Partially Attended

I just had my first hands on experience with the Microsoft surface hub. I tried out sketching a lean canvas on the surface to see how it would work. Things I liked writing was responsive pressure sensitivity worked well two people can write at the same time there is sketch to shape recognition, and it’s OK its just about big enough to work on, but bigger would be better Things I liked in principle, but was not able to check whether they work in practice being able to capture the output of the session digitally being able to remotely work on the surface with another team at the same time Things I didn’t like selecting and moving items really just was too hard to figure out under / erase was fiddly sometimes the built in grid would get in the way when I had object recognition on, it would sometimes turn my “D”s into triangles not as flexible as working with post it notes, in terms of being able to move and cluster ideas Conclusion Overall this is getting there, but for me its not quite there yet. ... (more)

A neat python snippet for jumping into a directory, running a script, and jumping out again, found on Stackoverflow, provided by Brian Hunt. from subprocess import Popen, PIPE import os import sys class cd: """Context manager for changing the current working directory see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/431684/how-do-i-cd-in-python """ def __init__(self, newPath): self.newPath = os.path.expanduser(newPath) def __enter__(self): self.savedPath = os.getcwd() os.chdir(self.newPath) def __exit__(self, etype, value, traceback): os.chdir(self.savedPath) with cd("~/blog/partiallyattended"): title = new_post.title process = subprocess. ... (more)

I previously Kicked the tyres on kubernetes, with an example of how to deploy it onto Google’s infrastructure, but if you want to scale out and start dong some real work with this piece of infrastructure where should you go to have a hosted Kubernetes solution? I honestly don’t have an answer to that. The Kubernetes site provides a large list of providers. A friend of mine has been considering between https://stackpoint. ... (more)

Back in November of last year we ran the first scholarly comms meetup with a focus on product management. There are lots of great meetups out there for people who work in scholarly comms, but we felt that there might be an unscratched need to have a meeting where the focus was not explicitly on community building, or on new technologies, or on public outreach, or on new trends and technologies, but solely on the product management work that is required to develop these kinds of tools. ... (more)

I’m at the Charleston conference, my first time, and we had a panel discussion this morning talking about AI. On the panel were: Heather Staines Director of Partnerships, Hypothes.is Peter Brantley Director of Online Strategy, UC Davis Elizabeth Caley Chief of Staff, Meta, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ruth Pickering Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Yewno and myself. It was a pleasure to be on a panel with these amazing people. There was a lot of interest from the audience, and we didn’t get anywhere close to talking through all of the questions that we had discussed as a panel ahead of the session, so I’m going to blog the questions that we had prepared. ... (more)

I’m currently working on supporting a JupyterHub installation for a series of online courses that we are launching at SAGE. Along the way I’ve had to get my head around deploying the software using kubernetes. This is a stack that I’ve been aware of for quite a while, but I’ve not worked with it before. In order to help with debugging my installation I’m writing up a guide on some of the kubernetes commands that I found useful when deploying a service onto google cloud. ... (more)

Here are some annotated slides from my ALPSP talk today. ... (more)

I’ve been changing the static blog generator that I use and am slowly moving from Jekyll to Hugo. My main reason is the better support for tags and categories that Hugo supports, but I’m not finding the templating as intuitive in Hugo as in Jekyll, so it’s not a slam-dunk. There are a couple of small differences between the two systems that are making me reconfigure my blogging workflow a bit. ... (more)

So, I’m hiring a product manager. We are working on developing new green field products. We have a small, really fun team, and we are using a lot of lean tools to try to get to product-market fit with relativly low risk. To apply submit a CV using our [hiring portal](https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/sage-vacancies]. Here are some more details about the role: What we are doing SAGE is innovating around how we might support social science researchers engaging with big data and new technology. ... (more)

ic2s2 - Thursday, closing keynotes Economic AI - Matt Taddy Economic AI breaks complex systemic questions into simple sets of prediction tasks, that can be attacked with off the shelf ML techniques. Today economists are being asked to answer basic economic questions but at a ridiculous scale (within companies like Microsoft or Amazon). There are just not enough economists out there to do all the work being asked of them. ... (more)