I listened to the episode about the 1872 four-year long Challenger expedition to investigate the oceans of the earth. I’d not known much about this before listening to the episode. In 1870, Charles Wyville Thomson (right), Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, persuaded the Royal Society of London to ask the British Gov...

Generative AI, characterised by tools like GhatGPT and MidJourney, has been taking the internet by storm, and they raise so many interesting questions about the nature of expertise, tools to support human creativity, and how AI is going to intersect with humans in the near and long term. There is a world of a difference between reading...

#inourtime/notes/greece The most recent episode of in our time that I listened to was about Demosthenes' Philippics - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f4ws. This is what I learnt. I’d hear about these works before but hadn’t realised that they are named after a person - Philipp of Macedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_...

#blog#inourtime/notes/poo I enjoy listening to in our time ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl), a radio show touching on all things cultural and scientific. I’ve listened to many episodes, but rarely retain any information. I’m going to blog short notes on what I learn from the episodes. This post is about the great stink of 1...

Deep science ventures opened up applications for its phd program - https://apply.workable.com/deep-science-ventures/j/58DD353058/. The idea is to embed a PhD program within a startup incubator, with a focus on transformative technologies that can help with challenges such as climate change. Their portfolio of projects is inspirational ...

Someone pointed out GlassHealth to me - https://blog.glass.health/company/ - a new startup that is building tools to help doctors. Their first tool is Glass Notebook, an online notebook for doctors to track their information, inspired by tooling like Notion, and dare I say it tools like ToddlyWiki. This whole area of semi-structured do...

Our knowledge world is in the process of a shift in affordances. The development of large language models is creating tools and assistants that will change how we interact with information. I feel sometimes that I have a seat near the window, looking out at these changes happening before my eyes, but being separated from them, as I'm n...

Following a post on the topic from Nate Mattis, I realised that it’s not enough to just use twitter less. You kind of have to tell folks that you are using it less. The reason is that it’s important to how our decision effect the network, for the network to be able to sense what is happening (broadly). One way to do this is to use a bo...

Are you a science blogger? Do you blog about your science? If so martijn Fenner has just launched a new service that might be interesting for you - the rogue scholar - https://rogue-scholar.org/#features. You point it at your blog feed and it provides full text indexing, assignment of a DOI and preservation. I love this idea. The norms...

I'd like to introduce you to Niamh Martins: This is her research biography: “Niamh Martins is an early career researcher and professor of ecology at the University of Galway in Ireland. She received her undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Dublin, and went on to earn her master's and PhD in ecology from the University...

year in review - 2022 climbing A good year. About 290 Boulder problems climbed in contrast to 315 in 2021, but there has been a good shift in difficulty with 73 V4s in 2022 vs 45 in 2021, and in 2022 I tried v5s about 60 times, succeeding 7 times, compared to a much lower attempt rate in 2021. In 2020 I only did 7 V4s, so this is good ...

This video about continuous code review is excellent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYFruezJEDs. The main takeaway is that in order to get reasonable throughout along with retaining code quality, you need to look to techniques of cop creation (pairing or mobbing). Taking a economic systems approach to what happens with pull requests the...

This talk from James Evans from 2019 is a great synopsis of the findings of his group about how small disconnected teams are much more valuable for science than large tightly connected teams. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XSAlAcGwW8c&t=950s&pp=2AG2B5ACAQ%3D%3D It’s an insight that rings true - more independent investigation of reality ...

Going Digital by Lyndsey Jones and Balvinder Singh Powar This is a micro-review of the the book Going Digital - what it takes for smoother transitions - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Going-Digital-Lyndsey-Jones/dp/1292375671/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21PD84V32VU1J&keywords=going+digital+book&qid=1671652221&sprefix=goi%2Caps%2C1966&sr=8-1. Overall I r...

I was reading through this update on open science news from September (I’m on a kick to try and read through all of my open browser tabs before the end of the year) https://council.science/current/blog/open-science-round-up-september-2022/ It’s a really good update with a lot of activity happening. The general sense I get is around dis...

Taking a moment to look back at the past week there have been a few really nice highlights. This was STM week. The Startup fair on the Tuesday was a real highlight. It was one of the best SSP events that I've been too. I'll write up some notes about some of the startups that I saw there - eventually. I missed the FutureLab meeting on t...

If you ever want to get into plotting data in Python then please do check out this site - https://aeturrell.github.io/coding-for-economists/vis-common-plots.html It shows you how to create the same graph in a number of different popular graphing libraries in Python, a great resource.

The recent release of ChatGPT is all I am reading about, and I'm having a lot of fun playing with it too. It's shifting the goalposts on what is hard for an AI, so it seems like a good point to link to this post - https://clivethompson.medium.com/when-robots-attack-83102761c6d5 which talks about Moravec's Paradox - it's easy to make ma...

I'm a very bit fan of Amazon Web Services. Every role that I have had since 2010 has involved some level of involvement with AWS and now the scale of services provided, and the pace of change, are just too large and rapid for me to keep on top of. AWS Reinvent just wrapped up and this page https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/top-announcem...

#book/review I read a lot of science fiction when is as growing up, and I was by far more of an Isaac Asimov reader than an Arthur c Clark reader, so my coverage of the classics in the genre from art Chue c Clark is pretty low. In the summer my brother in law was reading rendezvous with Rama and when he finished he gave me the copy. I ...

(a scientist writing a paper with a robot - Dalle) Within the last week papers with code and Facebook released Galactica - a large language model trained on the scientific research literature. https://galactica.org. It looks like you could download the model and get started with it pretty quickly (though I failed to get it running on a...

(How I imagine peer review works - via Stable Diffusion) #blog/draft #publihsing #stm #peer-review #elife eLife announced a new peer review model a few weeks back that will be fully rolled out by end of Jan 2023. It’s received a lot of attention, so you may have heard about it already. This post outlines the model, some reactions to it...

I hardly cut any code any more, but that doesn't stop me being interested in tooling. My language of choice for many years has been python, and the following post: https://til.simonwillison.net/duckdb/parquet is a nice short overview of how to use DuckDB (https://duckdb.org) to query parquet files blazingly fast. Simon manages to sum o...

This post from Isabel Thompson - https://typeshare.co/isabelthompson/posts/7-questions-darpa-developed-to-assess-research-proposals talks about seven questions to ask about a research proposal. It reminded me of advice from paul graham: # Paul Graham’s Advice Who is your user? What problem are you helping them with? Why is this a probl...

(a male tech billionaire wearing a puffer jacket, pouring petrol over a stack of burning library books, photo, life magazine - Dalle) #blog #twitter #altmetrics #predictions Caveat first, there is a lot to unpack with Musk's purchase of twitter. Twitter operates at scale, as individuals it is very hard for us to reason about systems at...

A few years ago Wiley bought Atypon, the main hosting provider for their journals. That kind of made sense — owning the infrastructure that you run on. At the time it caused conniptions amongst other publishers who were hosted on Atypon (I was working at SAGE at the time. For a period of time there was a palpable fury in some quarters)...

“At a conference in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, British cognitive psychologist and “godfather” of AI, said radiologists would soon go the way of typesetters and bank tellers: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better.”” Obviously today we have not...

(broken ceramic sample after a compression test - via Sylvain Deville generated by OpenAI) Inspired by this twitter thread - https://twitter.com/DevilleSy/status/1567412785897676800?s=20&t=CcZeMymoXFtaRliENhytUA I was wondering what it would look like when researchers start to use new image generation tools to manipulate or fabricate d...

(a hurdle race, where the hurdles are made out of internet browsers”) A paper on ArXiV looking at the impact of code quality on delivery . one caveat is that the study is from a company that offers tools to look at code quality, but the takeaway is that their measures indicate that “poor” code quality on average doubles time for develo...

Ian × DALL·E | a friendly robot goes to secondary school for the first day, still from a studio Ghibli film. My son is just entering year six in primary school. That means that over the next few months we have to visit secondary schools in our area to learn which ones we want to apply to. The schools all have different visiting dates, ...