Even as worldwide militaries develop autonomous killer robots, when we think of the ethics of AI, we often turn to the Asimov principles: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, announced in 2016 that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s).” This was published in 2016 as, “[g]iven the length of time required to produce and publish monographs,” HEFCE wished “to give due notice to the sector” by “signalling this now”. It is now two years since that signal was given and, to be

Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to reading academic research). Indeed, this is one of the many points when the discourses of neoliberal* governmentality intersect with open academic publication.

I’m very pleased to be able to announce some forthcoming titles in the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series that I edit! Dates are, of course, subject to change but we have a really exciting line up of titles coming soon!

I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?

A few years ago I wrote an article: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings , 1 (2012), 7–25. It was the first thing I wrote outside of my Ph.D. and I am not sure that the literary analysis is that good. I wouldn’t read the second half of it if I were you.

C’est l’année 1810, et vous vous promenez sur les Grands Boulevards de Paris. Vous avez l’impression que toute la ville, voir même toute la France, a eu la même idée, et est venue pour se promener, pour voir les gens et se faire voir. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez? Vous arrivez à un théâtre, vous montrez un billet pour une nouvelle pièce, et vous entrez. La pièce commence. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez de la scène? Quels voix, quel langage?

Language is not just spoken and written, and even though I’ve been working mostly on spoken languages for the past fifteen years, my understanding of language has been tremendously deepened by my study of sign languages. At the beginning of the semester I always asked my students what languages they had studied and what aspects of language they wanted to know more about, and they were always very interested in sign language.

In the past few days I have spoken with many colleagues with differing views on the offer from UUK. Like many other colleagues, I have been on strike to halt the conversion of the defined benefit pension of the Universities Superannuation Scheme to a market-performance-based defined contribution system. It has been heartening to see so many colleagues involved in industrial action and to see that labour has power in such disputes.

In the past few days, well over a year since HEFCE signalled its “inten[tion] to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s)”, humanities academics have been getting themselves stirred up on the basis of a document issued by the Royal Historical Society. It is curious that it is only now that people are paying any attention to this.