Was at an event only advertised on Twitter (how 21C is that?) I met some interesting people. One of them was the chief twitterer himself, Mark Carrigan (see post "coping with acceleration.") In a discussion about the ‘need’ for branding and the intensification of academic (if not intellectual) life, Carrigan approvingly cited the work of Will Davies,... Continue Reading →
"Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way, and here, in partial explanation perhaps, is the story of the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky a blog post! You have to stretch yourself, swim out of your depth on occasion. The seminar I... Continue Reading →
What does the ‘waste’ go when you flush? The citizens of Baltimore found out the ‘hard way’ in 1989, and again in 2014. Johns Hopkins Assistant Professor Graham Mooney (separated at birth from his identical twin) gave a thoroughly enjoyable seminar about something we don’t like to think about – “biosolids” (or, to you and... Continue Reading →
Fresh from a session on “Social innovation” (with a useful PhD writing interlude) I went to “What is… Policy Document Analysis?” These “what is…” events are put on by the methods@manchester folks.Sometimes ‘sage on the stage followed by q and a’ is okay. This was one of those occasions. Imma bullet point it, (#wearealldeadalongtime) Documents... Continue Reading →
Blooming heck. It’s not every day that you get to spend two hours in the presence of someone who, with zero flashiness, expands the floor of your mental cage every five minutes or so. (1) There was a CIDRAL (Centre for Interdiscplinary Research in Arts and Language) panel/symposium thingie at the Tin Can on Oxford... Continue Reading →
One hundred people, mostly pale male and stale, met tonight at Manchester Business School to take part in an 'attack' on capitalism that fell somewhere between Rooseveltian reform and a savaging by a dead sheep. The event, organised by “Manchester Capitalism” and co-sponsored by Manchester University Press and the Business School (full disclosure: imma student... Continue Reading →
A while back I went to a "how to 'do' social media for (academic conferences). Typed up stuff and... left it on my desktop... Good advice includes; start early have a separate email address (also makes it easier to get a twitter account) don't overcommit to stuff (if you're not populating a blog/updating a twitter... Continue Reading →
“Shut up and write.” It’s a good exhortation, though the non-violent communication crowd will probably wince a bit at the tone. On Friday (November 28th) about 15 of us shut up and wrote. It worked like this; We gathered in a room with our laptops and plenty of power sockets. Off with the mobiles (not... Continue Reading →
A rather intriguing and canny seminar at Manchester Business School… Ever stand in the aisle, lost in the supermarket, and wonder what went into getting the products on the shelves? The tin mined for the cans, the oil drilled for the plastic packaging, the lives lost and the futures mortgaged for our present convenience? I... Continue Reading →
One of the joys of being a PhD student (asides being paid to read, “think”, write, hang out with very very smart people (and you too, Miles? 😛 ) is that you can go to day-long seminars on things called “Enhancing Interdisciplinarity.” I couldn’t stay to the end because I had a symposium on neo-institutional... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 