Simon Waldman

Seriously, MS? seems you can't update an Outlook appointment that has a Teams meeting associated without an Internet connection.

Other gripes aside, Outlook used to be pretty good at letting you work offline and then syncing up.

But with recent features they seem to have given up on this.

Q for those who understand elec markets. This is pitched as encouraging data centres to be built in places with constrained generation. But shouldn't PPA market do that anyway? Is gov intervention needed?

#energysky

Brits to foot power bill for datacenters under UK AI plans : Cheaper electricity to lure bit barns north as planning fast-track kicks in

www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/u...

UK to subsidise electricity for AI data centres.

Errr...

Reminder about this #PhD project with me on #tidal #renewable #energy! Applications close on 28th November.

Boiler Upgrade Scheme: Government set to expand scheme to include air conditioning heat pumps Government expands heat pump scheme to include heat batteries and 'air-to-air devices' that can cool homes in summer, despite speculation over budget cuts

Heat pumps news! DESNZ is expanding the Boiler Upgrade Scheme to cover air to air heat pumps and heat batteries.
Both will be eligible for a £2,500 grant if it fully replaces a gas or oil boiler…

www.businessgreen.com/news/4521952...

Universities: "everybody gets rejected for funding, there's a lot of lucky involved, you just have to keep on trying"

Also universities: "we will punish you if you don't increase your grant income by this date"

#AcademicSky

Funders can drive change. Authors can't. Authors are producers, not consumers. Producers don't decide demand, consumers do. Funders and research institutes must demand change of their authors, or withhold their funds. It's that simple. Funders have all the cards.

10/n

Back on track:

Funders hold all the cards. There's this flawed view that authors are consumers and journals are producers. Wrong.

Funders and institutes are consumers. They contract authors to produce research, and they pay for journals to QC the work.

Funders are the consumers.

8/n

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions.

We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards.

6/n

2. Stopping the drain Back in the 1950s, when for-profit journal publishing was just getting going, British scientific leaders predicted that ‘the moment commercial gain began to dominate this field, the welfare of the scientific community would suffer’ (1). They were right – and it is past time that we acted. The first step we must take is to recognize the seriousness of the problems that scientific publishing’s engagement with for-profit publishing have become.

More fundamentally, every active scientist has been brought up in a system where The Drain was already normalized.

This system hasn't always existed. For-profit publishers are a recent invention. Their value proposition has always been awful, and now they are actively eroding trust in science.

5/n

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Flow Interactions of Tidal Stream Energy : Understanding how large tidal farms will affect each other (based in Orkney) at Heriot-Watt University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Flow Interactions of Tidal Stream Energy : Understanding how large tidal farms will affect each other (based in Orkney) at Heriot-Watt University, listed on FindAPhD.com

#PhD with me, using numerical modelling to study how large-scale #tidal #energy farms will affect one another.

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Contact me on simon.waldman@hw.ac.uk if you have questions or would like an informal chat.

Please send to anybody appropriate, & circulate to networks!

Scholarships to study with us in #Orkney next year!

Register your interest here:

www.hw.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

Eligible programmes are,

* MSc Renewable & Sustainable Energy Transition
* MSc Marine Renewable Energy
* MSc International Marine Science

Please pass around appropriate networks :-)

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

#AcademicSky

Not unexpected, given everything, but not good. Hard choices for NOAA. I don't know how much of a hole this puts in the Pacific tsunami warning system further afield.
It's so sad and frustrating to see America pull apart some of its greatest assets in real time. It will take longer to rebuild.

The "Is this a pigeon meme", but with Springer Nature thinking another open access journal is useful for open research.

Cooking up some memes for a @reproducibilitea.org session on Open Research next week. This is gonna be fun!

TIL that if you try to contact a journal editor through Elsevier's web system, it sends an email on your behalf to an address that autoreplies "This mailbox is not monitored".

Good to see those APCs at work! 🙃

Net zero by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5°C. That may have been plausible 10 years ago, but the continued rise of emissions means that there is effectively no carbon budget left for 1.5. It is cumulative emissions that drives warming. 1/6 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Should We Let Public Transit Die? Urban-rural hostility is fueling a public transportation crisis in US cities. But demands to abandon bus and train riders ignore the economic and social costs of cutting service.

"If you drive to the mall, bus riders subsidize you. "

Interesting article looking at public transit costs in the US, and how this relates to the urban/rural divide.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Astonishing when you see it like this.

It is a really annoying waste of my time when online students book appointments but never show up.

Perhaps there could be some arrangement whereby if they don't show, they agree to do some bit of tedious admin for me instead? 😉

#AcademicSky

Is academic research becoming too competitive? Nature examines the data Applications for European research grants increased in 2025. Scientists say they’re feeling the competition.

Success rates for Europe’s leading research grants are declining as a surge in applications far outweighs the funds available

go.nature.com/479Sni6

If you're going to spam #AcademicSky with recruitment, could you at least specify the field or topic of the postdoc position? Then people could know whether to click through.

Government aims to create 400,000 jobs through UK national green energy plan Scheme will offer training for plumbers, welders and carpenters as well as promoting trade union recognition

4️⃣0️⃣0️⃣,0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣

Number of jobs that the Government aims to create as it unveiled a scheme to double the number of people working in green industries by 2030
www.theguardian.com/environment...

I don't think the gov has to be actively anti-HE to explain their actions. I think broadly speaking they don't care about HE, but are very pro-tabloid-headlines and see international students as a problem to be solved. HE is collateral damage. IMBW, and in practical terms the results are the same 😞

A picture of a foggy street

Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage

My take is that they don't have any particular wishes about the number of HE providers - but they heard the idea of numbers caps from UCU and others, asked their buddies in the Russel Group for advice, and came up with this twist on the policy....

Clearly government has read what #UCU is telling them about numbers caps, misunderstood the reasons behind it, asked their buddies in the Russel Group for advice, and come up with a new policy that looks a little like what was asked for, but will be worse than doing nothing.

Lest this sound like a humblebrag, I should mention that it's on a Top Downloads list with 41 lifetime downloads. I don't think that list is very hard to get on!

When I recently submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal, they offered to put it on their preprint database SSRN at the same time as it went out for review. Great!

But now SSRN is bombarding me daily with emails saying "Your paper was listed on the Top Downloads list today!"

spam spam spam spam sp