Tag: Internet Archives

  • Free Downloads of Carl Menger's On the Origins of Money

    The Mises Institute provides (totally legal) free downloads of digital copies of Carl Menger’s book On the Origins of Money here.

    Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian school of economics.

    About the book: 

    “Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide what the most marketable good is for use as a medium of exchange. “Man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy,” Menger wrote, and so it is with deciding what is to be traded as money.”

    About the Mises Institute: 

    “The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, we seek a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. We encourage critical historical research, and stand against political correctness. The Institute serves students, academics, business leaders, and anyone seeking better understanding of the Austrian school of economics and libertarian political theory.” 

    Find the download link of the book here.

  • Including the Global South in Science Writing in the West

    In this piece for The Open Notebook, which “is widely regarded as the leading online source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science,” freelance science and technology journalist Karen Emslie talks about coming to the realisation that the Global South is under-represented or often completely absent from science writing and reporting: 

    “As a Scottish journalist reporting predominantly for publications in the United States, I have spent most of my career writing in English and interviewing expert sources in Europe and the U.S. That has been the easy path for me and many others. After all, most leading scientific journals are published in English; many studies’ corresponding authors are in the U.S. or Europe. And it generally takes less time for me and other English speakers to connect with sources in these countries than in others where we might run up against language and cultural barriers.”

    As she points out, this is an important issue because its consequences “aren’t just about a loss of narrative detail—they risk misportraying what science is, and whom it is done by.” 

    Realising that she “wasn’t entirely sure where to start looking for geographically diverse scientists to talk to,” Emslie sets out to remedy the situation. To that end, she shares “a few tips to leverage some of the tools and strategies you probably already use in cultivating sources.” 

    Furthermore, she has compiled a nonexhaustive yet growing “sampling of directories and other resources that can help reporters find expert sources around the world, with a particular focus on regions of the Global South.” 

    Read the full article and access the directory here.

  • A Creative Commons Primer for Journalists

    Creative Commons, in partnership with Open Newswire, recently released this “practical primer on Creative Commons for journalism, and how to make the most of CC licenses.”

    According to the Open Newswire website:

    “Open Newswire is a consolidated feed of freely-republishable news articles written by professional journalists from around the world! Articles are written in over 90 languages and are available to be used under Creative Commons licenses or similar guidelines.”

    This guide is a useful tool because, as the Creative Commons post says, “some journalists may not be aware of the potential and ease of these tools.” Furthermore, the guide itself is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. 

    The complete “A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons” can be downloaded or read for free here.

  • What is Black Sociology?

    This post on the blackfeminisms.com blog is a useful short introduction to Black sociology.

    According to the author: 

    “Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses.”

    The post gives a quick outline of the historical evolution of Black sociology, along with some of the key figures associated with it.

    Read the full blog post here.

  • The Long Road to Peace in Colombia

    This piece in The New Humanitarian, “the trusted news source on humanitarian crises,” by Bogotá-based journalist Joshua Collins is a useful resource in understanding the durability and effectiveness of long-term peace efforts. The writer reports on the aftermath of the 2016 peace deal in Colombia: 

    “Despite a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ending more than a half-century of civil war in 2016, conflict has been surging since in many rural areas of the country. 

    New armed groups have moved into the vacuum left behind when FARC fighters laid down their weapons and are now vying for territorial control with other older criminal organisations, with the lucrative production and smuggling of cocaine continuing to drive the violence.” 

    Even though the government of Gustavo Petro, famously the first leftist President of Colombia, “announced ceasefires with four of the five largest armed groups in Colombia,” the problem is that “none of the groups signed official written agreements.”

    Civil society organisations were reportedly “cautiously supportive of the ceasefire strategy.” While the government had claimed that the ceasefires “will allow for much-needed assistance to reach civilians in conflict zones,” humanitarian organisations raised questions about “whether they will actually improve conditions on the ground for civilians.” What makes matters worse is that many of the affected regions “are also effectively stateless as they’ve been neglected for decades – across administrations – by the national government in Bogotá.” 

    The scale of the problem is sobering: 

    “The UN estimates that 7.7 million Colombians are in need of some type of immediate humanitarian assistance, including hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered due to rising levels of conflict in recent years, in particular displacement and confinement.”

     The issues raised in the article take on more significance in light of recent reports that “[t]he administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced it is suspending a ceasefire agreement with a rebel group accused of killing four Indigenous people in a recent attack.” 

    Read the full article in The New Humanitarian here.

  • An Index of Digital Archives of Radical Literature from Around the Globe

    Academic Evan Smith, who has “published widely on the topics of social movements, political extremism, national security, borders and free speech,” has put together a growing index of “radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised” on his WordPress blog. Most, if not all, of the included archives, are free to use, the blog claims.

    Browse this index of online collections and archives of radical literature from around the world here.

  • South Asia Open Archives Now Contain More Than 1 Million Pages

    As this piece in JSTOR Daily reports, the South Asia Open Archives “now offers more than one million pages of digitized primary source material.” 

    The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) website describes the archive as:

    “… a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia. The member-driven collection includes historical and contemporary sources from and about the region in arts, humanities, social sciences, history of science, and other fields in English and other South Asian languages.”

    As the JSTOR Daily article points out, the archive was “launched in 2019 by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)” and since then “[m]ore than two dozen institutions have contributed to this ever-growing archive.” 

    The Centerfor Research Libraries “is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries” based in Chicago, Illinois. 

    Read the JSTOR Daily report on SAOA here. Browse the open-access South Asia Open Archives here.

  • The Ranajit Guha Entry in The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism

    In the wake of the death of Subaltern Studies pioneer Ranajit Guha, scholar Alf Gunvald Nilsen has shared an open-access version of the entry he wrote on Guha for TheRoutledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism.

    Read the full entry here.

  • PBS and NPR Stop Using Twitter

    As widely reported, PBS and NPR have stopped using Twitter. 

    According to the National Public Radio or NPR website: “NPR is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public.”

    According to the Public Broadcasting Service or PBS website: “PBS is a membership organization that, in partnership with its member stations, serves the American public with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain and express a diversity of perspectives.”

    To access multi-media content put out by NPR, visit their website here. To take a look at PBS programming, visit their website here or their Youtube channel here.

  • A Resource for Social Theory from a Global Perspective

    globalsocialtheory.org is “an open, collaborative resource for all those interested in global social theory” (as described in their Twitter bio). 

    Their website describes them as: 

    “This site is intended as a free resource for students, teachers, academics, and others interested in social theory and wishing to understand it in global perspective. It emerges from a long-standing concern with the parochiality of standard perspectives on social theory and seeks to provide an introduction to a variety of theorists and theories from around the world.” 

    Furthermore: “All entries published by Global Social Theory are covered by a Creative Commons licence, allowing share alike for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to author and link to the Global Social Theory web-page for the entry.” 

    Visit their website here. Read a sample entry on Critical Race Theory here.

  • Countering Fake News and Ideological Bias in Reporting

    Ground News is an interesting effort to counter fake news and ideological bias in reporting. According to their website: 

    “Ground News is a News Aggregation platform that helps users expand their view of the news and easily compare how a story is being reported across the political spectrum. We identify all news articles written on a story and arrange the organizations reporting on the event into categories of political bias, geographic location, and chronology. News is aggregated from over 50,000 news sources, including many alternative, independent sources that aren’t confined to the mainstream news narrative. This puts our community in a position to choose and easily compare the news they want to read, not just have it pre-selected for them by algorithms designed to drive clicks.”

    Some features on both the website and app versions are behind a paywall, but either version can be used/downloaded for free. 

    Visit the Ground News website here.

  • Exxon's Climate Change Predictions and Climate Change Denial

    This piece by Grist is a useful short introduction to the oft-quoted fact that oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil historically funded some of the most accurate climate change predictions long before most of the world was talking about climate change. And yet, they went on to fund and spread climate change denial in the public domain for decades, knowing full well that said climate change denial was not backed even by their own research.

    Watch the video version of the piece on Youtube here. Access the video and transcript on the Grist website here.

  • Investigating the Intellectual Status Quo Without Conspiracy Theories

    The Institute of Art and Ideas or IAI is a platform that, according to their website, was “founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.”

    On an internet where traditional publishing standards and processes have broken down to a large degree, IAI is a rare platform that tries to push the boundaries of knowledge without passing off pseudoscience as scepticism or heterodox thinking. In their own words, “the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.”

    Read more about their vision here. Visit their website here. Subscribe to their video player here.

  • Claude Shannon and Information Theory

    In this tribute for Quanta Magazine, Stanford professor David Tse highlights the remarkable contributions of Claude Shannon.

    Summing up Shannon’s foundational contribution to information theory, Tse writes: “in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.” Shannon “applied a mathematical discipline called Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits.” This was such an important development that it “is now considered to have been the starting point of digital circuit design.”

    All our digital communication technologies can be traced back to Shannon’s work. For instance, consider:

    “Another unexpected conclusion stemming from Shannon’s theory is that whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it. So in a radio system, for example, even though both the initial sound and the electromagnetic signal sent over the air are analog wave forms, Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave. This surprising result is a cornerstone of the modern digital information age, where the bit reigns supreme as the universal currency of information.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Curating Math and Science Resources

    Abakcus.com is described as “the best curation site for only math and science. We do the hard job and curate the best articles, books, tools, products, videos, and projects.” Abakcus is a project by math blogger Ali who interestingly puts their vision as: 

    “We believe that learning new things is crucial for happiness. Since Abakcus is the collection of perfect sources about mathematics and science, I think we can make tons of people happy.” 

    Check out their website here.