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.

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