Cognitive Labs

article with this pic is here, portugese

The SF Chronicle, a venerable newspaper since the U.S. Civil War, may shut down. It has been owned by Hearst since 2001, after it was decided to sell the SF Examiner, the original Hearst paper in SF. Hearst Corporation is also considering shuttering the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Another paper in the family is the Albany (NY) Times-Union. It is also possible that the parent is looking to find a new home for the newspaper operation while it retains the popular website, sfgate.com. There are much different costs and economies of scale in operating newspapers vs. operating websites...which reach far greater numbers of people, with equal or greater attentive time, for much less expenditure. And that's where the rub is with the business.

Labels: chronicle, hearst, kane, portugese

Why is that? Need more brain-training, I imagine. The sf examiner has an interesting flash-based CMS that provides a digital version just like the newspaper.

A few years back (in web 1.0) we looked at an early CMS asset management system that was being shepherded (and demo'd) by George Hearst, then the editor of the Albany, NY Times-Union newspaper - which at the time (2000-2001) was a Hearst paper.

It's amazing how far CMS has come, from vignette to Flash.

They did a lot for archaeology by backing George Reisner (in addition to building much of the UC Berkeley campus).

Albany has a number of monuments to Union soldiers and sailors, like many upper midwestern and eastern towns.

Labels: albany, george, hearst

A PR coo for the Real Age guys...(Hearst)

Go to the presidential brain gym and see the Ad that's been running there for some time.

Regardless, George Bush showed reasonable reaction time in avoiding the flying shoe.

Labels: bush, hearst, michael, realage, roizen, shoe

Today's archaeologists generally don't wear fedoras. However, that said Zahi Hawass, Supreme Director of Antiquities in Egypt and the usual frontman for Egyptological announcements, does wear one in media appearances.

A former U.C. Berkeley professor, Dr. Kent Weeks, has been known to wear one as well on those Discovery Channel specials, a little like Dr. Jones. At the end of the 80's, Weeks left Berkeley and went to Cairo full-time, making several notable discoveries, such as the tomb of Ramses' sons, heralded as the biggest discovery since Howard Carter, Lord Carnaveron and King Tut.

Weeks taught the upper division survey courses in the field, which were delivered in a classroom in the top levels of the insufferably hot and stuffy Wheeler Hall.

Hieroglyphics at that time was in Evans Hall, housing Math and CS. Generally those classes had a handful of people, at least half graduate students. There are only a few schools in the U.S. (or the world) that teach Egyptian, which generally requires fluency in German and French (at least reading knowledge) to master the codices and seminal interpretative works, generally written in those languages, plus you'll have to pick up some Arabic to get anywhere in Egypt. Now, with PC and Mac tools such as WinGlyph and MacScribe, it's easier to compose in Egyptian than ever before. There's also a new Linux-based open source hieroglyph project.

Some of the models for other characters of Raiders of the Lost Ark, include Dr. Kurt Sethe and Dr. Adolf Erman - Egyptologists in Berlin. Sethe was the editor of the all-important Urkunden des Ægyptischen Altertums. Sethe was the translator and the world's leading expert on the mystical and somewhat obscure pyramid texts.

References:

Univ. of Chicago Online version of Sethe, Kurt. Die Altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte nach den Papierabdrucken und Photographien des Berliner Museums Leipzig : J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1908


Utterance 373 (Teti)


pyramid text of Unas

So, if that pair is a model for the 'villains,' who is the real Dr. Jones?

One of the names sometimes thrown out is Dr. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago, because his names sounds like Dr. Abner Ravenwood, ostensibly of the University of Chicago. Braidwood, however, was an expert on the Near Eastern Palaeolithic, not Egyptian nor Near Eastern high civilizations. There is also a street known as Ravenswood in Menlo Park, CA - where SRI is located. This might be a Lucas joke like the invention of the banking clan mogul San(d) Hill in the Star Wars saga.


Reisner is 2nd from left, on donkey

In terms of someone actually looking the part and working at the right time period, you could pick Harvard-trained Dr. George Reisner, professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Berkeley in the first decade of the 20th century, thereafter at Harvard. With funding from Phoebe Hearst, Reisner brought to Berkeley thousands of artifacts from his expeditions in Upper Egypt - more than enough to fill several standard museums. There are so many objects they are not displayed regularly. One of the best is the stela of WepemNofret.(below)

Labels: ark, braidwood, crystal, hearst, indiana, jones, lost, ravenwood, reisner

New home page look, now that soccer season is over.


Read up on the life of Hearst and the Julia Morgan created wonderland.(No fee for us involved)

Amazon.com:
The epic scope of historian David Nasaw's biography matches the titanic personality and achievements of William Randolph Hearst (1862-1951), who built "the nation's first media conglomerate" from a single San Francisco newspaper. Based on previously unavailable sources, including Hearst's personal papers, Nasaw's long but absorbing narrative gives a full-bodied account of the often contradictory mogul: "a huge man with a tiny voice; a shy man who was most comfortable in crowds ... an autocratic boss who could not fire people; a devoted husband who lived with his mistress." Wife Millicent Hearst and actress-inamorata Marion Davies also emerge with more complexity than in previous portraits like Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, whose factual inaccuracies Nasaw dissects. The author tempers the usual simplistic account of Hearst's political evolution from fire-breathing leftist to red-baiting conservative, calling him "a classic liberal" who believed in less-is-more government and deplored fascism as much as communism. Fresh insights and elegantly turned phrases abound in Nasaw's depiction of Hearst's activities as newspaper publisher, movie producer, and politician, but what's even more intriguing is the poignant personal drama of a man born "in the city of great expectations on the edge of the continent" who was buried 89 years later in San Francisco, "the place he used to know."

Labels: cambria, chief, hearst, morgan, neptune, sansimeon

Here's a quick look at medicine in Ancient Egypt. We'll follow up with additional interesting links. One of the more interesting cases we are aware of is the Hearst Medical Papyrus, found by George Reisner of Berkeley, working under the sponsorship of Phoebe A. Hearst. Intensive evaluation of these works, with an eye for potential scientific value, is one of the more interesting prospective works we are considering. There is also a possible issue with the authenticity of this work, not, however with the Ebers Papyrus...

Labels: berkeley, hearst, medical, papyrus, reisner