Discover great authors from HEY World

SAGE 10 year impact awards

I just noticed that SAGE are continuing to announce the 10 year impact awards - https://group.sagepub.com/press-releases/sages-10-year-impact-awards-recognize-research-with-long-term-influence. The pull quote from Ziyad covers it well “Short-term measures of research impact fail to account for the many ways in which scholarship continu...

In our time - Persuasion

#Inourtime the title was [[title]] The tags were: [[hashtags]] episode link I know very little about the life or world of Jane Austin, so it was a delight to listen to this episode. My aim with this series of posts is to note down things that I had learnt, however as I knew so little before it would take too long to write, so I’ll keep...

Will AIs be scared if AIs, who cares?

There is a line of thinking about AI that fears the emergence of super-powerful AI. This paper https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-the-risks-and-impact-of-artificial-intelligence/ says that an AI that is capable of building a super powerful AI won’t do that because it will be as scared of the negative consequences as we are. Look, ...

things I've been reading - week 19 - 2023

Things I’ve been reading this week: • https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither - the cost of fine-tuning GPT-capable models is going from $100M dollars to $600!! • https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/finetuning-large-language-models - a good overview of approaches on fine-tuning • https://www.lorcandempsey....

NIH Data Science Scholarships

The NIH has a set of data science scholarships for US citizens or residents. Tyler Beck writes: "Please check out this year’s topics here: https://datascience.nih.gov/data-scholars-2023 Specifically related to LitCoin, one scholar will have the opportunity to take the output NLP systems from the LitCoin NLP Challenge and coalesce the b...

in our time notes - Tycho Brahe

#inourtime/notes #astronomy Episode - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hnlf I’d give this episode a solid B. I already knew quite a bit about Brahe from my background in astrophysics. Much of my internal impression came from reading Arthur Koestler’s the sleepwalkers many years ago - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sleepwalkers-History-Ch...

Some recent reads from around the web - week18

• Last week I attend the Dryad (Dryad) board meeting - Dryad is a not for profit that helps researchers share research data. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for some time (a deck I presented on the topic 10 years ago - https://speakerdeck.com/ianmulvany/connecting-data-and-literature). The meeting was generously hosted by the ...

Dryad board meeting 2023

I’ve just landed back in london after attending the dryad board meeting. I have the great privilege of being the treasurer of dryad. We worked hard for two and a half days to assess the current state of dryad and to draft sone strategic goals for the next three years. I feel folk left with the feeling of a job well done. It was a great...

Rawls - in our time.

#inourtime/notes#blog This was another great episode of in our time about Rawls’ theory of justice. Episode link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001h4bz This is what I learnt: • he was a fully 20th century philosopher, born 1921, died 2002. For sone reason I’d always assumed that he was 19th century. • the podcast points to the deat...

London Generative AI hackathon - some reflections

Last weekend I took part in a generative AI hackathon in london. Huge thanks to xx and Victoria Stoyanova and Sarah Drinkwater for organising it. (Sarah's writeup - https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-run-a-generative-ai-hackathon-dc27f8d4fdd0). It was hosted by Entrepreneur First and sponsored by Amazon, the British Medical Journal, ...

Some recent reads about how to think about large language models

I have been doing a lot of reading about large language models in the last few weeks. Here are some of the more thought provoking pieces that I’ve read. I’m pulling out quotes from these pieces, what I think is important about them, and some reflections on them. I don’t fully agree with everything in these posts, but they have all been...

In our time - superconductivity

#inourtime/notes #blog/draft #superconductivity #physics A few weeks ago I listened to the in our time episode on superconductivity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hfpc It was a really enjoyable episode, though I can’t recall a lot from the episode, I did learn a few things. The phenomenon was discovered accidentally in 1911 by K...

I have just built my first Safari Extension!

I often have a desire to copy a bunch of URLS from my current safari window, for example if I am opening tabs while at a meeting, to look at the resources that are being mentioned. I might want to capture them later in some notes. I was wondering whether there might be a way to easily grab all links that I have open in my tabs, but ins...

The Challenger Expedition - 1872

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...

BMJ is sponsoring an AI Hackathon in London in April

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...

In our time - The philippics.

#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_...

A note on technological disruption, unintended consequences, and poo

#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...

A nee way of structuring a phd

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 ...

What are the hard problems in innovating in healthcare?

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...

usage shapes computing, computing shapes usage

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...

Martin Fenner has launched a science blog indexing service

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...

A scaled way to step back from twitter.

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...

This researcher does not exist

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...

My 2022 in review

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 ...

async code reviews kill throughput.

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...

How team composition affects science.

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 ...

Micro Book Review - Going Digital

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...

What trends in open science make me think about.

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...

Some quick reflections on week 49

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...

what will be hard and what will be easy with AI

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...

What looks interesting in AWS going in to 2023?

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...

a nice resource for learning how to graph things

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.

book review - rendezvous with Rama - Arthur c Clark.

#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 ...

Two pieces of news regarding large language models

(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...

eLife, peer review, and architectures of attention

(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...

fast tools for data processing

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...

Questions to test your idea with

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...

What will be the effect of Elon Musk on Altmetrics?

(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...

Wiley Partner Solutions

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)...

A good overview of challenges in adopting AI in healthcare.

“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...

When will researchers use AI to manipulate images?

(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...

Some quick Links - End of summer 2022 edition

(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...

Using GTP-3 to do some data cleaning

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, ...

When should you build platforms?

Don’t build a platform, build one thing that works! - this post (Link) covers some very good advice on how to evolve towards platforms - or not. The key message here is to avoid enterprise thinking and premature optimisation of committing to platform delivery before there are real world use cases. I’ve added some key quotes below. A go...

DocMaps and integrations

(image via DreamStudio) Yesterday I wrote up some thoughts about DocMaps and I asked whether they might be interoperable with MECA. Tony Alves - the co-chair of the MECA standing committee reached out with the following: “we had Gabe Stein come and talk to us about DocMaps. We are currently revising our Reviewer XML guidelines/schema a...

docmaps - perhaps an effort to represent the creation of knowledge?

(image created by https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/dream). Knowledge Futures Group, eLife, Cold spring harbour press, and EMBO are collaborating on the development of https://docmaps.knowledgefutures.org. In one place they talk about it as being “a community-endorsed framework for representing research object-level review/editorial processe...

some experiments with DALL.E and AI generated images

("Robots painting an imagined future" - https://labs.openai.com/s/DVLdRxX1ttkpr02Y3E0GmHon). This month I got access to DALL.E - the AI tool for generating images from text prompts. It's astonishing. It feels odd using it, almost an amplification of the blank canvas problem. I spent a lot of time looking at images that were created by ...

Book review - “The Storm before the Storm” by Mike Duncan.

#blog/posted#book/review When the Republic began to break down in the late second century it was not the letter of Roman law that eroded, but respect for the mutually accepted bonds of mos maiorum - Mike Duncan I’ve just finished reading The Storm before the Storm by Mike Duncan, and I can't recommend it highly enough. The book covers ...

Book review - leviathan falls, the 10th book of the expanse series.

#book/review Leviathan Falls - Wikipedia I’ve just finished reading leviathan falls. It ends the expanse book series, I can’t properly review the book without giving away spoilers, but what I will say, this has been a most satisfying sci fi series to read through. Each book has delivered on a pacy story. The finale manages to hold up e...

We don’t know ourselves - book review

#book/review#blog/draft I’ve just finished reading this book by Fintan O’Toole. We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 eBook : O'Toole, Fintan: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store The book charts the dramatic changes that Irish society went through from the 1950s through to the present day. I learnt so much about my h...

Recent reading from across the web — late may edition 2022

#blog/draft#blog/weekly-read Here are some things from across the web that I found interesting over the past few weeks Git tables. Home | GitTables - is an effort to collect many examples of tables, to support the creation of machine learning models of tables. From the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07258.pdf : GitTables can be lever...

a breath of fresh air, a deeper perspective

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...

Recent reads from across the web - week 13

#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 yea...

A modern take on research communication - an emerging set of princi...

#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 Th...

remix vs, well, vs lots of other things

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...

reading list - week eight

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...

open letter asking for more support for Ukrainian refugees

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....

Weekly reading - weeks 4 through to six

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...

Some brief pointers about misinformation and the pandemic.

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...

What questions might we ask of AI systems in scholarly publishing?

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...

Week 3 links of interest - more on AI, and a saxophone playing toil...

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...

How might we champion integrity?

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...

AI - oh my, interesting links from week 2 of 2022

# 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...

easy reading to make writing easy - book review - the agile comms h...

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 ...

Brief links - 2022 week 1!

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 - The duty of genius.

#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 revi...

my climbing year in review.

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 ...

remember the reproducibility project?

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 have missed the conference circuit for the last few years

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...

operative representation and the scholarly literature

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...

what is going on with all the fake papers?

The following paper - https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1139702911https://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 sha...

Is AI Magic already here for conference posters?

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...

I take this as a sign that the pre-print world is maturing

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...

A new NLP Challenge for mining biomedical literature

#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...

ConteTech Live 2021 - day one - what lies in the future?

#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...

as employers what are our obligations to to millions of micro workers?

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...

technology slippery slopes

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 ...

a new again model of scholarly publishing

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...

eLife Reproducible Articles

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...

I caught COVID - Again, after vaccination!

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...

skills needed for the future of work!

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...

Are we seeing the promise of AI in augmented productivity systems?

We have known for a while that machine learning is good at very targeted specific tasks. The following is one of the best presentations on the topic: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf The key conclusions in that presentation are: - AI excels at some tasks, but can’t predict social outcomes. - We must r...

how much value can you get out of web scraping - quite a lot appare...

I was recently pointed to the following company - H1 https://www.h1.co. Their website claims to be creating a healthier future by delivering a platform that connects stakeholders. When you look at their product video you see that what they are building is a platform that automatically builds profiles of doctors. There is an emphasis on...

A collection of infinities.

#linklist This is a delightful overview of the Hilbert paradox. https://kottke.org/21/05/an-infinite-hotel-runs-out-of-rooms

Book review - good to great.

Good to great - a good book, not a great one. #blog/draft #book/review #strategy This is a book review of good to great by Jim Collins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great My one sentence review - this book is good, but not great. In this book the author looks at 11 companies that have substantially out performed the stock mark...

The importance of diversity in science

#diversity #gender #science I read through this twitter thread just now: https://twitter.com/ChemistryKit/status/1392076489760419849?s=20 and I was struck by how it contrasted with the picture of high class research that Dominic Cummings presented to a UK Government Select Committee a few weeks back in which he effectively said that th...

Are we still figuring out preprints?

#preprints #publishing There is a very nice set of slides from a mini conference on preprints that NISO hosted here - http://www.niso.org/events/2021/04/hot-topic-preprints My take on this is that the conversation around preprints has definitely moved on in the last number of years, from - oh my god what are these things - to -- OK, we...

Where is "the business"?

I love this blog post: https://tinyletter.com/TomChatfield/letters/how-we-talk-about-tech “Entire world-views are at work within words. Have you ever undertaken gig employment, participated in the sharing economy or used cloud computing? Would you feel differently about doing these things if they were described as insecure temporary la...

The Open Access button has rebranded

#open-access #cool-news The "Open Access Button" has now rebranded to https://oa.works/. Joe let me know a few days ago that this was coming up, and I'm delighted to see the new site and branding go live. They have a blog post explaining a bit about the change - https://blog.oa.works/open-access-button-is-now-oa-works/. The gist of it ...

The code check paper is out

#peer-review #code I’ve briefly written about code check before - http://scholarly-comms-product-blog.com/2020/07/03/codecheck_-_reviewing_code_in_publications/ They now have a paper out that goes into detail about how the system works: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-253

Innovation focus, and target states

#innovation #design #pace I liked reading this thread this morning. It’s about the difference between setting future state of a project as something new, vs describing it as a movement towards a better now, if you will. The response from Andy is good. https://twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1380717439760048131 I have a thought and a c...

Biden indicates a step change to research funding is on the horizon

In his press conference yesterday Biden discussed a significant increase in funding to R&D and life sciences in the US. He talked about moving to 2% of GDP (up from a current level of 0.7%) which would mean an extra $418B. He talked about how the US is being out-invested in many areas by China, and the need to effectively create the fu...

Even Wittgenstein had a hell of a time getting published

#philosophy #publishing #genius #wittgenstein I'm working my way through "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius" by Ray Monk, it's a great book that merges biography with philosophy. I'm fascinated by the history behind the publication of the Tractatus. It was really nearly damn impossible for Wittgenstein to get it published initial...

10 years of product failures, some personal stories

#product #scpb #failure #contechlive2020 Last year I presented a talk on some of the product failures that I have been involved in over the last 10 years. I just found the video of the session that I recorded, so I'm posting it here for your enjoyment. https://share.mmhmm.app/46e2c4aba3664511853a93b3823c3f12

Primer.ai are an interesting company

#ai #literature #future #primer #scpb Primer.ai https://primer.ai/ are an interesting company. They use machine learning models to create workflows and tools to make text comprehensible at scale. As far as I was aware most of their revenue is coming from the non academic market, but there is clearly a sweet spot to be found in applying...

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The https://mobile.twitter.com/medrxivpreprint team are looking for stories on how the existence of a medical preprint server has made a difference to people. You can read more at this tweet: https://twitter.com/hmkyale/status/1371901637439201291?s=20 BMJ co-supports MedaRXiV, and there has been an explosion of papers coming through th...

Reducing friction increases throughput.

#blogging #scpb #hey #friction Blogging this past week has been really fun. More fun than it’s been for some time. I’ve been blogging on and off in some form on blog platforms since 2006, and even played around with RSS and custom updates on my website back in the early 2000s, but there is always a friction. In the past few years I’ve ...

why publishers should care about persistent identifiers (PIDs) ?

#PIDs #scpb #infrastructure #ORCID #DOIs We are doing a big piece of metadata standardisation work at BMJ - the name of the internal group is the Research Data Integrity Group. We are also looking at where our processes diverge across our journals, and are aiming to have metadata and process diverge only where it must, rather than wher...

New "DARPA" style 300M fund for breakthrough biological science fro...

#funding #funders #scpb #research #darpa This just popped up on my radar - a new funding initiative spinning out of Wellcome - https://wellcomeleap.org/. I think this is interesting because it's following a trend from private funders to want to try to move the needle on fundamental research programs (e.g. CZI, Gates). I think one of th...

Four inspirational women

#science #international-womens-day Today is international women's day. Here are four women that I find inspirational. Emilie du Chatelet (1706 - 1749) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émilie_du_Châtelet) was a Frech noble, and mathematician. I am sad that I only found out about her recently through this amazing episode of in our time (ht...

How to think about technical innovation in a medium to large organi...

#blog #todigest #scpb #strategy #innovation #engineering #design (I drafted this post when I was in my old role, but a lot of this carries forward to my new role too). I like shipping things, and I like working with teams to help them become more effective, but what if in the race to help us get faster I end up just adding a whole lot ...

I’ve joined the advisory board of GetFTR

#access#GetFTR#scpb#publihsing A few weeks ago I was asked to join the advisory board for GetFTR https://www.getfulltextresearch.com/ I wrote up a long piece about this service when it came out, and I think I got my analysis mostly right - http://scholarly-comms-product-blog.com/2019/12/11/thoughts_on_getftr_/ I ended my post with the ...

What’s up with peer review these days?

#socscifoo #peer-review #publishing #scpb A couple of weeks back I got invited to social science for camp - more on that later - but the topic of peer review came up. The question was - what are the best ongoing systems for making peer review a bester experience. It’s 2021, there’s got to be something, right? I wrote up the following v...

The enduring and astonishing wonder of the universe

#astronomy #galaxies #childhood My eight year old son had a home schooling lesson this week about astrophysics. I used to be an astrophysicist, and it's kind of burnt into my identity. The school has a week of trying to teach the children about jobs and CVs and thinking about how they might "get a job in science" - rather than encourag...

Yet another blogging platform

#blogging #toblog #scpb #frictionless I've just gotten access to the new blogging platform from Hey, and, well, why not take it for a spin? I've been tinkering with trying to get a frictionless blogging system setup for years now, and was on the verge of looking to deploy something in AWS using Hugo, connected to github via github acti...