Posts from — November 2003

UK Universities (plc).

The depressing state of debate over the British university system is well explored by Stefan Collini in the LRB . He ponders this sentence from the White Paper on Higher Education:

We see a higher education sector which meets the needs of the economy in terms of trained people, research and technology transfer. At the same time it needs to enable all suitably qualified individuals to develop their potential both intellectually and personally, and to provide the necessary storehouse of expertise in science and technology, and the arts and humanities which defines our civilisation and culture.

And observes

Even those statements which are clearly intended to be upbeat affirmations of their importance have a way of making you feel slightly ill. It is not simply the fact that no single institution could successfully achieve all the aims crammed into this unlovely paragraph, taken from the introductory chapter to the Government’s White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, published earlier this year. It is also the thought of that room in Whitehall where these collages are assembled. As the findings from the latest survey of focus groups come in, an official cuts out all those things which earned a positive rating and glues them together in a straight line. When a respectable number of terms have been accumulated in this way, s/he puts a dot at the end and calls it a sentence.

As a certain person would say, read the whole thing.

[Crooked Timber]

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i wouldn't say read the whole thing, but i would say reconsider what value neoliberalism puts on education and research…. this is the sort of report that tends to indicate those values….

what i want to know is who is hitting my blog by searching for 'jeremy hunsinger blog'
on yahoo and google. i dunno why anyone would actually look for my blog, and most places that mention it probably link to it, so i find searching for it somewhat puzzling.

For Your (RIAA-Approved) Listening Pleasure. Rory, having recently rediscovered the instruction manual from a 1970s-era cassette player, has used the surreal illustrations contained therein to create The Recording Industry Guide to Home Taping. Is it any coincidence that this ghost-written voice of the RIAA reminds me so much of the similarly channeled voice of Homeland… [Planned Obsolescence]

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classic, interesting and fun, don't let the industry ownzor you

Updated Create Change. In October, ACRL, ARL, SPARC, and SPARC Europe updated the Create Change web site and brochure, both already among the most effective tools for educating faculty and librarians about the serials crisis and the best options for overcoming it. The brochure text is free online for institutions that want to customize it for their own circumstances. Print copies are available for a low price. The web site and brochure are available in English, Japanese, and Catalan. [Open Access News]

The Staging of the Jessica Lynch Rescue. This is a very interesting comment left today on one of our earlier Jessica Lynch posts: I came upon this… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

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more people should read baudrillard's political economy of the sign.

Building knowledge societies. UNESCO is currently hosting a “virtual exhibition” on Building Knowledge Societies. The exhibition consists of annotated links to projects in several areas: creating knowledge, preserving knowledge, sharing knowledge, and transmitting knowledge. It includes some open-access projects, but not as many as it should, given its focus. [Open Access News]

yasd.

my nethack game was going nicely (even had a gray dragon scale mail from a wish), and then i choked while eating a fire giant corpse. level 14, 122479 points. not bad. i should know better than to continue to chomp on big corpses while satiated, though…

i'm still playing 3.3.1. i even play 3.2.2 when i'm at my mom's house & the possibilities of her grape imac (with mac os 8.5.1) are otherwise exhausted. i tried 3.4 a while ago, but the os x version wasn't great…i should eventually try it again.

• which nethack monster are you? – i'm a unicorn/water nymph
• nethack for the ti-83 – whoa. awesome.
• nethack fan fiction – eep!

best computer game ever.

[a jeweled platypus]

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it truly is the best computer game ever…

Umm, thanks Apple.

My powerbook was running at 533Mhz instead of 866Mhz, apparently thanks to 10.2.28. I upgraded to panther last week and it seems to have stuck since then.

Read the instructions at Leonard's site to find out how to restore your former CPU power.

[A Whole Lotta Nothing]

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i had this problem, this solved it.

Parsing FOAF with PHP. don't mind me, just tossing this php/foaf tutorial into the annotated bookmark bin : [ via laughingmeme mlp ] [snowdeal.org > ex machina]

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same, annotating, keeping, plotting

Economic Left/Right: -6.88
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.64

i'm apparently worse than gandi and the dalai lama….