Partially Attended

12 week lattice training plan - review

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I finished up the 12-week lattice light training plan. What follows is an enthusiastic endorsement of th...

Prakash lab - frugal science and the future of research

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just wanted to share some work coming out of the Prakash lab in Stanford. Manu Prakash is a young engineer and researc...

Profit Trees and making business cases

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very nice overview of how to create a clear business case for design work, but the general approach of walking...

CODECHECK - reviewing code in publications

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CODECHECK is a fascinating service - https://codecheck.org.uk/ That creates a workflow for academics to provide feedback...

Using Datasette to publish data

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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...

Goodbye SAGE, hello BMJ!

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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 gr...

thoughts on GetFTR

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

what does it do? By using a single sign-on system (like SAML, or OAuth) a researcher can have their browser remember who...

Some brief thoughts on scholarly publishing and climate change.

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Who’s job is it to address the crisis of climate change? This question came up at an STM Tech Leaders workshop that I at...

STM Research data workshop.

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The start of December is always a busy time for news in the STM / Product space. There is the annual STM meeting in Lond...

STM Research data workshop.

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The start of December is always a busy time for news in the STM / Product space. There is the annual STM meeting in Lond...

Google data set search.

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just got back from a fantastic workshop looking at infrastructure for research data discovery. I’ll blog about the ...

rescognito - a route towards a weighted scholarly graph.

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I sat down with Richard Wynne. Richard has a long career in the publishing space, having been one of the senior team at ...

Where is research going - a Kudos report

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve finally gotten around to looking at the report that Kudos developed earlier this year looking into where research o...

Rave tech conference 2019

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I was at the aannual Rave publishing technology conference. It’s always an interesting event to at...

Unpaywall Journals - possibly the most interesting thing to happen this year in library subscription land.

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Heather and Jason from https://ourresearch.org/ have just released a preview of their new tool - unpaywall journals. You...

Responsible metrics - the state of the art - Elizabeth Gadd at Force2019

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At Force2019 the other day the one session that I really wanted to see, but missed, was the one by Dr. Elizabeth Gadd on...

Responsible metrics, the state of the art, Elizabeth Gadd at Force2019

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At Force2019 the other day the one session that I really wanted to see, but missed, was the one by Dr. Elizabeth Gadd on...

Things holding back your analytics.

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of my colleagues sent me over this short report “”3 Things Are Holding Back Your Analytics, and Technology Isn’t One...

Book review - Tiamat’s wrath - book nine of the expanse series.

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This book review is really only for people who have been reading all of the expanse book series. If you have not then th...

The three body problem.

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just zipped through this book in what feels like about a week, but was probably a bit longer. I didn’t like it. The...

Are scholarly publishers technology companies?

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There is tension in this question that gets to the heart of where a publisher should be putting its resources, and perha...

Strategies to reduce cognitive load, and make systems more robust whilst doing so, and why that’s important for product development.

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At my current company we are looking at strategies for improving the resilience of our core systems, and looking at the ...

key questions about AI in the publishing knowledge industry

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At the moment one thing that is front and centre in my thinking about AI and machine learning in publishing and the scho...

test blog post

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a test post while trying to fix some domain issues with the blog.

AGILE or agile?

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Three links today looking at the state of agile as a software development practice. Flavours of Agile In Flavours of Agi...

Some ruminations on software architecture and diagramming

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So Pat Kua recently tweeted: UML failed so here we have AML (Arbitrary Modeling Language) https://t.co/BnbgC8ZHTD &mdash...

The state of retractions in the research literature.

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The results below are oldish, but interesting around the rate of retractions in the scholarly literature, and there is c...

RAVE publishing technology conference 2018

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I took some notes on some of the sessions at the conference yesterday. Dave Smith - object oriented publishing. Dave mak...

Belmont Forum Round Table - data accessibility statements

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I attended a round table discussion hosted by the Belmont Forum about the release of their position on data ac...

One Two Four All - a technique for getting insights from groups

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started working my way through The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures - a hand book of techniques for collab...

One Two Four All - a technique for getting insights from groups.

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started working my way through The Surprising Power of Liberating Strucutres - a hand book of techniques for collab...

blockchain in STEM - part 3

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing up some thoughts on the uses of blockchain in STEM. The first post I gave a ge...

testing a new form of peer review - again

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

eLife is trying another experiment in peer review. When they launched back in 2012 they introduced a form of peer review...

notes on notes on “crossing the chasam”

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The following is not about scholarly communication, but is a post about one tool from the world of product development, ...

Distill is dedicated to making machine learning clear and dynamic

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Distill is an experiment in bringing interactive documents and scholarly documents together. I’m often asked what ...

Grants for Nonprofits | Grants for Researchers | Instrumentl

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A startup to help you fast-track you grant application process. The hard thing here is building a robust and clean pipel...

JavaScript End to End Testing Framework | Cypress.io

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.cypress.io/

Jobs to be Done A Case Study in the NHS | Digital transformation blog

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great post on using the jobs to be done framework. There are two specific enhancements that are discussed - ho...

Narrative Science | Natural Language Generation Technology

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I think what these people are doing is creating human readable summaries of large corpora of documents or signals based ...

Reaktor Breakpoint 2018 Ben Sauer, The rise of voice, and how to design for it - YouTube

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great overview of the sate of designing for voice. Ben is one the best designers / tech thinkers that I’...

Sentry | Error Tracking Software — JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, more

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://sentry.io/welcome/

Voice Principles | Clearleft

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great checklist and overview of design principles for designing for voice assistants. It’s complied and ...

blockchain in STEM - part 2

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I gave an overview of what blockchain is, while also confusing House of Pain and Cypress Hill. (These po...

Architect, The Killer Serverless Framework – Reify

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A nice overview of an npm framework for creating server-less applications on AWS. It abstracts away a lot of the plumbin...

Limiting “Software Infant mortality” rate — decoding GO-JEK’s Deployment Checklist

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A great example of using a “flight plan checklist” to reduce risk in software development. https://blog.goje...

Model Zoo - Pretrained deep learning models for transfer learning, educational purposes, and more

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This looks like an interesting corpus of machine learning models. One thing I’d not really thought about before is...

OA negotiation manifesto from university of California.

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a really interesting initiative from the university of California. If the scholarly landscape looked like this t...

Ongoing experiment in ‘Extreme Open Science’ announced at Structural Genomics Consortium - HBGDki

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s really encouraging to see the concept of open notebook Sciecne still being picked and adopted. It looks like ...

Preprints growth rate ten times higher than journal articles - Crossref

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Great post looking into stats on preprints in crossref. Headline takeaways, preprint registration into crossref is 10x t...

Research Software Engineering conference 2018 workshop abstract

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

About As SAGE is sponsoring the Research Software Engineers conference in September we get to submit a workshop. I’m thr...

Scholia

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Scholia is an amazing interface into scholarly information held inside id WikiData. It includes information about author...

Unsupervised Extraction of Epidemic Syndromes from Participatory Influenza Surveillance Self-reported Symptoms | bioRxiv

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great example of “web science for good”. The researchers looked at online signals to predict the s...

Blockchain in STEM - part 1

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of people are taking about “blockchain for science” and “blockchain for publishing”, but I’m skeptical. Some of th...

Adequate statistical power in clinical trials is associated with the combination of a male first author and a female last author.

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So if your last author is female the quality of the science is statistically better. I don’t know exactly what to ...

Advanced computing with IPython

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post shows how to execute compiled commands in your IPython environments. That can allow you to, for example, pull ...

After 5 years and $3M, here's everything we've learned from building Ghost

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great overview of how a not for profit open source technology company built a working business providing publi...

Digital Radar - STM landscape

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Thoughtworks have created a tool to allow you to build your own “Digital Radar”. The one linked to here was ...

Internet Archive, Code for Science and Society, and California Digital Library to Partner on a Data Sharing and Preservation Pilot Project

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Some major players are getting together to trial decentralised data sharing using the Dat protocol - https://datproject....

Open Knowledge Maps - social science map

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Open knowledge maps show the relationship between different papers, based on a keyword search. They have been gong for s...

Strategy in a Lean Enterprise - lean value tree.

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working with lean value tree as a framework for some time now, but there are few online resources about ...

The Cost of Developers – by Ben Thompson

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a fascinating post on what dynamics are in place between large companies and developers. The bottom line is that...

VIPER - The Visual Project Explorer

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a tool for visualising EC funded projects listed in OpenAire using the infrastructure of Open Knowledge maps. Fo...

About Backyard Brains

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://backyardbrains.com/about/

Cool slide deck about the advantages of using the shell for data science.

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I love this short presentation on using the shell for data science. Many of the things hat are described in the presenta...

How to Visualize an XML Sitemap Using Python - Ayima

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This looks like a great way to quickly get an overview of your site architecture, a vital step when thinking about wide ...

Impact of Social Sciences – The academic papers researchers regard as significant are not those that are highly cited

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/14/the-academic-papers-researchers-regard-as-significant-are-not-t...

Mindcontrol A web application for brain segmentation quality control - ScienceDirect

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

paper about an open source tool for studying neuroscience images developed by Anisha Keshavan, and others. https://www.s...

The Guardian view on digitising culture make manuscripts more illuminating | Editorial | Opinion | The Guardian

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

a nice description of IIF from the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/28/the-guardian-view-on-...

eLife Innovation Sprint - appstract.pub

Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last week the eLife innovation sprint happened in Cambridge. It was done in collaboration with the Mozilla global sprint...

A new new way to make biological data more easily citable

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Working under Force11 the California digital library and the EBI have made progress on making identifiers to data held i...

Alexa is becoming less popular as a baby name since the Amazon service launched.

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Mark this one down as totally not surprising. https://www.recode.net/2018/5/13/17345722/alexa-amazon-echo-baby-name-girl...

Computer replaces workers, workers ty to turn into data scientists.

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-automation-training-20180504-story.html The headline is a bit click-...

Google employees resigning in protest at potential militarisation of AI

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300 File this one under “don’t be evi...

Is caution justified when thinking about docker?

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been fascinated by docker for the past few years, and there is clearly a “rush to dockerise” I’ve been Neville’s by...

US phone companies are selling your real time location data.

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ File this one under “you do it...

Hunting for structure in nested JSON with python just got a whole lot easier

Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A very common python task that I find myself stumbling over repeatedly is trying to get the syntax right to address or r...

Some initial thoughts on the Google Duplex demo

Wed, 09 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Verge also covered this well: www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17334658/google-ai-phone-call-assistant-duplex-ethical-socia...

choice magazine podcast Questions

Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This week I was interviewed for the ALA choice podcast, a podcast that the that is a weekly program featuring in-depth ...

AI and discovery tools

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I got asked to contribute an answer to an upcoming feature looking at trends in scholarly discovery. There are four ques...

Where once we dreamt of many gardens, now we have many walls

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m reading through Anil Dash’s great blog post looking back at the way the web used to be in terms of how we thought of...

Microsoft Surface Hub - very first impressions

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I just had my first hands on experience with the Microsoft surface hub. I tried out sketching a lean canvas on the surfa...

python - running commands from within a directory

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A neat python snippet for jumping into a directory, running a script, and jumping out again, found on Stackoverflow, pro...

Where should you host your Kubernetes solution?

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I previously Kicked the tyres on kubernetes, with an example of how to deploy it onto Google’s infrastructure, but if yo...

scholarly comms product meetup - V2 - announcement

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Back in November of last year we ran the first scholarly comms meetup with a focus on product management. There are lots...

The robots are coming, the promise and perils of AI - questions

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at the Charleston conference, my first time, and we had a panel discussion this morning talking about AI. On t...

Kubernetes - As I Learn

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently working on supporting a JupyterHub installation for a series of online courses that we are launching...

Software Publishing To Maximise Data Value, slides from ALPSP

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some annotated slides from my ALPSP talk today.

Moving from Jekyll to Hugo - urls

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been changing the static blog generator that I use and am slowly moving from Jekyll to Hugo. My main reason i...

I'm hiring a product manager

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m hiring a product manager. We are working on developing new green field products. We have a small, really f...

ic2s2 - Thursday, closing keynotes

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

ic2s2 - Thursday, closing keynotes Economic AI - Matt Taddy Economic AI breaks complex systemic questions into simple se...

ic2s2 Thursday morning keynotes

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

ic2s2 Thursday morning keynotes Daniel Romero - Examining the Effects of Exogenous Shocks on Social Networks and Collabo...

ic2s2 Wednesday morning keynotes

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

IC2s2 Wednesday Morning Keynotes Cecliia Mascolo - human behaviour studies through the lens of mobile sensing and comple...

IC2s2 Wikipedia track, Wednesday

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ic2s2 wikipedia track Studying Content Survival, Authorship & Controversy – By Tracing Every Word Change on Wikipedi...

IC2s2 - Tuesday Morning

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

IC2s2 - Tuesday Morning Open Remarks, President of GESIS main note is his call for the potential creation of a new dis...

IC2s2 Tuesday Afternoon Keynotes

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

IC2s2 Tuesday afternoon Dashun Wang - Predictive Signals Behind Success Dashun starts by talking about weather predicti...

IC2s2 2017, conference preview

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m about to head to Köln for the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) and I’m p...

Futurepub10

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This week I attended futurepub10, I love these events, I’ve been to a bunch, and the format of short talks, and lo...

Three posts about product development

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m catching up on some reading at the moment. Trying to make headway on some other work while jet lagged is provi...

PLOS are looking for a new CEO

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So I hear that PLOS are looking for a new CEO. They are making the process fairly open, so if you are interested you can...

Reverse DOI lookups with Crossref

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today I had a need to think about how to do a reverse lookup of a formatted citation to find a DOI. @CrossrefOrg helped ...

Hello SAGE!

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hello SAGE! I joined SAGE at the start of September. Hello SAGE!! Here I outline some of my initial impressions. First u...

What do we mean when we talk about Big Data?

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

What do we mean when we talk about Big Data? The following blog post about this article provides the following definitio...

What we mean when we talk about preprints

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Cameron Neylon, Damian Pattinson, Geoffrey Bilder, and Jennifer Lin have just posted a cracker of a preprint onto biorxi...

Social Humanities DataHack event

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

How do people represent themselves on social media, and how are they represented by others? Which qualities and virtues...

Textometrica, a tool review

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A quick spin with Textometrica Yesterday I had a good conversation with Simon Lindgren, the creator of textometrica. I d...

Covalent Data, first impressions

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Covalent Data is a tool to search over research topics. It seems to have the following features: Is a DB of grants, pap...

Something broke in a Jekyll upgrade (a.k.a, sometimes I hate software)

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short story about software, some of the things I hate about it, my lack of knowledge of ruby, and a desire to ...

I’m voting IN, and you should too

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 14:47:22 +0100

Well, here we are, two days out from the referendum. I’m voting IN, but that’s not the main point of this post. The fact...

Goodbye eLife!

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

# Goodbye eLife! So after nearly four and a half years I am moving on from eLife. I’ve had an amazing time, worked...

A(peeling) Peer Review, a proposal.

Sun, 17 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

eLife’s peer review process is really good. One of the key attributes of this is that reviewers are not blind to o...

data science vs statistics talk at the RSS

Mon, 11 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight I attend a debate held at the Royal Statistics Society. It was en entertaining, and wide ranging discussion with...

aws london summit notes

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Web Summit London 2015 ## Keynote There were about three thousand people at the summit. I chatted to a few people...

RIP Terry Pratchett

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I must have been fourteen, fifteen years old, I was passing through a train station in Northern Ireland and I picked up ...

Some thoughts about product management

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I moved into digital product management in 2007. I had no formal training, and for much of the last eight years I’...

Wittgenstein and Physics, Cross College Oxford one day seminar

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

(image via peternijenhuis) Last year I attended a one day seminar on Wittgenstein and Physics. It was held at Cross Coll...

Climbing outlook for 2015

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I hit on the best way to set climbing goals (this was after many years of failing to hit my goals). The best w...

The 70/90 Rule

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was having a conversation last week with a good friend who works in the financial services sector. We were discussing ...

FuturePub Jan 2015 - Lens Next

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On 2015-01-27 I gave one of the short talks at the FuturePub event. My slidedeck is here. I wanted to give a quick updat...

Some thoughts on FORCE2015, science trust and ethics.

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I was at the FORCE2015 conference. I enjoyed it greatly. This was the 2015 instance of the FORCE11/Beyond the ...

synthesis of breakout session from day 1 - institutions and metrics

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to – Kevin Dolby, Martijn Roelandse, Mike Taylor and Andrea Michalek for taking the notes from each of the ...

FuturePub3 - September 2014 event

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back for the next installment of FuturePub. There are tons of people at the meeting tonight, pizza and beers car...

thoughts on the ERC data workshop

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended a European Research Council workshop on managing research data. It was we...

ERC data management workshop, day 1

Sun, 21 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

initial thoughts about the workshop. Opening remarks. Setting the scene. Sabrina Leonelli - the epistemology of data-...

ERC data management workshop, day 2

Sun, 21 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Life sciences breakout - key points. Physical sciences breakout - key points. Humanities breakout - key points. Open di...

Some pittfalls in using iPython to generate talk slides

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I gave a talk using iPython notebook to generate the talk slides. You can get the notebook on github, and you ...

shortcuts that I use for the git command line

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I use git a lot, it’s pretty complicated, and it has a lot of command line optoins that I can never remember. I&rs...

looking for ideas for our wikimania talk on open scholarship tools

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired somewhat by the aweome http://sciencetoolbox.org, along with Martin Fenner, we proposed a session for the upcom...

Designing better UX deliverables - Anna Dahlström

Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This talk happened a few weeks ago now, but the topic is timeless, so there is no harm in getting my notes up a bit late...

FuturePub - future of publishing event, hosted by NESTA and WriteLaTeX

Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second #futurepub event that I’ve been to. I also attended the last one The event was hosted by Nesta....

Trial by public, open peer review and the power of attention.

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There are two very interesting recent examples of review by community on highly exciting results. They both share one ve...

April digital strategy forum

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On the 1st of April I had the pleasure of being invited to a digital strategy forum event hosted by the Wellcome Trust. ...

Php user group March 2013 - BeHat.

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Background. On Monday the 31st of March I attended the Cambridge PHP Meetup, the topic was BeHat testing. Johnathan Goug...

Climbing goals update 1, 2014

Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a large post at the start of this year reviewing my climbing goals over previous years, and laying out my goals ...

Discussing Open Access - a comment

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Discussing Open Access http://discussingoa.wordpress.com/ I read through this piece by Rick Anderson. It’s a very ...

How to create threads between publications and clinical trial registraion numbers

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I attended an interesting meeting to discuss how to improve the connection between clinical trial registration...

Review of climbing goals, goals for 2014

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For the last couple of years I have done an end of year review of my climbing over the previous year, and set myself som...

WriteLateX/Overleaf launch event at the British Library

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Last Thursday I attended the launch event for OverLeaf. The event was composed of a set of very short talks, followed by...

advice on publishing research online

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I have posted this post as a comment on the thread over at software carpentry in answer to the question What do we teach...

STM innovations seminar, London, 2013

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m at the STM innovations seminar. The twitter tag for today is #ukinno. The program is online. I’m g...

STM brainstorming session - 2013

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Just attended the STM brainstroming session. I’ll update these notes in due course, and fix spelling issues, but I...

Hidden In Plain Sight

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was bouldering yesterday. At my local block - a lump of granite embedded in the middle of shore ditch park. I’ve...

Setting up Vagrant, Librarian-Chef and Vagrant aws plugins on OSX Mavericks.

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have a new macbook pro. I want to install vagrant, chef and librarian, with the vagrant-aws plugins. I’m working...

Spoton13

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I managed to squeeze in a few hours on Friday attending the spoton conference in London. I’ve been at each one sin...

Vertigo

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post was mostly written earlier this summer, in the days after I had finished reading a book. I’ve just finis...

PLOS ALM 13 day 2

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Connecting ALM and Literature As I took part in the first session I don’t have many notes from it. I’ve post...

NISO ALM standardization workshop

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This was a one day workshop discuss the creation of standards around Article Level Metrics. NISO has a grant from the Sl...

PLOS ALM 13, day1

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

## Cameron Neylon - Introduction & Welcome Interesting - this is the first PLOS ALM meeting that is a “normal&...

Cambridge usability group - UX and agile

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a U...

Cambridge usability group - UX and agile

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a U...

Some advice on learning web development.

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here is some advice I gave a few months ago to a friend on becoming a web dev. I think it still holds up. The most impor...

EC consultation on Open Data - a report.

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a report on todays consultation on open data that was help by the EC. The notes are long, so I have put my concl...

EC consultation on Open Data - my presentation.

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The following is the written representation that I made to the EC hearing on Open Data on behalf of Co-Action publishers...

Some Thoughts on web scale annotation.

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Ware recently asked me some questions about the state of web scale annotation, based on my impressions from the rec...

Some thoughts on the Taylor and Francis Survey.

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I took a look at the T&F survey with interest. I’m also very aware of the concerns and confusions that exist a...

Communicating better, moving from virtualenv to vagrant/Chef

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using virtualenv for a while, but in the past few months, since taking up the role of head of technology...

Climbing review of 2012, goals 2013.

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

212 climbing review. OK, time to review the year. I wrote out some goals at the start of last year. Goals for 2012 were ...

Font, Spring 2011, quick report

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s been almost a week since I got back from Fontainbleau. It was, as usual, a magical trip. Were took adva...

Font, Spring 2013, preview

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m about to head to Fontainbleau for another short climbing trip. I’ve been going there since 2003, this wi...

ENCODE - an example of open publication and data integration.

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

On Monday the 14th of January we met at the PLOS offices in Cambridge to hear a talk from Euan Birney on lessons learned...

Product Tank 6, big data

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at PridcutTank 6. Todays topic is big data. Hether Savory - Open Data User Group She is the chair of the open ...

SpotOn day 2.

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was awesome, let’s see how today goes. I was watching from afar, as my wife attended, and now I’m ...

SpotOn day 1.

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll keep a partial, live-idsh blog going during the day. I’ve been going to these things, I think, since ab...

The new food.

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I got to spend a really fun forty minutes or so this morning with Pat Brown, down at the home of Lyrical Foods, the new ...

Last minute changes to our solo12journals line up.

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

* {margin:0; padding:0} body {font:11px/1.5 Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; background:#FFF} #text {margin:50px...

The journal is dead, long live the journal - abstract.

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

With Anna Sharman and Bob O’Hara, I’ll be hosting a session on the future of academic journals at SpotOnLond...

Data literature integration workshop.

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Literature Data integration workshop 2012-10-10 There are many people attending today. I’m not sure whether the at...

Mind the product 2012, notes.

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last Friday I attended the amazing Mind the product conference in London. It was really inspirational. There were about ...

Going for gold, open access debate.

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Update, audio of the meeting is now available on figshare Last Thursday I attended the SciCommForum debate “Open a...

The slow web, more thoughtful experiences.

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been concerned for a few years about the flow of data that we are producing, and how to handle the angst of n...

academic ghost towns, Google scholar and Mendeley

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m on a mission to clear out my instapapper backlocg, so I’m going to be blogging olds rather than news. Th...

sharing documents with google apps for your domain

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just rolled out google apps for your domain for eLife. At about the same time google rolled out gdrive. We we...

The cost of production

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last week an interesting discussion on the cost of copy editing popped up over on Stephen Curry’s blog. In additio...

XMP wrangling on OS X

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

XMP XMP is the extensible metadata platform from Adobe. It can be used to embed structured metadata into a file. I think...

What use metaphor?

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I watched a little of the q&a at CERN this week. One question stood out. A journalist, who didn’t want to be n...

Elio

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As i write these words my son is a little under a day old. Everything changes, that’s what they tell you, all the ...

Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So this morning I had a scan with a consultant and he has diagnosed me with Dupuytren’s Contracture. I’ve be...

Some Thoughts on Peer Review and Altmetrics

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The upcoming altmetrics meeting, and a submitted abstract by Kelli Barr prompted me to note down some of my own thoughts...

Augmented Peer Review

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I was asked to contribute to a special issue on the evolution of peer review. I got quite excited about doing ...

Super quick start guide to fluidinfo

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick and dirty guide to getting started with fish, the command line tool for fulidinfo. I did it by setting u...

The Tractaus, a mini-review

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the only book that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. At the onset of the first world war Wittgenstein enli...

Leaving Mendeley

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m starting to draft this post on the train on the commute to my new job at eLife. After almost two years I&rsquo...

Mendeley, an investment branch of the citation bank.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The awesome Rod Page has a great post on utilising Mendeley as a bank for citation data. He recommends that projects suc...

SOPA and PIPA stink, but the RWA is more dangerous to science.

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There are three bills up for consideration in the US Government which if passed will have a significant negative impact ...

Climbing Goals 2012, review 2011

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote up my climbing goals for 2010, and I totally missed doing this for last year...

example title

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2010 I was pointed at zanran, a search engine that looks for data in graphs. I’ve been playing around with...

Update on MathJax

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

MathJax has come a long way since I last looked at it. There is now a CDN hosting the js files, which makes calling it r...

Converting between dates and unix time in Python

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Going from a date to a unix time: >>> from datetime import date >>> from time import mktime >>&g...

Nature, Whiskey and me

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In my earlier post on Megajournals I hinted that I felt that there could be a future in which this business model provid...

Hindawi have an awesome reviewing system.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Hindawi publishers is a really interesting outfit. They are an open access only publisher based in Egypt. They combing a...

Megajournals

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of megajournals had not really formalised in my head before, but at the COASP meeting the talk was all about &l...

The rude health of Open Access Publishing.

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR OA publishing is maturing with a scalable business model that all the big publishers are jumping all over. Money w...

Science Online London Keynote, Michael Nielson on Open Sciecne

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Nielson Keynote on Open Science He rightly points out that he is probably going to be talking to the converted, ...

SOLO11, day1, morning sessions.

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Session on engaging with peer review This is a very nice panel discussion. For my money there are a number of key points...

Talkfest, science and community

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction So this is a short TalkFest event looking at the public, communities and online science. I’m sure the...

ArXiV at 20, a brief review.

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I just read the brief article by Paul Ginsparg about 20 years of the ArXiV. I think the article is a must read for anyon...

Serendipity, a chance encounter (obviously)

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight there was a lovely sameas event on the topic of serendipity. I’d stared a blog post about this back in May...

Robert Bunsen's Birthday

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Google’s homepage cartoon today tells me that it’s Robert Bunsen’s birthday. He is famous for the inve...

Sits meeting notes, November 2010.

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

2010-11-04 sits Right, the meeting is starting, it’s an open meeting, so we don’t have a specific agenda, bu...

mini-review of "Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale"

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutch...

Our gospels define us

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m reading a fascinating book about the Wittgenstein family. It’s called House Wittgenstein, a family a war...

Rat in the Snow

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’s a beautiful morning in New York, the sun is shining, and the snow blankets central park. Yeserday the rain and...

Turning the Physics ArXiV into an Open Peer Review System.

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Axel Boldt posted an interesting short paper discussing how to turn the physics ArXiV into an open peer review system. I...

Cancelled :( Drinks with Chris Wiggins.

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

CANCELLED Due to flight cancellations out of NY, Chris won’t be making it over to this side of the pond, so sadly ...

Wrangling image metadata

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m trying to move away from iPhoto because I have lost too many pictures over the years from having multiple vers...

Video workflow with a mac using iMovie and capturing with a Lumix GF1

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m figuring out the best way to shoot video with my Lumix GF1 on a mac using iMovie. The GF1 offers two main opti...

Arriving in Paulo Alto for the DLF fall forum

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

(I’m posting some of these posts a few days after writing, but you’ll get that, won’t you) It’s ...

DLF opening keynote, beyond buckets and boxes

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

(notes taken yesterday) The keynote is starting, the DLF has grown by 15 new member organisations, and this is one of th...

San Francisco, and science hack day discussions

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

(This was from Sunday) In an attempt to get over the jet lag, myself and Dave headed over to San Francisco yesterday, we...

save mailfolder messages to a file using applescript

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll just start by explaining that I hate applescript. I wanted to create a script that would take a specific fold...

Citation Style Language

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Martin Fenner asked me to comment on Mendeley’s relationship with the Citation Style Language, so I thought I woul...

The Future of Knowledge Organisation on the Web, a one day conference.

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m attending this event today, and I’m going to keep some notes as the day progresses. There are a couple o...

Slides from APS Talk, August, 2010

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Back at the beginning of August I gave a talk at the American Phytopathological Society. It was a great opportunity to t...

Connecting Scientific Resources, Slides

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On Friday I hosted a session at Science Online London. Michael Habibi, Richard Wallis and Chris Taylor all gave great pr...

science scraping with YQL

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Last Saturday at Science Online London I gave a quick tutorial on YQL, and how it might be used to mash up scientific da...

Connecting Scientific Resources

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to be hosting a session at science online London next weekend, I’m excited. I’ve been intere...

Passing arguments in liquid templates.

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently moved my blog over to hosting on github using the Jekyll templating system. I was intrigued by the a...

Testing Code Hilighting

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

testing ruby def foo puts 'foo' end testing python for nice in this: print "how interesting" testing lat...

Notes from JISC activity streams workshop

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Dave Jennings giving the opening talk, http://www.slideshare.net/davidjennings abundance of content without structure is...

Read mail in intervals on OS X

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In order to check mail less frequently than the options available, following a hint from macosxhints: set up an applesc...

my first post

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m trying to understand jekyll here It seems to be quite nice, let’s see how we get on!

hackney are fuckers.

Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/31711/response/79454/attach/html/3/1%202181984%2020100407%204th%20Tier%20List.xls...

Edinburgh, first draft

Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I don't post my poetry often, indeed I don't write often, but I thought this one came out OK. Written over the past wee...

A mini rant about LaTeX

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a comment I've just posted to a comment thread about LaTeX over here: http://blogs.nature.com/farhat/2010/04/1...

creating a tumblog

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

After a few conversations with @zzgavin, I've come to the conclusion that there is a place for a tumblog in the too...

The three ages of Elvis in potatoes!

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

potato_3stagesElvis 004 Originally uploaded by gioia_On Saturday we went to a party thrown by some friends of ours. It...

Kierkegaard, forgetting and existence

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Reading though the excellent introduction to Kierkegaard's philosophy in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/co...

Python PEP for a graph API

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I just stumbled across this http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonGraphApi. I think it's great. The discussion has actu...

Probabilistic language models, auto-correction tools and scientific discovery.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Probabilistic language models, auto-correction tools and scientific discovery. "Durgesh Kumar Dwivedi":http://network.n...

4 ways to set the heigth of your open social gadget

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

You have a couple of options for setting the height of your gadget. I'll run through four methods that seem to work. Fi...

Banks and Credit Card companies are fuckers

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Via Bruce Schneir's blog there is a link to a paper about a new security system that credit card companies are roll...

Cost benefit of publishing academic books,

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Nature has just published an editorial (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7281/full/463588a.html) promoting th...

Identity systems, science and the internet

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I just posted the following on a forum (http://network.nature.com/groups/orcid/forum/topics/6547) on Nature Network, I ...

What's the right amount to charge for phone content?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Having a discussion earlier today with one of my colleagues, we were discussing pricing models for iPhone applications....

what makes a chocolate "cheeky"

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I'm eating a chocolate bar which contains, I'm told, a 'cheeky caramel layer'. It's shit like this ...

opensocial development on eclipse, starting the web server

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Unable to retrieve spec for http://localhost:8080/test/gadget.xml. HTTP error 404

quick thoughts on the iPad

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I just commented over on the digatilist:I'm in two minds, but on balance I'm optimistic. What they are deliveri...

Usage of graph layouts on Biostor

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

(co-author graph example) inspired by

Climbing Goals 2010, review 2009.

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Looking back at my goals for 2009, I've not done very well, however my current level of fitness is pretty good, so I th...

dreaming of snow

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

DSC00458 Originally uploaded by Ian MulvanyI just got some great feedback on this picture from someone on flickr, it w...

Keeping Dopplr and iCal in two way sync.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I don't know if the following is going to work, but I'm going to try it. Dopplr allows you to subscribe to your...

Strange anxiety dream

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I had a strange anxiety dream. I'm not usually prone to blogging this kind of thing, but it was pretty o...

Notes from the Google Wave London roadshow

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Gtug blog post On Monday I was at the London Google wave roadshow presented by Lars and Stephanie. The previous Friday ...

Django models vs. Pickling objects for object persistence.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I do a bit of code hacking and I often find myself putting objects into pickle files, and reading and writing them in ...

An interesting invitation

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last week an interesting invitation popped up in my email box, I got a message from Richard Sterling asking if I would ...

Comparing Windmill to Safariwatir

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

the post seems to be missing :/

Cron, python and Google Wave

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Documentation on getting a google wave robot written in python working with the Cron functionality is still a little sp...

Why I think the Drake equation is a crock of shit.

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I had a brief discussion with a good friend and colleague this evening about the Drake equation. He has recently come t...

Swine flu t-shirts

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm sitting at home in London with a head cold. For the dew minutes it took me to check my temperature (37 thank yo...

Fluid Dynamics in the Browser

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Navier-Stokes equations: \frac{\partial \mathbf{v}}{\partial t} + ( \mathbf{v}\cdot\nabla ) \mathbf{v} = -\nabla p ...

unknown post

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In February 2009 a mac security update broke my perl installation. You can read more about that on this Slashdot articl...

Another great example of how being lazy can reap great rewards

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I got really obsessed with the idea of making my google email contacts list, my phone list and my desktop add...

Neat blog on Sankey diagrams.

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just noticed a very nice blog dedicated to Sankey diagrams. As Phineas mentions in one post: Sankey diagrams are dire...

notes on "Classes of complex networks deﬁned by role-to-role connectivity proﬁles"

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Looking for algorithms to do community detection (there are a bunch from the famous Girvan-Newman algorithm doi:10.1073...

Why measure scientists and their work?

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm interested in using graph theory to develop tools to improve science (whether I manage to do this is a moot point, ...

Directed Graph blog setup.

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I've decided to use syntaxhiligher2 to do syntax hi-lighting and a call to Yourequations.com for rendering latex on the...

Grave of the reverend Thomas Bayes

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I visited bunhill fields at the weekend. It's a non conformist graveyard just off of moorgate in London. Over the ...

Moving over to the googleverse

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well, today I finally made a switch that I had been thinking about for a long time, I moved the hosting of my personal...

Why I'm setting up this blog

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Right, well, I'm pretty interested in graph theory. I work in publishing for the journal Nature on new web products, an...

Adding a tag cloud to blogger

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking about neat ways to make blogs approach research articles; about how to make some of the core feature...

Getting listed on nature blogs

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm gittin meself listed on nature blogs. I better whup this blog back into shape first though.

testing latex and syntax hilighting on blogger

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Some python code some links http://www.ramymostafa.com/?p=99 http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter http://ww...

I woke up today and git-svn was broken.

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Odd, it was working last time I used it. Today I got the following error git svn IO object version 1.22 does not match ...

Rail in the UK is really pretty shitty

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last month I bought some rail tickets online, and got to London Bridge only to be told that I had to go to Liverpool St...

Five places to eat in New York, mmmmm

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Five places to eat in New York, I used to live in New York a good few years ago, and now when friends ofmine are about...

other tips for new york

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Also Mona's bar on 13th and b (a bit of a dive, but all the better for it) The east village/alphabet street areas have ...

Not a smart way to do this.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to find out what all of the

Training Diary Catchup

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so, I've fallen off the wagon in terms of climbing training, or in fact training of any kind. Last weekend was inte...

unknown post

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I want to find out what all of the ISSN's are for the publications that are printed by Nature Publishing Group. They li...

Wrangling data from a mysql db

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on a project where I have to pass some data from tables in a MySQL DB over to some people who don't use a ...

Training diary, week 5

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Saturday 1st SnowboardingFriday 7th Bouldering at the castleOK, I'm a bit late posting this training update. Last w...

Converting a mysql schmea into an entity relationship diagram

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You will need to install XML support as a ScriptingAddition for script editor. You can get this from http://www.latenig...

Even Santa goes to see the rugby

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

weekly training log, week 4

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A week snowboarding in Switzerland, 6 days total with a rest day on the Wed. Pretty fantastic!I didn't get any runn...

Weekly training report, week 3

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Saturday 17thMile end, decided to try power endurance training, picked a 6a to work on. 7 leads, and at the end I was s...

Code Higlighting in Blogger

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

pbl-ian:python-c root# clear pbl-ian:python-c root# swig -o erf_wrap.c -python erf.i pbl-ian:python-c root# gcc -o erf_...

unknown post

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

///gi,'\n')); elements[i].replaceChild(newNode, childNode); } else if(elements[i].nodeName.toUpperCase() == "PRE") { b...

wrapping c code for python using swig on Mac OS X

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

from john d cook http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/20/using-swig-to-expose-c-code-to-python/ from http://www.penzil...

Weekly training report, week 2

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Friday 9th 2 hours at the castle, top roping with 5kg extra for Sunday 11th 57 min 8.75 km http://www.gmap-pedometer.co...

Is RSS dead, and why is it dying?

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

From Science of the invisible I picked up the link to the Read Write Web article on death of enterprise RSS. What is g...

Nasty week ahead

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

World War II, Science and Springer Authors

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Springer have just launched a web app that lets you search for locations of authors, AuthorMapper. They have done this...

Wekly training report, week 1.

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Sunday 4th of January 8 km run, in 53 min, average heart rate about 149 bpm. http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2468786Mo...

Review of Climbing Goals for 2008.

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Back in January I set myself some goals for my climbing in 2008. The results at the end of the year were mixed, which m...

a great presentation about books and community

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My colleague Gavin Bell just uploaded a great presentation about creating communities of readers out of readers of boo...

A minor milestone in leisurely reading

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I finally finished Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver. Oh, don't get me wrong, I've read it, and the full trilog...

blogging darwin

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of my friends is writing a series of blogs about Darwin. It looks like a very nice series of blog posts, and I loo...

bus podcast idea

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I had a great idea yesterday while I was engaged on a personal odyssey on London buses. I was on the top deck of, I th...

chasing cars

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This morning as I was leaving Shoreditch park a guy in a black masarti with the top down passed my on my bike. I conti...

climbing milestone

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I got my first UK 6a boulder problem at the Castle climbing wall, it's been a while since I was making prog...

Cloverfield

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Cloverfield Originally uploaded by Ian Mulvany My Work Colleague make a cloverfield diarama in our sandbox today....

collaborative intelligence and the pidgeonhole problem

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

O'Reilly are hosting a Collaborative Intelligence foo camp this coming weekend. There is some discussion bubbling out ...

Creationism as Science,

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I'm at the netsci08 conference and there is a really delightful talk about the network of papers published in the crea...

digital archeology, finding traces in the bits

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This article in Guardian today is describing a method of restoring colour to some original BBC tv shows whose master t...

drowning in the streamosphere

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking about the streamosphere (as coined by Euan Adie), and how I am starting to get dragged down in it a...

Efficient Name Disambiguation for Large-Scale Databases

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I've been interested for a while now in entity disambiguation, particularly where the e ntities are the names of autho...

further confustion

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, after a little more investigation it is clear that earlier links are broken and new links have the snap preview. W...

getting married and buying an iPhone are probably incompatible.

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Having just gotten engaged and begun to look at the relative costs involved in organising a wedding I woke up this mor...

How I learned to stop worrying and love RSS

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I am, one might say, a bit of an RSS junkie. It has been the main source of news and information for me for about the ...

how to learn python

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In response to a query that popped up on Friend Feed: I taught myself years ago with O'Reilly's Learning Python. The w...

I didn't expect lock in so quickly

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I've just signed up for an account with twidox, which is a start up that is collecting shared documents of interest to...

ikea is like a biological machine

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We are just unpacking some more furniture and we have discovered that the spacers inside the boxes were made up of cut...

incentives

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So after reading about some economists who decided to use economic theory to loose weight I have decided to follow sui...

iPhone prediction market

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well, a prediction about a new market that will spring up (perhaps it already has) around the iPhone. So it costs $99 ...

Max OS X does not have gethrtime and as a result cannot load Time::HR

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just discovered this after poking around for an inordinate amount of time. The trick is to use Time::HiRes instead. ...

mozy backup service

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I've been trying the free account this week. I've backed up 1.6 GB of data. It took, with given interruptions of a nor...

netsci08 blogging

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I'm in Norwich all this week attending Netsci08 http://www.ifr.ac.uk/netsci08/, the internatinal workshop and conferen...

netsci08 opening keynote

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nicholas Christakis, Harvard, "eat drink and be merry, the spread of health phenomena in social networks". T...

network branching, netsci08

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I'm really torn by the number of great talks on today. There are three parallel sessions, and for each time slot I wan...

Networks in Space, Mark Newman, netsci08

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Newman, Networks in Space, This is about networks in geographic space. Mark is looking at properties of networks ...

networks; head to head

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The second talk in the evening CREEN parallel session is from J. Holyst about phase transitions in coupled complex net...

nice idea for improving the six nations rugby tournament

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Shaun Edwards

perl and again,

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since Ian Clarke mentioned the potential delights of python to me whilst passing me in a corridor back in 1999 I'...

Predictably Irrational

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I was in, of all places, Godalming, at the weekend and ended up browsing in a book store for a few moments. I saw what...

progress

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you are interested in the progress of my bet you can follow here: hmm, my embedded image is not showing up here, s...

question of the day, evil vice presidents

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So the question of the day is if Hillary Clinton becomes Vice-President, would she be more or less evil than Dick Chen...

sadly I've just discovered that vox sucks

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have been liking using vox to blog, mainly because I can email a blog post from any email client. This significantly...

scribed is cool, but

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Scribd has rolled out a very nice interface to pdf documents. It is neat and slick, but I think what it is missing is ...

social networks

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There is a tension between the providers of social software, and the way we behave. When I move from one city to anoth...

Soft peer review

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The following paper "Soft peer review: Social software and distributed scientific evaluation" was passed alo...

star wars

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

"The modified tactical standard missile 3 (SM-3) hit the satellite at an altitude of 150 miles (247km) while it w...

subprime mortgage crises explained using stick figures

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dtfm9hj_30ccsw79f4 http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dtfm9hj_30ccsw79f4 This i...

test a link

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

test a link guardian Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Testing out a new blog platform

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, I've been having some problems with the Vox service for some time, and now I have a twine invitation, so I am goin...

The gap between Open Access and Editorial Quality

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I'm reading a great article by Joe Esposito on Open Access. You can read the article here:http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cg...

Ubigraph

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ubigraph (http://ubietylab.net/ubigraph/) Ubigraph (sorry for the fucked up formatting, I think my blog host vox is st...

Upcoming.org Founder Creates Fireball (Fire Eagle + DodgeBall + Twitter)

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ahh, convergence, ahh, the ability to pinpoint your friends on your mobile phone. I've been waiting for this to happen...

We have been nominated for a webby

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nature, the company I work for, has been nominated for a Webby, woot!. OK, so we are up against Nasa's earth observato...

what apps do I want on the iPhone?

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I just read through the engadget report on the iPhone SDK and it's looking pretty good. I'm in the middle of dow...

Why the LHC is not really that impressive

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday the Guardian had a special pull out section dedicated to the LHC. If you browse through the articles you fin...

Your Brightkite Invite

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just got the following Yay! "Hi, Somebody has sent you a Brightkite invite. Brightkite is a location-based soci...

agile programming