To my parents, Ayn Rand and God
via le Colbert Show, la problématique du #Oxford_coma, en français, la #virgule_de_série
Virgule de série — Wikipédia
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgule_de_s%C3%A9rie
en principe, le contexte devrait permettre de lever l’éventuelle ambiguïté …
Oxford’s Word of the Year Is ‘Brain Rot’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/arts/brain-rot-oxford-word.html
Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year Is…
By Jennifer Schuessler
Dec. 1, 2024
It’s not just you. Oxford University Press, the publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary, is also going a bit fuzzy between the ears.
After digging through its enormous database, it has chosen “brain rot” — specifically, the kind brought on by digital overload — as its 2024 Word of the Year.
It’s been quite a journey for “brain rot,” which triumphed over a shortlist of contenders including “lore,” “demure,” “romantasy,” “dynamic pricing” and “slop.” According to Oxford, its earliest known appearance was in 1854, in “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau’s classic account of moving alone to a cabin in the woods.
“While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot,” Thoreau lamented, “will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
The answer, apparently, is no. These days, according to Oxford, it’s often invoked by young people on social media to describe the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial online content.
That usage surged by about 230 percent over the past year. Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company’s dictionary division, said the term’s rise reflects the breakneck speed of social media-driven language change.
“With ‘brain rot,’” he said, “it’s a phenomenon of young people skewering language trends on TikTok, almost exactly after they themselves have churned out that language.”
Oxford’s Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from its continually updated corpus of some 26 billion words, which is drawn from news sources across the English-speaking world. The idea, according to the announcement, is to reflect “the moods and conversations that have shaped 2024,” backed by data.
As in the past few years, Oxford invited the public to vote on the shortlist. The winner was chosen by the publisher’s team of experts, based on the vote (roughly 37,000 people weighed in) and further analysis. “Choosing the Word of the Year,” Grathwohl acknowledged, “is a bit of a dark art.”
The contest began 20 years ago, with the selection of “chav” (British slang for working class). Over the years, it has anointed enduring new words like “podcast,” “selfie” and “post-truth,” along with a few head-scratchers. (Youthquake, from 2017, came in for particular abuse.)
And the contest has itself affected the language. Last year, after Oxford chose “rizz” (Gen Z or Gen Alpha slang for “style, charm or attractiveness,” possibly derived from “charisma”), a flood of news coverage caused usage to spike by more than 1500 percent. Current usage remains twice as high as it was immediately before last fall’s announcement, according to Oxford’s data.
“It was a huge hit,” Grathwohl said. “It’s got swagger, real energy, and was just the shot in the arm people needed at that time — even if for the young people who drove its use, it was already passé.”
This year’s list is short on flashy neologisms or blended words like “broflake” or “lumbersexual.” This year’s lone portmanteau, “romantasy,” refers to “a genre of fiction that combines elements of romance and fantasy.”
Instead, Grathwohl noted, the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of “bell-bottoms coming back into fashion.”
Take “demure.” The earliest recorded usage, according to Oxford, was in 1377, in a reference to the sea being calm. By the late 1400s, it commonly appears as a description of people who are serious, reserved or grave in demeanor.
Usage surged in August, after the influencer Jools Lebron posted a TikTok video describing her makeup and dress as “very demure, very mindful,” sparking a deluge of posts across various platforms reusing the phrase.
The “demure” moment, Grathwohl noted, came shortly after the singer Charli XCX sent “brat” surging. “It’s the other side of the coin,” he said.
“Lore,” which dates back almost 1,000 years, is another old-timey word that has been refashioned by young social media users, to refer to facts or beliefs around a celebrity or a fictional character, or even one’s own personal history.
“Slop” has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to “art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate,” according to Oxford.
Like “brain rot,” “it “represents the underbelly of today’s linguistic churn,” Grathwohl said. “There’s a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged.”
Oxford, it must be noted, is not the only language kingmaker. In recent weeks, there have also been Word of the Year announcements from Cambridge University Press (“manifest”) and Dictionary.com (justice for “demure”!).
Which raises an unsettling question: Could all these rival words — and the flood of news articles about them — contribute to brain rot?
“I don’t want to overblow the Word of the Year,” Grathwohl said. “It’s something fun and engaging.”
“The most successful ones,” he added, “are the ones that are slightly counterintuitive and make people think.”
More academic publishers are doing AI deals
A week after #Taylor_&_Francis sold authors’ work to #Microsoft AI for $10 million without asking or paying them, the Bookseller surveyed other academic publishers to see if they were cutting similar deals in the name of “AI research.” And, of course, they are. [The Bookseller, archive]
#Wiley and #Oxford_University_Press confirmed AI partnerships. But they’re in completely noble causes! (And a big bag of cash.)
Wiley said “it is in the public interest for these emerging technologies to be trained on high-quality, reliable information.” Oxford University Press wants to “champion the vital role that researchers have in an AI-enabled world.”
Cambridge University Press said it’s talking to authors before making deals, so that’s nice.
Pearson declined to comment. But CEO Omar Abbosh has called AI “an important driver of growth.” So have a guess. [The Bookseller, archive]
Pan Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins confirmed that they have not yet poured authors’ work into the AI shredders.
Some publishers promise authors opt-ins and remuneration. But we suspect that feeding academic work to AI will not go so well. It likely means a loss of citations — authors won’t get credited — and original work will get taken out of context or otherwise mangled, because LLMs process words the way a blender processes food.
▻https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/04/more-academic-publishers-are-doing-ai-deals
#édition_scientifique #AI #IA #intelligence_artificielle #recherche #ESR #Cambridge_University_Press #droits_d'auteur
Degrees of Abuse
A two-year investigation reveals how British universities are failing to protect their students from sexual harassment by senior academics or other students.
▻https://www.ajiunit.com/investigation/degrees-of-abuse
#université #ESR #facs #harcèlement_sexuel #abus_sexuels #UK #Angleterre #Oxford #Oxford_university #Warwick #Warwick_University
#podcast
#notOK
ping @_kg_
–-
ajouté à la métaliste sur le #harcèlement_sexuel à l’université :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/863594
et plus précisément ici :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/863594#message863599
Une étude analyse le profil des familles qui éprouvent le plus de difficultés financières à la rentrée scolaire : « Elle dévoile des choses étonnantes »
▻https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/enseignement/2021/08/31/il-y-a-un-manque-de-volonte-politique-sur-la-question-de-la-gratuite-scolair
J-1 avant la rentrée des classes. Une rentrée marquée par le coronavirus, mais aussi par un coût qui reste encore élevé pour de nombreuses familles. Dans son émission, Maxime Binet a fait le point ce mardi avec Maxime Michiels, chargé d’étude et d’action politique pour la Ligue des familles.
« On a un premier pas qui a été fait avec la gratuité dans l’enseignement maternel mais il ne faut certainement pas s’arrêter là »
Sur le coût de la rentrée des classes pour une famille francophone, l’invité explique que pour l’an dernier, il avait été calculé que cela revenait à « 250 euros pour l’enseignement primaire et environ 400 euros pour l’enseignement secondaire. Mais on peut parfois monter jusqu’à 500 euros. » Plus discriminant encore, la différence de coût entre les écoles. « Certains établissements peuvent décider d’être gratuits parce qu’ils mettent des moyens en place pour fournir le matériel scolaire. D’autres au contraire vont exiger de nombreuses marques, exiger de nombreux manuels scolaires. Et donc vont faire gonfler la facture des parents », détaille Maxime Michiels. « Alors je ne sais pas si c’est une volonté de faire le tri entre les élèves, mais au final ce qu’on voit c’est que ça le fait. »
Il faut sortir de l’école payante et avancer vers la gratuité
Mais pourquoi le coût est-il parfois si élevé alors que la gratuité est inscrite dans la Constitution ? « Je pense qu’il y a un manque de volonté politique sur cette question », répond le chargé d’étude et d’action politique pour la Ligue des familles. « C’est pour cette raison d’ailleurs que la Ligue des familles se bat depuis de très nombreuses années pour faire émerger cette volonté politique parce que c’est grave que l’école soit payante et que ça met des familles en difficulté au quotidien. Il faut donc avancer vers la gratuité. On a un premier pas qui a été fait avec la gratuité dans l’enseignement maternel dans le cadre du Pacte mais il ne faut certainement pas s’arrêter là ».
Concernant la différence de prix dans les écoles
Maxime Michiels est ensuite revenu sur l’étude qui analyse quel type de famille souffre le plus de cette rentrée scolaire. « Cette étude dévoile des choses étonnantes parce qu’on aurait pu s’attendre à ce qu’il y ait un profil type de famille mise en difficulté par les frais scolaires, or ce n’est pas du tout le cas. On voit qu’il y a de très nombreuses familles avec des profils très variés : des familles nombreuses, des familles monoparentales, des personnes qui travaillent, qui ne travaillent pas, qui sont en maladie etc. On a vraiment de tout mais il y a un point commun : c’est l’école qui coûte trop cher et qui met ces familles-là en difficulté. »
Et l’impact du corona ?
Pour Maxime Michiels, le coronavirus a évidemment eu un effet néfaste sur l’école. « On a vu clairement que dans la crise, on avait un problème avec l’enseignement hybride qui n’a pas permis l’apprentissage de tous les élèves. Selon une enquête que l’on a menée, il y a pour 40% des élèves plus de difficultés à apprendre. On a également beaucoup d’élèves qui ont eu des difficultés techniques (problèmes d’ordinateur etc) qui se mettaient entre eux et l’apprentissage. Donc plein d’élèves se sont retrouvés en situation de décrochage. Et on a noté aussi la situation inverse, avec des élèves surchargés de travail et qui se sont retrouvés complètement épuisés et à genou à la fin de l’année scolaire. Ces deux situations là, il faut absolument les éviter cette année. »
La digitalisation, source de discrimnation
Si Maxime Michiels ne se dit pas contre l’enseignement numérique ou l’utilisation d’un ordinateur à l’école, il veut que l’on parte « de la réalité des parents ». « Cette réalité que l’on a pu voir dans le cadre de la crise était double : d’abord de nombreuses difficultés d’apprentissage pour les élèves, difficultés avec l’outil (problèmes techniques) mais aussi difficultés à prendre distance avec l’enseignant au travers d’une interface digitale. L’autre réalité est celle de l’appauvrissement à travers laquelle les parents ont dû passer pour s’équiper en matériel numérique. » La volonté de la Ligue des familles est à présent que les autorités francophones de l’enseignement subsidient un peu plus les parents d’élèves par rapport aux outils informatiques à avoir pour suivre ces cours en digitalisation. Car de plus en plus d’écoles se tournent vers ce type d’apprentissage dit numérique. « Et souvent, les écoles en profitent pour s’équiper sur le dos des parents », confie notre invité.
#Ecole #discrémination #pauvreté #gratuité #apprentissage #décrochage des #élèves #appauvrissement #digitalisation #numérique #big_data #inégalités #belgique
Même chose jusqu’à la fin des études universitaires, et ce dans tous les pays évolués .
Ce n’est pas la même problèmatique pour les élites intellectuelles et financières, au cul bordé de nouilles
La Princesse Elisabeth étudiera à Oxford, un programme de trois ans en Histoire et Politique
▻https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_la-princesse-elisabeth-etudiera-a-oxford-un-programme-de-trois-ans-en-hi
A partir d’octobre 2021, la Princesse Elisabeth, Duchesse de Brabant, étudiera au Lincoln Collège de l’Université d’ #Oxford. Elle a conclu avec succès les épreuves d’admission à un programme de trois ans en « Histoire et Politique ».
La Princesse Elisabeth connaît déjà bien le Royaume-Uni. En 2020, elle a obtenu son baccalauréat international au Pays de Galles, à l’ #UWC_Atlantic_College .
Elisabeth reviendra régulièrement en Belgique et restera impliquée dans la vie publique belge lors d’activités, seule, ou avec ses parents et les autres membres de sa famille.
Interview: The women behind the #Oxford/AstraZeneca #covid-19 vaccine
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2283005-interview-the-women-behind-the-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
The unprecedented speed of its manufacture was only possible because the technology underpinning it had been in development for years before the pandemic struck, by a team of scientists at the University of Oxford.
The research was led by Sarah Gilbert, working alongside a team including Teresa Lambe, who helped design the vaccine’s genetic code, and Catherine Green, who helped manufacture the first batches of […]
More than just a statue: why removing Rhodes matters
In the context of a worldwide movement against race hate, Oriel College’s position makes no sense
Anger is a potent, if volatile, political force. It can be channelled toward many ends. It’s often dismissed as counterproductive, but Audre Lorde, the African American writer and civil rights activist, reminds us that anger can be a powerful source of energy. It can serve progress and change, it can be liberating and clarifying.
I remember so viscerally my own anger this time last year as I screamed Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. And I was not alone. The world witnessed a prolonged outpouring of rage. Global protests with emotionally charged testimonies and determined calls for justice abounded. These protests soon extended beyond the immediate circumstances of Floyd’s death at the knee of Derek Chauvin to challenging an array of institutions that are built on or propagate anti-Black racism. Anger had made it abundantly clear that, despite all the promises of liberal democracy, western society still has a problem with race.
At first the message appeared to be getting across. If we were to believe the black squares on Instagram, or the spike in sales of anti-racism books, or the spread of a new mantra among white people (“I need to educate myself”), then change of some kind was afoot.
In Oxford, the Black Lives Matter protests folded into the anti-colonial activism of Rhodes Must Fall. This is not surprising. Colonialism and racism are entwined like the strands of a double helix. In modern Britain, colonialism has transcended its historical epoch. It exists in the present as a kind of nostalgia for the country’s hegemony on the world stage, while fuelling nationalism, buttressing white supremacy and generating anxieties about immigration and cultural change. The statue of Cecil John Rhodes at Oriel College in Oxford perfectly distils this imperial nostalgia into a concrete object.
The charge sheet against Rhodes is well documented. Rhodes’s imperial philosophy was unabashedly supremacist, and he detested Africans (“If the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall be thankful that we have the natives with us in their proper position”). At the end of the 19th century, Rhodes invaded the Ndebele kingdom in what is now Zimbabwe. His British South Africa Company mowed down soldiers, women and children with Maxim guns; it looted cattle and destroyed grain stores and crops, leaving the local population destitute; and it went on to establish the apartheid state of Rhodesia. Rhodes was often present while these atrocities were taking place, and he was involved in strategic discussions about the wars he waged against Black people in southern Africa.
I have been part of the campaign to take down the statue of Rhodes at Oxford since 2015. In the last six years, I have seen the history of Rhodes – and indeed colonialism – sanitised, ignored, denied and distorted by critics of the campaign. Some claim that Rhodes was not a racist, others who know little of Africa have the gall to accuse people like me of erasing history. George Orwell was right when he wrote: “It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire.”
In response to the anti-racism protests last June, Oriel College’s governing body expressed its desire to remove the statue of Rhodes subject to review by an independent commission composed of academics, city councillors, Oriel alumni, university administrators and journalists. This was the second time the college had made such a pledge. In 2016, the college had stated that it would launch a six-month “listening exercise” on the Rhodes statue, only to renege on this commitment within six weeks because it feared losing donor gifts from the college’s old boys’ network.
I wanted to believe that the independent commission would be taken seriously this time round. The commissioners worked hard. They gathered evidence and testimonies from a wide range of perspectives for nearly a year before producing a detailed, heavily footnoted report. Ultimately, they recommended the removal of the statue and offered several other suggestions for advancing academic and public understanding of the Rhodes legacy.
On 20 May, Oriel College finally announced its decision: it would retain the statue despite the apparent wishes of the college’s governing body and the recommendations of the independent commission. Why? The college’s website states that the governing body has “carefully considered the regulatory and financial challenges, including the expected time frame for removal, which could run into years with no certainty of outcome, together with the total cost of removal”. Like dowdy clothing, such statements conceal more than they reveal. What are these regulatory and financial challenges exactly? What is meant by “no certainty of outcome”? Even Oxford City Council was baffled.
The statement goes on to say that “instead” of taking down the statue, the governing body will focus on contextualising Rhodes’s relationship to the college and “improving educational equality, diversity, and inclusion”. The word “instead” is doing a lot of work here: it is dissipating the core demand of the protests into an array of tiny initiatives that the college should be taking anyway. As educators, I think part of our professional mandate is to constantly improve equality, diversity and inclusion among students and colleagues. Oriel deserves no special credit for committing to this.
Taking down the Rhodes statue might seem symbolic, but it actually represents real change. At the very least, it would demonstrate that the university is not only beholden to a group of wealthy alumni and political patrons. The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, lauded Oriel’s decision as “sensible”. More generally, arguments over statues are always about the present and not the past. They are about which aspects of our cultural heritage we choose to honour in public space and why. They are about what values we wish to promote and who has a voice in these matters.
There is another salient lesson here. Public outrage can mobilise impassioned calls for change like an all-consuming fire, but this is difficult to sustain. Anger is potent but it is exhausting. When the temperature cools down, when energy is depleted, those opposed to change can extinguish the urgency of anti-racism agendas using bureaucracy, platitudes and obfuscation.
Still, I don’t think the story will end here. The anger that was activated last summer has shifted the public conversation about race and colonialism. If history has taught us anything, it’s that social change is often slow and difficult. It rarely unfolds through absolute victories but through partial gains and subtle shifts in collective consciousness. It’s a matter of time before anger erupts again. The question of how that anger will ultimately be used is an open one.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/24/oriel-college-rhodes-statue-anti-racist-anger
#statute #commémoration #mémoire #toponymie_politique #rage #Rhodes_Must_Fall #colonialisme #colonisation #Cecil_John_Rhodes #Oxford #Oriel_College #université
ping @cede
Covid-19 : Pourquoi le vaccin d’Oxford-AstraZeneca, autorisé par le Royaume-Uni, pourrait changer la donne
▻https://theconversation.com/covid-19-pourquoi-le-vaccin-doxford-astrazeneca-autorise-par-le-roy
Le vaccin développé par l’Université d’Oxford et AstraZeneca pr&ea...
Les données publiées précédemment indiquaient que l’efficacité globale du vaccin d’Oxford-AstraZeneca est de 62 % lorsque deux doses sont administrées. C’est inférieur aux 94 % du vaccin de Moderna et aux 95 % de celui de Pfizer. Cependant, l’administration initiale d’une petite dose, puis d’une seconde dose complète pourrait améliorer son efficacité. Les données préliminaires de l’essai de phase 3 indiquent que cette stratégie pourrait permettre d’atteindre une efficacité d’environ 90 % chez les populations les plus jeunes.
#vaccin #Oxford-AstraZeneca #vecteur_adénoviral : ▻https://theconversation.com/how-the-leading-coronavirus-vaccines-work-146969 #disponibilité #quantité #prix #logistique
Des manifestants #BlackLivesMatter ont fait tomber une statue d’Edward #Colston se trouvant à #Bristol depuis 1895. L’homme était un négrier. Elle avait été érigée car il avait aidé au développement de la ville au XVeme siècle.
La statue a ensuite été jetée dans un canal.
#monument #statue #GB #Angleterre #Edward_Colston #Colston #Bristol #toponymie #toponymie_politique #BLM #Black_Lives_Matter #esclavage #traite #traite_négrière
ping @neotoponymie @reka
Protesters rally in #Oxford for removal of #Cecil_Rhodes statue
University campaigners and #Black_Lives_Matter protesters block road outside Oriel College.
More than a thousand protesters have gathered outside Oxford University to demand the removal of a statue of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
Blocking the road outside Oriel College, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign said Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the UK, which included the dramatic toppling of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, had reignited their campaign.
Riot police stood on the roof of the college building while the crowd below the Rhodes statue listened to speeches, including the announcement of a BLM protest in Oxford on Friday. The demonstration ended peacefully with people leaving their signs on the outside of the building, while there were cheers as a police officer briefly took a knee in the crowd.
In 2016, hundreds of Oxford students campaigned for the removal of a likeness of the controversial 19th-century figure – who supported apartheid-style measures in southern Africa – from the wall of the college. The campaign also called for the university curriculum to be changed to reflect diversity of thought beyond the western canon.
The university said then that the statue would stay, with modifications that “draw attention to this history [and] do justice to the complexity of the debate”. It had been warned that it could lose about £100m in gifts should the statue be taken down, but it insisted financial implications were not the primary motive behind its decision.
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In a statement released on Tuesday, Oriel College said it “abhors racism and discrimination in all its forms” and that it would “continue to debate and discuss the issues raised by the presence on our site of examples of contested heritage relating to Cecil Rhodes”.
The campaign to remove the statue was supported this week by the Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran and the leader of the local council.
Femi Nylander, an organiser for Rhodes Must Fall, welcomed the support from the council, Moran and the thousands who signed the petition to remove the Rhodes statue.
He said: “It’s good to see public consciousness is changing. We are seeing a paradigm shift. You can see that everywhere.” He added that he hoped the protest would result in a resurgence of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford.
Simukai Chigudu, an associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford, said the phrase “black lives matter” resonated because of “a history of white supremacy that has denigrated, exploited and subjugated black lives”.
He added that Rhodes Must Fall, which he joined in 2015, had been started by student activists in South Africa who were “tired of colonial iconography, tired of white supremacy in our curriculums, tired of the crisis of representation of black and other minority ethnic people in our institutions”.
A PhD student, Ndjodi Ndeunyema, 30, said: “We reject this narrative that Cecil Rhodes is a complicated character. No, he is a genocidaire, he is someone who planned an assault [on] Africa and he is not worthy of exaltation, he does not deserve to be on a high street looking down on us. That history will never be erased, it’s a lived reality for people in southern Africa, but it needs to be contextualised, it needs to be accurately represented and not glorified in the way it is today.”
He said the protest went further than calling for the removal of the statue, it was also about meaningful equality “for the black community, given the moment we are in, but also people of colour and people on the social and economic fringes of any society”. He called for justice for the Windrush generation, describing the scandal as a “substantive policy manifestation of anti-blackness”.
There was a significant police presence before the protest, with police vans and officers on horses.
A PhD student who did not want to be named said: “We are here today as students, community members and community-based organisations who believe in democracies, who believe in the valuation of all lives equally and who believe in the removal of colonial iconographies that we must all inhabit.
“We’re here to say to the University of Oxford, Oriel College and other colleges in Oxford that still demonstrate in support of the values we disagree with, that it is time to take a stand. If you are truly anti-racist and pro-good race relations and inclusion of black and ethnic minority students then today is the day to put your money where your mouth is.”
Kate Whitington, the Oriel College junior common room president, said: “Oriel College must not be blind to its legacy of colonialism and racism in association with Cecil Rhodes. Despite claims that clear historical context about the Cecil Rhodes statue would be provided in order to acknowledge and educate our students on the imperialist past, the subject remains taboo and Oriel’s continuing silence equal to complicity in the perpetuation of white privilege and supremacy.”
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/protesters-rally-in-oxford-for-removal-of-cecil-rhodes-statue?CMP=Share
#UK
The statue of slave trader #Robert_Milligan has now been removed from West India Quay.
It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade - but this does not have to be celebrated in our public spaces.
Big up everyone in Oxford demanding @OrielOxford take down the statue of mass murdering white supremacist Cecil Rhodes. You are educating the nation: without confronting our past, we can’t overcome today’s racism #RhodesMustFall
Edward Colston statue replaced by sculpture of Black Lives Matter protester Jen Reid
Exclusive: Artist #Marc_Quinn leads secret mission to install resin-and-steel figure of #Jen_Reid at site of toppled Bristol slave trader.
The statue of slave trader Edward Colston was replaced in Bristol on Wednesday morning – with a sculpture of one of the protesters whose anger brought him down.
The figure of Jen Reid, who was photographed standing on the plinth with her fist raised after the 17th-century merchant was toppled by Black Lives Matter demonstrators last month, was erected at dawn by a team directed by the artist Marc Quinn.
The ambush sculpture is likely to reignite the debate over public statuary in the UK that began with the toppling of the Colston figure five weeks ago. On Wednesday morning police said they had had no complaints and it was “a matter for Bristol city council”.
Marvin Rees, the city’s mayor, issued a statement saying that “the future of the plinth and what is installed on it must be decided by the people of Bristol”. He said the sculpture was “the work and decision of a London-based artist,” and added: “It was not requested and permission was not given for it to be installed.”
But he stopped short of saying that the council would act to remove it.
Arriving in two lorries before 5am, a team of 10 people worked quickly to install the figure of Reid, who said she had been secretly working with Quinn on the idea for weeks. It came as a complete surprise to the authorities, who are yet to announce their plans for the location.
A cardboard placard reading “black lives still matter” was placed at the bottom of the plinth.
Shortly after the vehicles drove away, Reid stood in front of the statue with her fist in the air. “It’s just incredible,” she said. “That’s pretty fucking ballsy, that it is.”
After meticulous planning to ensure the statue could be erected quickly enough to have it in place before officials arrived, the vehicles left the scene about 15 minutes after they got there. “I just knew it was going to happen,” said Reid. “They were so efficient.”
The most powerful moment of the morning, she said later, was “watching children stand next to it and raising their fists. Black children and white children, together.”
Quinn said that the installation had gone well. “It went exactly the opposite of how it imagined, because I imagined it being stopped,” he said. “It almost feels like it’s been there forever. It gets under the skin before you understand what it is, which I think is how you make people think about things, how you pose the question a different way and renew the conversation.”
By late morning the only council presence had been a roadsweeper, whose driver stopped to take a picture before continuing on his shift.
“It is incredible seeing it,” said Jen Reid’s daughter, Leila Reid, arriving and gazing up at the statue a little later. “It’s surreal. From the kneecap to the shape of her hands - it’s just her.” She said she had struggled to keep the secret since her mother told her. “She’s proud to represent a movement, and if there’s a better way to do that I can’t think of it.”
Reid, a stylist, attended the march with her husband, who one of the group that rolled the statue of Colston to the river after it was pulled down. She said that to stand for the BLM movement was “massive”, but “it would be just as big if it was someone else representing the same thing.”
Quinn – whose best known works include his “blood head” self-portrait Self and a sculpture of an artist that temporarily occupied the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, Alison Lapper Pregnant – said he viewed it as a duty for prominent white artists to amplify other voices.
“Jen created the sculpture when she stood on the plinth and raised her arm in the air,” said Quinn. “Now we’re crystallising it.”
In the weeks since the Colston statue was removed, although ideas including a Banksy proposal and calls for a statue of civil rights campaigner Paul Stephenson have been floated, and a mannequin of the notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile was briefly installed before falling off, no permanent decision on the future of the Colston site has been reached.
The new black resin and steel figure – entitled A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 – was transported from Quinn’s studio on Tuesday and stored overnight nearby. It was put in place using a hydraulic crane truck parked next to the plinth.
The team carried out the same surveys and health and safety checks it would have gone through on a more conventional work, Quinn said, adding that it would be “extremely difficult to move”. But he added: “This is not a permanent artwork.”
Reid said it had been difficult to keep the secret from friends and family. “When friends say ‘I’ll see you later,’ I think … yeah, you will!”
On whether there was an issue with a white artist being behind the work, Reid said: “It’s not even a question. If we have allies, it doesn’t matter what colour they are. He has done something to represent BLM, and to keep the conversation going.”
A placard was briefly placed on the plinth reading “Marc Quinn loves money, not blacks” before it was removed by another member of the public to applause.
Others were broadly positive in their response. “It’s a really great addition to the centre of Bristol,” said Bobby Loyal, an engineer. “I just hope no one tries to rip this down. The statue before was offensive to a lot of people, I don’t think this is. I think the council should leave it in place.”
Sanna Bertilsson, who was cycling past, did a double take as she saw the figure and stopped to look. “I didn’t know they were replacing it,” she said. “It’s absolutely beautiful.” Told that it had been put up without permission, she said: “I’d better get a picture before they take it down.”
The author Bernardine Evaristo tweeted that “some people will find this image of black empowerment offensive/outrageous/threatening” but that she thought it was “wonderful”.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/edward-colston-statue-replaced-by-sculpture-of-black-lives-matter-prote
Juan Branco
Qui a encore confiance dans les médias ? Plus que 24% de la population française. Soit -11% en un an. Dans cette étude d’Oxford, sur 40 pays, la France prend l’avant-dernière place mondiale. Et encore, Fogiel n’a pas encore pris la tête de BFMT
►http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2019/overview-key-findings-2019
#Twitter #médias #journalistes #presse #confiance #merdias #journullistes #presse_à_papier #Oxford #Juan_Branco
Source : ▻https://twitter.com/anatolium/status/1139490153435734017
#métaliste de liens sur des projets qui visent à intégrer les #réfugiés dans les universités
En général, sur l’accès aux études universitaires des réfugiés :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/746028
Les Hautes écoles face à l’accueil des réfugiés, dans le #monde :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/593418
Refugees Welcome Map
►https://seenthis.net/messages/475877
#cartographie #visualisation
#Science_for_refugees
►https://seenthis.net/messages/474982#message474983
#science4refugees
Universities are failing refugees. They must do more to prevent a ’lost generation’ :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/813004
#études_universitaires #université #asile #migrations #intégration_professionnelle #éducation #accès_aux_études #solidarité #universités-refuge
En #Suisse
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/671694
–-> aussi sur le #Passeport_Européen_de_Qualifications
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/585406
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/526101
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/503039
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/409739
A l’#EPFZ (#école_polytechnique de #Zurich) :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/515188
Avec un témoignage :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/580710
Sur le programme #Horizon_académique de l’#Université_de_Genève :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/645853
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/513292
Réfugiés aux études (vidéo) : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/912826
#Chercheurs afghans abrités par l’uni : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/930868
Quand le programme ne s’appelait pas encore Horizon académique
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/499841
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/466178
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/466001
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/465817
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/444685
#Université_de_Bâle
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/440488
#Bâle
#USI, #Università_della_Svizzera_italiana
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/607485
#Tessin
Une #interpellation :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/602108
#interpellation_parlementaire
Les #barrières à l’inscription des demandeurs d’asile dans les universités suisses :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/746026
Des #critiques autour de ces programmes :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/592005
Prise de position de l’UNES : l’accès à l’université pour les réfugiés doit être facilité :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/563366
#Italie :
A #Trento:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/746029
Projet #mentorship en Italie:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/604788#message644263
#Università_Europea:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/482579
#Pavia:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/475877
Le projet #UNI-CO-RE de l’université de #Bologne:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/761696
#corridors_universitaires
#Bari, l’Ateneo dà a 42 rifugiati il passaporto di studio : « La nostra è un’università del mondo »
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/833074
#Kiron_University :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/426497
Autres initiatives en Allemagne :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/368941
#Grenoble :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/621465
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/497301
Des étudiants d’universités et de grandes écoles aident les migrants à passer leurs diplômes en #France :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/510007
Appel « Ils ferment les frontières, ouvrons nos écoles » :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/485541
#EHESS :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/474982#message474983
#Sciences_po (+ autres projets signalés par @stephane_m) :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/469358
Sur les #bourses_d'études pour réfugiés :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/613719
#Argentine #USA #Etats-Unis
Spécifiquement sur les Etats-Unis :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/570099
Et l’Italie :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/604788
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/585400
#Kings_College
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/568552
#Oxford :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/511012
#UK #Angleterre
#Compass_project, #University_of_London
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/511012#message608004
#Bristol
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/500218
#sanctuary_scholarship_scheme
#Goldsmith_university :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/421844
Université de #Leeds, #sanctuary_scholarships :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/790102
En France pour les #réfugiés_syriens :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/505542
En #Belgique
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/442897
#ULB
Le projet européen #coLAB :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/776300
En #Angleterre, #Newcastle :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/801990
#UK
Autres projets :
Programmes #Erasmus+ pour soutenir les réfugiés dans leurs études (notamment en lien avec l’apprentissage de la langue)
►https://seenthis.net/messages/621465
#ErasmusPlus
A ‘University in Exile’ to Reconnect Syrian Students and Academics
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/594865
#Jamiya_Project
The #silent_university :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/491347
Berliner Student gründet Online-Uni für Flüchtlinge ohne Papiere
►https://seenthis.net/messages/421844
#Wings_university
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/368941#message378162
#Off-university :
▻https://off-university.com
–-> pour chercheur·es de Turquie
Discussion sur twitter autour du fait que la #Oxford_Union ("students society") de l’#université de #Oxford ont invité #Steve_Bannon à donner une conférence...
voici l’annonce :
Voici une première réaction sur twitter :
@OxfordUnion has invited Steve Bannon to speak this Friday-16th November. You guys can’t find anyone better than an anti Semitic, racist, domestic abuser to speak? Stop normalizing fascists @UniofOxford #Oxford
Et la réponse de l’université de Oxford :
Hi Samira, The Oxford Union is independent of the University of Oxford, and Oxford Brookes University, and as an organisation we have no power to regulate their activities.
Et dans un deuxième tweet :
While the University has no involvement, we appreciate opinions often differ on the speakers invited and would add that students can attend these talks to challenge speakers, rather than agree with them.
▻https://twitter.com/UniofOxford/status/1062681958612897792
Et la réaction de #Polly_Wilkins :
This seems to be a theme whereby universities take no responsibility for the hate speech and normalisation of fascism resulting from the platforms given to racists, anti-Semites, and misogynists when these people are invited by students.
If a university will not stand up against rising fascism then it suggests it has no interests in defending itself. There is no possibility for academic freedom under fascism.
▻https://twitter.com/PollyWilkins/status/1062687717774028800
#liberté_d'expression #fascisme #normalisation #banalisation #xénophobie #racisme #liberté_académique
v. aussi ce qui s’était passé à l’université de #Grenoble, quand la faculté de droit a invité des représentants de #Frontex pour parler de #Frontex...
►https://seenthis.net/messages/697112
L’Oxford Union avait aussi reçu Marine Le Pen en 2015, avec le même discours gnangnan « si vous n’êtes pas d’accord avec elle, venez et débatez ! »
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/marine-le-pen-front-national-oxford-union-university-speech-delayed-pro
Innovation : En Angleterre, on scanne les sans-abri - Société - lematin.ch
▻https://www.lematin.ch/societe/angleterre-scanne-sansabri/story/26072939
Mais l’application donne surtout accès aux objectifs du SDF. L’un voudra récolter telle somme pour un dépôt de garantie de loyer, un autre pour une formation professionnelle, un dernier pour pouvoir refaire des papiers d’identité. L’utilisateur est donc censé savoir précisément à qui il donne et pourquoi. Il est précisé qu’un travailleur social accompagne les sans-abri et s’assurent qu’ils utilisent l’argent versé comme ils l’ont promis.
Sous le même genre de prétexte fallacieux, ça avait fait un tollé à Marseille lorsque la mairie avaient mis ce fichage en place avec des #SDF étiquetés affublés d’une carte permettant de les nommer … à la morgue. Ils avaient du renoncer.
#déshumanisation #controle_social #carte_de_pauvres #humiliation #fichage #la_honte
#confort_mental #élite #Oxford_university_bigshame #winner #colmatage_capitaliste #administration_du_désastre
Alex McCallion, co-founder of Greater Change | Enterprising Oxford
▻https://www.eship.ox.ac.uk/alex-mccallion-co-founder-greater-change
Alex McCallion is an Oxford graduate (Jesus College, Economics and Management) and co-founder of Greater Change, helping to provide a way of giving smarter to the homeless. The app will allow people to give to someone who is homeless directly and know the gift is spent effectively. In order to implement this the project is being crowdfunded on the University’s platform ▻https://oxreach.hubbub.net/p/GreaterChange.
What is your background? What made you decide to become an entrepreneur?
I have always loved entrepreneurship and can’t remember a time when I did not want to grow up to be one! I started by selling donuts in school aged 11!
#Oxford contre #Cambridge à la rame, un duel qui dure depuis bientôt deux siècles - Hebdo - RFI
▻http://www.rfi.fr/hebdo/20180323-oxford-cambridge-course-aviron-plus-ancien-monde-tradition-ripoll-basti
Ce 24 mars a lieu sur la Tamise la 164e édition de la « #Boat_Race », cette course d’#aviron qui met aux prises le huit de l’#université d’Oxford et celui de Cambridge. Retransmise à la télévision dans 200 pays à travers le monde, la course créée en 1829 passionne les Britanniques avec plus de 250 000 spectateurs sur les berges, et fait désormais partie de leur #patrimoine.
#Oxford accused of ’social #apartheid' as colleges admit no black students | Education | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/19/oxford-accused-of-social-apartheid-as-colleges-admit-no-black-students
Nearly one in three Oxford colleges failed to admit a single black British A-level student in 2015, with the university accused of “social apartheid” over its admissions policies by the former education minister David Lammy.
The data shows that 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not award a place to a black British pupil with A-levels in 2015, the first time the university has released such figures since 2010. Oriel College only offered one place to a black British A-level student in six years.
Similar data released by Cambridge revealed that six colleges there failed to admit any black British A-level students in the same year.
#Oxford_Bags, the Ridiculously Wide-Legged Trousers of the 1920s - Atlas Obscura
▻http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/oxford-bags-pants
IN A 2013 ARTICLE FOR the Newsletter of the New Sheridan Club—a club dedicated to extremely British #foppishness—writer Sean Longden makes the following claim: “Only jeans can compete with bags in the history of 20th-century menswear.”
Bags.
What he’s talking about is a style of pant called the “Oxford bags,” a mysterious and, yes, influential design that achieved extreme popularity in the 1920s. Of course, in the cyclical world of fashion, the popularity of the Oxford bags didn’t end with a single tenure; they came back in the 1970s, and then, arguably, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They are singularly ridiculous and delightful, at their extreme one of the silliest pant designs ever conceived. And there’s no reason to think they won’t be back again at some point.
C’était en réaction à l’interdiction des #pantalons_de_golf (ah, Tintin !)
The most-cited explanation for their size and name comes from 1924, at the University of Oxford, when the school administration supposedly banned the wearing of #knickerbockers (or, more specifically, #plus-fours). Knickerbockers are those baggy almost-pants that end at just below the knee. Plus-fours extend, as the name suggests, another four inches down. (There are also plus-sixes and plus-eights.) Plus-fours were, the story says, beloved amongst Oxfordians. As a rebellion, the students decided to keep wearing them—but to wear something over them, to hide them. Something fairly lightweight and billowy enough to hide the already loose plus-fours they loved so dearly. And so was born a fashion trend.
In the early 1970s, a new club trend started up in the cities of the north of England, spawning a movement which would come to be called #Northern_Soul. It was an unusual musical movement in that it didn’t actually involve new music; instead, it was essentially a fanbase of Northern English teens and twentysomethings with a passionate love of a particular brand of mid-1960s American soul. The music this scene favored was generally kind of sweet, up-tempo, doo-wop-inspired, pre-disco, pre-funk soul from Motown and Motown-inspired labels.
The fashion of Northern Soul clubgoers was just as specific and significantly older than the music they danced to: for men, it was, you guessed it, Oxford bags, paired usually with a tank top. But as with the likely original use of the Oxford bags, the Northern Soul kids liked Oxford bags because they were utilitarian: Northern Soul was very serious about its dance moves, which involved a lot of spinning and kicking the air and dropping down for splits.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2NySUcbv3w
Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi and the fraud of human rights imperialism - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/14/pers-s14.html
The plight of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims fleeing the Burmese military’s rampage in the western state of Rakhine is a devastating exposure of the fraud of human rights imperialism practiced by the US and its allies and their chief political asset in Burma (Myanmar)—Aung San Suu Kyi.
The brutality and scale of the military operations has been the occasion of a great deal of hypocritical handwringing in the UN and by those who have aggressively promoted Suu Kyi as a “democracy icon.” Despite the media and humanitarian agencies being barred from the operational area, there is substantial and mounting evidence that the Burmese army has been systematically torching villages and numerous eyewitness accounts of soldiers gunning down civilians.
L’#université d’#Oxford retire un portrait de #Aung_San_Suu_Kyi
La prestigieuse université britannique d’Oxford a décidé de retirer de ses murs un portrait de la dirigeante birmane Aung San Suu Kyi, ancienne étudiante de l’établissement, dont le pays est accusé par l’ONU de se livrer à une épuration ethnique.
Is the staggeringly profitable #business of scientific publishing bad for #science? | Science | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.
[...]
It is difficult to overstate how much power a journal editor now had to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself. “Young people tell me all the time, ‘If I don’t publish in CNS [a common acronym for Cell/Nature/Science, the most prestigious journals in biology], I won’t get a job,” says Schekman. He compared the pursuit of high-impact #publications to an incentive system as rotten as banking bonuses. “They have a very big #influence on where science goes,” he said.
And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”
Un peu de réaction:
Major German Universities Cancel Elsevier Contracts
Diana Kwon, The Scientist, July 17, 2017
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/615916
#résistance #Elsevier #université #Allemagne #éditions_scientifiques #publications_scientifiques
#Robert_Maxwell #Reed-Elsevier #Elsevier #multinationales #business #Pergamon
With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.
In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.
Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications
It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.
Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.
Scientific articles are about unique discoveries: one article cannot substitute for another. If a serious new journal appeared, scientists would simply request that their university library subscribe to that one as well. If Maxwell was creating three times as many journals as his competition, he would make three times more money.
“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. #Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology. It was edited by a young biologist named #Ben_Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published.
Suddenly, where you published became immensely important. Other editors took a similarly activist approach in the hopes of replicating Cell’s success. Publishers also adopted a metric called “#impact_factor,” invented in the 1960s by #Eugene_Garfield, a librarian and linguist, as a rough calculation of how often papers in a given journal are cited in other papers. For publishers, it became a way to rank and advertise the scientific reach of their products. The new-look journals, with their emphasis on big results, shot to the top of these new rankings, and scientists who published in “high-impact” journals were rewarded with jobs and funding. Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world. (Garfield later referred to his creation as “like nuclear energy … a mixed blessing”.)
And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”
As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars.
Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.
With the purchase of Pergamon’s 400-strong catalogue, Elsevier now controlled more than 1,000 scientific journals, making it by far the largest scientific publisher in the world.
At the time of the merger, Charkin, the former Macmillan CEO, recalls advising Pierre Vinken, the CEO of Elsevier, that Pergamon was a mature business, and that Elsevier had overpaid for it. But Vinken had no doubts, Charkin recalled: “He said, ‘You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. That’s what happened at Pergamon. And then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.’ He was right and I was wrong.”
By 1994, three years after acquiring Pergamon, Elsevier had raised its prices by 50%. Universities complained that their budgets were stretched to breaking point – the US-based Publishers Weekly reported librarians referring to a “doomsday machine” in their industry – and, for the first time, they began cancelling subscriptions to less popular journals.
In 1998, Elsevier rolled out its plan for the internet age, which would come to be called “The Big Deal”. It offered electronic access to bundles of hundreds of journals at a time: a university would pay a set fee each year – according to a report based on freedom of information requests, Cornell University’s 2009 tab was just short of $2m – and any student or professor could download any journal they wanted through Elsevier’s website. Universities signed up en masse.
Those predicting Elsevier’s downfall had assumed scientists experimenting with sharing their work for free online could slowly outcompete Elsevier’s titles by replacing them one at a time. In response, Elsevier created a switch that fused Maxwell’s thousands of tiny monopolies into one so large that, like a basic resource – say water, or power – it was impossible for universities to do without. Pay, and the scientific lights stayed on, but refuse, and up to a quarter of the scientific literature would go dark at any one institution. It concentrated immense power in the hands of the largest publishers, and Elsevier’s profits began another steep rise that would lead them into the billions by the 2010s. In 2015, a Financial Times article anointed Elsevier “the business the internet could not kill”.
Publishers are now wound so tightly around the various organs of the scientific body that no single effort has been able to dislodge them. In a 2015 report, an information scientist from the University of Montreal, Vincent Larivière, showed that Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Maxwell’s old partners Springer, and his crosstown rivals Wiley-Blackwell, controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market. (An Elsevier representative familiar with the report told me that by their own estimate they publish only 16% of the scientific literature.)
Elsevier says its primary goal is to facilitate the work of scientists and other researchers. An Elsevier rep noted that the company received 1.5m article submissions last year, and published 420,000; 14 million scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review.
In a sense, it is not any one publisher’s fault that the scientific world seems to bend to the industry’s gravitational pull. When governments including those of China and Mexico offer financial bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, they are not responding to a demand by any specific publisher, but following the rewards of an enormously complex system that has to accommodate the utopian ideals of science with the commercial goals of the publishers that dominate it. (“We scientists have not given a lot of thought to the water we’re swimming in,” Neal Young told me.)
Since the early 2000s, scientists have championed an alternative to subscription publishing called “open access”. This solves the difficulty of balancing scientific and commercial imperatives by simply removing the commercial element. In practice, this usually takes the form of online journals, to which scientists pay an upfront free to cover editing costs, which then ensure the work is available free to access for anyone in perpetuity. But despite the backing of some of the biggest funding agencies in the world, including the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, only about a quarter of scientific papers are made freely available at the time of their publication.
The idea that scientific research should be freely available for anyone to use is a sharp departure, even a threat, to the current system – which relies on publishers’ ability to restrict access to the scientific literature in order to maintain its immense profitability. In recent years, the most radical opposition to the status quo has coalesced around a controversial website called Sci-Hub – a sort of Napster for science that allows anyone to download scientific papers for free. Its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazhakstani, is in hiding, facing charges of hacking and copyright infringement in the US. Elsevier recently obtained a $15m injunction (the maximum allowable amount) against her.
Elbakyan is an unabashed utopian. “Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers,” she told me in an email. In a letter to the court, she cited Article 27 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.
Whatever the fate of Sci-Hub, it seems that frustration with the current system is growing. But history shows that betting against science publishers is a risky move. After all, back in 1988, Maxwell predicted that in the future there would only be a handful of immensely powerful publishing companies left, and that they would ply their trade in an electronic age with no printing costs, leading to almost “pure profit”. That sounds a lot like the world we live in now.
►https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
#Butterworths #Springer #Paul_Rosbaud #histoire #Genève #Pergamon #Oxford_United #Derby_County_FC #monopole #open_access #Sci-Hub #Alexandra_Elbakyan
Publish and be praised (article de 2003)
It should be a public scandal that the results of publicly-funded scientific research are not available to members of the public who are interested in, or could benefit from, such access. Furthermore, many commercial publishers have exploited the effective monopoly they are given on the distribution rights to individual works and charge absurdly high rates for some of their titles, forcing libraries with limited budgets to cancel journal subscriptions and deny their researchers access to potentially critical information. The system is obsolete and broken and needs to change.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/09/research.highereducation
#Oxford Students Refugee Campaign funds 8 full scholarships
A campaign to fund scholarships for refugees launched by an Oxford student has managed to raise nearly a quarter of a million pounds in pledges.
▻http://www.cherwell.org/2016/06/29/oxford-students-refugee-campaign-funds-8-full-scholarships/#
#université #solidarité #asile #migrations #bourses_d'études #réfugiés #UK #Angleterre
Oxford University students say ’refugees welcome’
This is a guest blog post by Thais Roque, a DPhil student in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford. She explains how Oxford students have responded to the plight of refugees and celebrates what can be acheived when the whole student body pulls together to improve the lives of others.
▻http://www.refugeesupportnetwork.org/news/oxford-university-refugees-welcome
The #Compass_Project Fund will provide 20 asylum seekers, who are not eligible for student finance, with a scholarship to study a university-level programme at #Birkbeck, #University_of_London.
▻http://www.bbk.ac.uk/student-services/financial-support/compass-project-fund
Scholarships Without Borders. Higher Education for Displaced Students
#Franklin_University Switzerland wishes to show its solidarity with displaced students by offering scholarships to recognized refugees in Switzerland through its #Scholarships_Without_Borders (#SWB) program.
▻http://www.fus.edu/academic-programs/scholarships-without-borders
#Suisse #université #asile #migrations #solidarité
#Oxford_University students launch scholarship campaign to help get refugees back into education
Developments come as US government reveals refugees from across the world will be able to take more than 1,000 online university courses for free
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/refugee-crisis-oxford-university-oxbridge-scholarships-education-a709
#Oxford
#Rhodes_Must_Fall at #Oxford (too)
▻http://africasacountry.com/rhodes-must-fall-at-oxford-too
Last month the Oxford Union (a student debating club) advertised a drink named ‘The Colonial Comeback!’ as its featured cocktail for a debate on whether #Britain owes reparations to her.....
#AFRICA_IS_A_COUNTRY recommends : Books of 2014
▻http://africasacountry.com/africa-is-a-country-recommends-books-of-2014
Christmas is coming, and like the German Bundesliga we’re going to be taking a wee break on AIAC, returning in the early days of 2015. Everyone has their own ways of getting.....
#Accra #All_Our_Names #American_Civilization #Another_Man's_War #Ato_Quayson #Barnaby_Phillips #Biometric_State #Breyten_Breytenbach #C.L.R._James #Chris_Abani #Clicko:_The_Wild_Dancing_Bushman #David_Scott #Dinaw_Mengestu #Double_Negative #Elena_Ferrante #Henrik_Chetan_Aspengren #Ingrid_Winterbach #Intimate_Stranger #Ivan_Vladislavić #JM_Ledgard #Justice #Kai_Bird #Keith_Breckenridge #Kuzhali_Manickavel #Masande_Ntshanga #memory #Michael_Hastings #Migritude #Momus #My_Brilliant_Friend #Neil_Parsons #Omens_of_Adversity:_Tragedy #One_Day_in_Delhi #Oxford_Street #Sara_Ahmed #Shailja_Patel #Submergence #The_Book_of_Scotlands #The_Elusive_Moth #The_Good_Spy #The_Last_Magazine:_A_Novel #The_Reactive #The_Secret_History_of_Las_Vegas #Things_We_Found_During_The_Autopsy #Time #Wilful_Subjects
Street Life in an African City: #Oxford_Street in #Accra
▻http://africasacountry.com/street-life-in-an-african-city-oxford-street-in-accra
The evidence of material on African cities does not inspire confidence. They are increasingly overcrowded with no clear plan for matching population growth to available facilities. Sewage and garbage disposal are perennial problems. Laboring street children are everywhere. The hope some five decades ago when many countries gained freedom from their former colonial masters was […]
Street Life in the African City: #Oxford_Street in #Accra
▻http://africasacountry.com/81072
The evidence of material on African cities does not inspire confidence. They are increasingly overcrowded with no clear plan for matching population growth to available facilities. Sewage and garbage disposal are perennial problems. Laboring street children are everywhere. The hope some five decades ago when many countries gained freedom from their former colonial masters was […]
Zero Geography: My BBC Radio 4 talk on Internet and Information Geographies
▻https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/fourthought/fourthought_20140514-2100a.mp3
The informational divides that we’re seeing reproduced can’t simply be explained away by a lack of connectivity. Connectivity is a necessary, but, by no means, a sufficient condition. But so is a broader ecosystem of information, an educated and tech literate population, having reliable infrastructure, not excluding half of the population (in other words, women), having the internet be trusted rather than subject to surveillance by the state, and having the critical mass for local-language tools, platforms, and communities.
We’ve always had inequality, but the digital layers of places mean that the internet and the ability to produce digital and coded information might start to amplify those older imbalances of voice and power and participation. We’re not just deepening the divides between different parts of our world, we’re also creating layers of places that aren’t necessarily representative of the underlying people, processes, and contexts that exist there.
So let’s think about that the next time we use Google to find a restaurant or look something up on Wikipedia. Let’s remember that our digital tools are usually just amplifying the already most visible, the most powerful, and the most prominent things, and let’s maybe look for alternatives; different stories; different narratives; different mediators. Our world is always going to be augmented by digital information, but let’s always try to remember what it leaves out.
Dr Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute talks about first level digital divide (material) and second level digital divide (information access and contribution) withing the framework of information economies and information imperialism.
Information-rich get richer and information-poor get poorer
#digitaldivide #informationeconomy #informationimperialism #oxfordinternetinstitute