Political Science - UCLA podcast review

I am indebted to Dara of Do It Yourself Scholar for heading me to this political science course at UCLA. The course is from 2007, but is timeless and therefore no less valuable this year around. I have not yet been able to go through the whole course (far from it), but felt I needed not to wait and point you to it.

Political Science 10 is taught by the Canadian professor Brian Douglas Walker, who displays an immediately recognizable Canadian accent and throws his background in occasionally, but this (so far) never bothers. Aside from this warning, there is another thing you need to be aware of: the lectures do not necessarily appear out of the feed into your reader (for example iTunes) in their proper order. If however, you read the titles well, you will discern the lecture date and find which order to follow. In my case, the first lecture came out in third place, but again, with the date in the title, you cannot go wrong.

Very valuable I found the second lecture where Walker typifies Greek philosophy and effectively brings home what is so profoundly special about it. In simple terms: the Greeks discovered theory and as a result, until this very day, Western thinking is obsessed with abstract constructions, logic, reasoning and argumentation. Plato kicks this off, but Walker moves on, pretty quickly to Aristotle, who has had the greatest influence (on him). Of course, even with the clear speaker and the high quality audio, this lecture series, as always with this kind of series, requires intense listening.

Music podcasts

There is a whole world out there, bigger even than ours, the educational talkative podcasts. It is the world of music podcasts. I lack the expertise as well as the capacity to venture into reviewing music podcast. However, as big as the branch is, it is inevitable I should bump into it after all.

My first encounter was with the easy listening music podcast Sunday Sundown as I was preparing for an article about the host, podcaster Maurice Zondag. Maurice's music show is most simply characterized as a radio show with accessible music, as it is featured on so many channels around the world. Recently, the podcast has even been promoted to become a live show on an on-line radio channel (Digital Music Radio). The whole difference with regular radio is that the music is podsafe. This is part of Zondag's idea that the revenue system in the music industry must and will change and that all music should be podsafe.

And so, any music show in podcast you are going to run into, is going to have its own signature niche, where it is seeking to give exposure. The podcast that was reported through report a podcast is called My Living Room! Radio Show. Here the focus is first of all on a style off the middle of the road. It is paced music with a lot of electronic elements. It creates an atmosphere of what reminded me of New Wave. An additional focal point is to have music of Canadian origin. The involvement the podcast has with Canadian music and musicians is especially tangible in the show (September 2008) that features an interview with Michael Perlmutter. Perlmutter is the coordinator of Canadian Music Cafe, a music encounter during the Toronto film festival which brings Canadian musical talent together with the movie industry.

The fact that podcasting is big and turns to a force of importance can be concluded also from the fact that regular music companies also engage in podcasting. An example of such is the company Naxos, whose podcast I have reviewed on this blog before.

More Maurice Zondag:
Podcasting has yet to break through,
Zoem podcast,
ICT Update.

More Naxos:
Pictures at an exhibition,
Hildegard von Bingen.