Yet Another Test

Testing 123 .....

While Bach's abilities as an organist were recognized and highly respected throughout Europe during his lifetime, he was not particularly well-known as a composer. His adherence to Baroque forms and contrapuntal style was considered "old-fashioned" by his contemporaries, especially late in his career when the musical fashion tended towards Rococo and later Classical styles. A revival of interest and performances of his music began early in the 19th century, and he is now widely considered to be one of the greatest composers in the Western tradition.

And another test!

Although Escher did not have mathematical training—his understanding of mathematics was largely visual and intuitive—Escher's work had a strong mathematical component, and more than a few of the worlds which he drew are built around impossible objects such as the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle. Many of Escher's works employed repeated tilings called tessellations. Escher's artwork is especially well-liked by mathematicians and scientists, who enjoy his use of polyhedra and geometric distortions. For example, in Gravity, multi-colored turtles poke their heads out of a stellated dodecahedron.

This is another test

I'm just testing this out again.

Although he spoke very little Czech himself, Gödel automatically became a Czechoslovak citizen at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian empire broke up at the end of World War I. He later told his biographer John W. Dawson that he felt like an "exiled Austrian in Czechoslovakia" ("ein Österreicher im Exil in der Tschechoslowakei") during this time. He chose to become an Austrian citizen at age 23. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. After World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.

Minutes of Blog Committee Meeting, July 22 2009

Present: Derek Denis, Alex Motut (minutes), Jen Higgs, Joanna Chociej, Richard Compton, Alexei Kochetov
Regrets: Naomi Nagy, Keren Rice, Elizabeth Cowper, Liisa Duncan

Issues
1. A new blog

• Elan appealed to the newsletter committee to revamp our newsletter
• The committee has decided that a blog style newsletter should replace the (annual) newsletter
  

2.Server

• We debated whether the blog should be U of T housed (through CHASS or otherwise) or done through a 3rd party server like Blogger
• We decided that going through a third party like Blogger would be best

• It is easily updated and editable


• It can be implemented sooner


• Other Linguistics departments (Ottawa and Memorial) have blogs through Blogger


• Blogger is associated with Google so we can use our new Google account (currently used with Google Calendar) for the blog and even potentially for other purposes like Picasso (a Google App for storing images)


• Blogger has the ability to add posts through email

3. A separate window or embedded in the department website?

• We can present the blog in two ways

• As independent from the website (like MIT)
• Embedded within the website (like UMass)

• We decided that for now an independent blog is more appealing

• Otherwise, we would have to make a template to match the design of the website (not difficult but time consuming)
• An independent blog has a more ‘home-grown’ feel – it’s a department thing rather than a U of T thing
• It wouldn’t be a hassle f down the road we want to embedded the blog in the website

4. Who can post?

• We debated whether to allow anyone in the department to post entries on the blog or to have a middle-person involved who receives news and posts the entries
• The concern with keeping the blog open to the whole community is that there is the potential for nothing to be posted (if no one is in charge) and there is the potential for too much to be posted.
  

• If too little… We won’t know this until we implement the blog
  
• If too much… The Blog Committee can easily delete any inappropriate content; The Blog Committee will make guidelines available for people as to what is appropriate to post, technical stuff, etc. For example, if posting about conference presentations, there should be one post about who’s presenting, not 4 posts from 4 different people who are presenting.
  

5. Next Steps

• Get a Blogger address through the department Google account (Derek)
• Create guidelines (Alex)
• Make a list of potential labels (Jen)
• Design a few templates for the blog (Derek & Joanna)
• Come up with a name (Anyone???)

Any questions/comments/concerns can be sent to Derek at derek.denis@utoronto.ca

This is a test

Hello world.

This is a test