I’ve just been reading the EC’s tender document for their new open-access platform. Everyone thinks that it’s a shoo-in for F1000. But quite frankly, good luck to whoever gets it. Some comments: Just noting that the clear “Brexit advantage” is showing here. Thanks to my fellow country-people for this. OK, wait, what? This is a higher uptime requirement than achieved by Amazon.

A lot of the social media posts that I’ve seen recently about the UCU’s call for “Action Short of a Strike” (ASOS) are fixated on the idea that everyone’s contract stipulates that they will work from 9 in the morning until 5 (or 6) in the afternoon and that one should not work outside these hours. One should not send email, either, apparently outside these hours. For instance, UCU Kent Branch said: “ASOS needs to be effective.

I have a Keith McMillen K-Mix audio device that I use for music-making. I noticed, though, that if you have a simple stereo setup on this, with, say, monitors plugged into outputs 1 and 2 (the master outs) then you basically lose a huge amount of bass response on Linux. I confirmed this trying it on Windows and Linux and, in Linux, the bass is totally missing. In fact, the sound is weak.

One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research.

Thinking aloud. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is undoubtedly a good idea, in my view. The thrust of the declaration states that research should only be assessed at the unit level, rather than at the level of the journal/venue. Certainly, I wish DORA was better worded to include more strongly disciplines where the specific measure of Impact Factor isn’t used (though it disavows “journal-based metrics” more widely).

You might be familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke tucked this away in a footnote without explanation, but it fits in with the discussion of magic in Chapter III of James Frazer’s magnum opus The Golden Bough . These two works have shaped a lot of my thoughts about science, technology and the way we interact with our world.

My friend Josh was puzzled to see that the City of New York offers videos of some of its documents, translated from the original English into American Sign Language, on YouTube. I didn’t know of a good, short explainer online, and nobody responded when I asked for one on Twitter, so I figured I’d write one up. The short answer is that ASL and English are completely different language, and knowing one is not that much help learning the other.

Who do you think was responsible for the monumental failure of judgement that ended with Toby Young being appointed to a regulatory body for HE in the UK, the so-called but misnamed “Office for Students”? You’d think that it would be impossible that anybody actually ran a recruitment panel that would come to such a conclusion, but the Department for Education got back to me today on my Freedom of Information request to provide answers to my

Let’s assume that we have a Learned Society that fulfills the following conditions: The society wants to move to an OA model for the good of disciplinary dissemination. The society has an existing subscription base. The society can take a hit of 3% on its subscription revenue. The society can handle a 90% renewal rate alongside the 3% hit.

Since I first encountered The Parisian Stage , I’ve been impressed by the completeness of Beaumont Wicks’s life’s work: from 1950 through 1979 he compiled a list of every play performed in the theaters of Paris between 1800 and 1899. I’ve used it as the basis for my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, currently a one percent sample of the first volume (Wicks 1950), available in full text on GitHub.