Carnegie Mellon's Don Marinelli Offers Food For Thought On Arts, Media, Technology
By Robert Goldrich
LOS ANGELES --Don Marinelli–co-founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Entertainment Technology Degree Program with Randy Pausch, the late educator/author/philosopher whose “The Last Lecture” provided inspiration to many–delivered a lecture of his own as a keynote address for SIGGRAPH 2010 earlier this week in Los Angeles.
There were some parallels thematically between Marinelli’s SIGGRAPH presentation on Monday (7/26) and Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Pausch’s famed lecture which was given on Sept. 18, 2007, at the Pittsburgh-based university. At the time, Pausch was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and knew he had just several months to live. Still, his talk was upbeat and humorous, containing insights into computer science and engineering education, building multi-disciplinary collaborations, and learning life’s lessons for happiness and personal fulfillment. “The Last Lecture” gained major media attention, widespread Internet exposure and resulted in a best-selling book co-written by Paush and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow.
Breaking down barriers so that people could realize their dreams and aspirations was a theme from Pausch’s lecture that carried over to Marinelli’s SIGGRAPH talk. Marinelli recalled his being a theater professor at Carnegie Mellon years ago when he reached a professional crossroads. He could continue on a fast track to becoming “an old fart” lamenting the fact that more students were moving away from the live theater art form. Or he could gravitate to forms that students were embracing with the paradigm shift from passive traditional media to interactivity such as that found in videogames.
Marinelli chose the latter option, one day walking across campus to the computer science department, asking if it could use a theater professor. To his amazement, the answer was yes, spawning a coming together of art and technology as embodied in the eventual formation of the university’s Entertainment Technology Center, which is a joint initiative between the College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science, teaming technologists and non-technologists on projects that produce installations and content designed to entertain, inform, inspire or otherwise affect an audience, guest, player or participant.
“We broke down the barrier between theater arts and computer science,” said Marinelli, noting that computer science has a passion often associated with the arts and conversely theater performance and storytelling have structural elements just as computer science does.
Indeed, said Marinelli, the boundaries between and among artists, scientists and graphic experts have become more blurred. That is evident at SIGGRAPH, and is the underpinning of the Entertainment Technology Center. Marinelli and Pausch envisioned the Center as Carnegie Mellon’s “Dream Fulfillment Factory,” providing students with the tools, experiences and expertise needed to realize meaningful accomplishments, including entertaining, engaging, challenging content. Again this is a theme expressed in both Marinelli’s SIGGRAPH presentation and Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” which was formally titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”
Caveats
Still, Marinelli is concerned over obstacles to this “dream fulfillment,” noting in his SIGGRAPH address that universities maintain bureaucracies that have grown worse during his some 30 years as an educator. He advocates a streamlining of bureaucracy, wondering out loud, “Do we need deans anymore?” Marinelli observed that just as countries are hemorrhaging money, so too are many universities due largely to being too top heavy.
Similarly regulations tied to federal funding are akin to “kryptonite” for progressive education. “We try to avoid it whenever possible,” he affirmed, adding that another barrier is the “ivory tower mentality” at many places of higher learning. “Each university views itself as its own universe which is a problem,” said Marinelli, contending that all universities are part of the same real world universe, with direct connections to their surrounding communities.
He pointed with pride to entrepreneurial media-related and content creation businesses that students in the Entertainment Technology Center have gone on to launch in Pittsburgh, helping to revive an economy that was hit hard by the implosion of the steel industry.
Marinelli, who’s a tenured professor, went on to bemoan the tenure and promotion system at universities which often undermines fairness and decency in education. “Good people can be corrupted by the system,” meaning that the politics of their jobs mitigate against what should be the number one priority–the students themselves.
Immigration regulation also works against students, claimed Marinelli who wants to see universities continue to draw students from the global marketplace, bringing different world perspectives to education.
Marinelli observed that he and Pausch created a curriculum that was light in classes and heavy in experiential learning. And part of experience, stressed Marinelli, involves taking risks and not being afraid to fail. This is the antithesis of what he characterized as “the risk aversion at every level of higher education.” Marinelli lauded Pausch for launching at Carnegie Mellon the first Penguin Award for “failing spectacularly.” Marinelli explained, “We weren’t rewarding failure but rather recognizing daring, bold risk taking, which we need more of in American education.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More