to D&AD etc are really the only ways to get students out there, to get them jobs and to publicise courses then how do you explain the successes of students who don't go to them, and of courses that manage to recruit without the expense of attending?

Could it be that it's all a great big con?

Cultural Studies Now

I'm speaking at this conference on 21st July. My paper looks at how design students respond to cultural studies which appears to be replacing traditional 'heroic' design history on courses. I won't give the conclusions away except to say 'it's a good thing'.
And to critics who wonder what happens to design history? It's still there, only this way students engage in it rather than passively receive it. Sure, you'll sell fewer books, but it's about time design history started being interesting and critical rather than simply celebratory.

I'll post the summary of my presentation here after the conference (my holiday starts the day after and I'm ready for it!)

Cultural Studies Now

A major conference at the University of East London

July 19th - 22nd 2007

http://www.uel.ac.uk/culturalstudiesnow

In a technocratic age of cosmopolitan capitalism, is there still a place for a Cultural Studies which is both
politically committed and relentlessly experimental in its intellectual, institutional and creative practices?

Cultural Studies Now will be the largest conference of its kind to have been held in the UK for many years. Explicitly addressing the present, past and future fate of the discipline conceived as a radical intellectual project, the conference will feature over 100 panels on a wide range of topics, with contributors from every continent. Keynote addresses will come from Ien Ang, Rosi Braidotti, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Jeremy Gilbert, Alan Grossman, Judith Halberstam, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Doreen Massey, Áine O'Brien and Horace Ové.

Registration (including food by Leon Lewis):

Full conference £200 (students and concessions £140)
day rate £60 (students and concessions £45)

Only two weeks left to book your place!

Please see our website for full details and registration:

The threat of 'ignorant' designers

"Ignorant designers have been singled out as one of the biggest obstacles facing design last week by one of the leading commentators on design and innovation in the US, Bruce Nussbaum.

In a keynote speech given at the Royal College of Art’s annual Innovation Night on Tuesday last week, the assistant managing editor of Business Week concluded by saying, ‘The two biggest barriers to innovation are ignorant chief executives and ignorant designers’.
Nussbaum suggested that undergraduate designers need to expose themselves to the tangible, everyday challenges facing the outside world, rather than rely solely on abstract, college-based learning.

He went on to say that design, innovation and technology are merging at such speed that it is pointless to try to classify disciplines.

‘You may as well call [the phenomenon] a banana,’ Nussbaum says.

Speaking to an audience comprising design practitioners, academics, students and the media, Nussbaum reiterated some of the prominent issues affecting design and innovation, as well as social trends that influence global business, including sustainability and social networking.

The US business community, he says, still associates design with cosmetic change, rather than practical problem-solving, technology and innovation.

‘This is something that needs to change. Design is ‘the’ way of reaching the consumer populace,’ he says.

(Via Design Week.)

The irony is, I think most design 'academics' have been pushing to diversify courses beyond the simple studio aesthetic approach for years, but 'industry' pushes us back to it. So long as cultural studies and 'theory' are separated out and given a 20% weighting against 'practical' work, we're never going to produce the sort of designers we need. So long as students only get an hour and a half a week of teaching about the issues surrounding design, but no opportunity to develop their understanding in the studio, we will continue to produce 'ignorant' designers.

A little aside: last year I was invited to give a talk to students at a well-known university that did very well at last week's D&AD Awards. In it I said designers need to be polymaths, and that design students need to stop reading Creative Review (designers' porn) and start reading a decent newspaper. I posed a question - this was November last year, just before the US midterms:

"The art director at The Guardian calls you up and says he needs a graphic to accompany a story on the US midterms. Do you a) say 'the what?', b) say 'OK' then go look it up on Wikipedia or c) say 'No problem, I know exactly what's going on'."

Half the students put their hands up to option a. The other half put their hands up to option b. Only one student put his hand up to option c, but when challenged actually didn't know what the midterms were.

Given that these were graphic design students at one of the leading graphic design schools in the world (according to its reputation), never mind the UK, it was a little embarrassing.

This isn't 'abstract knowledge' - it's bread and butter to graphic designers. And it isn't even knowledge that has to be taught - I'm not advocating weekly lectures on the world's news. I simply think design students should read newspapers, watch the news, think about the world and how design operates in it beyond the shallow way it's represented in most of the design press.

It's a state of mind - the idea that being interested in the world is 'a good thing' should be a core value of any degree level course. It should permeate every aspect of it. And I don't think it does in many design courses. We don't reward students who know stuff, we reward those who can do stuff. If anyone says that's okay then I've got a folder full of Photoshop Actions that are all due degrees.

Reading some of the early documents from Creative and Cultural Skills, for example, it's clear that there's a suspicion of 'academic' learning in the industry that sees colleges as employee producers. Academics are seen as 'out of touch' and there's a call for more practitioners to teach (more? The vast majority of teachers in design are practitioners!). But surely that just turns courses into critique-based masterclasses focused on art direction? When Nussbaum says "undergraduate designers need to expose themselves to the tangible, everyday challenges facing the outside world, rather than rely solely on abstract, college-based learning" does he mean more social studies, more 'theory', more cultural and political awareness, more ecology, and less skills-based learning?

I suspect he does and I agree with him. After all, there are plenty of step-by-step books and magazines available if you want to learn Photoshop. You don't need a degree to be an artworker. (And you shouldn't employ a graduate if all you need is an artworker. The role of industry in encouraging an unnecessary growth in design degrees is something they fail to acknowledge.)

We need to be clearer about what we mean when we call design education 'degree level' and not be ashamed to ramp up the 'academic' content of courses. 'Academic' does not equal 'abstract'.

But Nussbaum needs to know that he isn't the first to say these things and that some of us are trying. I wish someone would give a speech praising some design education rather than lumping it all together and calling it crap. It really pisses me off to be labelled like that.

Reading his comments, and those in C&CS publications among others, it's obvious that the problematic term is 'academics' which seems to take in everyone from technicians to researchers. This is not one homogenous group but a collection of tribes, each with their own territory and traditions (just like the design industry, in fact!) Debates like this need to be clearer in their terminology because one group will read the criticism of 'abstract, college-based learning' as a call for less theory and more 'real-world experience' (i.e. an industry, skills-based focus), while another (including me) will read it as a call for less of an industry focus and more of an industry changing focus.

It's a subtle difference when you write it down - a major difference philosphically.