As the dust starts to settle on the Supreme Court verdict, it’s incredibly important that Nationalist and Unionist alike understand there remains a lawful, constitutional and democratic path to independence for those who wish to pursue it 1/ That path is persuasion. Everyone understands & agrees that the decision-maker is the Scottish people. So, if you want indy, persuade them! When it is clearly and constantly the settled will of the Scottish people to have either indyref2 or independence itself, they’ll have it 2/
Yesterday’s ruling did nothing to change that. Ever since Margaret Thatcher was PM the UK state has been perfectly clear that it will not seek to obstruct the settled will of the Scottish people. Opinion polling will tell us what the people want 3/
If polls show clear and constant majority support for indyref2 or for indy itself, so be it. Nicola Sturgeon said this herself—get to 60% support for 6, 9, or 12 months and that’s settled will—and in those circumstances the UK state will not block what Scotland wants 4/
In that sense, and contrary to what Ms Sturgeon is now saying, the UK is and always has been a voluntary union. More so than Canada (whose Provinces cannot unilaterally secede). Much more so than the US (whose States cannot secede at all) 5/
Those opposed to independence should campaign for Scots to agree with them, that our true priorities are health, economy, schools, and hospitals, leaving the Nationalists to fixate on indy. That’s politics. It’s lawful, constitutional and democratic. That’s as it should be. /End
So, governance by opinion poll, not by the results of democratic elections.
If England were governed by the same principle the Tories would have been out on their arses long ago.
If you get a majority in the parliament that can call a referendum, you can call a referendum.
They have that you turnip headed cretinous half witted moron.
They have less than 10% of seats in that parliament, which last I checked is some way short of a majority.
Well that is just daft. If everyone in Scotland voted SNP it still doesn't change that does it? You are setting an impossible ridiculous target unless you seriously think the SNP should stand and actually win English seats.
They could lobby for a UK-wide referendum on whether Scotland should remain part of the Union...
Possibly more winnable for them than one just in Scotland.
As the dust starts to settle on the Supreme Court verdict, it’s incredibly important that Nationalist and Unionist alike understand there remains a lawful, constitutional and democratic path to independence for those who wish to pursue it 1/ That path is persuasion. Everyone understands & agrees that the decision-maker is the Scottish people. So, if you want indy, persuade them! When it is clearly and constantly the settled will of the Scottish people to have either indyref2 or independence itself, they’ll have it 2/
Yesterday’s ruling did nothing to change that. Ever since Margaret Thatcher was PM the UK state has been perfectly clear that it will not seek to obstruct the settled will of the Scottish people. Opinion polling will tell us what the people want 3/
If polls show clear and constant majority support for indyref2 or for indy itself, so be it. Nicola Sturgeon said this herself—get to 60% support for 6, 9, or 12 months and that’s settled will—and in those circumstances the UK state will not block what Scotland wants 4/
In that sense, and contrary to what Ms Sturgeon is now saying, the UK is and always has been a voluntary union. More so than Canada (whose Provinces cannot unilaterally secede). Much more so than the US (whose States cannot secede at all) 5/
Those opposed to independence should campaign for Scots to agree with them, that our true priorities are health, economy, schools, and hospitals, leaving the Nationalists to fixate on indy. That’s politics. It’s lawful, constitutional and democratic. That’s as it should be. /End
So, governance by opinion poll, not by the results of democratic elections.
If England were governed by the same principle the Tories would have been out on their arses long ago.
If you get a majority in the parliament that can call a referendum, you can call a referendum.
They have that you turnip headed cretinous half witted moron.
They have less than 10% of seats in that parliament, which last I checked is some way short of a majority.
You are a real cretin and I will waste no more breath replying to such mince.
Somewhat joking, but perhaps Sturgeon should set up an English National Party - same politics as the SNP, supportive of ending the Union, and contest all the English seats. Then they could form a coalition to end the Union. I'd probably vote for it.
An interesting idea. We have had the pretence from the UKIPpers that they are interested in anything other than England. Now we have REFUK where I have no clue what reform they have in mind.
So yes, lets have a proper English National Party with a clear vision for an English parliament and England keeping its money and its resources. Its what quite a lot of people think, so I'm surprised that nobody has tried to scale such a movement.
Trouble is the very name is so bound up in racism - the EDP etc. I genuinely think SNP politics, aside of independence chime with a lot of people.
English Democrats have long campaigned for an English parliament
'Yer carnt even wear a hauberk and crusader's surcoat without bein' arrested nowadays!'
It's funny, but I do think that sounds like bullshit. Getting triggered by medieval armour? There's been more modern depredations, but armour wielding knights was a bloody long time ago.
Hmmh.
Turkey - not really Arab lands. Syria/Edessa - something of a case although I don’t think that was particularly long lived Egypt - the Egyptians wouldn’t consider themselves Arabs, although Saladin was based there (albeit he was Kurdish)
Perhaps they are suggesting that Israel is an “Arab land”…
"Arab lands" generally means "lands conquered and occupied by the Arabian Empire in the 7th and 8th centuries, so a) yes they do mean Israel, b) yes they also mean Egypt, and c) by the way, they also mean Spain.
Don't worry, it was the good kind of conquest, slaughter and occupation. Empires capturing territory via military force was totally fine until the British spoiled everything by getting really, really good at it.
Did they? Compared to Achaemenids, Alexander, Rome, Mongols, Mughals, Ottomans? Even against contemporaries, Spain and Portugal fucked up S America just as devastatingly as the Brits did India and parts of Africa.
So most voters don't want to be in the EU or the single market, even if a slightly closer trade and security partnership which Starmer would likely agree and Sunak might edge to
Strictly speaking, no.
It shows that, given lots of options, none of them is the first choice of a majority- which is a shame, because that would make life a lot easier.
What we really need is lots of realistic forced choices. So forget the unicorn option.
If it comes down to it, would you prefer:
Status quo or Rejoin?
Status quo or I can't believe it's not Norway?
Something like Norway or Rejoin?
I suspect the answer would be a tangled mess (A beats B, B beats C, C beats A) combined with lots of complaints that the UK voted for a unicorn so where's our bloody unicorn?
But it would be a useful handle on where we actually are.
Just told my wife that whilst our union was consensual, she does not have the power to leave as she is not oppressed (although I have restricted her freedom of movement and banned engagement with our neighbours). I’ve told her we can discuss this again in a generation ;-)
Just about the least impressive analogy available. In a world requiring stability within established structures new state formation within democracies should be:
possible difficult and demanding only available with very strong numbers to support it not allowed to crowd out everyday issues and dominate the agenda.
The SNP fails critically on the numbers issue.
In general I think a persistent success by a separatist party should give the basis for a referendum every 20 years or so, but if the result vary by region then the separatists shouldn't be allowed to claim the entire area merely because they claim a historical identity - rather, the Schleswig-Holstein approach should be taken so that only those parts who are pro-separatist should split off. Cf. Northern Ireland too.
That's a neat idea, but it has a rather interesting potential issue: enclaves. As an example: if the Borders of Scotland voted to remain in the UK whilst the rest of Scotland voted for independence, then the border could just be redrawn.
But what if Edinburgh/the Lothians voted to remain, along with Dundee?
"A different and closer relationship with the EU than today" - Couldn't the FT find a subeditor who could write British English?
What a stupid poll anyway! Choose among these six options regarding Britain's relationship with the EU, none of which mention freedom of movement.
A bigger story today is that net migration has risen to more than 500,000. And yet Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour party, is at 1.38 at Smarkets to be PM after the next GE. 10.38 would be closer to his actual value. I shudder to think how many supposedly politically clued-up bettors are throwing their money away in that market.
Because, just as NATO relies overwhelmingly on the USA, CSTO relies overwhelmingly on Russia - and right now, there’s almost nothing left of the Russian army, and seemingly little in the way of deployability left of its Air Force.
"This explains another seismic shift since the 1990s: the young have moved dramatically Left-wards, and more of them voted for Corbyn when he lost disastrously in 2019 than for Blair when he won triumphantly in 1997. Boris Johnson compensated for this by hoovering up the pensioner vote, hence the triple lock and other gerontocratic policies. This process has run its course: there are too many angry under-50s.
The shortage of houses, their ridiculously high price and the collapse in home ownership among 20 and 30-somethings is the main economic force pushing the young Left-wards. Owning property is the key gateway to conservatism. Our deranged planning system, and the Tories’ refusal to allocate a lot more land – not just brownfield, but also greenfield – to housing is a betrayal of our younger generation. It is one reason for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, itself another blow to conservatism."
The sad reality about this is the complete lack of joined-up thinking. So many people are against new homes being built because they are being thrown up in places where no new infrastructure is added - no new roads, shops, schools, doctors surgeries.
People are against these developments because they crowd everyone else. It is always someone else's fault that this happens - the developers, the councils, the government. Yet it keeps happening. There are few new town developments where infrastructure is added - the Hamptons in Peterborough being an example of one that has been thought through.
We can't just build more houses, we need to build all the things new houses need. And that means building houses on a plan not just crushed in. But the last big change to the law under the coalition gave open license to developers to build anywhere they liked. No wonder people are opposed.
How often does that happen?
In England, following national policy all this stuff is called "sustainability" - schools , Doctors, shops, public transport, parks, playgrounds and all the rest. It's in the National Planning Policy Framework, and when our Local Plan was done all of the sites that came forward were assessed and ranked by sustainability and approved on meeting the criteria and in descending order.
I observed all of that when I was promoting land for development not long ago.
Has it changed, or are other places in the UK different?
Despite everything the Ashfield Independents held their local seat with an increased majority.
Yep - got that one completely wrong - thought they would finish third - the "uproar" in Hucknall about Whyburn Farm housing had no effect much to my surprise
Either a damp squib or an important geopolitical moment.
I'd really like to see Kazahstan join the league of civilised nations after Ukraine wins this war.
(stops poking Topping, Dura_Ace and NickPalmer... )
I can't find it but there's a new advert on Kazah television for a chocolate bar. It features a Russian man desperately walking over the border when he gets to taste freedom.
I could go on… but you get the point. Every single personal Twitter account has been deleted from the official profiles of Scot Gov ministers.
Presumably because misinformation by tweet was out of control, and Scot Gov doesn’t want to be held accountable for it.….
Nicola Sturgeon’s personal Twitter account has never been listed on her Scot Gov profile page, because she has an official First Minister Twitter account: @ScotGovFM
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
Either a damp squib or an important geopolitical moment.
I'd really like to see Kazahstan join the league of civilised nations after Ukraine wins this war.
(stops poking Topping, Dura_Ace and NickPalmer... )
I can't find it but there's a new advert on Kazah television for a chocolate bar. It features a Russian man desperately walking over the border when he gets to taste freedom.
Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their "code is not satisfactory" following the recent code review.
(Portes generally seems to be of the sensible remainer type)
His headline writer doesn't know what "drama" means, though. None of this sh*t is fought on the truth. It's the frontpage headlines of the day that count.
Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their "code is not satisfactory" following the recent code review.
George Hotz is good, but he isn't 1000s of standard devs good.
Isn't Twitter supposed to have fallen over by now?
Point me to someone who has seriously said it would.
But the real question is advertisers: and the mood music is that many of them, and their agencies, are not happy. Neither are the banks who cannot sell their debt for 60% of the price they paid for it.
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
I can't follow your point. We're not part of a security pact with Armenia. Whether the world should help either of them is irrelevant to whether Russia has obligations or commitments, and if it met them.
Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their "code is not satisfactory" following the recent code review.
George Hotz is good, but he isn't 1000s of standard devs good.
Elon asked devs to show him their 10 best lines of code
Somebody said that's like asking a mechanic to show you their 10 best screws...
It’s a completely insane metric to measure the value of a software dev.
The most effective dev I know was effective because they churned out line after line of code that was good enough to do the job. None of it was “clever” & if you picked out any given 10 lines you’d look at them & go “so what?”.
Their effectiveness lay in their excellent system design skills & their ability to churn out consistent code that implemented that design over an entire codebase: You can’t see any of that by looking at the code on a line by line basis: on that basis, their code was mostly very boring.
My personal guess that this “metric” is really an excuse to arbitrarily fire more Twitter devs, with the cover of legality to make it that much more difficult for them to challenge you in court (“Look your honor, their code was terrible!”). If you suck up to the Musk or are politically connected to the new regime internally then you get to stick around: everyone else gets the boot.
Either a damp squib or an important geopolitical moment.
I'd really like to see Kazahstan join the league of civilised nations after Ukraine wins this war.
(stops poking Topping, Dura_Ace and NickPalmer... )
I can't find it but there's a new advert on Kazah television for a chocolate bar. It features a Russian man desperately walking over the border when he gets to taste freedom.
How do you know he's Russian? His pronunciation of "Что это?" sounds foreign. His vowels are too close to the front. (But I'm not a native speaker. If any are listening...) He looks more like a western "hippy doing Asia" type. What does his t-shirt say?
Individual bat viromes reveal the co-infection, spillover and emergence risk of potential zoonotic viruses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517609v1 Bats are reservoir hosts for many zoonotic viruses. Despite this, relatively little is known about the diversity and abundance of viruses within bats at the level of individual animals, and hence the frequency of virus co-infection and inter-species transmission. Using an unbiased meta-transcriptomics approach we characterised the mammalian associated viruses present in 149 individual bats sampled from Yunnan province, China. This revealed a high frequency of virus co-infection and species spillover among the animals studied, with 12 viruses shared among different bat species, which in turn facilitates virus recombination and reassortment. Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. Functional analysis predicts that this recombinant coronavirus can utilize the human ACE2 receptor such that it is likely to be of high zoonotic risk. Our study highlights the common occurrence of inter-species transmission and co-infection of bat viruses, as well as their implications for virus emergence.
Jing Wang, Yuanfei Pan, Li-fen Yang, Wei-hong Yang, Chu-ming Luo, Juan Wang, Guo-peng Kuang, Wei-chen Wu, Qin-yu Gou, Gen-yang Xin, Bo Li, Huan-le Luo, Yao-qing Chen, Yue-long Shu, Deyin Guo, Zi-hou Gao, Guodong Liang, Jun Li, Edward C Holmes, Yun Feng, Mang Shi
Can any pupil point to any possible national bias in this paper?
"Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. We transported these five viral species to our leaky, not fit for purpose, bioinsecure city centre laboratory for study and modification"
And btw
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].
Some online journals allow you to put your results up for others to scrutinise and criticise. At its best its a good way to communicate early data and hopefully get reasonable criticism, that may improve the final paper. However its not something I would do. Peer review means a minimum of two academics in a related field have considered the manuscript and made recommendations (accept, accept with minor changes, major revision, reject etc). It can be annoying - not all referees get the point of your paper, some raise spurious issues, some demand certain papers get cited (almost always their own). Often it can help improve a paper.
What peer review is not, as is sometimes believed, is another academic proving a paper is correct. Ultimately that is replication where other researchers repeat the experiments. For instance I may need to synthesize a chemical someone else had made - I will follow their method and hope it works (normally in chemistry it does). In some fields there is currently a huge replication problem - a high percentage of published work cannot be replicated by other groups. More common in biology, psychology etc.
Re replication, social science is one with massive problems.
We also don't publish pre-review.* It makes sense for some urgent stuff (e.g. Covid) but for other things it makes sense to go through peer review which catches at least some of the howlers before putting nonsense out there.
*Sometimes projects include a report which will get published and used pre-review. That's what the funders want sometimes.
Key points are: - pre-prints: anyone can publish any shit to a pre-print server - should be treated about as seriously as a blog/Twitter post, e.g. potentially quite seriously if you trust the source or the detail stands up to scrutiny, but with healthy scepticism otherwise, particularly if you lack the skill to evaluate it - peer-reviewed articles from reputable journals: most of the complete nonsense is hopefully filtered out, but the paper could still be nonsense; sometwo (or more) who theoretically know the field have said it's kind of ok
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their "code is not satisfactory" following the recent code review.
George Hotz is good, but he isn't 1000s of standard devs good.
Isn't Twitter supposed to have fallen over by now?
Point me to someone who has seriously said it would.
But the real question is advertisers: and the mood music is that many of them, and their agencies, are not happy. Neither are the banks who cannot sell their debt for 60% of the price they paid for it.
Do you think Twitter is in a healthy place?
It's not terminal, but loads of agencies and advertisers are basically taking a wait-and-see approach, and pulling their cash out.
Not a healthy place, and pre-Musk the ad interface was not great, but now there are no sales folk, account managers and so on. Like I say, not terminal but the signs aren't good for an ad-funded model.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
I can't follow your point. We're not part of a security pact with Armenia. Whether the world should help either of them is irrelevant to whether Russia has obligations or commitments, and if it met them.
We're not part of a security pact with Ukraine either, but we're helping massively because we disapprove of the war. It's a fair comment, though, that we are awfully selective about where we intervene when atrocities are committed - Yemen and DRC say "hi", in the former case because we suck up to Saudi Arabia, in the latter case perhaps because we're just not very interested in Africa.
The original point that the CTSO is collapsing may well be true, though.
Individual bat viromes reveal the co-infection, spillover and emergence risk of potential zoonotic viruses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517609v1 Bats are reservoir hosts for many zoonotic viruses. Despite this, relatively little is known about the diversity and abundance of viruses within bats at the level of individual animals, and hence the frequency of virus co-infection and inter-species transmission. Using an unbiased meta-transcriptomics approach we characterised the mammalian associated viruses present in 149 individual bats sampled from Yunnan province, China. This revealed a high frequency of virus co-infection and species spillover among the animals studied, with 12 viruses shared among different bat species, which in turn facilitates virus recombination and reassortment. Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. Functional analysis predicts that this recombinant coronavirus can utilize the human ACE2 receptor such that it is likely to be of high zoonotic risk. Our study highlights the common occurrence of inter-species transmission and co-infection of bat viruses, as well as their implications for virus emergence.
Jing Wang, Yuanfei Pan, Li-fen Yang, Wei-hong Yang, Chu-ming Luo, Juan Wang, Guo-peng Kuang, Wei-chen Wu, Qin-yu Gou, Gen-yang Xin, Bo Li, Huan-le Luo, Yao-qing Chen, Yue-long Shu, Deyin Guo, Zi-hou Gao, Guodong Liang, Jun Li, Edward C Holmes, Yun Feng, Mang Shi
Can any pupil point to any possible national bias in this paper?
"Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. We transported these five viral species to our leaky, not fit for purpose, bioinsecure city centre laboratory for study and modification"
And btw
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].
Some online journals allow you to put your results up for others to scrutinise and criticise. At its best its a good way to communicate early data and hopefully get reasonable criticism, that may improve the final paper. However its not something I would do. Peer review means a minimum of two academics in a related field have considered the manuscript and made recommendations (accept, accept with minor changes, major revision, reject etc). It can be annoying - not all referees get the point of your paper, some raise spurious issues, some demand certain papers get cited (almost always their own). Often it can help improve a paper.
What peer review is not, as is sometimes believed, is another academic proving a paper is correct. Ultimately that is replication where other researchers repeat the experiments. For instance I may need to synthesize a chemical someone else had made - I will follow their method and hope it works (normally in chemistry it does). In some fields there is currently a huge replication problem - a high percentage of published work cannot be replicated by other groups. More common in biology, psychology etc.
Thank you!
Again, the "[what does this mean?]" was carelessly copy n pasted from the original, where it is a link to an explainer (less lucid than yours!)
Individual bat viromes reveal the co-infection, spillover and emergence risk of potential zoonotic viruses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517609v1 Bats are reservoir hosts for many zoonotic viruses. Despite this, relatively little is known about the diversity and abundance of viruses within bats at the level of individual animals, and hence the frequency of virus co-infection and inter-species transmission. Using an unbiased meta-transcriptomics approach we characterised the mammalian associated viruses present in 149 individual bats sampled from Yunnan province, China. This revealed a high frequency of virus co-infection and species spillover among the animals studied, with 12 viruses shared among different bat species, which in turn facilitates virus recombination and reassortment. Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. Functional analysis predicts that this recombinant coronavirus can utilize the human ACE2 receptor such that it is likely to be of high zoonotic risk. Our study highlights the common occurrence of inter-species transmission and co-infection of bat viruses, as well as their implications for virus emergence.
Jing Wang, Yuanfei Pan, Li-fen Yang, Wei-hong Yang, Chu-ming Luo, Juan Wang, Guo-peng Kuang, Wei-chen Wu, Qin-yu Gou, Gen-yang Xin, Bo Li, Huan-le Luo, Yao-qing Chen, Yue-long Shu, Deyin Guo, Zi-hou Gao, Guodong Liang, Jun Li, Edward C Holmes, Yun Feng, Mang Shi
Can any pupil point to any possible national bias in this paper?
"Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. We transported these five viral species to our leaky, not fit for purpose, bioinsecure city centre laboratory for study and modification"
And btw
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].
Some online journals allow you to put your results up for others to scrutinise and criticise. At its best its a good way to communicate early data and hopefully get reasonable criticism, that may improve the final paper. However its not something I would do. Peer review means a minimum of two academics in a related field have considered the manuscript and made recommendations (accept, accept with minor changes, major revision, reject etc). It can be annoying - not all referees get the point of your paper, some raise spurious issues, some demand certain papers get cited (almost always their own). Often it can help improve a paper.
What peer review is not, as is sometimes believed, is another academic proving a paper is correct. Ultimately that is replication where other researchers repeat the experiments. For instance I may need to synthesize a chemical someone else had made - I will follow their method and hope it works (normally in chemistry it does). In some fields there is currently a huge replication problem - a high percentage of published work cannot be replicated by other groups. More common in biology, psychology etc.
Re replication, social science is one with massive problems.
We also don't publish pre-review.* It makes sense for some urgent stuff (e.g. Covid) but for other things it makes sense to go through peer review which catches at least some of the howlers before putting nonsense out there.
*Sometimes projects include a report which will get published and used pre-review. That's what the funders want sometimes.
Key points are: - pre-prints: anyone can publish any shit to a pre-print server - should be treated about as seriously as a blog/Twitter post, e.g. potentially quite seriously if you trust the source or the detail stands up to scrutiny, but with healthy scepticism otherwise, particularly if you lack the skill to evaluate it - peer-reviewed articles from reputable journals: most of the complete nonsense is hopefully filtered out, but the paper could still be nonsense; sometwo (or more) who theoretically know the field have said it's kind of ok
Some interesting points here.
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/09/trust-in-peer-review-the-role-and-reputation-of-preprints/ ...We regularly post all of our submission-ready work on bioRxiv. Some people tend to do this only when they have confirmation of acceptance at a peer-reviewed journal, but I find this misses the point about preprints. We find it helpful to share our work as soon as it's ready to submit, often even before we've decided where to submit. It shows the community what we are actively working on, and it's great to gauge interest at that stage. Preprints shared on Twitter have ignited useful discussions, and even collaborations later on, and they are also a very good way for students and postdocs to show tangible evidence of their work when applying for funding or other positions. In other situations, a well-timed preprint put out by others has been helpful in suggesting to us that spending the next 2 years working on something that the preprint has already covered, may be a waste of our time. Even though preprints are not peer-reviewed, I tend to trust them because a) reputations rely on them advertising good quality work (no-one wants to share something before it's at least ready to be seen by reviewers) and b) even if some of the details will change under the scrutiny of peer review, the overall question and approach (and major result) is unlikely to change, and this is often the most useful information from preprints...
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
(Portes generally seems to be of the sensible remainer type)
Today’s immigration figures a complete non story once you subtract the number of students. Students shouldn’t even be in the figures arguably, as it makes the figures so misleading?
What should be a bigger story is how incompetent Leaky Sue was yesterday at the committee. How does she have any supporters of her competence, it was painful and embarrassing to watch.
I've got the day off today (after working ten hours on my other 'day off' yesterday), so didn't have to decide to strike or not, but I'm going in tomorrow
I thought I'd joined the union, but had made a mistake applying online (when drunk) and haven't yet corrected it
I feel like I should join the CWU, and strike with my comrades, but I'm rather enjoying all the overtime I'm getting from being willing to work strike days (which are easy - just parcels) and any of my days off
Luckily, I can get into work without having to physically cross the actual picket line. I don't think I'd get any stick since I'm still in my probationary period, even though my manager has said I don't have to go in
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
I agree with much of that - Armenia is a country that has been dumped on much in the past, especially by Turkey (e.g. the Armenian genocide a century ago). Note I'm willing to publicly call it a 'genocide' - something that might get me in trouble in a certain country.
I called it a 'spat' because it was limited, and has (for the moment) ended.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Especially given that 2026 = never, for practical purposes.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Not just at Westminster. As I undersdtand it (and certainly from past experience), UKG wants to retain repatriapted powers even when such retentions are clear breaches of the legislation for the devolution settlements.
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
"This explains another seismic shift since the 1990s: the young have moved dramatically Left-wards, and more of them voted for Corbyn when he lost disastrously in 2019 than for Blair when he won triumphantly in 1997. Boris Johnson compensated for this by hoovering up the pensioner vote, hence the triple lock and other gerontocratic policies. This process has run its course: there are too many angry under-50s.
The shortage of houses, their ridiculously high price and the collapse in home ownership among 20 and 30-somethings is the main economic force pushing the young Left-wards. Owning property is the key gateway to conservatism. Our deranged planning system, and the Tories’ refusal to allocate a lot more land – not just brownfield, but also greenfield – to housing is a betrayal of our younger generation. It is one reason for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, itself another blow to conservatism."
The sad reality about this is the complete lack of joined-up thinking. So many people are against new homes being built because they are being thrown up in places where no new infrastructure is added - no new roads, shops, schools, doctors surgeries.
People are against these developments because they crowd everyone else. It is always someone else's fault that this happens - the developers, the councils, the government. Yet it keeps happening. There are few new town developments where infrastructure is added - the Hamptons in Peterborough being an example of one that has been thought through.
We can't just build more houses, we need to build all the things new houses need. And that means building houses on a plan not just crushed in. But the last big change to the law under the coalition gave open license to developers to build anywhere they liked. No wonder people are opposed.
There's always opposition to newbuild, whipped up for political reasons. The current controversy in my patch is about building some homes on a car park, within walking distance of the town centre and of an agreeable riverside area - you can't get more brownfield than that, and the homes will be ideally connected and will reinforce the local shops. The parking capacity will be maintained entirely, by a new multi-storey carpark. Yet large numbers of people have signed a petition organised by the Conservatives to "save our car park", mostly since they aren't following the details and think parking space will be reduced.
Once referenda on new planning proposals are introduced by the Government, we can expect this sort of thing all the time.
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Ha! You mea what would any decent government be doing right now! Thatcher and Hestletine would have intervened already!
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Ha! You mea what would any decent government be doing right now! Thatcher and Hestletine would have intervened already!
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
Why are you even arguing. It’s a no brainier.
If it’s a “no brainer” what’s the answer to the question?
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
Not helped by the fact that much of this research is locked away behind very expensive firewalls.
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Ha! You mea what would any decent government be doing right now! Thatcher and Hestletine would have intervened already!
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
Why are you even arguing. It’s a no brainier.
If it’s a “no brainer” what’s the answer to the question?
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
I’m nothing to do with Labour, ask them!
Looking at the market interventions going on with households and business already, why hasn’t it already been extended to help with this crisis in a similar way. Existential threat to a British industry and our most poorest going without milk and eggs. No brainier, intervene now!
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Ha! You mea what would any decent government be doing right now! Thatcher and Hestletine would have intervened already!
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
Why are you even arguing. It’s a no brainier.
What do you want, price controls on eggs and milk?
Honestly some people seem to advocate turning this country into some nouveau USSR with high house prices these days....
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
I can't follow your point. We're not part of a security pact with Armenia. Whether the world should help either of them is irrelevant to whether Russia has obligations or commitments, and if it met them.
We're not part of a security pact with Ukraine either, but we're helping massively because we disapprove of the war. It's a fair comment, though, that we are awfully selective about where we intervene when atrocities are committed - Yemen and DRC say "hi", in the former case because we suck up to Saudi Arabia, in the latter case perhaps because we're just not very interested in Africa.
The original point that the CTSO is collapsing may well be true, though.
The difference in Ukraine is that Russia is directly threatening other European countries. Putin - the leader of a country that has directly murdered millions of people in the last century - has made it quite clear he sees a Greater Russia that creates Russian 'security' as far as the German border.
Yes, there are many conflicts around the world that we should perhaps get more involved in (or less...). But in the case of Ukraine, it is a direct threat to Europe.
If we don't stop him now, when do we stop him?
Where's your red line, Nick? Lithuania? Poland? Germany?
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Especially given that 2026 = never, for practical purposes.
Civil service media complex, having seen off one elected PM and one unelected one, now seem intent on kicking all decisions post 2025.
To govern is to choose. The choice shouldn't be delay. Rishi is weak, weak, weak.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
There is this persistent notion of Britain as the Incredible Hulk - a nation of huge strength and limitless potential, tied down by pettyfogging rules and busybody bureaucrats, ready to burst free and bestride the globe again, bestride it in a way that only Britain can, the moment those annoyances are removed. It's a seductive vision but imo wide of the mark.
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
Not helped by the fact that much of this research is locked away behind very expensive firewalls.
That's another but overlapping issue - for the published papers mainly I believe (and their immediate preprints post refereeing). For those not familiar with the situation, for many journals you need to pay maybe 1-2K per paper, or to be affiliated to an institution which pays the publishers large annual lump sums, to be allowed to post your own paper openly either on the journal site or on the institution's servers or indeed anywhere on the net, so anyone can get at it without further payment.
It's becoming a core element of academic research budgeting, bevcause HMG is demanding tht research be openly published (which is not a bad thing in itself at all, but acts as another score metric in the research assessment steeplechase). But it makes life much trickier for anyone not in a university or similar institution, whether as author or reader.
You're generally not allowed to post your own paper just like that, except possibly as an earlier draft typescript if the publisher allows. Unless you publish with a journal which is more relaxed - e.g. some societies (which make access fully open 2-3 yeats after publication, to protect their membership revenues, whuich is fair enough). Though most seem to have handed over to the commercial firms.
Individual bat viromes reveal the co-infection, spillover and emergence risk of potential zoonotic viruses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517609v1 Bats are reservoir hosts for many zoonotic viruses. Despite this, relatively little is known about the diversity and abundance of viruses within bats at the level of individual animals, and hence the frequency of virus co-infection and inter-species transmission. Using an unbiased meta-transcriptomics approach we characterised the mammalian associated viruses present in 149 individual bats sampled from Yunnan province, China. This revealed a high frequency of virus co-infection and species spillover among the animals studied, with 12 viruses shared among different bat species, which in turn facilitates virus recombination and reassortment. Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. Functional analysis predicts that this recombinant coronavirus can utilize the human ACE2 receptor such that it is likely to be of high zoonotic risk. Our study highlights the common occurrence of inter-species transmission and co-infection of bat viruses, as well as their implications for virus emergence.
Jing Wang, Yuanfei Pan, Li-fen Yang, Wei-hong Yang, Chu-ming Luo, Juan Wang, Guo-peng Kuang, Wei-chen Wu, Qin-yu Gou, Gen-yang Xin, Bo Li, Huan-le Luo, Yao-qing Chen, Yue-long Shu, Deyin Guo, Zi-hou Gao, Guodong Liang, Jun Li, Edward C Holmes, Yun Feng, Mang Shi
Can any pupil point to any possible national bias in this paper?
"Of note, we identified five viral species that are likely to be pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that is closely related to both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, with only five amino acid differences between its receptor-binding domain sequence and that of the earliest sequences of SARS-CoV-2. We transported these five viral species to our leaky, not fit for purpose, bioinsecure city centre laboratory for study and modification"
And btw
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].
Some online journals allow you to put your results up for others to scrutinise and criticise. At its best its a good way to communicate early data and hopefully get reasonable criticism, that may improve the final paper. However its not something I would do. Peer review means a minimum of two academics in a related field have considered the manuscript and made recommendations (accept, accept with minor changes, major revision, reject etc). It can be annoying - not all referees get the point of your paper, some raise spurious issues, some demand certain papers get cited (almost always their own). Often it can help improve a paper.
What peer review is not, as is sometimes believed, is another academic proving a paper is correct. Ultimately that is replication where other researchers repeat the experiments. For instance I may need to synthesize a chemical someone else had made - I will follow their method and hope it works (normally in chemistry it does). In some fields there is currently a huge replication problem - a high percentage of published work cannot be replicated by other groups. More common in biology, psychology etc.
Re replication, social science is one with massive problems.
We also don't publish pre-review.* It makes sense for some urgent stuff (e.g. Covid) but for other things it makes sense to go through peer review which catches at least some of the howlers before putting nonsense out there.
*Sometimes projects include a report which will get published and used pre-review. That's what the funders want sometimes.
Key points are: - pre-prints: anyone can publish any shit to a pre-print server - should be treated about as seriously as a blog/Twitter post, e.g. potentially quite seriously if you trust the source or the detail stands up to scrutiny, but with healthy scepticism otherwise, particularly if you lack the skill to evaluate it - peer-reviewed articles from reputable journals: most of the complete nonsense is hopefully filtered out, but the paper could still be nonsense; sometwo (or more) who theoretically know the field have said it's kind of ok
Some interesting points here.
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/09/trust-in-peer-review-the-role-and-reputation-of-preprints/ ...We regularly post all of our submission-ready work on bioRxiv. Some people tend to do this only when they have confirmation of acceptance at a peer-reviewed journal, but I find this misses the point about preprints. We find it helpful to share our work as soon as it's ready to submit, often even before we've decided where to submit. It shows the community what we are actively working on, and it's great to gauge interest at that stage. Preprints shared on Twitter have ignited useful discussions, and even collaborations later on, and they are also a very good way for students and postdocs to show tangible evidence of their work when applying for funding or other positions. In other situations, a well-timed preprint put out by others has been helpful in suggesting to us that spending the next 2 years working on something that the preprint has already covered, may be a waste of our time. Even though preprints are not peer-reviewed, I tend to trust them because a) reputations rely on them advertising good quality work (no-one wants to share something before it's at least ready to be seen by reviewers) and b) even if some of the details will change under the scrutiny of peer review, the overall question and approach (and major result) is unlikely to change, and this is often the most useful information from preprints...
Fair points, mostly.
I find the idea of writing a paper before decidng where to submit odd, though - for us at least, the format and content varies quite a bit by journal. Also, for students and post-docs, listing submitted (but not yet reviewed/published) papers and providing them is common with job/funding applications.
Depends on the field, I think. We know just about everyone else working in our area in the UK (and North America, Australia, Scandinavia - it's a fairly niche field) and keep up to date with what people are doing. We do also share some things informally.
There are other ways to keep people up to date with what is being worked on, e.g. protocol publication (which is a great idea as it gets input from others before you've done most of the work and so gives a greater opportunity to improve). A PROSPERO going beyond sytematic reviews would be very useful imho - there are equivalents to an extent for trials, but would be useful universally (and also means if you change your analysis plan, everyone will see that and you have to justify it; makes it harder to go fishing for p values).
I've certainly no objection to established researchers (yeah, I know that sounds elitist - also fine with new/ECR putting things up, but should be approved by someone a bit more senior first, perhaps) putting pre-prints up. Where it sometimes falls down is a masters student getting overexcited and publishing a trimmed down dissertation that may need a lot more work - I remember a few of those from Covid. I suspect the various pre-print servers have differing levels of pre-publication approval too.
We do tend to put papers up on our prints server as soon as they're accepted, which is sometimes months before the print journals get round to officially publishing.
I do think it certainly served a useful purpose in Covid and in other rapidly changing fields with a lot of teams working on things. I don't think I contributed to anything on a pre-print server, but we certainly had stuff going to JCVI (and I think also available publicly) pre-publication.
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
I can't follow your point. We're not part of a security pact with Armenia. Whether the world should help either of them is irrelevant to whether Russia has obligations or commitments, and if it met them.
We're not part of a security pact with Ukraine either, but we're helping massively because we disapprove of the war. It's a fair comment, though, that we are awfully selective about where we intervene when atrocities are committed - Yemen and DRC say "hi", in the former case because we suck up to Saudi Arabia, in the latter case perhaps because we're just not very interested in Africa.
The original point that the CTSO is collapsing may well be true, though.
Hmmm. We do have a Tripartite Security Pact between UK / Ukr / Pol. The question is in the details, and what it covers. Came in in 2020/2021 I think, and upgraded later.
"This explains another seismic shift since the 1990s: the young have moved dramatically Left-wards, and more of them voted for Corbyn when he lost disastrously in 2019 than for Blair when he won triumphantly in 1997. Boris Johnson compensated for this by hoovering up the pensioner vote, hence the triple lock and other gerontocratic policies. This process has run its course: there are too many angry under-50s.
The shortage of houses, their ridiculously high price and the collapse in home ownership among 20 and 30-somethings is the main economic force pushing the young Left-wards. Owning property is the key gateway to conservatism. Our deranged planning system, and the Tories’ refusal to allocate a lot more land – not just brownfield, but also greenfield – to housing is a betrayal of our younger generation. It is one reason for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, itself another blow to conservatism."
The sad reality about this is the complete lack of joined-up thinking. So many people are against new homes being built because they are being thrown up in places where no new infrastructure is added - no new roads, shops, schools, doctors surgeries.
People are against these developments because they crowd everyone else. It is always someone else's fault that this happens - the developers, the councils, the government. Yet it keeps happening. There are few new town developments where infrastructure is added - the Hamptons in Peterborough being an example of one that has been thought through.
We can't just build more houses, we need to build all the things new houses need. And that means building houses on a plan not just crushed in. But the last big change to the law under the coalition gave open license to developers to build anywhere they liked. No wonder people are opposed.
There's always opposition to newbuild, whipped up for political reasons. The current controversy in my patch is about building some homes on a car park, within walking distance of the town centre and of an agreeable riverside area - you can't get more brownfield than that, and the homes will be ideally connected and will reinforce the local shops. The parking capacity will be maintained entirely, by a new multi-storey carpark. Yet large numbers of people have signed a petition organised by the Conservatives to "save our car park", mostly since they aren't following the details and think parking space will be reduced.
Once referenda on new planning proposals are introduced by the Government, we can expect this sort of thing all the time.
I can't imagine why they are scepical about the pledge that "the parking capacity will be maintained entirely".
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
Not helped by the fact that much of this research is locked away behind very expensive firewalls.
A lot of it is, but that is changing. I struggle to remember when I last published without open access. Probably a US journal in 2015 from a quick check of google scholar.
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
There seem to be systems developing/developed that are a bit more reliable now.
...Can I remove an article that has already posted on bioRxiv?
No. Manuscripts posted on bioRxiv receive DOI's and thus are citable and part of the scientific record. They are indexed by services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Crossref, creating a permanent digital presence independent of bioRxiv records. Consequently, bioRxiv’s policy is that papers cannot be removed. Authors may, however, have their article marked as "Withdrawn" if they no longer stand by their findings/conclusions or acknowledge fundamental errors in the article. In these cases, a statement explaining the reason for the withdrawal is posted on the bioRxiv article page to which the DOI defaults; the original article is still accessible via the article history tab. In extremely rare, exceptional cases, papers must be removed because of a copyright breach or inclusion of information deemed dangerous...
Will bioRxiv content remain permanently accessible and usable in the future?
"This explains another seismic shift since the 1990s: the young have moved dramatically Left-wards, and more of them voted for Corbyn when he lost disastrously in 2019 than for Blair when he won triumphantly in 1997. Boris Johnson compensated for this by hoovering up the pensioner vote, hence the triple lock and other gerontocratic policies. This process has run its course: there are too many angry under-50s.
The shortage of houses, their ridiculously high price and the collapse in home ownership among 20 and 30-somethings is the main economic force pushing the young Left-wards. Owning property is the key gateway to conservatism. Our deranged planning system, and the Tories’ refusal to allocate a lot more land – not just brownfield, but also greenfield – to housing is a betrayal of our younger generation. It is one reason for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, itself another blow to conservatism."
The sad reality about this is the complete lack of joined-up thinking. So many people are against new homes being built because they are being thrown up in places where no new infrastructure is added - no new roads, shops, schools, doctors surgeries.
People are against these developments because they crowd everyone else. It is always someone else's fault that this happens - the developers, the councils, the government. Yet it keeps happening. There are few new town developments where infrastructure is added - the Hamptons in Peterborough being an example of one that has been thought through.
We can't just build more houses, we need to build all the things new houses need. And that means building houses on a plan not just crushed in. But the last big change to the law under the coalition gave open license to developers to build anywhere they liked. No wonder people are opposed.
There's always opposition to newbuild, whipped up for political reasons. The current controversy in my patch is about building some homes on a car park, within walking distance of the town centre and of an agreeable riverside area - you can't get more brownfield than that, and the homes will be ideally connected and will reinforce the local shops. The parking capacity will be maintained entirely, by a new multi-storey carpark. Yet large numbers of people have signed a petition organised by the Conservatives to "save our car park", mostly since they aren't following the details and think parking space will be reduced.
Once referenda on new planning proposals are introduced by the Government, we can expect this sort of thing all the time.
I can't imagine why they are scepical about the pledge that "the parking capacity will be maintained entirely".
Perhaps they are hoping that the moto lobby will save them. Do they have friends in Chiswick?
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
Not helped by the fact that much of this research is locked away behind very expensive firewalls.
That's another but overlapping issue - for the published papers mainly I believe (and their immediate preprints post refereeing). For those not familiar with the situation, for many journals you need to pay maybe 1-2K per paper, or to be affiliated to an institution which pays the publishers large annual lump sums, to be allowed to post your own paper openly either on the journal site or on the institution's servers or indeed anywhere on the net, so anyone can get at it without further payment.
It's becoming a core element of academic research budgeting, bevcause HMG is demanding tht research be openly published (which is not a bad thing in itself at all, but acts as another score metric in the research assessment steeplechase). But it makes life much trickier for anyone not in a university or similar institution, whether as author or reader.
You're generally not allowed to post your own paper just like that, except possibly as an earlier draft typescript if the publisher allows. Unless you publish with a journal which is more relaxed - e.g. some societies (which make access fully open 2-3 yeats after publication, to protect their membership revenues, whuich is fair enough). Though most seem to have handed over to the commercial firms.
If you read the terms (at least in my field) the journals don't often claim or require assignment of copyright on the submitted version, just on their typeset version (they, of course, own the copyright on that typesetting/layout as they did it). It's often perfectly legal to share the final accepted version sent to the journal.
Occasionally, there is an agreement otherwise, but then the journal is explicitly asking you to assign to them the copyright (or license them exlcusive rights) to something that actually belongs to you uness agreed otherwise.
If I was cynical I'd believe that the journals deliberately keep this unclear
ETA: e.g. in working on reviews, authors - if they can be contacted - will generally send a copy of their submitted version for an article behind a pay wall. Many share the published version, which may also be in the publishing agreement (often there's permission to share with colleagues etc, but not put online for general download).
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
I said the SC result was a great ruling for Sturgeon and the SNP. She's probably going to do a Catalonia. What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
The government will want the protocol sorted before Labour can get into power and sort it differently, so if they have a particular outcome in mind which requires complex negotiations, they had better get on with it.
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
Not helped by the fact that much of this research is locked away behind very expensive firewalls.
That's another but overlapping issue - for the published papers mainly I believe (and their immediate preprints post refereeing). For those not familiar with the situation, for many journals you need to pay maybe 1-2K per paper, or to be affiliated to an institution which pays the publishers large annual lump sums, to be allowed to post your own paper openly either on the journal site or on the institution's servers or indeed anywhere on the net, so anyone can get at it without further payment.
It's becoming a core element of academic research budgeting, bevcause HMG is demanding tht research be openly published (which is not a bad thing in itself at all, but acts as another score metric in the research assessment steeplechase). But it makes life much trickier for anyone not in a university or similar institution, whether as author or reader.
You're generally not allowed to post your own paper just like that, except possibly as an earlier draft typescript if the publisher allows. Unless you publish with a journal which is more relaxed - e.g. some societies (which make access fully open 2-3 yeats after publication, to protect their membership revenues, whuich is fair enough). Though most seem to have handed over to the commercial firms.
If you read the terms (at least in my field) the journals don't often claim or require assignment of copyright on the submitted version, just on their typeset version (they, of course, own the copyright on that typesetting/layout as they did it). It's often perfectly legal to share the final accepted version sent to the journal.
Occasionally, there is an agreement otherwise, but then the journal is explicitly asking you to assign to them the copyright (or license them exlcusive rights) to something that actually belongs to you uness agreed otherwise.
If I was cynical I'd believe that the journals deliberately keep this unclear
ETA: e.g. in working on reviews, authors - if they can be contacted - will generally send a copy of their submitted version for an article behind a pay wall. Many share the published version, which may also be in the publishing agreement (often there's permission to share with colleagues etc, but not put online for general download).
BioRxiv is very clear that authors retain copyright.
So most voters don't want to be in the EU or the single market, even if a slightly closer trade and security partnership which Starmer would likely agree and Sunak might edge to
Just dipping in.
That is a disingenuous interpretation of the poll.
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
I said the SC result was a great ruling for Sturgeon and the SNP. She's probably going to do a Catalonia. What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
A Catalonia is quite ineffectual. Half the electorate, and probably several local authorities would boycott it.
A wildcat referendum would likely see 90% voting in favour of independence, but on a turnout well below 50%. And even then, it would be open for any Scottish voter to seek an injunction blocking it.
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Ha! You mea what would any decent government be doing right now! Thatcher and Hestletine would have intervened already!
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
"This explains another seismic shift since the 1990s: the young have moved dramatically Left-wards, and more of them voted for Corbyn when he lost disastrously in 2019 than for Blair when he won triumphantly in 1997. Boris Johnson compensated for this by hoovering up the pensioner vote, hence the triple lock and other gerontocratic policies. This process has run its course: there are too many angry under-50s.
The shortage of houses, their ridiculously high price and the collapse in home ownership among 20 and 30-somethings is the main economic force pushing the young Left-wards. Owning property is the key gateway to conservatism. Our deranged planning system, and the Tories’ refusal to allocate a lot more land – not just brownfield, but also greenfield – to housing is a betrayal of our younger generation. It is one reason for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, itself another blow to conservatism."
The sad reality about this is the complete lack of joined-up thinking. So many people are against new homes being built because they are being thrown up in places where no new infrastructure is added - no new roads, shops, schools, doctors surgeries.
People are against these developments because they crowd everyone else. It is always someone else's fault that this happens - the developers, the councils, the government. Yet it keeps happening. There are few new town developments where infrastructure is added - the Hamptons in Peterborough being an example of one that has been thought through.
We can't just build more houses, we need to build all the things new houses need. And that means building houses on a plan not just crushed in. But the last big change to the law under the coalition gave open license to developers to build anywhere they liked. No wonder people are opposed.
There's always opposition to newbuild, whipped up for political reasons. The current controversy in my patch is about building some homes on a car park, within walking distance of the town centre and of an agreeable riverside area - you can't get more brownfield than that, and the homes will be ideally connected and will reinforce the local shops. The parking capacity will be maintained entirely, by a new multi-storey carpark. Yet large numbers of people have signed a petition organised by the Conservatives to "save our car park", mostly since they aren't following the details and think parking space will be reduced.
Once referenda on new planning proposals are introduced by the Government, we can expect this sort of thing all the time.
I can't imagine why they are scepical about the pledge that "the parking capacity will be maintained entirely".
If this is Godalming:
"Waverley is heavily reliant on revenue from car parks, and from the outset has sought to ensure there would be no net loss of parking within central Godalming as a result of the regeneration works. The council’s viability assessment indicates that redevelopment of The Burys site could support a multi-deck car park that would replace any loss of parking on Crown Court and The Wharf. Options for a decked carpark have been considered, which place the car parking behind an attractive façade and within the current height of the office building."
Which makes the new multi storey sound a fairly remote and theoretical concept. Love the admission that parking space matters because of the revenue from it.
I hate everything about multi storey carparks, but I don't think I would campaign against this, just on that basis.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Lots of people derive great benefit from heavy regulation. It provides a lot of well-paid employment, and stifles competition.
The government will want the protocol sorted before Labour can get into power and sort it differently, so if they have a particular outcome in mind which requires complex negotiations, they had better get on with it.
Is there any possible solution that can be acceptable to each of the EU, the ERG, and the Ulster Unionists?
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
I said the SC result was a great ruling for Sturgeon and the SNP. She's probably going to do a Catalonia. What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
A Catalonia is quite ineffectual. Half the electorate, and probably several local authorities would boycott it.
The run-up to a full-scale Kiltalonia could be very hairy, so it's hard to predict turnout.
My best effort: 1. (lawful referendum, which now won't happen) - Union 55%, turnout 87% - i.e. same result as last time but with even higher turnout. 2. (Catalonia) - Independence 52%, turnout 75% (calculated by assuming a quarter of those who would vote for the Union in 1 would boycott).
Turnout in 2 would exceed 50%. Agreed about local authorities. But the Partei has loyal patriotic members everywhere and some surprising tactics could be used to attrit and circumvent. Local authorities run on money. I'm not sure what the levers would be, but undoubtedly some exist. The SNP is powerful.
It will be hilarious if Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly tell the Russian government to shut its consulate in Edinburgh, maybe leaking some "interference in host country's affairs" documents on the same day.
Nigel Farage confirms Reform will stand a full slate of candidates at the next election & not make any deals with Conservative MPs. About 13-15% of 2019 Conservatives are already planning to vote Reform so this is another big problem in a long list of problems for Rishi Sunak. https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1595781501953929216
I'm no doctrix, but I know that doctor is from Latin and means teacher (doceo means I teach)
Doethur is derived from the same root, but not via English. I believe doeth means wise (from doctus, meaning taught)
Teacher is from German, and shares its Proto-Indo-European root with the Latin word dico (I speak), which is also the root of dictator
To save the confusion in English, I vote we adopt forms of the Old English - from before the Frenchies brought in their doctours. Wise man/teacher doctor was a lareow (sharing roots with learning and lore). "Medical" doctor was a læce, which is the root for the word leech
We could call them loremen and leechmen.
I just realised this gives us the opportunity for ambiguity when calling @ydoethur "Oh doeth one". Or telling him to
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
I said the SC result was a great ruling for Sturgeon and the SNP. She's probably going to do a Catalonia. What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
A Catalonia is quite ineffectual. Half the electorate, and probably several local authorities would boycott it.
The run-up to a full-scale Kiltalonia could be very hairy, so it's hard to predict turnout.
My best effort: 1. (lawful referendum, which now won't happen) - Union 55%, turnout 87% - i.e. same result as last time but with even higher turnout. 2. (Catalonia) - Independence 52%, turnout 75% (calculated by assuming a quarter of those who would vote for the Union in 1 would boycott).
Turnout in 2 would exceed 50%. Agreed about local authorities. But the Partei has loyal patriotic members everywhere and some surprising tactics could be used to attrit and circumvent. Local authorities run on money. I'm not sure what the levers would be, but undoubtedly some exist. The SNP is powerful.
It will be hilarious if Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly tell the Russian government to shut its consulate in Edinburgh, maybe leaking some "interference in host country's affairs" documents on the same day.
Why would Scottish Unionists bother? Such a referendum would be an exercise in futility.
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
A "spat" is a minor squabble over something relatively unimportant. This wasn't a spat - it was war, with the terrorist expulsion of large numbers of civilians and a denial that they'd ever put down roots where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Incidentally, denial of the genocide committed against Armenians is official policy in both Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey. Indeed saying the genocide occurred is against the law in those countries.
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
I can't follow your point. We're not part of a security pact with Armenia. Whether the world should help either of them is irrelevant to whether Russia has obligations or commitments, and if it met them.
We're not part of a security pact with Ukraine either, but we're helping massively because we disapprove of the war. It's a fair comment, though, that we are awfully selective about where we intervene when atrocities are committed - Yemen and DRC say "hi", in the former case because we suck up to Saudi Arabia, in the latter case perhaps because we're just not very interested in Africa.
The original point that the CTSO is collapsing may well be true, though.
Nice try, but it isn't a fair comment because the initial point was about Russia's security pact not security pacts in general. We've chosen to be allies of Ukraine and yes nations are selective in who they help and why, but that doesn't have anything to do with a story about problems in the Russian security pact.
It's a complete diversion. A point about geopolitical hypocrisy might be true it might not, but is not a rejoinder .
And the context was a comment essentially going 'Russia's not done much but we've done nothing', but there are very different expectations from Armenia.
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
I said the SC result was a great ruling for Sturgeon and the SNP. She's probably going to do a Catalonia. What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
A Catalonia is quite ineffectual. Half the electorate, and probably several local authorities would boycott it.
The run-up to a full-scale Kiltalonia could be very hairy, so it's hard to predict turnout.
My best effort: 1. (lawful referendum, which now won't happen) - Union 55%, turnout 87% - i.e. same result as last time but with even higher turnout. 2. (Catalonia) - Independence 52%, turnout 75% (calculated by assuming a quarter of those who would vote for the Union in 1 would boycott).
Turnout in 2 would exceed 50%. Agreed about local authorities. But the Partei has loyal patriotic members everywhere and some surprising tactics could be used to attrit and circumvent. Local authorities run on money. I'm not sure what the levers would be, but undoubtedly some exist. The SNP is powerful.
It will be hilarious if Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly tell the Russian government to shut its consulate in Edinburgh, maybe leaking some "interference in host country's affairs" documents on the same day.
Why would Scottish Unionists bother? Such a referendum would be an exercise in futility.
Fear of what the SNP might do - and the ghastly effect on Scotland - if it won its referendum.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Lots of people derive great benefit from heavy regulation. It provides a lot of well-paid employment, and stifles competition.
You are taking an ideological position, that’s fair enough in a debating society. Your post can be read though that you are on the side of damaging chaos, for moving too fast and too quickly purely for political reasons, not rational ones.
I was talking about sensible government, I wasn’t making a political or idealogical point, you are the one to introduce this, but as you have done so, the main political take out is hoping the Tories recover in polls over next two years, whilst they will continue to do dumb chaos creating things, unable to escape various positions they have got themselves wedded to, through promises and expectations, to party and country and media cheerleaders.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Lots of people derive great benefit from heavy regulation. It provides a lot of well-paid employment, and stifles competition.
You are taking an ideological position, that’s fair enough in a debating society. Your post can be read though that you are on the side of damaging chaos, for moving too fast and too quickly purely for political reasons, not rational ones.
I was talking about sensible government, I wasn’t making a political or idealogical point, you are the one to introduce this, but as you have done so, the main political take out is hoping the Tories recover in polls over next two years, whilst they will continue to do dumb chaos creating things, unable to escape various positions they have got themselves wedded to, through promises and expectations, to party and country and media cheerleaders.
Does changing the status quo ante cause "damaging chaos?" That's an argument for no change.
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3 ...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
A question however is the retrievability of such grey literature. A friend of mine works in medical trials and commented to me that a big problem is finding copies of such "unpublished" documents from a decade or two back, especially if they never led to a permanently published paper.
Not helped by the fact that much of this research is locked away behind very expensive firewalls.
That's another but overlapping issue - for the published papers mainly I believe (and their immediate preprints post refereeing). For those not familiar with the situation, for many journals you need to pay maybe 1-2K per paper, or to be affiliated to an institution which pays the publishers large annual lump sums, to be allowed to post your own paper openly either on the journal site or on the institution's servers or indeed anywhere on the net, so anyone can get at it without further payment.
It's becoming a core element of academic research budgeting, bevcause HMG is demanding tht research be openly published (which is not a bad thing in itself at all, but acts as another score metric in the research assessment steeplechase). But it makes life much trickier for anyone not in a university or similar institution, whether as author or reader.
You're generally not allowed to post your own paper just like that, except possibly as an earlier draft typescript if the publisher allows. Unless you publish with a journal which is more relaxed - e.g. some societies (which make access fully open 2-3 yeats after publication, to protect their membership revenues, whuich is fair enough). Though most seem to have handed over to the commercial firms.
If you read the terms (at least in my field) the journals don't often claim or require assignment of copyright on the submitted version, just on their typeset version (they, of course, own the copyright on that typesetting/layout as they did it). It's often perfectly legal to share the final accepted version sent to the journal.
Occasionally, there is an agreement otherwise, but then the journal is explicitly asking you to assign to them the copyright (or license them exlcusive rights) to something that actually belongs to you uness agreed otherwise.
If I was cynical I'd believe that the journals deliberately keep this unclear
ETA: e.g. in working on reviews, authors - if they can be contacted - will generally send a copy of their submitted version for an article behind a pay wall. Many share the published version, which may also be in the publishing agreement (often there's permission to share with colleagues etc, but not put online for general download).
BioRxiv is very clear that authors retain copyright.
Yes, I'd be very surprised if any of the pre-print servers tried to claim copyright (would likely prevent later publication elsewhere without their consent, as a derived work). What some don't realise is that few journals actually claim copyright on what the author submitted as final version - those that do have to get an explicit agreement signed; most do not. Without that, the journals only have rights over their formatted version.
Somewhat moot anyway, given the prevalence of open-access publishing now.
Is this what @NicolaSturgeon really wants - crowds shouting at elected representatives that they are 'democracy deniers'?
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
I said the SC result was a great ruling for Sturgeon and the SNP. She's probably going to do a Catalonia. What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
A Catalonia is quite ineffectual. Half the electorate, and probably several local authorities would boycott it.
The run-up to a full-scale Kiltalonia could be very hairy, so it's hard to predict turnout.
My best effort: 1. (lawful referendum, which now won't happen) - Union 55%, turnout 87% - i.e. same result as last time but with even higher turnout. 2. (Catalonia) - Independence 52%, turnout 75% (calculated by assuming a quarter of those who would vote for the Union in 1 would boycott).
Turnout in 2 would exceed 50%. Agreed about local authorities. But the Partei has loyal patriotic members everywhere and some surprising tactics could be used to attrit and circumvent. Local authorities run on money. I'm not sure what the levers would be, but undoubtedly some exist. The SNP is powerful.
It will be hilarious if Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly tell the Russian government to shut its consulate in Edinburgh, maybe leaking some "interference in host country's affairs" documents on the same day.
Why would Scottish Unionists bother? Such a referendum would be an exercise in futility.
Fear of what the SNP might do - and the ghastly effect on Scotland - if it won its referendum.
But, the SNP can do nothing. Sure, if Scotland's security forces were all prepared to rise up in favour of the SNP, there might be a point to that, but they won't.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
Lots of people derive great benefit from heavy regulation. It provides a lot of well-paid employment, and stifles competition.
You are taking an ideological position, that’s fair enough in a debating society. Your post can be read though that you are on the side of damaging chaos, for moving too fast and too quickly purely for political reasons, not rational ones.
I was talking about sensible government, I wasn’t making a political or idealogical point, you are the one to introduce this, but as you have done so, the main political take out is hoping the Tories recover in polls over next two years, whilst they will continue to do dumb chaos creating things, unable to escape various positions they have got themselves wedded to, through promises and expectations, to party and country and media cheerleaders.
Agreed, although I didn't actually read Sean F's post as ideological - well-paid employment is generally a good thing, competition isn't always. You may well know Sean better and be able to read more into it than I can.
But as to the wider point - I wonder if this actually presents an opportunity for the Conservatives. I'm definitely not a supporter, but am interested in the party returning to a more sane state, ideally as a sensible, moderate opposition to hold a Labour government's feet to the fire.
Sunak could look at this, in light of his commitment to grown-up government, as a chance to call the bluff of the Brexit absolutists. It's increasingly clear that a clean break from Europe is neither good for the country nor popular, so as Sunak has so little to lose, perhaps he could gain by appearing sensible and moderate, and allowing the ERG to fume from the sidelines.
The Tories have made a mistake thinking the milk and egg crisis is short term - it’s not bird flu, it’s price rises in industry the supermarkets refuse to take on and pass on. It’s absolutely the perfect situation for the government to intervene in this industry now to avoid greater crisis in the future, but this government not good enough to recognise this.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Ha! You mea what would any decent government be doing right now! Thatcher and Hestletine would have intervened already!
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
Why are you even arguing. It’s a no brainier.
Should government fix retail prices in general?
What do you think they are already doing spending £XXXbn helping business in this crisis? but too slow to intervene in egg industry. What I am trying to point out to you is it’s exactly the same thing as household and business energy bail out. What do you think the chickens eat, so why isn’t the war escalating the price of that, etc. it’s about a government recognising it’s not a short term issue when the industry shrinks and number of laying birds decreases, we suck in eggs from places like Italy, we don’t have our own egg security anymore. As well as backing up lip service of helping the poorest within our country, they hear you saying that, but can’t have eggs or milk. Foodbanks can’t get them.
Why are you are the side of crap government, not good government? The governmental is subsiding the cost of heating private pools same time mothers watering down milk for their babies. That’s you applauding that. It’s not about party politics, just fundamentals. You can’t get more fundamental than milk and eggs, civilised society is based on access to these.
Comments
https://www.englishdemocrats.party/
There’s an interesting narrative in the Irish immigration debate that we don’t get over here. Yet.
Because of their history, there’s a sense of shame in their politics when young people have to leave the country to make a life for themselves.
It doesn’t resonate much in our country, but it shouldn’t be any less true.
We’ve failed our young with unaffordable housing, gigantic student debt and loaded onto them a massive tax burden.
It shows that, given lots of options,
none of them is the first choice of a majority- which is a shame, because
that would make life a lot easier.
What we really need is lots of realistic forced choices. So forget the unicorn option.
If it comes down to it, would you prefer:
Status quo or Rejoin?
Status quo or I can't believe it's not Norway?
Something like Norway or Rejoin?
I suspect the answer would be a tangled mess (A beats B, B beats C, C beats A) combined with lots of complaints that the UK voted for a unicorn so where's our bloody unicorn?
But it would be a useful handle on where we actually are.
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1595720663427334144
In context: Armenia is a CTSO member. When they had a spat with Azerbaijan earlier in the year, Russia did not help.
💥
https://twitter.com/murdo_fraser/status/1595754018340573184
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oman–United_Arab_Emirates_border
The Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, today refused to sign the draft declaration of the CSTO Security Council after its meeting.
Both Lukashenko & Putin were furious.
The collective security organization is on the ropes
Via @Gerashchenko_en
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1595764495313698816
What a stupid poll anyway! Choose among these six options regarding Britain's relationship with the EU, none of which mention freedom of movement.
A bigger story today is that net migration has risen to more than 500,000. And yet Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour party, is at 1.38 at Smarkets to be PM after the next GE. 10.38 would be closer to his actual value. I shudder to think how many supposedly politically clued-up bettors are throwing their money away in that market.
Presumably a direct consequence of FOI review into John Swinney’s tweets.
So it’s now official: Scot Gov cannot guarantee the accuracy of anything tweeted by ministers.
https://twitter.com/staylorish/status/1595771026818072581
I'd really like to see Kazahstan join the league of civilised nations after Ukraine wins this war.
(stops poking Topping, Dura_Ace and NickPalmer...
1) A little cake
2) Some cake
3) All the cake
4) Two cakes
In England, following national policy all this stuff is called "sustainability" - schools , Doctors, shops, public transport, parks, playgrounds and all the rest. It's in the National Planning Policy Framework, and when our Local Plan was done all of the sites that came forward were assessed and ranked by sustainability and approved on meeting the criteria and in descending order.
I observed all of that when I was promoting land for development not long ago.
Has it changed, or are other places in the UK different?
They were looking at fibreglass substitutes back in the 1980s, when it kept getting stolen. And dad needed half to make a mould for the trial model.
Presumably because misinformation by tweet was out of control, and Scot Gov doesn’t want to be held accountable for it.….
Nicola Sturgeon’s personal Twitter account has never been listed on her Scot Gov profile page, because she has an official First Minister Twitter account:
@ScotGovFM
https://twitter.com/staylorish/status/1595771545896583172
It's true that Russia didn't help Armenia much.
The one country that has helped Armenia a lot has been Iran. (Meanwhile, Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan.)
The US, NATO, and the EU didn't help Armenia at all. And guess what - they're not going to, either. They want to keep Turkey on their side.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/the-ons-immigration-figures-are-not-as-dramatic-as-they-look/
(Portes generally seems to be of the sensible remainer type)
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23475817/san-francisco-police-department-robots-deadly-force
2) The ScotGov has to back up claims made in said deleted tweets. It’s taken them this long to work out “screenshot”.
‘They grab their lunches and sit alone’: Russians shunned at global cyber confabs
The frosty situation gives the world even less visibility into Russian cyber operations at a time when it is launching repeated digital strikes in Ukraine.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/23/they-grab-their-lunches-and-sit-alone-russians-shunned-at-global-cyber-confabs-00070587
But the real question is advertisers: and the mood music is that many of them, and their agencies, are not happy.
Neither are the banks who cannot sell their debt for 60% of the price they paid for it.
Do you think Twitter is in a healthy place?
The most effective dev I know was effective because they churned out line after line of code that was good enough to do the job. None of it was “clever” & if you picked out any given 10 lines you’d look at them & go “so what?”.
Their effectiveness lay in their excellent system design skills & their ability to churn out consistent code that implemented that design over an entire codebase: You can’t see any of that by looking at the code on a line by line basis: on that basis, their code was mostly very boring.
My personal guess that this “metric” is really an excuse to arbitrarily fire more Twitter devs, with the cover of legality to make it that much more difficult for them to challenge you in court (“Look your honor, their code was terrible!”). If you suck up to the Musk or are politically connected to the new regime internally then you get to stick around: everyone else gets the boot.
https://www.hucknalldispatch.co.uk/news/politics/ashfield-independents-retain-hucknall-seat-in-by-election-3929614
Council makeup now:
Ash, Ind - 28
Lab - 2
Tory - 3
Ind - 2
That's reminded me that I promised to post some background, and was trying to get round to doing a summary.
We also don't publish pre-review.* It makes sense for some urgent stuff (e.g. Covid) but for other things it makes sense to go through peer review which catches at least some of the howlers before putting nonsense out there.
*Sometimes projects include a report which will get published and used pre-review. That's what the funders want sometimes.
Key points are:
- pre-prints: anyone can publish any shit to a pre-print server - should be treated about as seriously as a blog/Twitter post, e.g. potentially quite seriously if you trust the source or the detail stands up to scrutiny, but with healthy scepticism otherwise, particularly if you lack the skill to evaluate it
- peer-reviewed articles from reputable journals: most of the complete nonsense is hopefully filtered out, but the paper could still be nonsense; sometwo (or more) who theoretically know the field have said it's kind of ok
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3748181-2024-tracker-heres-who-is-running-for-the-gop-nomination/
My (very) long odds tip is Maryland governor Larry Hogan.
Is this a piece of self deprecation about his weight ?
...Hogan, a moderate who will leave office in January, added of the prospect of a 2024 run, “That lane is much wider now than it was a week ago...
Not a healthy place, and pre-Musk the ad interface was not great, but now there are no sales folk, account managers and so on. Like I say, not terminal but the signs aren't good for an ad-funded model.
When It’s everyone asking this - from institute of directors and CBI through the Civil Service leadership to the union barons. And asking the government not to do it because it will cause chaos, damaging damaging chaos. Yet there is no way this shaky government can stand up to the right wing of the party and U Turn on this one, absolutely no political way of kicking this into long grass and the government not wobbling as dubbed closet remainer **** by so many in their own party.
Labour and opposition parties are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of this self inflicted clear ideological chaos over the next two years.
The original point that the CTSO is collapsing may well be true, though.
Again, the "[what does this mean?]" was carelessly copy n pasted from the original, where it is a link to an explainer (less lucid than yours!)
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/09/trust-in-peer-review-the-role-and-reputation-of-preprints/
...We regularly post all of our submission-ready work on bioRxiv. Some people tend to do this only when they have confirmation of acceptance at a peer-reviewed journal, but I find this misses the point about preprints. We find it helpful to share our work as soon as it's ready to submit, often even before we've decided where to submit. It shows the community what we are actively working on, and it's great to gauge interest at that stage. Preprints shared on Twitter have ignited useful discussions, and even collaborations later on, and they are also a very good way for students and postdocs to show tangible evidence of their work when applying for funding or other positions. In other situations, a well-timed preprint put out by others has been helpful in suggesting to us that spending the next 2 years working on something that the preprint has already covered, may be a waste of our time. Even though preprints are not peer-reviewed, I tend to trust them because a) reputations rely on them advertising good quality work (no-one wants to share something before it's at least ready to be seen by reviewers) and b) even if some of the details will change under the scrutiny of peer review, the overall question and approach (and major result) is unlikely to change, and this is often the most useful information from preprints...
What should be a bigger story is how incompetent Leaky Sue was yesterday at the committee. How does she have any supporters of her competence, it was painful and embarrassing to watch.
I've got the day off today (after working ten hours on my other 'day off' yesterday), so didn't have to decide to strike or not, but I'm going in tomorrow
I thought I'd joined the union, but had made a mistake applying online (when drunk) and haven't yet corrected it
I feel like I should join the CWU, and strike with my comrades, but I'm rather enjoying all the overtime I'm getting from being willing to work strike days (which are easy - just parcels) and any of my days off
Luckily, I can get into work without having to physically cross the actual picket line. I don't think I'd get any stick since I'm still in my probationary period, even though my manager has said I don't have to go in
https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3
...Our results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions...
I called it a 'spat' because it was limited, and has (for the moment) ended.
It's the politics of Trump and the far right. The words used by the FM & her colleagues since yesterday's ruling are highly inflammatory & dangerous. Enough.
https://twitter.com/JohnFerry18/status/1595733326320517120
Once referenda on new planning proposals are introduced by the Government, we can expect this sort of thing all the time.
You have the egg business unable to exist for long with the current costs, so not only the existential threat to an industry from delaying inevitable intervention too late, but at same time the very poorest in our society the government pay lip service to protecting in this crisis going without staples like milk and eggs.
Why are you even arguing. It’s a no brainier.
What would a Labour government do and how would it pay for it?
Looking at the market interventions going on with households and business already, why hasn’t it already been extended to help with this crisis in a similar way. Existential threat to a British industry and our most poorest going without milk and eggs. No brainier, intervene now!
Honestly some people seem to advocate turning this country into some nouveau USSR with high house prices these days....
Yes, there are many conflicts around the world that we should perhaps get more involved in (or less...). But in the case of Ukraine, it is a direct threat to Europe.
If we don't stop him now, when do we stop him?
Where's your red line, Nick? Lithuania? Poland? Germany?
To govern is to choose. The choice shouldn't be delay. Rishi is weak, weak, weak.
It's becoming a core element of academic research budgeting, bevcause HMG is demanding tht research be openly published (which is not a bad thing in itself at all, but acts as another score metric in the research assessment steeplechase). But it makes life much trickier for anyone not in a university or similar institution, whether as author or reader.
You're generally not allowed to post your own paper just like that, except possibly as an earlier draft typescript if the publisher allows. Unless you publish with a journal which is more relaxed - e.g. some societies (which make access fully open 2-3 yeats after publication, to protect their membership revenues, whuich is fair enough). Though most seem to have handed over to the commercial firms.
I find the idea of writing a paper before decidng where to submit odd, though - for us at least, the format and content varies quite a bit by journal. Also, for students and post-docs, listing submitted (but not yet reviewed/published) papers and providing them is common with job/funding applications.
Depends on the field, I think. We know just about everyone else working in our area in the UK (and North America, Australia, Scandinavia - it's a fairly niche field) and keep up to date with what people are doing. We do also share some things informally.
There are other ways to keep people up to date with what is being worked on, e.g. protocol publication (which is a great idea as it gets input from others before you've done most of the work and so gives a greater opportunity to improve). A PROSPERO going beyond sytematic reviews would be very useful imho - there are equivalents to an extent for trials, but would be useful universally (and also means if you change your analysis plan, everyone will see that and you have to justify it; makes it harder to go fishing for p values).
I've certainly no objection to established researchers (yeah, I know that sounds elitist - also fine with new/ECR putting things up, but should be approved by someone a bit more senior first, perhaps) putting pre-prints up. Where it sometimes falls down is a masters student getting overexcited and publishing a trimmed down dissertation that may need a lot more work - I remember a few of those from Covid. I suspect the various pre-print servers have differing levels of pre-publication approval too.
We do tend to put papers up on our prints server as soon as they're accepted, which is sometimes months before the print journals get round to officially publishing.
I do think it certainly served a useful purpose in Covid and in other rapidly changing fields with a lot of teams working on things. I don't think I contributed to anything on a pre-print server, but we certainly had stuff going to JCVI (and I think also available publicly) pre-publication.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/02/17/ukraine-uk-poland-announce-security-pact-amid-heightened-tensions/
(Trigger warning: Liz Truss photo
...Can I remove an article that has already posted on bioRxiv?
No. Manuscripts posted on bioRxiv receive DOI's and thus are citable and part of the scientific record. They are indexed by services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Crossref, creating a permanent digital presence independent of bioRxiv records. Consequently, bioRxiv’s policy is that papers cannot be removed. Authors may, however, have their article marked as "Withdrawn" if they no longer stand by their findings/conclusions or acknowledge fundamental errors in the article. In these cases, a statement explaining the reason for the withdrawal is posted on the bioRxiv article page to which the DOI defaults; the original article is still accessible via the article history tab. In extremely rare, exceptional cases, papers must be removed because of a copyright breach or inclusion of information deemed dangerous...
Will bioRxiv content remain permanently accessible and usable in the future?
Yes, all bioRxiv papers are archived at Portico.
Occasionally, there is an agreement otherwise, but then the journal is explicitly asking you to assign to them the copyright (or license them exlcusive rights) to something that actually belongs to you uness agreed otherwise.
If I was cynical I'd believe that the journals deliberately keep this unclear
ETA: e.g. in working on reviews, authors - if they can be contacted - will generally send a copy of their submitted version for an article behind a pay wall. Many share the published version, which may also be in the publishing agreement (often there's permission to share with colleagues etc, but not put online for general download).
She's probably going to do a Catalonia.
What the real Donald Trump does in relation to his motherland over the next year should also be watched.
What's going on in Scotland is hard for many to understand. Here's a useful question: what would the respective results be likely to be in each of the following two referendums, if held on 19 Oct 2023:
1. An official, lawful, British government-backed referendum rerun.
2. A referendum run by party heavies, because "it had to be done this way", because "the English b*stards Westminster's judges wouldn't let us do it any other way".
That is a disingenuous interpretation of the poll.
A wildcat referendum would likely see 90% voting in favour of independence, but on a turnout well below 50%. And even then, it would be open for any Scottish voter to seek an injunction blocking it.
My view right now.
"Waverley is heavily reliant on revenue from car parks, and from the outset has sought to ensure there would be no net loss of parking within central Godalming as a result of the regeneration works. The council’s viability assessment indicates that redevelopment of The Burys site could support a multi-deck car park that would replace any loss of parking on Crown Court and The Wharf. Options for a decked carpark have been considered, which place the car parking behind an attractive façade and within the current height of the office building."
Which makes the new multi storey sound a fairly remote and theoretical concept. Love the admission that parking space matters because of the revenue from it.
I hate everything about multi storey carparks, but I don't think I would campaign against this, just on that basis.
Thousands wouldn’t.
My best effort:
1. (lawful referendum, which now won't happen) - Union 55%, turnout 87% - i.e. same result as last time but with even higher turnout.
2. (Catalonia) - Independence 52%, turnout 75% (calculated by assuming a quarter of those who would vote for the Union in 1 would boycott).
Turnout in 2 would exceed 50%. Agreed about local authorities. But the Partei has loyal patriotic members everywhere and some surprising tactics could be used to attrit and circumvent. Local authorities run on money. I'm not sure what the levers would be, but undoubtedly some exist. The SNP is powerful.
It will be hilarious if Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly tell the Russian government to shut its consulate in Edinburgh, maybe leaking some "interference in host country's affairs" documents on the same day.
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1595781501953929216
It's a complete diversion. A point about geopolitical hypocrisy might be true it might not, but is not a rejoinder .
And the context was a comment essentially going 'Russia's not done much but we've done nothing', but there are very different expectations from Armenia.
I was talking about sensible government, I wasn’t making a political or idealogical point, you are the one to introduce this, but as you have done so, the main political take out is hoping the Tories recover in polls over next two years, whilst they will continue to do dumb chaos creating things, unable to escape various positions they have got themselves wedded to, through promises and expectations, to party and country and media cheerleaders.
Somewhat moot anyway, given the prevalence of open-access publishing now.
But as to the wider point - I wonder if this actually presents an opportunity for the Conservatives. I'm definitely not a supporter, but am interested in the party returning to a more sane state, ideally as a sensible, moderate opposition to hold a Labour government's feet to the fire.
Sunak could look at this, in light of his commitment to grown-up government, as a chance to call the bluff of the Brexit absolutists. It's increasingly clear that a clean break from Europe is neither good for the country nor popular, so as Sunak has so little to lose, perhaps he could gain by appearing sensible and moderate, and allowing the ERG to fume from the sidelines.
Why are you are the side of crap government, not good government? The governmental is subsiding the cost of heating private pools same time mothers watering down milk for their babies. That’s you applauding that. It’s not about party politics, just fundamentals. You can’t get more fundamental than milk and eggs, civilised society is based on access to these.