July 2010 Archives

• I Texas kan man byta fängelse mot läsning, genom programmet Changing Lives Through Literature, där man i grupp får läsa klassiker som To Kill a Mockingbird och Of Mice and Men, kanske lite Platon och John Stuart Mill också. Hyfsat effektivt, då bara 19 % återföll i brott, jämfört med 42 % i en kontrollgrupp testad i en studie. Mer hos The Guardian.
• En hyfsat osmidig boktjuv, tillika student vid Cambridge-universitetet, har (för andra gången) dömts för att ha stulit böcker på trädgårdstema, från biblioteket Royal Horticultural Society. Tre och ett halvt år får han...
• ...att i fängelse t.ex. läsa några av de böcker som boksajten AbeBooks rekommenderar på fängelsetema.
  

The defense said it would request that the names of books that one of the accused men, Steven J. Hayes, checked out of a prison library before the killings not be admitted as evidence. The books, the defense indicated in one motion, included plots that were "criminally malevolent in the extreme." 

Mr. Hayes's lawyers suggested that prison librarians might have given him what amounted to a literary blueprint for the crime, which already has what some see as a literary predecessor of sorts. It has been compared to the 1959 Kansas killings described in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

...who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists committed to a revolution of information, jumping down the stoops off of R&B album covers out of the late 1980s, tweeting their screaming vomiting whispering facts and advices and anecdotes of lunchtime sandwiches and cat antics on couches with eyeballs following and shockwaves of analytics and of authority and finding your passion and other jargon, whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes.

He smiled, guessing what I must have been thinking, and explained that he in fact had very few clothes in his suitcase and what weighed so much were his books, his files, and most of all his typewriter, without which he never traveled anywhere. And if at the time, graduate students like me had very little, light portable typewriters, Derrida carried with him in his suitcase a real desk typewriter that was solid enough to withstand the constant onslaught of his writing.

• Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts
• Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus
• Reframing the Victorians
• Classics in Google Books
• Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques
• Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books
• The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites
• Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books
• Hypercities Geo-Scribe
  
• Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts
• JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web
• orthern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books

The secret-police state, as best we can judge from the Russian prototype, is a much more evasive beast. The people who run it prefer to spend their time away from the public eye. They take minimal interest or pleasure in the traditional business of government, such as providing public services. They care little for public or private morality. Their method is to monopolize power, not so much by crushing rivals, as by preventing potential rivals from gaining any traction in the first place--which requires, naturally enough, an extensive domestic spying apparatus capable of infiltrating all social and economic structures. 

Foreign policy fascinates them, because they are conspiratorial by nature, and they imagine other countries to be conspiring permanently against them. Based on their own habits and history, they find it difficult to believe that any foreign government can possibly be telling the truth about what it is doing. Whatever might be said publicly is being said in order to distract attention from what is being done privately, which is going to be quite different. It follows from this that the only really useful type of diplomacy is espionage, getting at the hidden story. The rest of diplomacy is either useless protocol or useful cover.

The Mellified Man, a legendary mummy created by feeding someone honey until he dies, and then burying him in a sealed coffin filled with still more honey. The antibacterial properties of the honey preserve the cadaver even as they turn its flesh into a confection that is rumored to possess magical healing properties. It is one of these relics that the antiquarian is chasing, and her adventure threads through the lives of the large cast, leaving the story infused with mysticism and oddity.

När jag frågar om den kallas "ett utforskande" blir han märkbart irriterad: 

- Konst är en sak, ska du veta, forskning och vetenskap något helt annat. Boken rymmer mina samlade erfarenheter, är en sorts upptäcksfärd in i teckningen.

I förra boken presenterade du "ett tänkvärt Gudsbevis". De stora katedralerna nere på kontinenten borde egentligen rasa samman, med tanke på hur de blev byggda. Endast Stephansdomen i Wien är korrekt konstruerad. Ändå står de kvar, upprätthållna av Gud, skriver du.

The word salmagundi is derived from the French word salmigondis which means disparate assembly of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent whole. Salmagundi is used figuratively in modern English to mean a mixture or assortment of things.

The sheer size of the data set at Yarkoni's disposal allowed him to look not only at links between personality factors and broad word categories (as past research has done) but to also zoom in on the usage of specific words. Among the most strong and intriguing correlations were: Neuroticism correlated with use of 'irony' and negatively correlated with 'invited'; Extraversion correlated with 'drinks' and negatively correlated with 'computer'; Openness correlated with 'ink'; Agreeableness with 'wonderful' and negatively correlated with 'porn'; and Conscientiousness correlated with 'completed' and negatively correlated with 'boring'.

A common form of establishment, for much of Bes´zel's history, had been the DöplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the DöplirCaffée was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.

Next to his chair is a plastic shopping bag that contains everything he needs during the three days of the conference.

(...)

Zizek wears jeans and a T-shirt, blue sandals from the Adlon Hotel in Berlin and socks from Lufthansa's Business Class. "I haven't bought any socks in years," he says. He stays in the best hotels, and he has just returned from a trip to China and Los Angeles.

There are two posters of Josef Stalin on the wall in Zizek's apartment in a new building in downtown Ljubljana.

Zizek's roughly 600-square-foot apartment looks as though Tito were still in power. It consists of three rooms and is carelessly furnished. A poster from a Mark Rothko exhibition hangs on the wall above the sofa in Soviet-era colors; otherwise, the furnishings consist of a rack of DVDs, bookshelves, mountains of "Star Wars" Legos and his laundry, which he keeps in his kitchen cabinets. He serves iced tea in Disney cups.

Anders Elgecrantz är en god människa. Han är intelligent, fantasifull och känslig. Men han lever delvis i en fantasivärld som består av saker han läst, och han märker därför knappast hur hans hustru, arbetskamrater och överordnade utnyttjar honom. Hans bror Mårten och en grupp makthavare i stat och näringsliv har placerat honom som chef för DAFNE (Databasen för nationalencyklopedin), ett datoriserat uppslagsverk med märkliga utvecklingsmöjligheter. När Anders vision av projektets utveckling kommer i konflikt med de dunkla maktintressen som styr det, utbryter en maktkamp som för honom både till regeringens höjder och ned i den djupaste underjorden. Hans värld krossas. Han söker stöd hos de säregna män - och kvinnor - som funnit en fristad på projektet. Men en mäktigare och viktigare bundsförvant visar han sig ha i DAFNE själv, och med hjälp av DAFNEs märkliga program kan historien föras till ett överraskande lyckligt slut. För naturligtvis är det hela ändå just en sådan saga eller äventyrsberättelse som Anders tror på.

For all the controversy surrounding the Bible, its apocrypha and conflicting versions, Jerome's accomplishment had long been seen in terms of divine intervention--as with the Council of Rome, he is guided by the hand of God. Seen in this light, the Bible is perfect: there are no books missing, no books extraneous. It is a perfect library, a collection of exactly the books that God intended for humankind.

Jag arbetar i Stockholms stad, som nyligen har upphandlat nytt system och nya datorer via Volvo IT. Vi har i förväg fått ange alla program vi önskar få tillgång till utöver MS Office-paketet. Jag önskade bl a Tweetdeck. Anledningen är att programmet är ett effektivt och tydligt sätt att hålla koll på twitterflödena, prydligt separerade i olika spalter och med möjlighet att t ex retweeta med egna kommentarer och så vidare.

Tweetdeck är ett gratisprogram, väldigt enkelt att ladda hem på egen hand. Men vårt nya IT-system krävde att programmet måste paketeras på särskilt sätt och att vår avdelning måste betala 8500 kr för att jag ska få tillgång till det. Avgiften skulle tas ut pga att jag är den första i hela staden som har önskat Tweetdeck. Vad vi kan förstå är det efter mig fritt fram för alla anställda i staden som vill ha tillgång till programmet att få det till sin dator.

1. Introduction
   
2. History - Truths and Myths about Football as a Working Class Sport
   
3. The Ugly Sides of Contemporary Football - and the Fight against Them
   
4. Football and Politics
   
5. Football for Anarchists (A Theoretical Approach)
   
6. Anarchist Football in Praxis
   
7. References

Instead of having matches in the traditional sense, for example, anarchists could just kick the ball around. Or they could organise "open-ended pick-up games", in which no-one keeps score, people join in and leave when they feel like it, and play continues until too many players have wandered off the pitch, or everyone is tired. A third option is for players to swap sides occasionally, discouraging team loyalties. Or three or more teams take turns to play, with the "losers" being replaced each time someone scores.