Partially Attended

A few weeks ago I finished up the 12-week lattice light training plan. What follows is an enthusiastic endorsement of the plan and the training app that lattice provides, along with some reflections on where I’m at with climbing. My motivation for signing up was pretty simple. I knew we were heading into lockdown. I have a good fingerboard setup at home, I thought that in order to make the most of the enforced home time I should get some structured guidance on how to use my home board. ... (more)

I just wanted to share some work coming out of the Prakash lab in Stanford. Manu Prakash is a young engineer and research scientist who has taken a very different approach to how to think about the tools we use to do science. He has focussed on building very cheap tools that can be used by anyone in the world. One of the first tools that his lab created was the foldscope - a microscope built from paper, and a small piece of plastic - that can be produced very cheaply and given out to people across the world (https://indiabioscience. ... (more)

This is a very nice overview of how to create a clear business case for design work, but the general approach of walking a tree to find leverage points to build up the argument can be applied any time that you want to make a business case. ... (more)

CODECHECK is a fascinating service - https://codecheck.org.uk/ That creates a workflow for academics to provide feedback on research code. The project is being led by Stephen Eglen and and Daniel Nüst. They describe what they do succinctly as CODECHECK is a process for independent reproduction of computations and awarding of time-stamped certificates for successful reproductions of scholarly articles. Checking software in research is a significant challenge, and I really like CODECHECK because it is an initiative that has emerged from researchers themselves. ... (more)

In my department we have started to make a bit of space to allow for self learning to happen. I took the time to look at https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/, an ecosystem of tools that support data publishing. These tools are from Simon Willison, and they are fantastic. I’d been meaning to look at the them for some time now. I used a jupyter notebook to work my way around getting some data together, and working with the tool. ... (more)

I’m excited to share the news that from mid-April I will be joining the BMJ as their new CTO. I’ll be leaving SAGE on great terms with the teams here, and for sure there will be a little sadness and I’ll definitely miss my colleagues, but equally I’m super excited about the new challenges ahead. Crucially, at SAGE we are hiring for my replacement, so if you are interested in applying for one of the most fun roles in the Scholarly Publishing industry at the moment then reach out, I’m happy to chat about what we have been up to! ... (more)

what does it do? By using a single sign-on system (like SAML, or OAuth) a researcher can have their browser remember who they are. Today most access to subscription content is done via IP authentication. A university pays a publisher to access the content that the publisher hosts, and the university sends over a list of the IP ranges that cover the university buildings. Any researcher on campus just gets access. ... (more)

Who’s job is it to address the crisis of climate change? This question came up at an STM Tech Leaders workshop that I attended earlier this week? The answer is that we all are, and in that context we had a very interesting conversation on the topic. This is the first time that I’ve seen this topic come up in a forum like this, so a bit thank you to Dave Smith from the IET for pushing the topic forward. ... (more)

The start of December is always a busy time for news in the STM / Product space. There is the annual STM meeting in London, and AWS re-invent also kicks off this week. As a result, within just a few days, I find that I have more things to write about than I can ever possibly have time to get through before the end of the year, we must plough on, and plough on we will. ... (more)

The start of December is always a busy time for news in the STM / Product space. There is the annual STM meeting in London, and AWS re-invent also kicks off this week. As a result, within just a few days, I find that I have more things to write about than I can ever possibly have time to get through before the end of the year, we must plough on, and plough on we will. ... (more)