Leaving on the 11th of January!!!

Ok! It's confirmed and I have the tickets on my hand!

You might wonder "hand?? What about e-tickets??" Well, seems like Air New Zealand is not much into that, so they sent me (and Jeanette, the Master student from the Social Anthropology department at SU, who will partake in this journey with me) a small booklet with all the tickets!

Waste of paper? Environmental concerns? Pfff... We are taking planes for over 30 hours, so we're beyond that! And the feeling of having those printed tickets on my hand... priceless!!!

So for the curious here is my itinerary (Jeanette flies on the same date as me but returns on the 3rd of March rather than the 24th):

1) SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES - SK 531
MON 11JAN      STOCKHOLM SE        LONDON GB              1110     1250
               ARLANDA             HEATHROW
NON STOP       TERMINAL 5          TERMINAL 3             DURATION 2:40
 
2) AIR NEW ZEALAND - NZ 1
MON 11JAN      LONDON GB           AUCKLAND NZ            1545     0705
               HEATHROW            AUCKLAND                        13JAN
1 STOP         TERMINAL 1          TERMINAL INTL          DURATION 26:20

 
3)AIR NEW ZEALAND - NZ 378
WED 13JAN      AUCKLAND NZ         PORT VILA VU           2100     2210
               AUCKLAND            BAUERFIELD
NON STOP       TERMINAL INTL                              DURATION 3:10
 

RETURN:

4) AIR NEW ZEALAND - NZ 379
WED 24MAR      PORT VILA VU        AUCKLAND NZ            1500     2000
               BAUERFIELD          AUCKLAND
NON STOP                           TERMINAL INTL          DURATION 3:00
 
5) AIR NEW ZEALAND - NZ 2
WED 24MAR      AUCKLAND NZ         LONDON GB              2300     1040
               AUCKLAND            HEATHROW                        25MAR
1 STOP         TERMINAL INTL       TERMINAL 1             DURATION 24:40
 
6) SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES - SK 532
THU 25MAR      LONDON GB           STOCKHOLM SE           1350     1720
               HEATHROW            ARLANDA
NON STOP       TERMINAL 3          TERMINAL 5             DURATION 2:30

Manuel Castells at KTH

http://intra.itm.kth.se/kth-informerar/akademiska-hogtider/professors-future

Mobile revolution reaches Pacific

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091101/bs_afp/pacifictelecomdigicel

Some interesting Vanuatu related links

I found this short summary of some cultural aspects of Vanuatu. It is very concise and not really detailed. It is nice however as a (very) short introduction to some questions such as: which languages do they speak there? How is their education system?

A brief overview of the Old New Hebrides

The Vanuatu Peace corps also has some interesting information as for instance a "what to bring to Vanuatu" list for future volunteers, or a book for learning Bislama:

Main site
What to bring to Vanuatu
Bislama learning book (check bottom of page for links)

Enjoy!

Social and economic impact of introducing telecommunications throughout Vanuatu

This is the title of the report that is available at the Pacific Policy Institute website:
http://pacificpolicy.org/index.php?option=com_rubberdoc&view=category&id=57&Itemid=99

It is a very thorough report with many different looks at the situation. A lot of quantitative data for the number crunching addicts :)

Interactive Art Installation - Camille Utterback

Nice piece of bodily interaction, by Camille Utterback, that just won a MacArthur Fellowship.

MacArthur webpage about this project:
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5470973/k.6548/Video_Camille_Utterback.htm

Her page at the MacArthur foundation website:
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458045/k.A999/Camille_Utterback.htm

Her homepage:
http://www.camilleutterback.com/

Couldn't resist...

Should not be posting stuff too far from the project. I decided that if it stays below 10% should not be a problem... any criticism will be received happily.

Anyway, since my last post was about Mike Wesch, and this was a video he just "Twitted", I guess there is a rationale for this after all...

Now seriously, watch until the end:

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

Not really new, but a must for those who have not seen this awesome video yet:



Mike Wesch is a great professor at Kansas State University. He is also the author of the famous web 2.0 video "The machine is using us":



See more of him at the mediated cultures Website.

The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication

For those of you who haven't read this, it's an extremely interesting book about an anthropological study on Cell Phones in Jamaica. The interest of the book is much wider than the specificity of the setting.

I've been reading it as part of the Digital Anthropology course at Stockholm University, which I also highly recommend. The author, Daniel Miller also published another interesting read on the Internet in Trinidad and Tobago.
I leave with the Amazon link then...

Vanuatu on Swedish Television

Watch here from the Swedish channel SVT.

For those who do not speak Swedish, it is still a very nice watch, just for the sheer beauty of the place :)

And it begins

Mobile technologies have entered the lives of some of us in a way that, looking back now, might give us the impression that all along we have been following a straight road.

However, mobile technologies, as we know them today, are the product of a number of decisions, political implications, historical contingencies and a myriad of other factors, varying in degrees of intentionality, or lack of it.

Looking at it now, for someone like me who followed this process all along the way, might give the impression that the cornerstones of mobile interaction are untouchable. Hard to imagine something else than a variation of a phone book, thumbless interaction or other basic aspects of everyday mobile usage.

That is why we decided to go outside of our box. We will be conducting a series of workshops in Vanuatu, where mobile communications are relatively recent and "desktop metaphor"-style computer interaction has also met low adoption rates. Our hope is that this will result in fresh and innovative ideas for mobile interaction.

This idea was partly motivated by a lecture I heard by Alan Kay where he quotes Marshall McLuhan: “We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.” I think this reflects very well our ideas and intentions. We, as the fish, have a harder time to see and rethink what we are surrounded by.

(Great lecture by the way , never gets old):

This project is part of the bigger Generalized Interaction Models project, running at the Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University.

We will try and stay away from desktop, file/folder, point and click and all these metaphors that permeate our everyday digital interaction.

1,2,3... GO!