If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come [...]

from Silver Keys album. Listen closely to the lyrics… via YouTube – IKIPR – Profession – Esoterrorist.

The starting premise was that progressives should, in principle, have had two strengths going for them. First, we argued that modernizing trends were shifting the demographic terrain in their political favor. Second, we asserted that the crisis had illustrated the intellectual and policy bankruptcy of conservatism, which had now proven itself devoid of creative ideas [...]

After a few requests for a way to create visual inbound links to this site, we commissioned these images for you to use as you see fit…   taom-125×125.png taom-225×225.png taom-300×48.png taom-300×50.png taom-480×65.png taom2-300×48.png taom2-300×50.png taom2-480×65.png You may use any of these images to link to http://theartofmemetics.com from your site   Also posted at mutato [...]

Each of our lives is a story, an album, a painting, in which we play the starring role, but only posthumously, in hindsight, or through the internal wrestling of the creative process which separate us, momentarily, from our day-to-day concerns. These stories weave together into an ever-changing tapestry which we call culture. Though it sounds [...]

Twitter is “censoring” discussion of Wikileaks by preventing it becoming a trending topic, writes blogger Bubbloy. As he points out with some neat research, the popularity of Wikileaks discussion far outstrips that of the pop culture ephemera that does trend. But is there a clue in the fact Twitter’s feature isn’t called ‘popular topics?’ Perhaps [...]

ABNER ABNER is a statistical named entity recognizer “using linear-chain conditional random fields (CRFs) with a variety of orthographic and contextual features. Version 1.5 includes two models trained on the NLPBA and BioCreative corpora, for which performance is roughly state of the art. The new version also includes a Java API allowing users to incorporate [...]

Michael A. Hoffman II is also a man who devotes a large portion of his life to questioning the historical veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. He’s a religious fundamentalist with weird hobbies, and much like myself, badly in need of an honest editor. I’m not discussing him because he’s important or correct on much of [...]

As viral marketing strategies have been exploited by corporate media to make profit connecting people all over the world, Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting”social” experience.With Seppukoo in fact it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much [...]

As social media and technologies continue to disseminate and evolve, making it easier for everyone to connect with everyone else, to communicate and collaborate in ways we’ve only started to anticipate, swarm intelligence may become the norm rather than the exception. As that happens, the best leader may find themselves turning for advice to the [...]

Although the reflex still exists to evoke fear of these positions in political campaigning, neither pro- nor anti-state positions are meaningful in themselves. We have seen the devastating social problems that resulted from the idea that there is no such thing as society, under Thatcher, and under Blair and Brown we have learned that no [...]

Harnessing the power of the collective crowdsourcing for social change is a thread woven throughout Cognitive Surplus, and its viability requires two of Shirky’s assertions to be accurate. First, that our default state as a species is to create and share and collaborate, and we are just now moving back toward normalcy, aided by the [...]

…the egregore is not in total control… as the action of the social or corporate body is determined through the action of its parts, the individuals. These are intelligences that are emergent properties of the complex system that compose their bodies, and the individual people within these social or corporate bodies are not in control [...]

While First Wave Feminism focused on suffrage, and Second Wave Feminism focused on getting women ahead in the workplace, many of the more recent fractured feminist movements have continued to ignore the importance of play and leisure in everyday lives. This all-work-and-no-play focus has ricocheted to future feminisms: none have successfully reclaimed leisure and play. [...]

It’s the fast-growing social network and attracts far less attention than its far smaller rivals such as Twitter. And it is the users, not the site, who grab chunks of content to link to. via Facebook: friend or foe? | Media | The Guardian.

The killing of Americans through anthrax letters isn’t itself a useful end to the terrorists. Instead, the terrorists perceive that the communication of horror — not disease — through the country, along with the polarization of overseas opinion accomplished through viral marketing, will eventually lead to the adoption of their policy goals. To counter propaganda [...]

Have you used an online persona to accomplish self-transformation? I’m doing research for my hypersigil project currently thinking it will take the form of a free e-book, and then be extended into something else from there, and I’m looking for personal stories from people who have attempted to use online personas to make changes in [...]