Partially Attended

I was bouldering yesterday. At my local block - a lump of granite embedded in the middle of shore ditch park. I’ve been climbing on this block pretty much since the week it was put in place. Yesterday I saw that a hold I’d never noticed had been chalked up. It’s a great hold, at about shoulder height. It fits that pads of two and a half fingers, and in spite of being quite small, it feels pretty positive. ... (more)

I have a new macbook pro. I want to install vagrant, chef and librarian, with the vagrant-aws plugins. I’m working on OSX Mavericks, and I want to get as clean an install as possible. For the most part I am also using the fish shell. This is what I’ve just run through over the last 20 minutes. Install command line tools from the terminal $ xcode-select --install Next we are going to install homebrew, with homebrew we will install rvm and with rvm we will install ruby. ... (more)

I managed to squeeze in a few hours on Friday attending the spoton conference in London. I’ve been at each one since 2008, and have had the good fortune to present something at most of them. This time I had been asked to sit in on a panel to talk about elife’s policy around media relations, but as I was flying in that morning from an editorial board meeting held in Washington it was not clear to me that I would make it in time, so the fantastic @sciencescoops (Jennifer Mitchell) represented for eLife in my place. ... (more)

This post was mostly written earlier this summer, in the days after I had finished reading a book. I’ve just finished reading W. G. Seabald’s Vertigo. This is the second of his books that I’ve read over the last decade, and it is as haunting as the first. The first of his I read was The rings of Saturn. Towards the closing pages of the book I was filled with a great expectation that I might possibly experience some deep revelation. ... (more)

Connecting ALM and Literature As I took part in the first session I don’t have many notes from it. I’ve posted the slides from my talk, and I’ll write up some more on those in due course. For me the standout talk of the session, if not the entire meeting, was from Jevin West who talked about using networked ranked data to provide recommendations. The algorithms his group are working on are being tested on [SSRN][ssrn], and will be rolled out to PLOS. ... (more)

This was a one day workshop discuss the creation of standards around Article Level Metrics. NISO has a grant from the Sloan foundation to look into this, and this event was the first of three planned information gathering events. My own opinion on this topic has changed over the past year, evolving from being strongly opposed, to broadly supporting the idea of building some kind of standard or best practice for the field. ... (more)

## Cameron Neylon - Introduction & Welcome Interesting - this is the first PLOS ALM meeting that is a “normal” scheduled presentation. Time is going to be tight. Pete Binfield ALM: Looking back, moving forward A large chunk of OA does not select for impact - this is why ALMs are key for this space. PLOS didn’t invent ALMs - Frontiers were doing it a little ahead of PLOS’s launch. Web of science didn’t tell PLOS until 2010 that PLOS one was being tracked for an impact factor. ... (more)

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours. ... (more)

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours. ... (more)

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 important thing I have lots of advice, it I think the most important advice that I have boils down to do work. Build up a portfolio, and get comfortable and fluid with the tools that you will use to do web development. We look for skilled passionate people, and the best way to show that, is to show projects that you have been working on. ... (more)