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.

A quick roundup/review post from the "Calling All Agents: A Symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy" conference, held at Birkbeck and organised, superbly, by Dennis Duncan on zero budget. As might be expected, there's a slight (paranoiac?) Pynchon-bias in the reporting below, but I hope it proves useful. As always, I'm happy to correct any errors/omissions on authorial request.

Having read two great posts on OpenSSH best practices, I decided today that I wanted to upgrade my SSH key architecture to use Elliptical Curve Cryptography. There were several gotchas involved that I thought it would be worth sharing here. There are, at the time of writing, no packages for Fedora 15 or Debian stable that I could find, so I've worked from source. Getting ECC working on some systems can be a bit of a pain.

Perhaps a strange title for a post, but I was recently kindly alerted by Luis-Manuel Garcia at the University of Chicago that a certain dissertation writing "service" has been aggregating and re-posting material from blogs that feature the word "dissertation". As my professional reputation in academic circles could rest upon a Google search, I wanted this post to come up indicating that I absolutely deplore these outfits which do nothing to

As from July 11th, 2011, all content on this site, except where noted, is now available under the more permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, as specified in the footer. Featured image by Creative Commons under a CC-BY license. Change of license: all content now CC-BY was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on July 11, 2011.

It now seems the right time to unveil a project which we hope will enthuse and excite a great number of you. We have been working, over the past few months, to put together a new, very different, journal of Pynchon scholarship.

Britain or America for the PhD in English? I recently reached the halfway point in my 6-year PhD program at the University of Michigan, allowing me to ponder the consequences of my having chosen to do the doctorate in America rather than Britain. If I’d started my PhD in 2008 in Britain, I’d be expected to have pretty much finished my dissertation by now, to be on the verge of the abysmal job market.

Met up with my usually Stateside fellow Pynchonite Jesse Sherwood last week when he visited London. While sampling the delights of the city was important, he also took time out to get himself branded with a Lot 49 muted posthorn. While tattoos aren't, personally, my thing, I think it's great! Just remember, though: Don't Ever Antagonize the Horn.

So, here's a short post on the Dropbox problem. I'm sure others have picked up on this aspect, but it merits further coverage. Yesterday, I tweeted at Dropbox stating my belief that the terms and conditions they are trying to enforce are, in fact, untenable.

Today is the day that we've all been dreading waiting for. The final unveiling of the UK Higher Education White Paper. It's expected later today, but here's some early reactions. The Guardian runs with "'Naming and shaming' for degrees with poor jobs record", which gets to the core of the matter: The BBC are going with "Universities shake-up eyes greater competition", focusing on a fight for proportion of places.

I've been engaged recently in a discussion on Twitter as to the appropriateness of Creative Commons licensing for Open Access journals wishing to remove permission barriers, ie. become "libre". It seems there is a real problem as to how to define academic work. My original instinct was to go with a CC-BY-NC license as this would allow redistribution, use etc. in a context that was non-commercial.