In case you missed it, and you want to take a moment for some perspective - the James Webb space telescope has completed it’s alignment of it’s mirrors, and you can see some of the test images here - https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/wp-content/uploads/sites/326/2022/04/webb_img_sharpness_details_v2.png. The vast majority of the dots in thes...

#blog #publihsing #open-science I recently joined the board of Dryad. My old friend Jennifer Gibson is now leading the organisation, I'm excited for it's future. A few months ago she wrote a few posts covering thoughts on the future of research communication. They are well worth reading. You can catch them: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 ...

#blog/posted #blog/weekly-reads Here are some of the more interesting things I've looked at over the last few weeks. Posting and reading volume has dropped. Things are busy, there are many distractions. 1. https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/03/25/russian-plugin-go-fuck-yourself/ This is the most important link I have posted on this blog this ye...

Looking at the remix framework - https://remix.run/docs- we are experimenting with this right now at work. I am well past deeply understanding how many of these frameworks operate, and anything much beyond MVC is a bit beyond me, but we have very good people working on this right now. We have been using Vercel for a while with static s...

Here is my reading list over the last week: 1. Giuseppe Sollazzo has one of the best jobs, and best newsletters. He is head of AI skunkworks at the NHS and has a newsletter 'a quantum of sollazzo' https://buttondown.email/puntofisso/archive/451-quantum-of-sollazzo/. In this piece he is interviewed about whether the NHS can do AI? Giuse...

Yesterday I wrote to my MP to ask them to continue to advocate for improved support for Ukrainian refugees. I am publicly posting this in the hope that it encourages others to write to their MPs. Dear Meg, As your constituent, I am writing to ask you to continue to advocate for relaxed visa requirements for asylum seekers from Ukraine....

Well, that was a swish of activity over the last few weeks, with an intense session at work, and juggling school half term, so I’ve not read around as much as usual. Here are some links of interest from the last few weeks. 1. A brief article by the ever amazing Gina Neff (https://twitter.com/ginasue) — [We need a radical new approach t...

Today I chaired a small panel discussion for the Friends of the NLM group on the topic of AI and NLP tooling in the scholarly literature. You can see the outline of the workshop here: https://www.fnlm.org/product/lessons-from-covid-19-finding-synthesizing-and-communicating-research-that-matters/ and on the panel I chaired were Lucy Wan...

This news piece in Fortune by Gina Neff is worth reading - https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/we-need-a-radical-new-approach-to-tackle-scientific-misinformation-online-covid-vaccine-hesitancy-gina-neff/. It's a quick overview on the Royal Society report about the online information environment (https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projec...

Oh internet, you do have so so many things to read! Here are some of the things that piqued my interest in week 3 (and still so so many unread open browser tabs). 1. A nice twitter thread that builds towards a takedown of the strong Sapir whorf hypothesis - that language shaped our behaviour in fundamentally important social aspects. T...

When we think about the architecture of the scholarly publishing landscape an interesting aspect is that we have a diverse scale of publishers, many journals, and the ability to scale up in areas of new research by simply launching new journals. In addition we have de-facto standards similar metadata standards, an idea of what peer rev...

# 2022 week2 - interesting links #blog Welcome to week two of 2022, here are some things across the web that caught my attention. 1. Congratulations to Tasha Mellins-Cohen who has been appointed project director for project counter, what a great appointment!! https://twitter.com/TashaMellCoh/status/1480907285866192896?s=20 2. There are...

I've just finished reading The agile comms handbooks by Giles Turnbull (https://gilest.org/index.html). It is an easy read filled with wisdom about how to make communication both genuine, and if not easy, at least not painful. I grew up in product managment in London in the early aughties, and so a lot of my experiences were formed by ...

Welcome to 2022! At the end of week 1 here are some things across the web that caught my attention this week. 1. Invest in Open launched their catalog of open infrastructure services. Announcing the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) From their website: IOI was founded to help increase adoption and investment in the open in...

#book/review #wittgenstein Earlier this year I finished Ray Monk’s outstanding Ludwig Wittgenstein - the duty of genius - the comprehensive biography of the philosopher. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ludwig-Wittgenstein-Genius-Ray-Monk/dp/0099883708. The below review was written at the time, and I clearly ran out of time to complete the rev...

2021 ended up being a good year for me, in terms of climbing, in spite of some headwinds that I had to navigate. 2020 was obviously heavily disrupted due to the lockdowns in the UK, but I signed up for the lattice home training program, and that worked really well in terms of increasing my finger strength. I wrote up my experiences of ...

This editorial came out in eLife last week - https://elifesciences.org/articles/75830, giving a overview of the completion of the reproducibility project - in which a select set of key findings in cancer biology would be reproduced, with external funding. It has taken seven years to complete. Seven years! I was at eLife when this initi...

I've just been browsing through the agenda for Force2021 - https://force2021.sched.com. I have missed a lot of great conferences over the last few years. I managed to make ConTech live in person this year, but I missed Charleston, I missed being able to attend really any of AWS re-invent - even virtually. I don't think PIDAPALOOZA took...

This tweet https://twitter.com/RiederB/status/1469234889593696256?s=20 has a nice quote from this 2005 paper on the histories of computing: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/histories/ISR119.pdf The quote is: “But in the end, computation is about rewriting strings of symbols. The transformations themselves are strictly sy...

The following paper - https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1139702911 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 (by the way, as an aside FU dimensions, for basically hiding the outbound link to ArXiV on your webpage (grey, no hyperlink indication, and the thing that looks like a link just links to another dimensions page - super sh...

https://mindthegraph.com/ is an interesting service. It has a web app that allows you to create infographics based on a library of about 40,000 scientific graphics (they have created something to represent the most common concepts in science, so you plug them in to your visualisation, saving you time, and removing the need for you to p...

EU-PMC has posted some information on how it is going to display notices of withdrawals of preprints - http://blog.europepmc.org/2021/12/transparency-for-preprints.html. The metadata is carried under the "PUB_TYPE" tag (though one might argue that the state change is more to do with an action on a particularly type of publication, rath...

#NLP #future-of-knowledge #STEM #publishing There are too many papers, there are too many researchers, for any one person, group, or small network, to keep abreast of, so the future must be one where machines are doing a significant amount of the reading for us. That will require so many things, and amongst them are available high qual...

#conference/contechlive/2021/11/London "after content, the emerging world of information and intelligence" - David Worlock I am at ConTech Live - the first time that I've been to an in-person conference for the first time since the pandemic. The opening session is a peek into the future by David Warlock. It's a good session. In a nutsh...

The following article on the guardian: (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/big-techs-push-for-automation-hides-the-grim-reality-of-microwork) shines a light on the wage precarity of those who take on digital tasks on platforms such as Mechanical Turk. I do think that the article brings together two different kinds of...

This announcement from CUP crossed my radar this week - https://www.thebookseller.com/news/cups-research-directions-offers-new-journals-concept-1285697. It's really interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing what is launched. The press release outlines the ambition of the project as such: "In contrast to the traditional, self-conta...

This post (https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-recognize-when-tech-is-leading-us-down-a-slippery-slope-747116da2de) by Clive Thompson (https://clivethompson.medium.com) on technology slippery slopes is an excellent read. As technologists we have a duty of care to think about the implications of the tools that we are creating, and what I ...

I've been meaning to write about eLife's executable research articles (ERA) for some time. This (https://elifesciences.org/labs/51777514/elife-authors-relay-their-experiences-with-executable-research-articles) recent set of Q&A's with authors who have used them is a great prompt to set down some thoughts. These papers are backed by a c...

This post is more of a personal post, but there are a lot of interesting things to share about this topic, so I hope you will bear with me. Last Thursday, the 8th of July, I got a positive PCR test for having contracted COVID. This is after having had both jabs of the vaccine. My first vaccination was on the 13th of April and my second...

Mckinsey have just published a very readable overview of the skills we will need to foster for the future: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work# You can see a close up of the skills laid out here: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mck...