I've just been asked on Twitter as to whether it's worth presenting at postgraduate conferences and thought I'd share my thoughts in a short post. Answer: it depends what you want to get from a conference. If you are looking to meet intellectually stimulating people, get experience presenting and genuine feedback on your work, then a postgraduate conference is great.

Following on from my previous guide to using Zotero in Ubuntu Natty, I am pleased to present, here, the guide for Ubuntu 11.10: The Oneiric Ocelot. The most crucial new addition is that, at the time of writing (September 2011), Zotero was unable to load in Firefox 7.0 beta. Update: As of 9th of September, this is fixed.

As I ramp up my efforts to bring the critique of closed access journals to the fore I expect at some point to encounter the charge of hypocrisy; I publish in closed journals. Having just seen a post on twitter criticizing research on Open Access published in a closed destination, I wanted here to briefly outline a justification for this. I am not a tenured professor.

In response to George Monbiot's piece yesterday, I have a guest post up at PhD2Published on the issue. Specifically, I wanted to look (in brief) at the drivers behind the setup, which are not always down to individual choice but rather more systemic, the way in which institutional factors mask the problems and finally whether centralization is really the right way to go, arXiv-style.

On Friday, HEFCE announced its new board members. Here's the rundown: So, what should be taken from this? Professor Greenough is an eminent clinician and researcher and I have no objections to her appointment. Hugh Ross and Sara Weller, though, are both business managers. These appointments put a serious skew in the already business-centric board of HEFCE.

I've been working, over the past few days, on a web store for a client using Satchmo. I wanted to share some of my findings here so that others don't trip up at the same places. Firstly, I've committed a fix that has been pulled into the mainline build which puts images from product variations into a JSON array on the product view page.

This post comes as a therapeutic exercise after having spent longer than I'd hoped bogged down writing an academic journal piece. I wanted to write a little on the topic of getting published as a postgraduate, when to start and how to go about it. I did write on this before, but this is an expansion and refresher, so you can have the topic again! Why publish as a postgraduate?

The other day I was installing Xubuntu 10.10 onto an old Mac G4 Powerbook and got the keyboard layout wrong. I had encrypted the entire disk and so, with the keyboard mapped entirely incorrectly ("j" was enter), I was unable to unlock the disk to continue. To solve this, I booted off the alternate CD and entered a recovery shell, hoping this would ask me to unlock the disk.

I'm very pleased to announce that I will speaking in the opening plenary session at the UK Scholarly Group conference on March the 26th, 2012 at the University of Glasgow. My paper will focus on the many problems in academic publishing through a typology of computer malware, arguing for a deep infection within the system.

In an effort to ensure that I have a complete listing of my conference papers on my site, here is an abstract from the last International Pynchon Week conference at which I presented: Featured image by pheezy under a CC-BY license. Conference Paper: 'It sure's hell looked like war': Terrorism and the Cold War in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld', 2010-06-09, University of Lublin was originally published by

Having set out in part 1 some of the differences between the British and American PhDs in English, this here part 2 is a guide to applying to America, should its system seem preferable.