Imagined and imaginary whales: Benedict Anderson, Salman Rushdie and George Orwell

George Orwell, anticipating many of the arguments made by Benedict Anderson in the “Patriotism and Racism” chapter of Imagined Communities, illuminated patriotism and nationalism as shifting aspects of a wider dialectical interplay between an identification with imagined communities and a loyalty to humanity. Orwell's essay “Inside the Whale” can be seen, contrary to Salman Rushdie's criticism that it advocates quietism, as an essay about imaginary homelands. In this reading the whale is a metaphor for a dialectical space created by a writer in order to gain purchase on the unceasing dialectic of history. Analysis of The Lion and the Unicorn in this article links Orwell's work with that of Anderson and Rushdie by exploring in his vision of a classless England the relationship between the personal imaginary homeland and the political imagined community

Network properties of written human language

We investigate the nature of written human language within the framework of complex network theory. In particular, we analyse the topology of Orwell's \textit{1984} focusing on the local properties of the network, such as the properties of the nearest neighbors and the clustering coefficient. We find a composite power law behavior for both the average nearest neighbor's degree and average clustering coefficient as a function of the vertex degree. This implies the existence of different functional classes of vertices. Furthermore we find that the second order vertex correlations are an essential component of the network architecture. To model our empirical results we extend a previously introduced model for language due to Dorogovtsev and Mendes. We propose an accelerated growing network model that contains three growth mechanisms: linear preferential attachment, local preferential attachment and the random growth of a pre-determined small finite subset of initial vertices. We find that with these elementary stochastic rules we are able to produce a network showing syntactic-like structures

Women, know your limits: Cultural sexism in academia

Despite the considerable advances of the feminist movement across Western societies, in Universities women are less likely to be promoted, or paid as much as their male colleagues, or even get jobs in the first place. One way in which we can start to reflect on why this might be the case is through hearing the experiences of women academics themselves. Using feminist methodology, this article attempts to unpack and explore just some examples of ‘cultural sexism’ which characterise the working lives of many women in British academia.This article uses qualitative methods to describe and make sense of just some of those experiences. In so doing, the argument is also made that the activity of academia is profoundly gendered and this explicit acknowledgement may contribute to our understanding of the under-representation of women in senior positions

Epistemic Malevolence

Against the background of a great deal of structural symmetry between intellectual and moral virtue and vice, it is a surprising fact that what is arguably the central or paradigm moral vice—that is, moral malevolence or malevolence proper—has no obvious or well-known counterpart among the intellectual vices. The notion of “epistemic malevolence” makes no appearance on any standard list of intellectual vices; nor is it central to our ordinary ways of thinking about intellectual vice. In this essay, I argue that there is such a thing as epistemic malevolence and offer an account of its basic character and structure. Doing so requires a good deal of attention to malevolence simpliciter. In the final section of the essay, I offer an explanation of our relative unfamiliarity with this trait

Using pot plants to clean indoor air

Polluted indoor air, air contaminated by Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), are a major cause of headaches, nausea, concentration loss and other `building-related illnesses. Previous laboratory research by the Plants and Environmental Quality Group at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has shown that the `pot plant system (plants-and-potting-mix combination) can daily eliminate several times the Australian maximum exposure concentrations of the common VOCs benzene and n-hexane