Higher education as a gift and as a commons

This paper takes as a starting point Lewis Hyde’s (2007, xvi) assertion that art is a gift and not a commodity: “Works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies’, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without a market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” I want to argue that the same claim should be made for those aspects of academic labour that refer to teaching and education. Education can survive without a market, but where there is no gift there is no education. However the gift that is part of all educational processes gets rather obscured in regimes where higher education is either a public good or a private good. In regimes of higher education as public good the gift gets obscured by the provision of a service by the state. In regimes of higher education as a private good (e.g. higher education in the UK) the gift gets even more obscured, obviously so. It is only in a third educational regime, where education is a common good (e.g. the recent rise of the free universities), that the gift character of education can properly shine. Whilst this should be celebrated, the notion of a higher education commons poses some severe challenges. The paper ends with an examination of possibilities of academic activists to rescue or even strengthen the gift-like character of education

On the future development of the digital commons and the need of a global basic income

This is an article about digital production and the crisis of capitalism. It is about production in the digital commons and its implications for the building of alternatives to a commodified world. As digital production is at the very heart of cognitive capitalism, the digital commons is not just any other disruption of the process of commodification. This is the field of a fierce struggle over the future of the Internet and the future of capitalism itself. It is potentially the moment which moves back the frontiers of measurement, value and quantification towards qualities, values and an expansion of the gift economy. For this potential to unfold, it is vital that those who are giving, sharing, and contributing or the benefit of humanity are supported by global policies that enable them to do so. They have to be supported because their gifts are not based on reciprocity and the obligation to return the gift. This is an argument about the future of digital labour. The article concludes that this could be achieved through a global basic income scheme

From fracture to fragmentation: discrete element modeling -- Complexity of crackling noise and fragmentation phenomena revealed by discrete element simulations

Discrete element modelling (DEM) is one of the most efficient computational approaches to the fracture processes of heterogeneous materials on mesoscopic scales. From the dynamics of single crack propagation through the statistics of crack ensembles to the rapid fragmentation of materials DEM had a substantial contribution to our understanding over the past decades. Recently, the combination of DEM with other simulation techniques like Finite Element Modelling further extended the field of applicability. In this paper we briefly review the motivations and basic idea behind the DEM approach to cohesive particulate matter and then we give an overview of on-going developments and applications of the method focusing on two fields where recent success has been achieved. We discuss current challenges of this rapidly evolving field and outline possible future perspectives and debates

Coupled DEM-LBM method for the free-surface simulation of heterogeneous suspensions

The complexity of the interactions between the constituent granular and liquid phases of a suspension requires an adequate treatment of the constituents themselves. A promising way for numerical simulations of such systems is given by hybrid computational frameworks. This is naturally done, when the Lagrangian description of particle dynamics of the granular phase finds a correspondence in the fluid description. In this work we employ extensions of the Lattice-Boltzmann Method for non-Newtonian rheology, free surfaces, and moving boundaries. The models allows for a full coupling of the phases, but in a simplified way. An experimental validation is given by an example of gravity driven flow of a particle suspension

The exposure of Kataryna: how Polish journalists and bloggers debatch online anonymity

This article starts with the premise that anonymity is under attack and that we are experiencing the consequences of a slow but steady process of deanonymisation. While we are aware of the ambiguity of anonymity, we want to make an argument in defence of anonymous speech. The social productivity of anonymity will be demonstrated through an analysis of the doxing of Polish blogger Kataryna, whose real life identity was revealed by journalists. Her exposure in 2009 sparked one of the most heated debates in the history of the Polish internet. It triggered a controversy across several newspapers and blogging platforms. Using critical discourse analysis this study investigates how the Kataryna case was constructed, evaluated and interpreted by three traditional daily newspapers and by bloggers on two blogging platforms. The analysis reveals that the debate on online anonymity reflects three underlying conflicts: (1) conflict over the vision of the public sphere, (2) conflict over the professional identities of journalists and bloggers, and (3) conflict over the process of democratisation in Poland