Hey! Yes, sure, ping me at a dot lipp at ucl dot ac dot uk!

That’s great to hear. Would you be happy to share the data about this? I would be keen to hear how that’s going…

what is telling about UUK response is it focuses only on financial costs. EU students in U.K. dropped from 27% to 5% overnight after Brexit. There is clear latent demand that is not being met! As we have learned, student numbers is no limit, so why not diversify where students are coming from!

A proposal that would improve the university sector, bring in external investment and help normalise EU relations… so obviously the gov and UUK are dead against it

Good! I have been keeping a list of other vital environmental datasets and models that were publicly funded but now sit behind a paywall (looking at you CEH 👀). Can we initiate some community efforts to open up all such datasets? A digital right-to-roam as it were…

💯… Sewage pollution is “easy” (ish) to monitor: it’s literally a pipe. Agriculture is so much harder because it’s a diffuse source and not just one evil company to point the finger at… 🤷

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... “‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question”

The student-loan system now actively subsidises the rest of the state, fails to adequately support HE, *and* has punitive life-long repayment terms for students 🫠

Graduates are paying more and getting less Jim Dickinson traces how a student loans system once sold as cost-sharing has become one where graduates fund everything – and where Labour has quietly reversed promises to make things fairer Jim Dick...

wonkhe.com/blogs/gradua...
Remarkable quote: "We’ve gone from government suggesting that the state would subsidise undergraduate student loans by about 45p in the pound, to making a profit on them for that cohort."

🚨 Pre-announcement! 🚨

We’re hiring for 2 x two-year, full-time roles to join me and the wider @palaeoverse.bsky.social team @es-ucl.bsky.social.

- Research Software Engineer (REF: B04-06999): lnkd.in/eNRBiPnP

- Community Engagement Coordinator (REF: B04-06998): lnkd.in/ejUACCzn

This was a very fun project to work on, with some neat stats & maths from fractals to fluid mechanics. We were surprised that for such a high profile dataset like sewage spills there had been such limited public statistical analysis until now! 💩 🧮 🧑‍💻

eartharxiv.org/repository/v... 8/8

How to form, publish and maintain your drainage and wastewater management plan (DWMP)

This matters because water companies now need to create hydraulic models of thousands of CSOs to reduce their spilling… but unless they can model infiltration (hard!) they are likely to underestimate the frequency of the most damaging, long duration spills! 7/
www.gov.uk/government/p...

What causes the heavy tail? When trying to replicate it using hydraulic models we can only do so by including infiltration of groundwater into pipes through cracks… this suggests that these long duration spills are *not* only occurring after heavy rain…

eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

6/

We think this is driven by daily fluctuations in water usage (🚿 💩) which modulates the length of sewage spills…

eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

5/

A total (and cool 🤓) surprise for us, was the discovery of a periodic variation of the misfit to this modelled trend, fluctuating around spills that are multiples of 24 hours long… what’s causing this?

eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

4/

Statistically, this tail is well described by a stretched exponential distribution. It’s not quite as heavy as a power law, but much heavier than a vanilla exponential…

eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

3/

We find that sewage spills follow a very heavy-tailed distribution. 10% of spills account for 85% of all spilling *time*. So, it’s not the infrequent, short spills we should care about, it’s the infrequent long ones…

eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

2/

In our 💫 new preprint 💫 Barney Dobson & I drill into the statistics behind “shitty” headlines like these about the number & duration of sewage pollution spills.

We analyse a dataset of nearly 4 million individual #sewage spill events… 1/

eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

Is this all subjects? Undergrad & postgrad?

OTOH the environment agency *is* massively under-resourced so not totally their fault, *but* this defence is totally inappropriate… You’re an arm of the State, it’s right and good to be subject to criticism and you need to respond to it better than “uwu don’t be so mean” 🙄

Many people believe that the way to attract people to the geosciences is via logical, utilitarian returns on an undergraduate degree.

But left unexplored is the power of the field's inherent irrational, cosmic horror to command attention.

It's 2nd only to astronomy in that, & much more immediate.

I mean c’mon you’re the CEH! You famously study things that are naturally messy and green and blue! Why opt for…. black with very hard lines?!

so pleased everyone is choosing such unique and distinctive typefaces

Another research institute opting for “short lived AI start-up chic” in their (no doubt vastly expensive) rebranding I see

Finally, the scientific models used by agencies to model nutrient pollution are _remarkably_ opaque and under scrutinised given their ubiquitous importance (as I have written about previously: alexlipp.github.io/posts/2024/0...)

also the population change assumes (iirc) its all *new* population into catchment, rather than say residents moving *within* catchment (=no net increase). so, population density increasing due to limited supply would be a “win” for nutrient neutrality…

you’re right on the gist (nutrient neutrality is mad) but actually population growth *is* linear with nutrient outflow (ie it’s not a capacity thing). Problem is builders can’t pay to increase treatment efficiency at existing plants (!?) even though that can work…

The perfect conditions continue 😎 🌞!

… and blessed with some Aurora Borealis too! #studygeologyandseethenorthernlights

Stunning conditions (and enthusiastic students!) for the first few days of the @es-ucl.bsky.social mapping course in North West Scotland! ☀️ ⛰️ ⚒️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🗺️ #fieldworkfriday

Neat idea from psephology that might be useful for geological ternary plots too. Similar to the 4 component solid solution of garnet.