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April 2018

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I still have that line from Stewart Lee's piece yesterday echoing in my head: "The Hostile Environment, which sounds like an irradiated wasteland where teenage amazons get sent to die in The Hunger Games."

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When I entered the US today I got a big "X" on my automatic entry receipt and had to go for additional interrogation, err I mean questioning. Considered whether I should delete my anti-Trump tweets from earlier while queuing. Then thought: nah, I'd rather be sent home.

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Tl;dr: publishers have decided the only way they can stop SciHub is by making it much more painful to access subscription resources on campus? https://x.com/LibSkrat/status/990337354232545280

@LibSkrat wasn't sure whether that was a fair summary or not - but I haven't read anything about ra21 that has made me think "that sounds like a good idea"

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Hypothetically depending on whether my jet lag hits: Any NYC friends around and fancy an early evening drink?

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It's very early on a Saturday to be on a train, but have begun my trek to NYC to talk contemporary history of the book and publishing with a group of clever people...

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Re last RT: but then if systems of audit (with commensurate individual benefits for succeeding) didn't focus on prestige measures as proxies, academics would lose interest in them.

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This kind of thing is so stressful and ridiculous. Doesn't help with patient experience -- just creates anxiety -- and it's not exactly getting me seen more quickly. @uclh

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Urgh. @uclh bureaucracy is a killer. Was booked in for date when I am in the USA for work. I phone appointment line to change. Woman there can't change it because "I have to be seen within 13 weeks". But there are no appointments within 13 weeks. Has to go back to clinic.

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The scandal isn't just that a particular generation of "good immigrants" (Windrush) have been treated so appallingly, but that anyone should or could face such heartless behaviour from our terrible state.

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An amusing thing: electronic music artists who obsess about not having a laptop on stage but instead buy an independent sequencing unit to drive their rig that is basically a fully functional computer housed in a box to limit its functionality.

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(I should add that it was a very manually generated figure, not the result of any computational analysis)

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Today a non-specialist colleague pointed out to me a really basic error in a figure. I'd previously sent this document to five external specialist readers in the subject for comment and none had noticed it.

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On a train and tempted to scrap my actual destination in favour of "Jurassic Encounter Adventure Golf", which we've just passed.

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Rereading parts of Gravity's Rainbow this evening and struck by how sublime sentences leap out of the page at me. "She is prey to interior winds he never felt."

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Gotta say, if you're going to be delayed on a UK train, 31 minutes, as I was this AM, is just on the sweet spot for refund.

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Also just pressed "go" to initiate OLH consortium vote on journal admissions. New voting platform in use for the first time and pretty scared about it being used in the wild for the first time.

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EP delivered this evening, forthcoming on Logical Records in the very near future! Some cracking remixes on there from some talented people. Excited!

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Rewatching The Terminator. 'Selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"'. Just saying.

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Today I have just done 8+ hours of admin mercifully interspersed with Skype calls and oh the pain. Inbox still nowhere near tame :/

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Finally sat down with @clarehayesbrady's Wallace book this evening. Strong introduction and extremely persuasive thus far. Doesn't hurt either that the back cover of the paperback cites my PhD student reviewing it in my journal... (a v positive review!)

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Do any of my friends on here have recommendations for introductory reading re central auditory processing disorders and/or cochlear dysfunction? Would be most grateful also for RTs.

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Doctors' surgery playing classic 90s electrodance Rhythm of the Night in the waiting room. Good call.

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Hope the woman next to me on the train reading Machiavelli was studying history or politics but fear it might have been business management.

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Gearing up for another round of library votes on journal admissions at @openlibhums. We have four subscription journals up for OA flips in the very near future!

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Best acronym of the conference: the Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism or AC-DC.

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Thoughts on the UUK offer and why I voted yes

In the past few days I have spoken with many colleagues with differing views on the offer from UUK. Like many other colleagues, I have been on strike to halt the conversion of the defined benefit pension of the Universities Superannuation Scheme to a market-performance-based defined contribution…

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Struggling to leave this restaurant now as all the staff are having dinner together and I don't want to interrupt them.

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In Leuven and oddly melancholic this evening. Think this happens to me after every book manuscript is submitted - there's a frenzy then it goes quiet. Still, have a good conference this week to keep me busy.

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Pretty sure that some terrible person in the Eurostar waiting area has brought his acoustic guitar and is attempting Wonderwall.

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"Please be aware that after the UK's withdrawal from the EU, the rules of access to EU procurement procedures of economic operators [...] will apply [...]. In case such access is not provided by legal provisions in force, candidates or tenderers from the UK could be rejected."