I examined a Ph.D. thesis this week. I usually do about two or three of these a year. I was curious to work out how long it takes to undertake this task, so in my slightly obsessive fashion, I got cracking on the time tracking.
The [report on Learned Societies and Plan S](http://www.informationpower.co.uk/consultation/) commissioned by Wellcome, UKRI, and ALPSP has been released. In general, this is a very good document. Societies should read it and act. There is one amusing element to which I'd draw some attention, though.
On Mac OSX there is a really neat feature: the ability to create an "aggregate audio device" that chains multiple soundcards into a single virtual device. This essentially lets you expand your inputs and outputs indefinitely. You can do a similar thing with Jack on Linux and with ASIO4All on Windows, although with variable levels of success. My question is: where is the hardware device that will do this?
Today marks the 50th release on the [Tici Taci](https://musicbrainz.org/label/62db3e96-423a-4e9d-bf66-7a017f1dfc73) music label.
Those who are not invested in the digital humanities, on either side of an often nasty binary "for-or-against" style argument, may have missed the bust up in the past few days over Nan Z Da's "[The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies](https://doi.org/10.1086/702594)" in _Critical Inquiry_.
I've been having some serious problems running unoconv, the document conversion tool, on Ubuntu 18.04 using Libreoffice 6. This has been blocking the test suite (and basic functionality) in meTypeset from working. Today, [I found the answer](https://github.com/dagwieers/unoconv/issues/454) with the help of the maintainer! The basic gist is: 1. Uninstall the uno pip module everywhere. Use pip and pip3 to uninstall it. pip uninstall uno.
I have a new article out in _Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction_ on [how to read redaction in contemporary fiction](https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1568960). In this work, I produce an initial taxonomy of redactive functions and the contextual restrictions that are placed on the withheld content, following the work of Lisa Gitelman and others: as limited linguistic structures;
Today, Research England released its final guidance for REF2021 submissions in the UK. One of the worst parts of this was that they have changed the guidance so that universities can submit staff who have been made compulsorily redundant. That is, universities can make their staff compulsorily redundant and then submit their work to the REF. Why would Research England do this? That previous guidance sounded good.
The problem with non-lawyers, like me, speculating on legal matters is that there's a risk of scaremongering or just plain inaccuracy. Not that this really ever stops the practice -- and it won't here. In any case, I wanted to re-state [the question that I raised yesterday](/2019/01/23/additional-points-in-my-plan-s-response/) and that I'd like addressed about CC BY and defamatory attribution.
Further to my [other post earlier this week](https://eve.gd/2019/01/21/my-draft-plan-s-implementation-guidance-feedback/), I have added the additional points to my response letter to the Plan S implementation guidelines.
I write to provide feedback in an individual capacity on the Plan S implementation guidelines. I am extremely supportive of the cOAlition’s goals and Plan S in general. I disagree with those who say that the timeline is too short; many of these actors have not taken the opportunities over the last decade to experiment with open access or new business models and have only begun dialogue under the threat of immediate action.
