Quote
April 30, 2013
“I think there’s a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it’s not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson she offers. Yes, she’s correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. Its content isn’t like a newsletter mailed discreetly to private homes; it’s like a magazine on a newsstand, asking to be purchased. Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else… This is a way of using technology to reach out to and engage interested fans, yes, but it’s also indistinguishable from the intrusive begging of any corporation…”

— The Amanda Palmer Problem — Vulture

Quote
April 17, 2013
“It is unlikely, for example, that she would have set about the welfare state in the way Cameron and Osborne have done. What she had in common with them was an overriding desire to manipulate the electorate for the benefit of the Tory Party. While she might have hoped that popular capitalism would turn us all into entrepreneurs she chiefly hoped it would turn us all into Tory voters.”

— Ross McKibbin · Anything but Benevolent: Who benefits? · LRB 25 April 2013

Quote
April 13, 2013
“I don’t find my appreciation of David Bowie, for instance, even slightly compromised when I acknowledge that the glamour of his work is deeply shaped by his status as a signifier of particular generational, racial, national, gender, and class identities. A historically specific fabulousness is no less fabulous. The social specificity of Bowie’s glam does, on the other hand, complicate the kind of rationale I could provide for requiring students to study his music. It makes it harder to invoke him as a vehicle for a general cultivation that transcends mere specialized learning. And that’s why the sociology of culture has posed a problem for the humanities: not that it undermines aesthetic discourse as such, but that it complicates claims about the social necessity of aesthetic cultivation.”

— The long history of humanistic reaction to sociology. | The Stone and the Shell

Link
March 30, 2013
Scholarship: Beyond the paper : Nature : Nature Publishing Group »

Now we are witnessing the transition to yet another scholarly communication system — one that will harness the technology of the Web to vastly improve dissemination. What the journal did for a single, formal product (the article), the Web is doing for the entire breadth of scholarly output. The article was an attempt to freeze and mount some part of the scholarly process for display. The Web opens the workshop windows to disseminate scholarship as it happens, erasing the artificial distinction between process and product.

Quote
March 21, 2013
“RSS is really, really great. There’s a good chance if you’re read­ing this, I don’t have to tell you that because you already sub­scribe to my blog. And it’s a big part of why the open web beats social media. RSS is open; you pub­lish to your feed, and sub­scribers of that feed get the updates. Why would you not rely exclu­sively on Twitter or Facebook to do the same thing via their plat­forms? More peo­ple use those, right? Because Facebook and Twitter are com­pa­nies that ulti­mately con­trol what you pub­lish and what oth­ers see. Your web­site is an exten­sion of the open web. Open beats closed when it comes to dis­sem­i­nat­ing information.”

— Why a Website (and RSS) Is Still Your Best Bet | JeremiahTolbert.com

Link
March 02, 2013
mini. Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations »

quietbabylon:

The scenario imagined is one where there is a button that humans push if the AI gets an answer right and the AI wants to get a lot of button presses, and eventually it realizes that the best way to get button presses is to kill all the humans and institute a rapid fire button-pressing regime. …

And all I can think is: we already have one of those. It is pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that 1. a marketplace regime of firms dedicated to maximizing profit has—broadly speaking—added a lot of value to the world 2. there are a lot of important cases where corporate profit maximization causes harm to humans 3. corporations are—broadly speaking—really good at ensuring that their needs are met.

Link
February 10, 2013
And Richard it was « Mike Pitts – Digging Deeper »

… we were being shown a substantial research project that was a case study in how archaeology works at its best, from questioning and planning, to fieldwork, analyses and conclusion. The distinct but linked strands of research were given to us in one go, so their joint impact on the questions could be evaluated. Peer-reviewed publication will take longer, and will see those strands unravelled, as different journals and different research lines complete at different speeds. Armed only with those, the media would make it look more confusing, reporting some of the studies and not others, with differing emphases, and – a key point – the public would be less well served.

And, this is the rub, so would academia. Asking specialists to address a wider audience, during their research, forces them to think beyond the narrow confines of their immediate tasks, to see the bigger picture. It demands that they communicate in clear language, which means they have to think clearly. It encourages them (though in this case I doubt such incentive was needed) to work together, not competitively. And it asks them to think very hard about what they are going to say. For if they get it wrong, they surely will be fried.

Sometimes the peers in the street are the ones that matter most.

Link
February 09, 2013
On the Learning High Street « LRB blog »

At the moment, academics’ offices take up 21 per cent of total space; this is set to be reduced to around 10 per cent. Office space for UCL Estates, the Registry, finance and human resources, meanwhile, will expand from 5 per cent to 25 per cent.

As academics and students are crammed ever closer together, commercial projects will fill the spaces they vacate.

Welcome to the 21st-century university, where commerce and administration (quite literally) crowd out teachers and students.

OK, so let’s grant for a moment the premise that the withdrawal of funding forces the university to diversify and maximise income; and that modern universities are massively complex organisations whose administrative needs, simply in order to function effectively, are far larger than even a generation ago.

But where does it end?

Quote
February 06, 2013
“It did dampen my spirits to see so many prominent historians attempt to pour cold water on the whole discovery. On a day where archaeology and British history made headlines across the world it seemed petty and bitter to send out snarky remarks that the discovery wouldn’t really ‘change’ anything. I don’t think it is necessary for the discovery to change anything to be noteworthy. Your colleagues have had significant success in finding a frickin’ monarch and the whole world is talking about it. Say congratulations and then shut up.”

— Finding a Lost King in the Reality TV and Social Media Age | Tales From A Tour Guide