Day: February 11, 2012

Cyprus Mail reports:

CONSTRUCTION of a modern €53 million campus has begun in Pyla to accommodate the first British university on the island, University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, (UCLan Cyprus).

UCLan Cyprus will open in October this year and students will have the option of studying their programme entirely in Cyprus or transferring for part of their studies to the UK. They expect to have 5,000 students initially. All courses will be taught in English.

These are some interesting news. Of course, we have quite a few universities here in Cyprus, but most of them, with the exception of maybe University of Cyprus, were speed-track-converted from a bunch of colleges. It’ll be interesting to see how different a “real” university is going to be, and if it will create any worthy competition to push the educational institutions a bit. The level of local schools wasn’t all that high back when I was a student, and judging by the younger candidates that I interviewed for jobs in the last few years, the situation isn’t getting any better. Hopefully, the UCLan Cyprus arrival can change this.

I’m not a big fan of abstract art, not in painting, not in photography, not in sculpture. But once in a while something catches my eye and doesn’t let it go. And that’s exactly what happened in one of the offices I currently work. There is a bunch of paintings (reproductions?) and photographs on the walls. Most of them are just fine, but I particularly liked this one.

Of course, it looks way better in real life than on this tiny JPEG. But technology isn’t all that bad. In fact, while I was looking at this painting, I was trying to figure out how can I find out the name of the artist and see more of his or her works. That’s when Google Goggles for Android came to the rescue. I snapped a quick picture, and a few seconds later my mobile told me that this is a painting by Lyne Perinciolo Duluc. There is not much in terms of biography of her’s on the web, but there is plenty of her other works.