Featured image by Sarah Ross photography under a CC-BY-NC license. As part of my ongoing lecturer training programme I am required to design a twelve week syllabus for a period literature course running from 1860-1945. This was an exercise that I found useful as part of a training programme, but also, I would genuinely like to teach the course I designed!
The reason that the coalition government is now panicking over the set to be universal introduction of £9000 fees and desires to financially punish institutions that want to charge this amount is that it runs counter to their idea of a completely elitist education system: they want institutions to go bankrupt and are predicating this on metrics that don't exist and without taking account of a price-placebo effect.
Featured image by avlxyz under a CC-BY-SA license. A friend of mine has just negotiated a great deal on a new Android phone and she suggested I put together a list of apps/things to do once she gets it. I thought, rather than hoarde this all to myself, I'd put it out there for all to see. 1.) Root This is not strictly for everyone, but I want my phone to be free, as in speech, not beer.
As I tweeted yesterday, @dhlbrown was attending a workshop on which I participated last year at the University of Sussex on getting published in Academia. He very kindly tweeted his notes and I recommend you go follow him but thought it was worth collating the information in one place, which also gave me an opportunity to dig out my notes from last year's session.
I am very please to announce that the conference website for the UK Pynchon Network (and our first conference) is now online! The address is: https://www.martineve.com/ukpn/ We have an exciting programme of speakers lined up for the day, which is scheduled to kick off at 10am in the Durham University English Department's main seminar room. Attendance is free but, as such, you'll have to buy your own lunch!
Bit of an in-joke, but I think my career has reached a new high with Gaz's recent award bestowed upon me: The Gaz Pearce Award was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 11, 2011.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Richard Stallman, the pioneer of the CopyLeft movement, at the University of Sussex. Stallman was speaking on the need to reform a copyright system which has outgrown the historical circumstances of its creation and now serves the mega corporations, such as Disney, as opposed to the majority of the population.
As a scholar working on literature, I am often asked to describe my work in potted form. This necessarily involves an introduction to the work of Thomas Pynchon, an extremely difficult task. Pynchon's novels cannot be considered normal literature; they are vast, sprawling pieces that encompass hundreds of characters, vast historical scope and dense prose.
Featured image by Пероша under a CC-BY-NC license. I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and came across the phrase " in dubio contra reum " on p. 214. My Latin being a little rusty, and it being late in the day, I whacked the term into Google and was disappointed to find that there was no adequate definition of the term in the search results; merely band names and a German entry.
Reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website gives the twofold impression of a deeply ideological personality, but also a man stinging from hurt naivety.
A few weeks ago, I tweeted that the first beta of Android for Mendeley was almost ready. This post is an update on that status. I'm afraid to say that, about ten minutes after I posted that status, I ran a test on the oAuth code only to find that it was not working. This was strange as I had made no changes and it was previously working.