Note: All photographs used in this post were taken by me, and I reserve all rights to them.

The Stress of Research: a Collaborative Pastiche that Resulted from a Twitter Thread that Got a Little Carried Away (To be sung to the tune of the Paul Simon song The Sound of Silence) This turned out to be one of my most productive exchanges on Twitter I have ever had.

The cornerstone of the British government’s immigration policy is what they term the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants, intended to make life so difficult for people without the appropriate leave to remain that they will either not enter the United Kingdom in the first place or, if they are already here, they will leave of their own volition1.

Earlier this week, I went down to London to attend the biannual Postcolonial Studies Association Convention, 2017.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are an annual highlight of my academic calendar.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced that they were partnering with the US National Alliance on Mental Illness to provide a new feature: whenever users would google ‘depression’ on a mobile device, the search engine will return right on top of the results page a link prompting users to take survey to see if they are depressed.

Acrostics seem to be quite the rage in America. There have been several high-profile resignations in response to Donald Trump’s utter moral bankruptcy in the wake of Charlottesville. The entirety of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned en masse two weeks ago with a resignation letter in which the first letter of each paragraph taken together spelled ‘Resist’. A week later, one of the State Department’s science envoys, Daniel Kammen, resigned with a letter that spelled out ‘Impeach’. This use of an acrostic to embedded an implied message within what is said on the surface is an example of what Linda Hutcheon describes as the rhetoric of irony: there is a tension between the said and the unsaid which, in almost dialectical terms, creates a third meaning that is simultaneously both and neither, taking up a powerful affective charge in the process (see Irony’s Edge). A literary-critical reading of this irony reveals the power and impact of this rhetorical gesture that the PCAH and Kammen made, while also cautioning us of the risk of this ironic mode of resistance.

A recent study in the journal EPJ Data Science used machine learning to try and predict the incidence of depression amongst users of the photo-sharing social media site Instagram by analysing at the pictures they posted. The authors, Andrew Reece and Christopher Danforth, developed a model that, they argued, managed to predict depression amongst a sample size with 70% accuracy, compared to only 42% by GPs. While promising on first glance, upon closer examination the success is quite modest. Moreover, I am wary of using social media to predict depression because of how it can make users more vulnerable to depression, loneliness or anxiety, and because of other pernicious implication of these results.

A Day in the (Academic) Life: a Pastiche Written whilst Waiting in Vain for a Parcel to be Delivered on Time

(To be sung to the tune of the Lennon/McCartney song A Day in the Life)

Note: This was written on 2 August 2017 and as a result the topical news events I describe are dated by more than half a month. Given how fast the news cycle is just now, it feels like it has been ages since these stories. A lot has happened since then, and although I could tweak the lyrics to reflect the fact that America may be on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, that 60 children died in a hospital in Gorakhpur because of a lack of Oxygen cylinders, the horror of the neo-Nazi rally at Charlottesville or the attack in Barcelona, I feel it would defeat the purpose of the song to write the lyrics literally from one day’s news. Not to mention, it would be painfully depressing to have to describe all these events again, and I would not be able to do so with adequate sensitivity and tact in what is meant to be a humorous pastiche. This would not be the right tone to address these events.

A story in the Independent from a few months ago reported a study by Lancaster University and Stockholm University that found, according to the headline on Lancaster’s web site, ‘Language shapes how the brain perceives time’. The underlying principle behind the study was Whorfian linguistic relativity, or the idea that one’s language shapes one’s experience of reality. This study stood out to me because Whorfianism and cognitive metaphors are the areas in linguistics I find particularly fascinating, and because it made an interesting claim about the way in which bilingual people experience time: as someone who speaks (albeit to extremely varying degrees of fluency) four, maybe five, or at a stretch six languages, I thought the claims it made posed some interesting questions about the way I think when exposed to different linguistic contexts.