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April 2019

Working at home today and it's not all bad. Plus, I've had the second day in a row of actually feeling a bit better. Perhaps turned the corner health wise. Please!

Ya know what's actually even better than getting good academic peer review feedback? Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston (electronic music legends "A Love from Outer Space") playing one of your songs at a massive rave night and then people saying it was amazing.

Now if I could be well enough to go to one that would be nice.

Currently at #5 in the Juno Download singles charts :)

Today I have begun compiling the final manuscript of our edited collection, synthesizing references into Zotero for absolute consistency across many, many chapters. That's the bad bit. The good bit is that I got to re-read @AileenFyfe, @JohnWillinsky, and @lawsonstu back-to-back.

I really hate doing book acknowledgements. You offend those you accidentally leave out, you can look sycophantic towards those you include, it's never comprehensive, it's always too much.

please keep liking this tweet. It's reminding me of people I need to thank.

Re last tweet - Trademarked isn't actually the right term there, I'm assuming...? Copyright on genetics is what they mean?

Just managed to help my brother remotely hack in a Thunderbolt driver onto an unsupported Windows 7 system, including manually installing ASIO driver registry entries and feeling like

I am contemplating selling my first edition paperback of Gravity's Rainbow as I have bought too many bits of music tech recently. Then feeling remorse at thinking about this. Certainly the most significant novel in my life. Perhaps I will not.

I'd love a first edition hardback, but these go for thousands and I really can't justify that. Had I infinite resources, though... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Thomas-Pynchon-Signed-Book-Rare-signed-first-edition-of-Gravity-s-Rainbow/302289039300

One of the things I find most amusing about the Roland VT-4 is that it has a slot for a standard stereo jack input mic and now I'm tempted to run my next conference call through vocoder robot mode.

Because I am in a fortunate and secure position, I probably overshare about my health in online spaces. But I like to imagine that it helps others when we make it acceptable to speak about our vulnerabilities. So I'm going to say what's been wrong with me for the last two months.

Basically, rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis, from which I suffer, are terrible diseases that do far more than affect your joints and arteries. They cause all sorts of ongoing damage to your internal organs. This is how I ended up having a stroke two years ago.

Indeed, I might inflict physical damage on the next person who flippantly and ignorantly tells me that "their knees sometimes hurt a bit too" when I say I have rheumatoid arthritis. Oh, do you have to take massive doses of injectable immunosuppression for that too, then?

In any case, the latest thing that this disease has done to me is to totally shut down my bowel. Utter bowel dysmotility making me extremely unwell. My gut just won't move. Terribly painful. Almost passed out yesterday. Unpleasant treatment regimes.

Recent tests also showed ulceration and inflammation throughout the intestines indicating that the autoimmune conditions ("arthritis" and "vasculitis") are rampantly attacking my bowels. To be frank, it's miserably painful.

So, I'm not on top form at the moment, but I hope we'll deal with it. Regrettably, I won't be making my US trip to MIT next week. Solidarity with all who suffer chronic or acute health problems. Life can be hard.

Also want to say that nobody is ever under any compulsion to share anything about their health, impairments, or disability in this space. It's a deeply personal thing. I share because I can from a secure position and want to talk about this stuff. Others may not.

Finally, also: sorry to any colleagues who have encountered me on a bad day and been grumped at or got the sharp end of my tongue in the last 6 months. Hardening against pain makes it more difficult to be gentle.

When I first heard of Extinction Rebellion I assumed they were in favour of human extinction as the best thing for the planet. Bit of a letdown after that.

Some of the best python errors today: "daemonic processes are not allowed to have children" and "can't pickle module objects"

The type of "running a charity" overhead that many people don't factor in when calculating running costs: for the annual return we have to break down our income by country of origin and type of entity (not-for-profit etc.) Incredibly laborious to look this up over 100s of members

The problem with the audio book of Frankenstein in Baghdad is that "Faraj the estate agent" becomes "Farage" to my ear. He's a pretty corrupt character.

The real question is: should "completing the annual workload monitoring form" go on the annual workload monitoring form?

How many reviewers are required to obtain reliable evaluations of NIH R01 grant proposals?

"We estimate that three reviewers yield a reliability .2, and 12 reviewers would be required to bring this reliability up to .5"

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/483zj

leaving as a note for self to read this later!

OK, so it took longer than I wanted, but I migrated eprintsToCV to use CSL. This essentially means that... drumroll... I can now instantly reformat my CV in whatever citation style I like. Moved it to MHRA for now https://eve.gd/c-v/Eve-CV.pdf [PDF]

it uses a hacky web call, _per item_, to citeproc-js-server. I would do this section by section, but the processor replaces author names with "---" and insists on its own ordering. I know I should use citations=1 but can't get this to work yet.

once I figure that out, it will be much faster (not that it's that slow at the moment, TBH). Code is all here: https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/eprintsToCV

Had I much more time, I'd write a blog post about the weird contradictions of still widely accepted poststructuralist notions of authorship, contrasting this to HSS responses to open licensing and ownership of work they write.

Does anyone have experience with DB-25 terminated multi-core audio cables? These things seem pretty hard to get hold of...

From the giddy heights of UKSG, I am now into a 24hr+ nil by mouth regime for an unpleasant hospital appointment tomorrow. What larks.

Just going to say... With the OLH model, we have no problem adapting to Plan S. We have no problem with unfunded researchers. #uksg19 #UKSG2019 #uksg

What was I doing 4 years ago to the day? Oh look, I was speaking at #uksg! I think this was the one where I'd landed back from a terrible red-eye flight from Portland, Oregon just 2 hours earlier. #uksg19 #uksg2019

Tomorrow at #uksg19 #uksg #uksg2019 I will be presenting in the closing plenary on "Plan S: Origins, Developments, Speed". Looking forward to it. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/27100/

so you'd better not all be too hungover from the disco and bar.

As 2 Unlimited so eloquently asked: y'all ready for this?

Mmm, today's exciting book deliveries at home include @kfitz's Generous Thinking and @timmaughan's Infinite Detail. But I am not back home until Friday. 😭

"Are we going to see ECRs holding back publications in Third REF with non-portability?" asks @cemathieson. I would say not as guidance will want to avoid such game playing. Think @stevenhill once said "publish when ready" as a goal of guidelines. #uksg19 #UKSG2019 #uksg

@cemathieson @stevenhill Sorry if misciting you there, Steven!

I think Plan S has twice been mentioned as being fast today already. But the Plan S timescale is only fast if you haven't done anything to adapt your publishing business model over almost two decades of talk about open access. #uksg #uksg19 #UKSG2019

It's all very well to say "don't buy an article/book if you can't buy it separately", ie non-bundled, but that's not how research works. These artefacts are unique. When a researcher needs article x or book y, there isn't a substitute good. #uksg #uksg19 #UKSG2019

A weird thing in the Obourne piece: "Most of my personal friends are Brexiteers. I think they are – with a few exceptions – decent, patriotic people." If those "few exceptions" are such non-decent people, why are they still your friends, mate?

Shocked to learn from the BBC that new measures to "regulate internet firms" may "also include regulation" 🤔

Today I make the long and winding train trek to Telford for UKSG 2019. Looking forward to the conference. Less so the Sunday trains...

Feedback on latest EP includes: "Ratholin' is gonna rattle bladders loose". I think this is meant to be good.

Reading Don Osborn's African Languages in a Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities for Indigenous Language Computing this morning. If anyone has other recommendations on good stuff re. colonial and Anglocentric bias in development of computational standards, I'd be grateful!

I also saw the Harrison and Anderson "Review of Proposal for Encoding Warang Chiti (Ho orthography) in Unicode", which warns of linguistic colonialism. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07137-warang-chiti-review.pdf

(And indeed, I'm particularly interested in colonial legacies and assumptions of Unicode.)

Sorry, I should say: I already know Fiormonte's piece, too. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/86

Tickets booked for UKSG. Hoping to catch up with many people - give me a shout if you are around and fancy a coffee/beer.