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August 2020

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I'd never heard of Wardour Street English but wish I had. Would have been v useful in my recent work on historical fiction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardour_Street_English

I learned of this from a cryptic crossword clue. Worked out what it must be from the subsidiary indicator - an anagram - but had never heard the phrase.

Affected language's wording - the results are bizarre (7,6,7)

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Day brightened by the small girl with the puppy who shouted across the road at us: "what's your dog called? This is Bertie AND I LOVE HIM" (while hugging the pup)

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I'm just laughing at the fact that backbench Tories are *surprised* that Johnson's administration is doing terribly. I mean, it's not as though this wasn't entirely and utterly predictable when they put a "comedy", lazy, lying, oaf who cares for nothing but himself in charge.

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Argh. Garmin wouldn't sync and it said, an hour ago, that all services were fine. So erased all my activity data following their tech how-to only to find that it's their booming servers down again. Grrrr.

Fortunately, this wasn't lost 😁

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Writing about Scene communication channels and subcultural discourses today. My favourite article title on leetspeak is Perea et al., ‘R34D1NG W0RD5 W1TH NUMB3R5.’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34.1 (2008), 237–41

See also: Grainger, J., & Whitney, C. (2004). 'Does the huamn mind raed wrods as a wlohe?' Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 58–59

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Government advice that it's safe to return to offices reminds me of previous government advice: "It remains very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home... Will become infected". Wonder why people don't buy it...

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Lecture slides in-the-making for Autumn's MA in Critical and Cultural Studies at @BirkbeckUoL @birkbeck_arts

Mmmm

Stop. Captioning time.

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"Joe Biden is the Loch Ness Monster of the swamp" is the best mixed metaphor of the day. Joe Biden is a mythical, never-really sighted, monster of a lake, in the swamp.

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The Restart-19 project is billed, on the BBC website, as being a mass concert simulation, "with no safety measures in place", to test COVID infection. The official site for the project says FFP2 masks will be worn at all times. Frustrating sensationalism.

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So the latest fiasco is "schools in England will have to provide remote learning if closed again". And how many have been preparing for this in any extensive way given I haven't even seen this mentioned before now?

Just this AM there were accusations that there was no "Plan B"

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Spent the morning thus far working with @ScholTom on the @COPIMproject revenue models report, forthcoming in the not-too-distant future!

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Why interdisciplinarity still remains so very hard to do.

"Since the Sciences would be the main beneficiary, I cannot honestly say it is a project suitable for funding by the AHRC".

https://eve.gd/2020/08/21/rapid-response-grants-and-disciplinary-boundaries/

"Rather than thinking about solving problems, it encourages us to retreat into disciplinary silos, to protect our turf, and to continue to engage in a war of two cultures that is just inappropriate for contemporary research work."

I should stress, I'm not faulting the _reviewer_ here. I'm faulting the disciplinary structures that make us review in this way.

I wonder whether there is idealised type of interdisciplinarity that people purport to like but that the hybridity and messiness on the ground of interdisciplinarity in reality just rarely lives up to that aspiration.

Another point on this: it is interesting that this reviewer feels that the beneficiaries of AHSS work should be AHSS disciplines. Surely it's really good if other disciplines can benefit from the work we do - and how often can we say that?

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Rapid-response grants and disciplinary boundaries

There's an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing some of the frustrations that we had with a recent AHRC/UKRI grant proposal. Perhaps my favourite part of the whole thing is that when we applied, the letter from UKRI on the 24th April said "applications acknowledged within 48 hours and…

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"There is no reason that people can't go back to discos. We have not seen the virus spread in nightclubs in the past few months. People are usually catching it from other people in their homes, not in the discotheques."

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Lots of people seem to have no idea how bad A-Levels are. Markers are paid around £3.50 per script. And we want to base a system that determines people's entire futures on this?

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As though this year wasn't bad enough, next year's admissions are going to be SO messed up by all of this.

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So the new strategy for selective universities is: load up a couple of years of admissions in advance to provide guaranteed forward stability and let everyone else fight for the remaining students?

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Matt Hancock: abolishing Public Health England is the 'best thing to do right now'.

Also Matt Hancock during a house fire: abolishing the fire brigade is the 'best thing to do right now'.

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"Robert Halfon, the Conservative chair of the education select committee, said the prime minister must personally lead the back-to-school campaign in order to ensure confidence."

Oh yes, that will ensure confidence.

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I've almost recorded up to week 3 of my asynchronous lectures for the autumn. I don't usually do lectures at MA level but with digital delivery I find this gives me a nicer frame through which to structure the seminars.

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The BBC has a "write in" section and they ask "can universities cope with thousands of extra students?" They reply "they may well be able to manage". No mention of, you know, the global pandemic.

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"Ministers should seriously consider abolishing the beleaguered exams regulator Ofqual so ministers have direct accountability, the chair of a powerful committee of MPs has said."

I am sure that putting our *CHECKS NOTES* highly competent ministers directly in charge will help.

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I feel so safe knowing there is a National Institute for Health Protection run by an ultra-competent Conservative peer & wife of a Con MP who is responsible for our "world-beating" track-and-trace system. Really, honestly, my level of safety perception just increased noticeably.

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This morning I have been writing about scene courier magazines/charts and wkup rankings and formalised scorings that I found in the DeFacto2 archive. Democratic values often at play in this illicit subcultural ranking.

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As though today wasn't bad enough, I have been sent a fifteen-page tender document that includes the line "Is it your policy as an employer to comply with your statutory obligations under the Equality Act 2010?"

No, I thought we'd ignore our legal obligations. What the flying...

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University admissions about to go into total meltdown/chaos as gov. throws them under a bus https://x.com/RosieDBennett/status/1295336218255859713

w/out the dodgy smoothing of the algorithm, the whole hierarchy of university admissions falls apart. So will the gov. remove the cap and just let the rapacious "top" universities admit everyone to whom they offered, plunging other parts of the sector into insolvency?

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Went the furthest afield I've been in almost 6 months today. Only an 8 minute drive to take Toby for an evening walk but felt almost mind expanding from my otherwise very limited shielding existence.

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The good news that 2020 needed

Text reads: "Eat gummy bears for better recovery after a workout, says fitness expert"

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I've read lots of popular pieces on the appropriation of crusade imagery by contemporary far-right movements. Could anyone direct me to the best academic/research reading on this please?

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Today I've been writing a bit about the aesthetics of topsites and theming, including the way in which racist tropes manifest themselves throughout the DeFacto2 archive.

I've also been writing about the technicalities of SSL FTP traffic bouncers, the security tradeoffs inherent in their implementation, and the legalities when they are busted.

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Yes, it doesn't make any sense that the government announced the quarantine with a 48hr warning and people rushed back to "beat" the deadline -- as though the virus heeds manmade timetables.

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You can imagine Johnson's "gold command taskforce" setting up a little map with model tanks for each school and him shouting "pow pow!" as he moves them around the board.

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Remotely fixed my mother-in-law's wifi and it's hard to explain what an achievement this was given that the level of diagnostic feedback was "I pressed a button and this thing happened".

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Well look at that. Looks like Elsevier is buying up Google ads for searches for "Ubiquity Press Inc.", a born-open-access platform provider/competitor.

@rmounce 😂

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This morning's research work time (sadly ending and admin looming) has been covering the 1999 claim in Netmonkey XXXIX that glftpd was backdoored. A huge irony in this ultra-secure darknet continually using closed-source software.

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The kind of footnotes I get on this project, citing pseudonyms, still make me smile.

Rebel Chicken, ‘That Wasn’t You?’, Reality Check Network (RCN-20.txt), 20, 1996, DeFacto2

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There's only one book-length publication that comes close to my "Warez" project, which is Paul Craig's _Software Piracy Exposed_. Despite the duff design and corporate address - "4 free booklets" - it actually does a better job than many of getting into the high-level Scene.

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I do not think it suggests that at all. It actually suggests that Oxford is anticipating losing loads of overseas students and wants to plug its revenue hole.

Until Mr Fletcher has a clue about UK university finance, he should not be allowed to speculate on institutional motives on the BBC website.

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We at @openlibhums are doing the cOAlition S Diamond OA survey. We feel this is important, but the journal-level approach is painful. Our editors are all on holiday (or working on research/teaching prep) over the summer. Deadline is 25th Aug. This means we have to do it for them.

It's currently taking us an estimated 2 hours per journal to collate the information/liaise with journal editors etc. and put together a response. That's, then, a total of approx. 54 hours, or 7 days worth of work. 1/52 of someone's employed time over the whole year.

This is the kind of thing I mean when I (half) joke that we are going to need, at this rate, to employ someone to reply to consultations, to provide transparency reports etc.

It's a difficult balance to strike. Because we _want_ to be consulted/included (as I say, we think it's important), but my word is it labour intensive.

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Completed my first sweep of the 1,481 site NFOs in the http://shroo.ms collection. Fascinating to see the range of hardware, software, and affiliation networks that underwrite the topsite scene of the 1996-2000 period. Bonded T1 and T3 lines extremely common.

It's also fascinating seeing that the zipscripts reveal so many site details, including affils and location.

Later in this period (around 2000) it's not common for sites with high-quality affiliations (such as Razor 1911) to advertise hardware, software, location, or siteop details, but earlier, around 1996, this was still common. Compare: 1996 and 1998 on Syn City (SYN).

The trawl also revealed two additional Scene FTP daemons of which I was unaware and that aren't listed in Netmonkey XXXVI: granolaFTPD (on The Diamond Mine [TMD]) and dFTPD (on Delerium [DLM] -- 'a truly vicious daemon').

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1000+ cases per day for third time this week, broaching acceptable limit set by biosecurity centre in May.

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Some of the site NFOs I'm cataloguing have very poor anonymization principles. Let me think: on a site called VL ('Vampyre's Lair') what could 'VampXXX' possibly stand for?

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I have had the most depressing day. 1.5yrs after my latest health problem landed me in hospital I finally spoke with autonomics who suspect "autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy". This would explain most of my problems that make a lot of my daily life fairly miserable. But...

I am not able, safely, to have the tests that would confirm this or let us treat it. With 1,000+ cases in the UK per day and the knowledge that I will near certainly die if I contract the virus, I cannot see when I will be able to have this.

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Panopto amusing auto-caption fail of the day: "We suffer from a museum".

("Who suffer from amusia.")

Oh wot fun

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Many seem not to know that current advice to ex-shielders is “adopt strict social distancing”, “minimize contact with others outside your household”. “Remain cautious as you are still at risk of severe illness if you catch Coronavirus” and “stay at home where possible”.

Of course, this is then blown to shit by the final piece of advice: you “can go to work, if you cannot work from home”. FFS.

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Favourite line in an intellectual conversation yesterday: "if your philosophy means you cannot tell the difference between a fox and a badger then it has taken a very wrong turn".

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We're now twelve and a half WEEKS post-application to a rapid response call from the AHRC that promised a ten DAY turnaround and that required US to be ready to begin within four weeks. We cannot possibly plan on this basis given that we have to teach if we don't get the grant.

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Image caption: "A clown instructs children how to wear a face mask during a Covid-19 awareness session at a kindergarten in Gaza City."

This is definitely not the best way to encourage mask wearing...

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The pandemic requires a fundamental rethink of assessment in higher education. In particular, it is going to remain difficult for many students to access secondary reading material from academic libraries: institutions simply do not have digital copies of their physical resources

Even if a library service is operating, not all students will be able to avail themselves of it and it may be necessary to close these facilities again if there is an outbreak (or government-imposed lockdowns recur). Particularly vulnerable student groups will be worst affected.

In short: the criteria for independent secondary research may be seriously hindered for some or all students at various points. The demand for secondary research will need to be modified to accommodate these inequalities of access to physical resource.

I have heard of libraries being quoted ~£500,000 for e-book packages that would partially address off-site access. But this type of cash is not readily available to universities in order merely to put a sticking plaster on the system of research access.

There are also disciplinary challenges and the humanities will be the worst hit. Because disciplines that rely on monographs as the primary format will be significantly disadvantaged here, as we have hardly made the transition to e-books (let alone OA e-books).

In a sense, our media-form obsession with print -- for all its affordances -- could be the undoing of some disciplines' previously functional assessment paradigms.

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Done some writing work on the book under the current working title _Warez: The Economic Artforms and Illicit Crafts of the Topsite Scene, 1996-2000_. Currently building a pretty epic appendix of site details from the http://shroo.ms site.nfos collection.

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Research England circular: “Open Access is a key feature of REF2021. Research England should continue to support the implementation of full and immediate open access, in line with global efforts in this area.

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Acknowledging the implications for Learned Societies, you should develop mechanisms which will support them transition through implementation You should also continue open dialogue with publishers of all types, as you implement full and immediate open access.”

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Thanks to Ian Carter for drawing this to my attention https://re.ukri.org/documents/2020/ukri-delegation-and-allocation-letter-2020-21/

3/

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Today I will mostly be: recording a lecture; writing and preparing another; doing some COPIM work; checking in with the OLH team; and may fit in a little writing. Have a good Thursday, folks!

Ready to roll.

I am now being processed by panopto

Ok, so 20 min minilecture - all written in advance and slides pre-done - took me 1hr20 to record and fix the captions. Not too bad given that my travel time to give a lecture in person is 3hrs round-trip.

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I can't tell you how painful it was negotiating some of the image rights for that stained glass issue. "How many print copies?" "OK, how many digital copies?"

🤦‍♀️

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Today has been an email catch-up day; some calls with colleagues; wrote an exciting end-of-grant report for the Mellon Foundation; about to do a reference for an ex-student; would like to round it off with some writing.

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Government economy schemes are like "The scheme is valid Monday -> Wednesday when Mercury is in retrograde on alternate months in years that are even"

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Current evidence on school transmission is difficult to parse:

Young kids could spread COVID-19 as much as older children and adults, study suggests https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200730141324.htm

COVID-19 study in Australia confirms low transmission in educational settings https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200804100225.htm

When Covid Subsided, Israel Reopened Its Schools. It Didn’t Go Well. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-schools-reopen.html

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Today I have been researching the history of warez scene FTP daemons. The best documentation I've found on this so far is the Netmonkey Weekly Report, Issue XXXVI from February 22nd, 1999. Makes for a fun citation field.

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Because everyone knows that no mingling between households takes place in... Public Houses.

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A cabinet minister's wife tells us we should stop protecting people and just get on with dying from the virus.

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"The standardization of this format of presentation in both art and commerce has reached a level at which it is difficult to decide whether museums have become commercialized or shops have become musealized". Slowinska, Art/Commerce, p41

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Quite seriously, current UK policy is simultaneously: stopping the easing of lockdown; putting the North of England into a new lockdown; considering closing pubs again; sending the clinically vulnerable back to work