The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness -- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

As the folks at Cosmos and History say:

Open-access journals offer free access to articles and broaden the readership of publications beyond the restrictions of traditional commercial publishing. In any 12 month period Cosmos and History has around 900,000 ‘hits’, this equates to around 140,000 ‘unique visits’. However, what really matters is article downloads; currently with five issues published we are getting around 150 article downloads a day, with some individual articles being downloaded as often as 10 times a day.

Opponents of the open access journals assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model.

Well the digital age changes a lot of that, and so we have something like Philosophy Ethics and Humanities in Medicine.

Those interested in the conceptual and historical roots of medicine will not need reminding that early on work in natural philosophy spanned philosophy, science, and medicine. While scientific advances have led to the development of an ever-growing range of scientific disciplines and medical specialties, a consideration of the grounding concepts and ethical principles that underlie health care remains as crucial as ever. Indeed, advances in knowledge, and changes in practice, mean that these grounding concepts and ethical principles require constant reconsideration and reworking. This, then, is the work of philosophy of medicine, of bioethics, and of work at the overlap between the clinic and the humanities.To our knowledge Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine is the first open-access journal that aims to expand the discussion on health care by focusing on the intersection between philosophy, ethics, and the humanities and clinical theory and practice.

An interesting article in an early issue of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicineis Grant Gillett's Medical science, culture, and truth He says that medical science has followed the ideal of scientific objectivity so that we make observations, offer theories about the realities they indicate and assess those theories in the light of our ongoing accumulation of clinical and scientific evidence.This scientific objectivity is now stated in terms of scientific realism according to which the world is the way science says it is because there is a transparent and simply verifiable correspondence between our scientific descriptions and the reality they describe. On this view, science reveals the nature of the world and the processes going on within it and discloses facts about human health and disease.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Styrofoam plant near Cologne, Germany, 1997

The new technology is the internet and BitTorrent files---that gives us the capacity to “hyperdistribute” --- to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously. In his post Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century on the the human network. Mark Pesce describes the far reaching implications of this technology. Referring to YouTube he says:

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of distribution. What no one had expected was that the professional producers would lose control of production. The difference between an amateur and a professional – in the media industries – has always centered on the point that the professional sells their work into distribution, while the amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that self-distribution is more effective than professional distribution, how do we distinguish between the professional and the amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.
There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film and television production and distribution can survive in this environment.

As we know Russell particularly promulgated a 'shadow Hegel,' a distorted, even mythical image that justified his philosophical patricide, and he sold it effectively for the rest of his life. After the Cambridge Two slew the Hegelian father and liberated philosophy from his oppressive regime, Hegel and Absolute Idealism became taboo, mentionable only with disgust, scorn, and ritualistic excoriation.

The 'shadow Hegel', of course, is the British Hegelians, whose alleged idealistic excesses gave rise to ‘analytic philosophy. The disgust, scorn and contempt then ignored the way that Continental European philosophy over the last two centuries has been so many different responses to Hegel.

My favourite line from Balzac is “hope is a memory that desires” and that was how I wrote Spaces of Hope, around that idea. Everybody has a memory, but memory can become nostalgia when it’s left on its own; nostalgia is not hope. Hope is memory that’s mobilized around desire. So the question is what do we desire and how do we want to desire it? For me, that is the crucial aspect of everything we do. So if I focus on Balzac, to whom I return again and again, I might conclude, “wow, yeah, that’s what’s it about, I desire things, but I can not do this absent of the memory.” As Walter Benjamin says about memory, “memory is not history, its something that flashes up, in moments of danger,” it somehow or other animates things.

Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance – and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors – it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another – all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network. Only one of the Minis needs to be connected to the Internet as a gateway; the others will find it and route traffic through it. The Minis are small – and they’re also cheap. For just $49 dollars US, you can order one complete with an Australian wall wart. That’s cheaper than most access points out there, and because of the mesh networking, it does a whole lot more.

And thus a self-organizing network is formed outside the control of the telcos; a network in a era when the mob rules. So the emphasis is on the how the mob uses the networks , and how networks change because of the mob.

Howard government made no secret of its preference for subjects of a narrowly utilitarian nature and, accordingly, the humanities suffered funding starvation, not to mention open contempt, hence the recurring series of funding crises that afflicted arts faculties: crises engineered by the government and aided by opportunistic university administrations....It may be supposed that the Australian Research Council's grants scheme alleviates the problem. In fact, it exacerbates it.... In effect, then, the grants culture is a backdoor way of radically downgrading most humanities academic positions into full-time teaching positions.

For the humanities, the largest problem is that the system is deliberately hostile. This is obvious from a simple perusal of the ARC grant application form, which makes it clear that research means team-based research, organised into a hierarchy of chief investigator, co-investigators and research assistants, the whole supported by an equipment and infrastructure budget. This structure makes sense in the sciences but is nonsense in the humanities' world of individualised investigation.Research assistants have their uses, but only up to a point. In the end, one has to read and write things for oneself: humanities research is not fact accumulation but the development and defence of a point of view.

From memory Woolf's text equates instability of identity with instability of language and chart the social constructedness of gender to show that one's subject position as woman or man is only provisional. I recall that it was a complicated text to read, open to many interpretations, and that it invited us, as readers, to read the text against itself.

Users who participate in the development of open source software, in the collaborative extension and editing of the Wikipedia, in the communal world-building of Second Life, or processes of massively parallelized and decentralized creativity and innovation in myriads of enthusiast communities do no longer produce content, ideas, and knowledge in a way that resembles traditional, industrial modes of production; the outcomes of their work similarly retain only few of the features of conventional products, even though frequently they are able to substitute for the outputs of commercial production processes. User-led content ‘production’ is instead built on iterative, evolutionary development models in which often very large communities of participants make a number of usually very small, incremental changes to the established knowledge base, thereby enabling a gradual improvement in quality which—under the right conditions—can nonetheless outpace the speed of product development in the conventional, industrial model.

I never really understood the death of painting debate, or rather it passed me by. I appreciate that modernism devalued painting and photography and scaled them down. Is that what is meant by the end of painting? The failure of painting? Is that why painter's paint reproductions---to reveal paintings bankruptcy? Painting is killed by photography and video? So they make paintings about the failures and limitations of painting?