Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[dirty dingus]

5 minutes ago, The_Kincardine said:

36 years ago doing a dissertation on Scotland's influence world-wide (in my case through the spread of Presbyterian churches in, mostly, but not always, colonies) was seen as morally neutral.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-52640757/coronavirus-venezuelans-struggling-with-fuel-shortage

The situation in Venezuela under Corbyn's best pal, Maduro.

[The_Kincardine]

14 minutes ago, dirty dingus said:

Yup.  A drunk joke.  Not a surprise from the likes of you.

[The_Kincardine]

3 minutes ago, Sport socks and scampi said:

Can I ask you a question ? 

Of course.  Ask away.

[The_Kincardine]

1 minute ago, Sport socks and scampi said:

Thanks.   

Was merely a test of you receptiveness.   

I'll ask a question moving forward when and if I choose to do so.   

For now my powder is dry.  

Oh ok so it was a question asked by arseholes.  No surprise.

[peasy23]

[Navallion]

On 22/01/2020 at 06:08, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Hopefully. There’s too many people on the planet and we have finite resources.

We need something to dwindle down the numbers. 

 

Might be a bit too much...

[Theroadlesstravelled]

Horrible. I bet they wouldn’t force a non-BAME person to work under those conditions.

 

[dirty dingus]

6 hours ago, The_Kincardine said:

Yup.  A drunk joke.  Not a surprise from the likes of you.

Why would you associate Turpentine with getting drunk?

 

Stay Safe, Protect the NHS, Don't Drink Turps

[cyderspaceman]

3 hours ago, oaksoft said:

I have three questions for you.

Firstly, why do you have so much trouble understanding that millions of people passionately love their jobs and do extra hours for free because it gives their lives meaning to work on something worthwhile?

Secondly, how can you waste your life sitting in a 9 to 5 job you clearly have no real passion or strong interest for, a job that makes you feel "meh it pays the bills and I suppose it's an OK job", for 40 fucking years? How do you get out of bed each day? And to wear this shite state of affairs like some weird badge of honour is pretty bizarre.

Thirdly, why does the first type of person bother you so much? They have f**k all impact on your life but you won't shut up about it on here. Clearly they bother you. Why?

From the daily Malicious today on the furlough scheme exrension

Quote

It also raises the acute danger that large swathes of the workforce on furlough will lose any sense of the work ethic.

 

[SlipperyP]

ZERO cases to report here in Thailand today.

First time since 12th Jan, second country to report a case.

 

[Jacksgranda]

11 hours ago, Billy Jean King said:

10 weeks out of 11/12/13 YEARS = shattered education. Dearie dearie me hyperbole gone mad.

Your education obviously wasn't shattered if you're using big words like that. Lucky you!

[cyderspaceman]

50 minutes ago, MixuFixit said:

It's a relief that modern views on colonialism are not so unreconstructed

Presbyterian churches. God.  Santa Claus. Tooth Fairy.

[Jacksgranda]

11 hours ago, Billy Jean King said:

They appear fairly normal lessons in the circumstances, they are doing the best they can in what is a technology shitstorm in most authorities but that'sa different issue. You would think the teachers are choosing to not work, it's as if NS has ordered them back and they have said no. Why single them out ?

'Cos he's an attention seeking, contrarian, mewling, tear stained arse.

[Billy Jean King]

If going until then, by the new school year in August they will have missed a total of 12 weeks by my reckoning, absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

10 weeks? Where you getting that from.
This will last solidly into the new school year. Maybe until after Christmas, maybe after that?
The kids will go back in some capacity after summer I imagine, but the full time education that we've all known and become accustomed to has been sadly shot to pieces for thousands of our children.

[Billy Jean King]

So no reason at all then, as I thought. If you basing it on holidays what about month on / month off type patterns prevalent offshore, that must really boil your piss - 6 MONTHS off in your eyes !!!

A: Because teachers were the only group of lockdown employees being made out to be martyrs, weeping in anguish that they can't get to a classroom and teach the country's precious young minds. And they're also good for a meltdown when their relative inactivity is correctly added to their already existing laundry list of holidays. 

 

 

[Aufc]

Tbf to VT, i kind of agree with him regarding self-employed people. They want the best of both worlds

[dundeefc1783]

Watching news in England and its actually frightening how much they have appeared to returned to normal especially regarding people going back to work in the space of a couple days.

I understand that we have to at some point return to some sort of normality but I just don't see how they can now avoid some sort of second spike. The figures from the dept of health over the last week indicate that around 5 to 10% of people tested are positive. With the best will in the world with regard to social distancing I just can't see how those figures won't rise as people return to workplaces, public transport etc

Also watching BBC news for first time in a while and its all economy economy economy.

[Jacksgranda]

7 hours ago, craigkillie said:

That would depend on what their job role was and what their research interests were. 8 hours of teaching a week corresponds to anything between 12-15 hours when you consider preparation time, marking time and dealing with student emails and other silly admin tasks. I don't know a lot about accounting, but I'd guess they'd come from some sort of business or economics background and would therefore presumably be researching in that field. Alternatively, given that they said that they were off Mondays and Fridays they may have either been part time or one of a very small number of university teaching staff who are purely employed on a teaching contract, but if so their salary would have been nowhere close to what a teacher gets.

Has-an-unsustainable-overdraft-multiple-pay-day-loans-and-credit-cards-through-the-roof type post

[Clockwork]

I thought they were American. They are a bunch of b*****ds either way.
craigkillie is talking about funding now being dependent on open access but I'm a bit suspicious about whether this is true and immediate open access or whether they've gone ahead with the Gold, Green etc thing they were floating about for a while. I wonder if journals are simply going to pass on the entire cost to the author. I can't believe they are going to just stand aside and allow papers to be free without finding a way to gouge a massive fee somehow.
The illegal online service I am talking about is sci-hub. Elsevier and others are still trying to find the girl who created that site, logged into all the publishers and scraped virtually every published paper behind all of their firewalls. Researchgate ran into trouble over researchers posting their papers on there. 3 of mine from one journal were automatically removed but the rest were fine. don't know what the state of pkay is now as I'm out of the game now. You are right about academia.edu being shite.
All of this stuff should be freely available IMO, going right back as far as possible.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) was introduced in 2014, assessing the quality and impact of HEI research and is hugely influential in the allocation of £2 Billion worth of funding to UK Universities every year. REF performance is also a significant guidance factor with the various Research Councils (RCUK) and other funding bodies. Access to and transparency of research outputs are of paramount important to this process.

https://www.ref.ac.uk/about/