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July 2018

My lovely wife commissioned a drawing of two mice based on a photograph of us for our wedding anniversary. It's lovely. Look at the detail! The one on the left is even wearing my Doctor Who T-Shirt!

Neuro-otology was interesting, at least. Turns out I have two types of damage: one to the periphery nerve and one to the CNS.

Consultant said it's really difficult to guess precisely what happened but her best estimate is: antibiotics for pneumonia and sepsis were ototoxic and caused damage to nerves in ear. Then there was some kind of central nervous system event - a small stroke perhaps.

In any case, the problems do appear to be irreversible and permanent, although there could be some small improvement in speech perception over time.

Celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary today. I'll be spending most of the day in a neuro-otology clinic.

Orbital were great this evening and the most exciting part is that the new material - PHUK and The End is Nigh - were probably also the best! (Although Satan is always great.)

Almost killed a small child at the climbing wall who decided it was a good idea to walk directly beneath me when I was 9ft in the air on the roof section executing a crux move on a problem that I've failed several times before.

Given that no deal is better than a bad deal, but no deal involves hoarding food and medicines, I can only guess how bad the bad deal would have been.

Just realised I haven't properly been back to Birmingham for about a decade and a half. Last time I spent any time here was for three-quarters of a term of a poorly chosen business management degree that I started.

Thus far today has been a learning experience. I've learned that Birmingham is a lot further from where I live than I'd like.

I'm interested in doing some modelling of research monograph purchasing budgets at individual UK institutions vs BPC costs if we went OA. Happy to anonymize but could you let me know if you are willing and able to provide data?

I can tell you why Soundcloud is totally stuffed. Their recommendation engine thinks that promoting Mariah Carey tracks to me is the way to get me to subscribe, despite knowing exactly what I actually listen to on there.

"These amendments are hardly compatible with one another, let alone a coherent strategy for Brexit. [...] The behaviour of the UK parliament makes a no-deal Brexit a very plausible outcome." - @mgmcquillan pointing out how stuffed we are in this morning's research* playbook

Ah ha! And good. I found the Genette line I was looking for with respect to my inaugural lecture in September: "Jokes on the word text form a genre that seems to me indeed overworked”.

"At first glance this system is attractive (to those who are attracted by that kind of thing)" - classic Gérard Genette

This morning I genuinely thought: perhaps I should start stockpiling my drugs - the ones where I die if I stop taking them - in case of a no-deal Brexit. It would be totally ignominious to be killed by an internal spat in the Conservative Party.

Sigh. Estates did an electrical safety test on my portable hard drive used for backup at work, unplugging it and corrupting the filesystem. Journal irrecoverable so now have to re-copy 2tb of backup.

Taking over editorial duties from @the_blochian and awed at the number of people who generously give their labour to @openlibhums to make our not-for-profit OA publisher work. Reviewers, editors, authors. And of course Dr Edwards herself.

. @bootshelp bad experience at St Pancras store. I've several serious conditions, including stroke. Refused OTC painkillers without full med review despite hospital recommending them. This process penalises disabled & wastes our time. Next time I'll just lie to your operative.

It's my panel next at #WHN18 - Reading Matters, with my paper on digitally assisted close reading and natural language generation. Hope to see some of you there.

Seeing the brilliant Lola Young speak at #whn18. The sheer range of things she's done in her life is astounding.

Really enjoying @sadiseshiah's paper on ageing, societal perceptions thereof, and Caryl Churchill's /Escaped Alone/. #WHN18

Important news of the morning: "Boaty McBoatface is ready to take to the waters. Work has been completed on the RRS Sir David Attenborough, a polar research vessel, and it is set to launch from Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead on Saturday."

Another question prompted in me by this #WHN18 panel: is contemporary data gathering different in scale or in type from pre-digital contexts? I can quantify elements of the speaker's behaviour of which she is unaware. Is this different to implicit "sharing" online?

Rob Lederer here reading Jennifer Egan's database surveillance through Foucault. I'm a little surprised that it's not Deleuze... #WHN18

I'm in the shareveillance panel at #WHN18. My question so far is how the mechanics of sharing in the physical, rivalrous world map on to sharing of data, information, and other non-rivalrous "artefacts".

"Elon Musk has shown up with his mini-submarine and left it at the site, but the rescue chief has said it’s not of any use."

"Sir Vince Cable, the Lib Dem leader, congratulates May on killing off a UK-US free trade deal. He says that cannot take place now because the US would not accept EU rules on food." Errr, thanks, Vince, for angling for lower food standards?

Guardian headline reads "Brexit thrown into disarray", as if it was somehow just "thrown" into that state in the last fifteen minutes or something.

Ah good. I am glad that we can now practically see the hard Brexit psychopaths gearing up to take us over the cliff edge.

Realised today with newfound clarity that I really like writing books and really hate writing book proposals.

Imagining myself as some kind of Blofeld figure with my outdoor monitoring system in place. Then I remember it's for the guinea pigs and levels of seriousness drop.

One of the funniest things about next week's What Happens Now BACLS conference at Loughborough is that @sadiseshiah was central to setting this up at Lincoln. She seemed quite pleased not to have to run it again. Then she got a job at Loughborough. 😂

Rewatched Dark City for about the first time in a decade tonight. It's got great atmosphere but there's something somehow unfulfilling about the film as a whole. Why does Murdoch have his power, for instance? And why can't Richard O'Brien break into a camp dance number?

Unconscious bias training is really important but the videos in online training for it are dire. "We're looking for someone to play an unconsciously racist and sexist person on a hiring panel. Skills include very unsubtly repeating the phrase 'she'd fit in really well'".

also great that there are two characters, judged differently because one is dressed scruffily. The smart-dressed one is on £75k and the scruffy one on £275k. University lecturers are on ~£35k. Great sensitivity!

70 years to the day that the #NHS was founded and I am at the Royal Free Hospital for a nephrology appointment. The NHS has saved my life at least four times. It maintains my health in the face of difficult autoimmune conditions. And I have never paid for this except through tax.

1200m totally underwater swim, in a cave, with near zero visibility, with sections too narrow for a scuba tank, with strong currents, with a bunch of kids who have never swim before, let alone dived, let alone cave dived. Incredibly distressing.

Just think how much better England would do at football if the result wasn't just a crude metrification. I mean "number of goals scored" seems such a reductionist quantitative metric that doesn't really capture the essence of the performance. FIFA should sign DORA.

Hardest part of REF impact case studies is where to stop. We theorised an economic model (research), showed it worked (translational work), lots of people got positive economic impact from this, they did some good things with that (social impact), but what was the result of that?

it seems to me you can always ask: "and what did that do?" after every type of impact. "We cured a new type of cancer and people didn't die". "That's great, but what did that enable those people to go on to do?"

Health and safety training can be a bit of a joke. One of the multiple choice answers to the question "What should you do to avoid eye strain?" is "Do nothing, a bit of eye strain is inevitable". Seems reasonable.

Adam Tickell speaks of the "much missed David Willetts". That's the man who wrecked part-time higher education in the UK and put generations of students into debt.

The University of Sussex has a 123 word statement from the students union. It basically says: "don't verbally abuse people". I'm not sure how they could have read a 123 word statement over the course of 20 mins. 6 words per minute.

"At one institution when I turned up to speak to students they read the safe-space policy and it took 20 minutes" - this is the rubbish that our HE minister spouts. HE playbook contacted all the universities he spoke at, none of whom had a "safe space policy".

If any friends in the Oxford area fancy a pint, I'm in the King's Arms. But let me know if you're coming as I'll have to pop back to my hotel for 10 mins to get my hearing aids...

Heading off to the Jisc/CNI meeting today. Just discovered that delegate entry is £300, but they will not pay travel or accommodation for speakers. I want to say something about this as it's really not good and will undoubtedly decrease the diversity of the event.