If you read any review of the M-Audio Trigger Finger Pro, it sounds like a steal. A sequencer, drum machine, and more, all packed into a hardware unit that is available for about £100 on Ebay. Steal. The problem is, it seems that these reviewers have never actually tried to record midi output from the device.

A coalition of funders from across Europe has proposed a bold initiative, called [Plan S](http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/23819/), to [push towards OA for 2020](https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/). It includes the following 10 points: * Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions.

As you may know, the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck publishes and maintains a piece of open-source software for journal publishing called [Janeway](https://github.com/BirkbeckCTP/janeway/). This software is licensed under the AGPLv3. We chose this license for several reasons, but the most important was that we wanted strong CopyLeft protection, including for server-side usage, on this software.

I spent some time this morning trying to work out why my CPU - the beastly Intel i9 7980XE - was capped at 2.6ghz when the BIOS allows scaling to 4.3ghz. When I ran the usually suggested cpufreq and cpupower commands, I received: "no or unknown cpufreq driver is active on this CPU". The reason for this was that you need, in the UEFI/BIOS, to enable: Intel Enhanced SpeedStep and the option to expose pstates.

Even as worldwide militaries develop autonomous killer robots, when we think of the ethics of AI, we often turn to the Asimov principles: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, [announced in 2016](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2016/201636/HEFCE2016_36.pdf) that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s).” This was published in 2016 as, “[g]iven the length of time required to produce and publish monographs,” HEFCE wished “to give due notice to the sector” by

Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to reading academic research). Indeed, this is one of the many points when the discourses of neoliberal* governmentality intersect with open academic publication.

I'm very pleased to be able to announce some forthcoming titles in the Bloomsbury _New Horizons in Contemporary Writing_ series that I edit! Dates are, of course, subject to change but we have a really exciting line up of titles coming soon!

A few years ago I wrote an article: Eve, Martin Paul, [‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’](https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/12246/), C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings , 1 (2012), 7–25. It was the first thing I wrote outside of my Ph.D. and I am not sure that the literary analysis is that good. I wouldn't read the second half of it if I were you.

In the past few days I have spoken with many colleagues with differing views on the offer from UUK. Like many other colleagues, I have been on strike to halt the conversion of the defined benefit pension of the Universities Superannuation Scheme to a market-performance-based defined contribution system. It has been heartening to see so many colleagues involved in industrial action and to see that labour has power in such disputes.

In the past few days, well [over a year since HEFCE signalled](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2016/201636/HEFCE2016_36.pdf) its "inten[tion] to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s)", humanities academics have been getting themselves stirred up on the basis of a document issued by the [Royal Historical