Open Access As An Economic War

Richard Poynder published an article on the ugly economic background of the big scientific publishers (Springer, Elsevier, etc…). He thinks they might be succeeding in making even more profits by the way they are reacting to the Open Access movement. The ugly thing about this is that it’s just another scheme to turn public taxmoney into private profits. Poynder is thus suggesting that scientists, libraries, universities should back the green road to OA more forcefully. The most promising way seems to be universities and funding organizations mandating their researchers to publish OA. The only reason why this is not happening faster is institutions dragging their feet. E.g. Switzerland may have the highest ratio of universities with OA-mandates but their is no real reason why the remaining ones (Basel, Lausanne, Geneva, Lucerne, Berne, Fribourg, Lugano, Neuchatel) should not follow the example of Zurich (U and ETH), St. Gallen and the Swiss National Science Foundation in mandating their researchers to publish OA now. In the meantime, why don’t we start refusing to review for journals from big publishers?

(Another ugly way of turning public money into private profits relating to Switzerland is freeing international sport associations from taxes. See the current discussion in German.)

Even Fish Can Be Self-Critical

Stanley Fish is wrestling with an accusation of being a prime example of neoliberal ideology. Unlike many others he seems to be taking this seriously and wants to find out what “neoliberal” means when it is used in such a context. His post seems to confirm that the accuser (Sophia McClennen) is right and that Fish thought of academic freedom as something purely apolitical. I find it worrying that academics need to become aged professors before they even start thinking about their work as something that might be political. Students of the social sciences start this thinking process in their first semesters when they are confronted with the positivism dispute and the Frankfurt School.

Why is it that the most basic themes of sociology get no reception in other domains? Even someone like Stanley Fish is only slowly catching up. But late is better than never, I guess.

“Gemüse ziehen und forschen”

Das ist die Antwort von Marius Reiser auf die Frage, was seine Zukunftspläne seien, nachdem er seine Professur an der Uni Mainz aus Protest gegen die Bologna-Reform niedergelegt hat. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” hat schon Voltaire gefordert. Mir scheint nicht, dass er damit das Gemüseziehen gemeint hat.

Geology Can Be Fun

Hilarious video explaining why creationists are completely wrong about the history of the earth. Not only funny but also educational.

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Some Sad Scientists

in this documentary. (25min.) Five people living on top of a mountain in Armenia doing research on cosmic radiation in a huge, almost abandoned and run-down facility. Document of a collapsed Russian Empire and the ensuing sadness.

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Korrupte Medizin

Dass die Kommerzialisierung der Wissenschaft und insbesondere der Medizin in den letzten zwanzig Jahren bedenkliche Konsequenzen gezeitigt hat, ist in der Wissenschaftsforschung ein offenes Geheimnis. So langsam stösst das Thema auch zu einem breiteren Publikum vor: siehe das Interview mit Hans Weiss zu seinem Buch “Korrupte Medizin” auf Telepolis.

Art as Instinct

Another recommendable Science Saturday over at bloggingheads.tv. Denis Dutton discusses his book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution“. He argues that there are constant aspects through all cultures regarding the things we humans find enjoyable about art. He even provides cluster criteria that define art independent of culture:

1. direct pleasure
2. style (stylized)
3. individuality (“there is a mind behind the work”)
4. creativity and novelty
5. surrounding atmosphere and criticism
6. intellectual challenge (using the whole brain simultaneously)
7. institution (though not important)
8. representation
9. skill, virtuosity
10. special focus (special occasions)
11. emotional saturation
12. imaginative experience (“where music happens? in your brain”)

I enjoyed listening to this discussion (well, it’s more like an interview) because Dutton provides a rather relaxed and sophisticated rendition of arguments and themes around the “nature/nurture divide”. It also fits well with the Darwin-year, that seems to be everywhere.

Rorty, Bourdieu, Gross, n+1

n+1 has a fantastic review of Neil Gross’ book about Richard Rorty. The review by Gideon Lewis-Kraus provides a challenging discussion both of Gross’ book and of Bourdieu’s concepts Gross is working with. Lewis-Kraus disagrees with portraying Rorty’s leave from analytic philosophy as an act of rebellion against disciplinary authority. He argues to see Rorty as someone understanding that analytic philosophy “was a futile, unnecessary, and occasionally pernicious ambition.” According to him, Rorty was just trying to change the subject out of boredom. Embedded in the review is a sporadically elaborate criticism of Bourdieu’s sociology of science (which Gross calls the new sociology of ideas).

This review is part of the new book review supplement of n+1 called N1BR. For those not familiar with n+1: go check it out! It is one of the places on the web (and in print) proving that not aiming at the common denominator but challenging the user/reader can work.

Lewis-Kraus on the analytic philosophy and sociology: “The philosophical conversation had gotten so bad precisely because the analytic philosophers had been so successful in convincing themselves that only they had a clue about what was really going on, that everything done in any other discipline was frivolous and epiphenomenal and not worth worrying about. This is the peril of hermetic rigorism and abject professionalization: if you believe that whatever it is you have chosen to hypostasize—truth in epistemology, the class structure in economics, the drive for status in social relations—is the only thing ultimately worthy of discussion, you stand a good chance of finding yourself on the defensive, with fewer and fewer people to talk to and increasingly occult things to talk about. Whenever a discipline becomes too self-congratulatorily reflexive, when it thinks, for example, that the corrections to the blind spots of sociology will be illuminated in an infinite regress of ever more sociology, that discipline has become moribund.”

Wikipedia und Unipolitik

Es scheint, als hätte tatsächlich jemand versucht über den Wikipediaeintrag zu Eva Horn “Unipolitik” zu betreiben. Eva Horn hat sich offensichtlich persönlich in die Diskussion eingeschaltet und den Eintrag korrigiert.

“Der von mir gelöschte Satz wurde von einer IP-Adresse meines früheren Instituts (Uni Basel) gepostet. Er ist irreführend und rufschädigend für mich und das Rektorat der Uni Basel und wurde in dieser Absicht und wider besseres Wissen so ins Netz gestellt.”

Magicology instead of voodoo

Some say science is all about values. The scientists from the last post have probably some misguided value-orientations. Neuroscientists studying magic tricks to find out how the brain works, however, are aiming in a more promising direction. Their research has the added value of disentchanting all those magic tricks, that I personally find by and large just annoying.

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