Lezenswaardig: een groep jonge medici ageert tegen de marketing-wedstrijd waarin volgens hen narratieve CVs in kunnen ontaarden — de nieuwste bijdrage aan het Erkennen & Waarderen-debat. Maar niets is wat het lijkt. Over evidence-based CVs, kwaliteit & kwantificatie. Eerst dit: de brief benoemt het risico dat je met narratieve CVs een soort competitie krijgt tussen verhalen.
Giorgio Agamben gets around a lot on literature syllabi. His “What is the Contemporary?” is a staple of theoretical courses, his concept of “bare life” is used to think through the structures of contemporary biopower, and his thinking around “states of exception” and “states of emergency” find a fruitful home in many places. Here’s the problem, though: Agamben has just shown us the logical outcome of his thinking and it’s not good.
A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.
It has always “amused” me, to some extent, that the Augar review of post-18 education and funding was conducted by a bloke whose name is a near homonym for “augur”, the noun form of which denoted, in Ancient Rome, a religious official who observed natural signs, especially the behaviour of birds, interpreting these as an indication of divine approval or disapproval of a proposed action.
The government has told us that we must “learn to live with the virus”. It is undoubtedly true that coronavirus is not going to disappear any time soon. However, a sizeable minority of people cannot learn to live with a virus that continues to pose a deadly risk. I suffer from panhypogammaglobulinemia. This unpronounceable condition was triggered by the chemotherapy drugs that I received a decade ago.
Yesterday, I examined a Ph.D. It’s not an unusual experience – and huge congratulations to the candidate who had a well-deserved pass! But every time I go through this process I spot a number of weaknesses in the UK examination system that really should be put right. These reflections are not specific to the thesis I just examined. They are, rather, a broader policy reflection on the process.
Most major studies of the discipline of English that I know of, such as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Franklin E. Court’s Institutionalizing English Literature: Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), situate its birth as “English language and literature” in 1828 at the University of
Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a “chromoclasm”. The proposition that Pastoureau seeks to advance is that the austere aesthetic favored by Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Luther – linked to the avoidance of graven images and varying levels of iconoclasm – reoriented the color spectrum around a ‘black-gray-white axis’ (p. 124). Yet the challenge here lies
I’ve spent the past few weeks tracking down answers to the questions: “When and why did paper become white and why was white paper so valued?” for my work on Paper Thin . Here are some of my very abridged findings. This sounds as though it’s a trivial question. Obviously, we think, it must have something to do with contrast and ensuring the best legibility. This is definitely not the case.
It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membership programme; punctum books and Open Book Publishers are on the go; Springer is piloting a scheme with Berkeley;