Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to shoot. The possibilities are just too immense, and it’s hard to break out of the mundaneness of the everyday objects that you see around you. To remedy this social blindness, me and a friend decided that this week is B/W metal photography week.

Here are the pics so far.

We’ve been waiting for a new professor in Economy and Technology for several years at our department. Before x-mas the search committee had finally ranked the candidates. The top candidate was Claes Fredrik Helgesson from the Stockholm School of Economics and SCORE. CF Helgesson has a strong interest in economy, medical technology, as well as STS and Actor-Network Theory. He’s going to be a great addition to the department. Now, only the rector and the salary negotiation stand between him and the appointment. If all goes well, he’ll start this summer.

This blog has been asleep for a long time now. But it’s not dead. I’m now a father of Reuben, who’s 14 months. I’m working half time on my dissertation and the other half I’m taking care of Reuben.

I’ve finished one article during this year, which has been submitted to STHV, and I have just finished the first draft of a second article. Both of them are about the inscription of social and pedagogical values into digital standards in education. I’m also planning to finish a first draft version of my dissertation for my 80% seminar before the end of January.

Between all these activities, I’m also going to find some time to blog!

I recently spoke to a friend in the music industry: he had given up. His friend’s kids in fourth grade looked at him like a lunatic when he asked what they thought of record stores. They had never been to one. A 20-something relative of mine watches and listens to all media on his laptop in his parents home. He doesn’t own a single record. What’s happening with digital information?

The Danish documentary GOOD COPY BAD COPY takes a global view on digital reproduction and remixing. It traces copyright and digital reproduction in the US, Russia, Brazil, and Nigeria, and shows the variety of ways that people and societies handle infinite replication without quality loss. How does a county without copyright handle movie making? How do low cost producers and DJs in Brazil make money? Recommended viewing.

Also check out this blogpost on DRM.

A New STS search engine has been launched as a google custom search. It searches STHV, SSS, 4s online. It’s a bit limited in scope, not including a lot of other STS journals out there. But it’s a start. 

In Our Time

Big Ideas

Philosopher’s Zone

Radiolab

[Via Jeremy Hunsinger and the STSGrad mailing list]

Does a radio show featuring Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, Simon Shaffer, Ian Hacking, Andrew Pickering, and Brian Wynne sound interesting? If you do, check out the How to Think About Science podcast series.

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

[Via TMTTLT]

I’ve sometimes wondered whether there is any credence to if we live in a copy paste culture which is changing the way we produce and relate to texts. Now there seems to be evicence that indeed we are. According to Microsoft the single most used command in Office is Paste!

Windows Office team learned that paste is the most-used command in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (accounting for 11%, 15%, and 12% (respectively) of all commands issued in each application).

This could be something for the RIAA.

Via the Mac Office Team blog.

Open access journals can be compared to musicians who release their music on myspace or on the Pirate Bay. Rather than being locked into copyrights owned by large corporations, open access content flows free. This seems to be a growing movement in academia that aims to circumvent the publishing houses that have made academic publishing big business.

The question is when ISI ranking will be replaced with an open alternative, perhaps taking into account several types of data like the 0xdb for movies. Currently, according to Wikipedia, there are a billion English speakers on a “basic” level, hopefully such an index might allow “international” to be broadened to include the 400 million native Spanish speakers (600 million if you count the Portuguese speakers who could probably decipher Spanish), or the billion+ that can read Chinese characters. Why English should be the only lingua franca of academia is a good question.

See: Open access in STS or On Academic Productivity

Alf Rehn over at Text Sushi has been thinking about academic productivity lately, on one hand he rants on writing books , on the other he wants assistants to do it…

Sarcasm aside, I think these two posts really capture the risks with the publish or perish system. If every academic has to increase their research output there is bound to be people finding ways to circumvent the system: publishing with a mulittude of authors, makings students and assistants do your job, recycling the same ideas in different articles.

The increasing pressure to publish isn’t really an increasing pressure to research… It’s an increasing pressure to find creative ways to publish. Fordist research production… I’m thinking “Word Research Article Plugin”: File -> Export -> Article or “It looks like you’re writing a scholarly article? Do you want to start the Article Wizard.”