No, Turkey is not in it. 18 countries included:

Worldwide Academic Job Satisfaction

A study of academics in 18 countries has highlighted disparities in the satisfaction levels among university staff around the world.

Job Satisfaction on Scale of 1-5 by Academics in 18 Countries

COERCIVE GAMES

Here’s a bit of fun thinking about combining protest, games, and open source movements into a potent coercive tool for non-violent protest (in a post-Ghandi world).   It’s just some ideas that may or may not be of interest.

Traditional non-violent protest is dead as a means of reversing bad organizational behavior.  It’s so easily ignored in a media saturated environment and the methods of controlling and marginalizing it have become easy and widely practiced (from “free speech zones” to non-lethal weapons to crowdsourced identification of protesters).  Further, shame doesn’t work anymore as a means of dissuasion.  Given these impediments, the revival of protest means rethinking how it is used as a coercive tool.  It means going beyond attrition (boycotts, physical damage, etc.) and moral suasion (signage, marches, etc.) and into the realm of systemic disruption.  Here’s one approach.

The poverty of atheism

Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call things, but we may also need to, obviously, in order to give figure to that which we think and study. Remarkably true to that necessity, Stefanos Geroulanos tells us in the first pages of his impressive book that the ?conceptual reorganization? he will describe and analyze became ?an almost official face of French thought.? It was only later (with structuralism and everything, everyone, associated with and past it) that it ?acquired the name ?antihumanism?.? Geroulanos further proposes to expand the reach of the name ?antihumanism? by meticulously documenting lesser known antecedents, earlier phases of what the term might otherwise designate, seeking thereby to bring together a fuller, and detailed, account of numerous and diverse actors, elements and factors, and trends too, which in fact jointly define the greater part of the last century. The question raised by and with the name is therefore crucial, for it asks whether it is possible to articulate with some coherence an account of twentieth-century French thought, with its sense of the century ?as an unredeemable era welded by catastrophe,? to think with it, and simultaneously, ?false secular utopias, political hopelessness, and humanist stalemate,? along with efforts directed toward ?satisfactory alternatives to the economic, material, and political division and ruin of Europe??all under one name (the answer is yes, by the way, and the demonstration is successful, formidably erudite, thoughtful, and engrossing). The name is meant to embrace all these and more, to fashion and gather ?a set and perhaps even a system of philosophical and political arguments,? ?reformulations of the theologico-political domain,? as well as ?transformations in contemporary philosophy of science.? It points to philosophical, theological, and intellectual currents as diverse and distant as Catholic humanism, antifoundational realism, nonconformism, phenomenology, communism, existentialism, and more, without forgetting the impact of the latest developments in quantum physics. Philosophical and political, the name, ?antihumanism,? collects a staggering, and well grounded, array of yet other names, proper names, of known and lesser known individuals, likely and unlikely to be found in proximity with each other, names such as Koyré and Maritain, Malraux and Sartre, de Lubac and Canguilhem, Kojève and Bataille, Hyppolite and Blanchot, Tran Duc Thao and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Heidegger. The wager of the book is that naming (and obviously understanding) such widespread and diverse gathering is not only possible, but is in fact necessary.

Worried about Iraqis writing their own history? Then let?s violate international law, again

Military-controlled Information Access, Academic Imperialism, and the Cultural Cleansing of Iraq

On three previous occasions I raised the issue of the illegality of seizing Iraqi documents, relocating them to the U.S., and then controlling access to them for the purpose especially of Pentagon-funded academic researchers?see: ?Minerva Research Initiative Violates International Law and Iraqi Sovereignty,? and ?Minerva Project and Looted Iraqi Documents,? and ?What are the Pentagon?s Minerva Researchers Doing??.

Given news over the past two years since I started writing about this, and the U.S. ratifying the 1954 Hague Convention, plus the promised return of the documents (having made digital copies), and further reading of the legal principles established for the protection of written records during an occupation, it seemed that some further analysis was needed.

Crowdsourcing Scholarship

A few weeks ago, just before the 2010 THATCAMP, a well-known technology and humanities ?unconference,? got underway at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the center?s director, Dan Cohen, and his colleague and co-director, Tom Scheinfeldt, made a radical proposal.  In a blog posting called ?One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy,” Cohen proposed that conference participants and others following the discussion on Twitter and in the academic blogosphere should assemble a book about digital media and higher education.  The mandate was to do the project quickly ? in only one week by ?crowd sourcing? content ? and to create a publishable work that could be mass produced by an established academic publisher while also remaining on the Web in open access form

Philip K. Dick Festival in August

David Gill of Total Dick-Head writes: Even as you read this, preparations are underway for one of the largest gatherings of Dick-heads in history. Luckily, the Dick-heads, in this case, are fans of Philip K Dick, the counterculture?s favorite science fiction writer and disheveled prophet whose dystopian futures seem more and more prescient with each passing year and whose literary reputation is on the rise ever since his inclusion in the lofty Library of America collection.

Democratic access to academic knowledge, Fay Bound Alberti

The spread and speed of digital information have transformed many aspects of science, society and culture. Problems of access have grown at the same time. The digital revolution has outgrown traditional legal and organizational structures, while facilitating new ways for publishers to profit from a public good. Consider the British Library?s recent decision to digitise millions of pages of its newspapers. This has been achieved only through its partnership with Brightsolid, a commercial organization. Even though this is a British Library project, free access to this invaluable British history source is granted  only to those lucky few able to travel to the Library[i]. This is not a digital democracy by any means.[ii]