News: More Major Internet Injunctions

Another court judgement has been made against the six major UK Internet Service Providers in the for providing access to copyrighted material via third party websites.

Newsflash: Social Scientists Believe They Should Receive More Funding

(To the exclusion of other disciplines, of course...)

Earlier this week the Adam Smith Institute promoted a recent paper by Cristiano Antonelli and Claudio Fassio of the University of Turin. In their groundbreaking article they sought to trace the contribution of different academic subjects to economic growth, calculated using a data set from 1998-2008. Their controversial findings seemed to indicate that, while science graduates had the positive effect on growth that might be expected, humanities had a slightly negative impact, prompting the statement that "public support should be increasingly directed towards the most productive types of knowledge rather than across the board of all disciplines". What emerges from the analysis however is an unsurprising case in favour of an increase in state funding for the authors' own field.

Politics and Ethics in the Tyrant's Camp

The study of media, politics and society has for a long time been an interest of mine, and it was for this reason that when the time came for me to write up an undergraduate dissertation I chose to focus on the Civil War epic of Lucan, which I believed would nicely tie in these topics with my discipline of Classics.

Home Alone

Marissa Mayer, the Chief Executive of Yahoo, encountered a considerable amount of mixed press last week with the announcement that, from June, all of her employees would be expected to come into the office in person to do their work. From a company formerly known for prizing the flexibility of its working arrangements this memo, leaked from the office of Jackie Reses, the company's human resources manager, comes as quite a surprise, being merely the latest in line of a number of bold moves brought about to halt the decline of the shrinking dot-com giant.

The Happiest Gulag in the World

After its 2011 acquisition of Zagat, a popular service that allows users to review restaurants, hotels, bars and places of interest, Google has made some headway in integrating its ratings into its own Places listings. A notable success story among many more questionable decisions (see a previous post), Zagat has come to completely replace Google's own reviewing service and has as recently as this week become the target of a further advertising campaign from the search giant.