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September 2020

This sofa is being repaired tomorrow and Toby is going to be very unhappy at losing his favourite snooze spot for a day or few...

This morning I am writing about warez scene ‘announcements’ when there are legal busts and raids, the circulation of rumour at those points, and the reputational stakes that are at play in the (sometimes doxxing) NFO files.

Got a temporary and unexpected promotion to "acting HoD" this evening for 30 mins with some (un)muting problems at our online BA programme induction, but *I* got excited hearing about our programme from colleagues.

I'm interested in academic research on the "news cycle" after major events - i.e. how rumour fuels the initial reporting etc. Can anyone recommend some reading please?

This morning has been a return to meTypeset, the automated Word->JATS XML conversion utility that I started work on 8 years ago(!) A call with someone who may be able to work on the software followed by merging a pull request that improves anchor handling https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/meTypeset

There's a lot I'd change about the design of this if I did it again, but the basic approach that is needed is to create regression tests for loads of documents and then fix it iteratively against the existing test suite. I just don't have time to do this myself anymore.

It's been clear for weeks that we are entering a second wave of the virus, but there has been NO guidance for the clinically vulnerable. The last piece of government advice said we "are still at risk of severe illness if you catch Coronavirus".

Primary Immunodeficiencies UK advised that shielding should be withdrawn only "once we have effective medicines to treat or prevent more severe infection". We do not have these, but shielding was withdrawn anyway - with the loose caveat of "work from home if you can".

Now we have political arguments about whether a blanket shielding policy should or shouldn't be in place for those above a certain age. While this bickering continues, those with immunodeficiency or immunosuppression are being put at grave risk.

Without clear guidance, the economic threat to those with these conditions is also massive. They cannot get support at work, despite the risk to their lives. I am fortunate in having an enlightened employer, but this is far from the case everywhere.

In short, as usual, people with disabilities or impairments are kicked to the bottom of the pile by this government - and the many commentators and others who trot out barely soft eugenicist arguments assist them.

@DrFrancesRyan

The resolution to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Contagion, is that they turn the computer on and off again to fix it.

Of the meds I take, the most amazing is immunoglobulin. Since I started in Oct 2019, I've had 1 cold for a total of 3 days. Previously, I had terrible pneumonia every winter. This led to me having a stroke, sepsis, & needing antibiotics that caused permanent hearing damage.

Hard to describe how thankful I am for a treatment that stops this and boosts my immune system back to normal levels. It can't protect me against new infections, like Covid (yet), but I owe my life many times over to modern medicine.

Background reading for my Warez book today: Urbas, G., ‘Cross-National Investigation and Prosecution of Intellectual Property Crimes: The Example of “Operation Buccaneer”’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 46.4 (2006), 207–21 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-007-9060-x>, detailing Operation Buccaneer

I have, related to this, written up all that is known about the current SPARKS bust for the chapter on legal action

It's now just short of 7 months since we adopted Toby, the 15-year-old Jack Russell terrier. He arrived just before lockdown and has been a lovely addition to our family. I am going to write a few words in this thread on adopting older dogs.

Adopting an older dog was a great move. They are often left until last in the shelters and are very upset at the horrible change. It's heartbreaking. So if you can, please do consider this. They also can, often, be calmer than younger dogs.

At the same time, older dogs require a lot of patience to adjust to a new home. They do not know the new rules and are often frustrated at trying to communicate things that their previous owners would have understood.

Finally, it's really important that if you take on an older dog, you commit to him/her fully. The _worst_ thing (and this happened to Toby) is when an interim adopter takes them home and then BACK to the shelter, not being able to cope. Terrible for his confidence.

Which is also to note that Toby usually gets us up about once per night needing to go outside (as just one example of the challenges of older dogs who can't go that long) -- so it's a little like having a small child. But I still wouldn't change him for the world.

This is new guidance for schools on speakers. Looks an awful lot like a direct edict to "no platform" many critical standpoints - from the government that always bangs on about free speech. (Which is, quite obviously, just that they want to dictate which views may be aired.)

Spent the past few weeks working on Birkbeck's policy around dissertations and other independently selected research topics, which was finally circulated on Friday. This was a tricky project and I'd like to explain why and what we're doing to ensure continuity and fairness.

These modules have resource implications that we cannot predict. Students often use other libraries (Senate House, the British Library) over which we have no control. We have promised students that the whole of this year will be completable online so it's safe.

So the challenges are that 1. We do not know what resources may be required; 2. The external libraries (or even BBK's internal) may go into voluntary or compulsory lockdown; 3. Individual students may not be able or wish to travel to libraries;

4. Although we have massively expanded our ebook collection, with substantial investment, we cannot afford to replicate the collections of all these other libraries; 5. Requiring access to these libraries is not congruent with offering the whole year online.

To solve this, we are putting in place guidelines NOW for this. Primarily, this begins with a conversation with supervisors re resource availability with respect to topic selection and early planning re book access.

Second, we are about to open conversations with our external examiners about the ways that students can signal that resources were inaccessible to them for any reason. Third, this discussion with externals will include "no detriment" policies to ensure students are not penalised.

This is a topic that has huge import for me as it disproportionately affects students with disabilities or who are in the vulnerable category, so very pleased we have considered this early. I hope that sharing the outline of our policy may help those at other institutions.

Yes, I thought. It would be nice to record some music this weekend. Windows 10 then takes an hour to update and it has broken my thunderbolt audio interface. And people wonder why I use Ubuntu as my usual OS.

And now it's gone into some horrific broken bootloop. I give up.

As I look around & see catastrophe already at so many universities, Birkbeck's response to the pandemic - which has prioritised staff/student safety and preparedness for online learning so that we can run the year uninterrupted - reminds me of why it is such a good place to work.

Exciting. The contributor copies of Reassembling Scholarly Communications are going into the post. Book available for purchase -- or OA download -- in the very near future now.

FFS. Valance, it turns out, has £600k of shares in a COVID vaccine development company. This will undermine public trust in science no end. Are these people so, SO stupid that they can't see the damage they'll do?

A friend has just pointed out that the government support scheme sounds and is branded - with its horrible signature flourish - like a really shitty perfume. 'I'm wearing Winter Economy Plan No. 2, by Sunak'

Yesterday: EVERYONE MUST BE MORE CAREFUL BECAUSE A CAVALIER APPROACH IS LEADING TO THE SPREAD OF A LETHAL VIRUS THAT CAN ALSO LEAVE YOU PERMANENTLY IMPAIRED.

Today: WE MUST LEARN NOT TO FEAR THE LETHAL VIRUS THAT CAN ALSO LEAVE YOU PERMANENTLY IMPAIRED AND GET BACK TO NORMAL.

Afzal Khan: "What advice does the government intend to give to universities on keeping the wider community safe?"

Boris Johnson "[...] **Students should not be going home to infect their elder relatives**"

That's going to play out well.

On a cOAlition S Ambassadors' call today, hearing about the recently commissioned Diamond OA study. Results are preliminary but looking forward to hearing about this.

A BBC article asks: "Covid: Is it time we learnt to live with the virus?"

We are, of course, already "living with" the virus.

But what it really means is: "can we now let it kill everyone that it would without mitigation so that we can get back to how things used to be?"

As I remain in isolation on the advice of immunology, we have started a "post-Covid box". It's a box where you post bits of paper with things we want to do once it's safe to go out again. It's both sad - missing things that were once normal - but exciting that this day will come.

6.45am. 2/3rds of the household set off on a "dog" walk. The remaining third of the household returns to his basket having deemed it too early.

Spent ages trying to reconfigure my davmail setup as my university has relocated its mail to central Office365. Then realised that I actually now just have POP3 access and this isn't required anymore. Yay!

Well, my plan to get everything I have ever written for academic journals gold OA has been scuppered by Emerald's retrospective OA policy. It'll be a disappointing blotch on the record, but guess it serves me right for making the mistake of publishing with them. Green available.

With infection rates soaring, if the government cared about preventing loss of life it would reinstate shielding for at least the most clinically vulnerable & support them economically if they cannot work from home. It is murderous to force people without immune systems out now.

I don't think that full-blown hazchem protection gear for students is quite the marketing coup that the University of Birmingham Vice Chancelor thinks it is.

This AM I have been marking MA dissertations and am almost ready to record my next video lecture for this term's Reading the Contemporary MA course. Exciting stuff!

Looking forward to this one

No lovely pictures of the beach this morning as Toby decided that he didn't want to do a walk and refused, getting halfway there before turning back :/

My brother and his wife have been in total isolation for a fortnight so they can visit. We met our new niece and I grabbed my brother - the bassist for the thrash metal band Annihilator - to do me some funk... 😁

This afternoon I have been mostly working on a lecture for our Reading the Contemporary MA at @BirkbeckUoL @birkbeck_arts @birkbeck_ETC.

"Whale counting" for those in the know...

The advice for shielding students is appalling and NOT in line with official shielding advice.

Shielding advice remains:

* “minimize contact with others outside your household”
* “stay at home where possible”
* “you are still at risk of severe illness if you catch Coronavirus”

Those in the shielding category are, in typical contradictory fashion, advised that they “can go to work” but only “if you cannot work from home” and the above all applies. If at all possible, shielding students should also be allowed to study from home.

Our prime minister is the master of promising things he can't deliver. Like Brexit, moonshot testing schemes, marital fidelity.

This morning has been COPIM work and general admin. Now have an afternoon of the history of concrete poetry in Ph.D. thesis reading. Enjoyable variety!

Today is the ALPSP awards for which @openlibhums is nominated! Gearing up here. ACTIVATE PRESENTATION MODE.

my favourite part of this is that we seem to be the only non-business-to-business platform, so have nothing to sell :P

"To make this possible, I kindly request you to let us know your commercial expectations on the same for the complete acquisition of the "Open Library of Humanities"."

No thanks.

Suggestion to USS board: perhaps stop paying your members of staff £1m+ when you are totally mismanaging the fund to the extent that you have to propose that it requires 60% of members' salaries to run.

Following yesterday's stuff on MA Critical and Cultural Studies, today's work is preparing for MA teaching on Reading the Contemporary this autumn!

First time I've read something in WonkHE that I've thought was total and utter bollocks this morning. I'll leave the subtweet at that.

'Covid-19: re-opening universities is high risk' in the BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3365

"The first lesson is the importance of curbing community transmission before reopening. Community spread can be considered minimal if there is a seven day rolling average of fewer than four new cases per 100 000 population a day and the test positivity rate is under 5%."

The second lesson is the value of quarantining before or on arrival.

The third lesson: "Adopting symptom based covid-19 screening, as used by many universities, is not a robust prevention strategy. ... This recommendation is not evidence based. Model based evidence shows that preventing outbreaks requires high frequency screening of all students"

While our library support base is absolutely crucial, and I thank every single one of our library members, philanthropic funding from foundations for @openlibhums is extremely helpful in stabilising our operations, particularly during the turbulent times of COVID-19.

Very pleased to announce that the Dutch Research Council (NWO) has agreed to fund @openlibhums for three years! https://www.openlibhums.org/news/385/

cOAlition S has spoken often in recent days of the need for diverse revenue models to achieve OA across various disciplines. We are, therefore, grateful to NWO (as we are to The Wellcome Trust & the Austrian Science Fund FWF who have funded us for several years) for their support

I love the optimism of conference proposal forms that contain "Assuming that COVID-19 is largely under control by February 2021"...

Best spam email title of the day (genuinely): 'Did Homer’s 3000-year-old emotional linguistics in the "Iliad" lay the foundation for erroneous emotional comprehension, understanding, and beliefs in your education, literature, philosophy, law, and religion and in your psychology..

... of cognitive/emotional development, behavior, creativity, and decision-making abilities?'

I think the answer is probably "no"