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May 2018

Classic moment: large package in my pigeonhole. "Oh!", I think, "some kind soul has sent me a birthday present". Nope. Thesis I'm examining.

Today's 8am playbook from @ResearchRes (to which you should all subscribe) gives @mgmcquillan on the #UCU2018 fiasco: "For the outside world beyond the congress, the optics of this latest dispute are, to be frank, terrible."

BUT: all three readers very positive with just a few helpful remarks for minor revision. Also pleased since this is the book I wrote when recovering from my stroke. So it seems the little grey cells are not too battered. Hurrah!

Walking on air this morning as the third and final peer review on my book arrived from Stanford. This was the one I was most nervous about: the data report. It's so easy to make a trivial mistake when releasing quantitative data and it's very exposing.

Rather pleased with my efforts this evening - somewhat poor on the technique front but made it up my first 6a boulder problem since I restarted climbing a few weeks ago.

Am pleased to report that my new hearing aid seems to work well! (Albeit not really tested in a real-world environment yet...)

Did you know: that league table might do badly for institutions who provide degrees to mature students who are retired and therefore don't go on to have jobs? Makes you think.

I mean that league table does do some things well: it measures institutions with lots of money, who take in students who have done well at school, who take subjects that mean they get jobs immediately afterwards, who are taught mostly by men.

Hey, @GdnHigherEd: I've just seen that you've released your league tables and that 3 of your 9 measures are student evaluation of courses. Here are two studies showing that this is an invalid approach: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1304016 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02602938.2016.1261083

Further, @GdnHigherEd, here's a study showing that these type of metrics are heavily biased by gender: https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jeea/jvx057/4850534. "Women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues" - and you are perpetuating this system in your ranking.

You also, @GdnHigherEd, use "average entry tariff" as a measure of quality of institution. That is: you use a measure that works _against_ widening participation and _for_ elitism as a criterion of ranking universities. A totally anti-progressive measure.

Next, @GdnHigherEd, you use "career after 6 months", heavily biasing the dataset against younger, specialist, and AHSS-heavy institutions.

Finally, @GdnHigherEd, measuring "spend per student" entrenches existing systems of privilege. I mean, for heaven's sake, the front-page article _on the Guardian_ at the moment is "Oxford and Cambridge university colleges hold £21bn in riches".

here's another piece on the student evaluation side of things: https://www.aaup.org/article/student-evaluations-teaching-are-not-valid

Group playing music out loud on the train, of which I disapprove, but it's hard not to smile at Bad Boys followed by Rat In Mi Kitchen.

Past me was a scheduling sadist who put "do tax return" as a todo-list item on my birthday tomorrow. Nope, not standing for that.

Reworking a module on philosophies of technology our MA in Cultural and Critical Studies. Quite excited about the philosophies of mathematics week I've managed to weave in there...

On the train home having been awarded the KU Leuven Medal of Honor in the Humanities and Social Sciences!

It's OLH away week! I'm going to Belgium; @ajrbyers is in Minnesota; @ScrivenerSmith is in France; and @ernestopriego is in Ljubljana.

A good week ahead: giving evidence to the Wellcome Trust OA review tomorrow then off to Belgium to collect the KU Leuven Medal of Honor in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Laughing despairingly at tweet saying that "libraries make all books open access". Assumes everyone can access an academic library and that all libraries have all books. Seems to know and care very little about how people outside academia access academic work.

I think, by my count, 11 institutions joined OLH this week. Mostly due to the efforts of @ScrivenerSmith !

There's a thing going around that is something like "tweet something hard from your childhood that children now will never face" but all I feel like saying is "I never spent one day of my school life fearing I would be shot".

Today: 2 out of 3 peer reviews of my book are back and v. positive with some helpful suggestions for changes; PhD supervisions later; have to go back to hospital, though, as a kidney function test earlier this week didn't look good. #friday

On the plus side, new OLH members today and my university, Birkbeck, as brilliant as ever, are getting me the hearing aid device. A pain-free process that will greatly improve my life at work.

Gist of my rheumatology appointment today, where they treat my vasculitis: it seems likely I had another stroke last November which has caused my hearing loss. However, the MRI didn't show this at the time so not 100% sure. They can't guarantee it won't happen again. Me: "great".

In other news, my second bouldering session today was, I think, a success. Climbed a few 5s and a 5+, though I think the latter was under-graded. I will hurt tomorrow.

This eve I rewrote part of my book introduction to avoid that annoying "In chapter one, I..." stuff. It still needs work and I _do_ still need to give the reader the orientation, but I've been working through the idea that there are questions behind each section of the book.

Framing it as a series of logical questions and stating how I will address each issue seems a way of giving a sequence to the book without giving away the findings.

It's a difficult balance. Certainly, an academic book isn't something that should have a twist "gotcha" at the last minute, but it is galling giving it all away upfront, especially since I do have some "aha!" moments.

Anyway, if anyone else has tips on this and how you've handled it, I'd love to hear them.

Hearing therapy today was good. I have some initial exercises and have been recommended a type of technological hearing assistance unit. Have been in touch with HR at my university to discuss as I can't really afford it myself. A positive start.

On the train and putting the final touches to an edited collection a long time in the making. Such a painful process...

Tomorrow I begin my speech perception and reception hearing therapy. Apparently this is supposed to help you with strategies to discern speech and, if you're lucky, route around the neurological damage.

Ha! In response to that last tweet, a friend dug out this picture of me aged 18 putting previous climbing skills to good use...

Did it! Plucked up the courage to go to a climbing wall for the first time in a decade. By comparison to before I was ill, I am rubbish. But I've got some targets now grade wise and going to start this as a regular thing.

Another good thing about the REF that nobody mentions is that with all the internal readers, external readers, consultant readers, panel readers and so on, you probably quintuple the average readership figures of a humanities monograph.

Out this month on Logical Records, my first EP! Produced with a friend on guitars and with remixes from Javier Busto, Quantal, Los Fugazzi, and K-Effect.

So... If I want a new PC, should I be waiting for next gen chips with specter and meltdown protection built in, or is it likely to be a perpetual waiting game?

I have been dragged around many tedious shops in Canterbury today by my wife. Eventually I think she sussed that my patience was waning as she asked if I would like just to go sit quietly in the pub while she toured the remaining emporia. Now you're talking.

Wish more people knew about and could read @HE_Analyst's 8am Playbook today. @mgmcquillan utterly sharp on the unwelcome resurrection of the phony free speech debate.

Today is our departmental research away day, which I always really like (despite some pretty bad jetlag!)

If I'm getting a new motherboard and have around 15 USB devices that I want to connect, what's the best way to do this? Thunderbolt + hub off that?

I have travelled a long way from NYC today. And now there's a power failure on the final leg of my train journey. Painful.

Anyway, off now to the inaugural meeting of the Disability Staff Network group at Birkbeck. A positive development, I think.

I do often note that I continued working as a computer programmer in the background so that I would be OK if I didn't get an academic job. I really wasn't sure it would come off.

It's hard not to appear hypocritical in this situation. But there are many who worked as hard as I did but just had worse luck/less advantages in life etc. and didn't get the post they wanted. I guess I'll just keep warning but I haven't found the best way to broach this yet.

I must say, one of the hardest things I find to advise on are PhD inquiries with aspirations to work in academia. It isn't fair if I don't give an accurate picture of how tough it is to get an academic job. But, conversely, applicants say: "well you did it".

OK, woah, jetlag kicking in now. Just have to hope I don't say something totally nonsensical in Research Committee.

Had a great first day talking contemporary digital history of the book here in NYC. Second day and home tomorrow with a red-eye flight segue into committee meetings on Wednesday.