India: Free Speech Or Sedition?

By Rezwan

Arundhati Roy protests against dams on India’s Narmada River. Image by Flickr user International Rivers. CC BY-NC-SA

and a literati roundup….

2010 Global Hunger Index

As the world approaches the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ? which include a goal of reducing the proportion of hungry people by half ? the 2010 Global Hunger Index (GHI) offers a useful and multidimensional overview of global hunger. The 2010 GHI shows some improvement over the 1990 GHI, falling by almost one-quarter. Nonetheless, the index for hunger in the world remains at a level characterized as ?serious.? The result is unsurprising given that the overall number of hungry people surpassed 1 billion in 2009, even though it decreased to 925 million in 2010, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

humanities: bottom line or end of the line?

Perhaps you have seen this recent Wall Street Journal report revealing the bottom line production of various departments at Texas A&M. Or the latest xtranormal video titled “So You Want to Get a PhD in Humanities,” which has been circulating Twitter and Facebook (if not the video is below the fold). They are two of the latest missives in this ongoing debate about the fate of the humanities.

What Ozzy Osbourne teaches us about genome analysis

You may have heard back in July that Osbourne was set to become one of a small handful of humans who have had their entire genome sequenced and studied. Now, we’re starting to hear a little about what researchers found in Ozzy’s genes. Scientific American had an interview today with the founder and the research director of Knome, Inc., the company that did the data analysis.

Romanticism, reflexivity, design: an interview with Colin Jager

Colin Jager?s reading of the British romantics places them at the center of debates about religion, secularism, and pluralism today. In The Book of God, he traces the ways in which design arguments for God?s existence?predecessors to the current Intelligent Design movement?were developed and discussed in British literature from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. His interpretation challenges those in the habit of trying to disentangle the religious and the secular, in both the past and the present.

World University Rankings 2010 – Social Sciences & Management

from cafebabel.com by ugur bakici

Warning on Bologna

Speaker tells European rectors that process of unifying higher education has eroded the rights of individual universities. more