A [recent XKCD](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2839:_Language_Acquisition) caused some amusement: "Vocabulary update: I learned another word today, bringing my total to twelve". We wondered whether there might be possible formulations of this joke that also contained the unique character count, so I wrote the following python script: import num2word import numpy def find_self_reference(): sentence = "I learned another word today
How do you solve a problem like a séance? With Python and GPT3, is my answer. I’ve spent this weekend working on the technology for a forthcoming Artangel exhibition in Leeds that features an AI séance.
What is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his history of the footnote, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them” (233). So the point of a footnote/citation is to be able to lookup and check that epistemic claims are true? Sometimes.
My next book, tentatively titled Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s is now under contract at Lever Press (title definitely needs some work). This, for me, is very exciting. An open-access press with an innovative funding model – so there are no author-facing charges – I am really pleased to be working with Lever.
Today’s big news is that Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database of expressions of concerns and retractions and has made it openly accessible to anyone who wants to use it. I’m waiting for full confirmation of the license or public domain dedication under which it will be released, but this is still a great commitment of Crossref to the POSI principles. The liberation of this database is good for science and scholarship in general.
This morning I gave the third of my keynote talks this week at the Janeway conference: The Lower Decks. It’s been quite a week and I am exhausted with my kidney failure. Indeed, today is a macabre one year anniversary, precisely, since I had the kidney biopsy that revealed my BK Virus Nephropathy and that my kidneys were going to be totally destroyed. Of course, I didn’t know that quite at that time.
Well, it finally happened, as Queen once sang. But I am not going “slightly mad” as the song professes. Instead, I have decided that the time has come where I need a wheelchair to get around. My arthritic hip damage is substantial and painful – and it’s stopping me going places. I rarely want to go out anywhere “for a walk” because the pain is so great. A wheelchair will help with this. But there are some things about it that bother me.
Excel stores dates in a very odd way: a serial number of days since 1900.
In recent days, several signatories to the Principles on Open Scholarly Infrastructure have taken to performing self-audits of their compliance with the principles. Of course, holding oneself to account in this way is a welcome development. Without some form of self-appraisal it is not possible to know how close one is to fulfilling the goals of POSI.
It is sometimes easy, when discussing openness, to get bogged down in the technical weeds. People often want detail and specifics: what open license should I use? Precisely how much revenue do I need to keep in reserve safely to wind-down an organization? When does advocacy become lobbying?
