Speaking in Planes

January 26, 2009 in capturing, objecting, politicizing, publicizing, speaking
Tags: aedh, africa, brazzaville, deportation, france, planes, police, resf, solidarity, violence

Online petitions are quite useless. That said, it doesn’t hurt signing one once in a while.
So French-reading followers of this blog might want to catch up on one most favorite theme — cops terrorizing people in planes from France to Africa, see a couple of old posts on that here and here — and sign [...]

Short Manifesto on Economics

January 16, 2009 in economizing, politicizing, publicizing
Tags: economics, manifesto

An important anonymous manifesto has been publicised at Will Davies’ Potlatch. It has been decided to cut-and-paste it here for the sake of knowledge diffusion:
“I don’t give a fuck about economics or the so-called economy. The concepts I choose to deal with are ’society’, ‘power’ and ‘justice’. I’m not some Marxist twat. It’s just my [...]

Political Anthropology of Finance

January 9, 2009 in explaining, politicizing
Tags: abs, anthropology, crisis, finance, hart, mauss, money, ortiz, polanyi, politics, securities

This is a quick plug for a short (but epochal) piece by Keith Hart and Horacio Ortiz published as a guest editorial in the last issue of Anthropology Today and titled “Anthropology in the financial crisis” (relevant excerpts also available here): the anthropology of finance is defended as both an intellectual and a political venture [...]

Godless Message for the Greater Public

January 7, 2009 in publicizing, testing
Tags: atheism, buses, god, probability, transportation

An attractive experiment in civilizational, urban marketing: this newly launched Atheist Bus Campaign (note the interesting probabilistic precaution).

Chopping Statistics Down

January 5, 2009 in capturing, politicizing, publicizing, quantifying
Tags: censorship, cgt, darcos, depp, france, statistics, universities

One reputable French union is alerting here the scientific and teaching community about what is happening to public statistics on science and education in France. The government’s mot d’ordre seems to be here “contrôler le chiffre” (“controlling figures”).
So there is this statistics department working for the ministries in charge of education and scientific research, called [...]

Sociological Supervision

January 3, 2009 in testing
Tags: books, economics, finance, merton, nobel, pinch, sociology

Trevor Pinch (who did author quite some time ago an article on testing which was secretly praised as a pivotal part of this blog’s historical unconscious), is whipping up some publicity here for a recently edited book (see also a follow-up here). The point there in that post, perfectly justified by current events in the [...]