UX research with distance learners

In order to avoid restricting the Open University Library's User Experience research to those students who happen to live within easy travelling distance of our Milton Keynes campus, we conduct as much UX as possible remotely online. This chapter talks about some of the methods we have used

’No Poetry, No Reality:’ Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Fiction and Reality

Friedrich Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality are notoriously baffling. They are often regarded as outlandish, or “poetically exaggerated” statements, since they are taken to suggest that there is no difference between poetry and reality or to express the view that there is no way out of linguistic and poetic constructions (Bowie). I take all these responses to be mistaken, and argue that Schlegel’s remarks are philosophical observations about a genuine confusion in theoretical approaches to the distinction between fiction and reality. The confusion at stake involves the assumption that this distinction is and must be fixed independently of the ordinary practices of using these terms to mean certain things in specific situations. And this assumption itself is grounded fundamentally in a confused picture about the way language works. I argue that this confused understanding of the distinction between fiction and reality is not an object of the past, but a picture that is still shaping a central strand in the contemporary debate in philosophical aesthetics about our emotional responses to fiction. And while I do not use Schlegel’s approach to argue against this contemporary view directly, I suggest that his philosophical method includes the resources for unraveling a central confusion in this contemporary debate

Value First: Comments on Mohan Matthen’s ‘The Pleasure of Art’

While I welcome Mohan Matthen’s insistence that art is connected to aesthetic pleasure, I worry about his commitment to viewing pleasure as prior to, and constitutive of, the value of art. I raise my reservations by (i) dispelling his criticism of the reversed explanatory direction, and (ii) showing problems for his commitment. As an alternative, I offer an account of pleasure that explains it in terms of the independent value of art—an account that is free of the problems Matthen raises against this explanatory approach

The Second International m-Libraries Conference

Keren Mills reports on a two-day conference exploring and sharing delivery of services and resources to users 'on the move,' via mobile and hand-held devices, held at UBC in Vancouver, BC, Canada, from 23 - 24 June 2009

Rationally Agential Pleasure? A Kantian Proposal

The main claim of the paper is that, on Kant's account, aesthetic pleasure is an exercise of rational agency insofar as, when proper, it has the following two features: (1) It is an affective responsiveness to the question: “what is to be felt disinterestedly”? As such, it involves consciousness of its ground (the reasons for having it) and thus of itself as properly responsive to its object. (2) Its actuality depends on endorsement: actually feeling it involves its endorsement as an attitude to have. I claim that seeing that nature of aesthetic pleasure requires that we divest ourselves of the following dilemma: either feelings are the non-cognitive, passive ways through which we are affected by objects; or they are cognitive states by virtue of the theoretical beliefs they necessarily involve. On my reading of Kant, this dilemma is false. Aesthetic pleasure is neither passive, nor theoretically cognitive, and yet, it is an exercise of rational agency by virtue of belonging to a domain of rationality that is largely overlooked in the history of philosophy, but that deserves, I argue following Kant, our close attention: aesthetic rationality. In the first section, I explain this nature of aesthetic pleasure, and in the second section, I respond to a charge of “over-intellectualism.

M-Libraries: Information use on the move

When people talk about mobile libraries, they tend to mean a bus or truck that has been kitted out as a roving branch library. However with a growing number of people accessing the internet from their pocket PCs and mobile phones, libraries are investigating ways to deliver their services to mobile phones and other small-screen devices so their customers can access them any time anywhere. This can be as simple as sending text message alerts about reservations becoming available or overdue books, or as complex as the Athabasca University Library’s Digital Reading room, which allows readers to access full eBooks and journal articles through their library’s subscriptions on any mobile device. These services have collectively become known as ‘m-libraries’.The Arcadia Programme has been funded by a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund. http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk

Zvi Keren: his contribution to Israel's music scene : an interview in honor of his 85th birthday

It is with great pride that I introduce a new section in this issue of Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology, dedicated to interviews with musicians who have made major contributions to Israel’s music life. I am particularly pleased to inaugurate this section with an interview with our esteemed colleague (and in my case, teacher), Zvi Keren, a major figure in the development of Israel´s contemporary, jazz and light music. This interview is conducted by Alona Keren-Sagee, Zvi Keren´s daughter

The local RG equation and chiral anomalies

We generalize the local renormalization group (RG) equation to theories with chiral anomalies. We find that a new anomaly is required by the Wess-Zumino consistency conditions. Taking into account the new anomaly, the trace of the energy momentum tensor is expressed in terms of the covariant flavor currents, instead of the consistent ones. This result is used to show that a flavor rotation induced by the RG flow can be eliminated by a choice of scheme even in the presence of chiral anomalies. As part of a general discussion of chiral anomalies in the presence of background sources, we also derive non-renormalization theorems. Finally, we introduce the $\theta$ parameter as a source, and derive constraints on a perturbative running of this parameter