Image copyright the Economist. Too much of an opportunity to pass off for a quick post, the Economist recently featured a humorous take on the US map.

While browsing the EThOS Thesis collection today, I suddenly became curious as to the history, statistically speaking, of doctorates in my field of literature: studies on Thomas Pynchon. It emerges that, on record since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the UK on, or in part concerning, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon.

Featured image credit: husky under a CC-BY-SA license. Some will tell me this is overkill, but I believe that, in 2011, we should have the option to read whatever we like on the web without ISPs, WiFi hotspot providers and their ilk able to see what we do online. There's nothing of huge sensitivity on my blog, but that is no excuse: "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" cannot be allowed to parade at every turn as a rationale for snooping.

This is a re-publication of a post originally written for the Vitae blog's Digital Researcher section, archived here for preservation purposes. Image credit: leezfield under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Much of the rubric surrounding social media is, to my mind, somewhat de-humanising.

This is an update post for my progress on Mendeley for Android. I have just committed code that provides almost working background synchronization to the device. Indeed, the strange image that you can see here is an emulator dump of the Android logcat while the synchronization procedure is running. It's probably worth, at this point, detailing a little bit of what I'm doing.

Image credit: grewlike under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text Postcards Competition – deadline extended! The arrival date for entries is now the 4 February. There is no entry fee and the competition is open to all. For full details of how to enter, see our website.

My Christmas present (I am SUCH a geek) was a lovely OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E SSD, with blistering 540mb/s read/write speeds. Very nice. However, it was not a simple install on my rig and I thought I'd share my basic tips from the experience. If you need the manual, it's on the official Abit site and there's lots of additional info at Digital Daily.

Image credit: El Waka; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike This is a post to announce the initial draft of a mission statement and implementation plans [PDF] for my Digital Humanities project, Rockaby.

Image credit: rodolphoreis; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike To my great excitement, my initial proposal for the forthcoming book, Zombies in the Academy has been accepted! While it still has to undergo peer review and as such isn't guaranteed to be published, I'll certainly be doing my best to overcome that hurdle. If you are interested, you can read my full proposal.

Surprisingly, I managed to make an appearance in the business section of the BBC News website, of all places. When I returned from lunch at the British Library last week, a camera crew were asking people to define various jargon terms used in the pension industry.

As mentioned previously, the two part tutorial on c99.org is a great starting place for people wanting to write their own synchronization service for Android. The only problem is that, because it syncs to Contacts, it omits to tell you what to do to get your new service appearing under Settings -> Accounts -> "Data and Synchronization". The answer is surprisingly simple, but also elusive.