Partially Attended

Tonight I attend a debate held at the Royal Statistics Society. It was en entertaining, and wide ranging discussion with a great panel, and fairly intelligent questions from the floor. Two fun facts: One of the founding members of the society was Charles Babbage The society is located within spitting distance of the grave of William Thomas Bayes So, here are the notes, rough and ready, and I missed a lot in my note taking, but I hope I get a flavour of the discussion across. ... (more)

Amazon Web Summit London 2015 ## Keynote There were about three thousand people at the summit. I chatted to a few people throughout the day. Their experience with AWS ranged from moderate use through to just being at the evaluation stage. The keynote highlighted AWS’s approach of wanting to put the customer in control, and to remove all unnecessary work from the customer in terms of managing IT. AWS has grown enormously, they are estimated to have five times the compute power on hand than all other cloud providers combined. ... (more)

I must have been fourteen, fifteen years old, I was passing through a train station in Northern Ireland and I picked up a copy of Mort, from that point on I was hooked. How could it not speak to me, a gangly awkward teenager, trying to find my way in the world. I devoured the books as they came out, within a few more years I had a healthy stack. ... (more)

I moved into digital product management in 2007. I had no formal training, and for much of the last eight years I’ve been learning on the job. There are a huge number of resources out there, great lectures, books, conferences, blog posts. In this short post I just want to reflect a bit on what I’ve learned on this topic through direct personal experience. I continue to learn, and my thinking continues to evolve, so this post is more of a look back, than a look to the future. ... (more)

(image via peternijenhuis) Last year I attended a one day seminar on Wittgenstein and Physics. It was held at Cross College Oxford and was the first in a planned series of talks on the history and philosophy of science. It’s been a long time since I’ve done physics seriously, and longer still since I took classes on the history and philosophy of science, so I attended very much in the mode of the interested outsider. ... (more)

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 way to do it was to set very short term goals, not ones for the end of the year, but rather quarter by quarter, and modify and update those goals as I went. In addition, I found that focussing not on outcomes, but on process, also helped a lot. ... (more)

I was having a conversation last week with a good friend who works in the financial services sector. We were discussing technical debt, and the tendency of certain teams to want to do everything themselves. He described some colleagues in a team that is tasked with managing a large data pipeline for calculation of risks in a particular market. This is central to the bottom line of the company. Oh, they also used to run their own mailing list server! ... (more)

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 update on where the Lens viewer for research articles is heading. Lens is a great platform for experimentation, and we have been iterating on some ideas towards the end of 2014 that have now made it into the 2.0 release. The main update is that Lens can now be configured to accept information from a 3rd party source and display that information in the right hand resources pane. ... (more)

Last week I was at the FORCE2015 conference. I enjoyed it greatly. This was the 2015 instance of the FORCE11/Beyond the pdf conference. I’d been aware of these meetings since the first one was announced back in 2011, but this was my first chance to attend one. (If I recall, I’d even been invited to the DagStuhl workshop, but had been unable to attend. I’d been to one DagStuhl workshop on science and social networks many years ago, and that had been one of the best short meetings that I’d ever attended, so I’d been sad not to be able to go to the Beyond the PDF meeting). ... (more)

Thanks to – Kevin Dolby, Martijn Roelandse, Mike Taylor and Andrea Michalek for taking the notes from each of the breakout sessions, I have synthesised them here. Altmetrics could be used as a way to indicate the pathway of impact Institutions should define their game plan, what do we want to achieve, what metrics can help get us there they could give guidance to researchers on what platforms to adopt (the landscape is cluttered, but at the same time Institutions probably don’t know), that said funders are behind the principle that universities drive what metrics they want to collect, and the set of standards, instead of prescribing metrics (don’t get led by what gets measured, define the change you want to affect first). ... (more)