The decline and fall of a working classicist

Although the academy tends not to recognize it, scholars and students from working-class backgrounds are automatically at a disadvantage. To demonstrate both sides of the university experience, I provide here a detailed, personal account of my journey from undergraduate to postgraduate to post-Ph.D. researcher. I pay special attention to my chosen subject of classics and ancient history, an area of study with its own set of class-based problems – for while those from working-class backgrounds might be (and are) subject to classism in any discipline, the seemingly inherent elitism of the classics and ancient history field makes it doubly hard for the underprivileged to succeed. I begin by illustrating how ‘working-class knowledge’ of popular culture granted me access into an otherwise closed, exclusionary set of subject materials and go from here to detail how such work is undervalued by the field, before ending on the violent effects that the all-too-familiar casualized employment structure has on those would-be academics who lack access to family wealth, savings and freedom of opportunity/action. Ultimately, I try to show how that – no matter how hard you try – if you are from working-class background, you are highly unlikely to succeed in the modern-day academic system.

Challenges of Higher Educational Documentary Institutions in Supporting Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka Program

Independent Learning Independent Campus (MBKM) was launched by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Research and Technology to support the readiness of students to face challenges in the world of work by applying active learning. Documentary institutions in universities, namely libraries, archives, and museums, should become strategic partners in supporting the MBKM program because the documentary institution has all the necessary conditions, facilities, and infrastructure to succeed MBKM program. This study aimed to determine the readiness of documentary institutions in the university environment to exploit the opportunities and challenges and what obstacles they encountered. This study used the qualitative method and in-depth interviews for data collection and a literature study. The researcher concludes that the biggest challenges facing documentary institutions are regulation and the readiness of human resources. Due to this, changes to regulations and educational curricula and the introduction of new documentation of pure science are priorities in improving professional education providers in library science, archives, and museology.

IoT Notary : Attestable Sensor Data Capture in IoT Environments

Contemporary IoT environments, such as smart buildings, require end-users to trust data-capturing rules published by the systems. There are several reasons why such a trust is misplaced—IoT systems may violate the rules deliberately or IoT devices may transfer user data to a malicious third-party due to cyberattacks, leading to the loss of individuals’ privacy or service integrity. To address such concerns, we propose IoT Notary , a framework to ensure trust in IoT systems and applications. IoT Notary provides secure log sealing on live sensor data to produce a verifiable “proof-of-integrity,” based on which a verifier can attest that captured sensor data adhere to the published data-capturing rules. IoT Notary is an integral part of TIPPERS, a smart space system that has been deployed at the University of California, Irvine to provide various real-time location-based services on the campus. We present extensive experiments over real-time WiFi connectivity data to evaluate IoT Notary , and the results show that IoT Notary imposes nominal overheads. The secure logs only take 21% more storage, while users can verify their one day’s data in less than 2 s even using a resource-limited device.

Online Synchronous Teaching during a Pandemic

As the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) spread rapidly across the globe, most educational institutions tried to address major challenges of engaging students in a productive way and disseminating knowledge through online learning. Given this consideration, the present study qualitatively explores the observations and experiences of a private university and giant strides taken by the institution in adapting and delivering value to all the stakeholders through educational transformation during the pandemic. The data was collected using observations and in depth interviews. The findings of the study revealed that the university went through certain structural changes and modified teaching pedagogy for virtual delivery like providing support and training to the faculty before shifting completely to online mode and delivering the sessions online in both synchronous and asynchronous mode. The results of the study are likely to help transform and address the major challenges of engaging students in a productive way and disseminating knowledge through online learning during a pandemic.

Atlantis, an Autoanthropology

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

Glasgow climate pact: a step on the way towards a lower carbon dioxide world

Geoffrey Hammond at the University of Bath and Marcus Newborough of ITM Power review what happened at the UN climate change conference in Glasgow last year, and what the resulting ‘Glasgow climate pact’ means for global warming and climate change.