Spiked debate event in London on 11th November 2013, Academic freedom in illiberal times…

“in association with Academics for Academic Freedom and Times Higher Education, will debate the impact of the closing down of debate and free thinking on campus. Join us for this important and timely discussion in the Palace of Westminster, which will continue informally afterwards over free drinks with the panel and the Spiked editorial team.”

TextTeaser, a new open source text-summation algorithm. I tried it out with the opening section of Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature”. TextTeaser is just picking out whole sentences and bullet pointing them, rather than doing any rewriting.

TextTeaser version:

Supernatural Horror in Literature

* Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself.

* With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear.

* This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome.

* The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.

* If the proper sensations are excited, such a “high spot” must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down.

Supernatural Horror in Literature (first section)

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

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The Open Folklore portal and search tool has updated with a clean new look, with not a hobgoblin or a boggart in sight. It might be a bit more fun it they had used javascript mouseovers to switch the icons to subtly different monster-ised versions, as the mouse cursor moved over them…

See also the JURN Directory, for my folklore ejournals links-list — currently standing at 140 titles.

What with all the fuss about the NSA and the Tor privacy system and the consequent influx of new users to the amazingly easy-to-use Tor bundle, it seem natural that a new Tor search-engine has just launched and is being covered by the likes of Venturebeat. The TorSearch engine claims to search the deep/dark Web (hidden pages that are only accessible to those running a Tor connection). TorSearch seems a little underpopulated. For example, it’s difficult to believe that only one site on the deep/dark Web offers to sell the drug Modafinil (the keyword I used as a safe test). That said, TorSearch’s one result (from the Netherlands) did actually look like it might be happy to take some shiny bitcoins from swivel-eyed Modafinil snorters. Which is more than can be said for what appears to be the incumbent Tor search engine called Torch. From Torch came three results for “Modafinil” dated from 2013 — two being anonymous drug-use diaries, and the other occurrence being in what seemed to be a sort of weird parody manifesto (from one of the old anarchist document libraries that seem to have pride of place on l33t hackawarez sitez). Judging from my brief visit to the deep Web search engines, I don’t think Google has any competition just yet — at least in a “students just wanna buy some modafinil for their exams” scenario.

BeeLine Reader is a simple extension for Web browsers, that uses colour gradients to guide your eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

It sits as an icon up on your Google Chrome toolbar, and clicking the icon gives you a clean Instapaper-like version of a long-form article or blog post, which is then overlaid with colour gradients along each line. The aim is to speed up speed-reading and skim-reading, while still enabling you to keep focus.