The professors and researchers at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS), an have just started a blog, PoliSciZurich.
From PoliSciZurich:
“Our goal is to engage in a fresh exchange on research, teaching, and the academic profession by exploiting what makes political science in Zurich distinctive, namely a strongly research-oriented and international profile in a European location.”
Welcome to the blogosphere. Make yourselves at home!
Bradford Peace Podcast / YouTube
When the boss isn’t looking and we have a few minutes to spare, we check out the latest international relations video podcasts. Here are some currently on our YouTube playlists:
Conversations with History from UC Berkeley. Noam Chomsky, Wole Soyinka and Christopher Hitchens are some of the big names that have been interviewed.
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Bradford Peace Podcast from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Dr Paul Rogers, a columnist for ISN Security Watch republishing partner Open Democracy, is a frequent guest.
Some, like C-SPAN, provide a live stream of congressional events, speeches and hearings (often on foreign affairs); others offer insights into current affairs drawn from expert interviews, while the Economist, for example, provides audio summaries of their Special Reports and a weekly podcast outlining the key events to look out for in the days ahead. The London School of Economics and the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations provide audio and video files of speeches and public lectures held at the schools on a wide variety of topics and often by high profile speakers.
And remember that we can also be found on the audio airwaves – enjoy ISN podcasts at home or on the go!
Those among you who are interested in the origin of words may already know the etymology of “serendipity.” The word is based on an ancient tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip” and describes an accidental and fortunate discovery of something unexpected.
Serendipitous discoveries take place because of how things are ordered and because of the search tools and practices we employ. At the ISN we are also concerned with the order of things. We classify our content by using about 3000 keywords on international relations and security. With this concern in mind, on Wednesday in our weekly editorial meeting we discussed a recent NY Times article by Damon Darlin on the loss of serendipity in the digital age. According to Darlin, because of the internet tools in place today we have “lost the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find.”
So we wondered: Does indexing information really remove the element of surprise?
I believe this is not the case. Indexed information in any encyclopedia is a beautiful opportunity for serendipity. To support my argument I will cite Jorge Luis Borges, who, in his “Investigation of the Word” (in Selected Non-Fictions) talks about the “alphabetical disorder” of dictionaries. What a beautiful opportunity of finding words with very different meanings next to each other just because they share the same initial letters!
First it was TV, then it was video games, now Twitter? Are these things really contributing to the decay of the human psyche, our morality and our ability to concentrate? Or is this just paranoid blame-seeking, intent on vilifying the entire spectrum of modern day tools part of our everyday life?
The ISN blog presents two viewpoints- mine and that of my co-worker Cristina Viehmann. Let the debate begin!