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aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2017I recently received a long-awaited verdict on an official complaint I had filed: there was in fact nothing formally wrong with the decision by the Dept of Historical Studies in Gothenburg to hire Zeppo Begonia. Since the verdict didn't go my way, as planned I am now turning my back on academic archaeology. The reason is that qualifications don't count in Scandyland.
Being friends with people inside, and preferably being a local product, is what gets you academic jobs here. I need to cut my losses and move on. I would call this post a burning of bridges if there were any to burn, but there are…
aardvarchaeology | June 27, 2017Academic recruitment procedures in Sweden are a mess. There are at least four strong contradictory forces that impact them.
Meritocracy. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to find and employ the most qualified person on the job market, even if it's just for six months. This is after all the public sector.
Labour laws. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to give a steady job to anyone who has worked at your uni for a total of four semesters in the past five years, regardless of their qualifications.
Funding. As Head of Department you cannot give anyone a steady job unless…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2017After almost 14 mostly dismal years on the academic job market, I find it a consolation to read an opinion piece in Times Higher Education under the headline "Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy". In my experience this is also true for Denmark, Norway and Finland. In Norway, for instance, the referee board that evaluates job applications isn't external to the department: it is headed by a senior employee of the department itself. With predictable results.
At Scandinavian universities, people who didn't get their jobs in fair competition are often handing out jobs to their buddies without any…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 201714 months of no teaching gigs and several bad professional disappointments have brought me down a bit. So I checked my calendar for things to look forward to in the coming months.
April. War games exhibition at the Army Museum. Katana sword exhibition at the Royal Armoury. Fieldwork at a promising site in Östergötland.
May. LinCon gaming convention in Linköping. Kontur / SweCon scifi convention in Uppsala.
June. Mountain hiking in Abisko.
July. Summer.
August. WorldCon scifi convention in Helsinki. Castle conference in Koblenz.
Dear Reader, what are you looking forward to?
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2017Inspired by Karin Bojs's and Peter Sjölund's recent book Svenskarna och deras fäder, I've looked into my ancestry by means both genetic and genealogical. Here's a few highlights.
Like most Stockholmers, I'm of mixed rural Swedish stock. My great grandpa's generation contains 16 people born mainly in the 1880s. Only one of them was born in Stockholm. His parents were born in Värmland and Södermanland provinces. The other 15 were born all over rural southern Sweden: Bohuslän (two people), Småland (two people), Södermanland, Skåne and Närke. They went to Stockholm to find work, met and got…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2016Downtown Kavalla's mix of well-kept properties and hopeless ruins confuses me. I've seen similar in the Baltic States, but there it has to do with uncertainty about the ownership after the Soviet period, I've been told. That doesn't apply here. So I googled real estate agencies and went visiting on my lunch break.
The first clue was simply that I couldn't find most of the agencies at their stated addresses. One had closed down so recently that the sign was still there and the shop space hadn't found a new tenant. The real estate market here isn't exactly booming: demand is low. But eventually…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2016Cousin E pointed out something odd about the International Mathematical Olympiad. It's an annual competition for high school students. And girls do super poorly in it. We ran some stats on the data for 2015 and 2016, and found that a national team with more than one female member gets less than half the median points per capita of an all-male team. With one female member, it's 59-78%.
The question I want to address is not whether women are in empirical fact worse at maths than men. Nor do I, if this is the case, want to discuss whether it's because of nature or nurture. I want to understand…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2016I've been away from my various desks for almost two months while excavating and then enjoying some time off. Here's what's on my plate right now. Saddle. I mean my saddle, in which I'm back.
Landscape archaeology conference, three days in Uppsala. I'm giving a paper on my Bronze Age project.
European Association of Archaeologists, Annual Meeting, five days in Vilnius. I'm chairing a session on castle excavations and giving a paper on our fieldwork methods during the past three seasons.
Apply for grants. I've got 35 kilos of animal bones that need osteological attention. And I only have my…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2016 Why?
I wonder what motivates people to start companies that make or provide boring stuff. What causes a person to devote decades of their life to an organisation that manufactures soap or installs archive shelving? It doesn't surprise me that people take boring jobs: everybody needs a job and most jobs are boring. But what makes a person suddenly think "What I really want to do with my life is run a squeegee company"?
Maybe what they really think is "I want to make more money and avoid taking orders, and the only business I really know anything about is the squeegee business. I am resigned…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2016The Swedish Institute is, according to Wikipedia, a Government agency in Sweden with the responsibility to spread information about Sweden outside the country. One way the organisation does this is the Twitter account @sweden, which is handed over to a new Swede every week. This week it's me.
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2016One of the best pieces of economic advice I know is ”Don't throw good money after bad”. Or in other words, when you consider whether you should continue to invest in a project, don't let the sum you've already invested figure into your decision. To do so is known as the ”sunk cost fallacy”, and leads to ”escalation of commitment”. A good way to avoid this is to decide beforehand what your exit conditions will be, and then stick to them. A bit like saying “I'm going to play the slot machines until six o'clock or until I've lost $50, whatever comes first”.
Google Maps offers a beautiful real-…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2015A colleague of mine has left contract archaeology to work for the police as a civil utredare, that is, someone with a university degree who works on crime cases despite not being a policeperson. He told me a pretty neat story about Gubbligan, the Old Man's Gang.
The OMG were three professional bank robbers who never settled down. In the 00s they were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and still they kept committing armed robberies across southern Sweden. The police were onto them and had begun to tap the gang's cell phones. This way they learned that the OMG had an arms stash out in the woods, where…
aardvarchaeology | January 24, 2015After my first marriage I briefly dated a stoner girl. She was sweet and mild-mannered, her conversation laggy. There was a sleepy micro-pause before each of her replies. She'd spent four years on social security in a Copenhagen squat, smoking pot as a full-time occupation, before moving back to Stockholm and finding a job. Here's her festival pregnancy story, as I remember it.
"I met Robert from Ringkøbing at the Roskilde rock festival. We got along really well and ended up in my tent together. Weeks later I realised that I was pregnant. This turned out to be a pretty complicated thing. I…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2015Five years ago I blogged about a study by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, identifying the higher education degrees that were likely to give you the best chances of a Swedish job in the period 2010-2020. This was because I complain a lot here on the blog about how useless a degree in anything even remotely similar to archaeology is, and I wanted to say something positive for a change. The careers that looked promising in 2010 were in lower-paying positions in healthcare, education and tech.
Now the Swedish Public Employment Service has published a similar study of what…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2014Here's an interesting case regarding Muslim women's veils. They're instruments or symbols of patriarchal repression, right? Well, check this out.
Dania Mahmudi is from my area, Fisksätra. She's 14 years old and wears a veil. Mahmudi has been practising karate for years. Two weeks ago she went with her club to the district championship, eager to compete. But the umpire disqualified her – for her veil's sake. It covered her throat, and karate competition rules state that the umpire needs to be able to watch for damage to each contestant's throat. OK, said her coach after a heated argument, so…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2014 No chair could cast a shadow like this
Many graphic designers like to cut out objects from photographs and give them a digital drop shadow on the page. Here's an example of why this is often a bad idea. Since it's working with a 2D image, the drop shadow algorithm has to assume that the object has no depth or surface contour. In the example above, we have a 3D chair that's been given a shadow that would only be realistic if the object had been a 2D picture of a chair cut out of a piece of flat cardboard.
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2014A few months ago I registered on Elsevier's clunky old on-line manuscript submissions site and submitted a paper to Journal of Archaeological Science. It got turned down because the two peer reviewers disagreed on whether it should be accepted or not. No biggie: I resubmitted elsewhere. Today Elsevier Science & Technology Journals spammed the address I submitted from with an offer of language revision!
Need help getting published? Elsevier Language services can help you
Dear Dr. Martin Rundkvist,
Could expert language editing improve your chances of getting published?
• Language Editing…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2014 Part of my subscriptions list in Podkicker
I give these podcasts $5-8 monthly. Only the HPLLP has a pay wall.
The Drabblecast -- Norm Sherman produces strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners.
The Geologic Podcast -- George Hrab on skepticism, music and more.
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast -- Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey on pre-WW2 horror fiction.
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff -- Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws wax eloquent and eclectic on gaming, fiction, history, occultism, books, movies, and the list just goes on.
I've also been a paying member of the Planetary…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2013I love listening to podcasts during housework, commuting and travelling. I use the Podkicker app on my Android phone. Some of my current favourites are put out by the old media: NPR, CBC and BBC. But here are five faves without old-media ties.
The Drabblecast. ”Strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners”, with the inimitable master of the form, Norm Sherman.
Planetary Radio. All the weekly space news you need, and interviews with the scientists and engineers who make that news.
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. Role playing games, speculative fiction, history, spy thrillers,…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2013When I was a kid around 1980 me and my buddies used to play in small tracts of woodland around where we lived. There we sometimes found woods porn, Sw. skogsporr: damp and fragmented pornographic magazines. We learned quite a lot from them that stood us in good stead later in life.
Back then, before porn went digital, woods porn was ubiquitous. Woodland deposition in fact seems to have been a major culturally sanctioned way to get rid of unwanted porn. It's easy to imagine scenarios that would have given rise to the custom: you need to (use and?) get rid of something discreetly, you can't…