Banapana » Banapana http://banapana.com This is your mind on media. Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:34:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 General Update http://banapana.com/banapana/general-update http://banapana.com/banapana/general-update#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:45:00 +0000 Russell Warner http://banapana.com/?p=657 It’s been pretty dead over hear at Banapana, I realize, but there’s a great reason. Last night I submitted my first ever academic paper to Cognitive Science Society for the 2009 conference. I am very excited about that, but it took a LOT of work and posting to the old blog is one of those things that just has to suffer a little. However, the work on the paper did inspire me to begin to move Banapana in a slightly more technical direction. I feel the need to discuss “minds on media” in more than an anecdotal fashion. So, in the coming weeks I’m going to start discussing some of the psych literature with regard to media’s effects on the human mind (and maybe monkey, dolphin and parrot minds) alongside the usual string of posts that bare some subjective relevance (i.e. in my opinion) to the topic at hand here; namely, what is our media doing to our brains? 1

  1. For anyone interested in the recently submitted paper, it’s not got much to do with the goings-on here. It is a paper about modeling learning and search with Bayesian hierarchical models. In due time I will post it over at my personal site (russellbits.com). If you would like a heads-up when it goes live, please email me. ↩

]]> http://banapana.com/banapana/general-update/feed 0 WordPress 2.5 http://banapana.com/banapana/wordpress-25 http://banapana.com/banapana/wordpress-25#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:41:20 +0000 admin http://www.banapana.com/?p=363 So you may be wondering what’s going on here at Banapana since things have been up and down and changing and disappearing. There are two things going on. One, I’ve installed the new version of WordPress (2.5)–more on that in a minute. The other thing is a general change in the way that this blog is structured. Banapana has always been about the relationship between media and cognitive psychology (though it has wandered from the subject from time to time). So, my aim, with this new WordPress installation is to really shift things into a tighter focus. There will be better categories, new icons and a completely new design. (This current design is a theme borrowed from the excellent designer over at N.Design studio.

So that’s what’s changing around here. On to WordPress 2.5; before I dump praise on it, let me tell you that it is a slightly different kind of upgrade if you’ve been running WordPress. WordPress upgrades tend to be brilliantly easy—so easy that I got lazy and was doing upgrades with Fantastico. Press-a-button-upgrades are just my style. Unfortunately, I wasn’t doing a good job of backing things up and keeping a running list of my plugins and where they came from. Long story short, when I tried to go from the Fantastico WordPress 2.3.1 installation to a manually installed WordPress 2.5… BLURP! Internal Server Error 500. How I dread the Internal Server Error. No problem. I made a database backup, irradicated the Fantastico installation, “manually” upgraded to 2.5 and then carefully wrote over most of the tables in the database. Problem solved. Sort of. I (in my own sloppiness) also managed to destroy my custom theme and lose all my plugins. Oh well, I was re-designing the site anyway, right?

So far my experience with 2.5 is just fantastic. The admin pages are just so much cleaner, just so much more easy on the eyes. I can’t wait to upgrade my clients; they’re going to love the new backend look. Despite the pain of the experience (and I have no one to blame but myself) I’m really happy I did it. So, stay tuned, I hope to debut the new look by this weekend!

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