Corpus 2

[TokyoBouncyBall]

A summary would be good and I might do one later but Aston, data scraping, astonishing lack of contrition…

I think for you, even if you don't tell us what was said, it might help you work out how bad the department is if you talk to her and see what her experience was like. It could be just some individuals but from today's cock up as well its looking like something is seriously wrong at Aston University!

To be fair, they've probably been too busy trying to blame each other and running around like their arses are on fire.

Running around with your arse on fire? Do Aston do a PhD in that? Sign me up!

Can I help with the data collection?

We may need to promise participants a few sessions with a therapist to get it past the ethics committee.

A PhD in Hagitude and Fuckery from ArseonFire University.

😂😂😂

From the html version, Nicci MacLeod, Tamineh Tayebi and Pam Lowe

research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/nicci-macleod

research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/dr-tahmineh-tayebi

research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/pam-lowe

@ethicling DD will be applying for linguistics + MFL next year- do you have any thoughts on where is reputable. Ta!

@TokyoBouncyBall feel free to PM me. It depends (somewhat) on her areas of interest and if she wants to combine with a specific language.

Oxford for Modern Languages and Linguistics is probably the most prestigious, unsurprisingly. Edinburgh also is strong for joint degrees with MFL.

Your wish is my command

discussions over how horrifc hot weetabix is.

Not just any hot weetabix. Hot weetabix with... I can scarcely bring myself to say it... banana not envy

Weetabix with cold milk otoh is heaven, and one of the things I can never eat again. So sad.

But, important public service announcement, it your arse is on fire DON'T RUN

Stop. Drop. Roll.

I'm so proud!

@GCITC Thanks for the names. I was just curious; the text had been redacted on the html by the time I found it.

I'd wondered if the inadequate supervision problem and approval for the PhD topic had gone wider than Aston but obviously it hasn't. I've known people doing PhDs who've had supervisors from different universities with their main one being at the university where they were enrolled. Although it adds complications, I wonder if it benefits everyone to filter thinking through, one hopes, a wider safety net of good practice.

To have all supervisors employed by Aston (whose own ethics monitoring and ability to even keep their own staff's data safe, let alone the stuff they've taken without permission) and to have the main supervisor as an ex-Aston student herself whose own PhD is raising questions about ethics on here, makes it look as if the problem is in danger of self-perpetuating.

It's also occurred to me this morning that there is no way of proving that any of the posts on MN are from adults is there? There are plenty of articulate under-18s out there. We can make assumptions that we are talking to adults, but none of us know for sure.

@ArabellaScott I'm so proud! And so you should be 😀

Aston is a shoddy institution with poor governance and without even a basic understanding of ethics.

I just wanted to repeat this excellent part of a post as I thought it aptly summed up where we are.

There's no way of proving that any of the posts on MN are from humans. There have certainly been threads where people (including me) became convinced that the naive questioning OP was an IT construct.

And even ones that are from humans may be from linguistics students constructing straw men that they can attack and expose.

The whole discipline seems an ouroboros living in quicksand inhabited by weasels.

There was the thread where the chat bot malfunctioned!😁

There's no way of proving all MN posts aren't Winnading using many socks. Or children working in a sweatshop overseas. Or bots. Or an army of TRAs.

Ouroborus/quicksand/weasel sounds accurate, and for much of academia tbh

Ethics committee?

And I posted some posts on behalf of another posters 14 year old daughter using the daughters chosen username once. What do they do with that? And whilst everyone in the thread knew that was what I was doing how many other posts are there out there that aren't actually written by the person who posts it?

ethicling, the first part of your post... the clap emoji is inadequate to express how incredibly glad I am that you have spelt this out.

Can I suggest someone makes sure @JustineMumsnet know about all this. Maybe email with relevant original screenshots etc.

Aston's response to P. Murray's FOI request is in. It's startlingly short and doesn't answer all the questions.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ethics_and_data_protection_for_t

Aston have responded to the other FOI request
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ethics_and_data_protection_for_t/response/2664248/attach/html/4/FOI%20Response%20FOI%202324%20215%2022.05.24.pdf.html

Please send to me any and all records that you hold about the ethics
approval and Data Protection Act 2018 due diligence surrounding
acquisition of the source material for the "Toward linguistic explanation of
idiolectal variation – understanding the black box" conference talk found at
At the time this project was conducted the University’s ethics procedures not require approval for projects which used publicly available online

nd listed as a research data and did not involve interaction with human participants. The output at research.aston.ac.uk/en/publications/toward-linguistic- University’s data retention policy recommends that records relating to explanation-of-idiolectal-variation-understandi ethical approval be kept for six years from project closure. As ethics approval was not required in this case, we have checked whether records are still available and we confirm they are no longer held. In particular, pertaining to: # Minutes and ethics committee decisions pertaining to the approval of the research presented at this talk. Data protection # Consent obtained from forum operators to scrape these datasets. The project dataset contained usernames linked to posts, in the same form # Consent obtained from forum operators to store and analyse these as they were originally posted on Mumsnet. Usernames do not constitute datasets. personal data unless the user has chosen a name which can be linked to # The justification used under Data Protection Act 2018 to store and their real identity. The researchers did not attempt to link usernames to analyse special category personal data about the health conditions, sex real world identities. Neither usernames nor personal names have been lives, political opinions, sexual orientations, and philosophical and religious included in published research. This dataset has been deleted.

It took them that long to write that??