Partially Attended

Mark this one down as totally not surprising. https://www.recode.net/2018/5/13/17345722/alexa-amazon-echo-baby-name-girls-apple-siri ... (more)

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-automation-training-20180504-story.html The headline is a bit click-baitey. I think the big takeaway from this article is that there is a significant shift in how companies are doing training with the advent of online learning. Unsurprising, but hopefully good news for efforts like sage campus. ... (more)

https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300 File this one under “don’t be evil”. Of course what is also interesting is that there is actual pushback from the employees, within an industry that has sometimes been called a “morality free zone”. ... (more)

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 how easy it is to get complex systems up and running locally, so perhaps it’s time to read with some caution some of the potential downsides. http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-is-a-dangerous-gamble-which-we-will-regret Argues about those. He article highlights exactly why I like docker: Me: “I can write a bash script. Or “make”. Or any other kind of installer, of which there are dozens. ... (more)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ File this one under “you do it to yourself” Of course the key thing here is that directly selling this data to law enforcement is illegal, but indirectly selling it is not. The market is acting as an evolutionary force to find ways to extract money by moving around laws that are out in place to protect citizens. In this case the economy can move at a faster pace with business innovation that the law can to protect citizens. ... (more)

A very common python task that I find myself stumbling over repeatedly is trying to get the syntax right to address or retrieve a specific value to a key in a dented JSON document, in particular if that key is some way down the tree. I’ve just found the library https://github.com/mahmoud/glom which is written up really nicely here: https://sedimental.org/glom_restructured_data.html Before looking at this modele in detail I had thought that I could pass a reference to a key to glom without specifying its location fully in the structure of the input file, but after looking at this for a moment it became clear that this is not what it does, but rather is good at helping to remap nested data structures into new structures, and accessing the data you want via path like queries. ... (more)

The Verge also covered this well: www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17334658/google-ai-phone-call-assistant-duplex-ethical-social-implications and they have a quote from Joanna Bryson, who talked at SAGE just before Christmas. Her quote is finished out with the following. There are no obvious answers to these questions, but as Bryson points out, Google is at least doing the world a service by bringing attention to this technology. It’s not the only company developing these services, and it certainly won’t be the only one to use them. ... (more)

This week I was interviewed for the ALA choice podcast, a podcast that the that is a weekly program featuring in-depth conversations about contemporary trends, best practices, and case studies important to academic librarians. Hosted by Bill Mickey, the Editorial Director at Choice The topic was about trends in big data and the role of the library, and it was really fun to participate in, and the panel I was on included Caroline Muglia from the University of Southern California Libraries as well as Andy Rutkowski and Eimmy Karina Solis from USC libraries. ... (more)

I got asked to contribute an answer to an upcoming feature looking at trends in scholarly discovery. There are four questions and I’ve been asked to think about an answer to the last of these four. In a sentence or two, please tell us what you understand is meant by ‘discovery’? For a researcher, how has the discovery experience developed in recent years? How can researchers decide which tools are going to do the right job for them? ... (more)

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 it, and how it was implemented. (As an aside, I’m deeply fascinated by Glitch, but have not had the time to date to spend on it that I would have wished). In addition to his comment about how websites are now assembled, component by component, there is another aspect to modern development that I’ve strongly noticed, and that is of specialisation. ... (more)