iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

"Reduced play time in children: a study of adults" - in seriousness, at EBT we try to get an honest accounting of limitations and make sure the key methodological information and findings are properly presented. Would the authors accept my suggested title? Hmmmmmmmmm P.S. no findings in titles! 🤬

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

My field (the methods end of toxicology) seems to have very good gender balance and I always thought "well done us" but increasingly wonder if it's not that women cannot easily succeed in trendier areas of research and are therefore driven towards my field. To our benefit, but maybe sad overall.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's hard for a pea-brain such as myself to cut through the bullshit, but it seems to me that if their proposal is to get rid of the state of Isreal, their small-printing around what they mean by "Zionism" is irrelevant. I am quite sickened by them and by many responses I am seeing on Bluesky.

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Reposted by Paul Whaley

flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If you’re not familiar with the way industry insiders, political hacks, oddball volunteers and some of the world’s largest media outlets regularly combine on idiotic stunts intentionally constructed to fool the public into believing drivel and bullshit, then “Climategate” is a handy place to begin.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Having been scorched by a few human evaluators, on this matter I for one welcome our new AI overlords - at least for triage, because the important thing here is doing better than the comparator. Obviously there are *really* dumb ways of doing this so 🤞 😬

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Wagner was very much the Michael Jackson of his day.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Don't get me started on the right sort of knife for doing this.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Excuse *me* but it's three of us., and I bet I've been doing it longer. How else do you get the top off properly, and have perfect quarters of peel down the sides?

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This is chaotic, I cannot imagine how a distributed research community will not continually cock-up data sharing. If it is difficult for a reasonable individual to judge where and how data can be shared, the policies and infrastructure are simply not fit for purpose. It has to be black and white.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

humph. Reminds me of when I was ragging on someone for doing very complicated stuff in two weeks to meet policy-maker deadlines, then sitting on it for nine months to get it published in a fancy journal. Unfortunately I was doing this in a "more of a comment than a question" bit at a conference but

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Detective work? Not at all, I'm just on one of the mailing lists where people are moaning about this instead of emailing the editors in question. :)))

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

So I have found out which journal. Looking at their website, it looks like they do not have the most sophisticated publishing architecture, so I suspect it is a mix of not really having the tool to communicate the policy properly, and they haven't planned it well, so it's very solvable.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Jurassic Park wouldn't be the same movie if it was 120 minutes of a surprisingly small dinosaur hiding quietly in a bush. Not a bad film, but a different film. :D

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Like, how often does anyone wear shoes that go CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP? Yet we always here people walking in a scene, so the visual has a sound. It's technically false, but it is a necessary language of film. Count the times you hear CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP when someone is wearing bloody sneakers, hahaha

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Fair points the whole way down, but I'm with the sound guys on this: if a thing happening in a movie is key to a scene, it needs to make a sound (unless you want to make a point of it being silent, of course - and even then, it probably wouldn't be silent but very quiet against background silence).

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Nobody said those are mutually exclusive properties.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

If they are not complete jerks, usually editors and publishers are happy to have constructive discussion of a policy, so it may be that all is not lost. They are trying to solve a problem, however inept the policy is and ill-thought-through the consequences.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Oh don't get me started on CHI, I know all about their ahem process from Miriam. :D

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Oooh, congrats on the position, I am 110% sure you'll do absolutely fine. If not, I find blaming the authors is the way to go. ;)

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I think this would fall under my general recommendation to researchers, which is not to submit to dumb-ass journals.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Can we say which journal it is? As policy, it sounds like a crazy edge case.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

My ancestors so suck it up and get back to the plough, losers.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I'll have you know that both my flashy website AND my CV are both profoundly out of date, thank you very much. (I guess that means the last version of them worked?)

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

oh shit no john redwood calls it this, reverse reverse

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

oh bollocks if we are redwooding by calling it the bayeux embroidery then i'm going back to tapestry

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

It's the Bayeux *Embroidery*, you fools!

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Ace. I went to Pittenweem Arts Festival for the first time this year, and it was bloody good - I had no idea that you just sort of chat with the artists about their stuff, and there was loads of very affordable, brilliant work - and I bought my first piece of original art. I feel proper grown-up.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

2/2 That word "limited" is doing a lot of heavy lifting: many systems could do better. But shifting to those systems is much harder than describing the features of those systems. (And focusing on features but not the shift is where I get grumpy and start shouting at people on Bluesky, verysorry 😬)

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This is key. We can all say "the solution is simple, we just need XYZ" but actually solving the problem (i.e. transitioning from where we are to where we want to be) is a freaking nightmare. In a limited sense, commercial publishing works really well: it provides a sustainable infrastructure. 1/2

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

IIRC: basically the deal is that publishers provide a system for both managing and measuring the value of the output of university activity, so govts can know their investment in higher ed is working. An alternative system needs to compete with that to replace it. I can vibe with this.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Someone said to me recently that although it looks that way to academics, it is a mistake to think that universities are the customers of publishers, or that publishers are in any way working like a B2C business. Actually (in a somewhat complicated way) it's governments who are the customers.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Spoiler alert: Noah tried to do research with editors. I feel like someone should've warned him.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Short answer: we can only externalise so many costs onto the employing institution, who anyway needs money; and revenue needs to be more consistent, spendable at discretion, and scale with effort than grant-based programmes can achieve. The financial model issues are very non-trivial, IMO.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

You can't safely say "metadata schema" around me, I get over-excited. Would you be able to include me on that? 🥹 I'm not sure how much I can contribute, but I have Ideas.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I love the model, but there are going to be commercial actors in the space because at some point someone is going to have to pay someone to curate. My learned society will need money for people's time, & maintaining a sustainable metadata standard and overlay infrastructure is not going to be free.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Fair enough, I am in grump mode today. I'm just tired of the incessant moaning and lack of trying anything different and the general misdiagnosis and brutal lack of understanding of the system everyone moans about, wants to change, and participates in anyway.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

3/2 (woops, I always do this). I am not defending rapacious behaviour by publishers but we need some perspective here. Nonsense like "they add zero value" is not going to move us forward when correcting incentives and complex systems requires a very clear grasp of where the value in fact is. Bah.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

2/2 There is also the infrastructure for manuscript review, indexing, and discovery, which everyone seems to forget about and for sure could be a LOT better, but is far from a nothing. It has sustained for quite a long time now, replacing that is not trivial.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Come on, don't be basic: if they added zero value (which is not true) then we wouldn't keep coughing up APCs to publish our crappy, self-interested manuscripts. They provide a service (citation count) that academics *really* want. Breaking the incentive cycle is going to be very hard. 1/2

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I did not guess and it is fantastic.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I got every word right in that bleet.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

On Friday I dropped Tractatus Proposition 6.54 into the chat in a team meeting, a propos how much methodological information we need to be include in a white paper we are working on. Anyway, I'm now out of a job, divorced, and I have lost all my friends.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Don't know who needs to hear this but repayments can be negotiated with HMRC if you are finding this difficult. (You might have it in hand, this is a PSA). One reason I have an accountant is she calculates the set-aside I need for payments on account, which is amazing for innumerate little me.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I found it quite hard to figure out what you are arguing for. If you are arguing that adult smokers should have easy access to vapes as an alternative to cigarettes, you are right - but that needs to be administered as a public health intervention, not a free-for-all, and you sound pro-free-for-all.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Funnily enough, in relation to our pile, I have opinions about completion certificates and the lack thereof as well.

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Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Vaping is much better than smoking, but not vaping is much better than vaping. So vaping needs to be sold and regulated as a way of getting people off smoking, not the multicolour nightmare adolescent introduction to nicotine addiction that it currently is.

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