Heads-up for 20 December 2010

The History of Rome
120- Interregnum
After Aurelian's death, an old Senator named Marcus Cluadius Tacitus briefly reigned before the throne fell to Probus, who ruled from 276-282.
(review, feed)

Binge Thinking History
1914 to the decline of Empire
The First World War marks the end the supremacy of the battleship and the beginning of the end for Pax Britannia. The decline of Royal Navy mirrors the that of the British Empire for obvious reasons and the it's future is unclear.
(review, feed)

EconTalk
Nocera on the Crisis and All the Devils Are Here
Joe Nocera, New York Times columnist and co-author with Bethany McClean of All the Devils Are Here, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the origins of the financial crisis. Drawing on his book, Nocera identifies many people he considers devils for contributing to the crisis and a few angels who tried but failed to stop it. The discussion covers the history and development of securitization and the peculiar incentives created by securitization and the relative lack of regulation of the securitization process. The conversation also includes a discussion of whether past bailouts contributed to the crisis.
(review, feed)

University of Warwick Podcasts
Dating the Birth of Jesus and the 'first Christmas' with a Herodian Coin
Anno domini. Today we use the system devised by the sixth-century monk, Dionysius Exiguus, as a way of synchronising events, and associate its origin with the nativity of Jesus and the 'first Christmas'. But did Dionysius get his dates right? Professor Kevin Butcher from the Department of Classics explores how a coin issued by Herod Antipas suggests not.
(review, feed)

Heads-up for 19 December 2010

Exploring Environmental History
Reframing a vision of lost fens
Wetlands were once common over a large part of eastern England. Of these so-called fens only two percent survives today and most of it is now situated in nature reserves. One of these reserves is Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. Today Wicken Fen is the focus of a controversial proposal to radically expand the area of managed wetland around the reserve and to return arable land to its former wetland condition. On this podcast we interview Stuart Warrington, Nature Conservation Advisor for the National Trust at Wicken Fen, about these proposed changes and the role of history in recreating the wetlands. The second half of the podcast is devoted to a talk delivered by Ian Rotherham of Sheffield Hallam University. In his talk Ian analyses the attitudes towards the fens over the centuries and how these influenced the desire to drain thousands of square kilometres of wetland. He also considers the rich wild life in these wetlands and what a rich resources these provided for its inhabitants. Music credit: Mechanics in Love (Cue 3) flac Stems by boomaga, available from ccMixter.
(review, feed)

Norman Centuries
Episode 11 - The Great Count
Roger de Hauteville was a strange conqueror. The youngest of twelve sons he was the last to come to Italy and treated as the least capable of the siblings by a jealous Guiscard. His first raid in Sicily was a disaster that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about him. But Roger persevered and over three decades he managed to carve out a kingdom that rivaled that of William the Conqueror's. Along the way he won one of the most spectacular battles in medieval history and managed to die with all of his vast conquests at peace. Join Lars Brownworth as he looks at the surprising life of the last Hauteville brother.
(review, feed)

History According to Bob
The Berlin Wall Goes Up
This show is about the construction and political fallout from the first Berlin Wall 1961 .
(review, feed)

Tapestry
Franciscan Priest
Mary Hynes talks to Richard Rohr. One of the world's best-known religious thinkers and activists, he is both adored and denounced. Many see him as a spiritual leader who lives the teachings of the 13th century friar, St. Francis. Rohr is an advocate for urban renewal, the eradication of poverty, male spirituality, as well as for gay and lesbian rights. He is a priest, a former prison chaplain, author, and a man who spends half the year living out of a suitcase, teaching around the world
(review, feed)

Dogear Nation
The Death of Delicious
We end the year with some bitter news, and we need your help to move into 2011. Delicious, our site of choice for getting your tags, is being shut down by Yahoo. How do you want us to get your input for the show? Please drop us an email at dogearnation@gmail.com or comment on the blog. Should we use an open Google Doc? Should we use Twitter Hashtags? Should we use the Facebook? Should we use Google Buzz? Or do you have an idea? We hope everyone has a great year end, and we will be back with a new episode Recorded January 7th, 2011.
(review, feed)

Chris Hedges - Radio Open Source

Here is a quick recommendation to listen to Radio Open Source, where Christopher Lydon interviews Chris Hedges about his bleak outlook on modern world in general and the US society in particular. Here he explains how he think our democracy is run down the drain - with Democrats and Republicans equally guilty. (feed)

About a year and a half ago, we also heard him on Media Matters with an equally grim depiction of where we live. Also here his concern is liberal democracy, but here he discusses how our culture is dumbing down and thus is undermining the proper political state. (feed)

More Radio Open Source:
Geography shifting big history,
Kai Bird,
Amartya Sen on India,
Mustafa Barghouti,
Jackson Lears.

Heads-up for 18 December 2010

New Books In History
Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead”
What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and foremost, understanding the human body. Naturally, then, the philosophes and their successors paid close attention to the body. They cut it up, took it apart, measured it and attempted to see how it worked. They were most interested in one part in particular–the human head. It was the seat of the human characteristic the Enlightenment scientists admired most: intelligence. If one could get a handle on the human cranium, then one would understand what it meant to be human. Or at least so they thought.
(review, feed)

London School of Economics: Public lectures and events
Valuing the Humanities
James Ladyman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol and co-editor of the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Lord Rees of Ludlow is President of the Royal Society, Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College Cambridge. Richard Smith is a Former editor of the British Medical Journal and Director of the Ovations Institute. Mark Lawson from BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian.
(review, feed)

Big Ideas
Art historian Francis Broun on The Art of Sir Edwin Landseer
Art historian Francis Broun presents his lecture entitled Genius Denied: The Art of Sir Edwin Landseer. It was recorded at the Women's Art Association in Toronto on May 24th, 2010.
(review, feed)

Philosophy Bites
Philip Pettit on Group Agency
When a group of people acts together we can hold that group morally and legally responsible. But how does the group decide to act? Is a decision of the group simply the majoritarian sum of individual group members' views? Princeton philosopher Philip Pettit, who has written a book about this topic with Christian List of the LSE, discusses these issues with Nigel Warburton for the Philosophy Bites podcast. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
(review, feed)

Veertien Achttien
Charles Mangin en het succes van de vijfde golf (zondag 17 december 1916)
'De slager' noemden de soldaten hem wel. Erger nog: 'de menseneter'. Charles Mangin nam in het krijgsbedrijf menselijke verliezen voor lief. Met het eind van de oorlog had hij ook geen vrede.
(review, feed)

Heads-up for 17 December 2010

Being aka Speaking of Faith
The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi
This Peabody award-winning show explores the spiritual world of Rumi, a 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet, with Persian scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz. Rumi saw human love as a mirror of the divine, and searching as a form of arrival. Hear his poetry and its echoes in our world.
(review, feed)

Forgotten Classics
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Deluge. In which we hear a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh
and also consider myth and literature.
(review, feed)

Russian Rulers History Podcast
Peter Takes on the Turks
Peter, having partied for 5 years, is ready to take control of things and take the fight to the Turk backed Tatars in Azov.
(review, feed)

Witness
Washington Snipers
On December 18th 2003, one of the 2 Washington Snipers, Lee Boyd Malvo, was convicted of murder. He and John Allen Muhammad had terrorised the US capital and its suburbs for 3 weeks in 2002, killling at random.
(review, feed)

Harvard Business IdeaCast
Guilty People Make Good Managers
Frank Flynn, Stanford Business School professor and subject of the HBR article "Guilt-Ridden People Make Great Leaders."
(review, feed)

Remove iTunesU files - revisited

It is hard to remove iTunesU files from iPod (nano and older - not from iPod touch). I have written about this last August and that is one the most frequented posts on this blog - Problem with iPod: remove iTunesU files. This post gives three methods to remove the files, each with their own limitations.
1- Recategorize (safe, but does not work for all)
2- Delete through file system (risky and complicated, but effective)
3- Reset (easy and safe, but with side-effects)

Here I want to tell you about a fourth method I have found. The fourth method is safe and effective, but as I will point out, has drawbacks of its own.

4. Synchronize iTunesU

You can change the settings of your iPod to synchronize with iTunes on your computer. This can be done for Music and Podcasts as well as for iTunesU. Select your iPod in iTunes (as on the picture above) and click on the iTunesU label above the summary. Then select the checkbox to sync iTunes U and choose to synchronize all unplayed and all collections. As on the picture below.

What this setting will cause is for iTunes to automatically copy all unplayed iTunesU files from your computer onto your iPod and after you have played them, either on computer or iPod, automatically remove them from the iPod. In case you want to listen more than once, you can choose to sync All files from iTunesU and in that case, the files will only be removed from your iPod, after you delete them from your computer. In case your iTunesU section is very large, you may also want to not sync for all collections, but rather choose one or more among them.

So far so good - this indeed is a safe and effective way to get rid of redundant iTunesU files from your iPod. What are the drawbacks?

First of all, like me, you may want to prefer managing your iPod manually. You may not like all unplayed files to be on iPod and also, you may not want to immediately remove what has already been played.

A second, very weird phenomenon, is that iTunesU files will appear on the computer interface on the iTunesU item under iPod, that is, as a category like podcasts, yet when you handle the iPod independently, iTunesU acts as a playlist and not as a category like podcasts. This makes the files more difficult to find and one more click away than podcasts.

The best solution to the second phenomenon is the playlist, which is a feature I use anyway, because I like back to back listening. Copy your iTunesU files onto a playlist together with podcasts and other audio you like and create your own order there. One has to be warned though: you can only make playlists when your iPod is managed manually, so do not sync music and podcasts otherwise playlists are no longer available. Be aware also that this not stopping the first problem and therefore, the iTunesU files will be removed from the playlist as they are removed from iPod during synchronization.

The way around the first problem is to only use the sync iTunesU setting occasionally when you want to remove all iTunesU files and once that is done, revert back to manual.

UPDATE: Go to the BEST method I propose for dealing with this problem: Subscribe to iTunesU feeds as a podcast