In the wake of the Finch report, the Times Higher published a story entitled "Finch's open-access cure may be 'worse than the disease'" which was a response from so-called elite universities bulking at the cost of Open Access publishing.

David Cameron has now launched the end of "compassionate Conservatism", pledging to end the "entitlement culture" of benefits. Twitter has, predictably, exploded: the irony overload of being lectured on entitlement by somebody who inherited his own wealth from a tax haven and went to an extremely privileged public school is, of course, unbelievable.

Up at Durham, Sam Thomas has just announced the details of the forthcoming International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference to be held at Durham University from 5th-8th August, 2013.

I'm always on the lookout for good, free image sharing sites and somebody pointed out MorgueFile to me the other day. It's not CC licensed. In fact, in many cases it's even more permissive. Hope that helps somebody. Another great source for free images to use in blogging was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 24, 2012.

Just found one that I hadn't noticed before: -- Adorno, Theodor W., The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 69. This is a strange conflation if it is indeed supposed to refer to Wittgenstein's Tractatus , at which Adorno takes aim in several other places. (Adorno, Theodor W., Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans.

Probably not. But... I was proofreading some articles for Orbit this morning (which, by the way, will come out now as soon as I have DOI number permissions), when, during fact checking, I came across the following: The picture is a yearbook entry from the Kansas State University yearbook, 1988, which was digitized last year.

As I count down to the launch of Orbit: Writing around Pynchon, I've been thinking carefully about the mechanisms through which the articles will be consumed. In short: what metadata should be in the PDFs and where should it be. Obviously, I want the metadata to be visible to the human eye, but what about embedding this within the PDF's proper metadata mechanism? Apache FOP, which I'm using to the transforms, has the facility to do this.

Imagine if you could have, in your pocket, access to the world's research information in an easy-to-navigate, accessible format with dynamic add-ons, customizable aspects and links to other pieces of research. Well, we have a way of doing this. The technologies are called XHTML, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. The problem is, if academic materials are published in those formats, it is harder for publishers to: Lock down material with DRM.

The third conference I attended last week was a day called SuShI. The idea was to bring together the humanities and business worlds. It was, from my extremely critical Leftist perspective, a somewhat strange event. I attended talks on advertising and creativity schematising business theorists. I have to say that, although left still not entirely persuaded by the contents of their papers, it was an extraordinary fusion.

I just realised that I forgot to Storify my live tweets from day 2 of this conference... enjoy! [View the story "Day 2 of Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Symposium" on Storify] Day 2 of Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Symposium Storified by Martin Eve · Mon, May 21 2012 06:15:47 Asks: what is the value of scarcity, and what about the scarcity of value?

This Friday and Saturday, the University of Sussex hosted the Thinking Feeling conference on affect, feeling and emotion, attempting to theorise the myriad ways in which this is mapped out.